http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/media/marx/79_01_05.htm

It’s like The Beasty Boys song: “You gotta fight, for your right”

I agree that books are better. They allow for more creativty, perhaps. I maintain computers as excellent tools; the analog world needs to imitate some of the finer points on the internet–that tendency towards free.

Bonhoeffer, a very influential theologist in Nazi Germany–you should check them out–said also that books must be the focus of ones reading; i.e. not the ‘newspapers’. He also said that the resistance had wasted too much time in talking and that what they truly need was action, action, action.

I don’t believe in a violent revolution. I will defend myself, my family, my friends, my fellow humans. An emotional/intellectual stands as good a chance as anything, however.

About the internet i think its good, but i think that old fashion printed books are better for knowledge. The computers, laptops, nintendos, playstations, cell phones, ipods are really for the capitalist slaves, not for the true revolutionary marxists supermen

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I also tend to think that propaganda meisters and the social engineers have become very good at what they do. This might be because on the internet they can collect limitless amounts of data useful to eliciting responses out of their subjects.

The internet is a somewhat free market insofar as it tends towards free. P2p, etc.

In Nazi Germany, in Soviet Union, all opposition press was banned and all party newspapers pushed propaganda. Dissidents were atomized and then exterminated.

The internet has functioned as a forum in which people can stumble upon new ideas, ideas that some desire be banned and eradicated from popular culture, or a place where people can get caught in the same entertainment realm provided by the TV and the powers-that-be.

Justin

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We have said that our movement, much more extensive and deep than the movement of the seventies, must be inspired with the same devoted determination and energy that inspired the movement at that time. Indeed, no one, we think, has until now doubted that the strength of the present-day movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally, the industrial proletariat) and that its weakness lies in the lack of consciousness and initiative among the revolutionary leaders.

However, of late a staggering discovery has been made, which threatens to disestablish all hitherto prevailing views on this question. This discovery was made by Rabocheye Dyelo, which in its polemic with Iskra and Zarya did not confine itself to making objections on separate points, but tried to ascribe “general disagreements” to a more profound cause — to the “different appraisals of the relative importance of the spontaneous and consciously ‘methodical’ element”. Rabocheye Dyelo formulated its indictment as a “belittling of the significance of the objective or the spontaneous element of development”.[1] To this we say: Had the polemics with Iskra and Zarya resulted in nothing more than causing Rabocheye Dyelo to hit upon these “general disagreements”, that alone would give us considerable satisfaction, so significant is this thesis and so clear is the light it sheds on the quintessence of the present-day theoretical and political differences that exist among Russian Social-Democrats.

For this reason the question of the relation between consciousness and spontaneity is of such enormous general interest, and for this reason the question must be dealt with in great detail.

A. The Beginning of the Spontaneous Upsurge

In the previous chapter we pointed out how universally absorbed the educated youth of Russia was in the theories of Marxism in the middle of the nineties. In the same period the strikes that followed the famous St. Petersburg industrial war of 1896 assumed a similar general character. Their spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed the depth of the newly awakening popular movement, and if we are to speak of the “spontaneous element” then, of course, it is this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity. Strikes occurred in Russia in the seventies and sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the “spontaneous” destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these “revolts”, the strikes of the nineties might even be described as “conscious”, to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period. This shows that the “spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than. consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle. The strikes of the nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness; definite demands were advanced, the strike was carefully timed, known cases and instances in other places were discussed, etc. The revolts were simply the resistance of the oppressed, whereas the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo. Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the nineties, despite the enormous progress they represented as compared with the “revolts”, remained a purely spontaneous movement.