Classless society is impossible

Hi

Bless you. That's uncalled for.

What's so good about pretending to give a shit about people other than yourself?

Lots of love

Chris

Not much, but have you ever considered the merits of actually caring about other people? Or are you one of these "greed is good" pseudo-anarchist nobheads?

Oh yes. But I don't call it politics.

Hope not.

I know that wasn't aimed at me, but I find the relationship between anarchism as a politics and as a "morality" very interesting. For my 2p-worth, "anarchism as a morality" is liberal wank.

Hi

madashell, you're clearly one of my fans trying to bait me into emitting a poem. Fair enough...

(To the tune of "I gave my love a cherry" etc)

A bit of wee hostility

It's something in your tone

Altruists are nice in public

But they’re nasty on their own

I'm sorry if you're uptight

About anything I do

I'd prefer us to be friends

If it's all the same to you

I thank you!

Chris

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. What's wrong with grounding your politics at least partly in compassion? Is there no room for humanity in political theory?

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths." - Vaneigem

I'm going home in a minute (yaaaay!) so no time to do this question justice, but (in the proverbial nutshell) grounding your politics in compassion can lead to charity & altruism (even *gasp* liberalism), but never to solidarity.

While it is no doubt true that the workers are downtrodden & exploited (& so on), should I feel sorry for them? Do I expect other people to feel sorry for me? No. Fuck 'em. Piss on pity (to coin a phrase).

Edited to add: what does the black bit mean in the ? It's not love or compassion, is it?

Ah well..... off home.

I happen to disagree. Solidarity and mutual aid are all about compassion, empathy and altruism, IMO.

You are falsely conflating pity and compassion here. Pity implies condescension, compassion implies solidarity (IMO, of course).

Kittens?

Have fun

This probably just boils down to semantics, but AFAIK compassion means "suffering with......." So if I have compassion for someone's situation, it's like "Hey, man, I feel your pain." Which is fairly pointless.

For me, solidarity is something more & something other than compassion. If someone attacks one of my fellow workers, they are attacking me. An attack on one is an attack on all (to coin another phrase).

(And now you all know, not only what time I go home, but also what time I get to work )

No compassion is, "Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it." So it'd can always implies wanting to change and stop the suffering of another.

Mr pedantic

Mr Wikipedia, more like.

*ahem*

There is a world of difference between compassion/empathy and solidarity. For most people compassion doesn't really run deeper than the immediate. I mean to be totally honest the only people who's suffering would genuinely move me to any great degree are my friends and family. That's nothing to be ashamed of - it's pretty natural. It dosn't mean I don't recognise the global shitness of suffering under capitalism, or that I think the masses of people I've never met and have no connection to are somehow less valuable human beings, just that my politics are based on my understanding of the world, not on the emotions I feel for others.

Hi redyred

Exactly.

Love

Chris

Y'know that sounds exactly like something revol68 would say himself.

how the fuck do people manage to connect with their communities when they natter on like that all the time

Any attempt? Is this trtue of the CNT in spain, or the paris 68 uprising, somewhat of a generalisation i think, but seeing as we're generalising anyway, lets try russia.

How and why exactly did the bolsheviks become a ruling class? Because while its undoubtedly true that they did, simply saying ''they became an elite because they did' is rather pointless as i'm sure you're aware.

Before answering, read: http://libcom.org/library/BolsheviksWorkersControlSolidarity

'Justice' is just a meaningless word, i could use that word as a fascist, a trot, a liberal or as an anarchist, i could use it to mean anything i wanted.

Charity, is dependent on a class based society, and on ideas of private property ownership. If i earn £14k a year, and i work for a smallish company with a surplus profit of £2 million a year and my mate is earning £10k, why should i give him my spare cash, since its not me thats robbing him.

In fact its fair to say that most charity funding comes from the wealthy anyway, take shelter, one of the biggest domestic charities; over half their funding comes from estate agents.

Now that doesn't mean that i'm mental and think we should have a go at shelter and leave the homeless to starve or something, but equally it doiesn't mean that i'm going to pretend shelter and charities like them are some sort of solution to the problem of homelessness, because they clearly aren't.

So besides feigning emotional detachment in order to prove what a clever, theoretically sound materialist you are, is there any real difference?

yes there is, for example, i feel empathy for a homeless guy, but i don't base my politics around the fact that i feel sorry for them, since trying to organise among the homeless in say london, many of whom have hard drug addictions or mental health problems, would sadly be extremely difficult if not impossible.

so do you only do stuff that's easy?

My point is emotion and compassion are no sound basis for politics. For example most people, even a cold-hearted materialist like me, will feel some kind of sadness or sympathy when they see, say, victims of a natural disaster on TV. But no-one, not even the most bleeding-heart do-gooder can realistically say it comes anywhere close to what they would feel if they saw someone they cared about killed or injured before their eyes. No-one has an even, egalitarian ability to feel emotional attachment regardless of their politics.

Pretty much. He isn't called cantdo for nothing.

fuckin missed that one, open goal an all!!!

na if that was true i wouldn't bother being here. I just think that we have to try to aim at things that are realistically possilble, rather than letting our emotions lead us into a manic impulse that we have to 'do something' about every single bad effect capitalism has on the world.

what posting on a bulletin board - how hard is that?

Not hard at all even oisleep can do it

exactly

its a lot tougher than it looks

I'm not really following your argument here to be honest. All I'm saying is that there is nothing wrong with feeling compassion and anger about the state of the world, without it, all you have is a dead ideology with no driving force behind it.

Much like writing the theory section?