Coup in Zimbabwe. Why? What next? - Page 4 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14864998
Why don't all these people who complain or say that Africa is supposedly lacking literacy---do something about it? Cuba in 1959 had a low literacy rate back then. They did a literacy campaign and voila---now it is in the nineties. Stop the complaining.

Most production as Potemkin pointed out dictates if something happens or not. It doesn't just happen out of the goodness of anyone's heart. You need a change to a society that requires literacy to be productive and modern then it will become that. If it doesn't need it for any kind of objective and subjective reason--it won't. Please, don't come up with the excuse that a nation isn't literate because it fails to have intelligent people in it. That is for non thinkers.

Even the most modern and industrialized nations have large sectors of public education institutions that fail to teach their pupils well enough to go out to a modern market and compete. They usually have all kinds of excuses and the blame lies with the poor students who have uneducated parents and who don't have the right culture and all that jazz. In reality? The worst resources, and the lack of being able to invest and attract all the necessary infrastructure to produce the best and most educated students is lacking. It is usually deliberate. Poor neighborhoods? Neglect them. Rich neighborhoods? Invest and give plenty of resources. Then sit back and blame the poorest neighborhoods for high school dropouts galore and low readers and bad writers and low level math skills. They are just naturally inferior. It happens in the USA, and many other nations. And it happens globally.

My solution? Get up and do something about it. If you are educated? Go out there and get involved educating communities with very few educated adults in the neighborhood. Make a difference. Don't be an armchair criticizer.

I read an interesting book recently entitled "Three Cups of Tea" about building schools in Afghanistan. It is the best defense against ignorance, and backward thinking and bringing peace. Educating women, girls, poor people, and being thorough in dedication and respecting people's cultures are essential. I get just tired of all these debates about 'these people are backward'. If you don't like it? What has to happen to change?

I also think that human beings in many societies have to decide what is correct for them. The essential ingredients are if you are committed to that society or you are not. If you are not? Your impact will be negligible. If you are? And your intentions are not imperialistic exploitation agenda? And your agenda is service and caring and something positive and work your buns off to help? You will win the locals over. Guaranteed.

I am sick of the ones with sideline excuses of judgment filled crap about if the people are 'primitive'. Primitive are the people who don't do a damn thing about injustice.
Last edited by Tainari88 on 22 Nov 2017 20:49, edited 1 time in total.
#14865002
Potemkin, Be the reason not to have it, you need this intellectual basic infrustructure besides formal industrialization. And since people didn't need or didn't care, they don't have it, and social changes doesn't occur. And in Africa I don't see them care much. Industrialization may come from China, money from diamonds to supply the dictate's army. And thats about it. The few tallanted or strongest- escape this continent. Certainly since the same gang who robbed the white's farms has captured not the regime, there won't be much progress.
#14865007
What is needed is for Africa to have the right to start dealing with its needs thinking of what is best for the local Africans as a whole. Not trying to cater to ex Colonizer concepts of what the Africans should become.

The Africans are going to vary. Some Africans are going to be socialists like Patrice Lamumba or Nelson Mandela, others are going to be horrific dictators and corrupt officials a la Robert Mugabe, and Idi Amin. For me you study the behavior. If they act like corrupt dictators regardless of what they spout politically? They are corrupt dictators. They are humans just like all of us are. Some bad, some good and some horrible, and some brilliant beyond all compare. The important thing to remember is that development and infrastructure has to be something that moves with necessity. That is why Gandhi did not expect India to be as modern in economics as England was or the UK. What he did expect was for India to find its sovereignty and build from that.

All the Africans I have studied and have been around all of my life have one thing in common. Love of their native lands. They are the best qualified to go back and build something. The job of the non-Africans is easy. Treat them as equals, and fight for justice for them. Same as one must fight for justice in whatever society you inhabit.

There isn't any progress with people who fail to understand the reality of the struggle for making a better life for everyone. Judging and saying they don't care? Cop out. Yes @LehmanB I am talking about you. Sweeping statements about the Zimbabwe Africans. There is going to be dissent to whoever might fill the vacuum of power if they don't produce needed changes. Then again, power struggles. Internal strife. No one said transforming a society is easy. But? Keep in mind. A bloodless coup is kind of unique.

Do you know what the average Zimbawean has to deal with on a daily basis to survive? Probably not. They are the ones living in that society. Not you LehmanB. They are the ones who are gonna have to deal with the circumstances. And ultimately they are the ones who are going to have to sacrifice. I respect humans sacrificing for their cultures, societies, nations and people. It is very hard to really think that outsiders know what they are all about. Because everyone is living in their own realities.
#14865012
Beren wrote:But he's a patriarch who has a family to take care of and I wonder whether they would be pleased if they had to live on Papa Bob's pension.


Most men of his age, if they are lucky enough to reach such an age, are not working.

And most men of his age have children who are working and well able to support themselves.

I'm sure the new regime will take care of him.
#14865018
Political Interest wrote:Most men of his age, if they are lucky enough to reach such an age, are not working.

And most men of his age have children who are working and well able to support themselves.

I'm sure the new regime will take care of him.

Most men are not patriarchs and if Mugabe wants to be a good patriarch he should find another country the treasury of which his family can consider and handle as their own.
#14865024
Potemkin wrote:And without Hitler, the commies never would have been able to take over half of Europe. You reap what you sow. :)

So the commies empowered Hitler then ran their half of Europe into the ground, so we have the reds to thank for creating the American super monster.

Good riddance Mugabe but the guy taking over will no doubt be just as bad.
#14865189
@Tainari88 "Why don't all these people who complain or say that Africa is supposedly lacking literacy-do something about it? Cuba in 1959 had a low literacy rate back then. They did a literacy campaign and voila -now it is in the nineties."

Of course things are changable. But at first, the change will be realllly slow. I don't think you can change a society in one generation. After they read, and their children read, their grandchildren will born in a society where they are serrounded by readers and can absorb some better informal education and be in less primitive inviornment. After several generations, you can say there is some intellectual infrustructure.

All the Africans I have studied and have been around all of my life have one thing in common. Love of their native lands. They are the best qualified to go back and build something. The job of the non-Africans is easy. Treat them as equals, and fight for justice for them.

From what I have encounter, people in Asia- including India, and Africa- actually accepts reality more peacefuly and don't demand much changes. See, you too suggests ways to change them. Be patriotic or not, I don't see them doing much effort to change their reality. I frankly have never seen people so happy with their ignorance and poverty as I have seen in the third world, and now I am speaking of India. Which is fine, but they don't think of ways to change their problems, and I think it applys to Africa too. Especialy where the regimes are fucked up in most places, and the successful people escape this continent never to return..
#14865215
Of course things are changable. But at first, the change will be realllly slow. I don't think you can change a society in one generation. After they read, and their children read, their grandchildren will born in a society where they are serrounded by readers and can absorb some better informal education and be in less primitive inviornment. After several generations, you can say there is some intellectual infrustructure.

You cannot force people to be intellectuals. The word 'education' literally means to draw out, to reveal and draw out of someone what was already there, inside them. Some people cannot be educated, because there is nothing inside them to draw out. They are intelligent, but have no intellectual curiosity about the world and care for nothing and no-one except themselves. Can you imagine trying to educate someone like George W. Bush or Donald J. Trump? Exercise in futility. A large proportion of the population are like that - they will only learn new things if necessity forces it upon them (such as being elected President of the United States, for instance. Lol.)

But trying to create an intellectual superstructure without first constructing the social and economic base for that superstructure is pointless. The rise of public education in the West was a consequence of industrialisation, but a cause of it.

From what I have encounter, people in Asia- including India, and Africa- actually accepts reality more peacefuly and don't demand much changes. See, you too suggests ways to change them. Be patriotic or not, I don't see them doing much effort to change their reality. I frankly have never seen people so happy with their ignorance and poverty as I have seen in the third world, and now I am speaking of India. Which is fine, but they don't think of ways to change their problems, and I think it applys to Africa too. Especialy where the regimes are fucked up in most places, and the successful people escape this continent never to return..

As Tainari pointed out, change can only come from necessity. If the majority of a nation's population are subsistence farmers whose way of life has not substantially changed for millennia, then that nation is unlikely to have a large intellectual class, and nor is it likely to be a world leader in, say, nuclear physics or grand philosophy. Likewise, if some raw resource such as oil is paying for a luxurious lifestyle for everyone without any effort on their part, then there is also unlikely to be a large intellectual class or any significant intellectual superstructure. Most people don't like to think; it's hard work and it makes their head hurt. They'd rather not do it if they don't have to. The UAE have only just got around to building their first university. Not because they couldn't afford to, but because they could afford not to. It's only now that the leadership of the UAE have made the decision to diversify their economy and industrialise before the oil finally runs out, that they have bestirred themselves from their intellectual lethargy and started a serious programme of public education. Without that economic necessity driving it, they still wouldn't have a university.

One of the great breakthroughs in human thought was Karl Marx's demonstration (using Hegelian ideas) that human society is constantly changing, and that this constant change is driven by the internal contradictions within society itself, as well as by its interactions with the physical world and other human societies. In other words: everything is changing, and that change is driven by necessity. This is partly what Engels meant when he asserted that human freedom is nothing but the recognition of necessity. The economic base of society, and its constant dialectical change, is the engine driving the development of the intellectual and cultural superstructure of society. Not vice versa.
#14865243
You cannot force people to be intellectuals.

Of course not! I only pointed out that social engineering won't acheive much since a needs generations and it needs to come from within.

One of the great breakthroughs in human thought was Karl Marx's demonstration (using Hegelian ideas) that human society is constantly changing, and that this constant change is driven by the internal contradictions within society itself, as well as by its interactions with the physical world and other human societies. In other words: everything is changing, and that change is driven by necessity. This is partly what Engels meant when he asserted that human freedom is nothing but the recognition of necessity. The economic base of society, and its constant dialectical change, is the engine driving the development of the intellectual and cultural superstructure of society. Not vice versa.

Funny, cause the whole point of socialists is to create social engineering; as if no order is natural but can be changed through brief revolution. "Who said these guys are better mannager?! " .

Now the question of free choice, or just necessarity, has no answer IMO. Its both. And different groups used other tools to thrives, and over generations sharpen it. They could have used other methods- but some used brain developing. And it evolved. Its both a choice and necessarity.
There is no chart and a horse- there is just a very long way; the more you use something, the more neccessarily it will become for next generations; in an assumption the thing you develope fits the natural competition.
#14865264
Funny, cause the whole point of socialists is to create social engineering; as if no order is natural but can be changed through brief revolution. "Who said these guys are better mannager?! " .

If that's what you think socialism is all about, then you apparently don't understand socialism. Revolutions are not merely some brief voluntarist spasm which overturns a static old order and immediately replaces it with a static new order. It takes centuries for a society to evolve to the position where socialism even becomes thinkable, let alone possible, and the revolutionary process can take decades to transform that old system into a socialist society. In fact, it could be argued that the Soviet Union never completely that transition before collapsing in 1991.

Now the question of free choice, or just necessarity, has no answer IMO. Its both. And different groups used other tools to thrives, and over generations sharpen it. They could have used other methods- but some used brain developing. And it evolved. Its both a choice and necessarity.
There is no chart and a horse- there is just a very long way; the more you use something, the more neccessarily it will become for next generations; in an assumption the thing you develope fits the natural competition.

But you again seem to be detaching the intellectual and cultural superstructure from the economic base of society. You cannot cultivate an intellectual elite like an exotic hothouse flower; it must be rooted in the soil of a particular society and a particular economic mode of production. Otherwise it will wither and die as soon as it is taken out of the hothouse.
#14865269
https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12613281/index.pdf
Even in the German Ideology, Marx explicitly points out that “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstance” (GI. 165), and this sentence obviously shows that the real concrete’s relation to law, morality, religion, consciousness etc. is not one-sidedly determined. Of course, intellectual wealth directly depends on material conditions (GI. 154, 163, 166, and 172), but human beings affect and even change the material conditions and the circumstances in so far as it is possible for them to do so within the boundaries of the restrictions set by these conditions. Material conditions and intellectual wealth affect each other: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness; is at firstly directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men” (GI. 154 italics mine)

http://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/means-ends.htm
The overall process is one in which the subject tries to realise itself; the existing object is the means, and the result is not the End which was foreshadowed in the new concept, but the Realized End, which differs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the original End which motivated the subject. The End turns into the Realized End, and the object is now the Realized End, and this changed object is now what the subject utilizes as the means to a reformulated End. The Realized End is the objectification of the Subject, and the process continues until there is no difference between subject and object.
#14865271
I rather say its both; society and geographic enviornment. Changing just one factor will not be enough.
Potemkin wrote:You cannot cultivate an intellectual elite like an exotic hothouse flower

I agree that you can't. Niether by sudden revolution of education or industrialization. My point is that certainly one of these will not be enough to fulfill a change. Also, just a geographic change, such as technological transformation can co exist without causing any trigger for intellectualism, as seen in the Arab penninsula. Now when we both agree (I think) that things that happen too fast aren't effective, I pointed out for their lack of previous civilization and literacy, while you pointed out that they needed to struggle. Well I am sure that Africans do struggle. And if they lack the same previous intellectualism in their society, the industrialization of Africa won't intrigure the changes as it intrigured Europe or east Asia.

Edit: Wellsy, ok, but why he supported the means of revolution to collapse the order and create a new society?

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