Date: Thu, 18 Feb 93 20:19:28 EST From: daf 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