Bulletin #3 KULTCHA GOULDISM; The Significance of Stressing the Insignificant It was 19th-Century railroad capitalist Jay Gould who said the way to cure unemployment would be to hire one half of the jobless to kill the other half. Writing about the Spanish anarchist movement, Bookchin notes two principal factions, both inspired by the atheist anarchism of Bakunin. There were the radical bourgeois -- very literate persons of middle-class background who were anti-clerical and critical of traditional sexual mores. There were also proletarian anarchists who opposed the Church and endorsed Free Love, but whose main targets were capitalism and government. As much has usually been true of radicalism in general. without the disaffected bourgeois intelligencia there is a trend toward range-of-the-moment pragmatism bereft of theory and explicit rational values. Success is brief, followed by a loss of momentum. Yet, of course, without the proletariat there is no getting off the drawing boards. Between these necessry components of any progress is the weak link of differing attitudes toward religion and lifestyle extensions of faith or unbelief. Making anti-clerical libertinism their mainstay, the radical bourgeois found a great deal in common with Social Darwinist reactionaries who in many instances were also atheists and libertines. Yet such matters were so unimportant to the working class Spanish anarchists that, even in refusing Church-sanctioned marriage, they tended tro practice strict lifelong monogamy. Bookchin describes them -- the goal being to attract the conventional masses. As a result they recruited large numbers of very conformikstic people who remained that way in spite of convertin gintellectually to the principles of free organization. Thus the stage was -- inadvertently and with the best of intentions -- set for dividing the movement. This was in fact done and still is done simply by emphasizing lifestyle -- a cultural matter of minor political significance -- at the expense of all else. That strategy of Gouldism has been refined over the years so that today most revolutionists argue only with each other -- about culture. "The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the poeople wage against the forces of occupation." -- Franz Fanon 1986 HO CHI ZEN c 1986 Kerry W. Thornley Available Exclusively From: Illumi-Net Computer Bulletin Board System (404) 377-1141