Gordon, first I should apologise for my ascertive reply to you as I thought it was uttered from a different standpoint.
Years of political defeat and disorganisation, even in areas where there was in the past some passable political activity and awareness produces nothing but individuals who try to make sense of the world as best they can with what is available to do so.
And what is actually available to most people are the carefully crafted questions and the dictated answers produced by the media (if we are talking about big events especially). Once the question is socially framed, the dissident voice, just reduced to a voice (ie lacking organisation and past and meaningful contact) appears as both dangerous and irrelevant (an odd combination).
Irrelevent because it does not fit the framework which people have accepted as underpinning the "real" questions, dangerous because if the thoughts are dwelled upon they challenge much more about life than what is in the news at the moment, but the means of practical struggle are absent (hence acting in this direction is socially suicidal).
There is no great magic involved in producing mass chauvanism, so long as people are fragmented and denied the resources of political self-education.
However, there is some little magic involved in sucessful political organisation. Given this element things really do shake down to class basics and do so with great rapidity. Personally I have seen it so many times I take it as given, which is no reason for you to believe me.
The Left has become so irrelevant to life, it stands on the sidelines, doing nothing very practical for the most part and produces incoherent and conflicting pronouncements, or flamboyant and disconnected demonstrations.
However, where it does do the opposite (a thing not all that rare despite the Left's normal behaviour) and becomes involved in some practical battle for change the effect on "ordinarty folks" can be profund.
Literally it is possible in such struggles to see people change over-night. There is no one thing that does this, but something in a struggle strikes home and forces people to question their beliefs to a far greater extent then whatever the problem of the moment is. This I have seen too often to be in any doubt of its existence.
In this class is the key to criticial consciousness and also the determining factor. Not in any mechanical way, it is not the case that a person's class background or position leads to a direct change in consciousness, but it is also true that when that jump in consciousness occurs class becomes the critical element upon which all other understandings are erected.
Those that for whatever reasons cannot make the jump but become radicalisied (unfortunately those most attacted to uncritical acceptance of the left as it is) merely adopt a new ideology, often sectarian, and usually with religious overtones. These I consider a problem, a very mixed blessing, and although they are the ones who proclaim their "politics" most loudly are not the ones I have in mind at all.
The other response, the class response, does not lay aside its critical facilities, they often find the left organisations and ideology as equally fallicious as the bourgeois ideology they reject. What they do express drawn from their experience and observations (it is not necessiarily confined to those who have a clearly working class background though it is most often drawn from them), is a growing critical awareness of all the games being played and a very practical-political bent as to what should be done. Class consciousness at such times becomes a palable expression.
AS I said I have seen this, and I have also watched the left loose just these people because it is unable to reflect their criticial understanding. The two go hand in hand as I have opnly seen a few exceptional iundividuals who having transformed their world view are ready to take on both the bourgeois and "left" world together as the ground for struggle, usually the process is uneven and begins with a momentary infatuation with the left.
Such people might be wiser because of this experience (I don't believe it gets worn off, but often must be supressed in order to engage in practical life) but they are for the most part forced to slide back into the individual isolation they came from. Little wonder then that even those radicalisied at one time appear to rejoin the pack.
However appearances are deceptive, there is an accumulation of knowledge from past struggles that exists flowing through the social fabric, history cannot repeat itself, even now when a level of mass hysteria has become dominant there is a great fragility in the official ideology (which does not make it any less dangerous).
Ideologically the right has had to side-step some of the shop-worn weapons of the past, what is more it has picked up on elements of proletarian criticism of the left and used it for its own purposes exploiting the accumulated weaknesses of our past.
So while everything looks like the same-old-story, while the vast majority of working people express black-shirted opinion, there are some enormous cracks in the superstructure, unexploited because they are precisely the cracks which the Left has avoided seeing because they inherently criticise its own derived ideologies.
Left cyncism, whereby all in the world is by definition tainted and bad (a cyncism derived from its quasi-religuos political views), or the flip-side to this cyncism whereby some struggle is blessed and beyond criticism, a world without greys but only stark blacks and whites. Has denied us the ability to speak plainly.
The cracks in the official ideology of the moment revolve around the proper authority of the UN (we are too cyncial to speak of such things) the role of unilateral treaties (cynicism again), the proper role of international law (eek... would this not necessarily be bourgeois law? - well of course!), a clear understanding about what is an acceptable role of a defense force (ie we have to be crystal clear as to when it is legitamate to use military force), a clear understanding about what is not acceptable in armed struggle (this is where we are forced to disapprove of measures taken by our favourite past struggles and to say so in no uncertain terms - it also means we need to be clear what is acceptable).
Lack of clarity on these and similar things are in fact the very cracks in current official ideology. You see if we attempted to address any of the above questions we would qualify them out of existence (this is where the right has characterisied us preceisly and will pounce as soon as we open our mouths in the predicatable style).
Sorry Gordon to go so far around the bush on this, but consider the situation where the left was able to speak without humbug on these criticial aspects of international relations, consider the possiblity where we were capable (which we don't seem to be) of giving a clear and unambigous and immediate solution to the international question which faces us - what do you think the mass working class response to this would be even in America?
If we could speak clearly and without qualification and humbug, and directly address the questions as they have been framed up by the bourgeois media and in doing so present senible and immediately realisable solutions - I have no doubt at all that the cracks already within the dominant bourgeois ideology would split apart and the class nature of that ideology become very apparant to millions.
Unfortunately we are not in that position organisationally (in order to be heard) or intellectually (in order to clearly understand and express what needs to be said). Unfortunately, I can see no other future then to be subject to bourgeois triumphalism for sometime to come and what a bloody business that will be. The left's unwillinglessness to be self-critical will be paid in the blood of countless innocents, we have the legacy which could unlock this impasse, the intellectual and even the organisational legacy but only by building on it.
Gordon: "I think what you've done is rewrite the interests of the working class as what you think their interests _really_ are. It is hard not to do so, since many of these interests appear to be contrary to reason and common sense. But in doing so you put yourself in the position of the elites who already do this, yet without their power. By contrast, as an anarchist, I respect the freedom of working-class people to utter and seek their interests, but I oppose many of those interests (war, imperialism, racism, police-state practices, conformity, voluntary ignorance, fetishism, and so on) and am indifferent to many others. I want to change their interests, or at least sabotage the progress of their current interests in the world if they can't be changed immediately."
Gordon this is an interesting and sophistocated way of putting an important question.
Now, the difference here is perhaps not as great as you suppose. The interests you speak of are real enough and often expressed by working class people. But what makes you think these represent their class interests?
I pose the question in this way not to simply dispose of what you have said for one one hand we have interests expressed in practical reality (all those and more that no humane person would subscribe to) and my counterposing of what can only be said to be an abstract interest (a set of immediate interests which stem from an abstract understanding of class - ie look as you will and such an abstract class cannot be said to exist in reality).
Now it is utterly reasonable for you to state that what I am doing is imposing my "elite" views on the great bulk of people while you at least accept them for what they are. All things being even you thereby bring up a telling criticism.
But are all things even, is what appears before us all there is? On this basis you are absolutely right and I am absolutely wrong, anti-demiocratic and elitist. On this hangs the great question of history either it is thoroughly contigent, has no inner sense but what is apparent (the powerful are powerful because they have power, hence power is the key to a better world), or there is much more going on than meets the eye.
To be frank, if everything is in plain sight then your approach is correct, if power is the key then getting rid of power by any means is justified to bring about something better then we have got. However, if this is not the case, if history has some inner logic of which appearance is but a contradictory expression of this other thing then the anarchist position would lead to nowehere (hitting the wrong target in the wrong way).
Now if you assume my purpose is to impose my elitist views on the rest of the world, I would have to come up with something like this - that is I have a way of seeing the real workings while everybody else sees only the outside of things. Again your logic is sound and I appear to fall into the very criticism that you first raised.
But the whole thing has little to do with my or even your purpose - surely the resolution lies in the real world for either it is merely contigent or not.
Now I will not try and persuade you, rather I will leave this hanging as the next step in the logic of what you have already said. The solution is not a moral one, (ie elite vs democractic acceptance), but a practical one, that is of practical reason.
Practical reason has a nice democractic edge to it, that is it requires no special preparation, one does not have to make any particular assumptions, in fact all that has to be done is being prepared to question assumptions and place them into an understandable order.
Gordon:
"> Gordon, may I as the reverse question? Where are the immediate
> interests of the working class not manifest in some realizable
> and immediate change for the better?"
"For which _better_? Any time people get what they want (that is, pursue their interests successfully) they think it is good, at least temporarily. Right now they are celebrating "victory" in Afghanistan. But this is not a change for the better from _my_ point of view."
I suggest that it is not a change for the better for you because it is not a change for the better for the world in reality. For such a victory what is the triumph (another war?) many thinking persons today after such a victory must be asking what has it actually achievied? Millions of people in America, admist their feelings of success, must also have this lurking question in the back of their minds - history places it there because they are a part of it - getting what you want is not always in your interest (look at any smack addict).
Gordon: "> Who are the working class of December 21, 2001?"
"My answer is: Anyone who has to sell their labor power in order to get a livelihood, or who depends personally on those who do. I also construe those who suffer for and under the State, such as Welfare recipients and the homeless, and young people languishing in the vacuums of the suburbs, as laborers of a sort, since I believe liberalism and capitalism depend upon their suffering. But this is a construal for the purposes of analysis; there does not seem to be a self- conscious working class in the sense I define it, or in fact in much of any coherent sense anywhere. Almost all of those who are not still enclosed in conservative, traditional or reactionary ideologies appear to swallow the myths of liberalism whole without blinking. One must respect its hypnogogic power."
Well I agree with this wholeheartedly - but where is the problem?
Class consciousness is the end product of struggle not its starting point. Asking where is the class consciousness seems out of place, ask rather where is the struggle and then look for the beginings of class consciousness there. I can say with certianity that if you find a struggle which involves working class people class consciousness will not be far away. But looking for it when struggle is all but exitinct is looking for something which by definition cannot be.
Gordon:
"> ...
> Thge working class is more numerous more widespread than at
> anytime in its past history, but perhaps its interests are
> somewhat ill articulated by those who claim Socialism as their
> private preserve, and perhaps this political disability leads
> to the whole class being hidden away behind some fixed ideas
> that are no longer applicable?"
>
"> For the bulk of the class the interest is real and lived but
> not necessarily either said or thought spontaneously - then
> why should that be the case when organisation and political
> agitation wallows in apologetics and nostalgia."
"I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I might agree with you, sort of. It might be useful to explore a case where the expressed interests of working-class people are clearly not pathological (in my opinion), like for instance affordable medical care in the United States. How has this desire been deflected by the liberal establishment to prevent any inconvenience for the ruling class? What have radicals articulated? I've noted previously that not only can't a politics of national health insurance be gotten off the ground, one can apparently not even organize local cooperative HMOs (except in Wisconsin). I think this is a very curious situation, since it's an area in which I would think even social democrats could do something useful without violating their affection for the established order."
We live in interesting times. The old reformists (social democrats, liberals whatever) have become softer versions of the hard conservatives - the whole groundwork which use to exist now no-longer is there. Curiousier and curiousier!
The radical left, cannot bring itself to utter any practical improvement at all, not without immediately qualifying it into no-existence. Forgetting the ideological for the moment, does this not look like a great social need which by circumstance is not being expressed by anyone?
This is what is odd, that just where you would expect the reformist wing of the bourgeoisie to be most active in fostering such needs if only to deflect them, we find silence and inaction. Yet we have a radical left which behaves as if these elements were still active (they hand on the sidelines ever eager to point out the faults of any proposal).
Just as reformists are showing at the moment their true colours, the readicalk left is also exposed as being both reliant on them and chronsicaly incapable of initiating real struggle.
We are collectively faced then with an unusual circumstances - a crying social need, a huge desire to have this need catered for, but a total lack of political struggle to realise the need. When we look at what is responsible we assume the continuation of the social need (indeed it is growing daily) and fix our gaze on the political actors - who all seem to have forgotten their lines and stand mutely and unmoving on the stage looking as nothing other than another piece of scenery.
Dearest comrade (I address you so because by a very different route you have expressed the point that so much of the left has failed to even look at), you and I stare at a vaccum in the political hegemony of the ruling class - this is a crisis for them in the making, a crisis made real if we find the means of filling the void with political struggle uncompromised by the problems and set-piece dramas of the past.
Imagine for a moment a clear political platform, shorn of all excess of expression, dealing with the need to make immediate and realisable change for social improvement, and behind this platform the rich intellectual fields which are available for any individual to transgress if they desire to know more, imagine a means of organisation unhampered by past hierachical forms. Place these, simple things into the mix and something explosive takes shape.
We are a long way from doing this, a long way because so few have even recognised the vacuum within the hegemony, so far because the left has become a dead hand on its own development and refuses to leave the well worn and circular paths with thich it is familiar.
As far as I am concerned, and I am no lover of anarchy, but via a path very different to my own we have ended up looking at the great divivide - there are not many of us doing so. You frame your answer up as anarchism, fine, such anarchism I have no dispute with, I frame mine up in terms of good old fashioned Historical Materialism and the lost art of being communist.
When you say: "How has this desire been deflected by the liberal establishment to prevent any inconvenience for the ruling class? What have radicals articulated?"
I would say, they have not deflected anything but left the field, and the radicals say nothing that is practical, nothing that is without hypocrisy, nothing which resonantes the social interest. The impasse is real your criticism true.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
Use LesTecML Mailer (http://www.lestec.com.au/) * Powerful filters. * Create you own headers. * Have email types launch scripts. * Use emails to automat your work. * Add comments on recieve. * Use scripts to extract and check emails. * Use MAID to create taylor-made solutions. * LesTecML Mailer is fully controlled by REXX. * A REXX interpreter is freely available. _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________