72 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
72 lines
2.7 KiB
Plaintext
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Bulletin #3
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KULTCHA
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GOULDISM; The Significance of Stressing the Insignificant
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It was 19th-Century railroad capitalist Jay Gould who said the way to
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cure unemployment would be to hire one half of the jobless to kill the
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other half.
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Writing about the Spanish anarchist movement, Bookchin notes two
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principal factions, both inspired by the atheist anarchism of Bakunin.
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There were the radical bourgeois -- very literate persons of middle-class
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background who were anti-clerical and critical of traditional sexual
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mores. There were also proletarian anarchists who opposed the Church and
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endorsed Free Love, but whose main targets were capitalism and
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government.
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As much has usually been true of radicalism in general. without the
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disaffected bourgeois intelligencia there is a trend toward
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range-of-the-moment pragmatism bereft of theory and explicit rational
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values. Success is brief, followed by a loss of momentum. Yet, of course,
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without the proletariat there is no getting off the drawing boards.
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Between these necessry components of any progress is the weak link of
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differing attitudes toward religion and lifestyle extensions of faith or
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unbelief.
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Making anti-clerical libertinism their mainstay, the radical bourgeois
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found a great deal in common with Social Darwinist reactionaries who in
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many instances were also atheists and libertines. Yet such matters were
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so unimportant to the working class Spanish anarchists that, even in
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refusing Church-sanctioned marriage, they tended tro practice strict
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lifelong monogamy. Bookchin describes them -- the goal being to attract
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the conventional masses. As a result they recruited large numbers of very
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conformikstic people who remained that way in spite of convertin
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gintellectually to the principles of free organization.
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Thus the stage was -- inadvertently and with the best of intentions --
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set for dividing the movement. This was in fact done and still is done
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simply by emphasizing lifestyle -- a cultural matter of minor political
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significance -- at the expense of all else.
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That strategy of Gouldism has been refined over the years so that today
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most revolutionists argue only with each other -- about culture.
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"The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that
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you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you
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substantiate its existence in the fight which the poeople wage against the
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forces of occupation."
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-- Franz Fanon
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1986 HO CHI ZEN
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c 1986 Kerry W. Thornley
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Available Exclusively From:
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Illumi-Net Computer Bulletin Board System
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(404) 377-1141
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