> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >I think empty calls for unity such as Alex's are disgusting and
> >disunifying, besides being utterly out of touch with the actual
> >realities of trying to build unity in practice.
>
> You don't build unity in practice by denouncing people as sickening. You
> start on building unity in practice by trying to find common ground with
> people who are more or less on your side, instead of trying to find the
> mote in their eye. I'm sure the German Communists thought they were
> following some higher revolutionary principle in denouncing the Social
> Democrats as social fascists, but the only revolution that was promoted by
> that stance was Hitler's. It seems to me that a lot of "Marxist" political
> practice consists of citing your own purer revolutionary Marxism, which
> almost always involves pointing to the impurities of other leftists from
> whom you're differentiating yourself. That looks like the essence of
> Proyectism, which creates enemies and demons through ignorant and
> tendentious readings of people you don't even understand, in the name of a
> higher purity. I say that's fucked, bigtime.
Absolutely BRAVO, Doug.
Now, without destroying the moment, I'd like to try and move things forward a bit. I think it's an example how a cogsci approach can be helpful.
Doug has identified a central problem here -- the ways that "purity" is deployed (and internalized) as a category that transcends the specific content (both/all sides can claim 'purity' regardless of the content that's claimed to be 'the pure'.)
I'd suggest that ideological purity on the left shares something in common with racial purity on the right, simply because of the nature of concept employed. If, on the other hand, we employed a different metaphor of virtue, very different consequences would follow.
There's an obvious candidate here: richness. As in a rich mixture of ideas, genes, species, spices, you name it.
Richness even has a way of embracing purity, in that purity itself can be part of a rich mixture. Thus there's no contradiction in a rich democracy allowing some people to live by their own strict standards of purity, but pure theocracies (including secular marxists ones) cannot tolerate rich diversity of views.
If we really have faith in our ideas, we don't need the protections of purity. They will hold their own in the rich intermixture with other ideas.
What we should be seeking out is paths toward greater richness. This has to begin by recognizing the richness that does exist in bourgoise society, as well as the violence, oppression and poverty. If we insist on ONLY seeing the later, then we naturally dichotomize ourselves and become enraptured with the notion of our own purity, and we ineviatble lash out at others whose purity is close to -- but not quite like ours. The narcissism of small differences takes over, because these are the people within striking range, not because they are the real source of the problems that confrint us all.
The market is without question a source of richness -- a richness of choices unimagineable in most of human history. But it's also a source of tremendous impoverishment. The main impoverishment right now, IMHO, is an impoverishment of vision, an impoverishment of any sense that things COULD be radically different.
We ought to be willing to allow for a wide range of different approaches to trying to overcome this impoverishment. 'Allow for' doesn't mean agree with, necessarily. I don't agree with the basic thrust of PoMo theory or practice (the practice of hiding in universities, IMHO), but I think it's VERY CLEARLY motivated in large part by a desperate attempt to create alternative visions. Based on that recognition, I have to have a very different way of constructing my criticisms of it than a rightwing critic would have.
I may get carried away in the moment, or I may simply be so narrowly focused that I fail to see the forest of solidarity for the trees of specific stupidities, but there is always this guiding recongition to bring me back again.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"