I avoid "vanguards" because I associate them with "starting revolutions you can't finish".
My look at history suggests to me that those who agitate the oppressed classes either fail to agitate them sufficiently, and get stomped by the ruling elite; or they DO agitate them and get stomped by the masses in an orgy of uncontrolled mob bloodletting.
In this case, "stomped" can mean anything from being murdered by the system they themselves set up (Post-imperial Rome/Reign of Terror France/Stalinist Russia, to name the biggies) to starting a club on campus and being thrown out of it by people who think you're part of the problem.
I'll worry about the ethics of too-patronizing "leadership" when it becomes apparent that said leaders actually get to become long-term leaders and not victims.
Will and Ariel Durant wrote that wealth and power tend to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands, and that when this tendency reaches a critical point, one of two things ALWAYS happens. Either the rulers step in and do some controlled redistribution, like with the New Deal, or else there is a violent and bloody revolution. There are no other choices. I go with the redistribution, because I know that if the oppressed classes really get moving, it will get very ugly very fast, and the masses have a tendency, when busting heads, to not distinguish between the evil capitalist overlords and people like you and me. Look who got hurt the most during the race riots of the 60s/Rodney King/etc....it was usually small businesses in the neighborhoods where the oppressed classes lived, many of whom were struggling nonwhite victims of race prejudice themselves.
And if that shows that privileged white liberals have a different agenda than people of color and any other nonprivileged folks, then so be it. It's the truth.
no subject
I avoid "vanguards" because I associate them with "starting revolutions you can't finish".
My look at history suggests to me that those who agitate the oppressed classes either fail to agitate them sufficiently, and get stomped by the ruling elite; or they DO agitate them and get stomped by the masses in an orgy of uncontrolled mob bloodletting.
In this case, "stomped" can mean anything from being murdered by the system they themselves set up (Post-imperial Rome/Reign of Terror France/Stalinist Russia, to name the biggies) to starting a club on campus and being thrown out of it by people who think you're part of the problem.
I'll worry about the ethics of too-patronizing "leadership" when it becomes apparent that said leaders actually get to become long-term leaders and not victims.
Will and Ariel Durant wrote that wealth and power tend to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands, and that when this tendency reaches a critical point, one of two things ALWAYS happens. Either the rulers step in and do some controlled redistribution, like with the New Deal, or else there is a violent and bloody revolution. There are no other choices. I go with the redistribution, because I know that if the oppressed classes really get moving, it will get very ugly very fast, and the masses have a tendency, when busting heads, to not distinguish between the evil capitalist overlords and people like you and me. Look who got hurt the most during the race riots of the 60s/Rodney King/etc....it was usually small businesses in the neighborhoods where the oppressed classes lived, many of whom were struggling nonwhite victims of race prejudice themselves.
And if that shows that privileged white liberals have a different agenda than people of color and any other nonprivileged folks, then so be it. It's the truth.