#gradualism

[daisukitoo]

Half-ass is better than no-ass. Small steps are better than no steps. Gradual progress is still progress.

Get out there and make your life marginally better today.

[er-cryptid]

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[thepopoptic]

[yngwrthr]

I have never said the socialist party [SPD] will become the majority and then proceed to take power. On the contrary, I have expressly said that the odds are ten to one that our rulers, well before that point arrives, will use violence against us, and this would shift us from the terrain of majority to the terrain of revolution.

Friedrich Engels, Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio (1892)

[conza]

Rand Paul’s Fall in Four

”Right-wing opportunism is self-defeating for ultimate goals in several ways. The major reason for putting forth transition demands is as a way station to ultimate victory; but, by studiously avoiding the raising of ultimate goals or principles, the opportunist, at best, short-circuits the ultimate goal, and betrays it by failing to raise the consciousness of the public in the explicit direction of the final goal. The ultimate goal will not be reached automatically, by itself; it can only be reached if a large group of adherents continues to hold high the banner of that ultimate, radical objective.

But, if libertarians refuse to examine and put forward their ultimate goals, who will? The answer is no one, and therefore that objective will never be obtained. Indeed, if libertarians fail to keep their ultimate objective in view, they will themselves lose sight of the objective, and descend into another gradualist, nonlibertarian reform movement, and the main purpose of having a movement in the first place will be lost.

Secondly, opportunists often undercut the ultimate objective, and libertarian principle as well, by openly advocating measures that undercut that principle - such as a higher sales tax to replace an income tax (as did the Mid-Hudson chapter of the Free Libertarian Party in early 1976), or a gradualist Four-Year Plan to advertise their moderation and alleged reasonableness.

Even in the short run, opportunism is self-destructive. Any new ideological movement or party, in order to acquire support - as in the case of new products or firms on the market - must differentiate its product from its established competitors. A libertarian party which, for example, sounds almost indistinguishable from right-wing Republicanism (as did the Tuccille campaign for New York governor in 1974), will fail if only because the voter presented with no clear alternative will quite rationally remain with right-wing Republicans.”           — Murray Rothbard

[yngwrthr]

I was amazed to see today in the Vorwärts an excerpt from my ‘Introduction’ that had been printed without my prior knowledge and tricked out in such a way as to present me as a peace-loving proponent of legality quand même (trans. come what may). Which is all the more reason why I should like it to appear in its entirety in the Neue Zeit in order that this disgraceful impression may be erased. I shall leave [Wilhelm] Liebknecht in no doubt as to what I think about it and the same applies to those who, irrespective of who they may be, gave him this opportunity of perverting my views and, what’s more, without so much as a word to me about it.

For those who use the 1895 Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 to turn Engels into a proponent of legality, opportunism, and gradualism — here’s what Friedrich had to say about that.

[russia-libertaire]

Turgenev's conflicted liberalism

'Civilisation, humane culture, meant more to the Russians, latecomers to Hegel's feast of the spirit, than to the blasé natives of the West. Turgenev clung to it more passionately, was more conscious of its precariousness, than even his friends Flaubert and Renan. But, unlike them, he discerned behind the philistine bourgeoisie a far more furious opponent - the young iconoclasts bent on the total annihilation of his world in the certainty that a new and more just world would emerge. He rejected their methods, he thought their goals naive and grotesque, but his hand would not rise against them if this meant giving aid and comfort to the generals and the bureaucrats. He offered no clear way out: only gradualism and education, only reason.'

'Fathers & Children', in Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin