Btw in current circumtsnaces I think that the compromises that we face are less those involved in risking (or actually) killing innocents than those involved in collaboration with the enemy to defend reforms -- "peaceful" compromise, also knowna s selling out among purists. But the questions involved are related to the issues, today posed only hypothetically, of revolutionary violence.
The rejection of moral compromise reflects a moral abolutism deriving from the territory Kierkegaard identified as the "beautiful soul," unstained by ugly thought or deed. Also ineffective at accomplishing anything. I am the last person to casually or otherwise condone using others as mere means or ignore the moral significance of killing innocents and the like. But I cannot think of a major historical change involving major conflict that was brought about by pure and totally ethical means. Seems to me Sartre posed the question well when he asked us about "dirty hands," about the sometimes terrible moral compromises that have to be made to do things that have to be done. Brecht framed the issue similarly (though somewhat dogmatically) in The Measures Taken and other works.
By way of illustration, and assuming that we are not pacificts, if there ever was a just war it was thewar against the Nazis. But that war, like all wars, necessarily involved killing innocents, and would have done even if firebombing cities had not been adopted as a policy. Does that mean that we should not have fought the Nazis?
Rather I think it means we face real moral tragegy -- where doing good requires us to do evil. The key thing is to remember that the good doesn't wipe out the evil, that we are compromised when we act with dity hands even if good ends, that sometimes there's no entirely rioghht thing to do, just less wrong ones.
Incidentally I don't buy the slippery slope that Trotsky's easy resort to violence, e.g., at Kronstadt, made Stalin's terror possible or necessary or something of the sort. Stalinism was the result of vast social forcves, not a bad moral example. If Trotsky had been utterly uprifght (a), there would have been no USSR, because, as head of the Red ARmy in the Civil War he would have avoided the moral compromises necessary for victory, and the Whites would have wob, and (b) even if per impossible they had not, his good example would not have deterred Stalin, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria from their crimes, because it would not have cganged the conditions that brought them to power and impelled them to impose dictatorship and terror. I don't say where whether Kondstadt was right or wrong and I doubt if taht battle is worth refighting. My point is just that the slipper slope argument is wrong.
jks
--- Richard Harris <rhh1 at clara.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> From: jimhillier99 at aol.com
> Subject: Re: Statement by ethical anarchists on
> London Bombings
>
>
> ... I am with Trotsky on this question. Their morals
> and ours, and all
> that. What makes these bombs wrong is not that
> 'innocent' people were
> killed. ...
>
> *** *** *** *** *** ***
> Oh dear. If you really think that then you are on
> the same moral turf as
> the terrorists who have just killed working class
> Londoners on their way to
> work.
>
> "Innocent people" are not empty tokens in your great
> game, a game in which
> elites (some 'marxists' being one) decide who lives
> or dies.
>
> Trotsky's thinking opened the door for Stalinism; an
> regime which saw the
> people as no more than pawns to be sacrificed during
> its continuing struggle
> to maintain power.
>
> It seems to me that such ideas have their home in
> bourgeois alienated
> society, a society in which people are reduced to
> things and stripped of
> their humanity. People are not goals, but tools.
> That appears to be the
> way you think, Jim Hillier, but it is a mindset that
> Marx opposed.
>
> No wonder Marx said 'je ne suis pas marxiste'.
> Marx, I, and I suspect at
> root you are involved in the attempt to build
> socialism because it is the
> only way humanity can escape from the barbarities of
> capitalist society.
> Isn't that supremely a moral mission in anyone's
> language? Why would any of
> us devote so much to the cause of socialism unless
> we thought it the right
> thing to do?
>
> For all his many great merits, comrade Trotsky knew
> nothing about moral
> thinking. If he had, perhaps he would have avoided
> disasters such as
> Kronstadt, which have so much damaged the world
> struggle for socialism.
>
> The revulsion workers feel at the many barbarities
> wrought by so called
> 'socialists' cannot be underestimated. In my
> experience, it is one of the
> greatest barriers we face.
>
> Richard
> Canterbury
>
>
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