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Indybay Feature

Constitution, anyone?

Date:
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Time:
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Event Type:
Other
Organizer/Author:
Ron Kelch
Location Details:
Niebyl-Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. (at Acatraz)
Oakland

Radical Marxists may soberly confront the dismal facts of today's economic and human crises, but none are better at it than Al Gore, now a self-described recovering politician, for whom the hijacked U.S. constitutional democracy has humanity on a course of total devastation of increasing poverty, permanent unemployment and destruction of the life sustaining capacity of the planet.
In his book, The Future, Gore shows the roots of today's bleak trajectory all the way back to the way capitalist elites in the U.S. reacted to the 1871 Paris Commune. Gore quotes Karl Marx's prediction that the Commune would be "forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of the new society."
Yet Marx's prediction came out of a critique of constitutionalism as a very limited freedom which would become the handmaiden of capitalism. Against constitutionalism Marx saw a new and deeper concept of freedom in the Abolitionist movement and the emergent struggle for the eight-hour day that ensued after the victory over slavery in the U.S. Civil War.
Today's global Occupy movement and especially Arab Spring face the challenge of constitutionalism even as they attempt to deepen their stifled new beginnings in freedom. How can Marx's practice of his philosophy of revolution in permanence help us now?
Added to the calendar on Wed, Jul 3, 2013 12:16AM
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