poll on civil liberties

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Sep 24 11:07:07 PDT 2001


Ian Murray wrote:
>
>
>
> I can only define [militancy based on my experience of it; know-it-all anger.
>
> If that's a bad definition of it I'm happy to be corrected.
>

I think it is a bad definition -- though it covers some (not all) forms of ultra-leftism. (As I've noted before, I still carry a grudge against the Weatherman tendency in SDS.) I think, perhaps, it is one of those concepts the content of which is describable only within particular contexts. What is militancy in one context, is supineness in another, and utterly unacceptable ultra-left madness in yet another.

E.g., there will be occasions when window-breaking is not only acceptable but necessary; there are other contexts in which it is utterly disruptive of a mass movement; and there are other contexts (e.g. the night of the storming of the Winter Palace) when indulgence in mere window breaking would be as detached from reality as is the tailing of the Democratic Party now on lbo.

Carrol

Carrol



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