activism

Gar W. Lipow lipowg at sprintmail.com
Sat May 2 10:03:58 PDT 1998


Bill Lear wrote:


> ----
>
> On Fri, May 1, 1998 at 19:21:43 (-0800) Gar W. Lipow writes:
> >...
> >What I would like you do is something much harder than a vision of the
> >future. I want you to look at your vision, look at where we are now
> >and use your creativity, your knowledge and your imagination to create
> >a path that gets there from here. Assume your vision will win, and
> >imagine yourself a historian fifty years from now explaining how your
> >side won.
> >
> >In short, I am asking you to use some of your intellect and energy
> >developing a strategy manual for the marxist, or green or generally
> >way left of liberal activist.
>
> Anyone with an iota of common sense will realize that trying to
> construct such a path from first principles --- connecting "goals"
> with "visions" --- is a dicey game, at best. You are asking for the
> impossible, frankly. We have to work slowly, building awareness and
> understanding through open forums of discussion and information
> dissemination. We cannot charge up the hill in a hail of bullets, we
> must fight for every inch, patiently, tenaciously, and tirelessly. I
> can see no other way to approaching social change via these truisms
> that has any hope of anything other than random success.
>
> Bill

Who says you have to construct from first principles? By all means use facts.

Look the right spends a great deal of money every year on think tanks and such that develop strategy and tactics. They do not spend all their time criticizing "gummint" and developing propaganda. A right wind activist not only has a broad a large spectrum of potential funding sources (something I don't expect the left to match) but a broad menu of suggested strategies to choose from (something we sought to be able to offer and better).

There is about 100 times more out there from left intellectuals about what is wrong with capitalism than how to defeat it. The right certainly had no problem writing about how to defeat what used to be called liberalism. Are you saying there is no intellectual work to be done in figuring out how to defeat the right?

If my little thought experiment was poorly conceived, then frame your own question. But I'll tell you the "start with where you want to be and work backwords to think how to get there from here" is a quite common planning technique in the business world. I'm not asking for utopianism -- I'm asking for long term planning.

As I said frame your own question. But it seems to me that intellectual pendulum on the left swings between pure theory and pure reporting, with an occasional pause in the realm of program. What about spending some time thinking about how the hell we can win?



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