>>> dhenwood at panix.com 09/26/00 02:07PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>However, a slight disagreement with P.S. 2. Oil shortages, economic
>disaster and global warming ( caused by the capitalist system) ALONE
>will not produce insurrection. However, if capitalism didn't do
>something horrible like these things, there would be no reason to
>get rid of it. So, these shortages and disasters are necessary but
>not sufficient to insurrection and revolution. Their negative
>effects on people are fundamentally necessary to making people turn
>against the system and to making abolition of capitalism rational.
>
>Reference to some kinds of serious problems must be part of the
>appeal for revolution.
I think references to a better future are a more important part of the appeal for revolution. Hard times - economically or ecologically - could just make people nastier, intensifying the war of each against all.
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CB: Yes, as in the Chinese symbol, crisis is both danger ( people getting nastier, fascism and Nazism) and opportunity.
I'd say your idea that references to a better future as more important as a part of the appeal for revolution poses an interesting critique of aversions to Utopian socialist appeals. I am not sure that references to a better future are more important than references to problems and dangers, but I am not averse to John Lennonism : Imagine no war, no government, no religion, no poverty. Imagine them affirmatively. As Aretha Franklin says, "Freedom, freedom, freedom, let your mind go free"
But to be empircal, where did affirmative imagining of the future actually RESULT in revolution. Certainly the American slaves imagined "freedom" in their future. Maybe it caused revolution.
)))))))))))))
I've quoted this before, but why not quote it again?
>I think it must be conceded that it is possible to create a society
>in which the response to market failure is not a swing to socialism,
>but an exacerbation of individual efforts to stay ahead by making
>and spending yet more money.
> Does the public health service have long waiting lists and
>inadequate facilities? Buy private insurance. Has public transport
>broken down? Buy a car for each member of the family. Is air
>pollution intolerable? Buy an air filtering unit and stay indoors.
>Is what comes out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full of
>carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on. We know it can all hapen
>because it has: I have been doing little more than describing
>Southern California.
>- Brian Barry, from an essay in book Thatcherism, edited by Robert
>Skidelsky (Chatto), quoted by Christopher Huhne in Manchester
>Guardian Weekly, 1/8/89