[lbo-talk] Surrender!

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Sep 27 14:50:18 PDT 2009


Joanna writes: "It can't be back to business as usual because that's exactly what has changed. There will be no more business as usual. The post WWII American dream of working class families attaining stable work, modest housing, and education and resulting upward mobility for their kids has just been destroyed for at least a generation."

So what! Seriusly, nothing you say here, even if true without qualification, tells us _anything_ about what to expect. It's ahistorical and these claims (or these expressions of surprose) show a great failure to recognize just how useless resistance of any kind has always been, just how rare and unexpected periods of a burst of serious militancy are. And this kind of illusion has its penalty: of disillusion. It is so fucking hard, under any conditions, to build a successful (however defined ) demo, and success is so rarely followed by increased success.

I think the Myth of Progress may be behind all such fakse gioes abd fakse desoaurL the expectation that if you do it right, great days will come again. They won't. And when they do, if they do, they will catch you by complete surprise. No one expected 1789; No one expected 1871; No one expectd 1905; No one expected 1917; No one expected 1968. No one will expect or predict the next explosion or what its sources will be.

Hope not grounded in pessimism always ends up in liberal dissilusion, in precisely what you call "business as usual."

Carrol



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