[lbo-talk] Surrender!

[wrobert at uci.edu]

I just wanted to mention that this is really well-stated.  I understand
that the sort of nostalgia that Carrol is critiquing is really easy to
fall into, I've done it myself (on quite a few occasions), but I think
Carrol makes the important argument that this can easily lead to a sense
of powerlessness and passivity that we need to fight.  Perhaps the fact
that my University had one of the largest demonstrations that it has ever
had, bringing in 700-1000 students, workers and faculty for the Irvine
part of the statewide demonstrations.  Probably, I will go back to being
annoyed with the campus soon enough, but it was nice to see my university
capable of something more than passivity and indifference.  Anyways, I'm
off topic, but thanks for the response Carrol.  robert wood


> This could have been written any time in the last 200 years and have
> made just about as much sense as it does now. Really desperate men and
> women, incidentally, stay home and cringe, not go out and fight, so that
> is nonsense hnow as it woujld have been in 19789 or in China in 1935.
> Check out accounts of massacres over the last couple centuries of
> demonstrators: Almost always they were shot in the back as they
> "charged" the police. Demonstrators aren't stupid; they run and
> demonstrate another day, and another day and another day.
>
> And it takes a lot of them that get no where before the 'virus' of
> resistance spreds sufficiently to where they can build on each other:
> and this usually doesn't happen. Times of really large and aggressive
> resistance have been few and far between. And it is never possible to
> predict before hand when they will build to really great heights. No one
> in 1789 knew or guessed what was going to happen in a year or two; ditto
> the scattered resistance of the early 30s or the the Montgomery NAACP
> when they launched that bus boycott.
>
> To always be comparing scattered resistances of "today"  against the
> high periods of the past is a sure recipe for dispair and inaction.
>
> As Luxemburg and Benjamin and others have known, the odds really are
> against us. The greater probability is barbarism. But that is no excuse
> for sneering at those who try to start something. Many many many such
> false starts are the ONLY  route to a better future. Praise them, don't
> compare them to a mythical past.
>
> Carrol
>
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