Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >But if you mean what social forces, what historical dynamics, is pushing
> >many intellectuals (particularly young ones) further to the right, then
> >it would seem to be a very interesting question indeed.
>
> You ask the question on a very high level of abstraction - "forces"
> and "dynamics." You seem quite hostile to any attempts to examine how
> actual people experience those forces in their daily lives - too
> subjective, too individualistic, too psychological.
Doug, I have answered this question over and over and over again for almost four years and you don't reject my argument, you simply stare right past it without acknowledging its existence. And it is you who attempts to replace actual people with abstractions, not me. The "actual people" you talk about simply have no existence except as abstractions in the psychologist's laboratory or seminar room or journal article. Moreover, unlike my abstractions, which can be and are concretely related to actual practice, your abstractions can *never* contribute to interchanges with actual people.
I don't confuse my abstractions with actual people, so I don't write posts in which I create mythical subjects who can, as mythical actual people, directly fit into abstractions. And I don't confuse actual people with abstractions, which you do all the time.
Those who have had real and continuing experience in actually "reaching" people, in mobilizing "actual people" in "actual struggles," *know* that the problems which are involved in that activity cannot be theorized independently from ongoing engagement in a particular struggle involving particular people at a particular time in a particular place. And then in reference to most of the questions that you continually raise concerning "actual people" it turns out that the questions simply dissolve, the problems don't appear. There are lots of problems, but they have nothing to do with the "psychological" issues of relating to "actual people." The problems rather, more often, are problems about what set of abstractions to bring to bear to *unite* all those actual people not only with each other but with their own future selves. I'll return to this, but first two other problems that *do* always surface in these actual situations and which will always continue to surface.
There will be two (at least two) assholes present within the organizing group. They will balance each other perfectly, but unfortunately instead of cancelling each other out they will only enhance each other's power. One jackass will be abstractly similar to the jackass you suggest I am being in this exchange. He -- usually a he but in one particular struggle it was a she -- will have some huge sweeping principle to push, an abstraction which not only does not relate to the personal experiences of the people involved but does not even necessarily relate to whatever struggle we are involved in. (In my particular personal experiences this person has usually been a Christian or a white "follower" of Martin Luther King or both, but in one case were people declaring themselves to be marxists.) The problem then is not that the principle is abstract -- only abstractions can relate present to future or people of different backgrounds to each other -- but that it was a wrong or irrelevant principle.
The other asshole uses the jargon and slogans you are using in this debate. He (usually he: perhaps we do need a movement made up only of women) can't see the actual people in front of him because of his abstract conception of what actual people are, and in insisting that we chase after those non-existent actual people fucks everything up.
I learned this in almost the very first activity I ever participated in, several years before I dreamt of becoming a marxist. Over some issue of race in Bloomington we had leafletted the west side (the poorer side of town) for a city council meeting, and we got a rather large number of people to come to the council meeting (and it was a racially mixed group). Most of them even fit the cliches abstract theorists like you seem to carry in your head of what kind of people "actual people" must be. (I don't even remember the particular issue now, but it was interesting enough to get quite a few people to respond to our leaflet.)
We had hoped for some success and had prepared for it by arranging to use the gym of a nearby YWCA as a meeting place. We even had refreshments. But the member of our organizing group who was really into "real people" and who continually sneered at big abstractions, had a bee up his ass. He had been to Mississippi for a few days the preceding summer, and he really grooved on those singing sessions. So when the city council meeting adjourned, and all these people (all strangers to us and mostly to each other) were pausing on the sidewalk outside city hall waiting, this asshole gathers three or four off to one side and they began to sing freedom songs. I was practically dancing up and down in frustration, because while I was an utter amateur with no experience then, I knew damn well that people didn't get much thrill out of singing freedom songs before they even had any developed and shared idea of why they were there -- and that that goal made it an absolute priority to get them over to the YWCA munching their donuts and sipping their coffee and talking to each other, moving toward a provisional set of abstractions that would hold them together. (This was not how I would have phrased it then but is nevertheless an accurate expression of what my feelings were.)
Well, not more than a third of them wandered off before the song-singing ninnies could be persuaded to start the move over to the Y. We still had a fairly good group, and there was some interesting conversation, but no one was really prepared to suggest any principles that could hold them together, then bring them back together in any systematic way, and nothing much ever came of it. (In other words we had not discussed among ourselves the forces and dynamics involved, and hence were not prepared to translate such an understanding into the specific terms needed on the occasion.)
Now you really don't have to consult Lacan to know that sitting together eating donuts and chatting is better than standing around in the dark watching four or five strangers do a bad job of singing freedom songs. Nor do you need any theories about how marxists relate to Christians, or how leftists relate to poor people, or any of the other topics of the "how-do- we-relate" genre that flutters around on this list. It happens.
The worries about the RCP are relevant here too. What explains their relative success in the Mumia Defense effort? I think it comes from the fact that when they put their minds to it, no matter how unpleasant they are (and I agree with Yoshie that it is no fun to work with them), they are actually much less sectarian and dogmatic than most of the subscribers in this list. And this is because most of them (however corrupted they may have become from the RCP's bizarre politics) were recruited to the RCP in the course of actual struggles and know in their fingertips how to relate to people.
> So how do you get
> from the level of forces and dynamics to the level where actual
> people make choices about their political philosophies and
> organizational affiliations?
You organize struggles and relate to people within those struggles through the methods of relating that you have learned through decades (or in some cases only weeks) of practice and experience. It's simple. This has never been a problem, and never will be. But of course you do have to have a correct understanding of what those forces and dynamics are. This maillist can't help us in methods of concrete struggle (and we don't need its help) but it can, perhaps, help us move toward a shared understanding of those forces and dynamics. I used those vague terms in my post because it would simply be ignorant (and arrogant), in abstraction from a particular struggle, to use more concrete terms. The other day you were sneering at someone who invoked the importance of activists. Now you are sneering at the analysis of abstract forces and dynamics. Make up your mind.
>
> I find it amusing to watch you & Ken Lawrence take obvious enjoyment
> in denouncing people who claim enjoyment has a role in politics.
? I've always had fun in politics. I would guess Ken has too. Only a college professor (who was nothing but a college professor) or a freudian would think that you have to theorize fun or desire to have fun.
Carrol
P.S., on the "too individualistic" of the following sentence:
"You seem quite hostile to any attempts to examine how actual people experience those forces in their daily lives - too subjective, too individualistic, too psychological."
Have you read anything Yoshie and I have posted. Our objections are that the kind of discussion you want IS NOT INDIVIDUALISTIC ENOUGH. We have argued that the responses of actual people, taken one at a time, *cannot be theorized* -- that theory is always too abstract. That if you want to relate to actual people you have to become at home in contingency -- and that psychologism brutally interferes with the necessary respect for the contingent, the particular, the actual. If you think of politics through the perceptions of a professor or a journalist or a politician (in electoral politics) you simply cannot see that the process of reaching people is a function of concrete struggles, not of abstract psychological or rhetorical or pedagogical or public-relations theory.
=============
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Feb 2000, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > [SNIP]
>
> In other words, find the vanishingly few people who think
> exactly like you do, tell them exactly what they already
> want to hear, and ignore everyone else. I had no idea
> organizing a revolution was so simple!
No, it's terribly complex. You seem to have no idea however of where the complexities lie and where they don't lie. I am not proposing some new idea of my own -- I am summarizing successful mass-struggle tactics as they have been carried out for around two centuries. It really should not be necessary to argue the point with anyone who has either engaged herself in actual organizing and outreach or who has read any detailed political history. (By political history I mean mass struggles, whether reformist or revolutionary, not electoral politics.) In mobilizing the sympathetic and launching actions you reach people beyond that immediate circle, and hence the next time around the pool of sympathetic to be mobilized is larger.
Had we had a "mass line" and a greater understanding of "forces and dynamisms" in that minor event I discuss above, we would have ended up with three or four more people who were busily talking to friends and fellow workers and neighbors and relatives. Your understanding is completely academic -- that is, you assume a captive audience for your rhetoric.
Carrol
P.S. After writing this I read Brad Hatch's post:
> I think Carrol is saying that it's a waste of time and resources trying to
> persuade those who are hopeless in the first place. My understanding of
> basic grassroots organizing is to first identify those who agree with your
> cause and mobilize them first. With their help and infuence you then move
> on to those who can be educated about the cause and then won over to it.
> It's almost a waste of time and resources to win influence from those who
> benifit from the way things are and fanatically appose change. I don't
> think Carrol is advocating that activists preach to the quire.
This is excellent. I would only add that there are times when it is quite necessary to preach to the quire: to deepen their understanding; to reinforce solidarity; to extend the area of shared agreement. Perhaps it is better to say that there are times when the members of the quire need to preach to each other. I would also add that one reason to reach out only for the sympathetic is that often the numbers of the sympathetic are much larger than you might think. "Silent Majorities" are not all Nixon Lovers.