Re: AUT: America Implodes

["Chris Hurl" <munkah@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doesn't Bakunin say the state is "an abstraction devouring the life of the people"?

It seems like there are two sides to this.  While it is easy to fall back on the rationality of democratic politics, as Angela says, this is ultimately an abstraction.  The State appears back at us as an abstraction, a spectacle, the culminating point of an abstract citizenry.  But as Nate, Tahir, and others point out the ulitmate driving force behind the State and the Republican machine is much more diffuse.  Networks, radical right social movements running through small towns connected by churches, where there really isn't a hell of a lot else.

It's kinda funny though.  I just read Jeremy Brecher's book, "Strike!" where he discusses how the early labour movement found strength in many of these small towns.  At this point they were made up of independent farmers, merchants, craftspeople, etc.  According to this book, a lot of 19th and early 20th century American leftism, drew its strength from the autonomy of these towns.  That kinda Henry David Thoreau, Town Meeting romanticism.  There was not yet a Walmart in every town.  They hadn't been colonized with large scale corporate capital, and if this was tried, there was often widescale resistance.  The militias could not be counted on and soldiers often had to be brought in from other states to quell revolt.  Even then, those soldiers often mutineed.

so then, how did things change?  Can an American populist left be revived in these areas?  Are there still threads?  I gues the population is no longer predominantly craftspeople, merchants and small farmers.  More like factory farmers, grocery clerks, a smattering of professionals.  Is this primitive accumulation, deterritorialization at work?  Have people been ripped from a sense of entitlement to an abstract sense of cohesion or reterritorialization in the radical right?  Entitlement through affiliation with a group or identity rather than entitlement through seemingly limitless space and land ownership for everyone (well, except indigenous people and blacks).

i don't know if this makes any sense.

--chris





>From: "Tahir Wood" <twood@xxxxxxxxx>

>Reply-To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

>Subject: Re: AUT: America Implodes

>Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 12:03:09 +0200

>

> >>> pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx 11/04/04 10:02AM >>>

>p.s. i've argued for a number of years that we can learn a lot from how

>churches organise... go figure ;)

>

>Not such a bad point. The fact is that churches don't depend on electoral outcomes for their influence. The problem with this handwringing about elections is that it is a substitute for something else. And that something else has to involve a turning away from false hopes at state level and turning precisely towards everyday life and the way that ordinary people organise themselves and engage in social relations. That is exactly what churches concern themselves with.

>Tahir

>

>

>

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