From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 19:59:23 MST
Unfortunately, politics as such is a cancer on
society. Just as soon as ANY group gets the upper
hand and starts imposing its will on the remainder, it
turns into a contest for the spiggots of power that
sucks more and more of the total wealth of the society
into its bottomless maw. People will fight and kill
over anything - soccer matches, for example - and
politics is the systemized, institutionalized aiding
and abetting of that unfortunate potentiality.
(As opposed to business, which is about producing
something that people will willingly give you
something valuable in exchange for.)
There is little chance of anarchists finding a common
meeting ground philosophically with any kind of
statist, as anarchists consider the cancer of politics
as just that. How much cancer do you want? Here,
just try a little? It won't hurt that much...
On a purely practical level, it HAS proven possible
historically for anarchists to cooperate successfully
for limited strategic goals with various types of
statists. I've been viewing an xlnt 6 hour
documentary on the Spanish Civil War of late. It was
quite heartening to hear of a million anarchists in
one small geographical area, and to see the actual
footage of the CNT. It was also a real delite to see
all the radical anarchist WOMEN! with their rifles,
right up there on the front lines. Almost made me
want to time-slip back there... Sad to think that most
of those women are dead or will be soon.
Anyway, there were large-scale cases of the anarchists
joining forces with not just the socialists and
Marxists, but also with the Republic police, to defeat
the Nationalists. They did this so well, in fact,
that after the Nationalists were defeated in one of
the largest cities, the police chief was called in by
the mayor who demanded to know how they were going to
set things back to the previous order - and especially
how to get all those guns back from the anarchists...
The police chief, who was interviewed in the
documentary, told him it was probably not possible, as
even his own men would probably refuse to attempt it,
since they now considered the anarchists to be their
comrades in arms. And there was footage of anarchists
and police, arms around each other, grinning at the
camera, celebrating the (temporary) victory over
Franco's fascists. Later, of course, Stalin's
"advisers" made a special effort to involve the
anarchists in the struggle - essentially using them as
front-line cannon fodder.
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:06 MST