ready for an american lenin?

Are we ready for an American Lenin? Or a Mao? Or even a Gandhi? Will “make love not war” ever give way to “make revolution not love”; until then the odds are doubtful…

Many people assert that a revolutionary situation now exists in America. The nature of this supposedly impending revolution  has been hanging around for a long time and is rarely discussed in any depth. At the Woodstock era, it was only Herbert Marcuse who seemed to have fully confronted the differences between what he called the Aesthetic Revolution and what could be termed the Ascetic Revolution. Today, what with globalization, technological unemployment, potentially currency wars and perhaps a higher level of consciousness than existed in Marcuse’s time, it may be worth reopening the dossier.

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The Aesthetic Revolution, involves a rejection of the so-called Puritan ethic, with its demand for honest labour, restraint of impulse, deferral of gratification, and general self-control. A possessor of these former virtues is seen today as being up-tight; the mass impetus of consumer culture exhorts taking it all in now and pay later, if at all. Behind these commercial suasions is the Keynesian revolution pushed to its extreme of printing money and fiscal policy: the transition from production to consumption values. It was shift  in saving from the balance column of virtues to that of vices, tone that equates deferral of gratification with a lag in utilization of productive resources.

---The All-India Congress Committee, which assembled at Bombay on August 7, 1942, therefore, endorsed the resolution of the Working Committee by an overwhelming majority and proposed the starting of a mass, nonviolence struggle under the leadership of Gandhi ji. Addressing the delegates on the night of August 8, 1942, Gandhi ji said, “I want freedom immediately this very night before dawn if it can be had. Freedom cannot wait for the realization of communal unity.---click image for source...

—The All-India Congress Committee, which assembled at Bombay on August 7, 1942, therefore, endorsed the resolution of the Working Committee by an overwhelming majority and proposed the starting of a mass, nonviolence struggle under the leadership of Gandhi ji. Addressing the delegates on the night of August 8, 1942, Gandhi ji said, “I want freedom immediately this very night before dawn if it can be had. Freedom cannot wait for the realization of communal unity.—click image for source…

The Aesthetic Revolution is merely the public expression of a long-term secular development where “radicalism” is contained within the consumption cycle. William Burroughs selling Apple Computers and Bob Dylan hawking Pepsi, Naomi Klein living in off-limits section of Toronto , Michael Moore in an enormous mansion come to mind. Its cachet and status driven by image not content. This all raises the possibility of a paradox. Most successful revolutions have been led by ascetic revolutionaries, men and women who have put behind them the lures of the flesh and financial reward. And, up to now, efforts to combine the aesthetic and the political revolutionary impulses have not worked for long.

---Idealized version of Mao's Long March, when the Chinese Communist Party militants and army escaped the claws of the bourgeois forces and set up quarters in a remote area of China. Revolutions are complex phenomena, affected by many factors, both internal and external, and no single reasons can account for their evolution, nor predict the final outcome. However, that's no argument to discard all revolution from human affairs.---click image for source...

—Idealized version of Mao’s Long March, when the Chinese Communist Party militants and army escaped the claws of the bourgeois forces and set up quarters in a remote area of China. Revolutions are complex phenomena, affected by many factors, both internal and external, and no single reasons can account for their evolution, nor predict the final outcome. However, that’s no argument to discard all revolution from human affairs.—click image for source…

Why? What are the characteristics of an ascetic revolutionary? Will such people ever emerge in America? These people who manifest or are imputed to manifest great self-control, which entitles them to control other people, ostensibly free of libidinal ties and to use Freud’s formulation, “love no one but themselves, or other people only in so far as they served his needs.” This of course, permits the pursuit of revolutionary aims without sentimental weakness. He is like Robespierre, incorruptible. As such, they are perceived by the followers as being without self-love or self-interest, and consequently, able to judge impartially the competing claims of others. ( to be continued)…

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