Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1009
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28 September 2012
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Leon Trotsky on “The Future of Man”
(Young Spartacus pages)
We reprint below the concluding remarks of exiled Bolshevik
leader Leon Trotsky’s 1932 speech on the Russian Revolution, titled “In Defence
of October,” delivered in Copenhagen, Denmark. This excerpt was published in the
July-August 1947 issue of Fourth International, theoretical journal of
the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
* * *
Between nature and the State stands economic life. Technical
science liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire
and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to
nature, to become a slave to the machine, and still worse, a slave to supply and
demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man,
who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who
converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler
of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical
task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by
reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them
to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on
this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man
and every woman, not only a selected few—become a citizen with full power in the
realm of thought.
But this is not yet the end of the road. No, it is only the
beginning. Man calls himself the crown of creation. He has a right to that
claim. But who has asserted that present-day man is the last and highest
representative of the species Homo-sapiens? No, physically as well as
spiritually he is very far from perfection, prematurely born biologically, with
feeble thought and has not produced any new organic equilibrium.
It is true that humanity has more than once brought forth giants of
thought and action, who tower over their contemporaries like summits in a chain
of mountains. The human race has a right to be proud of its Aristotle,
Shakespeare, Darwin, Beethoven, Goethe, Marx, Edison, and Lenin. But why are
they so rare? Above all, because almost without exception, they came out of the
upper and middle classes. Apart from rare exceptions, the sparks of genius in
the suppressed depths of the people are choked before they can burst into flame.
But also because the processes of creating, developing and educating a human
being have been and remain essentially a matter of chance, not illuminated by
theory and practice, not subjected to consciousness and will.
Anthropology, biology, physiology and psychology have accumulated
mountains of material to raise up before mankind in their full scope the tasks
of perfecting and developing body and spirit. Psycho-analysis, with the inspired
hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically
called the “soul.” And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only a
small part of the work of the dark psychic forces. Learned divers descend to the
bottom of the ocean and there take photographs of mysterious fishes. Human
thought, descending to the bottom of its own psychic sources, must shed light on
the most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to
will.
Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society man
will set to work on himself, in the pestle and the retort of the chemist. For
the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a
physical and psychic semi-finished product. Socialism will mean a leap from the
realm of necessity into the realm of freedom in this sense also, that the man of
today, with all his contradictions and lack of harmony, will open the road for a
new and happier race.
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