[lbo-talk] Reactionary Platitudes (Was Re: Marx, Brenner, Technology )

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Sep 21 16:20:55 PDT 2003


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >
> > I don't believe radical upheavals can have a
> > predictable outcome. It seems that radical
> > upheavals almost always end in fascism or
> > some form of totalitarianism.
> > -joan
>
> A lovely reactionary commonplace. A.O. Hirschmann has
> a nice little book tracing it back quite a ways, to
> the reactionary opposition to the French and American
> revolutions, which didn't turn out that way either.
> Now, I'm not advocating taking up arms against the
> empire, but not because it would like to fascism or
> totalitarianism if we did it, but because it would be
> suicide, unbelievably stupid, and really
> counterproductive.

And in addition "taking up arms against empire" is simply not the way any revolution, if one did occur, would proceed. You can't "take up arms" against anything without first recruiting and training the men and women who are going to wield the arms, which is not quite the same thing as organizing a college football team. :-) Actual revolutions always catch even the revolutionaries by surprise.


> "Radical upheavals," however, are not the same as
> armed insurrection.

Without trying to predict their content, it is spitting in the face of history to pretend that "radical upheavals" (for better or worse -- usually for worse) won't occur. Moreover, when residents of the u.s. say there won't be any radical upheaval there is (often) a concealed premise (concealed even from those who hold it): Really Bad Things (RBTs) occur _elsewhere_. WE don't have such things. (Somewhat like in the old anecdote, The Queen of Spain Has No Legs.) In any case, Radical Upheavals and worse are not, ordinarily, chosen: they happen.


> It would be a radical upheaval to
> take the power and wealth away from the ruling class
> and vest in the dsmocratic control of the workers,
> however we did it. Moreover, doing it will require a
> lot of unconventioanl politics, rather than straight
> electoral campaigning, because there is no party that
> would advocate that, and even creating such a party
> would involve a radical upheaval.

I think if someone were to look back through the archives of lbo-talk she would find that what the "revolutionaries" on the list have consistently advocated is the building of mass movements. That is because we tend to deny that revolutions can be planned or "built" in advance; we tend, those of us on this list in any case, to lean rather heavily on the proposition that a good deal of history is _contingent_. We simply cannot predict the future or mold history to fit some plan. _In General_, we can know with certainty that surprises, most of them unpleasant, are going to happen, and that confronting those surprises will require, not a Revolutionary Plan but, rather, mass political movements with enough variety and enough flexibility operate in such surpises. That variety and flexibility implies a goodly scattering of "revolutionaries" in the sense described here: people with political experience who know that history doesn't go smoothly. But that need is met through the building of mass movements of resistance. Primarily movements that Just Say No.


>
> Do I think it is worth it -- worth the risk that we
> might end up with fascism or Stalinism or the
> equivalent? I do -- if only becausea blind person can
> see (forgive me, Marta) that we are heading to
> repression and ruin already.

Indeed. And I don't think, incidentally, that that repression and ruin can be met by elaborating what I call sandbox plans (one has control over what everyone does in one's sandbox) which, if carried out by those who are leading us to ruin and repression, would make things nice in Iraq.


> We are not ins a
> situation where there is a stable liberal democarcy
> with a welfare state maintaining the least well off.
> In America, we havea savage neoliberal regimes with
> authoritarian ambitions that has alreadya sserted its
> willingness (if not shown its ability) to rule the
> world by force. Rejecting radical upheaval means
> assenting to that. It may happena nyway, but not with
> my cooperation!

One last point. When one predicts Ruin & Repression one is NOT (or at least I and several others on this list are not) predicting Fascism. Those who go around labelling this that or the other thing Fascism make two errors: 1) they usually underestimate the destructiveness of capitalist regimes at their best, and 2) they lack imagination as to the possible forms repression and ruin can take.

And there is a worse penalty now for this habit of crying Fascism. It is clear from some threads on this list that many of the posters really don't understand that the U.S. can remain a democracy at home AND BE A TERRIBLE THREAT TO THE WORLD -- more of a threat than Hitler ever was.

Democracies can commit and have commited horrible crimes. The U.S. war on the Philippine people a century ago was one of the most horrible massacres of the 20th century. But the U.S. was a democracy then as it is now.

Even the way elections got handled in Florida in 2000 (and it may happen again) is not especially new or different. In 1960 I was a rock-ribbed Democrat like Brad or Luke. I was very angry that Daley in Chicago had fucked up and sent in the Chicago vote without first checking on how the Dupage County vote was going. That's why Kennedy almost lost in Illinois. I remember saying to a friend at Northern Michigan where I was teaching then, something like "What the hell good are big city machines if they can't even do a good job of stealing an election." And of course Texas elections in those days (under the thumb of Lyndon Johnson and friends) would make Florida in 2000 look like an 8th grade civics text conception of democracy at its best.

It did take an armed insurrection on a small scale to overthrow the Memphis city machine back in '48 or so. (I forget the name of the man who ran that state. "Crump" comes to mind, but I think that was the Kansas City boss who managed Truman's plitical career.) A group of veterans got together, stormed the courthouse, and defended the ballot boxes with arms until they could arrange for an honest counting. There were shots fired, but I forget if anyone was wounded or not.

And there is even a movie about the massacre of a black community in Florida back in the '20s; similar events have occurred elsewhere in the U.S.

There is a frightening naivete in assuming that (whether it is a good thing or a bad thing) there won't be very messy radical upheavals in the United States.

Carrol


> For radical upheaval,
>
> jks



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