[Peace-discuss] a friend: Haiti's problem is overpopulation

[C. G. Estabrook]

An excellent statement of anarchist principles - which, it's important to see, 
contrast fundamentally with (neo)liberal and statist views, such as those 
advanced (mostly propagandisticly) by both wings of the US Business Party.

The only difficulty is that the class struggle is not perspicuous - it's not 
always easy to see what's really going on, and therefore what is to be done. 
It's possible for popular movements to make great mistakes, as the history of 
the last century illustrates woefully. (E.g., the triumph of the Bolsheviks was 
a setback for socialism, as Rosa Luxemburg et al. saw at the time.)

In the absence of a good analysis, the best will in the world can do the right 
thing only by accident - so it's vital to "sometimes disagree a bit" because the 
effort to understand what's going on is not incidental or dispensable. Confusing 
the understanding of society by propaganda has been the great triumph of 20th 
century capitalism, as political commentators (who might not otherwise agree) 
from Hitler to Obama have understood. (See Hitler on what went wrong in WWI; see 
Obama on what went wrong in Vietnam).

The late Australian social scientist Alex Carey wrote accurately, "The 20th 
century has been characterized by three developments of great political 
importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the 
growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against 
democracy."  It's particularly the job of those of us who have the leisure to 
read and write, think and talk, to try to dispel that propaganda by talking 
about it.

Solidarity indeed, CGE


Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> Indeed.  ... and our use of their bodies, too, in various unsavory ways: 
> cheap labor and slavery, including child and sexual slavery, and so on.
> 
> Women, particularly poor/downtrodden ones, should control (their) birth 
> rates.  The poor in general should control their use of land and other 
> resources.  The unemployed should control their joblessness, as the 
> homeless their homelessness.  Workers should control their wages and 
> working conditions.  Faculty, staff, and students should control the 
> universities.  Communities should control their governments, and in 
> particular  (especially the poor/black neighborhoods) their police forces.
> 
> You can read these two ways, can't you?  As admonition or manifesto.
> 
> It's one thing to say it, another to realize why it's so difficult to 
> make it real and work on it.  The best way to work on any of these, in 
> my opinion, is not to dream up the solutions for other people - 
> perfection, clarity, etc. - and then advocate these fine ideas, but to 
> support the people themselves in their efforts to organize and improve 
> their lot - even where we may sometimes disagree a bit - to the best of 
> our abilities.  We never have to pick out a movement or a group of 
> people and make them into saints or heroes.  In fact, we shouldn't, in 
> my view. 
> 
> Don't the poor and the abused have a right to be human, to make 
> mistakes, as much as those with a little more power?  Life is crueler to 
> these when they do fall short, but their supporters don't have to be.
> 
> In Solidarity,
> Ricky
> 
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn

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