[lbo-talk] USA and protests -or lack thereof-

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sat Mar 14 19:08:23 PDT 2009


On Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:05:23 -0600 Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> writes:
> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 5:21 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> wrote:
> > Alexis de Tocqueville in his book, *The Ancien Régime and the
> > Revolution*,
> > emphasized the role that increasing prosperity played in
> generating
> > resistance by increasing people's expectations of future
> improvements.
> > It's when these expectations turn out not to be met that people
> will
> > then rebel. So misery by itself tends not to generate rebellion.
> In
> > fact it usually breeds passivity.
>
> Why would ever want to prescribe the conditions necessary for
> change
> and "revolution"?

I am less interested in "prescribing" these conditions than I am in describing them and analyzing them, if only for the simple reason that I think an understanding of the causes of social change and even of "revolution" can better help us to attain progressive social change.


> This is where Leninist (the ripening of
> conditions)
> and social democratic (the technocratic achievement of equality)
> politics march in step with classic liberalism: the (economic) base
> determines the (political) superstructure.
>
> I'm generally pretty critical of cult-stud/Negrian theses that
> resistance is everywhere, but subscribing to this list almost makes
> me
> want to convert. Reading the (mostly middle-aged white) guys here,
> you'd never know that people collaboratively dig tunnels to cross
> borders or that Pakistani health care and sex workers form their
> own
> unions or that people engage in informal mutual aid every day. No,
> the
> revolutionary politics (which had a pretty strong Oedipal
> component)
> they grew up with don't exist anymore so they assume politics don't
> exist anymore. Fortunately, most people don't care what progressive
> mailing lists have to say.
>

I think that Doug's questions are apropos here:

"What do they care about? Are they too busy digging tunnels? Counting up their great successes?"

The fact is that while politics might be going on all the time and perhaps resistance is indeed everywhere, it's only on relatively rare occasions that resistance becomes strong enough and broad enough to force through radical social change. One thinks of periods like 1848, 1917, or 1968 as times when resistance became massive enough to seriously threaten the position of the rulers of the day. So that raises the question as why did resistance become so strong on those occasions, and why is it the case that most of the time, resistance is not generally all that overwhelming.

Jim F. ____________________________________________________________ Click here to find the perfect picture with our powerful photo search features. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTEuJCuyHIpayHP48DKxkOv4a1DrRwjOlIkmOXPSZxowyYdHzOhIhq/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list