- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Barry Stoller: sovereign individual?

Posted by: Samuel Day Fassbinder ( Citizens for Mustard Greens, USA ) on November 07, 1999 at 22:09:55:

In Reply to: On my own terms posted by Stoller on November 05, 1999 at 16:25:53:

: I will post here if I so choose.

: I will NOT post here if I so choose.

: I will SAY that I am NOT going to post here if I so choose.

SDF: Now that's interesting. Choice? Freedom? Written like a true sovereign individual, or at least a self-owner. You could say that nobody affects you; if you did, though, the converse statement ("you don't affect anybody"), would appear to have some disturbing implications for the possibility of socialist revolution were we to accept it as true...

One wonders what to make of your last signoff, when you claimed you were posting to this BBS to clarify some problems for yourself. Sheds new light on Presidential candidate Joel Kovel's description of the conundrum:
 

Bearing this in mind, let us look more closely at the failures of socialism, which can be appreciated as a twofold contradiction:

  • the more "advanced" the capitalist society, the less likely is the
    emergence of a revolutionary subject; and

  • those "backward" situations in which revolutionary subjects have
    tended to appear do not provide the proper conditions for socialist development.

Kovel's conundrum would also shed light upon your attack upon the idea of a confederation of communes -- we might just as well argue that the non-oil producing nations aren't going to "drill the oil" for the socialist paradise, and the oil-producing nations aren't motivated to start the revolution, they've already got the world by its balls.

: Interested parties can either read my posts, ignore my posts, respond to them, or not respond.

: If I was for looking for APPROVAL, I probably wouldn't be a communist.

SDF: So are you looking to build the "revolutionary subject," or are you merely trying to clarify conceptual problems you've posed for yourself? I guess it was a waste of labor-time challenging the Sovereign Stoller Individual to produce examples of socialist behavior.

: I'd be a liberal.

SDF: Oh! How cutting! It's OK, after the revolution you can have me executed.



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