OK Ralph, you hit the nail on the head exactly. n the purpose of holding classes on revolutionary history and experience if you will, a need for basic definitions of terms arose. This class was filled with people between 15 years old and 30. Three of us older comrades anchored the educational with internally cohesive presentations due to having worked together for 30 years and more. Then another group of mostly older workers came together to study the current situation and what to do about things in and out of the union. This group could no advance without discussing history. Half of the group was familiar with Marx the other half never heard of him. Then another group of workers started meeting around the health care issue. This group jumped from 5 - 9 people to any average low of 30 people. All these different groups are devoid of any history about anything. Zero, nothing. For instance no one in any group possess any understanding of the Soviet Union or what it was other than a hazy concept of taking from one person and giving to the other, and this is amongst the older workers only. Here is why I felt no impulse to explain communism from the Soviet experience. Why? There is no incentive to wade through various interpretations of Soviet history. All of these group come together to fight and resist the system as opposed to a perception of injustice against "someone else." My tendency was to totally exclude "historical arguments." For instance there is not index called "permanent revolution." There is an outline of the Soviet Union, but nothing on the Stalin period because it serves no purpose. I am under no illusion about this project. I agree one cannot explain a concept like dialectics in a glossary. What is being fought for is ideology rather than theory. That is the . . ., well, contradiction. No one can advance without an understanding of general aspects of American history. The fascist are cloaking themselves in the ideology of the Constitution and concepts of political democracy exactly as the Slave oligarchy did. We - us boyz and girls in Detroit who have been together a very long time, have no intention of desire to "fight the right." Rather, we our fighting or ass off to organize and then win a section of the proletariat in motion to an ideological stance and general vision of society we are calling a "Marxist lens." Hence the agi-prop character and heavy ideology of concepts. We have to do something. WL. In a message dated 3/24/2010 6:49:36 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, _rdum...@autodidactproject.org_ (mailto:rdum...@autodidactproject.org) writes: It's really essential to define the purpose of this project, its audience, and the degree of erudition that it should exhibit. If it is to exhibit the perspective of a specific tendency, then perhaps a textbook or handbook might be a better format than a glossary. I could be wrong, but "glossary" to me sounds more abbreviated than "dictionary", which is more abbreviated than an "encyclopedia". You can't explain concepts like dialectic in a glossary. At most, you could list a number of possible definitions. And depending on what you think your audience needs to know, applied to what texts or analyses, why do you think certain terms belong or not in your glossary. But ultimately, the why of all this must be nailed down first. And then there's the question of the Internet. Young people who won't go to the library to read books, which here are being purged from branch libraries in favor of computers, but they'll go to surf the net. They would rather cruise dating sites and watch movies than educate themselves, but if anyone maintains the curiosity to look at your glossary, they could go to the Internet, click on designated URLs to learn more. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm)
_______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
