<HTML><HTML> From: "Todd Archer" -clip- 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. ^^^^^^ CB: I'd plead that I specified "resistent" owning classes, and that I  thought of the context more as during and after the insurrection ( like the Paris Commune or Russian Revolution of 1917) , not the ordinary day to day under capitalist rule. The attitude of the capitalist on a day as bad as the insurrection is murderously hostile toward the workers rising up, I'd guess. I'm not saying Marx advocated revenge. I think he would anticipate that there would in fact be some revenge because no way are you going to get 100% of the revolutionary population that mature in their thinking and feeling, even though they are a revolutionary population. Of course , there would be mistakes in the rev. He would criticize it, but he wouldn't say call off the rev because everybody doesn't have rational self-consciousness yet. One of the Theses on Feuerbach is on changing circumstances in order to get new individuals, or the like, not change some individuals who will change the circumstances, I think. ^^^^ 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 </HTML>