Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> Right.... if only the serfs had just gone anarchist when met with the
> proposition of owning their own land or wage labor.... what idiots the serfs
> must have been....
Quite a few of them did, actually. See Christopher Hill, _The_World_Turned_Upside_Down:_Radical_Ideas_During_The_ _English_Revolution_.
> > It appears to me that, because of that very creativity, we do
> > not have the conservative choice of simply accepting the tragic
> > nature of human life and muddling on. As technology and
> > accumulation make more and more humans more and more powerful,
> > the likelihood that continued aggression, competition and
> > violence will destroy the world steadily increases, so that
> > our choice becomes not one between socialism and barbarism --
> > we chose! -- but between anarchy and self-annihilation. So
> > we may have to tragically abandon the delights of tragedy.
> I like the Judy Garland version the best:
> "Come on along, come on, Get Happy,
> Get ready for the Judgement Day!"
Yes, we all do. Saint Judy has done what she could, which was actually fairly impressive if you count the Stonewall riots and all that followed. It's certain more than most of us accomplish. But, weak as we may be, the greater task remains before us.
> It is not a matter of "accepting tragedy," or for that matter comedy,
> happiness, etc. It is the necessity of coming up with an analysis of the real
> obstacles that people really face. The "reality" is not a bourgeois universe,
> a la the Oprah Winfrey show, where people can "choose" happiness, if only
> they put their minds to it. It's not as if Daddy would have given me a
> Jaguar, if only I hadn't found the "worst" way of asking for it, and ended up
> with a Dodge Dart instead. There are real economic-- and dialectical--
> constraints.
>
> And again, you seem to be hinting at this notion that socialism has already
> been attempted (i.e., "we [sic] chose"), or that socialism is the same as
> barbarism. But, socialism has never been attempted in the most developed
> countries-- the very countries in which Marx wrote that it needed to occur!
No, "we" -- everyone -- chose barbarism. About the rest of what you say above, sarcasm is too blunt an instrument to convey exactly what your objections to the foregoing material are, if any.
> ...
> > which contained some very specific ideas for advancing anarchist
> > culture and politics. Subsequently I have discovered that
> > many people have put forward similar ideas here and there.
> > However, at this time they're not taken seriously by very many
> > people because of the widespread assumption, even among
> > leftists, that all politics is and must be statecraft, that
> > is, some kind of technique of violence and domination. I
> > believe that these cannot get us anywhere we want to go for
> > both theoretical reasons and the evidence of history.
> You just wrote, above, that "maybe there was no other politically possible
> way out of the feudal state", but now seem to be stating that the "possible"
> was impossible. If you care to explain how the burghers could have avoided
> violence and domination in their overthrow of the feudal system, I'd love to
> hear the reason. Or, at the dress rehearsal for the next stage, I'd love for
> you to explain how Russia could have become a instant utopian society free
> from want, given the isolated nature of its revolution and economic
> backwardness.
You want me to advise Lenin, address 1911? I don't think he's going to listen.
There are some other models besides civil war for the transition from feudalism to liberalism / capitalism, for instance the Japanese, although of course this still involves the intrinsic violence of the State even if handled a bit more coolly than in England, France or America. But in western Europe in its earlier stages, capitalism didn't confront and attack feudalism directly; it grew up in the insterstices and margins of feudal society and gradually subverted feudal relations and institutions, and that's a very interesting process. So is the way in which Christianity infected and helped to destroy the Roman Empire. Subversion, seduction, sabotage -- they may be too femmie for most of you, but for me it's the way to go, because once you get guns and start marching around, you've got the very you-know-what you were trying to get rid of. Unless you actually like that sort of thing.
-- Gordon