Joseph Raso wrote:
>
> >
> But how else will the tide turn in our favor if not through organizing and
> education?
>
Of course -- and that does not remotely affect the argument Yoshie and I are making. You, Doug and Justin remind me of a 6 hour 'conversation' I had back in the mid-70s with an RU (predecessor of the RCP) cadre. The whole conversation was punctuated by my saying about every 8 minutes --"Yes, that's the ABC of Marxism, BUT the question is . . . ." [The point is not affected by the fact that at the time probably neither she nor I knew the ABCs of marxism. ;-)]
Clarity here seems difficult to achieve.
Bertell Ollman writes:
Many writers, of course, have interpreted these events as the demise not only of particular regimes and forms of social organization but of the Marxist world view to which, at least verbally, their leaders seemed so attached. Leaving aside such obviously important questions as whether and to what extent these regimes were socialist, let alone Marxist, I would just like to point out that the most striking feature of all the social explosions of the past few years -- and remarked upon by virtually every observer -- is just how unexpected they were. What existed before, however one evaluated it, was taken as given and unchanging; just as most people treat the situation that has emerged as a new given and equally unchanging. It is the same mistake that was made in 1789, again in 1848 and again in 1917. These revolutions, too, surprised almost everyone, and as soon as they happened almost everyone alive at the time thought -- wrongly -- that they were over.
_Dialectical Investigations_, p. 3
Now all those events were preceded by an immense amount of "organizing and education," but not one of those doing the "organizing and education" had the least idea of what they were organizing and educating for. If Doug was asking what we should be doing day by day (organizing and educating), the question was merely silly -- a way of substituting empty chatter for casual political chatter. If he was asking for a scenario of revolution, then it exhibits either serious historical ignorance or something very much like serious bad faith.
One of the things that made Lenin great was his capacity to respond to total surprise -- a capacity which the dogmatist's demand for a scenario cripples.
Carrol
P.S. I accepted your term "education," but in a number of ways it is quite wrong, two in particular.
1. Who will educate the educator?
2. How do you get the pupils into the classroom?