>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 01/22/00 10:37AM >>>
Charles Brown writes
in reply to my
>The rise in conspiracy theories is proportionate to the decline in
>political engagement.
>
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>
>CB: This is not true. In the last period of heavy political engagment, the
>60's/70's , activists took it for granted that the system hatched all kinds of
>criminal conspiracies - COINTELPRO, the prominent assassinations discussed on
>this thread etc. That's part of what I am getting at. This skepticism about the
>widespread existence of corporate/govt. plots is a mark of the rightward trend
>of the left in this period of less political engagement.
>
>Put simply, taken the plotting nature of the establishment for granted is a key
>feature of distrusting the system.
>
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I don't think so. There is a difference between the proper scepticism towards the state, which is the reaction of people who value their independence, and paranoia, which is the response of enfeebled people. The kind of people who think that they are being controlled by cosmic rays, or messages beamed by their television screens, or that black helicopters are transporting the troops of the Zionist Occupation Government - these are the kind of people who have actually just lost control over their lives and project that fact, fantastically, onto conspiracies against them.
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CB: Proper skepticism toward the state doesn't just occur. Leftists have to agitate and propagandize for it. Class consciousness doesn't arise spontaneously. Some on the Left here are not carrying out this responsibilty to agitate.
There were just as many paranoid and fantastic fears in the 40's. 50's. 60's 70's and 80's. as in the 90's. No evidence of increase in the 90's
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>
>
>Jim H.
>The less control we feel over our own lives the
>more willing we are to believe that someone more powerful is pulling the
>strings.
>
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>
>CB: This is pop psychologizing. The reason to be aware of the major institutions
>of society cheating is as a step toward wanting to change the system. It is an
>important element of being dissatisfied with the status quo.
>
>
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JH:
I wish such psychologising were more popular. The X-Files view of the
world does not lead to action, but passivity. And as you yourself have
shown, a view of the state as a criminal conspiracy clearly coincides
with a legal-reformist outlook.
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CB: COINTELPRO, patterns of assassinations, other observations of police apparatus machinations are not an X-files view of the world. They are realistic assessments of the Machiavellian specifics of the U.S. state at that time. X-files is your obsession. No evidence that today's population has a more X -file view than the 50's/60's had a Twilight Zone view or the 30's a War of the Worlds View.
My view of the state is pretty much the same as that of __The State and Revolution_ , which is to say it is not reformist. That view recognizes the bourgeois state and institutions as a system, but with specific conspiracies. Without this understanding, Lenin and the Bolsheviks never would have defeated the imperilialist invasions. Nor would the Cubans and Castro survived as long as they have, nor the VietNamese have defeated the Americans.
You have a quietist view of the bourgeois apparatus. You have nothing to worry about, in the quiet of your study, debunking the idea that the bourgeois state engages in plots.
> Oh they're just a bunch of bumblers.
>No, they are some of the most sophisticated and effective achievers in history.
>You are grossly underestimating the bourgeois enemy and its agents.
>
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Jim H. Well, as a rule, I avoid any dealings with them. But what I've seen, I have to say that they are pretty low-grade in the intellectual stakes.
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CB: Well, sure you have nothing to worry about. You aren't really challenging them. If you were really a revolutionist, you would have to be concerned about what they would do to you. Marx was put on trial and exiled. Lenin went to prison, was exiled, lived underground. Angela Davis was framed for murder. Cabral was assassinated. Every real revolutionary has to deal with the bourgeois secret and open police. But you aren't engaged or do not intend to engage in real revolutionary struggle , so you can dismiss concerns of this type.
Nor do real revolutionaries underestimate the intelligence of their enemies in egoistic pronouncements like yours here.
>
>
>
>OF course government's do promote all kinds of absurd and vicious
>intrusions into people's lives, but generally on the basis of trying to
>deal with a society they have no idea of how to control.
>
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>
>CB: This defies the obvious. Society is completely under control. The efforts of
>the bourgeoisie to control society are a roaring success right now ( Doug can't
>even imagine a revolution, they have been so successful in this year 2000).
>They didn't stumble into this roaring success , as Justin and Jim would have us
>think. The bourgeois are smarter and more conscious than you give them credit
>for. It is not anonymous, objective, impersonal, mechancial forces that have
>achieved the current neo-liberral triumphalism at home and abroad.
Funny and there was me thinking that the problem with Capitalism was that it was anarchic and un-planned. Plainly Marx got it all wrong when he said that the laws of production operated, so to speak, behind the backs of the producers.
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CB: You don't seem to understand Marx's idea of anarchy of production. The devastation of that anarchy, depression, unemployment, poverty etc. does not impact the bourgeoisie, who are continuously rich whether it is the boom or bust part of the cycle, but the working class. Of this creative destruction, the bourgeoisie get the creations and the working class gets the destruction. THEREFORE, THE BOURGEOSIE ARE PRETTY SMART IN MARX'S SCHEMA.
As to things going on behind the backs of the producers, in case you didn't know it the "producers" are the workers , not the bourgeoisie. THEREFORE, the bourgeoisie have to be pretty clever to pull that off.
In sum, Marx's version of the bourgeoisie portrays them as smart, not dumb.
In message <v0422081ab4a55c35215d@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>Charles Brown wrote:
>
>>If you'll notice I tend to think that the Kennedy assassination was
>>mainly motivated by Kennedy's actions internationally ( aside from
>>the lifestyle things).
>
>Do you really think JFK was less an anticommunist than LBJ? You buy
>that whole Oliver Stone line? Seems like a crock to me.
I always admired Alexander Cockburn's assessment of Lee Oswald that, whatever one thought of his methods, his reaction against the imperialist Kennedy was wholly understandable. Incidentally the Chomsky book on Camelot demolishes the Stone thesis. My father sold an anarchist newspaper in Leeds around the time of the assassination with the headline 'So What?'
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CB: You all can't tell a government agent in left disguise, an infiltrator. No sensible leftist in the U.S. thinks that Oswald was really a leftist. He was a police agent of the type that there were many in these times. He had been a Marine sharpshooter. I think there is some kind of cultural barrier that you and Cockburn are tripping over here. It really is rather ridiculous that you think Oswald was really left.
The importance of the Kennedy assassination is not that Kennedy was more progressive than Johnson , but that there was a crisis in the bourgeois political system such that one sector resorted to breaking the rules (some people in the military industrial complex panicked ,in LM terminology); Also, it demonstrates that the U.S. system is not as democratic as most Americans think, thus it is an important historical point of agitation and propaganda for the Left. The "So What" was that there was a real crisis going on in the U.S. It was a harbinger of the turbulent, radically reformist, but not quite revolutionary 6O'S. The Left looks for divisions and crises in the ruling class as significant for strategy and tactics at a given time.
CB