: Yeah, so? I still don't see this "weakening the revolutionary resolve" thing.You haven't noticed how the intentional community movement---and its high-stepping co-housing kin---has done NOTHING to challenge property relations for the working class?
AND looking at the RAPID TURNOVER rate of intentional communities in general, it should be obvious that they don't encourage LONG-TERM socialist behavior AT ALL.
: Sure, communes are a "middle-class movement" -- so is intellectual Marxism, should we dismiss that too? Don't intellectual Marxists work for the capitalists?
One difference: Marxists (and I'm NOT including 'academic' Marxists) insist on the active PARTICIPATION of the working class in their movements---unlike the explicit snobbery evinced by, say, Kat Kinkade (see Is It Utopia Yet?, Twin Oaks Publishing 1994, pp. 194-95).
: Doesn't the struggle for socialism START with the struggle to identify and model the preliminaries to socialist behavior? Sharing, anyone?
Well. if you think SHARING will change the existing property relations as they stand NOW, then I'd say you were a true utopian...
: Let's turn it around: does typing a lot of chat about revolutionary resolve on a BBS with 10 or 12 regular posters "weaken the revolutionary resolve" merely because it doesn't ignite a revolution tomorrow, and what's more isn't it really just another bourgeois debate club, one worthy of the creation of tenured radicals with university positions (we're pretty damn smart, at least I have a PhD), and thus worthy of our condescension?
Well, Sam, I NEVER said (or implied) that I was EVER an academic. As a matter of (anecdotal) fact, I don't even have a high school diploma---so when I say I know what MONOTONOUS, LOW-PAYING jobs are, I actually know.
When you accuse of me of debating pointlessly here, all I can say is: You are a hypocrite to do THE SAME THING without treating your own actions as contemptuously---and what do you know of WHAT ELSE I DO?
