Re: [Marxism] Lucio Magri [1932-2011]

[Vladimiro Giacche']

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A great comrade, indeed. 
Ciao Lucio. 
Vlad

Il giorno 30/nov/2011, alle ore 01:50, jay rothermel ha scritto:

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> ==
> 
> 
> THE TAILOR OF ULM 
> 
> At one of the crowded meetings held in 1991 to decide whether or not to
> change the name of the Italian Communist Party, a comrade posed this
> question to Pietro Ingrao: 'After everything that has happened and all that
> is now taking place, do you still believe the word "communist" can be used
> to describe the kind of large, democratic mass party that ours has been,
> and is, and which we want to renew so as to take it into government?'
> Ingrao, who had already laid out in full the reasons for his dissent and
> proposed that an alternative course be taken, replied—not altogether in
> jest—with Brecht's famous parable of the tailor of Ulm. This 16th-century
> German artisan had been obsessed by the idea of building a device that
> would allow men to fly. One day, convinced he had succeeded, he took his
> contraption to the Bishop and said: 'Look, I can fly'. Challenged to prove
> it, the tailor launched himself into the air from the top of the church
> roof, and, naturally, ended up in smithereens on the paving stones below.
> And yet, Brecht's poem suggests: a few centuries later men did indeed learn
> to fly.
> 
> Ingrao's reply was not just witty but well-founded. How many centuries, how
> many bloody struggles, advances and defeats did it take for the capitalist
> system to reach—in a Western Europe that had initially been more backward
> and barbaric than other parts of the world—an unprecedented degree of
> economic efficiency, and for it to acquire new, more open political
> institutions, a more rational culture? What irreducible contradictions were
> to mark liberalism over those years, between the solemn ideals—common human
> nature, freedom of speech and thought, popular sovereignty—and the
> practices that constantly belied them: slavery, colonial domination,
> expulsion of peasants from common land, wars of religion? Contradictions
> whose social reality was legitimated in thought: the idea that freedom
> could and should only be granted to those who, by virtue of property and
> culture—even race and colour—were capable of exercising it wisely; and the
> correlative notion that ownership of goods was an absolute, inviolable
> right which therefore precluded universal suffrage.
> 
> Nor was it just the onset of this historical cycle that was beset by such
> contradictions: they were reproduced under various forms in its subsequent
> development, and gradually diminished only by the action of new social
> subjects, and of forces contesting the reigning system and its ideas. If,
> then, the real history of capitalist modernity was not one of unambiguous
> linear progress, but was rather dramatic and costly, why should the process
> of its supersession be otherwise? This is the lesson that the tailor's
> story was meant to convey.
> 
> Yet the parable also poses further questions. Can we be sure that if the
> tailor of Ulm had been crippled rather than killed by his disastrous fall,
> he would immediately have got to his feet to try again; or that his friends
> would not have tried to prevent him doing so? And secondly, what actual
> contribution did he make to the subsequent history of aeronautics? In
> relation to Communism, such questions are especially pointed and
> difficult—above all because, at its theoretical formation, it had claimed
> to be not an inspiring ideal, but part of a historical process already
> under way, and of a real movement that was changing the existing state of
> things. Communism therefore always entailed a factual test, a scientific
> analysis of the present and a realistic prognosis of the future, to prevent
> it dissolving into myth. But we also need to register a significant
> difference between the defeats suffered by the bourgeois revolutions in
> France and England, and the recent collapse suffered by 'actually existing
> socialism'—measured not by the number of deaths or recourse to despotism,
> but by their respective outcomes. The former left an inheritance that,
> though much more modest than the initial hopes they aroused, is nonetheless
> immediately apparent; it is difficult, by contrast, to discern the legacy
> of the latter, and to identify legitimate heirs.
> **
> 
> read in full:
> http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2011/11/remembering-lucio-magri-1932-2011.html
> 
> Send list submissions to: Marxism

[Marxism] Lucio Magri [1932-2011]

[jay rothermel]

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Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
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THE TAILOR OF ULM 

At one of the crowded meetings held in 1991 to decide whether or not to
change the name of the Italian Communist Party, a comrade posed this
question to Pietro Ingrao: 'After everything that has happened and all that
is now taking place, do you still believe the word "communist" can be used
to describe the kind of large, democratic mass party that ours has been,
and is, and which we want to renew so as to take it into government?'
Ingrao, who had already laid out in full the reasons for his dissent and
proposed that an alternative course be taken, replied—not altogether in
jest—with Brecht's famous parable of the tailor of Ulm. This 16th-century
German artisan had been obsessed by the idea of building a device that
would allow men to fly. One day, convinced he had succeeded, he took his
contraption to the Bishop and said: 'Look, I can fly'. Challenged to prove
it, the tailor launched himself into the air from the top of the church
roof, and, naturally, ended up in smithereens on the paving stones below.
And yet, Brecht's poem suggests: a few centuries later men did indeed learn
to fly.

Ingrao's reply was not just witty but well-founded. How many centuries, how
many bloody struggles, advances and defeats did it take for the capitalist
system to reach—in a Western Europe that had initially been more backward
and barbaric than other parts of the world—an unprecedented degree of
economic efficiency, and for it to acquire new, more open political
institutions, a more rational culture? What irreducible contradictions were
to mark liberalism over those years, between the solemn ideals—common human
nature, freedom of speech and thought, popular sovereignty—and the
practices that constantly belied them: slavery, colonial domination,
expulsion of peasants from common land, wars of religion? Contradictions
whose social reality was legitimated in thought: the idea that freedom
could and should only be granted to those who, by virtue of property and
culture—even race and colour—were capable of exercising it wisely; and the
correlative notion that ownership of goods was an absolute, inviolable
right which therefore precluded universal suffrage.

Nor was it just the onset of this historical cycle that was beset by such
contradictions: they were reproduced under various forms in its subsequent
development, and gradually diminished only by the action of new social
subjects, and of forces contesting the reigning system and its ideas. If,
then, the real history of capitalist modernity was not one of unambiguous
linear progress, but was rather dramatic and costly, why should the process
of its supersession be otherwise? This is the lesson that the tailor's
story was meant to convey.

Yet the parable also poses further questions. Can we be sure that if the
tailor of Ulm had been crippled rather than killed by his disastrous fall,
he would immediately have got to his feet to try again; or that his friends
would not have tried to prevent him doing so? And secondly, what actual
contribution did he make to the subsequent history of aeronautics? In
relation to Communism, such questions are especially pointed and
difficult—above all because, at its theoretical formation, it had claimed
to be not an inspiring ideal, but part of a historical process already
under way, and of a real movement that was changing the existing state of
things. Communism therefore always entailed a factual test, a scientific
analysis of the present and a realistic prognosis of the future, to prevent
it dissolving into myth. But we also need to register a significant
difference between the defeats suffered by the bourgeois revolutions in
France and England, and the recent collapse suffered by 'actually existing
socialism'—measured not by the number of deaths or recourse to despotism,
but by their respective outcomes. The former left an inheritance that,
though much more modest than the initial hopes they aroused, is nonetheless
immediately apparent; it is difficult, by contrast, to discern the legacy
of the latter, and to identify legitimate heirs.
**

read in full:
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2011/11/remembering-lucio-magri-1932-2011.html

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