Todd: << What point is that Leo? It's a thorny question, I know, to ask on a Monday morn, but please indulge my desire to know. >>
My original: << That is where a right to revolution kicks in. >>
Todd: << "Rights" is a word with which I have lots of trouble. As it appears to work in practice, a right is an "allowance" in the stictest sense of the word: what someone else allows another to have. Rights can be made constitutional and thereby given an air of permanence, but they can still be modified, superseded, or abolished. A right is granted to a person or class of persons or people in general by those who also have the power to take it away. It can be granted out of fear for or fear of those who don't have a particular right or rights, but it is always granted by someone else, who may not feel it is in his/her/their best interests or even the best interests of the one petitioning for rights. If there is such a thing as a "right to revolution," it exists entirely within the mind of the petitioner for that "right", who then has to convince others that this "right" should be exercised while all the while those who insist there is no need for this "right" (either innocently or with an ulterior motive) loudly proclaim the insanity and/or diabolism of the petitioner (Ohh . . . . There's a fantastic quote from the preface to Joanna Russ' The Female Man that speaks exactly to what I am saying. I wish I could remember it!) and the benefits/beauty of the present. I'm all for peaceful and democratic (radical) changes to societies/governments, but to assume that it can come about simply by obeying what the majority says and tacking on a rider for minority rights is, to my mind, only a flea's-step above "micro-resistance" techniques in efficacy. Even if the present First-World Governments were informed by Marxism, I still would be leery of "majority right."
I will grant you that democracy is great for preventing one individual from running roughshod over people for his/her own benefit (this is the historical milieu it grew out of), but it does nothing to prevent a class of people from running roughshod over other classes or individuals.
Todd >>
Todd is right that the question of the precise point at which a government becomes illegitimate is a rather thorny and difficult question. It is easy enough to point out instances of clear illegitimacy [the slave South vis-a-vis African-Americans, apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR], but the question of the line of demarcation between a legitimate and illegitimate government is heavily debated.
But I don't think that it is necessary, in this context, to carefully draw that line of demarcation. My point was that democrats recognize, as a matter of principle, that the line exists; anarchists, also as a matter of principle, do not recognize it. For them, the state is always illegitimate, democratic or not. The democratic theory of civil disobedience allows one to break a specific law, while still recognizing the legitimacy of majority rule, and of a state based on majority rule and the consent of the governed.
Rights discourse is a discourse with all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes, but it is also the dominant political discourse in the US, the discourse in which political projects and efforts to transform the boundaries of political subjectivity are expressed. I do not think that one can step outside of rights discourse, pace the communitarians, and have much practical impact on American politics. Anarchism is a species of rights discourse -- but it see rights as extra-or pre-political, as natural.
The right to revolution is a right unlike the ordinary species of rights. In a constitutional democracy, rights are claims that one has on the government, either to refrain from limiting one's freedom in some respect or to enforce one's freedom against interlopers in another respect. The right to revolution is clearly a right that exists outside of constitutional government; it is the right, if you will, that comes into effect when other rights have been violated. It is more of a justificatory concept for a certain species of political action than it is a legally enforceable claim on the government.
The combination of majority rule and democratic rights is not a recipe for radical democratization. But it is not meant to be. It is a concept for understanding one part of what a democratic government might be, one set of the tensions it embodies. Radical democracy builds on it, but it can not, IMHO, transcend it.
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 -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010430/b40d49b5/attachment.htm>