Re: More on the Eugenians

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    This quote from Lenin may be apocryphal -- I don't remember its
source, but it's useful in any case: "Anarchism is the penalty the
working
class pays for the sins of opportunism." A second observation from
Lenin (also from memory), "The sight oif petty bourgeois youth driven
to a frenzy by the horrors of imperialism is very common." (Something
like that).

    There will *always* be anarchistic elements (and diverse anarchistic

elements, for it is not a monolith) in the movement, not all of which
will
call themselves anarchists. However much wiser some of us might
have been in the '60s, I doubt that we could have completely stopped
the emergence of the Weathermen. Such elements are simply part of
the political weather [pun intended], which revolutonaries must learn
to handle just as farmers must deal with variations of weather. So the
real question is not how to deal with the Eugenians, but (assuming for
a minute a wholly negative judgment of them) how do we build a
movement which can survive and grow assuming that we will always
encounter such elements and the bourgeois press will always lie about
them and us.

And there will also always be provocateurs. Some of the weathermen
were almost certainly provocateurs but most were honest idiots. The
SLA was almost certainly in part a police plot incorporating a few
honest members at the fringe. And so forth.

Carrol