Resonant Reading (Saturday)-Revolution-Eric Hobsbawm

An exploration of ideas, feelings, and our life experiences, using a different short reading as our springboard each time. The sessions are on Saturdays, 4-5, and on Wednesdays, 12-1. All are wide open and you are welcome to come twice a week or once in a while.

The participants over the years have found that the approach we take, and the respectful, affectionate community of inquirers in which we read and converse, are as important as the reading itself. While many small groups begin with a check-in, with a session only an hour long, Resonant Reading jumps right in to the conversation. Those who are frequently in the group get to know each other very well this way, and those who are new will soon find they are among friends.

Facilitators use a light hand, posting the reading in the chat and calling on whoever’s Zoom hand is up. Suggestions for readings* come from group members, who also take turns facilitating, if they want to try that role.

The reading for this session: This Saturday (8/9 at 4PM)

What exactly did this phrase [“the socialist revolution”] mean [and how would the revolution be brought about]?

Even then the veteran Engels,who looked back to the Age of Revolution when barricades could be expected to go up every twenty years or so, and who had indeed taken part in revolutionary campaigns, gun in hand, warned that the days of 1848 [and revolution] were gone for good. Even so, few labour leaders born after, say, 1860 abandoned the idea of the New Jerusalem. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), a self-made socialist intellectual who suggested incautiously, not only that Karl Marx’s theories should be revised in the light of a flourishing capitalism (‘revisionism’), was massively condemned by labour politicians whose interest in actually overthrowing capitalism was sometimes extremely faint. [Socialist philosopher Karl] Kautsky’s embarrassed description of the great German Social Democratic Party as ‘a party which, while revolutionary, does not make a revolution’ sums up the problem.

What kept the new parties committed to the complete revolution of society, at least in theory, and the masses of ordinary workers committed to them, was certainly not the inability of capitalism to bring them some improvement. It was that, so far as most workers who hoped for improvement could judge, all significant amelioration came primarily through their action and organization as a class. If they had hope – and their organized members were indeed proud and hopeful – it was because they had hope in the movement. If ‘the American dream’ was individualist, the European worker’s was overwhelmingly collective. Was this revolutionary? Almost certainly not in the insurrectionary sense, to judge by the behaviour of themajority of the strongest of all revolutionary socialistparties, the German SPD.
–Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (1873-1914)

How to join:

• Join this class from your Web browser: https://zoom.us/j/91019857324, passcode 227385
• Join this class using the Zoom app: Meeting ID: 910 1985 7324
• Join this class by phone: 669 900 9128 US (San Jose), Meeting ID: 910 1985 7324
• Join this class by on-tap on mobile phones: +16699009128,,91019857324# US (San Jose)
• Phoning in, but not in the bay area?  Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abL8clvIYT

This is the Zoom link for Saturdays. For the Wednesday Zoom link, go to the Calendar and click on a Wednesday session.

Questions? Drop an e-mail to resonant-reading+owner@uucpa.org.