At 1:47 AM +0800 30/6/00, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> Charles Brown wrote:
>>
>> >To purport to answer your question fully would be to assume the
>> >approach of a utopian. The answer to your question must come in
>> >the main from the practice, trial and error, of billions of people.
>>
>> This is evasive. I'm not asking for a 24-volume detailed blueprint -
>> I'm asking for general principles of organization, and specifically
>> those that are technically feasible but politically impossible under
>> capitalism. If red-greens can't do this, they will convince no one of
>> anything except their millennarian fervor.
>
>Bullshit Doug. On the contrary, any statement of the kind you want
>would be arrogant and stupid, not merely utopian. No one except
>a few academics and journalists (I ignore sheer demogogues) has
>ever taken up resistance to capitalism on the basis of being convinced
>there is a "better system."
Perhaps no one except a few academics and journalists has taken up
resistance on the basis of being convinced there is a better system,
but many have _not_ taken up systemic resistance because they _don't_
believe there is a better system.
But as a matter of fact, the bullshit is Cox's if he seriously truly
that the revolutions were not made by people who all believed that
there was a better system which they were ushering in.
Why do you think there is so much insistence on TINA?
>And frankly I doubt the good faith of anyone who asks such questions.
And many others will doubt the good faith of anyone who refuses to
answer such questions in outline, especially since the collapse of
ten years ago. A 100-years ago, it was still possible to leave it
vague; even 50 years, or 30 years, ago. No more; not today.
Sorry if this comes across as offensive, but one has to live in a
cocoon world not to recognise that the massive defeat of 10 years
ago, and the u-turn of Deng 20 years ago, hasn't had the massive
effect of eroding belief in an alternative system and consequently
resistance with a view to an alternative system, and not just against
specific onerous and oppressive features of the existing.
And within the former Soviet Union, ten years of declining life
expectancy, of severe economic hardships and a contraction worse than
that of the great depression, even of the Asian financial crisis, of
a mafia economy, etc. has not generated any serious organised
resistance. Does anyone seriously believe this has nothing to do with
loss of faith in a "better system"?
KJ Khoo
