Am I for instance drawing a non-existent division between legal and illegal by introducing extra-legal? Certinly barricade type civil war is not, except under very special circumstances, a successful way forward for many reasons not the least as Engels remarked because of the improvement of military technology even in his day.
Is it an impasse, an "aporia", where the "legal" means will not work and the illegal means won'tr either? Certianly as a movement we are stuck and part oif that problem rests on a dogmatic roimaniticism with "violent" quasi-military means (which to my mind are a good excuse to do nothing in the here and now). The other aspect of this is a shunning of "legal" struggle as if reformism was a highly contagious disease rather than a political relation..
Is it the translation of Lenin or Lenin himself? My money is on the translation and not because post-1914 Lenin is a perfect mind, but rather because in State and Revolution there is the outlines of a complete concept, one that is not really addressed by dogmaticists who hang on quotes.
Force is the critical factor but violence in the terms of armed struggle has little to recomend it especially the chances of success which seem proved by history to very slim.
If armed struggle is the only means for struggle (the inevitable end-point of organisation and politics), then much else in Historical Materialism falls away letv alone the need for elaborate analysis.
Which returns me back to Lenin and translation and why without knowning any Russian I strongly suspect that "Violence" only picks up on a single thread of the meaning.
First and formost for a document written on the eve of Revolution there is no call to arms, no military concepts and no attempt to provide them. Lenin confines himself to criticising different views of the state and reviewing past attempts to grapple with it in practice.
Odd for someone calling for violent revolution in the civil war sense. If however, the word also carries the meaning of extra-legal, beyond the confines of order, or even simple force in the sense of taking rather than waiting to be given (violence also has this meaning - ie to violate propriety, to take), then what Lenin has to say makes perfect sense and is largely in accord with Engels and Marx.
Historical context obviously defines what may or not be taken and how it can be got-away-with. In this I am a happy proponant of politically taking the initiative and extra-legal struggle at all levels - however, knowing what modern weapons can do I am no lover of collective suicide.
Dogmatists/opportunists must do two things to create room for themselves, first the objective must be far away something obtained mysteriously when the planets are in conjunction while all political struggle today is merely education (indoctrination) for that future time - the mellieum.
Utopian visions of future society need equally utopian means for achieving it - the vision of revolutioin steming from civil war may not sound all that utopian, but it has the virtue that in those parts of the world which are not particularily violent, such a thing is practically safeguarded against. To me this is why so much wind and spittle is wasted on this topic, struggle cannot be concrete it must always be for something else (not victory here but in the hereafter) and it must also be something else other than itself (education for the masses not struggle for something concrete).
If struggle is reduced in the end to who has the most guns, then we will be waiting a long time until the working class possesses them. If guns are irrelevant then the role of the state becomes worth thinking about and also the role of force as something a class can muster within civil society. in that sense there is no "aporia" just a super-abundance of day-dreaming and menbtal laziness.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia
--- Message Received --- From: Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 08:40:47 +0100 Subject: Is this an aporia? force and violence
In response to Greg and Chris Doss I commented:
>Yes in my copy of State and Revolution I have ringed the English word
>"violent" where Lenin, as you quote, refers to "this panegyric on violent
>revolution" and I have noted in the margin that "Engels uses the word 'force' "
from the web: Xrefer definition
>Aporia
>
>
>In Greek aporia means a tangled path blocking the way, but the term has
>often been used in a literary context to describe a logical problem or
>inability to settle to a course of action as, for example, in Hamlet's `To
>be or not to be' speech. More recently, the term has been used by
>deconstructionist critics to refer to a point of contradiction or impasse
>in a work when the reader is left with inconsistent or unresolvable ideas.
>For deconstructionist critics, the aporia is inevitable in all writing and
>should not be seen as a mistake or blemish in the work.
And from an introduction to
METAPHYSICAL APORIA AND PHILOSOPHICAL HERESY Stephen David Ross
>Philosophy has recurrently acknowledged aporia: "moments in the movement
>of thought in which it finds itself faced with unconquerable obstacles
>resulting from conflicts in its understanding of its own intelligibility."
Or is the jump in English from Engels' German to Lenin's Russian, just a bad translation which has been absolutised by dogmatists and glossed over by opportunists?
Chris Burford
London