class

[Kelley Walker]

and, carrol, not surprisingly, it isn't a study about what people 
think.  sociologists don't really study how people think. some do, but most 
of us are trying to study social institutions and practices. we can't 
actually see these social institutions and practices, we can however take a 
look at their "effects".

kelley

At 06:04 PM 4/17/01 -0500, you wrote:
>For political purposes, what people think at any given point in time
>(i.e., what they think now) is not really very important. The question
>is always "What will a given sector of the population think _after_ some
>specific event?" Not, for example, "What do people think now about the
>Brown students' action?" but "What will that part of the population now
>passive but potentially actively on our side think after a year of
>highly visible actions focused on the subject of reparations?" Even that
>is too general. But it is the kind of question someone in a planning
>group might come up with as a first step in exploring what the question
>should be. It moves towards, very roughly, making reparations an issue
>that activates people.
>
>And not, surely, "What class do people think they are in?" but "What
>class would (say) 20% of the working class think they were in after five
>years of growing mass activity around a given set of issues?"
>
>One of the great changes capitalism brought about was to make absolutely
>fundamental to human life the fact that the world in which an act's
>consequences play out is a different world from the world that existed
>before the act. Now this was clearly embryonically present in a number
>of pre-capitalist class societies -- and in particular in the one I am
>most familiar with, ancient athens, where recognition of it shows up in
>reactionary thought and feeling, most dramatically in Sophocles. If only
>Oedipus had not tried to avoid marrying his mother he would not have
>married her. His act changed the world from a world in which he would
>never know Jocasta to a world in which he married her. If only my
>grandfather had not raised so many strawberries in 1939 [i.e., if only
>he and all the other strawberry growers had not raised so many] he would
>not have had to feed 300 crates of them to the hogs (because the price
>offered was less than the cost of the packaging).
>
>For the academic (as academic) and for the journalist, only the present
>(or past) exists; for the political activist only the world transformed
>by her action (i.e. the future) exists.
>
>The title "One Nation" is an obvious lie.
>
>Carrol