a critique of the march on Sandton

[Dddddd0814 at aol.com]

> Doug Henwood wrote: 
>>> I don't think the only two paths open are 1) burning down convention 
>>> centers or 2) listening to blowhards drone on. No one burned anything 
>>> down in Seattle. A few windows were broken, which is more than fine with 
>>> me, but no one thought to castrate the Space Needle. 
> 
> Joe R. Golowka: 
>> So, should people in Argentina stop burning banks down? 
> 
> It depends on what it accomplishes, materially speaking. I 
> think there's a considerable danger that burning banks and 
> the like may become fetishized, since they're sort of 
> exciting and enjoyable in themselves. What do you do for an 
> encore? 


>>Apply for jobs rebuilding the bank.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1909/tia09.htm

from Trotsky, "Why Marxists oppose Individual Terrorism":

"As in a strike, so in elections the method, aim, and result of the struggle 
always depend on the social role and strength of the proletariat as a class. 
Only the workers can conduct a strike. Artisans ruined by the factory, 
peasants whose water the factory is poisoning, or lumpen proletarians in 
search of plunder can smash machines, set fire to a factory, or murder its 
owner. 
"Only the conscious and organised working class can send a strong 
representation into the halls of parliament to look out for proletarian 
interests. However, in order to murder a prominent official you need not have 
the organised masses behind you. The recipe for explosives is accessible to 
all, and a Browning can be obtained anywhere. In the first case, there is a 
social struggle, whose methods and means flow necessarily from the nature of 
the prevailing social order; and in the second, a purely mechanical reaction 
identical anywhere - in China as in France - very striking in its outward 
form (murder, explosions and so forth) but absolutely harmless as far as the 
social system goes."