Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 19:59:44 -0500
From: Charles Brown <charlesb-AT-CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Subject: M-TH: a vulgar marxist here


   How do you do , folks ?
    It seems that some of the movements included under the category New Social Movements are as old as the working class social movement or marxism. I feel certain this is true of women's liberation and racial/national liberation movements.
     For example, the slavery of African's was part of the socalled primitive accumulation of capitalism, and Africans started the African American liberation movement right at the start of capitalism, and as early as the working class struggle against it. I am not as versed in women liberation history, but Mary Wissnscraft (?) Mary Shelley's mother wrote a feminist tract in the 1800's.  The Salem "witches" must have been liberation heroines, because there is no such thing as a  witch. Those are late women's struggles. The struggle against Eurpean imperialism started circa 1492. The peace movement is likely as old as war. That is way before Marx.
     So what if they are not new ? The integration of old social movements with the old working class movement, has been going on long before the Post-modernists. I am not sure what important the post-modernists have added to their integration or each individually.
    Since the pomoderns are not practicing much, what harm can they do ? They may pull off a few intellectuals who might have been more regular radicals like marxists. Postmoderns are causing a lot of friction among intellectuals, division, but they aren't dividing the social movements that much because they don't have that much influence in them.
    What practice the pomoderns have had has been sort of left liberal,not that harmful to liberation
    Postmodernists are sort of entertainers for the movement and we marxists might as well enjoy them.  You can learn how to write poetry and do art in just about any activity you do by treating everything as a discourse and metaphors. It certainly improves your reading skills to treat everything as a text.
     Also all of the fancy marxists and post-modernist, semioticians and structuralists have drawn out Engels' philosophical aphorism a little more: being determines consciousness DISCONTINUOUSLY.  That is rarely, intermittently. Like the roof falling in makes the law of gravity manifest, when a crisis is reached. Meanwhile, continuously, being and consciousness are more reciprocal in their determination. I sent a message on this ,but I am computer illiterate, so I don't know if anybody got it. That's a next message.
    What's new with the old social movements and new social movements?
There are new social movements or relatively new: gay and lesbian and environmental. The latter has become especially pressing based on something very objective in terms of species-being in its aspect of species survival. Catastrophic pollution and destruction as with the rain forests and ozone layer, and nuclear weaponry.
   The lesbian and gay movement have kinship with the women's liberation movement and overall sexual liberation movement.
   The social movements have won reforms. The old social movements have accumulated reforms,but the ruling class has  also taken back reforms

     Theoretical unity of the rationales and bases of the social movements is promising as a basis for uniting their practice and multiplying each individual's strength.That is the job of we intellectuals. I propose one basis as species-being , the concept from Marx and Feuerbach. Are there others ? Species-being as a root of the true universal Doug asked Yoshie about. More on that another time.



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