Chris hedges promoting revolution now
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ALB wrote:My experience of the Black Blob was at a European trade union demonstration in Amsterdam. They came on the train from Italy. The riot police were lined up waiting for them at the station. They got off and lined up opposite them. The stand-off lasted for hours with passengers walking in between them. I wish I'd had a camera. I think that in the end they got back on the train and went back to Italy.The real objection to them is not so much that they want to break the law but that they are acting undemocratically compared to what most of the other demonstrators want, i.e. a peaceful demonstration.
In Brazil the majority of the peoples do not approve their behaviors, and some Anarchists and Leninist organizations do not approve them either.There was a similar Maoist group which used to interrupt peaceful demonstration, and public meeting of workers and leftists parties, there were rumors within the left that they were financed and formed by the CIA
You might find his latest article quite good reading…if a bit pessimistic. https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/hedges-american-psychosis.html "The goal will no longer be the possibility of reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture from mass contamination…The goal will become the ability to endure." Well, the SPGB certainly should have an advantage here since we have already demonstrated our longevity and commitment to our principles.
Quote:Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse of fascism for models. The goal will no longer be the possibility of reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture from mass contamination. It will require the kind of schizophrenic lifestyle that characterizes all totalitarian societies.Actually, this is the same conclusion as reached by the German section of the Trotskyist Fourth International in 1944 (there was only one 4th International then). They argued that capitalism was regressing to barbarism and that the immediate aim could only be to try to preserve whatever democratic and human values could be.Murray Bookchin was associated with this group for a while and wrote of them many years later:
Quote:One of the earliest attempts to “dialectically” deal with social regression was the little-known “retrogression thesis,” undertaken by Josef Weber, the German Trotskyist theorist who was the exile leader of the Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands (IKD). Weber authored the IKD’s program “Capitalist Barbarism and Socialism,” published in November 1944 in Max Schachtman’s New International during the bitterest days of the Second World War and posed the question that many thinking revolutionaries of that distant era faced: what forms would capitalism take if the proletariat failed to make a socialist revolution after the Second World War?Fortunately, they were proved wrong, but this reflects an old argument we have had as to who was right in their prediction as to how capitalism would develop: George Orwell in 1984 or Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. I would have thought that it was Huxley. In fact Hedges's view seems to be that Huxley's vision has arrived and is just as bad as Orwell's. I'm not so sure that Huxley's is as bad. At least it doesn't feel like it, not like it must have been under Stalinism or fascism.
"I can understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certainty, only possibility." – Howard Zinn
Gramsci is supposed to have said "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". I've always thought that the opposite applies to us, i.e. "optimism of the intellect, pessismism of the will".Not sure what the political implications of this are, except that Gramsci's version is one for the Leninists as it sums up well their tactic of knowing that reformist campaigns won't succeed but telling workers that they can. We, on the other hand, don't doubt that the workers can establish socialism, but know that we can't establish it for them.
I think Orwell and Huxley were both mostly correct.I have two acquaintances, with good credentials, who think society is/will collapse (mostly due to peak oil). They thought it would happen over the past 2-4 years. I knew they and others like them were wrong (but not why, usually the case with me. My subconscious is smarter than my conscious). Same with Hedges and Marx being wrong.However, the wealthy and powerful aren’t letting capitalism collapse. The wealthy need consumers, as some of you have pointed out. They need the system to keep going. They do seem to be moving it, though, mostly to Dubai, some to Singapore, other places. They are letting the USA decline. I’m not a nationalist and don’t approve of protectionism (though personally wish my jobs were not so scarce to get). Why should I have a decent living and not someone elsewhere.We, the majority of people, need to unite enough to use our power. I see so many people riled up and yet spread out like dandelion puffs. Sigh. thanks for the hopeful quotes. I need 'em. Gramsci is high on my reading list.
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