>>>Okay -- I have been trying to follow this thread and now I am lost. How
>>>is
>>>the idea that violence is necessary empirical and scientific when it
>>>(violence) hasn't worked yet?
>
>>I think what Charles is getting at here (although I'd wait for
>>confirmation from him) is simply that: if there's to be a space where
>>human beings can be(come) fully conscious as human beings, it has to be
>>defended from those who'd prevent that space from opening up and growing,
>>to their detriment.
^^^^
>CB: Yes, and in particular on this thread, I am saying that Marx says this.
He does. Here's another point from Marx's annotations to Bakunin's Statism & Anarchy:
"It means that so long as the other classes, especially the capitalist class, still exists, so long as the proletariat struggles with it (for when it attains government power its enemies and the old organization of society have not yet vanished), it must employ forcible means, hence governmental means. It is itself still a class and the economic conditions from which the class struggle and the existence of classes derive have still not disappeared and must forcibly be either removed out of the way or transformed, this transformation process being forcibly hastened."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm
>I respect Ted's effort to articulate what might be termed Marx's utopian
>ideals ( setting aside the famous Marxist critique of utopianism), but
>there
>remains an enormous and tragic puzzle of how to get there without using
>very
>non-utopian defenses. And actually historical experience with this struggle
>shows the puzzle even more difficult to solve.
With respect to Ted, and I'll wait to see if he agrees with me, I suspect what he was getting at more was your somewhat bloody rendition of Marx here:
"There is a nuanced possibility ,probability even, that Marx anticipated a mass and even majority of working people who would be repressively and murderously hostile toward resistent owning classes , including petit owning classes, intellectual strata, AND THAT THIS DICTATORIAL ATTITUDE WOULD BE SUBTANTIALLY RATIONAL and democractic in the full historical context and in face of the murderous and repressive resistance of the bourgeoisie to peaceful socialist revolution."
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040503/009784.html
"Murderously hostile" doesn't describe the bourgeois' attitudes towards workers even on a bad day. So if their 'tude to us is largely one of technocratic Taylorist control and repression (which gets more violent as we get more uppity), why do we have to get all sweaty in turn about our moves in the class war? There's a difference between butchering a hog to get the meat, and slicing the animal up to hear it squeal.
Marx says this vis-a-vis peasants in the same notes I cited above:
It [ie the dictatorship of the proletariat/proletarian government] must not hit the peasant over the head, as it would e.g. by proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or the abolition of his property.
>
>In other words, it is _Marx_ , not Lenin, who originates the notion that
>there will have to be a socialist state which uses violence to suppress
>bourgeois counterrevolutionary efforts to stop the building of a world in
>which people can be authentic humans.
If it comes to violence, fine. But most of it's just going to depend on force, I think. No need to apply too much, but rather to simply give back as good as we get so proles can progress human civilization a bit more.
Hmmm. I'm starting to sound like Nathan . . . .
Todd
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