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To be communist means that one lives in the perspective of an ontology of
the “social” citizen . My dear friend, the Italian literary critic,
Professor Romano  Luperini (Department of Philology and Literary Criticism,
University of Siena), stresses that “the human being either  is social or
it is not at all a being. In this light , communism is the answer to a need
of meaning that he is able to unite together, and not,  to divide men.
Communism is, therefore, a value,  it is more than a  political or economic
program. Today task is  first of all to know or to recognize such value.
But to choose to be communist is not to choose one certainty, but one
possibility. (…)”  the ontology of the social being and its necessity of
ethics being itself a risk assumed, not a certainty granted, since, today,
it does not identify itself in the plan of one social or one economic
organization. Whichever definition one gives to Communism, in such sense,
appears to be merely scholastic, therefore inapplicable to the current
state of affair (in Italy, for instance). In this Luperini and I share a
close view of the communist ideology: in fact, Communism, says Luperini,
is a perspective, a tendency, a movement of liberation."
To be communist means to think and be in a given way " (Blockhouses). To be
communist means to believe that the equality and the fraternity of men are
preferable to the dominion of one small part on the great mass of the
humanity. This still involves the requirement to remove the material and
political causes that sink in misery, hunger, constrains million men. To be
communist means to assume one perspective in a universal sense, in regards
of the human species in toto. ( Until there will be an Albanian living in
our country as an extra-community, says Luperini, and  rejected at the
frontiers as such, there will be a need for a communist perspective, there
will  be the need for communism. )
“To be communist in the West means to know that, also in the West, also in
Italy, there are groups of endowed individuals which are not given  equal
possibilities, or offered at a same level the economic power to manage
their lives, and who still struggle for obtaining a certain degree of
economic, political and cultural freedom. “ To be Communist is to know that
such social inequality is a non-value to fight.








On Wed, 19 Dec 2001 08:24:23 -0000, domfox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>> What did concern me was Fred's endorsement of some odd elements in
>Dominic's
>> post. I've read that latter about five times now, and it seems to me that
>it
>> is (whether consciously or not) perpetuating one of the hoariest
>> conservative myths of all: that people are naturally evil and therefore
>need
>> to be curbed, by the force of law and the force of 'hard-edged' economic
>> realities.
>> That telling word 'determinism' was lodged in Dom's post.
>
>On the occasions when I've run into people behaving in evil and stupid
ways,
>I've often tended to wish that something forceful and hard-edged would come
>along and curb them. Batman, for instance. Authoritarian fantasies come
>readily to people who are used to being picked on. The robes of the Taliban
>are a kind of superhero costume - "your bullets cannot harm me - my wings
>are like a shield of steel..."
>
>I don't think it's true that you have to believe that people are naturally
>or preternaturally evil in order to think of the rule of law as something
>useful. "Potentially" evil will do. I suppose I don't believe that the
>potential for evil is ever not there. There's always someone somewhere
>drawing little felt-tip skulls on the walls of his rumpus room.
>
>Economic determinism is as much a feature of some marxisms as it is a
>feature of some right-wing ideologies. The joke doesn't work without the
>punchline: I was describing the rather commonplace accommodation of
>neo-liberal tenets about the "icy" or "iron" determinism of markets with
the
>incompossibly "warm" and "fuzzy" hopes and wishes of social democracy.
Every
>"sensible" person accepts the former to a greater or lesser degree, and
>every "decent" person has at least a minimal investment in the latter; but
>it's actually senseless and contradictory to be "sensible and decent" in
>this way. Anyone whose politics can be mapped according to the currently
>prevailing intellectual stereotypes is caught up in this contradiction,
>which defines Blairism as much as "compassionate conservatism". Whether you
>lean leftwards or rightwards within this supposed consensus ultimately
makes
>no difference to its bogosity.
>
>I agree about the experience of work: the managerial perspective is that
>people have to be continually bullied into getting their act together,
>"people" meaning everyone below oneself in the management hierarchy, but
the
>chaos goes all the way up and is in no way rooted in the incompetance of
any
>single tier of an organisation. Having to implement other people's
>thoughtlessly-taken "strategic" decisions means having to square circles,
>fit quarts into pint-pots and add one and one together to make three.
What's
>interesting is that there *is* an "iron law" of sorts at work here after
>all: the one that says that one and one together does not and cannot make
>three. If the wishes of managers could be effortlessly fulfilled without
>encountering any sort of resistance from what for want of a better word
I'll
>call "reality", then the chaos would vanish.
>
>I don't in spite of this believe that reality is an entirely disorganised
>and "potentialised" muddle. It has powerful self-organising tendencies, and
>can be curtly "actual" when it feels like it (as anyone who has ever walked
>into a lamppost should appreciate). There's a sort of dualism that would
>have it that all human "dreams of order" are delusions caused by a failure
>of the imagination to apprehend the primal chaos of existence. This is
>bollocks, and is used all too often by muddled thinkers to excuse the
>failure of *their* imaginations to cope with any order of systematicity
>higher than that of an A-level social psychology textbook...
>
>Dom