However, the advent of global decentralized communications networks is totally changing the game. By the very nature of the net it is impossible for any one person or entity to consolidate to much power - people can simply "route" around the "problem". CyberLeninism is I believe an inevitable emergent behavior of this increasingly complex global brain. Capitalism won't be destroyed however, it will be transformed into a more resource-base economy that Buckminster Fuller had advocated all his life.

Keep up the good work Ben!

Chris Donovan.

I have recently joined the Autopsy list and came across Max Anger and from there your site. I visited it but I can't seem to get in to any of the work you have there. [Note by Ben: one of my "internet service providers" was down for a few hours] I should be very interested in 'The economics of transition period' or whatever, since here in Liverpool we attempted something like this in a discussion group we had going. Thru' [deleted] on the Autopsy list this article is available below.

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/newrab.html

At the moment I am trying to use the net to get support/discussion of the dockers dispute which is now in its 13th month. I have reported this at the following site:

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/dockhome.html

Either way I should be grateful for comments AND anything you can do to make the dockers struggle better known.

Thanks
Gra

Ben -- Seattle -- 27 Oct 96

LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION OF 1917
LONG LIVE LENIN AND THE PEASANTS AND THE SOLDIERS DEPUTIES

Ben -- Seattle -- 29 Oct 96

In unity,
Phoenix

• Reconstitute the CP!
• Revolutionaries Unite! Win the Advanced to Communism!
• Build the Democratic Workers Party
  (organizational form of the United Front against Fascism)
• Build the United Front for Self-Determination of Oppressed Nations
  (one section of the United Front Against Imperialism)
• Build the People's Feminist Movement for Women's Emancipation
  (One section of the United Front Against Imperialism)

Here is an excerpt from part one of my reply: The Digital Fire:

The false choice between eternal capitalism and permanent police state I believe that many of the essential views of Phoenix are mistaken. I will show here how it is actually the views of Phoenix which serve the bourgeoisie and help to prop up the thoroughly bourgeois perspective that we can only choose between: Eternal capitalism, and A permanent police state which creates less wealth than capitalism and seeks to exterminate all political life. The views of Phoenix are not merely wrong. The views he holds (which are not original with him--which in fact are views which I once held and which date to the 1930's) are obstacles to the re-emergence of Leninism as a modern theory capable of guiding the revolutionary struggle of the working class. The essential views of Phoenix (as a supporter of the theoretical views of Stalin) is what I call the "single-point-of-control" theory--under which workers' rule in a modern, stable society requires the administration of all society (and in particular the media, the culture, the economy and the politics) by a single political party or organization which represses all other (and particularly, all other oppositional) political parties, organizations, trends or forces.

Here is an excerpt from part two of my reply: The Digital Fire:

How "transparency" will transform the "ecosystem" of groups on the left The proletariat, in the modern age, has little or no need for "information isolation". On the contrary, its interests are served by the opposite principle: "information wants to be free". The open, principled exchange and clash of views -- serves to cast light on the issues and raise the consciousness of everyone involved and is part of the principled cooperation and competition of proletarian trends. Part of this "principled coopetition" involves representatives from opposing trends publically answering public questions from one another designed to establish the truth about such issues as what principles should guide the development of a genuine communist party and how the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in a modern society might function. So in the spirit of determining whether my distinguished opponent knows what he is talking about -- or is just full of hot air -- let me ask him now, in full view of the world: "Dear Sir: What will be the attitude, in a modern society, of the dictatorship of the proletariat toward censorship of the internet ?" And while we wait for Phoenix's answer (hint to readers: don't hold your breath) we will start a clock. Today is Monday, November 4, 1996. Let's see how many days, weeks, months or years it takes Phoenix (or anyone upholding Stalin's interpretation of Lenin) to answer our simple question.

Here is an excerpt from part three of my reply: The Digital Fire:

Will the dictatorship of the proletariat censor the internet ? The bourgeoisie (and its ideological servants) argue that the harsh features of the bolshevik regime which emerged from 1917 are the inevitable result of all successful attempts to overthrow capitalism. "The cure", they argue, "is worse than the disease". The bourgeoisie argues that therefore workers should give up the idea of overthrowing capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie. Rather, this argument goes, workers should either: (a) accept capitalism as eternal, as the final stage of development of human economic organization, or (b) confine their perspective to reforming or gradually reducing the worst outrages, the most anti-human features of bourgeois rule, or (c) if the elimination of bourgeois rule is to be stubbornly maintained as a goal--to restrict the conception of how this will come about--to something gradual, something evolutionary, something that does not involve building an organization capable of mobilizing millions of angry workers to defy bourgeois respectability, bourgeois authority and bourgeois law and to seize direct control of all levers of power in society, all institutions--and break them up and create, in their place, new machinery to better organize the political, cultural and economic life of society and to smash and repress all attempts of the bourgeoisie to recover their lost paradise. No ruling class will be able, in any meaningful way, to censor the internet without crippling it. And you can't cripple the internet without crippling the economy. And this simple truth will apply to the rule of the proletariat with just as much force as it will apply to the rule of the bourgeoisie. And to this we can add one more simple truth: no regime which cripples its own economy can resist being eventually overwhelmed by a more powerful and dynamic system of economic organization (the former Soviet Union, with its bureaucrat style of state capitalism eventually yielding to more conventional and dynamic free-market capitalism is the example that here most comes to mind). Freedom of political expression on the internet will serve the dictatorship of the proletariat and mobilize mass opposition to bourgeois, reactionary and backward ideologies.

[additional note by Ben: Oct 29] Per your more recent request, I've zapped your e-mail address and will temporarily forward to you mail I receive
(To: "Ben@pix.org", Subject: "forward to Post#3-Oct10").
You should get a free anonymous e-mail account here.

Your site is very interesting, but it has no graphics or organization.

take care
Sara

Ben -- Seattle -- 9 Oct 96

Capitalism uses all its abilities to achive the same goal: winning people's consciousness; that "things could not be better than what we've already done".