>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 07/21/99 01:05PM >>>
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> > [snip] There is no left movement
> >without the vast majority of people making it.
If this is true, then we might as well give up now. No mass movement in history has involved the "vast majority" (or even a slim majority). "Majorities" belong in the never-never land of bourgeois elections and Gallop polls, not in the world of "movements" in which level of commitment and cohesiveness count for more than do mere numbers. (Assume that even under conditions of maximum political activity something like half the population will remain essentially passive.)
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Charles: I think you are talking about the insurrection end of the spectrum. I am talking about the revolution, which takes a long time and must change the activity of the vast majority.
Take the Russian Revolution. The majority may have been relatively passive in the insurrection, but for there to be a revolution, the long term activity of the vast majority had to change; the relations of production, which encompass the vast majority changed.
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> > [snip] Yet, as Kelley says, this valid vision will not be taken
> >up by people who are victims being blamed. What a dilemma.
I don't understand. People are transformed (collectively transform themselves) through collective activity ("revolutionizing practice" the young Marx called it), not through passively receiving a vision, valid or otherwise. And at any given time only a small minority can become involved in such struggle -- though under the right conditions (not specifiable in advance) and with minimally decent leadership those small struggles tend to grow.
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Charles: As Lenin taught, the working class can reach only trade union consciousness spontaneously, that is through their collective activity under capitalism. To develop socialist consciousness takes an interjection from conscious revolutionaries. I was trying to be non-dogmatic in using the term "vision". Just think of "vision" as equalling "socialist consciousness." Activity under capitalism alone, without the conscious element intervening, will not get us there. The small struggles will not grow without this.
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> How do
> >we make our message persuasive and inspiring , especially when the
> >ruling class has a very strict monopoly control on the means of mass
> >communication ?
A couple things. Given that control we simply accept the fact that we are *never* going to be able to deliver a mass "Message" to a large number of passive recipients (readers of newspapers, viewers of TV, etc.) Secondly, who is "we"? A definition won't do here. What is needed is specification of the means by which that "we," however defined, is to be brought into existence. Clearly no "we" exists at the present time, and until such a We does exist discussion of the content of its message or the form of its delivery is sort of silly. (Major Qualification: It is possible, under some conditions [again unspecifiable
in advance] that such a we could come into existence precisely through discussion of the content of the message to be delivered. But this involves rather more difficult dilemmas than the imaginary ones that preoccupy Kelley and Charles.)
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Charles; The "we" is the party, the conscious partisans of the working class. Sorry to rely on Lenin so much, but the conscious partisans were almost as small as the membership of this list when Lenin wrote _What Is To Be Done ?_ . So, discussions of the "we" are almost never premature, by that example.
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> How can we be critical of the ways that people
> >participate in their own oppression without blaming the victims ?
Why be critical or uncritical? Why not concentrate on those who, *at a given time*, are already at least partly involved in struggling against
at least some aspect of "their own oppression"? (*Im Anfang war die That*)
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Charles: Why not start out with a holistic, variagated approach, with different approaches to different levels of consciousness ?
CB
>
>
> Ok, I'm feeling less cranky today, and more constructive. Of course
> there's nothing intrinsically defective about the American masses;
> they're not hard-wired to be atomized apolitical xenophobes, or any
> of the bad things that are attributed to them. They've been shaped by
> bad education, bad media, bad religion (background music: "I want to
> conquer the world/give all the idiots a bad new religion!"), a
> preposterous system of government, and a lifetime of subservience to
> the power of money.
This is too passive a description, as though on the one hand we had the bottle of education etc, on the other hand the wine of passive recipients poured into it. People *act*, and under ordinary conditions they act in a way that confirms, materially and ideologically, their conditions of oppression. And again under conditions unspecifiable in advance, some times some of the people find themselves acting in contradictory ways, ways that partly reproduce *but partly challenge* that oppression.
And so on. It partly depends on whether you believe that capitalism is a contradictory condition and on whether you believe the materialist premise that action is prior to and determinative of thought.
Carrol