We were all raised to admire Thomas Alva Edison for his comment that although it took him 10,000 tries to get the electric lighjt bulb right with tungsten, he kept on going because he considered the first 9,999 attempts to be not failures, but rather lessons from which something important could be learned.

But communism?

Well, to paraphrase Sandra Bullock's character in "Hope Floats":

Russia? Failure. Check.

Cuba? Failure. Check. Check.

China? Failure. Check. Check. Check.

Yup - that's it, then - communism definitely can't work.

Just like the electric light bulb, on which research should have been stopped before 9,996 more wasted efforts were undertaken..

Makes a whole lot of sense, dnn't it? (Particularly since Marx made his own opinion clear that industrially immature societies without large proletariats couldn't possibly serve as launching-pads for the next stage in the dialectic.)

But you see, there's a key difference between the electric light bulb and communism.

In the case of the electric light bulb, folks knew that if it could be made to work, there were vast amounts of money to be amassed by a few Heroes of the Free Market.

While in the case of communism, the only thing that folks can get out of its success is the ability to look all and any of their fellow human-beings straight in the eye without shame.

And what is that worth in the long-run?

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The People Yes

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

Once having marched
Over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man came
To the deeper rituals of his bones,
To the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses
and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food
while reaching out when it comes their way
for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive.
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet
for lights and keepsakes.

The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome,
a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux of color poems
wherein the sea offers fog
and the fog moves off in rain
and the labrador sunset shortens
to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray
of northern lights.

The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
"Where to? what next?"

I appreciate your contributions.

Great read

Thanks

jo

Thanks, jo.

Since I know you have a "conservative" steak to your political thinking, I appreciate your comment all the more.

Regardless of what one thinks about communusm as an organizing principle, the Sandburg is something that everyone should read at least once a year, if only to remind ourselves how we are all bought and sold, and how we put up with it to get the "standard of living" we so prize in this country.

The fact that the Soviet Union subsidized Cuba does not change what Castro did with some of the money - he did bring health-care to a large segment of his population that didn't even know what it was.

We can't even do that, for all our vaunted socioeconomic supremacy.

It certainly predates marx and engels and even Cain and Able.We have spent trillions in order to be a world community.Like edison,we may appear to fail but 2008 is the culmination of the work of many community activists.

Yes,Where to?What next?

Hey fpl -

I've got an old college roommate (RM) who was a producer on the film that was done about Pete Seeger's sloop Clearwater (a key part of Seeger's efforts on behalf of the Hudson River.)

RM once asked Seeger why he was a Communist before he left the Party.

And he said that this is what Seeger told him - that he grew up knowing a lot about Native American culture and that in most if not all tribes, when a hunter brought back game, it was shared - it didn't just go to the hunter's family.

So Seeger said he (like Woody Guthrie) never paid much attention to the complex discussions at the party meetings they attended - because to them "communism" was just kind of an expression of a basic human instinct to help and shate.

I think this story goes to your point about the word "community" being around for a long long time.

Also - glad you read the Sandburg all the way thru (or at leasat you seem to have, since you quoted the last two lines.) As I said to jo, tnat poem "nails" US society more than any other I know, and folks should remember that the "hard times" which it reflects can come back at any time - they may already be on the way.

Someone has to lead, and someone has to follow. What makes you think that Communism would miraculously result in honest leaders? What makes you think we wouldn't just have the same leaders giving different speeches? It could easily have been Eisenhower beating his shoe against a podium.

Marx, like any good philosopher or economist, forgot one little detail. Large groups of people are neither decent nor rational. If they were, it wouldn't matter what system we chose. Communism would fail in America too, because we too are flawed.

Oh... and are you sure China is a failure? They're pretty opaque, so its hard to say exactly how things are going on the ground, but from over here, it looks like they're eating our lunch. Not that communism has anything to do with it, any country with a huge resource base and a huge population is bound to eventually find itself at or near the top of the heap. Thats how we got here, isn't it?

revisionist history journals, John Birch, Hoffman...and so forth. They tend to be extreme in their viewpoints.

You can say whatever you want about Karl Marx...the man was simply way ahead of his time and had spectacular vision.

He more or less predicted the current process of reproletarianization that we are now witnessing.

jo

CE -

You write:

Someone has to lead, and someone has to follow. What makes you think that Communism would miraculously result in honest leaders?

And I want to thank you for providing a perfect illustration of the point I was just making about "truisms" vs "truths".

Hey man - if you're happy with your "truism" there - if you really do think it's a "truth", then I'm happy for you.

You never have to wonder about why the National Association of Manufacturers, the FBI, and the House Un-American Activities Committee had to spend so much time and money propagandizing and threatening folks into thinking it was true.

I mean - if it's such a "gimmee" as a "truth", what were they all so scared of from 1916 to 1980 that they ruined the lives of many brave and loyal Americans just to make sure that everyone knew it was a truth?

Yeah JO - and not to mention NAFTA as an instance of Lenin's "Imperialism:the Last Stage of Capitalism". Lenin's analysis of how capitalism has to react to saturated markets would not have been possible without Marx.

Hey fpl - this is a side note about my roomie RM who I mentioned in my last reply to you.

He took a double-E at NYU School of Engineering in the early 60's and got to know the early work on small devices.

But he chose to leave the field, he said, because he knew that to make a living, he'd have to wind up working for a defense contractor or a sub to a defense contractor.

I told him there's no way anyone can escape being a whore in this society, so it really didn't matter.

When he was up for the draft (Vietnam), he went CO and did three years as an inhalation therapist on Roosevelt Island. I wrote a letter of support to his draftr-board telling them that I was not by any means a personal pacifist, but that I honestly believed that RM was, and that his pacifism came from his deep Christian beliefs, as exemplied by the tutorial program he singlehandedly organized for kids in the South Bronx while he was completing his double-E.

What's Next? Liberation Theology?

Communism [like democracy] has never even been tried.

I'm not saying that the "leader/follower" thing is inherantly good, I'm saying its just natural. Can you describe an alternative? Even if you acheive "community ownership of production," decisions need to be made, which means there are going to be winners and losers (unless you think that suddenly everyone will agree on everything). And rules need to be made, which means there will be enforcers (unless you think that everyone will suddenly be honest and decent toward one another). I suppose in some theoretical fantasy land where people stop acting like people you make communism work without having a "party" running things.

As for the cold war, why do you think "communism" has anything to do with it? Thats a bit naive, I think. People like power. People in power like power even more. There are many ways to preserve power once one has it, but fear is an especially effective tool. Communism made for a great enemy, and the cold war made for a great narrative for the preservation of power. People "at war" don't throw the bums out. Or revolt. Because they're more afraid of outsiders than they are of their own government. They become very pliable when it comes to things like civil rights and privacy.

Just look what's happened in the past decade or two, now that we can't use the communist narrative any longer. Do you think that Bush really gives a shit about "fundamentalist muslims?" Not at all, he just saw in 9/11 the opportunity to create a new cold war. A long, unwinnable war, guaranteed to give a certain type of politician an advantage as long as the narrative survives. From 1916 to 1980, the politicians weren't scared of anything, they just used our fear to get us to do what they wanted. Just like the Stalinists, albeit with a little more subtlety.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, Z-B, but given the success of the US powers-that-be at convincing folks that "Communism" did exist and was a threat, I figured that I had to frame my point the way it did.

Reminds me of Gandhi's comment about "Western Civilization" - you know the one.

Also, btw, you mentioned the other day that you don't feel qualified to comment on the US mise-en-scene because you're over there. In that regard, it's certainly true that there still is a "real" left over there, perhaps because class-structures are so much more obvious.

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A man, apparently acting alone with no known motive nor ties to a terrorist group, drives a bulldozer into a bus in Isreal. He is immediately labeled as a terrorist, because it will inspire the maximum amount of fear in the population, and so the citizens of Isreal will be less likely to consider if a regime change might be a necessary precursor for peace and stability.

CE -

I didn't think you were saying your principle is "good". Both "truisms" and "truths" can be as disheartening as they are true.

But when you write:

Can you describe an alternative?

I have to not only answer "no", but also say that the whole point of my post is that we're not innocents anymore - there's not gonna be some great "manifesto" out of the blue - not from me nor anyone else.

What can happen, though - and this was one of the points of my post - is that an alternative might well evolve evolutionarily - if 9,999 experiments are allowed to proceed and fail.

But unless we do something about the way our country behaves in the world (e.g. Chile), those 9,999 experiments will never be allowed to proceed.