From Empty to full Auditoriums: How, was post-leftism or something

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>"Important" is an understatement. It is also important to recognize that
>>we not only do not know where the next movement will come from or what
>>will trigger it, we don't have a very deep understanding of where _past_
>>movements (revolutionary or otherwise) have come from.
>
>[...]
>
>>This is related to my continuing attempt to explain that it is of no use
>>to give a lecture or sermon (no matter how brilliant in content and
>>masterfully articulated) in an empty auditorium. That is, the question
>>of "what should we say?" is irrelevant unless subordinated to the
>>question, "How can we recruit an audience to listen to what we say" --
>>and that audience must be recruited while they are NOT listening to us.
>>Hence at the present time only what we say to each other, pointing
>>towards (non-argumentative and non-persuasive) methods of recruiting and
>>audience is of any use to the future.
>
>But you've also disparaged the notion of recruitment in the past, 
>and even in the first part of this paragraph, since nothing "we" can 
>say can persuade the unpersuaded. And you've expressed the fatalism 
>of the first graf many times. So is this the Waiting for Godot 
>theory of revolution? If we sit around talking among ourselves, 
>eventually the right circs will materialize, we know not how? 
>"Nothing to be done," as Vlad and Esty used to say - the other Vlad, 
>not the Impaler, and certainly not the Vlad of What Is To Be Done?
>
>Doug

Not so much Samuel Beckett as Hannah Arendt.  From _On Revolution_:

*****   The role the professional revolutionists played in all modern 
revolutions is great and significant enough, but it did not consist 
in the preparation of revolutions.  They watched and analyzed the 
progressing disintegration in state and society; they hardly did or 
were in a position to do, much to advance and direct it.  Even the 
wave of strikes that spread over Russia in 1905 and led into the 
first revolution was entirely spontaneous, unsupported by any 
political or trade-union organizations, which, on the contrary, 
sprang up only in the course of the revolution.  The outbreak of most 
revolutions has surprised the revolutionist groups and parties no 
less than all others, and there exists hardly a revolution whose 
outbreak could be blamed upon their activities.  It usually was the 
other way around: revolution broke out and liberated, as it were, the 
professional revolutionists from wherever they happened to be -- from 
jail, or from the coffee house, or from the library.  Not even 
Lenin's party of professional revolutionists would ever have been 
able to 'make' a revolution; the best they could do was to be around, 
or to hurry home, at the right moment, that is, at the moment of 
collapse.  Tocqueville's observation in 1848, that the monarchy fell 
'before rather than beneath the blows of the victors, who were as 
astonished at their triumph as were the vanquished at their defeat', 
has been verified over and over again.   (Hannah Arendt, _On 
Revolution_, 1963, pp. 259-260)   *****

Arendt puts it a little too melodramatically and overstates her case, 
but there is a grain of truth in what she says, especially concerning 
revolutionary social changes.

And then, another grain of truth -- this time from Hegel:

*****   The special interest of passion is thus inseparable from the 
active development of a general principle: for it is from the special 
and determinate and from its negation, that the Universal results. 
Particularity contends with its like, and some loss is involved in 
the issue. It is not the general idea that is implicated in 
opposition and combat, and that is exposed to danger. It remains in 
the background, untouched and uninjured. This may be called the 
cunning of reason, - that it sets the passions to work for itself, 
while that which develops its existence through such impulsion pays 
the penalty and suffers loss. For it is phenomenal being that is so 
treated, and of this, part is of no value, part is positive and real. 
The particular is for the most part of too trifling value as compared 
with the general: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. The Idea 
pays the penalty of determinate existence and of corruptibility, not 
from itself, but from the passions of individuals.

(G.W.F. Hegel, _Philosophy of History_, 
<http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm#026>) 
*****

Minus idealism and teleology, it's a necessary antidote to voluntarism.
-- 
Yoshie

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