>Messsage du 22/11/2000 02:18
>De : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>A : <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Copie à :
>Objet : Re: Election Crisis and Electoral Reform
>
> On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Christopher B. Hajib-Niles wrote:
>
> > My own feeling is that by turning exploitation
> > > into a kind of primal, original sin,
> >
> > can you show me where i did this?
>
> By saying you don't think electoral politics matters at all and that
> PR systems don't really matter.
That's essentially a moral position,
of course its a moral position; has discourse degraded to the point where a moral position is equivalent to moralizing? it is also a political position which i elaborated on only briefly.
> you know, the idea that if you free your mind, the institutions will
> follow.
whoa! i never said or imlied this, nor do i believe in that kind of new age foolishness.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but the reality is, institutions need to be freed, too: schools need better funding, military budgets need
> trimming, etc. Minds need freeing, and so do governments. No subjective
> emancipation without the objective.
we need to listen to teenagers when they say school sucks! yes, i want dynamic institutions (?) that are serious about engaging young minds but school does indeed suck and pumping money into them such as they are is not likely to change much (i'm a teacher, by the way, and i certainly would not mind more money to do cool things with my students). i think young people struggling against establishment forces will do more for their minds than any uninspired 'increased investment in our schools.'To illustrate the point, i remember during the fight against prop 187 in cali how more or less apolitical 15 and 16 year olds were transformed in two weeks time into relatively sophisticated political thinkers, and in not a few cases, serious readers. i also remember how a number of the kids i worked with could not understand why the issues that surrounded the struggle never came up in the classroom, or as one kid put it, "no wonder school is so pinche boring, man." just trim the defense budget? is that really all you want?
the 'subjective' and the 'objective' are in constant dynamic interplay; i want revolution and i want it asap, and a radical transformation of 'material' relations is utterly essential to revolution, but unless you want to insist on newtonian conceptualisations in a (post?)qauntum world where quantum phenomenah inform both the material world and consciousness, emancipation cannot in any meaningful way be reduced to an either or proposition. That is to say, in doing so you sacrifice an understanding of world and mind that can facilitate creative, liberating thoughts and actions.
>
> > authoritarian depradations, but yes we as workers are all tragically, if
> > not willingly, complicit in the status quo, and no, no worker needs to
> > walk around feeling guilty about this, but yes, workers need to take
> > responsibility for their unwilling comlicity
>
> How is some clerk at an Exxon station supposed to take responsibility for
> Exxon's depradations of the environment?
i did not say that. he can't. he can, however, acknowledge that he drives a car everyday, learn without too much effort that cars are a problem on a variety of levels, watch the tv or go to the library when he gets a break from proleing and parenting to learn about cars as the primary culprit in global warming, or yucky conditions at car factories, or the number of auto related deaths each year, or the general environmental impact of cars, or communities designed to accomodate cars not people, etc., get pissed about it, ask as many questions as possible and try to do something about it. the trouble of course is that everything in our our society conspires to rob people of their consciousness, not to mention time. in fact, at this historical moment, there may be nothing that we can do about our dependency on authoritarian institutions, like auto companies. or it may be that we will have to 'wait' for the contradictions of the current financial mania to resolve themselves in wo! rldwide depression and that there is nothing to do except resist, know why we are resisiting and prepare as much as we possibly can to take advantage when our rulers are on 'their' backs. workers have to at least know that in their dependency, they are forced, to one degree or another, to pollute the planet. if you cannot acknowledge something, you cannot even begin thinking about how to approach the problem.
That's not a rhetorical question,
> I'm quite serious: how *do* we get ordinary folks to see the links between
> their daily lives and the machinery of global capitalism?
we may not be able to but we can start by using clearer rhetoric--it's not just corporations, it's capitalism; it's not "racism," it's 'white' folks and race; it's not sexism, it's men; we don't live in a democracy, so 'our' democracy could not and is not being threatend, nor is it possible to rescusitate it since it never existed (see the nader campaign rhetoric); we are not simply workers, we are indeed wage slaves; etc.
we can also recognise that all of those non-profits and unions who claim to support working people, don't in any way that would help them understand their circumstances.
If we assume
> that the answer isn't simple,
and i certainly don't...
that we need education
politicking,
> multiculturalism, and a thousand other varieties of solidarity, then those
> PR systems, trade unions and other institutions really are worth fighting
> for, aren't they?
i'll say this: that all of us, especially agitators (including myself), generally underestimate how brain fucked we really are and how that gets expressed in tragicically absurd ways in our political efforts. i would love it if all these institutions were worth fighting for. it would make life a lot easier and relieve me from the bouts of despair where i sometimes find myself suddenly awash in tears. and i always qualify my critiques of the so-called left by saying that even though one can make some pretty good guesses as to where, how and when the next insurgency will develop, one can never really know for sure. that said i truly believe that if the left really wants a world where freedom, democracy and peace prevail, then the first things it will have to do is liberate itself from itself.
chris niles the new abolitionist
> -- Dennis
>
>