***** What should the People do, when left alone? The Governor, and Government are gone. The publick Wealth to Foreign Parts convey'd; Some Troops disbanded, and the rest unpaid. Rhodes is the Soveraign of the Sea no more; Their Ships unrigg'd, and spent their Naval Store; They neither could defend, nor can pursue, But grind their Teeth, and cast a helpless view.
_Fables_ (1700) *****
And here's a pep talk from Gramsci (again wrested out of its exact historical meanings of _Prison Notebooks_). When he says "mechanical determinism," read it (against the grain) as referring to both economistic and postmodern discursive determinisms.
***** When you don't have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance...and of patient and obstinate perseverance....It should be emphasized, though, that a strong activity of will is present even here, directly intervening in the "force of circumstance", but only implicitly, and in a veiled and, as it were, shamefaced manner. Consciousness here, therefore, is contradictory and lacking in critical unity, etc. But when the "subaltern" becomes directive and responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in the social mode of existence. The boundaries and the dominion of the "force of circumstance" become restricted. But why? Because, basically, if yesterday the subaltern element was a thing, today it is no longer a thing but an historical person, a protagonist; if yesterday it was not responsible, because "resisting" a will external to itself, now it feels to be responsible because it is no longer resisting but an agent, necessarily active and taking the initiative.
But even yesterday was it ever mere "resistance", a mere "thing", mere "non-responsibility"? Certainly not. Indeed one should emphasize how fatalism is nothing other than the clothing worn by real and active will when in a weak position. This is why it is essential at all times to demonstrate the futility of mechanical determinism: for, although it is explicable as a naive philosophy of the mass and as such, but only as such, can be an intrinsic element of strength, nevertheless when it is adopted as a thought-out and coherent philosophy on the part of intellectuals, it becomes a cause of passivity, of idiotic self-sufficiency. This happens when they don't even expect that the subaltern will become directive and responsible. In fact, however, some part of even a subaltern mass is always directive and responsible, and the philosophy of the part always precedes the philosophy of the whole, not only as its theoretical anticipation but as a necessity of real life. (336-7) *****
We are now living in the "yesterday" of resistance (resisting an external will), and it is possible that the initiative-taking "today" may never come again or come too little, too late (here's contingency for you), but I think we ought to keep Gramsci's words in mind nonetheless (and we have to do so _without_ turning ourselves from pipsqueak individuals into cabinet ministers in our imagination).
post-USSR, but not postleninist/postmarxist,
Yoshie