me:
it's not _isolated_ individuals that I was talking about, but rather the kind of individuals you see in the US and everywhere else in the world, i.e., the tinkerers who scrounge up parts from here and there to solve technical problems, often working in their own garages or back yards. _Of course_ these folks exist in society -- and even exploit society.
Charles Brown wrote:
If they are not isolated, then they are in groups or collectives or families. We are talking about not isolated in projects of patching together these cars. However, we don't know that they are like the kind of individuals we see in the U.S.. How do we know that they don't get the materials from all over the neighborhoods, and even from other places, not just "in their own garages and backyards" ?
I said that they got parts from "here and there." They also likely get technical help and even moral support from "here and there." Charles:
> It is not isolated individuals whose resources - mental, soulful and > physical - fix- up and maintain these old cars, but collectives, social > groups and their resources, organized within the Cuban social revolution.
me:
I would bet that such collectives exist, but the biz of fixing old cars started with the start of the US embargo, before the current set-up of Cuban society was fully established.
Charles:
Committees for the defense of the rev are pretty old. Surely, there were work collectives from the start of the U.S. embargo. My bet is that the fixing up of cars was done in groups and networks, in terms of the mechanical work and the collecting parts, learning how to fix cars through shared knowledge, etc. They probably had meetings on how to do it.
have you done research on this? a lot of Americans fix cars in groups, too. And the CDRs are more like neighborhood government agencies. They aren't auto repair shops.
The Cuban revolutionaries and people have consciousness of working in collectives as opposed to doing things as individuals, the very point we are discussing. They understand building socialist personality and consciousness in opposition to bourgeois individualism and consciousness.
But by-and-large, the cars we are talking about (1950s US-made cars) are the _private_ property of the people who fixed them and drive them. It isn't the CDRs that put diesel engines in old clunkers. Charles:
> It is more the resourcefulness of Cuban revolutionaries organized in > collectives ( which is the Cuban revolution), not the resourcefulness of > Cuban individuals.
me:
such repetition makes your missive sound more like a political speech than a thoughtful comment. You wouldn't want to spout political rhetoric, would you?
Charles:
Yes ! You don't want your missives to sound apolitical , do you ? Everything you discuss here _is_ political. If you don't acknowledge and signal the politics in how you say it, you fall into the style of bourgeois "economists" who pretend what they say is not political. I hope you consider yourself a _political_economist. The notion of "apolitical political" statements is a big hypocrisy of most discussion of this stuff in the U.S. We want everything said in this area to be shaped toward rhetoric, i.e. aimed to persuade people politically. Otherwise , its scholastic, divorced from practice.
_of course_ everything we write is political in one way or another; apolitical political economy is nonsense, as you say. However, the problem is that the US left is in BIG TROUBLE. Because our situation is not simply the result of the efforts of the Other Side, but also the strategic and tactical mistakes made by previous generations of leftists, that means that instead of spouting cant, we need to "doubt all" (as Rosa Luxemburg's personal slogan says) or engage in "ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be" (Marx). The "powers that be" should include not only the capitalists, patriarchs, racists, homophobes, fundamentalists, etc., but also established dogmas and slogans of the left (and the organizations that push them). That doesn't mean that the left establishment and its ideas are automatically wrong. But it means that we have to hold back on the temptation to engage in sloganeering and dogma-pushing.
Surely, there are repetitions in your terminology in this discussion. Why focus on the particular words I repeat in the way that Americans typically try to censor socialist revolutionary rhetoric ? ...
who said anything about "censorship"? Not I. You can say anything you want to, as far as I'm concerned. But revolutionary cant can easily become tiresome, especially in that we're in the middle of a non-revolutionary period. (If I were to be cheered by revolutionary rhetoric, BTW, it would _not_ be via e-mail, a very individualistic medium. It would involve thousands of people on the march.) anyway, I wasn't referring to "repetitions of terminology" as much as repetitions of entire paragraphs (using slightly different words).
We want people to talk like Cubans ,not like the U.S. television and mass media, that bourgeois political rhetoric pretending to be apolitical and neutral when it is clearly bourgeois propaganda. We must bring out that that U.S. media way of talking is in fact the most political of rhetoric and propaganda in existence, and is not at all apolitical or neutral.
I doubt that "talking like a Cuban" will encourage "people to talk like Cubans." People change their consciousness and language due to their practical activity and experience, not due to listening to strangers. me:
BTW, the fact that Cuban society (or non-isolated individuals in that society) is fixing up old cars is a bad thing in many ways. Instead of fully developing mass transit and non-polluting forms of personal transit, there's entirely too much emphasis on stinky (diesel) and unsafe vehicles. A more completely planned economy would likely move away from these horrors (if, that is, the democratically-organized citizenry willed it). The incompleteness of the democratic planning system is of course partly a result of the embargo (and the imperialist world-system in general), the prior poverty of Cuba, and the impossibility of creating socialism in one country.
Charles:
Of course it's a bad thing. We want them to have plenty of airconditioned buses and trains ( run on solar energy). But given that no buses or trains were coming in the foreseeable future, at that point, it is tremendously gratifying that the people had the energy and resourcefulness to make a way out of no way. Only in the context of the poverty enforced by imperialism on Cuba do we celebrate the revolutionary elan that overcomes the poverty with what is "poor" relative to U.S. abundance. Material poverty overcome by revolutionary enthusiasm. "Viva La Revolucion !" and other "political rhetoric" !
oh wow. -- Jim Devine / "FREE ENTERPRISE, n. A system in which a few are born owning billions, most are born owning nothing, and all compete to accumulate wealth and power. If those born with billions succeed, it is due to their personal merits. If those born with nothing fail, it is due to their personal defects." -- American Heretic's Dictionary
