The Sarabite: Towards an Aesthetic Christianity

There is a continuous attraction, beginning with God, going to the world, and ending at last with God, an attraction which returns to the same place where it began as though in a kind of circle. -Marsilio Ficino

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Who's Bringing the Keg?


If the forums don't want to become the Fifth International, they should also avoid becoming a social Woodstock.

-from the Nation Magazine March 6th, 2006 issue

The above quote was metioned in realtionship to the World Social Forum held in Caracas recently, a sort of meager attempt at an international leftist congress. Again, I cannot help but think that globally even the Left is experiencing a "crisis of tradition". Gone are the days when leftists were paragons of discipline, altruism and culture. Gone are the days when the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci could give workers Latin grammer exercises to better their minds in dialectical thinking. (The most ironic thing about this latter thing is that Gramsci is the darling of the New Left, and if he tried to do this same thing today, he would be accused of "Eurocentrism" of the highest degree.)

In truth, the old succeses of the Left were based on a very much Christian attitude whose forunners were St. John Chrysostom, the monastic fathers of the desert, and the Gospels themselves. With that spirit of sacrifice and brotherly love taken away, the workers' hammer has turned from steel to glass. Now in this age of self-interest and self-fufillment, always one of the goals of the revolution, any collective action shatters into factionalism and accusations of racism, sexism, imperialism, homophobia, etc. Like all people today, the "oppressed" band together in interest groups for very myopic goals.

So what then? What else more is there to do than party, if real social action is impossible?

Indeed the Left has so deconstructed itself that only the goals compatible with global capitalism have been acheived (that is, complete personal license), while oppression and exploitation go on unabated.

1 Comments:

At 8:48 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dude I am bringing the keg and the H*s, you know what I am saying dog?!
Well I think the left is suffing from trying to be in the system as oppose to being out of the system. I mean look at the Sparts, do you really want to be taking orders from people with superiority complexes. Oh, the time of attonement for the left is at hand. The time when it won't be cool to be radical sheak, but one would have to be in the closet with their politics. I think people with revolutionary politics should be bold at this time.
By the way, the left has never been the paragon of morality. Lenin had a mistress and Trotsky fooled around on his wife. Morality is not at issue here, it is the engine of history that is taking us forward, to where is not a moral place, but one of violence and severe disappointment. No longer will the left be rewarded with professorships where they can bellow at the top of their lungs their sanctomonous bull*(&. They will be rewarded like Gramsci was rewarded for being principaled; to languish in a prison. Everybody who wants to join the revolutionary cause jump on board it is going off the edge. I think it is too Eurocentric, I think workers should be learning Hittite, it is more original and the cases are easier I think; you just have to learn the cunniform...wait a minute.

 

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