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My reaction when I read Russell's statement was, "Oh, that can't be true." But at the same time, the press was full of reports about how the two sides were about to reach a disarmament agreement. Then the reports disappeared from the press for a few months. This was followed by press inquiries about what had happened to the agreement. Finally there was a reply from an official of the Kennedy Administration which said, in effect, that it was no ones business what they were going to do about the proposed agreement. At this point, I realized that Bertrand Russell was right.
Three members of CORE also supported disarmament, and when I expressed my prodisarmament views after the subject came up in conversation, I agreed to distribute leaflets with them by a group called The Peacemakers against the military draft. Our action was followed by a year of furor in the local press.
I had first begun to think about politics during the 1952 Presidential campaign when I was twelve. My own thinking led me beyond the issues of the 1952 campaign to the conclusion that it would be far better if society owned the productive resources in common instead of each family being thrown into the economy to sink of swim on its own. These views led me to join the Young Peoples Socialist League after I had graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1963 and moved to Chicago for graduate school at the University of Chicago. YPSL was the youth group of the Socialist Party, which I also joined.
But YPSL was divided into about twelve factions and, after about a year, I realized that the entire international socialist movement, begun by Marx and continued by Lenin and Trotsky, had devolved down to about twelve people in Chicago and two or three other people around the country. Also, I was used to the activism of CORE expressed in public demonstrations and civil disobedience and I was increasingly turned off by statements in YPSL that "we've got to stay on campus and work on our consciousness."
Looking around for better alternatives, I started attending meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth group
of the Socialist Workers Party. I soon was convinced to resign from YPSL and the Socialist Party and join the YSA and, after eight months, the SWP. The SWP/YSA transferred me to build up the Minneapolis branch in 1965. I continued working in the SWP and YSA until 1969.
I read a book by C. Wright Mills around this time, expecting that I could easily refute his arguments against Marxism. However, Mills pointed out that Marxist theory had predicted that the first socialist revolutions would happen in the first world, the developed capitalist economies and,at the end of the 1960's, this had not happened. I knew from my study of the philosophy of science that scientific theories were confirmed by their ability to make correct predictions and that, if more and more ad hoc hypotheses were needed to expplain away failed predictions, the theory would eventually have to be abandoned.
This set of a period of acute doubt about my political views. Also, I had known I was Gay since I was 13, but a series of personal crises convinced me that I couldn't keep falling in lover with heteroxexual men for the rest of my life and that I would have to join the newly out Gay movement.
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Friday, October 9, 2015
Ben Carsons ignorant about constitution Ben Carson's Ignorance of the Constitution
Friday, October 9, 2015Ben Carsons ignorant about constitution Ben Carson's Ignorance of the Constitution
