[lbo-talk] Surrender!

[Carrol Cox]

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