...Maybe it's time to say goodnight so you can dream your bloody utopian dreams( and get shot in the process): Piper: You Mr Stoller are the one who made me break my resolution...
: Stoller: I did? Well, wouldn't Skinner be pleased to see you going over to his side.
: : Hardly stoller. On a Skinnerian analysis i should be exhibiting avoidance behaviour. If you want to debate skinner (as opposed to taking snide swipes) then go ahead.
: You have stated that I 'made' you break your resolution to not post to me. First, that is NOT avoidance, that is engagement.
Piper: Exactly on a Skinnerian analysis i *should* be avoiding you. That is why i don't give skinner no heed.
Second, any self-proclaimed anarchist who acknowledges determinism in his own behavior has pretty well deconstructed anarchism. And last, if you've read ONLY Skinner’s pot boiler Beyond Freedom and Dignity, as you imply here, then that would make for a dull debate (for me, anyway).
Piper: I'm committed to an anarchism only in the utopian sense, as an ultimate state of being. I don't see how the abovementioned post leads to any sort of inference that i have only read one of Skinner's books (no i haven't read em all, but i have read some of em, a few years back though, i'm also reasonably familiar with Wittgenstein another of your behaviourist faves No?).
: Stoller: I know the Bolsheviks started a worker's state in 1917. You wanna tell me about any 'anarchist' states I might have overlooked?
: Piper: Strictly speaking 'anarchist state' would be an oxymoron.
: Yes it would. So would 'anarchist nation,' 'anarchist country,' 'anarchist community,' etc., etc. The point stands: you cannot name an anarchist equivalent to the worker's state of 1917. It's pretty easy criticizing the Bolshevik's failings when the anarchists have never had the challenge of trying the same. REAL easy.
Piper: You misunderstand me stoller, i'm not one who thinks an anarchist state is necessarily achieveable, I 've already sited my agreement with chomsky:
"One might, however, argue... that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule."
(From notes on anarchism)
: : Nor do i believe that violence will ever bring anything but misery and more violence.
: Then, by all means, let's have peace. That is what the capitalists want, after all, peace to fill up young heads with all sorts of 'anarchist' propaganda while raising yet another generation of worker drones to make them rich.
Oh come on stoller i hardly think i've been infected with anarchist propaganda. I don't think it is just the capitalists who want peace. There are other ways to change things than killing everybody who doesn't agree with you, (or who might not agree with you).
Face it stoller history shows that violence isn't the cure for any social ills. Bloody revolutionaries do however make for good dictators.
: I have an idea. Why don't you and Lark rub together a couple of one-paragraph utopias and let’s see if that produces anything as substantial as this.
Don't try to misrepresent me stoller. I know well enough that an anarchist society is utopian and unlikely ever to become an actuality. But it remains to me a representation of the best human society and something to work towards even if it is never fully reached.
Anyway if your so keen on violent revolution, lets see you go for it. I suspect you'll find yourself and most of your comrades dead before dawn...
