Angela: >but, i did not frame this as such. it has already been framed as such >by the khmer rouge and by shining path. Please don't confuse these 2 groups. > my comments go to the >question of how exactly you would distinguish your version of 'back to >the land' from these historical experiences of it. that is to say, >how exactly can you be sure that this is not simply a version of a >middle-class radicalism turned against its roots through the longing >for an idealised version of what 'the land' (or at least peasant >cultures) are? Do you want a detailed plan of not only how socialist revolutions will take place, but a guarantee that they will not turn sour? You will not get this from me or any other Marxist. I urge you to spend less time immersed in all that trendy cultural studies nonsense and read some history. The Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions did not turn sour. What happened in Nicaragua is that US imperialism did not allow it to become another Cuba. If Nicaragua had been left in peace, it would have improved the FMLN and Guerrilla Army of the Poor's chances to succeed in El Salvador and Guatemala. Three developing socialist republics in Central America would have had a destabilizing influence on Mexico to the north and Colombia to the south. Falling dominos Central America style. That is why Reagan fought so hard against the "Vietnam syndrome." One of the biggest problems with viewing things ahistorically--which is the most bitter fruit that postmodernism has bestowed upon us--is that the revolutionary project is not seen through a Marxist prism, but through a Nietzschean or Foucauldian one. The problem becomes one of how power corrupts in a philosophical sense, rather than one of how particular revolutions fell victim to historical conjunctural relationships of forces between the workers and the ruling class. That is why some analysts describe postmodernism as a retooled version of the anticommunist critique first developed by Daniel Bell in the "End of Ideology". Although this passage has been quoted a million times to illustrate the problem revolutionaries face, it is always good to hear it one more time: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language." Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
