>My first point was that the Soviet Union isn't as benign an object as
>pretty
>dresses, so backlash was more justified, even if the form of backlash was
>bad.
And my return to that was you, and others, seem to blame the "victim".
>Secondly, unlike pretty dresses, demands for social justice are not
>ends in themselves but means to an end, so if the result of a poorly
>strategized demand for justice is a loss in justice, then it was stupid and
>wrong to make that particular demand in that context.
(What, a pretty dress can't be a means to an end? Oh, Nathan, you need to get out from behind that computer!)
And I'm telling you that that "loss in justice" doesn't have to be because of a poorly strategized demand. You seem to be forgetting there are people out there, who have power, who would love to see even you bleeding on the sidewalk, and who don't need much (if any) of an excuse to do it. Even mild reforms would be seen as spawned from the Devil's hind-quarters and a "real reason" to open fire.
>What many folks seem reluctant to admit is that "good intentions" isn't
>enough for good activism.
Right. I agree. And what a lot of liberal-sorts seem reluctant to even acknowledge existing is that failure can come about for a myriad of reasons, but at least two: one's own ability and the environmental context. And those two reasons can shift "amounts" and change all the time. You're still clinging to this bourgeois notion of the Will over all.
>Results matter. Bad results, bad activism. So if
>the probable result of a particular political demand is backlash and
>political loss, then don't make that political demand. Make a different
>one
>that is more strategic and will move you towards the desired goal.
Ok. Or that same logic could lead one to getting bullied into submission because your opponent knows you're going to back down from a threat of "backlash". It's self-censoring!
>>-Gulags have a real material reason for appearing, not simply because
>>someone
>>-decides to pervert socialist values. You think people in the States
>>won't
>>-ever get hauled off to an American gulag.
>>-Proletarian dictatorships are the flip-side of the capitalist
>>dictatorships
>>-we all live in now. One person runs the show: Money, The Boss. The
>>-bourgeois dictate, we obey. I want to see the proles dictate, the
>>bourgeois
>>-obey. Here's a good place to start:
>Don't buy it. Not that the capitalist west isn't bad in all sorts of ways,
>but it's bad in DIFFERENT ways.
Not necessarily. I'm talking about power. In capitalist countries, that power is dispersed among capitalists as well as in the state, with next to no power for those outside those groups. So far as I know in a country that would have no capitalist class as such, power would just be concentrated in one place, with those "outside" the state largely powerless. The Boss has changed shape, gotten more concentrated, but He's still there.
>Making the analogy is therefore
>unconvincing to most people. It's far better to condemn the capitalism
>world for what is obviously wrong with it, mass poverty and inequality,
>then
>to equate it with Stalin's particular form of repression.
You brought up the whole dictatorship of the proletariat thing. And you seem to think it MUST, beyond any shadow of doubt, be referring to Stalin the same way people think Nostradamus must have been referring to Hitler. You really think someone who wrote, " . . . the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people" is going to push for a simple dictatorship of one person? More likely something more along Luxembourg's lines.
>And on the broader point, if you fuckup by pushing too hard and the result
>is worse than if you had moderated demands and gotten more, than you
>shouldn't "try so hard." Stupid unstrategic militancy is nothing to
>praise.
-So who the hell died and made you the last word in deciding on the limits of -militancy? No single one of us can tell without a crystal ball exactly how -hard to push, when to leave off, etc. I'm all in favour of moderation when -the time seems right, but moderation as grand strategy?
>Who said moderation as grand strategy?
That's all you seem to be talking about: how moderation and less militancy would have made things better off. What else am I to think? I'm bending the bow back the other way, if you'll forgive my stealing Lenin's line.
>I'm all for militancy when it works.
>We were talking about whether the world would have been better off without
>the particular form of Bolshevik militancy. I think it would have been,
>and
>maybe the IWW-- a form of militancy I quite like-- might not have gotten so
>smashed during the Red Scare.
And I doubt you're right. Without Bolshevik militancy it's just as possible, I think, the world could have been worse off.
<sigh> This is arguing over whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. Let it end. We can't/won't agree about this minor point. We're like two kids arguing over who's the better fighter: Superman or Batman. Let's just drop it.
Todd
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