Re: Rampage Across Athens

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown wrote:
> Yea, and what good did the LA riot, or the Watts riot, or the Newark riot or
> the Detroit riot do ?

these might have lit the fire under the government's ass to get it to
seriously address the issue of poverty. But too often, riots tend to
simply bring down the iron fist.  The 1992 events in LA didn't seem to
do much good...

> What good did all the guillotining in the French Rev
> do ? They accomplished nothing.

nothing? in some interpretations, it set the stage for having a
capitalist state that was more in sync with bourgeois society. If
probably didn't do the sans culottes much good, though

> What a fool that John Brown was ? He had no
> chance of winning. The Paris Commune was doomed to failure, as Marx noted.

both of these events had larger effects, helping to mobilize more
serious movements for change (abolitionism, the W. European workers'
movement).

> One must confine one's activistism to electoral politics and peaceful
> demonstration, less we offend people's sensibilities.

this is the either/or thinking that we see on the left too much:
there's no choice but between self-indulgent ATM-burning and the
excessive politeness of the League of Women Voters. There's no
combinations or subtle variations in between, so anyone who criticizes
one must be advocating the other.

> As Lenin said, the masses are only capable of spontaneous action without
> PEN-L cooler heads injecting revolutionary discipline from the outside.

heck, pen-l doesn't have any power to inject discipline even on itself.

By the way, since when did "doing critical thinking about" or
"criticizing" become synonymous with "imposing discipline on"?
--
Jim Devine / "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or
calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin