And I thought I said exactly how it'd work -
> parties, unions, and other organizations in relentless struggle, with
> a friendly media chronicling, criticizing, and promoting their work.
> I don't think there's any great mystery to it. What I find utterly
> mysterious are the calls for revolution that seem to treat all the
> difficulties of this path as resulting mainly from a failure of
> nerve, and seem to treat all the (fundamentally conservative)
> psychological and institutional complexities of today as obstacles
> that will simply disappear in some magic transformation.
I don't think (from reading his posts over the years) that Carrol thinks you are lacking in 'revolutionary moral fibre' or any other such thing. Neither do I.
I just think that at some point in the development of the grand movement you're proposing, you're going to go head on head with the armed might of the capitalist state. You're going to head into a class war, quite literally. I think you should anticipate that, and be prepared for it. The century from the Haymarket to COINTELPRO should be history enough to learn from.
We don't know what it looks like till it happens, but whatever the path from capitalism to socialism is going to be, it won't be easy.
Anyhow, at the moment the issue is not how to build barricades - it is more like how to organise all those tele-workers. How to organise temp workers. And scientists. How to give people some dignity back, to make them feel that they don't have to work a job that's ever longer hours, ever faster, a job where the onus is on them to always be a 'hot commodity' (someone asked what's going to happen to all these computer workers when the bubble bursts - my answer is that the ideology of blaming yourself is already built into how computer workers value themselves). How to make people blame the company for making them choose between parenthood and career, rather than crapping on themselves for being 'bad mothers' or 'bad fathers'.
In all these mundane struggle, I expect that (if I was in the US) we'd all be one the same side anyway. There's a lot of mundane work that needs to be done right now, and we can get one with that while we harangue each other over theoretical differences.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available 'The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.' - Karl Marx