[lbo-talk] Credit Where Credit is Due

Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com
Tue Jan 25 19:26:01 PST 2005


--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> response to what Thomas Seay asks must be found in
> explaining why they
> militarized. They militarized in self-defense
> against capitalist invasion
> and threat. So, a key to preventing militarization
> of socialist society is
> preventing capitalist attack and threat.

My response was a reaction to a particularly flippant remark by Chris Doss. I understand why these societies militarized. Even though I understand that, I also understand Chuck's concern. The bourgeois apparatus is not completely smashed and the people who take power tend to wield that power similarly as the "old bosses". They are repressive and NOT JUST repressive toward the bourgeois class and bourgeois right.

My point is that I understand both sides of the argument here. It's legitimate to be concerned about how a revolution might be threatend militarily by both external and internal enemies. It IS naive to think that we could defend it with our grandfathers' shotguns and kitchen knives.

However, a heavy state apparatus tends to behave repressively. So thinking about this dilemma is good, but jeering at Chuck, acting as if his concerns are illegitimate, does not seem productive to me.

Thomas

===== <<Furthermore, we must ask what does the dialectician want? What does this will which wills the dialectic want? It is an exhausted force which does not have the strength to affirm its difference, a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it-only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence.>> -Gilles Deleuze "Nietzche & Philosophy"

__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list