From: "ricardo" <davidb-AT-ak.planet.gen.nz>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Zizek on PKs
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 11:54:54 +1300


Rakesh,
You don't need to read Arendt to discover that the pre-capitalist hangovers
into capitalism including the partriarchal family are a source of social
reaction. The reason that fascism won support in the working class in
Europe was because capitalism has not developed sufficiently to eliminate
these pre-capitalist forms. It had developed enough to create a working
class which was now a threat to the capitalist class during  in the epoch
of imperialism and war. Hence the exhaustion of democratic forms of the
state and the bourgeois reliance upon the mobilisation of fascism as a
social movement of the economically threatened and politically disoriented
middle class. Yet in the working class loyalty to kinship relations
remained the main social base of identity and not class. After all
nationalism is just an appeal to a racial stereotype of a historic and
geographic kinship relation. So capitalist production produced individuals
which loosened kinship ties, but did not supplant these weakened social
roots with sufficiently strong working class cultural roots. To say that
all imperialist states have this potential is very true.
To say that today the potential for fascism remains is also very true,
because the crisis of capitalism intensifies world wide and the working
class is an even more powerful threat to capitalist rule. Yet, the working
class is unevenly developed, and large sections are in the reserve army, or
only formally subsumed to the capitalist economy. Which means that the
appeals of kinship, religion and nation, are the major barriers to working
class unity internationally and will, when the most militant sections of
the working class move into battle, be sources of potential reaction within
the working class. This could happen quite quickly depending how economic
crisis unfolds, and how quickly the exhaustion of democratic forms happens.
So the PK's are maybe are harbinger. That's why understanding the historic
importance of Trotskyism, and the necessity of a vanguard party is so
crucial. Given the confusion on this list about how revolutionaries
organise, its just as likely they will still be debated this question when
the fascists pull the plug.
Dave.

----------
> From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU>
> To: marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Cc: dhenwood-AT-panix.com
> Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Zizek on PKs
> Date: Thursday, October 09, 1997 09:22
> 
> 
> >By focusing just on the (unarguably) evil leadership, you're just
ignoring
> >the issue of what draws millions of people to such movements, or
implictly
> >assuming that the American masses are full of fascist shock troops.
> 
> No, I said that we ignore the American masses who are not drawn to such
> movements and often contribute to their marginalization, which is what
the
> main function of these spectacles are in the first place. At the same
time,
> Doug, isn't it a bit naive to think that the American masses couldn't
> produce a full complement of its very own fascist shock troops. Perhaps
> those already predisposed to be so are drawn to the PK, which will in
turn
> socialize them into this role.  And what did you think about my guess
about
> their occupational composition?
> 
> And what's the big deal that some of them cry in public about having been
> irresponsible towards their family. If anything, this underlines their
> proto-fascism. Here I will always remain an Arendtian. A sentimental
> attachment to the family or a limitation of one's moral horizon to the
> family is at the core of all personal involvement in bureaucratic and
> systematic evil. I can't remember where Arendt said this, I remember
> reading it ten years ago and it changed my life.
> 
> Rakesh
> 
> 
> 
> 
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