<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html>   "Mr P.A. Van Heusden" wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE>On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:  What I find utterly > mysterious are the calls for revolution that seem to treat all the > difficulties of this path as resulting mainly from a failure of > nerve, and seem to treat all the (fundamentally conservative) > psychological and institutional complexities of today as obstacles > that will simply disappear in some magic transformation. I don't think (from reading his posts over the years) that Carrol thinks you are lacking in 'revolutionary moral fibre' or any other such thing. Neither do I.</blockquote> Peter speaks for me.. <blockquote TYPE=CITE>  I just think that at some point in the development of the grand movement you're proposing, you're going to go head on head with the armed might of the capitalist state. You're going to head into a class war, quite literally. I think you should anticipate that, and be prepared for it. The century from the Haymarket to COINTELPRO should be history enough to learn from.</blockquote> Doug himself has posted important information on the willingness (even anxiousness) of the U.S. ruling class to shed blood. And we have had some recent postings on the premature fascism of some elements of that class in the 1930s. (Those who were looking for a general with sufficient charisma to lead a putsch against the New Deal.) <blockquote TYPE=CITE>We don't know what it looks like till it happens, but whatever the path from capitalism to socialism is going to be, it won't be easy.</blockquote> Any perspective not captive to the bourgeois conception of automatic progress must (as Marx and Engels do in the CM) entertain the real possibility that it will be impossible: that history will end in the mutual ruin of the contending classes. I certainly have never for a minute assumed that sufficient revolutionary fervor was an even remotely sufficient cause of revolution. I think I have said somewhere that among those who make (have made) revolutions very few of them even think of themselves as revolutionaries. <blockquote TYPE=CITE> <ul> <li> Anyhow, at the moment the issue is not how to build barricades - it is</li> </ul> more like how to organise all those tele-workers. How to organise temp workers. And scientists. How to give people some dignity back, to make them feel that they don't have to work a job that's ever longer hours, ever faster, a job where the onus is on them to always be a 'hot commodity' (someone asked what's going to happen to all these computer workers when the bubble bursts - my answer is that the ideology of blaming yourself is already built into how computer workers value themselves). How to make people blame the company for making them choose between parenthood and career, rather than crapping on themselves for being 'bad mothers' or 'bad fathers'. In all these mundane struggle, I expect that (if I was in the US) we'd all be one the same side anyway. There's a lot of mundane work that needs to be done right now, and we can get one with that while we harangue each other over theoretical differences.</blockquote> At least those who agree on fundamental tasks should be able to harangue each other on their differences without personal animosity -- especially (for example) those differences which bear on the kind of tasks Doug and Peter list. (It's a pretty good list) My main point of disagreement with Doug does not concern reform vs. revolution: it's difficult to even name the difference clearly. He speaks (in the text quoted at the beginning of this post) of "the (fundamentally conservative) psychological and institutional complexities" we encounter in our struggle. I don't think that psychology is, ever has been, ever will be pertinent -- except for the kind of "psychology" Wojtek noted recently in the post in which he argued that people first *join* a movement, *then* come to believe in it. But we should be able to fight hard over that without growling about revolutionary fervor or the lack of it. Carrol  </html>