Yours in crankiness, etc.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2009 4:53 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Surrender!
Marv Gandall writes:
"It's hard to come to any conclusion other than that this global downturn will have to deepen and cause significantly more hardship for working class families before they join these demos in large numbers."
This too is wrong. It is not worse conditions but improving conditions (or the illusion of such) that drives significant resistance. There has been a consistent tendency on this and other lists to reduce the '60s to a few cliches, to focus on the alleged mistakes of that period, to dream of a day that never was. The future will be different from anything we can imagine today, but a future uprising will resemble the '60s more closely than any other image in your mind.
The last workers to give up in France '68 were the skilled workers of the TV stations, not blue-collar workers of Marv's romantic memory.
"I'm surprised we've seen so little protest on a world scale to date, but maybe the initial shock and fear will have to begin dissipating…"
Exactly. See the paragraph in Capital in which Marx introduces his discussion of the fight for the 10-hour day. I think he may use Marv's identical words, "the shock" must wear off. Bad times do not trigger reistance. They trigger a flight to individualist survival, and the early resistance in such periods is defeated time after time after time before (again under unpredictable conditions) grows into something larger.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2009 4:34 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Surrender!
> Marv Gandall writes:
>
> "Today's demonstrators retreat to coffee shops, video games, university
> dorms, and, at worst, rundown housing and a minimum of state income
> support when they're cleared from the streets. They don't have the same
> desperate incentive to revolt as did the early industrial working
> class."
>
> 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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