> Since many individuals in contemporary society, including very poor
people pretty
> much disconnected from immediate bourgeois influence, carry
> on social relations in a peaceful and constructive manner
> independent of the State, it is clear that State power is not
> necessary for such behavior. Such relations often include
> relations across group boundaries, even when these have been
> sharpened and deepened (if not, indeed, created) by class
> war elsewhere.
>
> If we look back through history, not just the history of the
> bourgeois states but the feudal and imperial states which
> preceded them, we find a continuous presence of such people
> on the peripheries of the State, among whom peaceful and
> constructive relations can and do arise. The notion that
> those outside State power are all inevitably violent barbarians
> is propaganda, originally concocted in service of the assertion
> of slavery and military government, that is, the primordial
> State. It is precisely these archaic forms of behavior
> which are the most advanced in the sense of departing from
> war and slavery.
Well put, Gordon. I have spent a good portion of my life near or among these very people (broken up by periods when I mixed with the ed'cated class) and you do indeed see these "archiac" forms in action. Most times there's no overt political awareness, just the need to survive and get along at the margins. In fact, I've met far better people at that level of society than I met when I lived in Manhattan, people without pretense or career agendas. Of course assholes exist there too, but such is the human condition.
> Hence, while the violence of the oppressed is >understandable, and its
condemnation by liberals
> often fraudlently context-free, one cannot expect it to produce a new
society. It is necessary to think more >radically.
Which was the point I thought I was making regarding the Brown students. I don't blame them for their anger, and I'm sure the Daily Herald is staffed by white yuppie swine. I simply think (and this is the last time I'm saying it) that their tactics were wrong for the situation. Given another set of circumstances, perhaps I would feel differently.
DP