Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > [Doug:]
> >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.
This is silly. Of course we try to recruit. As to persuading the unpersuaded Doug has never yet even _tried_ to explain the mystical process by which those who do not know we exist can still be persuaded by our arguments. I and quite a few thousand other people in the U.S.have spent a good deal of our time over the last 30 years exploring ways to attract attention so there will be someone around to persuade. It's worth doing, but those who think that we can make it happen are doomed to academic frivolity or real despair.
And Doug _must_ know (except when he's responding to one of my posts -- or rather, once again, not responding to the post but commenting on the poster) that no one has _ever_ been persuaded to _anything_ unless their activity (however generated) had led them to want to be persuaded. (I think he, Kelley, and others are lying, probably to themselves, when they claim that an argument has caused them to change their mind in any substantive way. In marginal ways, within the scope of our activity, all of us I suppose keep changing our minds every day, often in response to an "argument" -- but never of course an argument by someone we don't even know exists.
> > 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
I fear that Doug simply can't think _politically_; he is completely caught up in the journalistic and/or scholarly trap of assuming an audience prepared to believe. And he has _never_ offered any example of a large movement being "planned" in advance -- i.e., hecan't give a counter-example to the examples Arendt gives in the passage quoted by Yoshie. And the devil of it is, that there is _nothing_ at all original or personal in this argument I have given time after time. It is a mere summary of 400 years actual practice. One need not be a Marxist or a political theorist at all. It simply requires a _little_ bit at least of actual political practice to take for granted these points. I have clarified them for myself (and for a few others) after encounering journalistic or academic conceptions of political organizing on this and other maillists.
>
> 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.
Arendt of course accepts the elementary misunderstanding of "profesisonal" in this context which has corrupted understanding of WITBD by both followers and enemies of "Lenin" and "Leninism." See Hal Draper's article on this in _Historical Materialism_ 4:
****
It can easily be shown that, from Lenin's copious discussions of the professional revolutionary for years after _WITBD_, that, to Lenin, the term meant this: _a party activist who devoted most (preferably all) of his spare time to revolutionary work_. [Note SPARE time] The professional revolutionary considers his revolutionary activity to be the centre of his life (or of his lifestyle, if you will). He must work to earn a living, of course, but this is not his life's centre. Such is the professional revolutionary type. (p. 193)*****
Actually, an econ grad student from Stony Brook, speaking some 35 years ago at a conference on "Radicals in the Professions" at Ann Arbor (at which I first decided that I would probably be a marxist when I figured out what a marxist was) put it this way: "Are we," he asked, referring specifically to teachers, "radical teachers or teachers who are radicals?" (Radical carpenter or carpenter who is a radical, radical Walmart clerk, or Walmart clerk who is a radical?) It took me about 5 minutes to make up my mind that I chose the second alternative. I wasn't a radical teacher (and never tried to be): I earned a living by teaching (having as much fun and being as useful as possible while doing so) but my centre was being a radical -- a marxist.
Draper continues:
**** I have come to believe that part of the confusion stems from the important difference in the meaning of _professional_ between English and most continental languages. In French ...the word _professionel_ refers simply to an occupation. Whereas, in English, only lawyers, doctors and other recognised "professions" can be said to have "professional" activity, in French this can be said of anyone of any occupation. . . .(Of course this does not count for non-English Leninologists, and is only one factor in the confusion.) p. 193)****
> [clip] 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.
> [clip](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.
One can keep quite a bit of Arendt's formulation. What she leaves out (and what in all my posts on lbo I have taken for granted but Doug seems unwilling to acknowledge) is that it is (a) pretty damn difficult to "wait around" to participate actively in that mass movement when it comes (unexpectedly) and (b) that even the kind of professionalism Draper speaks of requires constant training on the job as it were -- and there again, the effort usually (over the last 30 years) fails*, and one has to simply go back to the next opportunity. While the journalists and the academics can enjoy themselves making fine distinctions within the capitalist class (about whom we know very little in fact -- but that it another story: See Domhoff) or whining because those toiling away to find someone to talk to aren't making large persuasive speeches to magically filled auditoriums.
* "Fails": In the sense of achieving the overt goals of the particular struggle (though once we did salvage a life that a racist prick in the Normal Police Dept. was trying his damndest to ruin). Each struggle, small or large, often (not always) leaves behind it one or two new links, people who have become involved in politics through the struggle. If the interval before the next occasion is not too long those links survive and may develop more fully.
Carrol
P.S. just a few months before I first got involved in some local political (civil rights) activity I had been intensively reading Arendt, especially _The Human Condition_ and _On Revolution_, but also a book of essays the title of which I forget. She probably was the one who made me a marxist. :-) That would perhaps make her wince! And what impressed me most, even when I had no experience to affirm it, was her discussion of the way in which Committess of Correspondence, soviets, etc. sprang into existence under utterly unpredictable circumstances. Marx _recognized_ the Commune, he didn't project it. Lenin _recognized_ the Soviets; he never dreamt that such a thing would be. A friend did quote Lenin (perhaps in some recorded conversation or letter I haven't read) as saying there were three revolutionary virtues: 1. Patience 2. Patience 3. Patience.
And lest it go out with the day's news, as it in fact already has (and only in local Bloomington news at that) a great woman died here last spring -- Beulah Thornton Kennedy. She had been a black student at ISU when it was virtually all white & racist as hell. And when some of the excitement began in the mid-sixties, she triggered a local (black and white) group (later, at the suggestion of a SNCC worker, named US). It is hard, perhaps impossible, to describe the kind of person she was, though someone like her must exist wherever political activity flares. She never got her name in the paper, and never really got recognized (except by about every person who ever came in contact with her). About all I can do is repeat what I said to her when I visited her two days before her death: "Beulah, It has been a privilege to know you, and an honor to be your friend."
She never got her name in the paper, and never really got recognized. But in many ways the US group was an expression of her energy. Her husband, who was the first person to recived some awards initiated by local Human Relations Councils in later years, had to fight like hell to get her, belatedly, given one of the rewards -- almost all the US group members had been so awarded some years earlier. No one knew how important she had been for a few years. _That_ is the unexpected spontaneity which is fundamental to all mass movements.
Carrol
P.S. for humor. One of the things the US group did was to put a black Santa in the 1966 Christmas Parade in Bloomington. Half the police force came out to prevent that, so "Santa" (Merlin Kennedy) walked along about 20 yards behind it! So easy in those days to turn a whole community into an uproar!
P.S. 2. Bruce Franklin passed on an interesting anecdote to me once. Some "pure-peace" types were maintaining a regular picket at a napalm plant somewhere in the Bay Area. They had been beaten several times by some of the workers. Bruce and friends showed up one day with barrel staves. The reaction of at least some of the plant workers was something to the effect of "Hey, we didn't know you were serious. Let's talk." Organizing is to a large extent dreaming up and implementing ways to announce one's presence to those who, if they only knew it, already in substantial ways agree with you. I think the riots of the '60s probably did much more to shift the racial attitudes of many whites in a substantial ways than did the collective works of ML King.