From: topp8564-AT-mail.usyd.edu.au
Subject: Re: AUT: Perplexing perplexion
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 15:19:53 +1100 (EST)



Quoting Peter Jovanovic <peterzoran-AT-hotmail.com>:

> hi all
> 
> Thiago wrote:
> >Yes but how can I tell if supporting the greens in my local town will,
> in 
> > >twenty years time, lead to them throwing their lot in with the the 
> >bombers? >How would anyone have guessed the way Joschka Fischer went?
> 
> well there was the precedent of the European socialist parties rapidly
> 
> changing from a (rhetorical) position of general strike in the event of
> war 
> to acting as recruiting sergeants for their respective governments in
> 1914 
> (not including the Russian, Italian and Serbian parties). First time as
> 
> tragedy, second time as farce anyone?

But who would have guessed that the AG Greens in 1979 would be, in twenty years, 
like the belle epoche social democrats faced with 1914? 

This is all very easy to argue in retrospect, but impossible to do now for the 
future. For all I know, the FARC will be a parliamentary party endorsing IMF 
loans in the year 2020; or maybe there won't be an IMF or Colombia. Maybe the 
people struggling against the IMF are going to convert into supporters of the 
IMF, maybe they won't. There is no assurance except our own will to force these 
outcomes.

And how do I know I won't be a libertarian in forty years time? I don't. Maybe 
there will be a remarkably good argument for anarchocapitalism that I can't 
beat, although right now I find this inconceivable. 

Deciding not engage people because they may collaborate with people you don't 
like in the far future is like not wanting to hear arguments in case they 
convince you of things you don't want to be convinced of. It is the enactment of 
Pierce's method of tenacity at the level of politics, but I am repeating myself.

> 
> as sure as night follows day parliamentary 'radicals' will support the
> 
> imperatives of capitalism.

Ok, you may feel this, and I tend to agree with you, but we believe this on the 
basis of a certain theory of society and political structure. We are entitled to 
be fairly confident of it, but not completely confident. And I would argue that 
given a long time scale, we are not entitled to be very confident at all. We 
just don't know what parliaments will be like in the year 2020; maybe there 
won't be any. Maybe some parliamentary radicals will have helped bring that 
about.

It is one thing to argue that parliamentarians have much to loose, that the 
system encourages cooption, that there are all sorts of structural reasons 
parliaments and reform fail to address serious issues; it is quite another to 
argue from the as yet hypothetical future revolution backwards to establish that 
parliaments are counter-revolutionary. That involves all sorts of speculations 
about how a revolution would actually take shape; if you want to spell this out, 
be my guest - I am intensely interested to hear what you have to say.

It is not inconceivable that someone might actually change the parliament from 
within, or use it as a platform for calling on radical change. Past example only 
shows this is very hard to achieve, but not impossible. 

It is also arguable that there have been plenty of parliamentary radicals that 
have achieved something for the people; or do you think that public education, 
universal suffrage, social security and progressive taxation are just diversions 
from the true cause of pure struggle? (These may have been forced on parliaments 
by the people, but that only shows that parliaments can, in fact, enact the will 
of the people when pressured.)

> >Throwing a rock at the moon is pretty easy physics; there are only
> two
> >objects involved, the rocket itself being to small to matter. Three 
> >objects, >however, and you have chaos.
> 
> that's not entirely true. there is no 'general' solution to a three-body
> 
> problem in gravitational physics but if your measurements are good
> enough it 
> is possible to make good predictions for a fairly long time. barring the
> 
> entry of massive objects from outside the solar system no-one need worry
> 
> that the earth will be ejected from its orbit anytime soon despite it
> being 
> part of a system with a sun, nine planets and
> dozens of moons.


But in about a million kazillion years, planets will fly off, and no one knows 
where or when it will happen. Or maybe a nearby star will go nova and we'll all 
be roasted.  

Even the solar system is infinitely simpler than a human person, let alone a 
society. It's another order of complexity entirely.

Thiago

> 
> peter
> 
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