Fun fact. Eugene Debs’s father was a French liberal who fled France after the 1848 revolution, and named his son after two French liberal reformist authors, Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo.
And, of course, Debs was one of the founders of the IWW until he got disgusted with Heywood’s advocacy of violence and sabotage and kicked the IWW out of the socialist party.
Isn’t it a helluva lot easier just to shout “Up Against The Wall, Ed Zotti!”?
Gawd, it’s fun being a Junior Oppressor.
Nice revision of history. What actually happened is that the IWW has had a policy since its inception of avoiding the political process as being useless, ineffectual, and in the interest only of the rich; Debs wanted the IWW to join his crusade to form a political party, and when they refused to be buffaloed, Debs took his ball and went home. Debs and the other socialists created the Socialist Worker Party and pretended to be the IWW. Their phony “IWW” folded within ten years, Debs was shellacked at the polls, and the SWP vanished without a trace. The IWW continues to fight the good fight 105 years after its founding, and just unionized another Starbucks in Quebec.
The proof is in the pudding. Reformists like Debs become failures celebrated by those who wish to protect the status quo while those of us who remain unreconstructed revolutionaries become hated and feared successes whose willingness to use, in the words of Big Bill Heywood, “debate and dynamite,” equals effectiveness.
… hated and feared successes. Seriously? I call bullshit.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
As I said upthread, apart from the occasional act of violence (usually perpetrated upon totally innocent victims) your ilk will never be successful in fomenting any sort of revolution. You can’t marshall the appropriate support from society because 99.99% of society thinks you’re a crackpot. (And also because, in America and Canada, far too many people live far too well and find the notion that some sort of revolution is in order to be utterly laughable.)
SmashTheState, whatever else the IWW can claim to be, the word “successes” is not one that I think any significant portion of society is going to allow you to claim.
It is fun, however, to watch any number of people display behavior roughly equivalent to that of seven year olds in trying to deal with you.
Well, I tried being poite. Let me try another tack.
Hey StS! Next time you spout off your fantastical horseshit about the supposedly enlightened nature of Athenian society 2400 years ago, how’s about you take your tongue out of the nearest panhandler’s sweaty and fungus-enriched ass chasm long enough to mouth along with me the following phrase:
THOSE ATHENIANS WERE SLAVE-HOLDING WARMONGERS
I don’t have a problem with that statement, as I recognize that, in spite of its manifest evils, ancient Athens’ society represented one of the most significant advances in the entire history of human freedom. Sort of like a proto-Amerika (without the NASKAR, natch).
I think if you go back and read what I wrote, you’ll find I never made any such claim about the “supposedly enlightened nature of Athenian society.” What I did was cite the Greeks as historic evidence that a professional police class is not required in order to maintain civil society.
Thanks for the invective-free response. I’ll take it down a notch myself. However…
Even though you didn’t explicitly say that ancient Athens was “enlightened”, you certainly implied as much by insinuating that we should take our cues from a bunch of slave-owning warmongers. I was trying to draw a parallel between the deeply-flawed Athenian society (of which you at least approve some facets), vis-a-vis modern Western democracy, which you seem to despise in its entirety.
I hope the Yanomani referred here aren’t the Yanamamo of South America. Because far from a peaceful orderly society you had a group of folks that were exceedingly violent with a penchant for murdering their neighbors and beating their wives.
The problem is that you’re using the word anarchy in a manner that isn’t generally accepted. Nobody in their right fucking mind refers to New England town hall governments as anarchy.
Welcome to civilization. Do you enjoy things like roads, running water, trash removal, and other large public works? Because these things aren’t possible without some sort of authority. There’s a reason humanity didn’t build these kinds of things for 2,000,000 years until the advent of agriculture.
Odesio
Not that I endorse its politics, but I seem to recall a major disturbance in Russia in 1917 that was fomented by a political party…
Well, you’re flat-out wrong here. Setting aside for a moment your reference to Eugene Debbs (with whom the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion party in the US have absolutely no relation), I can tell you that a number of socialists are members of the IWW, and do not disguise this fact from either the union or the Party. If you honestly believe that “our type” cannot, or should not, be members of the IWW, then maybe you should start a witch hunt to get us all purged. Good luck with that.
No, that’s not true at all.The IWW was founded in 1905 in Chicago by a coalition of labor organizers and left wing leaders, ranging from orthodox Marxists (like Daniel DeLeon) to revisionist socialists (like Eugene Debs), to radical labor organizers (like Bill Haywood).
In 1908, the leadership of the IWW, after a three year argument between Haywood and DeLeon, changed its constitution to prohibit affiliation with any political party. This led DeLeon (not Debs) to “take his ball and go home”, and DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party (not Socialist Worker Party) founded its own IWW in Detroit (which changed its name to the Workers International Industrial Union in 1915, and was disbanded in 1925).
At this point, the relationship between the IWW and the Socialist Party of America (Debs’s party) was still pretty good. Haywood campaigned for Debs in 1908, and in 1910, was one of the party’s delegates to the Second International in 1910. It wasn’t until 1911, when Haywood gave a speech at Cooper Union suggesting that leading Socialist Party members were “step-at-a-time people whose every step is just a little shorter than the preceding step”, and that, he believed that “while a member of the Socialist Party and believing firmly in political action, it is decidedly better in my opinion, to be able to elect the superintendent of some branch of industry, than to elect some congressman to the United States Congress.” This led to Morris Hilquit (Socialist Party leader) criticizing the leadership of the IWW as “purely anarchic”.
In spite of this, Haywood was elected to the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee in 1911. It wasn’t until the aftermath of the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, when the Socialist Party passed an amendment saying, “any member of the party who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation shall be expelled from membership in the party.” that Haywood was forced to step down and the IWW walked out.
Rather than vanishing without a trace, the Socialist Party of America lasted until 1973 as a party when it finally fell apart after an internal split on the morality of the Vietnam war. It then split into three groups, the Socialist Party USA, which still runs candidates under that name and most recently ran a presidential candidate in 2008, the Democratic Socialists of America, which works with labor unions and community activist groups and makes up part of the left wing of the Democratic party, and the Social Democrats USA, which served mostly as a think tank and has been more or less moribund since the death of Penn Kimble, one of its founders and the leader of the group until his death.
I apologize, you’re right, it’s the Socialist Labor Party, not the Socialist Worker Party. In my defence, it’s hard to tell the difference between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. What’s a poor anarchist to do when confronted with 51 flavours of socialism ranging from spam, spam, Marxism, spam, spam and spam to spam, spam, spam, spam, Marxism, spam, Leninism, and spam?
And yes, I should have compared Psychonaut to DeLeon, whom the IWW tossed out, not Debs. I’m sure any minute now that whole “speaking truth to power” thing will make Psychonaut and Debs heroes of the revolution. Any minute. Maybe now? No? Well, don’t worry, I’m sure it’s just around the corner.
And what a terrible thing that is. I’m sure the Western Federation of Miners were suitably chagrined for all the victories those evil anarchists achieved with their, you know, effectiveness and everything.
I’m pretty sure 70 years of utter and total irrelevance counts as “vanishing without a trace.”
I think he already said that he was referring to a group of highland vs. lowland people, both lumped together under “Yanomani”.
Begins to sound a bit like a “No true Yanomani” argument, but maybe I’m misunderstanding.
Start his own group since none of the others have a true sense of anarchy, I gather.
There is very little love between authoritarian socialists and anarchists. The anarchists were ejected from the First International as a result of their refusal to endorse oppression as a viable means of securing freedom, and the exchanges between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx are quite educational.
“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called `the People’s Stick’.” – Mikhail Bakunin
*"[The Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship — their dictatorship, of course — can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up." *— Mikhail Bakunin
Bear in mind, however, that we’re talking only of authoritarian socialism. I, and many other anarchists, identify as voluntary socialists in the sense that we would (and do) choose to freely share our stuff with others. We only object to people being forced to contribute their labour against their will. We also want no truck with a State, and certainly do not want an all-powerful State which owns the means of production and forcefully redistributes the wealth.
[quote=“SmashTheState, post:116, topic:503315”]
I, and many other anarchists, identify as voluntary socialists in the sense that we would (and do) choose to freely share our stuff with others. QUOTE]
Money, send me all ya got…and any hawt wenches.
On receipt of either I’ll subscribe to your newsletter
I doubt if you are an anarchist at all.:dubious: You’re just pretending to be one, to stir things up, i.e. troll.
Thank-you. This is the sort of informed, positive, rational posting that is most likely to effectively address things that Smash says. 
The irony of this statement coming from a member of the IWW is pegging the meter. :smack:
Y’know, there are very few threads on this board, even here in the Pit, in which one cannot learn something.