Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> The divide-and-conquer argument doesn't have to persuade neoclassical
> economists, though, to be a good political argument. It only has to
> convince workers, who are the audience of leftist rhetoric. Workers (even
> apolitical or conservative ones), in my opinion, don't think like
> neoclassical economists in any case.
If one's experience is primarily academic (teaching) or journalistic, one begins to think solely in terms of what kind of rhetoric will "reach" and "convince" people, entirely forgetting that the political organizer's task is to reach people *before* it even occurs to them to listen to him/her. The content, the rhetoric, the psychological appeal of one's speech or writing all become irrelevant until someone on their own initiative bothers to listen to the speech or read the writing. But even then the speech or writing is irrelevant unless it leads to or is part of a direct (person to person) relationship to political activity. Back in the early '70s in almost all my classes there were students who were attracted by the way I talked about the world, the way in which I related the stories people told each other ("literature") to the way they lived and related that to the ways in which the world's work got done.
They would come to my office and we would get involved in lengthy political discussions, which would greatly move them.
That was it! End. Nothing more.
There was no ongoing political activity in which they could be at once involved in an active way, so all the good arguments and all the good rhetoric and all the good personal relationships were, politically speaking, wasted. It was a "good experience" for them *as individuals*. They liked the class. They liked me. Period. No politics.
And incidentally, Seattle as an isolated event is worthless. Its worth will be in local organizing moving towards more Seattles, but which *also* takes local root. The great anti-war demonstrations of the '60s were powerful because of the immense amount of local work in many places which those demonstrations reflected.
Carrol