F is for Fellow Travelers

by RS on April 6, 2012

After yesterday’s post E is for Email Subscriptions and my lament of losing subscribers, I received a lovely message from a comrade who liked the post and subscribed.

In Julius, when Alvah Bessie starts appearing in Corinne’s dreams, he says to her right the wrongs that were done to their fellow travelers. It’s all very cryptic and foreshadows an event in a later chapter … and that’s all I’m saying.

But let me get back to “Fellow Travelers” what’s the precise meaning? Essentially it means people who sympathize with a political party (typically Marxist) and follow the party line, but are not formal members even though they might contribute to party causes, but they don’t pay dues, don’t have a party card and aren’t tied up 100 percent to party discipline.

So is my comrade a fellow traveler? Technically, no. He’s a full-fledged member. Whereas yours truly is a fellow traveler (I let my membership lapse when I had limited funds).

So was Alvah Bessie a fellow traveler? Oh, no, he was a bonafide member;  however, after Krushchev revealed the atrocities of Stalin, Alvah, like many others, dropped out of the party and then became a fellow traveler. See how it works?

During the 1950s, fellow travelers was a pejorative used by anti-communists and were attacked for either lacking the courage of their convictions and becoming full-fledged members or hiding their true convictions from the public. What the hell? Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Now here’s something interesting to note: You’ve obviously noticed that the states that typically vote Republican are “Red” states. It gets worse I was reading about the Tea Party and one of the so-called leaders said in an interview that he and other “fellow travelers” were planning a rally. This furacious use of our terms is irritating. They couldn’t come up with another color like beige (that seems insipid enough) or make up with their own term to describe themselves like crony wanderers? But then again we’re dealing with the Tea Party where originality and imagination is in short supply.

That’s all for this week. Next week it’s G through J and they’re really good ones. Before I sign-off, I’m having a little contest of sorts. In each entry, I used an uncommon word from the Word Lover’s Dictionary. The first person to leave me a comment with all five words and their definition gets a free copy of HAND/EYE Magazine’s World Textiles.

Good luck and have a great weekend!

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E is for Email Subscriptions

by RS on April 5, 2012

If only we could get a pretty stamp...

I’m taking a day off from the Left. Today’s post is benign: email subscriptions.

My subscriber list isn’t very long, but it was steadily growing and I’d like to think that my sage words were making some sort of impression; however, since starting this challenge I have lost three subscribers.

Is it the topic I chose that has alienated these readers or are they tired of getting their inboxes deluged by other writers who are also participating in the challenge?

I want to clarify that I am not trying to convert anyone to my way of thinking. As I mentioned in the very first post, the purpose of this challenge and my goal was to inspire and educate readers in a part of history and politics that may not be familiar and that could possibly entice them to learn more.

As for me I’ve always leaned to the left, and as I get older my sympathies go much further. Some of you might wonder whether out of fairness I’ll feature the men, women and the movements of the Right like Russell Kirk, J. Edgar Hoover, Ayn Rand, Sarah Palin, The Moral Majority or The Tea Party.

One word: No.

In an argument with a friend years ago, he shouted that I was partisan and because of people like me we would always have some sort of stalemate in government. I have no shame in admitting my alliances. From the time that I seriously started following politics in high school to today, I can say that I have never seen one single policy from the Right where I’ve nodded my head in agreement. Not one. If that makes me a partisan to the Left then so be it.

You won’t see me yelling “Huzzah!” in the streets or support a modern day Republican until I see a a policy that fairly benefits all Americans and not just his supporters, friends big business and their lobbyists.

If I have offended readers with what may seem as a glorification of the Left, keep in mind that many of the reforms we’ve seen passed like the right to a free education for all children, enactment of child labor laws, workplace safety laws, regulation of monopolies and large corporations, conservationism to just name a few. These, among the hundreds of other reforms, were spurred by Leftist activism.

Instead of hitting that unsubscribe link, bear with me. I have some wonderful posts coming up that will surely resonate and hopefully you might experience an expergefaction of sorts to learn more about the Left.

 

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D is for Raya Dunayevskaya

by RS on April 4, 2012

Raya Dunayevskaya, activist and philosopher.

Are you scratching your head and thinking, “Where is she getting these obscure names?” For students of the Left, Raya Dunayevskaya is considered one of the glam gals of Marxist thought and activism. Well, maybe that’s more like Angela Davis*. Okay, I just made that up to vamp this post a bit.

A minor digression: my C is for CPUSA post didn’t get as many comments as the previous ones and I managed to lose one subscriber. However, in terms of Facebook shares and likes, it proved to be my second most popular post. So here’s a shout out to my fellow travelers from across the globe: Thank you for visiting and giving it a thumbs up!

Back to the lovely Raya and her part in Julius. Raya only comes up in  a conversation when Corinne admits to Jake that she had been Ph.D bound and studied Raya’s political philosophy—Marxist humanism—which focuses on Marx’s earlier writings, specifically the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 wherein Marx wrote about his theory of alienation. Corinne explains to Jake that her dissertation was supposed to on the psychosocial consequences of natural and alienated labor during the early part of the 20th century. Admittedly, it’s an esoteric (and dry) disquisition for most people’s taste and I leave it at that. The scene is really more about Corinne withholding information about her past and why she never shared it with Jake—it’s part of a mysterious subplot . . . and that’s all I’m saying.

But who is Raya  Dunayevskaya? Born in Russia in 1910, she emigrated to the United States in 1922 and became involved in radical activities at a young age. Among those activities was Communist efforts to reach out to black workers. In 1928, she was booted out of the Communist Party’s youth section and turned to Trotskyism. In fact, during the 1930s she was the secretary to the “Old Man” in Mexico. Eventually, Dunayevskaya broke away from Trotsky over the nature of Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. It’s at this point where she developed her theory that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist social formation.

Raya’s political philosophies proposed returning to the early Marx and his Hegelian roots, which centered on the Marxist critique of alienation and overcoming it. Her work includes Marxism and Freedom (1958); Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and her final piece, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s  Philosophy of Revolution. To get a better idea of Raya’s writings, visit  Marxist.org where numerous of her essays are posted for your reading pleasure.

*Angela Davis taught at San Francisco State University when I was getting my MA in economics in the 1980s. The afro was gone; she wore her hair in dredlocks and she was gorgeous.

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