If there WAS a broad mass-based left-wing revolution during a Democratic presidency...

[Ken Burch]

20. Genovese's point was bogus

He was accusing people who might have asked the question he objected to of calling slaves cowards, and of doing so from a position of personal comfort. The actual reason people would have asked that question was far different from what Genovese implied: they were just wondering why Nat Turner was the only one...the fact that they wondered that did not mean they were retroactively saying that the slaves should have gone on suicide missions of defiance-and it simply meant that those people weren't as aware as they might have been about how futile open slave revolts would have been. But that was a question of innocent lack of historical awareness, NOT of knowing arrogance and sanctimony.

And Genovese permanently discredited himself by his vicious and arrogant essay, titled "The Question&quot IIRC), in which he implied that everyone on the Left everywhere KNEW the Bolshevik Revolution would end up degenerating in to Stalinism from the very beginning, even before Stalin took power, and that, therefore, everyone on the Left, even those on the parts of the Left that were independent of Bolshevism and, later, the Comintern, were ALL complicit in Stalin's crimes and that, as a result, EVERYONE on the Left anywhere, no matter how independent and anti-dictatorial, were evil. He also basically ended up as an apologist for the antebellum South and the supposed benevolence of white Southerners towards blacks, during slavery AND during "Jim Crow". Thus, nothing he had to say could have any redeeming value.

I know the Tea Party types are armed and the people who would back a left uprising aren't. Everyone knows that. That fact has nothing to do with whether the question I asked has any validity. And there's no way that this poll would give aid and comfort to a right-wing uprising.

What harm does it do to ask the question the poll asks? It's a hypothetical...about a situation that likely wouldn't happen anytime soon.

I suppose part of why I asked the question, though, is based on this larger question:

why should the Democratic Party remain loyal to the existing order when that existing order puts anyone and everyone who works for any sort of progressive social change at a permanent and hopeless disadvantage? In a way, isn't it kind of like asking prisoners to remain loyal to their jailers?

Why should we remain loyal to what is inherently unjust to us?

BTW, you have no reason to assume that I do NOTHING but post here. I am active in other ways as well. I post here simply because it's far easier to communicate quickly with large groups of people all over. Why should I just work locally, when that confines me to having no effect on anything outside my own town? Why should anyone accept that limitation?

Local work is important...but, by itself, it can't lead to anything beyond the local. Just working locally can't affect anyone anywhere else...and change has to ultimately be national and international to matter. Just winning your own county, or even just your own state isn't anything. There must be national and global communication and activism for ANY meaningful change to occur.