"challenge"!
So I'm up in Benicia, visiting ramik,greatmanly, and emmerific watching the sun set behind the Carquinez bridges. It's good.
When I was in SF a while back, I picked up a copy of "Challenge: Revolutionary communist newspaper of the internatinoal progresive labor party [sic]". I think I've said this before, but I'm astonished how anachronistic it feels. Their mission statement:
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to smash capitalism -- wage slavery. While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim "communism is dead:" capitalism is the real failure for billions all over the world. Capitalism returned to the Soviet Union and China because socialism failed to wipe out many aspects of the profit system, like wages and division of labor.
I don't understand how abolishing "division of labor" is intellectually credible these days. It wasn't too plausible in the 19th century, but it really doesn't make any sense at all these days, now that we have a lot of fairly powerful mathematical machinery to demonstrate its advantages.
They have a back-page obit on some Boeing union organizer:
Discipline and an unsurpassed sense of responsibility - to her family, her friends, her co-workers and the international working class - marked her time in the Party. Until her illness made it impossible, she would faithfully attend every national and local meeting. She was often the first to hand in CHALLENGE sales money and reveled in seeing a stadium full of Boeing workers reading our CHALLENGE extras during strike-sanction votes. She struggled with us to seriously study Dialectical Materialism. Coming from a religious background, she felt it imperative we have a world view that pointed toward communism.
Dialectial materialism is basically a punch-line these days. Even in the academy, it's pretty much dead as a live intellectual force.
When I was in SF a while back, I picked up a copy of "Challenge: Revolutionary communist newspaper of the internatinoal progresive labor party [sic]". I think I've said this before, but I'm astonished how anachronistic it feels. Their mission statement:
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to smash capitalism -- wage slavery. While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim "communism is dead:" capitalism is the real failure for billions all over the world. Capitalism returned to the Soviet Union and China because socialism failed to wipe out many aspects of the profit system, like wages and division of labor.
I don't understand how abolishing "division of labor" is intellectually credible these days. It wasn't too plausible in the 19th century, but it really doesn't make any sense at all these days, now that we have a lot of fairly powerful mathematical machinery to demonstrate its advantages.
They have a back-page obit on some Boeing union organizer:
Discipline and an unsurpassed sense of responsibility - to her family, her friends, her co-workers and the international working class - marked her time in the Party. Until her illness made it impossible, she would faithfully attend every national and local meeting. She was often the first to hand in CHALLENGE sales money and reveled in seeing a stadium full of Boeing workers reading our CHALLENGE extras during strike-sanction votes. She struggled with us to seriously study Dialectical Materialism. Coming from a religious background, she felt it imperative we have a world view that pointed toward communism.
Dialectial materialism is basically a punch-line these days. Even in the academy, it's pretty much dead as a live intellectual force.