[lbo-talk] internal threats

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Wed Nov 9 15:12:28 PST 2011


On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> I think you are reading something into Harris's comments that just
> isn't there. I've seen the "cowardly" thing thrown around, and that's
> not what Harris is doing here. I wouldn't even say that he's
> particularly advocating or defending, e.g., window breaking.

You may be right there, but it's hard to tell - here is his response to my comment, in full (the Jacobin blog just switched hosts and comments from the last 24 hours have been lost, hopefully temporarily):

"Not arguing for it, except that I find it aesthetically compelling. But it's not like a hard left strategy any more."


>> And now here we have yet another displacement of the argument. It's
>> just not true to say that 'Reluctants' are liberals and
>> window-smashers are 'anti-capitalists' or 'communist invariants'.
>
> This is a non-sequiter. Nothing in Harris's article implies this.

You cut the citation from my comment. Here is what I cited from Harris's post: "That the Reluctants gather and march at least part of the way, even occasionally getting themselves peaceably arrested, can’t distract from the conflicts that emerge when they encounter anti-capitalists in the street. The communist invariants put the two goals at risk, publicly shaming Reluctants for their bourgeois attachments and threatening to occupy then burn any possible bridge to party politics."


> Ah, here we go. The appeal to provincial knowledge. I think you are
> missing the point. You think there can be an economic solution to this
> economic crisis. Fine, you are free to believe that (though I'd point
> out that bond traders concur 100%). But other people disagree with you
> and think the crisis can only be, or is best, addressed by political
> and social action. There are many different ways to carry that out.

I don't know where you get this reading of my position: "You think there can be an economic solution to this economic crisis." I don't understand how you separate the political from the economic here - the idea of a purely economic solution makes no sense to me. I was not even talking about 'solving the crisis', but about whether or not "smashing up a bank" was a threat to capitalism.

I'm a socialist and I do hope and believe that one day we can supersede capitalism. But I don't think that by smashing up a bank you destroy the social relations that generate banks. Neither do I think that capitalism is sustained primarily by state/police repression, so that if only you could shake it off there is a ready-made socialist society underneath yearning to breathe. I think capitalism will only be superseded by building the institutional preconditions for socialism - alternative ways of organising production, distribution etc., at a society-wide level: social control of the means of production.

In the present the vast bulk of the population doesn't think that's a good idea or a possibility. There will be no sustainable socialism until they do. Socialist activity at the moment is therefore about movement-building, raising expectations, and so on. I don't claim to know what means will be most successful and I support letting a bunch of flowers bloom - competition between them can be productive or destructive, but it's hard to tell which in advance, and in any case it is not under any of our power to control. However, I don't think adventurism and deliberate confrontation with the police is at all productive in the current context - it narrows the potential for participation. It's perfectly legitimate for others to try to isolate 'insurrectionists' - they're like truthers but more harmful and harder to just ignore.

Mike



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