I think that Max's insistence upon economic questions as the leading issues is a manifestation of the worldview (one might even say the hubris) of economists. The last great mass movements we had in the US -- the civil rights and anti-war movements -- were clearly not economic issue movements. The Civil Rights movement was about the right to full citizenship, the right to equal, non-discriminatory treatment by the state and civil society. In fact, just as the Civil Rights movement took up the unfinished business of the Reconstruction, we may very well now be in a position to build a movement which takes up the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement.
Kelley wrote:
> This is problematic as well. we cannot and do not
> constantly forge and
> re-forge social contracts. we can't. it would be,
> were that demand placed
But anarchists do not, on principle, subscribe to the very idea of the social contract. It is, after all, a justification for the establishment of government and a state. For anarchists, the state of nature is preferable to government. Of course, this is a form of tyranny, as not only Kelley but the various social > contract theorists, from Hobbes and Locke onward, pointed out -- tyranny to nature, to the power of the strongest. But anarchists don't see it that way.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --
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