Are there any current Socialists with personality and oratory skills?

[Blanquist]

I'm just watching this video of Gerry Healy and it's amazing, whatever you think of the man or his politics, you can't deny he is a powerful speaker, are there any other leaders you can compare? Current, living, working leaders?

I'm not too familiar with the leadership of some parties, but the ones I have heard, they are very soporific, it's like they don't even believe or care about what they're talking about.

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[Railyon]

I quite like David Harvey. Radiates that good-natured wise grandpa aura. Yes, I said aura.

[Anarpest]

Wikipedia says there are currently 12 socialists with personalities.

[honest john's firing squad]

Wikipedia says there are currently 12 socialists with personalities.
The rest make up revleft's dull and generally charmless membership base.

[Zealot]

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the presidential candidate of the Left Front, although not a Communist, is quite charismatic. Not to forget Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro, who can get quite fiery at times.

One of my favourite orators would be, unfortunately... Hitler, whose skills, no doubt, helped launch him into power.

[Mr. Natural]

Perhaps the personalities on the left would come to life if their theories had some life. Marx and Engels died a century-and-a-half ago, and their Marxism is now treated as a dead dogma. Current leftists have abandoned the materialist dialectic as understood and used by the founders of Marxism, and have almost religiously ignored the new sciences of organization, despite Marx's and Engels' radical appreciation of science and the inability of the modern left to organize.

I challenge comrades to acknowledge the truth of the preceding remarks. This would be the first step in developing radical remedies to our current paralysis.

However, it is my hopefully incorrect opinion that few members of left sites are even interested in developing viable revolutionary processes. This has been my experience. Prove me wrong, please.

My red-green, wanna get organized best.

[Blanquist]

Perhaps the personalities on the left would come to life if their theories had some life. Marx and Engels died a century-and-a-half ago, and their Marxism is now treated as a dead dogma. Current leftists have abandoned the materialist dialectic as understood and used by the founders of Marxism, and have almost religiously ignored the new sciences of organization, despite Marx's and Engels' radical appreciation of science and the inability of the modern left to organize.

I challenge comrades to acknowledge the truth of the preceding remarks. This would be the first step in developing radical remedies to our current paralysis.

However, it is my hopefully incorrect opinion that few members of left sites are even interested in developing viable revolutionary processes. This has been my experience. Prove me wrong, please.

My red-green, wanna get organized best.

Aware me on this? What are the new sciences of organization?

[Mr. Natural]

Blanquist, The "new sciences of organization" are my constant theme. I am most interested in getting comrades to investigate them, and they are almost completely ignored in the Sciences and Environment forum.

The "things" of life have an organization that is critical to their being. Matter has self-organized into living systems on Earth--cells to biosphere--and there have been revolutionary developments in the understanding of the organization life and community.

The first of these "new sciences" was evolution, which was of the greatest interest and significance to Marx and Engels. Following evolution was the new physics, which Mach and Bogdanov took on a creative but idealistic detour. Then came cybernetics, chaos theory, and the culmination of all of this: systems-complexity science.

Fritjof Capra has written a masterwork on this new systems-complexity science" The Web of Life (1996). This work is clearly written for a popular readership. This book reveals life's universal pattern of organization and makes it available to the development of grassroots revolutionary processes.

The Santa Fe Institute, now in decline along with these "new sciences" (they aren't capitalism-compatible), was the center of "rules of life" research. Two fun, eminently readable books exist on the ultra-creative characters who initially formed the SFI. They are Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, by Roger Lewin, and Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

I so strongly advocate those three books because they so compelling introduce readers to the stark but unrealized profound reality that life is organized. What is that organization? It is the organization that the left must learn if it is to get organized.

Human perception is blind to life's organization, and a left that cannot organize must develop an "organizational vision" based in the pattern of organization of life. Are we not life?

Not for much longer are we life if we do not learn to organize.

My red-green best.

[Stalin Ate My Homework]

'Oratory skills' is the last thing we need, I'm fed up of 'leaders' who shout and roar without any real substance, lets leave that to the fascists. The revolution will come when we see a culture of debate, when working class people come together to discuss and debate ideas in a mutually respectful environment, I think Occupy shows positive signs of this. The emphasis should be on meetings, not on speeches or 'demonstrations'.

[Hit The North]

I challenge comrades to acknowledge the truth of the preceding remarks. This would be the first step in developing radical remedies to our current paralysis.

Your criticism would be more serious if your own remedy was not vague and mainly rhetorical. I've yet to read your definite opinion on how your "new science of organisation" relates to the matter of the internal organisation of political parties, or how those parties should relate to the working class. Neither does the phrase-mongering, of which this is a good example,
Human perception is blind to life's organization, and a left that cannot organize must develop an "organizational vision" based in the pattern of organization of life. Are we not life? tell us anything concrete about how your "new science" should be applied to the class struggle and how it will provide political tools to aid our side in that struggle.

So, with all due respect, no wonder your approach has failed to win converts across the various forums you participate in.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

'Oratory skills' is the last thing we need, I'm fed up of 'leaders' who shout and roar without any real substance, lets leave that to the fascists. The revolution will come when we see a culture of debate, when working class people come together to discuss and debate ideas in a mutually respectful environment, I think Occupy shows positive signs of this. The emphasis should be on meetings, not on speeches or 'demonstrations'.

Speeches during mass demonstrations, however, are a vital point in keeping grassroots organizers and activists properly high in morale;after so many setbacks a nice fiery tirade can be good for the "spirit." This isn't to say that debate is no longer needed but just that all factors of activism-debate,public speaking, and organizing-must be held together, as a single unit.

[Alfonso Cano]

I'm just watching this video of Gerry Healy and it's amazing, whatever you think of the man or his politics, you can't deny he is a powerful speaker, are there any other leaders you can compare? Current, living, working leaders?

Bob Avakian. :cool:

[The Idler]

Steve Coleman is the best I've heard and proves that oratory isn't the same as leadership.
Debate - Is Britain Worth Dying For? (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/debate-britain-worth-dying)

[Vanguard1917]

I'm just watching this video of Gerry Healy and it's amazing, whatever you think of the man or his politics, you can't deny he is a powerful speaker

Too much shouting, surely?

[Mr. Natural]

Prole Art Threat, You are a force on left sites and deservedly so, but you insist on missing the simple content and message of my posts.

Life has an organization, dammit, an organization the left must learn and employ. You wonder how my "new science of organization relates to the matter of the internal organization of political parties, or how these parties should relate to the working class?"

Well, PAT, the party and its relations to the working class must be organized in life's universal pattern of organization: all its internal and external relations must be network-patterned with their "life activity" (what they do). In life, being and doing are the same thing. The material organization of a termite (its internal "party" organization) generates a being that is its doing. A termite's internal organization produces a "self" that seamlessly integrates with its life activity (doing), and a left political party of the sort you propose must organize its internal relations into a being that integrates with its doing (facilitating working class organization).

So the comrades in a political party must self-organize into the relations that produce a party that integrates with the working class to enable its self-organization into revolutionary consciousness and processes.

All of this self-organization and all of life's self-organization is modeled by Capra's triangle. The triangle says: merge people and materials (the physical stuff) into the network pattern that seamlessly integrates it with its life activity (meaning, purpose).

We do this all the time, although unconsciously, when we create various forms of community. Life is self-organized community, as are viable families, cub scout packs, basketball teams, political parties--and all of these "communities" are integrated with their external environment of such communities. It is the failure to integrate into living networks internally and/or externally that kills life.

Capitalism kills the communities of life, for its people-parts do not self-organize but are externally, exploitatively organized by The System. Marxism explains this by saying we do not produce for use, but for profit. People do not produce for themselves within capitalism, but are cogs of the machine.

Capra's triangle, which models living organizational relations, potentially enables regular people to sit down together to design various forms of community opposed to capitalism. This is revolutionary almost beyond belief, and comrades currently do not believe it.

This post has been an expression of the paradigm shift in consciousness the human species must make if it is to continue. As a species, we have become destructive to all forms of life as well as our own, and must learn to organize in life's pattern. This pattern is modeled by Capra's triangle.

My red-green best.

[hatzel]

I can be pretty charismatic when I want to be. Got myself a bit of a posse going. Not that it matters, mind...

[Brosip Tito]

Zizek, because his drug addled craziness amuses me.

Also, Harvey is good.

George Galloway would be amazing as a marxist...sadly, he's just an asshat.