Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com> writes:
One of the many interesting contributions Joe Stalin made to the Marxist theory was the observation that the class struggle intensifies as the old mode of production becomes obsolete; and that there's really no differe between "terrorist acts" and government-sponsored violence and economic deprivation. You might view the second statement as the generalization of Klauzewitz's (or Bismarck's?) maxim that war is the continuation of foreign policy by other means.
Well couldn't class struggle simply mean the difference between wielding large quantities of power and not.
Stalin claimed (and I agree) that when the ruling classes are facing loss of power, even due to purely market forces, they will resort to violence to try to keep their poer: first government regulation/taxation to suppress the new technologies/modes of production, and when it fails, jailing and killing those who challenge them. Imagine a very primitive society on some sort a of Pacific Island, where people live in relative deprivation and obey the Chief, whose main duties are to deflower the virgins, and to allocate the meager coconut harvest "fairly". Some bright islander invents a way to grow many times as much coconut as before, making the Chief unneeded (say, he discovers that if you shit on the roots of the palm tree, it acts as a fertilizer :-). The Chief will try to use whatever means are at his disposal to preserve his power, starting with regulatory (declaring that to shit on palm tree roots is blasphemy), to extreme violence (punishing such blasphemy by torture and death), because the invention, even though non-violent, threatens his rule. Get it? Now replace "shitting on palm tree roots" with "anonymous digital commerce".
If thats the case then Stalin was the ultimate hypocrite when his wonderful revolution attained of temporary system of government. That system of government was unstable in that in failed to allow people to provide for their own and each other's welfare through free market activity.
Irrelevant to what I was talking about.
As resistance to centralized modes of production increased (especially with the farmers), the central government systematically starved 20 million people to death.
Irrelevant to what I was talking about, and not quite true. (The number of farmers starved to death was at most 6 million; many others died elsewhere. Yes, Stalin used arguments such as the one I cited as the theoritical justification for the forcible farm collectivization (actually invented by Trotsky :-)).
Reminds me a lot of Orwell's "Animal Farm".
Though I do agree in principle with the idea that corruption runs rampant at the end of a megapolitical era (for more or less the same reasons), Stalin was not the first to have this idea. For a run-down on this concept check out the much-maligned "Sovereign Individual".
Consider, for example, a Black child in the United States who dies of a trivial curable disease because of the lack of health care. Consider the child's parents who labor "off the books" in menial jobs, who are deprived by the state from the ability to marry, to work "on the books", to hold a bank account, et al. Is being deprived from the results of one's labor that different from being sold at an auctioned and whipped in a public ceremony to terrify other (wage) slaves?
No. I agree with you here. I think the difference is in the resolve of the individuals under this kind of pressure.
Joe Stalin himself took part in several spectacular terrorist acts in his youth, which resulted in deaths of dozens of "innocent bystanders".
make that millions
Not in his youth. Before Stalin got in the position of ordering his minion to kill millions of people, he used to be a "hands-on" terrorist - blowing up Tsarist officials, robbing banks, killing numbers of "innocent bystanders".
Prepare for crypto to be criminalzed.
definitely. but under what system of law? for all practical purposes the constitution is null and void. the people that run this country do so under the guise of constitutionalism, but its all a grand facade. the whole idea of the current government is a type of consensual reality. (literally so, perhaps?) When enough people agree that the version of reality no longer serves them, they will agree that it doesn't exist.
This, of course, assumes they have the power to alter it.
Under the same system of law that criminalizes mj, sex for teenagers, "sodomy" between concenting adults, driving over 55, tax evasion, et al.
Prepare for the former cpunks who "sold out" (C2Net and the like) to support criminalization of crypto use within the U.S. in exchange for a possible relexation of export rules.
I'm not sure I understand why you assert that C2Net "sold out". I was probably out of town at the time this discussion went down.
Yes - review the list archives. C2Net supports criminalizing domestic use of encryption for the first time, and also sends threatening lawyer letters to security experts who question their products. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps