Chuck0 wrote: If you are going to start smashing capitalism, you have to go where capitalism is, right? ;-)
Where is capitalism? Does it have a home address? Doug
With anarchists and/or amateurs (often the same) one has to be very careful with how one words things. A common internal slogan amont antiwar activists in the '60s was "Raise the political cost of the war" (with the emphasis on POLITICAL). I had used it several times, and the next thing I knew three ISU students had been caught in the middle of the night trying to smash the windows on the State Farm building in Bloomington. Costing State Farm money was seen as raising the cost!!!*
And Doug Henwood also wrote:
Michael Pugliese wrote: Ravi, I.F. Stone, no Rightist, on late 60's new left street trashers ala Days of Rage , "stunt mongers and suicide tactics." William Appleman Williams, leftist historian, called this kinda pseudo-militant nonsense the work of , "orangutans."
[To which Chuck0 replied] A journalist and a historian, two people unqualified to understand the naunces of being a social change activist or a revolutionary.
Huh? Was Marx, who was more than a bit of both, not a revolutionary? Does thinking have no place in activism or revolution? Doug
This shows your paper on actionism (better term than activistism, being pronounceable among other advantages) (a) was aimed at people who were not going to recognize its existence and (b) failed to realize that nominal rejections of theory are NOT rejections of theory but merely a rhetorical trick (often fooling its users) to prefer one theory rather than another. Activism is ALWAYS based on theory: it's just that too often the practioners don't understand their own theory, and call that obtuseness anti-theory.
The label "orangutans" is tempting but probably misleading. Most of the people to whom it's applicable were extremely bright and sophisticated. One of those arrested in that escapade, after serving a couple years in prison for possession of marijuana, and for several years running what may have been the longest-lasting "underground" paper of the '60s, returned to school, got his degree, got the highest score on record on the Law School examination, graduated in Law at UofI with the only 100% straight-A average in the history of the school, gave a Valedictorian speech which had 1/3 of the audience wildly cheering and 2/3s sitting stolidly on their hands, and last I heard was the Director of the Denver ACLU region.
And on provocateurs. Some of them are amateurs trying to get hired as
professionals. A certain bozo called Jan & me, wanting to talk politics.
We met him in the student union coffee shop. He had some wild scheme he
wanted to recruit us to to blow up power stations or something like
that. We blew him off. It happened that the person referred to in the
preceding paragraph had been in the coffee shop and saw us. He informed
us later that this fellow was the narc who had busted him a couple years
before. He wasn't working for the police at the time, but was apparently
thought that if he could suck us in he could get hired as a provocateur.
:-)
Carrol