In this dreadful era of so-called 'neo-liberal', "savage" globalization of capital and of capitalism, of coming world wars that may devastate the whole planet, it is high time that we state what is on our revolutionary minds and do what can possibly still be done to emancipate life on earth; otherwise we may soon be silenced forever and the species man may fade away into galactic oblivion. In spite of centuries of European, Christian and Western 'culture', 'civilization', 'education', religion and 'information', for billions of us, the wage slaves living in the South, ignorance is still bliss.
Many of us are still believing in colonial myths and religious fabrications, are dancing on the sinking imperialist Titanic and are picnicking on a rumbling, already erupting, globalized, corporate volcano, that has been struck by a powerful particle liberated from the nether world. Similarly, mighty earthquakes generated by HAARP in Alaska, using Tesla technology, in chain reaction are now shaking the very foundations of human existence; droughts and famine drive us out of existence. The greenback is in agony, it does not trust in God anymore; oil prices are reaching record heights, millions die of hunger, a terrible world war is being launched, many of us feel nothing, see nothing, think nothing. ...
In spite of nearly two centuries of scientific and philosophic socialist enlightenment, of the revelations of the internet video "Zeitgeist", we still fear to tackle our real problems at their very roots, we prefer to polish up our mental chains of illusion, we dread any possible social freedom, we very carefully evade global emancipation.
What is to be done, what is to be thought by billions?
To achieve the latter, we have no choice in the battle against global, systemic, systematic barbarism. Yes, by Jove, it is "end times", Apollo is indicating that we are crossing the Rubicon, the Zodiac, towards the Age of Aquarius. In the 60s all over the protesting student youths were fascinated by this revolutionary, creative transcendence; they were looking at guerrilla documentary films in the jazz cellars, they wore black berets, with "new age" music they welcomed the revolution, were dancing to the rhythm of the galactic spheres. This was a time before everything was ideologized to the "5th dimension".
Today, globally, we have to grasp imperialism at its very cultural and economic roots, we have to become radical, we have to eradicate an obsolete, apocalyptic world order. This can only be accomplished by negating it dialectically, by annihilating its major roots: economic exploitation of nature and man; political domination by the ruling class State with all its oppressive institutions and corrupt machinery; social discrimination, ranging from the unequal global master-slave relations to the repression of women and children, to open violent racism against indigenous peoples and ransacked continents; universal militarization and genocide, ranging from "full spectrum dominance", to "preventive wars", to "military humanism", to "the war against international terrorism"; and finally, dehumanization, ranging from a global mental holocaust, launched ever since Ancient Greece, to total human alienation, brought about by capitalist indoctrination and ruling class manipulation, media disinformation, an education for corporate barbarism, a dying culture and merciless dissocialization and a pathological disassociation.
This is not an academic issue, it is a battle of life or death.
Before we can even talk about Marxism, at first, in our schools and missions, at our universities we have to study capitalism scientifically and philosophically. Soon we will discover that with ruling class ideology, with formal logic, with religious metaphysics, with pacifism and reformism we cannot identify the very destructive, bellicose roots of capitalism. To know living Marxism is to know globalized capitalism, is to know that big business is war, and that war is big business. We cannot introduce big business (mammon) and socialism in Venezuela at the same time. A socialism that is not radically anti-capitalist, that is not Marxist, that nurtures class consensus and alliances, that negates global class struggle, eventually will degenerate into reformism.
This historic truth was verified scientifically by all the attempted, aborted and betrayed social revolutions of the 20th century. Cuba is a very special case, but even there currently the social revolution is in serious danger. Only by knowing the transhistoric truth about capitalism can we discover the roots of its negation, that is, of socialism, Marxism. The latter is just as alive and globalized as capitalism itself. What is hindering its recognition and realization is capitalist ideology, is the absence of philosophic theory, of scientific praxis. Generally the radical students, the youth movements, the workers' vanguard investigate and enrich the class struggle. However, the brutal onslaught of mind, thought and act control is playing havoc with the youth on a world scale. No where else in the world this heinous crime is so clear as in Venezuela, where for a decade already it is being perpetrated by the "opposition" and the international mass media against President Hugo Chavez, against the Bolivarian Revolution. But also some of our comrades have internalized bourgeois ideology and practices, and it is very difficult to exorcize capitalist attitudes and behavior patterns over night.
Independent of the fact that our acts and thoughts may be stopped, censured or forbidden, sometimes even by our very own comrades-in-arms, there are scientific facts and philosophic truths right before our eyes, which our partially manipulated and indoctrinated minds very often cannot grasp, cannot fathom, cannot accept.
Hence, in this spirit, let us look at the background of the current revolutionary inertia of the youth and students at schools and universities. What is causing this social danger for the future of mankind? What is absent, what is being destroyed systematically?
The answer is very simple: It is youth itself, youthful anticipatory daydreams, the concrete, utopian principle of hope (Ernst Bloch)!
Just now we will give an example of the theoretical power and veracity of true Marxist analysis, and transhistoric scientific prediction.
Inter alia, compared to the 60s of the previous century, to the massive, global protests against the Vietnam War, to the concrete support for the liberation movements in Latin America and Africa, to the Black Power movement in the United States of America, to the freedom struggles against world imperialism and to the condemnation of Apartheid in South Africa and of Zionism in Israel, relatively, at the eve of the 21st Century, globally very little revolutionary activity and thought can be registered among pupils, students and the youth in general.
- Or, is it just that the Murdoch empire does not inform us about global rebellion?
* What happened? What is happening to our ministries of education, our institutions of learning, their curricula and teachers?
*To our students and professors?
* Why does a great part of the academic youth at the traditional universities of Venezuela and elsewhere mostly support reactionary, reformist and anti-socialist tendencies? Over the last decade a lot was done to remedy this critical situation, but working class conscientization is moving forward at snail pace.
* What is the class character of the students at our instittions of higher learning? Which class interests do they defend, to what are they aspiring?
* Why are we looking mainly towards the past for revolutionary solutions, while in reality the future is ours?
* Why is it so arduous to establish new revolutionary schools and universities, to create working class consciousness, to win over the students for the revolution, for socialism in Venezuela?
* What is the "educational" role of capitalist consumerism, music, videos, video games, education, religion and ideology in the globalized pacification of the youth?
* In globalization, are there no workers anymore, do they not form any social class anymore? Are students not future workers, part of class struggle?
Surely, these questions we have to ask, to study, but within the limits of a short article, we can just touch some factors of emancipatory pertinence.
Scientifically and philosophically, questions are answers, and answers are questions, are questionable. Hence, here are more youthful answering questions and more academic questioning answers:
Now, really learning from living, dialectical history, what really fascinated and bewitched the global youth of the 60s? What had to be halted with LSD and drugs of the CIA? What is currently absent in Venezuela? In the 60s what did all the huge metropolitan printing houses publish? For example, which works were republished by S. Fischer Verlag or Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany? Believe it or not: it was classic works of Marxists, the collected works of Leon Trotsky! Writings of Fidel Castro, Malcom X, Che Guevara and the Dependency theoreticians. These works the students read, studied and they developed their own social theories and political forms of resistance. It was a time when at first one was studying a book of Marx, for example, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, and only then one was able fairly to criticize Marxism constructively.
In the 60s, Revolutionary Theory was in the air, Emancipatory Praxis was in the making, and the youths were on the barricades. At the same time, a restructuring of the world market took place, a new technological revolution was ushered in; Orwellian globalization, global terrorism, was launched, to stop this emancipatory fire.
The modern bedeviling of class struggle, socialism, communism and Marxism began...
Of course, concerning this phenomenon much has been said and written.However, in the meantime, what has disappeared from the curricula of all major international universities?
With what was the history of workers' movements, of global class struggle replaced? For example, across 26 years, who was still teaching such "obsolete" subjects at the University of The Andes? Many leading Bolivarian comrades learned about Marxism for the first time in my iniversity seminars.
However, returning to our central topic, here we can just briefly highlight the most important factors that sparked off juvenile revolutionary fervor in the middle of the 20th century, that grasped the imagination of the "wretched of the earth" and which seemingly is currently lacking in Venezuelan academic life. My teacher, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch summarized it as the hot (emotional, theoretical) and cold (incisive, scientific) currents in Marxism, as explained in his philosophic reflections with reference to the then aborted socialist revolution in Chile.
But, at first, let us look at who all world wide were supporting the fascist ruling class status quo, and what did they attack with all the ferocious might of their ideological, belligerent apparel and State power.
Today, this does not seem to be necessary anymore. Why?
Did Plato in his "Republic" or Hitler in his "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) tell the global rulers what to do with controlled education and international mas media?
During the reactionary racist epoch of McCarthy in the United States, but also in the 60s, during the "Cold War", the most hated political actors and thinkers were either true Marxists or critical persons who were denigrated as "communists"and who were systematically eliminated as "Marxists". In this way in Indonesia a million "communists" were slaughtered within a very short period of time. Their crime was the mistake to have been inspired by an 'obsolete' Marx.
The apartheid regimes of Southern Africa even passed Anti-Communism Laws, and imprisoned anyone who possessed or studied the writings of Marxists with a minimum sentence of five years jail. In fact, the Minister of Justice personally was given the right to decide what was communism or Marxism. In this way, my Ph.D thesis on the Influence of Marxism in Southern Africa landed under the ax of censorship of apartheid. The racist, fascist regime was radically anti-Marxist.
The architect of apartheid in South Africa, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, studied anti-communism in Hitler's "Third Reich". German Nazism was radically anti-Marxist. Many gypsies, Blacks and Marxists also ended up in the Jewish "holocaust". Although many famous Marxists were Jews, were persecuted by the Nazi regime, Zionism, the Israeli version of apartheid, till this day is radically anti-Marxist. Stalinism assassinated Lenin's Bolsheviks, eradicated revolutionary Marxism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Over the last decades, the Venezuelan "puntofijista" governments were all anti-Marxist, they negated dialectics and the class struggle. In China we have a "communism" liberated from Mao tse-Tung and Marx. What happened to Tito's Marxism in Yugoslavia?
Did all these pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist regimes want to save us, the world, from the 'red danger', from Marxism? Is current global fascism an antidote, a panacea against Marxism?
Now, why do the youth, the revolutionaries of Venezuela urgently need knowledge about Marxism? What can Marxism teach us about our current Orwellian present? What is socialism without Marxism?
What are our erudite professors hiding from the student youth? Let us see how out-of-date, how 'obsolete', how radical can Marxism be.
The first scientific theoreticians of current globalization, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848, with up to date theoretical precision already described the current global crisis.
They predicted the current apocalyptic reality of "modern bourgeois society", of all corporate capitalist moguls which over the centuries has been conjured up by the mortal spells of private property of the means of production, of concentration and monopolization of capital, of elites who "no longer (will be) able to control the powers of the nether world":
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, they wrote: "A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." 1)
Apart from oil prices approximating 150 dollars per barrel, of world famine, of global over-production, concerning the above, by selecting topics at random, on June 13, 2008, world news had the following eerie head lines:
* United States And Russia Sack Top Generals In Preparation For Total Global War
2)
* Australia Orders Troops To Leave Iraq, Joins Call For War Crimes Charges Against US Leaders 3)
* China Orders Strike Against US For Catastrophic Earthquake 4)
* Massive US Built Space Plane ‘Blasted’ Out Of Sky Over South-East Asia 5)
* Brazil Prepares Nuclear Bomb Test To Protect Amazon Rights 6)
Really, we are vegetating in dangerous times! That this was coming, we were warned in 1848 already!
How far the Yankee sorcerer really has driven bellicose affairs, the following information from one of the articles mentioned above is witnessing. This came from the "nether world" (Marx):
"Chinese and Russian Military scientists, these reports say, are concurring with Canadian researcher, and former Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief of Forbes Magazine, Benjamin Fulford, who in a very disturbing video released from his Japanese offices to the American public, details how the United States attacked China by the firing of a Billion Million Volt Shockwave from the Americans High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facilities in Alaska. Russian scientists are further speculating that the United States strike against China was ‘exactly timed’ to coincide with the dangerous experiments ongoing at Large Hadron Collider for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and which we had previously reported on in our May 13th report titled “CERN ‘Nailed Heart Of Earth’ With China Quake, Chilean Volcano”. 7)
What causes this severe global contradiction, what generates world wars, produces the the current recession, a century and a half ago, Marx and Engels already explained in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party":
"For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule.
In this way, from a materialist dialectical view the scientific progenitors of socialism also explained the origins of private property, religion, social classes, class rule, class struggle and history, which are basic concepts to understand the modern State, ruling class education for barbarism, capitalist ideology and practices, global disinformation campaigns and fatal, academic, intellectual alienation. Furthermore, they revealed that under capitalism not only some societies are "at risk"; on the contrary, the whole capitalist society is "on trial". Far from becoming "obsolete", long before writing and publishing "Capital", they knew that capitalism is periodically being haunted by "over-production" and that it is essentially a system of permanent, epidemic crises, in other words, that it is a murderous mode of self-destruction:
"It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodic return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production." 8)
Capitalist barbarism as we experience it currently as globalization is directly linked to an over-production of goods, of physical human wares, to the elimination of physical labor forces, the only real source of surplus values, to their replacement by a galaxy of computers and machines -- which neither consume nor realize profits -- and to monopolization and concentration of capital, to progressive geometrical pauperization and famine of billions on a world scale.
"Society suddenly finds itself put bad into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed." 9)
And how does the global, capitalist bourgeoisie get over these periodic crises? By destructive, fascist, terrorist global wars:
"On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces: on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented." 10)
Precisely this world imperialism is doing now, bringing mankind on the brink of global nuclear wars.
Finally, capitalism has reached the Rubicon, the stage of globalization, of global fascism and terrorism. The United States of America, the "Empire" is just a significant part of world imperialism. The Second Conquest has begun: the military capture of strategic resources, oil, gas, biodiversity, metals and minerals, water and oxygen. All these are to be privatized and placed under the control of a single world State of global corporations. Venezuela, like Bolivia, possesses the above in abundance and hence finds itself in the front line of global fascist attacks. All these imperialist projects of global conquest were studied, were prepared for decades already. "Think tanks", the Bilderberg group and the Club of Rome all were and are engaged theoretically and scientifically in the formulation and organization of practical strategies of immediate conquest.
Compared to other species, the only formidable weapon of mankind is its brains. It only survived because it developed thinking, thought, theory, philosophy and wisdom. About Reason, a synonym for Capital, we will not talk now. Contemporary ruling class man is the most irrational, criminal being in the galaxies.
Thinking is negating, is relating, contradicting, is searching for the flowing truth, is anticipation, emancipation. Ernst Bloch stated: Thinking is venturing beyond.
What is the negation of capitalism? What is anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-terrorism? It is emancipatory theory and praxis; it is scientific and philosophic socialism, it is living Marxism.
In our schools and universities, in our mass media, not reason has fled the scene, not capital or capitalism is leaving Venezuela. World wide, the negation of capitalism, Marxism, dialectically produced by capitalism itself as its negation, is being destroyed. In this way, capitalism is destroying itself, has become an auto-destructive brainless mode of production, a productive mode of self-destruction, and therewith of man himself.
To do anything still, to think about emancipation, to venture beyond all revolutions, our youth, our students urgently should study capitalism, and therewith discover socialism, Marxism. Marxism is not a caricature, a joker, a cook book, a recipe or a panacea for all evils. It is the true negation of capitalism, it is socialism, the other side of capitalism itself. Only when capitalism has become obsolete, its negation, Marxism, will be realized and will as such fade away into the Clouds of Magellan.
Franz J.T. Lee
blackdiamond@franzlee.org
*****
1) http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/workbook/ralprs31.htm
2) http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1106.htm
3) http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1105.htm
4) http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1104.htm
5) http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1102.htm
6) http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1101.htm
7) http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1104.htm
8) http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ralph/workbook/ralprs31.htm
9) Ibid.
10) Ibid.
*****
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