Date: Thu, 18 Feb 93 20:19:28 EST
From: daf <
[email protected]>
Subject: wasted and wiped out
the day before yesterday, I didn't ask, "what were the Florentine peasants
doing while all this was going on, in fact, the peasants all over Italy. all
over Europe except for Switzerland and Bohemia?
Then the whole problem of *emergent contradiction*, which is what I call it,
which I formerly thought was a universal law of revolution, in the Florentine
Revolution of 1378 got omitted. The Ciompi just didn't decide to have
themselves a proletarian revolution without even knowing what it was. First
there had to be a losing war with the Papacy, 1375-1378, The War of the Eight
Saints (..."Major Powers whose diplomatic inclinations are watched with
suspicion by all others...," no state in the League doesn't have a Game of the
Week with every other state).
But the Papacy? Isn't that contradictory to the central tenet of the
ideology of the Ruling Pary?
Yer nuts, Foss, Ruling Party in the 14th century, [barnyard epithet]!
Eppur si movere. It was called the Parte Guelfa and ran the state from
not so very far behind the scenes on the grounds that there werre Ghibellines
everywhere and Ghibelline sympethizers and crypto-Ghibellines and people you
would *never* suspect who knew Ghibellines or did business with Ghibellines....
For the whole period of Brucker's 1962 study, which is resticted to politics,
1343-1378, there wasn't a single Ghibelline in town, but this didn't stop
the thing. Somethign between McCarthyism and a totalitarian Pary-State. There
were six directors of the Parte Guelfa who were a species of Central Committee,
but were also the Old Money. Outside the charmed circle, but trying to get in,
was the New Money, the *gente nuovi*; the Old Money were the *gente decente*.
The rules of the game were that, if you "wanted to work for meaningful
change within the system," meaning, catch a few crumbs off the table, you had
to denounce Ghibelline perils louder than the old reactionaries whose Guelfism
was unquestioned. Like Cold-War Liberals. The rhetorical parallels were
*chilling*.
If on the other hand you dared to spout wild-eyed radical ideas about power
in a few hands and there aren't any Ghibellines anyway, that is, go after the
entrenched power and privilege, then the Parte Guelfa met in secret and there
was a special procedure for dealing with Your Kind: There was a Oarte Guelfa
staff official called The Accuser Of The Ghibellines who issued an *admoniti*,
admonition to get out of politics. There was no Or Else, this *was* the Or
Else. It meant the withdrawal of state protection for your life, property, and
buisness; you were dead meat.
Without being anachronistic, we can say that the *first* revolution of 1378
was the overthrow of the ruling faction of the bourgeoisie by a rival bourgeois
faction in alliance with the petty bourgeoise. Then came the turn of the
oriketariat, and everyone else turned on them; it was a slaughter. The Left-
Center forces then got re-stomped in the Rightist coup of 1382, leading straigh
to the Medicis....
What most people would learn from history is, they would always lose. So
maybe they are better off not knowing?
Geewiz, that just woke me up. Fascism. If only they had nuclear weapons too.
daf
