joanna bujes wrote:
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> You're mostly right Yoshie, but let's admit that it's not "simple."
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> Political/organizing work is incredibly hard, detailed, and unrelenting.
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The second proposition is, at least in part, a non sequitur. The opposite of "simple" is not "hard, detailed, & unrelenting" but "complex" (which may or may not be hard....)
There are complexities hidden as it were within Yoshie's description of organizational work (e.g., defining the material content of "likely constituencies") -- but those complexities are mostly anterior or posterior to the actual work of organizing -- which itself is (and should be seen as) simple rather than complex.
The complexity _after_ the fact resides in summing up and interpreting the work. The main complexity prior to the fact is one Yoshie and I have been pounding away on as long as this list has existed: At any given point in the task of organizing the only people you can reach are those who already agree with you. These people fall roughly into five categories:
1. Those who agree with you and want to work with you but don't know you exist.
2. Those who agree with you and want to work with you (but don't know yet that they want to work with you because they more or less accept TINA (and who probably don't know you exist).
3. Those who agree with you but don't know they do (and will perhaps and perhaps not be people willing at a given time to work with you).
4. Those who don't yet either agree or disagree with much of anything but will be apt to explore any ideas that they _see_ visibly setting other people in motion.
5. Those who agree with you but are convinced (as most subscribers to this list are) that one must give first priority to figuring out the right arguments to persuade those who don't agree already. These in turn will subdivide into several sub-categories:
a. Those who will constantly gum up organizing efforts by weeping and wailing about only preaching to the choir.
b. Those who will simply drop out after awhile because nothing exciting is happening.
c. Those who discover that they have an unexpected talent for agitation and organizing and will before long take over the leadership from you. (You will find this sub-category under the preceding four main categories as well.) This sub-category (whichever main category it comes from) is sort of what makes life worth living.
All the painful (but simple) work Yoshie outlines is devoted to reaching these various categories (and the beauty and the wonder comes when it turns out, very rarely but once or twice in a lifetime, that Category 4 is not only much larger to begin with than you dared to dream, but is growing every day).
Carrol