#novack

What could be more anomalous than for a would be socialist to support the president at the helm of the major imperialist power and then defend this in the name of Marxism?

Dean: hey, how much money do you have

He [Trotsky] became tense, agitated. 'Upon going back to the States,' he urged, 'you comrades must at once take up the struggle against Eastman’s distortion and repudiation of dialectical materialism. There is nothing more important than this. Pragmatism, empiricism, is the greatest curse of American thought. You must inoculate younger comrades against its infection.'

The experience of nothingness arises when we consciously become aware of--and appropriate--our own actual horizons. What once seemed fixed and steady dissolves. What seemed certain, necessary, and stable suddenly seems arbitrary and unfounded. We do not know who we are. Yet we keep inventing ourselves. We continue to throw up symbols against the dark reeling formlessness in which we seem to be adrift, like space ships whose rockets no longer fire, whose direction can no longer be controlled. It has become part of the human condition in our time, at least for those who attain a consciousness that is increasingly communicable, to face the formlessness of nothingness. It is the task of ethical reflection today to make such formlessness its starting place. That nothingness cannot be evaded. Fidelity to it, moreover, liberates, instructs, delights. In comparison, the pursuit of happiness that we used to share seems pallid, dehumanizing, and sickeningly destructive.

NIEUWE EDITIE RADIO MORTALE LIVE: DONDERDAG 20 MAART