Thomas_More
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But awareness of history, never great, is at an all-time low. Many have no chronological sense of it at all, let alone any interest in or knowledge of working class history. Many even ridicule an interest in history and are actually proud of their ignorance of it. It is considered “dead and gone” and not worth thinking of.
” Present generations would eventually learn this without a group of organised socialists passing this on, but the growth of the understanding of what needs to be done would be slower.”
Really? We are so small a number and most never hear of us. Would it really be any slower without us?
I agree with everything here. But there is a consideration we need to note.
Capitalism has always been destructive, but it is only in modern times that it is threatening all of us with final destruction. Not just its WMDs, but the climate crisis too.Plus, the extinction of species, especially of bees, plankton and corals, affects the climate, the food chain, and oxygen levels. Plant, as well as insect and animal diversity, affects us, because all life is connected. Pollution in air and food produces cancers and capitalist production and waste disposal practices lead to disease.
I’m not a scientist, but I think you have an idea of what I’m saying, if generalising.People and other animals died in the summer heatwaves around the world. Droughts and floods kill, and capitalism is causing them, and each year will be worse. We could be wrong about time beyond our finite lives. There mightn’t be any.
Every suffering society, from antiquity onward, has had apocalyptic anxieties, but the difference now is that, whereas theirs were religious, ours today are witnessing real physical destruction happening as never before, and confirmed by science.Yes, but that’s the tragedy: that the masses as a whole need to act on it in order to change things.
Advanced modern capitalism has, contrary to Marx’s expectations, eradicated the class consciousness that was evident when industrial capitalism was young, and before. The consolidation of the modern nation-state has obliterated it.
Mass literacy happened, and is now, in the 21st century, in retreat. Knowledge of the world, of history, is at an all-time low. Evolution is not understood nor accepted by the majority of humans.
The possibility of an informed social revolution by the masses has retreated into the mist. The more suicidal damage capitalism wreaks and the more blatant it becomes, the more its idols are worshipped, as, in the most industrial and technologically advanced parts of the world, alienation and superstitions increase. While science advances on one hand, it does not translate into mass awareness on the other.Things are the very opposite of what our founders were expecting to result from the development of capitalism back in 1904, heirs that they were of 19th century enthusiasm for the future.
I think the frame of mind of most people throughout history is that the society they inhabit, the way things are organised and done, is natural and forever.
Talk of changing it, beyond this or that reform, is seen as a crazy notion of fanatical minorities whose minds are “not in the real world”; small pockets of overgrown adolescents, who need to “get a life.” (Which is precisely what socialism would give to everyone!)
My late teens and young to middling adulthood were spent waiting for life to begin. Now in my sixties, it is spent in nostalgia for my past. The only time I felt that I was living was my childhood.
My feelings are those of the theme song to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads: “… the only thing to look forward to is the past.”Still talk about sending troops.
So Bijou, you do think the talk of war with Russia means there will be war between Europe and Russia soon?
