> Dddddd0814 at aol.com writes:
> > Sounds more like pacifism to me. Should we love our enemies, too?
JCWisc at aol.com:
> Someone asserted, Chuck I think, that this thread has perhaps reached a
> decadent phase where it may be best simply to agree that we disagree. Maybe
> we do agree on some things, though. I would agree, for example, that it's a
> good rule of thumb that when Hitler's (or Pol Pot's) name comes up with any
> frequency, a discussion has probably outlived its usefulness (if it isn't
> about the history of Germany or Cambodia). I would only observe at this
> point that in my view weakening, let alone getting rid of the grossest, most
> obvious forms of coercion, means participating in a lot of messy,
> compromising politics. Just saying "No," even in thunder, won't do it.
>
> There's also a long history in the US of people trying to found alternative
> institutions, withdrawing to one degree or another from the surrounding
> society and its horrors. The 19th century was full of them, and there was
> another wave of it in the 1960s-early 70s. A lot of people tried the
> back-to-the-land commune thing then, and while a few of them are still
> around, most failed--same thing in the 19th century. Someone who's more
> clued in to the sociological literature than I am may be able to fill us in,
> but I have the impression that the 60s communes that lasted had strong
> religious motivations, or--strong leaders.
>
> Dave also notices a religious or quasi-religious overtone that recurs from
> time to time. One noticed it as well in the article on primitivism, with its
> discussion of "spirituality." Being at heart a die-hard Enlightenment
> "Ecrasez l'infame" rationalist, this sort of thing always makes me
> suspicious. Perhaps some of what bugs me about anarchism is that it seems to
> call for, or require, a wholesale change of heart. Is that what we're
> waiting for? A Third Great Awakening?
As John Adams said,
The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The
Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change
in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations....
This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments,
and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.
A mere liberal, Adams, perhaps; but his revolution succeeded, so we might want to pay some attention to it. But Adams does leave something out; due to the peculiar conditions under which the colonists lived, most specifically their movement into the relative freedom of the land and the indigenous (Indian) culture of North America, they not only thought of but experienced a new thing, I would say an anarchic thing, which made them susceptible to political changes -- a susceptibility which Adams and his bourgeois liberal friends were able to turn to profitable use. We require both the material change and the spiritual change, because they are not really separate, independent things.
The idea that one has discovered a religious sentiment in others may well be as much a discovery of a religious sentiment in oneself. After all, without some powerful vision or intuition, what are we to make of "écrasez l'infâme"? It's something a recently-mentioned, rather unpleasant Asian politician might well have said, as he had his soldiers kill all the people with eyeglasses, impelled by _his_ quasi-religious visions. Once we abandon conventional and received opinion and begin to think radically, there is certainly danger of thinking the wrong thing. But the alternative is not thinking at all, which is probably no longer available to those who have addicted themselves to, even cultivated, the practice. That is, we're stuck with Awakenings and we have to live with them.
--
You may be poorly informed about the present state of communal enterprises today. You could begin to correct this by looking at Twin Oaks's web site and following some of the links therefrom, if you're interested, which you probably aren't if you're willing to accept the mass-media line that they all died out after the '60s. They are not specifically anarchistic, and the tendency of any kind of successful enterprise floating in a sea of bourgeois relations to bourgeoisify itself is great; but the form, the idea, the practice do afford one route of anarchist possibility which provides some change in both the material and the spiritual conditions of life while yet avoiding the dead-end violence implicit in the use of State power. And they're usually quite messy, if that's what you're looking for, but it's a messiness which has a chance of keeping its eyes on the prize, unlike holding one's nose to vote to give this fellow rather than that one a license to kill.
-- Gordon