Venezuela: The Principle of Hope Against Global United States Military Bases
Franz J. T. Lee | 15.09.2009 01:56 | Analysis | Globalisation | Terror War
Our clarion call is the New, a new logic, science, philosophy and wisdom, that is, the New per se. To create this we need no Manhattan project for arms of mass destruction: we only need to live the Truth 'praxically', to study reality theoretically, and to surpass the bourgeois, capitalist, world revolution with creative emancipation, with emancipatory creation.
A year ago, our graduate department of political science at the University of The Andes, Merida, Venezuela, offered a Diploma in Marxist Studies, to elevate the class consciousness of our youth, students and comrades. Jutta Schmitt and I gave some introductory lectures on Ernst Bloch's philosophic principle of hope, his concrete utopia, on epochs of social revolution, 'zeitwenden' (turn of the times), revolutionary youth and human creativity. 1)
Over the next three days a fervent debate resulted with reference to the Bolivarian Revolution and its future. Amazingly the result was a very enthusiastic interest in such new topics, especially in relation to the current nearly hopeless situation in many countries, to the class struggles stuck in the doldrums of reformism, to the global depression, economic recession, violent fascist repression. Also there exists a general repudiation against the genocidal killing at whim of millions of innocent peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere by social, by State order. The victims of corporate imperialism, ... of the United States war economy, financing hundreds of military bases across the planet, ... are countless. Aggressive, violent capitalism never ever had respect or any humane feeling for natural, human and social life, it converts everything on the planet even itself into ossified and cossified relations, into capital, wares, money, death. According to Karl Marx, in a footnote of his monumental work, Capital, Volume I, Part VIII, Chapter 31, "If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek', capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." 2)
This is what has to be annihilated, any alliance, any joint adventure with the ruling class enemy , that is, any reform project is tantamount to sacrificing ourselves on the postmodern Phoenician altar of Baal, of the golden calf. We have no alternative, our principle of hope against 'military humanism' is launching the New, that is, the turn of the millennium, youth and creativity, in short, emancipatory praxis and theory.
Hence, like elsewhere, among the socially less 'privileged' Venezuelan youth, especially among popular groups, a general frustration can be detected, which very often results in psychological evasion, pathological consumerism, sublimation and capitulation vis-a-vis the brutal onslaught of the current 'second conquest'. Progressively this critical situation is shattering many of our juvenile anticipations, expectations and hopeful daydreams. Big Brother, the Empire, slowly are catapulting us into the devouring vortex of the ravenous Moloch of capitalism, of the greenback, yes, ... into the very cynical blasphemy of its 'In God We Trust".
* Those who trust in great gods making history, now blame the small devil, the axis of evil, for breaking it;
* those who believe that great ideas, absolute ideas, are governing mankind begin to burn books and establish mind and thought control centers for the small workers;
* those who are convinced that history is the exclusive work of great men, solidify them in statues, and tell the small men to honor and adore them forever; finally,
* those peoples who do not have a superior, radiant white skin color as small, inferior soulless creatures neither serve for the use nor for the abuse of philosophy, in their blackness, they live in the backyard of democracy, of history.
What is our concrete utopian principle of hope? How could we act, think and surpass emancipation in Latin America? These questions can only be answered collectively in praxis and theory, no great god, idea, man or race will emancipate us: we have to do, think and surpass it all of, by and for ourselves, here and now.
After a decade of Bolivarian Revolution, the Venezuelan youths, the future leaders and hope of America, necessarily have to cast off all obsolete conceptions of history, all political ideological cobwebs. We have to activate our few remaining sane neurones, to think, to reflect very deeply about revolutionary theory, to go wisely on the anti-capitalist warpath of emancipatory praxis, of creative, constructive self-defense. Furthermore, among other things, especially in Venezuela urgently fiery youth and juvenile flames of all ages have to find, to blaze the serpentine trail towards the exit, the exodus out of such imperialist vices and crimes like sabotage, mortal military coups, destabilization, impunity, plunder of natural resources, bureaucracy, corruption and political assassination.
Our emancipatory exodus (exvolution) is the New, is that what never has been done, said or surpassed, and which will not be repeated. In Venezuela excellent examples of the thorny paths leading towards the real, true New were the class struggles between April 11 and 13, 2002, and the battle to save Venezuela's economic heart beat PDVSA from the claws of Yankee imperialism. A typical example of the Old, of the Obsolete, was precisely the 'Caracazo', the merciless massacre of thousands of workers on the 27th of February, 1989 by the then 'Accion Democratica' Carlos Andres Perez government. Till today the USA did not protest against this barbarism, and did not title Carlos Andres Perez neither as a 'tyrant' nor as a 'dictator' nor as a 'terrorist'.
However, over the last decade, we did not cross the Rubicon. Like in the case of the October Revolution, if we are not cautious, we can still fall back into a murderous 'puntofijismo', that is, into reactionary reformism. The New, the concrete social utopia, is one of the most complicated scientific and philosophic categories. It is very complex to grasp, very responsible to act and within the capitalist global system well-nigh impossible to venture beyond, to surpass, to transcend. Thus we should be very careful when we use concepts like the 'new man or woman'.
Now let us get down to serious 'transhistoric' reflections about earthly reality, human existence and its transcendental 'quo vadis'. We have to part from natural history, from the origin of life, of men, to enter capitalism and its dialectical negation, socialism, and to depart via the new, towards creation and emancipation.
Fiat lux! Nearly unnoticed by billions of whitewashed eyes, in sublime magnitude 'experimentum mundi', namely, the cosmic experiment world, Pacha Mama, life, all are taking place here at the edge of the galaxy called the Via Lactea. In formal geological terms, Mother Earth, Chthon, Geo, ... as a child of "multiversal" 'natura naturans natura naturata' (Avicenna), that is, of creative, creating and created Nature, ... has already existed since a myriad of aeons; our best scientific guess dates our material origin, the birth of our planet Earth back to some 4.54 Ga. Formal logical Big Bang adherents even claim that our universe, our 'hen kai pan', our one and all, is between 13.5 and 14 billion years old. Seen from such celestial dimensions, with all due respect, how Lilliputian must be the arrogant character of the United States administration in the White House and of all the global corporate moguls! All this happened and still is occurring in order that a few elites bomb the planet to hell? Worse even, will billions of workers really allow them to do it? Is this reason, rational, rationality? Or is it the total eclipse of reason?
However, let us advance...
Nonetheless, what all still could happen on our small planet is still written in the stars. On principle, youths, youngsters generally experiment hopefully with the new, they become social detectives, political engineers and economic constructors. On the face value, apart from brilliant exceptions, nowadays the above seems to be a pipe dream, a fata morgana from the 1960s. Mass media, video games, music, drugs and consumerism seem to have mesmerized also a great part of the postmodern 'colonial' youth. It seems that the modern globalized chatting young people are interested in every thing else except in socialism, Marxism and revolution. Surely, also in Venezuela, everything is not won as yet, but also everything is not lost as yet either. The latest orchestrated demonstrations by the 'opposition' in Venezuela against President Chavez verified that apart from a small minority of brainwashed individuals, the youth, pupils and students, are not prepared to blindly support open fascism.
Being already a decade in power, Chavez still enjoys at least 60% popularity -- next to Fidel Castro, this is a Latin American record. This is why the coupsters protest against the new law of education. They fear that their manipulation and indoctrination of the youth are coming to an end. They are losing the body, mind and thought control of the young people, of all youth at heart.
Thus, void of Big Lies, military hoaxes, fairy tales and religious myths, that is, without any illusions we are trying to reflect some innovative aspects of the turn of our epoch. This simple and relatively introductory commentary is directed towards the emancipatory youth of the world, towards accumulated youth of all ages. Nevertheless, because of the complexity of our topic, allow us to return to our experiment world, to the sublime philosophic heights of emancipatory analysis and of constructive critique and self-criticism.
We know that material, spiritual and transcendental life developed itself here on Earth millions of years ago and progressively multifaceted life changed Geo into a 'non-centric', hylozoist, panpsychic, cosmic world. This world process Friedrich Engels and Charles Darwin have highlighted centuries ago. As such appeared a myriad of natural experiments: the dawn of apes, chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas, ape-men, men-apes, hominids and men ... much later, even tyrants, dictators, saviors, saints, popes, men-gods and god-men appeared on the solar horizon. All this partially has already been spotlighted by Charles Darwin in his pioneering work, The Ascent of Man (1871).
On St. Valentine's Day, 2009, we reminded the terrestrial great lovers about their ape descent, also about some possible things to come:
"About the future of ruling class homo sapiens sapiens, about his coming mode of destruction, in 1876 Friedrich Engels already warned us. In his famous essay 'The Part played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,' written in May-June 1876 and first published: in 'Die Neue Zeit', 1895-06, Engels stated:
'Only Man has succeeded to put his stamp on nature; not only is he transferring plants and animals from one place to another; also by changing the climate and their natural habitat and even by modifying the flora and fauna to such an extent that the consequences of his activities will only disappear with the universal extinction of the entire earthly globe.' " 3)
Engels definitely warned that the 'experimentum mundi' could fail, that no 'Happy End' will await us if we perpetuate master and slave relations and that the exploitative activities of ruling class capitalist man will only disappear with the "universal extinction of the entire earthly globe." As we can see nothing is determined, deterministic, 'economistic' or absolute in scientific, philosophic anti-capitalism, that is, in socialism.
Mankind, we ... the toiling 'speaking tools' (Aristotle) of our reigning 'philosopher-kings' (Plato) ... only stepped into terrestrial existence a few hundred millennia ago, into a man-made, self-destructive world order, in the labor process, in the process of production, into a history of natural and social exploitation, domination, discrimination, militarization and alienation. It, our 'pre- and post-modern' historic reality, the current inexorable mortal process of the accumulation of capital is casting us on the very edge of time; we find ourselves at the Rubicon, at the brink of a 'Zeitenwende' (turn of the era), at the cataclysmic crossroads of an imperialist, corporate Russian roulette. If no last minute scientific 'miracle' would occur, if in time we cannot jerk ourselves out of our current lethargic complacency, then rapidly billions of us will be sacked, laid off, down-sized and be cast out of history, sliding towards the nearest black hole of cosmic oblivion.
It really seems that all ruling class men are hell bent on destroying life on our planet. War mongrels of all bellicose genres, as was the case of the unnecessary nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are desperate to test their latest mortal and lethal arms of mass destruction, viz, to destroy within a few centuries what had taken thousands of aeons to come into earthly being and planetary existence. The heinous dimensions of the bourgeois, imperialist, corporate, capital and cardinal crimes against nature and society cannot be expressed in words. Perhaps, who knows, at best the previous United States president George H. W. Bush, Sr. has formulated the truly democratic, popular sentence for such abominable transhistoric atrocities and fascist treachery:
"If the North American people knew what we have done, they would string us up from the lamp posts." 4)
What does all this mean? Can mankind, planetary life, still survive, still emancipate itself?
As far as we could gather, over the past aeons of creating itself, of experiencing and experimenting itself and with itself, in contradistinction to today, in the past, life on planet earth on various occasions was seriously threatened externally by radical climatic changes and other adverse astronomic factors.
On July 27, 2009, with reference to this, we explained:
" ... according to scientific estimates, over millions of years, at least three times natural disasters, ... collisions with other heavenly bodies or sudden drastic climatic changes, ... had annihilated over 90% of then existent life, destroyed a myriad of invaluable cosmic experiments of living beings. So-called homo sapiens sapiens probably underwent a premature birth, compared to cockroaches and crocodiles, it, the 'crown of creation', ... deliberately using a neutral pronoun, ... barely could survive. Only thanks to the natural genes that he was sharing with chimpanzees and pigs, especially with his creative brain (wo)mankind was able to survive. Brains in cooperation with his thumb, early human praxis and theory, saved man's life. Across the millennia the above formed his only formidable weapons of self-defense in a violent natural and social habitat." 5)
Against current global fascism, which has already claimed more than a million innocent lives over the last decades, could our thumbs and our brains still save earthly life? If not, farewell, crown of creation!
Billions of us, as a result of ruling class 'information', 'culture', 'education' and 'socialization' have been bamboozled ideologically to the very brim. Many of us do not have the foggiest idea of what is really happening around us. And who as a walking encyclopedia thinks that he knows everything, has patented the truth, very soon, like Socrates, will discover his immense chronic ignorance about Pentagon aliens, blue prints for 'rainbow revolutions', lies about Chavez, myths about '9/11', Bin Laden, about who really 'discovered' America, who was the first Russian in space and what is happening in Los Alamos under ground or in 'Area 51' in the desert above ground. He would be surprised what liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy and justice are all about.
Many of us, now already living in tent cities, under bridges, in ghettos, 'cerros' and 'favelas', perhaps soon will be marked and transported to camps, gulags, football fields, Bantustans or even caves. We are too near to the fleeting moments of contemporary belligerent reality. Many of us are pathologically submerged and immersed in omnipresent consumerism, in a deep reformist slumber, in an intellectual coma; millions of us do not care a dime about revolution, socialism, human emancipation or future life on this planet. As capitalism inexorably is globalizing itself in geometric progression, daily it is terrorizing us with true or faked excruciating horror stories produced by the Murdoch empire or even is harrowing us with gruesome reports like those from Falujah or Gaza. Slowly the youths are being accustomed to war, fear and horror, are being prepared for the military humanism to come, are being nipped in the bud, die in 'defense of their fatherland'.
Now, who scientifically and philosophically studies contemporary history, ... capitalism, socialism, imperialism, theories of imperialism, fascism, theories of fascism, ... who really knows what is happening in this great depression, in this global recession? All the forerunners of this global depression and recession ended up in bloody wars, and the workers had to carry the weight of the restoration of capitalism on their exploited shoulders. The past 'recoveries' of capitalism had a bitter price, thousands and millions of victims; infrastructures, houses, work places and cities, all destroyed. This time it will be worse, it is not only an 'economic crisis' it is the logical, the finite collapse of the decaying, global capitalist system.
Yes, we are living in a decisive epoch of radical changes, in a 'turn of the times'.
What are the social characteristics of such epochs of drastic internal changes? The matrix of all social revolutions, the French Revolution, gives us a glimpse of the feelings of such dramatic transitional epochs.
Allow us to quote extensively from a 'secretary' of the triumphant bourgeois revolutionary 'weltgeist', as described in his classic: "A Tale of Two Cities". In this novel Charles Dickens explains the severe sharpening of the dialectical contradictions of social class struggles. He tells us:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, ... " 6)
In that epoch of social revolution, there was "the spring of hope" for the upsurging bourgeoisie, for the global accumulation of capital, for the coming globalization. It was the "winter of despair" for the falling clergy and nobility.
But, what did he say about the workers, the "proletariat" (Marx and Engels), about "Les miserables" (Victor Hugo), the "white man's burden" (Rudyard Kipling) and the "wretched of the earth" (Frantz Fanon)?
Let us continue quoting Dickens:
" ... we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." 7)
Nothing ... that is why like here we have to say what we mean and mean what we are saying!
Nothing, the revolution did not reach the proletariat, it remained incomplete. Wage slaves were doomed to be exploited "for good or for evil".
In 1789, Rousseau's 'noble savagery' did not triumph on the streets and barricades of Paris; on the contrary, bourgeois 'democracy', ... the liberty, equality and fraternity of capital to accumulate and expand itself won the day ... the Hobbesian beast, 'bellum omnium contra omnes' (the war of all against all) was ushering in its future bloody 'reign of terror'. Today having reached its zenith of perverse military destruction, corporate imperialist terrorism calls itself "full spectrum dominance", by some, euphemistically it also is named "military humanism", by others, simply the war against the "axis of evil", which comprises "failed states", like Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, Ecuador or Bolivia. Ever since, global master races, a 'Herrenvolk', a 'chosen people', 'homo homini lupus', are reigning over slave races, the children of Ham, "les miserables" and "the wretched of the earth". Concerning the above, how deep racism is embedded in the original primitive accumulation of capital in 'civilizations' of Antiquity the following testifies: the Babylonian Talmud states that 'negroes' were the children of Ham, who were cursed by God with 'blackness'. In reality they were down graded to toiling slaves, to 'hewers of wood and drawers of water"; in the twentieth century the Herrenvolk, the apartheid fascist regime in South Africa, had used this 'sacred' testimony to enslave over 40 million 'blacks'.
In fact, objectively, in corporate imperialism, more than ever before, within the current global mode of production, still the master-slave relations, the capital-labor contradictions, the international bourgeois-proletarian class struggles violently and inexorably are raging. Subjectively and "transjectively", the description of the current social situation is immensely complicated and complex, because we need a new logic, science, philosophy and "man" to determine the global crossing of the Rubicon, from capitalist revolution to creative emancipation.
Concerning the "spring of hope" during 'Zeitenwende', on April 24, 2009, we commented:
"Across the millennia, in the brilliant words of Anaximander, our clarion call must read; who does not anticipate the unexpected will never find it. For this very reason there still exists the infinitesimal possibility, by means of global workers class struggles, to eradicate and annihilate the capitalist monstrosity. According to Bloch, in the titanic battle against capitalism, in global class struggle very little has been won, but also, not everything is lost as yet. The experiment world, man, continues." 8)
Generally, before obtaining success, many times experiments fail. It took capitalism many centuries to realize itself, as Hegel stated, to launch its eventual passing away into the galactic quicksands of time. Capitalism was possible, it became real, then it passed into decadence and will perish due to severe dialectical conflicts, and hence it will vanish into obsolescence. Its mortal error was that it never gave its possible negation, its Non-A, a chance of self-realization. Anti-capitalism, socialism, remains utopian, the possible, the authentic new. Our moment is there, capitalism, with all its arsenals of destruction is currently experiencing the nadir of its hegemony; its life energy is running out. At the moment capitalism is bombing its internal dialectical quintessence: labor - capital, to blazes.
Much has been said, written and debated about the New; over the last decades it was given all sorts of ideological, 'postmodern', systemic connotations; nowadays formal logically and even dialectically as a philosophic postulate, as creative eros, as 'vis vitalis', as an emancipatory concept, the New is being violated and sacrificed on the altar of pathological capitalist greed, avarice and consumerism. In the twentieth century, among others, Ernst Bloch, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara still tried to rescue its utopian emancipatory forms and contents.
Currently, experiencing its greatest recession and depression, world capitalism is entering its 'winter of despair'. Is there still a 'spring of hope" for us, for the exploited, dominated and discriminated classes or has global imperialism already stopped the proletarian "coming of spring"?
Is capitalism or Marxism or both of them obsolete? As stated before, within a closed world system, an utopian daydream is possible, an anticipatory expectation may become objective, concrete, true or not. Socialism as real and true anti-capitalism never was realized on a world scale as yet, it is still possible. Something fully materialized, realized is dying: all the possibilities of the capitalist mode of production are running out, this is why lately it is so brutal in Iraq and Afghanistan, so mortal in Falujah and Gaza.
Bloch reminded us that hope (Hoffnung) is not confidence (Zuversicht); in emancipatory matters nothing is sure, secure. Emancipatory hope is beleaguered with all types of dangers, with hundreds of United States military bases, stockpiled with arsenals of mortal and lethal weapons of mass destruction. Internally this is amplified with an age old global mental holocaust, with sophisticated, technological mind and thought control machinations and mechanisms, and with Orwellian surveillance gadgets. These days, standing on a soap box on Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, in the midst of millions of surveillance cameras, trying to convert the laborers towards socialism, to explain to the buzzing consumer bees global class struggle would be tantamount to the hopeless job of an ancient Sisyphus.
Who is not in orbit already, who does not have the long view of history, cannot see the sinking 'Titanic', cannot escape the coming deluge, the mighty 'tsunami' of tons and tons of melted ice coming from the North Pole, cannot feel the scorching rays coming from the holes in the earth's ozone layer, cannot register the radio-activity coming from above, from the powerful bombs which were launched by the USA after the Second World War in the Van Allen radiating Belts.
What did the philosopher Ernst Bloch consider to be the revolutionary distinctive signs, the principle of hope of our turbulent Zeitenwende?
Firstly, the 'turn of the times' itself.
Among many others, Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and Bloch have explained that epochs of radical social change, of violent class struggles, have no recipes, no time-tables, they cannot be copied, imported or exported. Every time a new epoch presents itself, its zeitgeist blazes its own trail. Kant's 'practical reason' and Hegel's weltgeist (world spirit) ushered in bourgeois enlightenment. From there Bloch continued with his Marxist pedagogics of the oppressed peoples.
At the 'turn of the times', during epochs of radical change, like the one that we are witnessing now; because of the fragrant New, of their novelty, innovation and freshness, they are pregnant with youth, with erotic creativity and creative eros. The New is not the continuation of the obsolete, a copy of the past, it is not the ideological humdrum of yesterday, the repetitive rigmarole of an eternal political blue print or perpetual, competitive social bull-fighting. In this sense, according to Bloch, it is time to humanize and socialize the current global exploited classes. Linking Kantian enlightenment to Marxian humanism Bloch underlined that 'even if it should be true that the social relations form human beings, we have no alternative but to change the very relations into human relations. Long live practical reason!'.
To demonstrate the gigantic difficulty for mankind to walk in dignity, in upright gait, he stated that historically we could register thousand wars but less than ten revolutions.
Concerning the 'praxical' and theoretical depths and heights of Bloch's principle of hope, not to repeat ourselves, we will quote from two important articles published last year.
Concerning youth as a philosophic category, on June 18, 2008, in the article "Venezuela: Youth, Students, Education and Marxism", we emphasized that juvenile enthusiasm, imagination, fantasy, "youth itself, youthful anticipatory daydreams, form the concrete, utopian principle of hope (Ernst Bloch)". 9)
We explained that in his writing "Marx als Denker der Revolution" (Marx as the Theoretician of Revolution), Bloch (widely seen as the father of the 1968 student movement in Europe and elsewhere) emphasized that "Youth is driven by a dim presentiment of things to come," of something ahead, of the crimson dawn on the red human horizon." 10)
Bloch elaborated that the rebelling youths suspect already what they do not want, however, they do "not yet" know what is to be done, what is to be thought, how to venture beyond this capitalist, terrorist vale of tears.
A year ago, on September 18, 2008, in an article titled "Ernst Bloch: The cat falls on its four paws, who has not learned to think falls into eternal yesterday", we informed that already in 1974 at the eve of global fascism, of international thought, mind and body control, Bloch warned us about the possible coming of a global 'Farewell to Utopia'. 11)
Secondly, Youth, restless youthfulness and energetic adolescence themselves are emancipatory elements and creations of the turn of the times. Bloch still hopes for emancipation within productivity, within the process of planetary production. We in honor of Bloch are trying to venture beyond systemic production, we include possibilities of realizing extra-systemic, 'transvolutionary', creative emancipation. Surely concrete, fundamental utopian hope is not confidence or national security; no 'happy end' or divine 'hunting grounds' await us. We are the experiment, we are part of the 'experimentum mundi'; it could be victorious, have a different result, that is, it could fail. However, the outcome of this planetary experiment could be totally new, it could be 'trifferent', be neither successful nor a failure. Hence, real Hope is not Confidence, is not triumphalism. For example, nothing is sure about a hopeful socialist victory in Venezuela or elsewhere.
Finally, in this epoch of radical social transformation, of political depression, economic recession and military repression, of world fascism, where mankind de facto is already engaged in a life and death battle, in devastating international class wars under disastrous belligerent conditions ... inter alia, in Gaza, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Palestine, Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan ... we better wake up urgently out of our long, deep consumer slumber (Shelley), get rid of our mechanisms of evasion, of our fear of freedom (Eric Fromm).
What Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in 1819 at the eve of the Industrial Revolution in England, on the occasion of the Peterloo massacre of many workers by the British government is still valid today:
"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few." 12)
In spite of all its Big Lies, for example, about '9/11', world capitalism fears the truth, the youth, social creativity, the new, that is, that what the billions of wage slaves could become: emancipated!
Summing up, currently by means of intra-class wars ruling man is threatening himself internally; internationally he does the same via systematic means of self-annihilation. We are living in a decisive Zeitwende of history, we have to study its zeitgeist, its scientific tendencies and philosophic latencies and also its short and long term objectives, its revolution.
Marx expressed the principle of hope as follows: : a problem only turns up when humanity has the solution already at hand.
In our specific case, the long term objective of experimentum mundi, the New, already dawns on the crimson horizon of Planet Earth. We have the 'free' choice: it depends on us whether we want to sink into the current obnoxious quicksand of corporate arrogance, ignorance and obsolescence, into the capitalist cesspool of radio-active fascist darkness or to transcend this imperialist vale of tears by means of a creative exodus, by crossing the Rubicon towards the realm of the New, of Emancipation. A gigantic, titanic global war alias 'world peace' awaits us. Our clarion call is the New, a new logic, science, philosophy and wisdom, that is, the New per se. To create this we need no Manhattan project for arms of mass destruction: we only need to live the Truth 'praxically', to study reality theoretically, and to surpass the bourgeois, capitalist, world revolution with creative emancipation, with emancipatory creation. As Bloch taught, the genesis is now, after exploitative production comes human creation. However, these topics surely merit new discussions and new
commentaries in the near future.
***
1) See:
http://www.franzlee.org.ve/bloch001.html
2)
http://www.econlib.org/library/
YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA31.html
3) (My own free translation from the German original)
http://www.pr-inside.com/franz-j-t-lee-
no-problem-r1059947.htm
4)
http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.
shtml?x=619885
5)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Honduras
-and-Venezuela-Ro-by-Franz-J-T-Lee-090726-107.html
6)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/
Charles_Dickens
7) Ibid.
8)
http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=619885
9)
http://quebec.indymedia.org/en/node/30964
10) (Ibid.)
11)
http://www.trinicenter.com/modules.php?
name=News&file=article&sid=1896&
mode=thread&order=0&thold=0964
12)
http://www.artofeurope.com/shelley/she5.htm
Over the next three days a fervent debate resulted with reference to the Bolivarian Revolution and its future. Amazingly the result was a very enthusiastic interest in such new topics, especially in relation to the current nearly hopeless situation in many countries, to the class struggles stuck in the doldrums of reformism, to the global depression, economic recession, violent fascist repression. Also there exists a general repudiation against the genocidal killing at whim of millions of innocent peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere by social, by State order. The victims of corporate imperialism, ... of the United States war economy, financing hundreds of military bases across the planet, ... are countless. Aggressive, violent capitalism never ever had respect or any humane feeling for natural, human and social life, it converts everything on the planet even itself into ossified and cossified relations, into capital, wares, money, death. According to Karl Marx, in a footnote of his monumental work, Capital, Volume I, Part VIII, Chapter 31, "If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek', capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." 2)
This is what has to be annihilated, any alliance, any joint adventure with the ruling class enemy , that is, any reform project is tantamount to sacrificing ourselves on the postmodern Phoenician altar of Baal, of the golden calf. We have no alternative, our principle of hope against 'military humanism' is launching the New, that is, the turn of the millennium, youth and creativity, in short, emancipatory praxis and theory.
Hence, like elsewhere, among the socially less 'privileged' Venezuelan youth, especially among popular groups, a general frustration can be detected, which very often results in psychological evasion, pathological consumerism, sublimation and capitulation vis-a-vis the brutal onslaught of the current 'second conquest'. Progressively this critical situation is shattering many of our juvenile anticipations, expectations and hopeful daydreams. Big Brother, the Empire, slowly are catapulting us into the devouring vortex of the ravenous Moloch of capitalism, of the greenback, yes, ... into the very cynical blasphemy of its 'In God We Trust".
* Those who trust in great gods making history, now blame the small devil, the axis of evil, for breaking it;
* those who believe that great ideas, absolute ideas, are governing mankind begin to burn books and establish mind and thought control centers for the small workers;
* those who are convinced that history is the exclusive work of great men, solidify them in statues, and tell the small men to honor and adore them forever; finally,
* those peoples who do not have a superior, radiant white skin color as small, inferior soulless creatures neither serve for the use nor for the abuse of philosophy, in their blackness, they live in the backyard of democracy, of history.
What is our concrete utopian principle of hope? How could we act, think and surpass emancipation in Latin America? These questions can only be answered collectively in praxis and theory, no great god, idea, man or race will emancipate us: we have to do, think and surpass it all of, by and for ourselves, here and now.
After a decade of Bolivarian Revolution, the Venezuelan youths, the future leaders and hope of America, necessarily have to cast off all obsolete conceptions of history, all political ideological cobwebs. We have to activate our few remaining sane neurones, to think, to reflect very deeply about revolutionary theory, to go wisely on the anti-capitalist warpath of emancipatory praxis, of creative, constructive self-defense. Furthermore, among other things, especially in Venezuela urgently fiery youth and juvenile flames of all ages have to find, to blaze the serpentine trail towards the exit, the exodus out of such imperialist vices and crimes like sabotage, mortal military coups, destabilization, impunity, plunder of natural resources, bureaucracy, corruption and political assassination.
Our emancipatory exodus (exvolution) is the New, is that what never has been done, said or surpassed, and which will not be repeated. In Venezuela excellent examples of the thorny paths leading towards the real, true New were the class struggles between April 11 and 13, 2002, and the battle to save Venezuela's economic heart beat PDVSA from the claws of Yankee imperialism. A typical example of the Old, of the Obsolete, was precisely the 'Caracazo', the merciless massacre of thousands of workers on the 27th of February, 1989 by the then 'Accion Democratica' Carlos Andres Perez government. Till today the USA did not protest against this barbarism, and did not title Carlos Andres Perez neither as a 'tyrant' nor as a 'dictator' nor as a 'terrorist'.
However, over the last decade, we did not cross the Rubicon. Like in the case of the October Revolution, if we are not cautious, we can still fall back into a murderous 'puntofijismo', that is, into reactionary reformism. The New, the concrete social utopia, is one of the most complicated scientific and philosophic categories. It is very complex to grasp, very responsible to act and within the capitalist global system well-nigh impossible to venture beyond, to surpass, to transcend. Thus we should be very careful when we use concepts like the 'new man or woman'.
Now let us get down to serious 'transhistoric' reflections about earthly reality, human existence and its transcendental 'quo vadis'. We have to part from natural history, from the origin of life, of men, to enter capitalism and its dialectical negation, socialism, and to depart via the new, towards creation and emancipation.
Fiat lux! Nearly unnoticed by billions of whitewashed eyes, in sublime magnitude 'experimentum mundi', namely, the cosmic experiment world, Pacha Mama, life, all are taking place here at the edge of the galaxy called the Via Lactea. In formal geological terms, Mother Earth, Chthon, Geo, ... as a child of "multiversal" 'natura naturans natura naturata' (Avicenna), that is, of creative, creating and created Nature, ... has already existed since a myriad of aeons; our best scientific guess dates our material origin, the birth of our planet Earth back to some 4.54 Ga. Formal logical Big Bang adherents even claim that our universe, our 'hen kai pan', our one and all, is between 13.5 and 14 billion years old. Seen from such celestial dimensions, with all due respect, how Lilliputian must be the arrogant character of the United States administration in the White House and of all the global corporate moguls! All this happened and still is occurring in order that a few elites bomb the planet to hell? Worse even, will billions of workers really allow them to do it? Is this reason, rational, rationality? Or is it the total eclipse of reason?
However, let us advance...
Nonetheless, what all still could happen on our small planet is still written in the stars. On principle, youths, youngsters generally experiment hopefully with the new, they become social detectives, political engineers and economic constructors. On the face value, apart from brilliant exceptions, nowadays the above seems to be a pipe dream, a fata morgana from the 1960s. Mass media, video games, music, drugs and consumerism seem to have mesmerized also a great part of the postmodern 'colonial' youth. It seems that the modern globalized chatting young people are interested in every thing else except in socialism, Marxism and revolution. Surely, also in Venezuela, everything is not won as yet, but also everything is not lost as yet either. The latest orchestrated demonstrations by the 'opposition' in Venezuela against President Chavez verified that apart from a small minority of brainwashed individuals, the youth, pupils and students, are not prepared to blindly support open fascism.
Being already a decade in power, Chavez still enjoys at least 60% popularity -- next to Fidel Castro, this is a Latin American record. This is why the coupsters protest against the new law of education. They fear that their manipulation and indoctrination of the youth are coming to an end. They are losing the body, mind and thought control of the young people, of all youth at heart.
Thus, void of Big Lies, military hoaxes, fairy tales and religious myths, that is, without any illusions we are trying to reflect some innovative aspects of the turn of our epoch. This simple and relatively introductory commentary is directed towards the emancipatory youth of the world, towards accumulated youth of all ages. Nevertheless, because of the complexity of our topic, allow us to return to our experiment world, to the sublime philosophic heights of emancipatory analysis and of constructive critique and self-criticism.
We know that material, spiritual and transcendental life developed itself here on Earth millions of years ago and progressively multifaceted life changed Geo into a 'non-centric', hylozoist, panpsychic, cosmic world. This world process Friedrich Engels and Charles Darwin have highlighted centuries ago. As such appeared a myriad of natural experiments: the dawn of apes, chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas, ape-men, men-apes, hominids and men ... much later, even tyrants, dictators, saviors, saints, popes, men-gods and god-men appeared on the solar horizon. All this partially has already been spotlighted by Charles Darwin in his pioneering work, The Ascent of Man (1871).
On St. Valentine's Day, 2009, we reminded the terrestrial great lovers about their ape descent, also about some possible things to come:
"About the future of ruling class homo sapiens sapiens, about his coming mode of destruction, in 1876 Friedrich Engels already warned us. In his famous essay 'The Part played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,' written in May-June 1876 and first published: in 'Die Neue Zeit', 1895-06, Engels stated:
'Only Man has succeeded to put his stamp on nature; not only is he transferring plants and animals from one place to another; also by changing the climate and their natural habitat and even by modifying the flora and fauna to such an extent that the consequences of his activities will only disappear with the universal extinction of the entire earthly globe.' " 3)
Engels definitely warned that the 'experimentum mundi' could fail, that no 'Happy End' will await us if we perpetuate master and slave relations and that the exploitative activities of ruling class capitalist man will only disappear with the "universal extinction of the entire earthly globe." As we can see nothing is determined, deterministic, 'economistic' or absolute in scientific, philosophic anti-capitalism, that is, in socialism.
Mankind, we ... the toiling 'speaking tools' (Aristotle) of our reigning 'philosopher-kings' (Plato) ... only stepped into terrestrial existence a few hundred millennia ago, into a man-made, self-destructive world order, in the labor process, in the process of production, into a history of natural and social exploitation, domination, discrimination, militarization and alienation. It, our 'pre- and post-modern' historic reality, the current inexorable mortal process of the accumulation of capital is casting us on the very edge of time; we find ourselves at the Rubicon, at the brink of a 'Zeitenwende' (turn of the era), at the cataclysmic crossroads of an imperialist, corporate Russian roulette. If no last minute scientific 'miracle' would occur, if in time we cannot jerk ourselves out of our current lethargic complacency, then rapidly billions of us will be sacked, laid off, down-sized and be cast out of history, sliding towards the nearest black hole of cosmic oblivion.
It really seems that all ruling class men are hell bent on destroying life on our planet. War mongrels of all bellicose genres, as was the case of the unnecessary nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are desperate to test their latest mortal and lethal arms of mass destruction, viz, to destroy within a few centuries what had taken thousands of aeons to come into earthly being and planetary existence. The heinous dimensions of the bourgeois, imperialist, corporate, capital and cardinal crimes against nature and society cannot be expressed in words. Perhaps, who knows, at best the previous United States president George H. W. Bush, Sr. has formulated the truly democratic, popular sentence for such abominable transhistoric atrocities and fascist treachery:
"If the North American people knew what we have done, they would string us up from the lamp posts." 4)
What does all this mean? Can mankind, planetary life, still survive, still emancipate itself?
As far as we could gather, over the past aeons of creating itself, of experiencing and experimenting itself and with itself, in contradistinction to today, in the past, life on planet earth on various occasions was seriously threatened externally by radical climatic changes and other adverse astronomic factors.
On July 27, 2009, with reference to this, we explained:
" ... according to scientific estimates, over millions of years, at least three times natural disasters, ... collisions with other heavenly bodies or sudden drastic climatic changes, ... had annihilated over 90% of then existent life, destroyed a myriad of invaluable cosmic experiments of living beings. So-called homo sapiens sapiens probably underwent a premature birth, compared to cockroaches and crocodiles, it, the 'crown of creation', ... deliberately using a neutral pronoun, ... barely could survive. Only thanks to the natural genes that he was sharing with chimpanzees and pigs, especially with his creative brain (wo)mankind was able to survive. Brains in cooperation with his thumb, early human praxis and theory, saved man's life. Across the millennia the above formed his only formidable weapons of self-defense in a violent natural and social habitat." 5)
Against current global fascism, which has already claimed more than a million innocent lives over the last decades, could our thumbs and our brains still save earthly life? If not, farewell, crown of creation!
Billions of us, as a result of ruling class 'information', 'culture', 'education' and 'socialization' have been bamboozled ideologically to the very brim. Many of us do not have the foggiest idea of what is really happening around us. And who as a walking encyclopedia thinks that he knows everything, has patented the truth, very soon, like Socrates, will discover his immense chronic ignorance about Pentagon aliens, blue prints for 'rainbow revolutions', lies about Chavez, myths about '9/11', Bin Laden, about who really 'discovered' America, who was the first Russian in space and what is happening in Los Alamos under ground or in 'Area 51' in the desert above ground. He would be surprised what liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy and justice are all about.
Many of us, now already living in tent cities, under bridges, in ghettos, 'cerros' and 'favelas', perhaps soon will be marked and transported to camps, gulags, football fields, Bantustans or even caves. We are too near to the fleeting moments of contemporary belligerent reality. Many of us are pathologically submerged and immersed in omnipresent consumerism, in a deep reformist slumber, in an intellectual coma; millions of us do not care a dime about revolution, socialism, human emancipation or future life on this planet. As capitalism inexorably is globalizing itself in geometric progression, daily it is terrorizing us with true or faked excruciating horror stories produced by the Murdoch empire or even is harrowing us with gruesome reports like those from Falujah or Gaza. Slowly the youths are being accustomed to war, fear and horror, are being prepared for the military humanism to come, are being nipped in the bud, die in 'defense of their fatherland'.
Now, who scientifically and philosophically studies contemporary history, ... capitalism, socialism, imperialism, theories of imperialism, fascism, theories of fascism, ... who really knows what is happening in this great depression, in this global recession? All the forerunners of this global depression and recession ended up in bloody wars, and the workers had to carry the weight of the restoration of capitalism on their exploited shoulders. The past 'recoveries' of capitalism had a bitter price, thousands and millions of victims; infrastructures, houses, work places and cities, all destroyed. This time it will be worse, it is not only an 'economic crisis' it is the logical, the finite collapse of the decaying, global capitalist system.
Yes, we are living in a decisive epoch of radical changes, in a 'turn of the times'.
What are the social characteristics of such epochs of drastic internal changes? The matrix of all social revolutions, the French Revolution, gives us a glimpse of the feelings of such dramatic transitional epochs.
Allow us to quote extensively from a 'secretary' of the triumphant bourgeois revolutionary 'weltgeist', as described in his classic: "A Tale of Two Cities". In this novel Charles Dickens explains the severe sharpening of the dialectical contradictions of social class struggles. He tells us:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, ... " 6)
In that epoch of social revolution, there was "the spring of hope" for the upsurging bourgeoisie, for the global accumulation of capital, for the coming globalization. It was the "winter of despair" for the falling clergy and nobility.
But, what did he say about the workers, the "proletariat" (Marx and Engels), about "Les miserables" (Victor Hugo), the "white man's burden" (Rudyard Kipling) and the "wretched of the earth" (Frantz Fanon)?
Let us continue quoting Dickens:
" ... we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." 7)
Nothing ... that is why like here we have to say what we mean and mean what we are saying!
Nothing, the revolution did not reach the proletariat, it remained incomplete. Wage slaves were doomed to be exploited "for good or for evil".
In 1789, Rousseau's 'noble savagery' did not triumph on the streets and barricades of Paris; on the contrary, bourgeois 'democracy', ... the liberty, equality and fraternity of capital to accumulate and expand itself won the day ... the Hobbesian beast, 'bellum omnium contra omnes' (the war of all against all) was ushering in its future bloody 'reign of terror'. Today having reached its zenith of perverse military destruction, corporate imperialist terrorism calls itself "full spectrum dominance", by some, euphemistically it also is named "military humanism", by others, simply the war against the "axis of evil", which comprises "failed states", like Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, Ecuador or Bolivia. Ever since, global master races, a 'Herrenvolk', a 'chosen people', 'homo homini lupus', are reigning over slave races, the children of Ham, "les miserables" and "the wretched of the earth". Concerning the above, how deep racism is embedded in the original primitive accumulation of capital in 'civilizations' of Antiquity the following testifies: the Babylonian Talmud states that 'negroes' were the children of Ham, who were cursed by God with 'blackness'. In reality they were down graded to toiling slaves, to 'hewers of wood and drawers of water"; in the twentieth century the Herrenvolk, the apartheid fascist regime in South Africa, had used this 'sacred' testimony to enslave over 40 million 'blacks'.
In fact, objectively, in corporate imperialism, more than ever before, within the current global mode of production, still the master-slave relations, the capital-labor contradictions, the international bourgeois-proletarian class struggles violently and inexorably are raging. Subjectively and "transjectively", the description of the current social situation is immensely complicated and complex, because we need a new logic, science, philosophy and "man" to determine the global crossing of the Rubicon, from capitalist revolution to creative emancipation.
Concerning the "spring of hope" during 'Zeitenwende', on April 24, 2009, we commented:
"Across the millennia, in the brilliant words of Anaximander, our clarion call must read; who does not anticipate the unexpected will never find it. For this very reason there still exists the infinitesimal possibility, by means of global workers class struggles, to eradicate and annihilate the capitalist monstrosity. According to Bloch, in the titanic battle against capitalism, in global class struggle very little has been won, but also, not everything is lost as yet. The experiment world, man, continues." 8)
Generally, before obtaining success, many times experiments fail. It took capitalism many centuries to realize itself, as Hegel stated, to launch its eventual passing away into the galactic quicksands of time. Capitalism was possible, it became real, then it passed into decadence and will perish due to severe dialectical conflicts, and hence it will vanish into obsolescence. Its mortal error was that it never gave its possible negation, its Non-A, a chance of self-realization. Anti-capitalism, socialism, remains utopian, the possible, the authentic new. Our moment is there, capitalism, with all its arsenals of destruction is currently experiencing the nadir of its hegemony; its life energy is running out. At the moment capitalism is bombing its internal dialectical quintessence: labor - capital, to blazes.
Much has been said, written and debated about the New; over the last decades it was given all sorts of ideological, 'postmodern', systemic connotations; nowadays formal logically and even dialectically as a philosophic postulate, as creative eros, as 'vis vitalis', as an emancipatory concept, the New is being violated and sacrificed on the altar of pathological capitalist greed, avarice and consumerism. In the twentieth century, among others, Ernst Bloch, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara still tried to rescue its utopian emancipatory forms and contents.
Currently, experiencing its greatest recession and depression, world capitalism is entering its 'winter of despair'. Is there still a 'spring of hope" for us, for the exploited, dominated and discriminated classes or has global imperialism already stopped the proletarian "coming of spring"?
Is capitalism or Marxism or both of them obsolete? As stated before, within a closed world system, an utopian daydream is possible, an anticipatory expectation may become objective, concrete, true or not. Socialism as real and true anti-capitalism never was realized on a world scale as yet, it is still possible. Something fully materialized, realized is dying: all the possibilities of the capitalist mode of production are running out, this is why lately it is so brutal in Iraq and Afghanistan, so mortal in Falujah and Gaza.
Bloch reminded us that hope (Hoffnung) is not confidence (Zuversicht); in emancipatory matters nothing is sure, secure. Emancipatory hope is beleaguered with all types of dangers, with hundreds of United States military bases, stockpiled with arsenals of mortal and lethal weapons of mass destruction. Internally this is amplified with an age old global mental holocaust, with sophisticated, technological mind and thought control machinations and mechanisms, and with Orwellian surveillance gadgets. These days, standing on a soap box on Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, in the midst of millions of surveillance cameras, trying to convert the laborers towards socialism, to explain to the buzzing consumer bees global class struggle would be tantamount to the hopeless job of an ancient Sisyphus.
Who is not in orbit already, who does not have the long view of history, cannot see the sinking 'Titanic', cannot escape the coming deluge, the mighty 'tsunami' of tons and tons of melted ice coming from the North Pole, cannot feel the scorching rays coming from the holes in the earth's ozone layer, cannot register the radio-activity coming from above, from the powerful bombs which were launched by the USA after the Second World War in the Van Allen radiating Belts.
What did the philosopher Ernst Bloch consider to be the revolutionary distinctive signs, the principle of hope of our turbulent Zeitenwende?
Firstly, the 'turn of the times' itself.
Among many others, Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and Bloch have explained that epochs of radical social change, of violent class struggles, have no recipes, no time-tables, they cannot be copied, imported or exported. Every time a new epoch presents itself, its zeitgeist blazes its own trail. Kant's 'practical reason' and Hegel's weltgeist (world spirit) ushered in bourgeois enlightenment. From there Bloch continued with his Marxist pedagogics of the oppressed peoples.
At the 'turn of the times', during epochs of radical change, like the one that we are witnessing now; because of the fragrant New, of their novelty, innovation and freshness, they are pregnant with youth, with erotic creativity and creative eros. The New is not the continuation of the obsolete, a copy of the past, it is not the ideological humdrum of yesterday, the repetitive rigmarole of an eternal political blue print or perpetual, competitive social bull-fighting. In this sense, according to Bloch, it is time to humanize and socialize the current global exploited classes. Linking Kantian enlightenment to Marxian humanism Bloch underlined that 'even if it should be true that the social relations form human beings, we have no alternative but to change the very relations into human relations. Long live practical reason!'.
To demonstrate the gigantic difficulty for mankind to walk in dignity, in upright gait, he stated that historically we could register thousand wars but less than ten revolutions.
Concerning the 'praxical' and theoretical depths and heights of Bloch's principle of hope, not to repeat ourselves, we will quote from two important articles published last year.
Concerning youth as a philosophic category, on June 18, 2008, in the article "Venezuela: Youth, Students, Education and Marxism", we emphasized that juvenile enthusiasm, imagination, fantasy, "youth itself, youthful anticipatory daydreams, form the concrete, utopian principle of hope (Ernst Bloch)". 9)
We explained that in his writing "Marx als Denker der Revolution" (Marx as the Theoretician of Revolution), Bloch (widely seen as the father of the 1968 student movement in Europe and elsewhere) emphasized that "Youth is driven by a dim presentiment of things to come," of something ahead, of the crimson dawn on the red human horizon." 10)
Bloch elaborated that the rebelling youths suspect already what they do not want, however, they do "not yet" know what is to be done, what is to be thought, how to venture beyond this capitalist, terrorist vale of tears.
A year ago, on September 18, 2008, in an article titled "Ernst Bloch: The cat falls on its four paws, who has not learned to think falls into eternal yesterday", we informed that already in 1974 at the eve of global fascism, of international thought, mind and body control, Bloch warned us about the possible coming of a global 'Farewell to Utopia'. 11)
Secondly, Youth, restless youthfulness and energetic adolescence themselves are emancipatory elements and creations of the turn of the times. Bloch still hopes for emancipation within productivity, within the process of planetary production. We in honor of Bloch are trying to venture beyond systemic production, we include possibilities of realizing extra-systemic, 'transvolutionary', creative emancipation. Surely concrete, fundamental utopian hope is not confidence or national security; no 'happy end' or divine 'hunting grounds' await us. We are the experiment, we are part of the 'experimentum mundi'; it could be victorious, have a different result, that is, it could fail. However, the outcome of this planetary experiment could be totally new, it could be 'trifferent', be neither successful nor a failure. Hence, real Hope is not Confidence, is not triumphalism. For example, nothing is sure about a hopeful socialist victory in Venezuela or elsewhere.
Finally, in this epoch of radical social transformation, of political depression, economic recession and military repression, of world fascism, where mankind de facto is already engaged in a life and death battle, in devastating international class wars under disastrous belligerent conditions ... inter alia, in Gaza, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Palestine, Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan ... we better wake up urgently out of our long, deep consumer slumber (Shelley), get rid of our mechanisms of evasion, of our fear of freedom (Eric Fromm).
What Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in 1819 at the eve of the Industrial Revolution in England, on the occasion of the Peterloo massacre of many workers by the British government is still valid today:
"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few." 12)
In spite of all its Big Lies, for example, about '9/11', world capitalism fears the truth, the youth, social creativity, the new, that is, that what the billions of wage slaves could become: emancipated!
Summing up, currently by means of intra-class wars ruling man is threatening himself internally; internationally he does the same via systematic means of self-annihilation. We are living in a decisive Zeitwende of history, we have to study its zeitgeist, its scientific tendencies and philosophic latencies and also its short and long term objectives, its revolution.
Marx expressed the principle of hope as follows: : a problem only turns up when humanity has the solution already at hand.
In our specific case, the long term objective of experimentum mundi, the New, already dawns on the crimson horizon of Planet Earth. We have the 'free' choice: it depends on us whether we want to sink into the current obnoxious quicksand of corporate arrogance, ignorance and obsolescence, into the capitalist cesspool of radio-active fascist darkness or to transcend this imperialist vale of tears by means of a creative exodus, by crossing the Rubicon towards the realm of the New, of Emancipation. A gigantic, titanic global war alias 'world peace' awaits us. Our clarion call is the New, a new logic, science, philosophy and wisdom, that is, the New per se. To create this we need no Manhattan project for arms of mass destruction: we only need to live the Truth 'praxically', to study reality theoretically, and to surpass the bourgeois, capitalist, world revolution with creative emancipation, with emancipatory creation. As Bloch taught, the genesis is now, after exploitative production comes human creation. However, these topics surely merit new discussions and new
commentaries in the near future.
***
1) See:
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2)
![](/img/extlink.gif)
YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA31.html
3) (My own free translation from the German original)
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no-problem-r1059947.htm
4)
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shtml?x=619885
5)
![](/img/extlink.gif)
-and-Venezuela-Ro-by-Franz-J-T-Lee-090726-107.html
6)
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Charles_Dickens
7) Ibid.
8)
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9)
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10) (Ibid.)
11)
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name=News&file=article&sid=1896&
mode=thread&order=0&thold=0964
12)
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Franz J. T. Lee
e-mail:
franzjutta@cantv.net
Homepage:
http://www.franzlee.org.ve
Comments
Hide the following 3 comments
Pompous
15.09.2009 13:00
How pompous can you get and who goes around actually talking like this? I tried to read the rest but got bogged down by about the third paragraph.
GW Bush
The big question
15.09.2009 15:12
Interesting ... very interesting
venezuela buying arms
16.09.2009 00:57
**/