roachboy

revolution.

well, if you think about it, were there to be a revolution in the states right now, it would probably come from the right because the right is relatively coherent on its own terms, and amenable to mobilization.

it would be easy enough to imagine---just map the thug characteristics of much right discourse onto an embrace of brownshirt tactics and there you have it. groups that would actually carry out "programs" like those dear to ustwo. the result would be an explicitly authoritarian, fundamentalist protestant nationalism--no more pesky diversity of opinion, no more dissent--a fetishism of the military--lots of flags--and endless war against an invisible enemy who was everywhere an nowhere---that would justify extraordinary social brutality covered over by a discourse of markets-as-rational....

it would be a logical and more brutal extension of bushworld.

and that would be, as art said, hell on earth.


if by revolution, you refer to something that would come from the "left"--you run into problems straight away....revolutions do not simply happen--and they do not happen at points of maximum poverty
(this theory of revolution was a function of marx's later work, not of a history of revolutionary movements in general--the correlation is false--i can provide alot of information on this point)

revolutions are made--they require considerable political and organizational work.
the anarchist notion of local strike-general strike-revolution presupposes political conditions that simply do not obtain in the states.

which is a shame, frankly.

on what nancy said above:
i do not see anything revolutionary at all about a more social-democratic system.
i also do not see how any capitalist country can long survive without some version of social democracy in place.
there are lots of reasons--to mention just one, the redistribution of wealth is accompanied in social-democratic regimes by a discourse of social justice. the result is greater social stability, the incorporation of greater segments of the population into the legion of consumers--greater and more fleixble job training--a balance of pwer that does not favor atomized and powerless working people selling everything about themselves to holders of capital...there are still plenty of opportunities for wealth generation...and this over the longer term.

but to know about this, you would have to move away from the american right's knee-jerk tendency to confuse social democratic and stalinist systems.
and you would have to see that american conservative conceptions of economic well-being do not even make sense on business grounds.
in short, you would have to not be an american conservative.

i would like to still believe in a social revolution from the left that would sweep away everything about the enormous machine that is the "american way of life"--but it is not going to happen soon---the problem lies elsewhere than dreaming about revolution as if it were something like a messiah that would simple turn up, a result of "objective contradictions" as if they existed, as if capitalism had not made adjustments to disrupt them

(adjustments which the american right wants to dismantle--so much for imputing any knowlegde of actually existing history to them--they prefer fiction, myth--in the long run, they will choke on it--the only question is how much agony they will inflict on others as their politics implode)

and as if these "contradictions", if they did exist, would have some kind of transcendent meaning such that the work of revolutionary politics was unnecessary.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite