Farce said:Quote:
Samotnaf wrote:Quote:
Killing scum is not the same as capital punishment.The exact difference being that?
Capital punishment is a cold-blooded ritual conducted by the State, which as everyone on these forums well know, is directly and indirectly complicitous in far far greater crimes than even those of Fred and Rosemary West. During the revolution in South Africa collaborators with State murder were often given the 'necklace' - i.e. a tyre was put round their necks and set light to. Unpleasant, but a fairly good incentive to other collaborators to not continue with their collaboration. It's not a model for post-revolutionary society but it was not capital punishment. It was rage. During the French revolution the mob would often kill aristocrats or defenders of the nobility spontaneously until Robespierre etc. took control of the situation and introduced the public spectacle of the guillotine (which clearly was capital punishment). Cold blooded mathematically calculated killing is not the same as hot blooded revenge. I far prefer the summary justice meted out to Mussolini than the spectacle of State 'justice' performed at Nuremburg.
I also prefer the summary justice meted out to Mussolini than the spectacle of State 'justice' performed at Nuremburg. But then, I also very much prefer the spectacle of State 'justice' performed at Nuremburg than the mob lynchings of black Americans suspected of some kind offence in the Deep South, even though the former was cold-blooded state killing and the later was a crowd of working-class people spontaneously acting out their rage. So I think the situation's a little more complex than "trials and courts bad, mobs going apeshit and killing people good".
OK, clearly I should have checked back on this thread sooner. I said that the strikes should be supported. In its most basic sense, this just means that we would regard it positively if the strikers won. It does not necessarily imply even one of these things:
Do we have to advocate a perspective of self-management for every sort of capitalist workplace, in order to back strikes by workers there? Obviously not.
Do we need to give space on a communist website to every group of workers whose strikes we support? Nope.
Do we have to get involved in "colonisation" in any industry in which we support strikes? Not that either, no.
I haven't had time to read the rest of this thread, so perhaps there's a better case been made against supporting the strikes than that. But I don't think that's very strong. What if someone you knew was considering scabbing on the strike? Personally, I'd try to persuade them not too. Perhaps Ret would be indifferent, I don't know.
There is, furthermore, no sense in which support for industrial action in a given area involves support for the industry itself. Consider workers in factories that manufacture armaments. We could go further than Ret's list, which also includes intelligence service agents and bailiffs, and include, as well as workers in armaments factories, people working in the dole office (for harassing claimants), the housing office (leaving people homeless), who assess immigration applications (having them deported from the country), and on and on and on.
It is not necessary to discard a critique of any of these roles in order to support a strike of workers in them. And relating to any such strike without being honest and upfront about a critique of - e.g. prisons - would be dishonest. In fact, you'd probably find that many prison officers would be able to supply much of that critique themselves: but that, like most people, they assume prisons such as they are to be an eternal and natural product of human society, never to be superceded.
For me, and I think for most of us, there is a basic relation between taking militant collective action, and establishing the confidence, not only to make a critique of the system, but to move toward making that critique "concrete", acting against the system. That relation is not as simple as some people make out: there is no automatic connection from one to the other. However, a critique of work, of capitalism is something that some people discover in the process of being on strike. I am in favour of prison warders, police officers, soldiers, and so on having the chance to discover such a critique.
One argument often rolled out is that the sort of anti-working class activity engaged in by the prison officers is "direct", whilst other sorts (manufacturing armanents) are "indirect". For me, this is a pair of words chosen to justify a division which is neither relevant nor clear. Is it really better, from a class point of view, to help make a cluster bomb than help deliver it? Does the "directness" of one make it worse than the other, from a class point of view? Are the makers of riot shields strightforwardly proletarian, while the holders of them are straightforwardly not? I don't see why.
Bolsheviks ("humanistic liberals", in Ret's view) joined the Tsar's army, and sparked a revolt that became a revolution. The Spartacus rising was prompted by the sacking of the USPD chief of the Berlin police. The lessons from periods of high class struggle is that moralistic attitudes toward certain jobs of work fade away in favour of the concrete value of having people making communist propaganda in all areas of public life. Encouraging a revolt amongst the "praetorians" would be a necessary part of any social revolution.
I don't speak for my group, and I have no idea what others think about it. The Commune has no position, and would be open to people independent of their view on the question.
I'm open to persuasion. This has been discussed on libcom before. The above is what I came away thinking.