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Revolutionary Socialist Network – On the Far Right
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Louis Proyect
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Dayne Goodwin
This was new to me, may be of interest to you: . . ."History tells us that we must also avoid adventurist and substitutionist tactics that isolate us from the masses. In general, we must caution activists against bringing guns to demonstrations. Such actions by unorganized individuals can expose the movement to repression, especially given the frequent lack of centralized leadership. On the one hand, it can give police and right-wingers a pretext to use deadly force, perhaps even planting provocateurs as happened at Kent State before the National Guard killed three student activists there. Needless deaths and defeats will only demoralize our class, demobilize the movement, and teach the false lesson that if we fight back, we will lose." . . . I looked for further information and found this: Uncovering the Kent State Cover-Up by Laurel Krause - Mickey Huff Counterpunch, September 27, 2012 and similar, i.e. Terry Norman
On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 6:45 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote: http://www.revolutionarysocialist.org/on-the-far-right/
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fkalosar101@...
It's unfortunate for modern readers that Trotsky, in the passages quoted at the beginning of this essay, necessarily used the word "fascism" What we are seeing in the US today IMO is certainly the product of the very same forces Trotsky adumbrates, but in a different form appropriate to the current phase of world capitalism.
Crying "fascist" now is a version of pastoral--the nostalgic re-enactment of a bygone time that transforms the lethal menace of the present into the defeated ogre of a legendary and therefore comforting past. Waving actual guns around in the face of this phantasmagorical monster--who in imagination has already fallen down dead--is dangerously crazy. Today's American rightwing killers are ideologically antistate, and not only antistate but anti-governance. Any rule that threatens to abridge the sovereign despotism of their godlike masculinity confers upon the offended parties the purely individual right to kill or enslave. As a consequence, for the Trumpists, as for the vulgar Graeberites of the "occupied zones," not only "government" but the complex mechanisms of social infrastructure that are necessary to the maintenance of advanced society--which in reality require revolutionary renewal--are expendable and beneath contempt. Trump's dictatorship would thus not be "totalitarian" but rather a form of decadent anarchy with himself as anarch. If Trump achieved that power the result would be a sort of loosely controlled deadly chaos, not the total state. The question of arming the Left in this situation--and in view of the many millions of guns in the possession of or practically at the disposal of God's own he-men and the women that love them--is a complex one even if starting gunfights at demos is politically and strategically wrong. (And it is.) A good question might be, will the next rightwing menace requiring a change of underwear by the Democrats be a throwback to some Bonapartist or actually fascist type or another right-wing anarchist bent on transforming the US of A into some bullet-riddled war of all against all? Or will the military step in, anti both Trumpism and the left, to "rescue the constitution" somewhere down the road? Or ... .?
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