--- Chuck0 <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> It does many productive things.
>
> I'll leave you some time to figure them out. It has
> something to do with
> the fact that the anarchist movement is growing in
> this country while
> the Old Left hawks boring newspapers.
Chuck, you are right to criticize the sale of boring newspapers...but just because that is a useless, tired enterprise does not mean that breaking windows is always correct. I have no problem with tactics (even breaking windows) that really could slow down the war machine, but in some cases (I am not saying "all") there are people breaking windows, etc, and it seems to be done with little forethought, other than just to do something ostensibly radical. In other words, that, too, is just "symbolic" protest...not a thought-out, effective direction of political energy.
I noticed that at the recent protest in Palo Alto some members in "Anarchist Action" (dont forget I have praised this march and even took part in it) made a coment to the press that the event proved that we live in a police state. This is misleading. The police are always there to enforce "law" but I would say that "police state" actions are secondary. The main form of control is through media and social pressure and a million other insidious ways that arise from the dynamics of the system. It seems that because a lot of leftists dont understand this and continue to insist that the police are the main form of control (instead an important secondary backup) that they feel frustrated when people dont see this and go out and want to prove that they are right. They then carry out trivial, meaningless forms of violence (not effective ones), get themselves arrested (instead of preparing and putting up a real fight that MIGHT win) and then say "Voila', we were right; you see, we live in a police state."
<<We are at such a point in mankind's evolution where changed conditions invalidate all our policies that have been so successful even in the recent past, and that presumably have constituted the ideal response to a presumably unchanging and unchangeable human condition. No wonder we are stupefied and confused-but our mistake is the same which many cultures have made before us, namely to force a rigid model upon a fluid reality.
Erich Jantsch - "Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems"
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