DeepSight:


I thought its only me and my friends who use "gbagada" . . .

One word more about the implications of this problem of Marx’s early works. It is certainly not irrelevant to our understanding of Marxism today. This is evident when one considers notions like the End of history, bound up in turn with the notion of alienation. If Marx and his followers do no more in their works than illustrate and corroborate the still philosophical theses of On the Jewish Question or the ‘1844 Manuscripts’; if they merely attempt to ‘flesh out’ the Hegelian philosophical notion of the end of alienation and the ‘end of history’, then their undertaking is worth what this notion is. And, in that case, Marxism sacrifices its scientific pretensions, to become, in some sort, the incarnation of an ideal, which, although certainly moving, is utopian, and, like any ideal, gets entangled in both theoretical contradictions and the ‘impurity’ of concrete means the moment it seeks to bend reality to its demands. Conversely, if Marxism has nothing to do with any ‘philosophical’ notion of this sort, if it is a science, it escapes the theoretical contradictions and practical tyranny of the ideal; the contradictions it runs up against are no longer those resulting from its philosophical pretensions, but simply the contradictions of reality itself, which it sets out to study scientifically and solve practically


Louis Althusser ON Marxisim

DeepSight:


He didnt say a governor stole $69 billion. He mentioned 200 Million GBP stolen by a former governor. And he said the governor was also a former Senate President. So that rules out Bello, he is talking of a Mark or Saraki.

Strehler was acutely aware of the implications of this remarkable structure,[5] and his production and direction of the actors were determined by it; that is why the audience was bowled over by it. The spectators’ emotion cannot be explained merely by the ‘presence’ of this teeming popular life – nor by the poverty of these people, who still manage to keep up a hand-to-mouth existence, accepting their fate, taking their revenge, on occasion with a laugh, at moments by solidarity, most often by silence – nor by the lightning tragedy of Nina, her father and the Togasso; but basically by their unconscious perception of this structure and its profound meaning. The structure is nowhere exposed, nowhere does it constitute the object of a speech or a dialogue. Nowhere can it be perceived directly in the play as can the visible characters or the course of the action. But it is there, in the tacit relation between the people’s time and the time of the tragedy, in their mutual imbalance, in their incessant ‘interference’ and finally in their true and delusive criticism. It is this revealing latent relation, this apparently insignificant and yet decisive tension that Strehler’s production enables the audience to perceive without their being able to translate this presence directly into clearly conscious terms. Yes, the audience applauded in the play something that was beyond them, which may even have been beyond its author, but which Strehler provided him: a meaning buried deeper than words and gestures, deeper than the immediate fate of the characters who live this fate without ever being able to reflect on it. Even Nina, who is for us the rupture and the beginning, and the promise of another world and another consciousness, does not know what she is doing. Here we can truly say that consciousness is delayed – for even if it is still blind, it is a consciousness aiming at last at a real world.

Louis Althusser : Notes on a materialist theater , 1962

DeepSight:


U hope.

The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny. At that moment Marx puts himself in a position where he becomes the necessary target of all who have a special interest in maintaining the old-similar to Democritus before him, whose work was burned by Plato and his disciples, the ideologues of Athenian slave aristocracy. Beginning with the revolutionary Marx, a political group with concrete ideas establishes itself. Basing itself on the giants, Marx and Engels, and developing through successive steps with personalities like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and the new Soviet and Chinese rulers, it establishes a body of doctrine and, let us say, examples to follow.

The Cuban Revolution takes up Marx at the point where he himself left science to shoulder his revolutionary rifle. And it takes him up at that point, not in a revisionist spirit, of struggling against that which follows Marx, of reviving "pure" Marx, but simply because up to that point Marx, the scientist, placed himself outside of the history he studied and predicted. From then on Marx, the revolutionary, could fight within history.

Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Notes on the Cuban revolution.