Chuck Grimes wrote:
I've just browsed through Chuck's post, because I've just about used up all the 'eye-time' I dare to for a day, but it looks like a classic. I'll be studying it later.
On resentment at being turned into a cop. When a revolutionary struggle ebbs (as most do), and the '60s really were, however apparently chaotic, such a struggle, life can get rough in varius ways for the participants. At least most of us (at least if we were white) were not lined up while a general rode along, pointing at about one out of six -- shoot him, as happened after the Commune.
We did what we could Chuck. No regrets, pleased.
Carrol
P.S. From the Introduction to Bertell Ollman, _Dialectical Investigations_:
I would just like to point out that the most striking feature that of all the social explosions of the past few years - and remarked upon by virutally every observer - is just how unexpected they were. What existed before, however one evaluated it, was taken as given and unchanging; just as most people read the situation that has emerged as a new given and equally unchyanging. It is the same mistake that was made in 1789, again in 1848, and again in 191`7. These revolutions, too, surprised almost everyone, and as soon as they happened almost everyone alive at the time thought -- wrongly - that they were over.
(Dialectical Investigations, p. 3)
And also:
impossible to say, as Bernstein has, that once we take over command of the ship, even then we will not be in a position to do away with capitalism. When I read that, I said to myself: what a stroke of luck that the French socialist workers weren't that bright in 1871, for then they would have said: "Children, let's go to bed, our hour has not yet struck, production is not yet sufficiently concentrated for us to maintain control of the ship." But then, instead of a moving drama, instead of a heroic struggle, we would have seen a different scenario, for then the workers would not have behaved like heroes, but like old women.
(Rosa Luxemburg, Speech of October 3, 1898 to Stuttgart Congress)
I take this to mean, among other things, that losing is nothing to weep about; it happens. And one goes on.