: : : "Real democracy" will any rate be our best bet. As for your "definition," i.e. your support for activism, I agree (since obviously the present society is vastly undemocratic), but my question tried to get at where such democracy COMES FROM, the stork doesn't bring it, it isn't hatched... : :
: : *Well comrade (in the fraternal sense...;), it seems to have been snipped out. I did post a bit on the topic of 'how.' People like us with our fancy PC's and gift for the gab have to get those who have '...nothing to lose but their chains' off their arses.* --K
: SDF: How do we know that those who have "nothing to lose but their change" aren't themselves reformists? Thus my emphasis upon education and upon the democratic life of the people, such as can raise the demand that society itself be democratic. Perhaps a renewed understanding of what Gramsci called the "war of position" might be appropriate at this point.
**I'd go one better and say that you're extremely fortunate if the very people you are trying to organise rise to the level of reformers. The real question is how can we create a struggle wherein the broadest possible expression of people is drawn in? As my friend Ed would say, a movement which is broad enough to attract the 20 year old punkers with purple hair, and the white-haired little old ladies who get mad whenever anyone puts "Kicking *Ass* for the Working Class!" on their picket signs (an example taken from real life...). That reminds me... I'll have to read up on my Gramsci. Now that idea is a keeper.** --K
: Simply relying upon Marx's statement in the Manifesto that
:
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association
: never cut it in the first place. Combinations of the working class aren't necessarily revolutionary, as the first three Internationals should have proved. So the creation of mass revolutionary depends upon more than just mere agitators...
**Jeesh SDF... you asked what us flesh and blood mortals could do to advance the cause of democracy and I answered 'agitation' as one of the things we could all do. There is no *one* thing that can do it. Which is usually why people end up forming associations of like minded people to try and do all the education, agitation, and informing needed to build a movement.
Also, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the Internationales as proof of the lack of revolutionary fervor in the working classes. Just to take the example of the first internationale alone, 70,000 workers were executed for taking part in the Paris Commune and the international workingmen's association got the lion's share of the credit for that. If anything, the apparatus of the Internationale(s) themselves has been a hindrance... so let's fix the apparatus.** --K
