> http://209.204.231.190/BeyondPsych/BeyondPsychoanalysis.htm
> http://209.204.231.190/BeyondPsych/PsychologyofMassOrganizing.htm
> >...9. The Psychology of Mass Organizing
>
> BACK (A Social Approach to Individual Psychology)
>
> In political mass organizing, the socialist propagandist and
> individual organizer in effect strips away a critical aspect of the
> persona of the worker, and so momentarily implicitly reduces that
> worker to the wretched state of a "little me." The general possibility
> of that negative aspect of mass-organizing work varies in effect to
> the extent that the practical habits of the workers' bourgeois
> ideology have ceased to work. Trade-union forms, for example, have
> ceased to provide efficient means within themselves for securing the
> worker the circumstances which coincide with his bourgeoisified
> illusions. More generally, depression conditions, unpopular wars,
> etc., have undermined the authority of those apparent "fixed laws"
> which correspond to the workers' bourgeois-ideological "respect for
> law." The anxiety which the workers have experienced through the
> failure of acts corresponding to their bourgeoisified ego-ideal has
> weakened their sense of identity (passivity) and has undermined the
> authority of the bourgeois-ideological ego-ideals. These are
> circumstances in which aspects of the persona may be more readily
> stripped away.
>
> Stripping away such elements of the persona, by itself, obviously does
> not produce socialist impulses in workers. Quite the opposite; it
> produces an alternation between pathetic passivity and wild, imbecilic
> heteronomic rage. Oppressive conditions, etc., absolutely do not make
> workers class-conscious, revolutionary, etc. Nor could stripping away
> the persona in itself accomplish this.
>
> Socialist organizing is directed to the mobilization of workers around
> a new sense of social identity replacing the "little me," a new sense
> of identity which the propagandist and organizer must synthesize. What
> is to be done is, in effect, to realize to the extent possible the
> possibility for reconstructing an actually human individual from an
> adult accultured by capitalist society. The partial stripping away of
> the persona is at best merely a precondition for the positive work;
> moreover, this stripping-away should be carried out only to the extent
> that the debridement is accompanied by the beginnings of a new sense
> of social identity in the worker. This new sense of social identity is
> an approximation of the creative identity.
>
> The object of organizing is to replace the old persona-determining
> ego-ideals with new criteria, formally identifiable by the concepts of
> class-for-itself and of socialist expanded reproduction. This
> transformation cannot be accomplished by a mere pedagogical
> relationship to the workers involved in this program of personal
> reconstruction. The advancement of the process depends upon the
> individual's acting in such a way as to establish such criteria
> through acts which approximate the realization of class-for-itself and
> expanded reproduction. The new qualities of the worker's identity can
> be developed only as his developing human powers for actualizing those
> qualities in the outer world.
>
> The solution to this apparent difficulty appears in the understanding
> of the point that all abstract (formal) ideas, to the extent they
> reflect or are susceptible of actuality, are nothing but concentrated
> social relations. In this view of the tasks of mass organizing, the
> two conceptions, class-for-itself and socialist expanded reproduction,
> reduce to a single process-conception as follows.
>
> The immediate practical basis for developing rudiments of the class-
> for-itself conception in the worker is that otherwise identified by
> the term motion. The socialist cadre induces the scintilla of a change
> in the individual worker, who replicates that by inducing a scintilla
> of change in other workers. The spread of this process, under the
> conditions that the affected individual workers are being brought
> together to "reenforce" the tendency by unifying their forces on this
> basis, is the deliberate determination of a movement of social forces
> corresponding in principle to a mass-strike process. The
> psychodynamics of the relationships among workers in this process are
> those of love (e.g., "comradeship"); the individual realizes his inner
> identity by positive developments in the conceptual powers of other
> workers, and depends upon them in turn, for development of his
> conceptual powers. These are not abstract conceptions as such, but
> sensuous conceptions, in the sense that the conceptions in themselves
> imply and demand appropriate collective action and represent the
> potential basis for common such actions otherwise impossible.
>
> In this process, up to a certain point, the process of organizing a
> broader force is itself the sensuous activity which feeds the
> development as a whole. The elementary laws of mental life demand
> superseding that condition. Since the failure to execute an
> appropriate collective act destroys the will and weakens the
> conceptions associated with new social identity, the organizing
> process under capitalism must become the basis for a strike process.
> The conception must be sensuously actualized.
>
> Once we consider the sensuous acts corresponding to this mass-strike
> organizing process, the importance of the notion of Freedom/Necessity
> in this process becomes obvious. What is the conception that properly
> demands actuality? Essentially, the mass must act to realize the
> necessary acts corresponding to the potentiality of its actual powers.
> The mere impulse to "free" itself from the objective chains of
> capitalist oppression, which would ordinarily be an irresponsible,
> suicidal act, represents only the pathetic notion of the new
> creativity of the worker's identity. Freedom must be realized as a
> scientifically known means for developing the powers to overthrow
> existing, oppressive laws.
>
> The practical point for the socialist cadres is identified by noting
> the bourgeois- ideological idiocy of the typical members of
> Progressive Labor, International- Socialists, etc., which prompts them
> to limit their efforts to exciting the workers to greater militancy
> around linear slogan-impulses. If one instructs the workers that
> militancy is what is wanted, then how can one restrain the militant
> group of isolated workers from undertaking almost any sort of
> premature, futile, heteronomic act of suicidal desperation? The idea
> of mass-organizing cannot be a simple linear notion of freedom; it
> must be introduced and constantly reestablished as a concept embracing
> Freedom/Necessity, such that the criteria of the mass-act are
> presented as subsumed by the notion of Freedom and vice versa.
>
> Already, we have identified a rudimentary approximation of the tasks
> of organizing. We have eliminated the problem of the pathetic monad-
> self by giving the worker the sensuous realization of the real inner
> self of his creative life. This is socially located (and thus
> reflected) for him, to become an actuality, through his activity of
> reciprocally advancing the conceptual grasp of the situation with a
> growing number of workers. Instead of "little me," as a fixed monad,
> the worker begins to locate his inner self as the socially-reflected
> self-perfecting activity of increasing his mental-sensuous powers. In
> practice, he begins to realize this advancement in his mental and
> social life by working in concert with socialist cadres to effect the
> rudiments of similar changes in other workers.
>
> The instant this begins to occur, the worker becomes virtually class-
> conscious and revolutionary. The instant he breaks with the notion of
> his inner self as a monad-like thing, he has also broken with the
> "organic" epistemological outlook on the world around him as a world
> of fixed laws. He is open to judging possible ways of effecting even
> sweeping changes in the way society is organized, the way "things are
> done."
>
> The change which occurs in this way is efficiently illustrated by
> reviewing the bourgeois myth that the axiomatic principle of
> individual human behavior is "individual material greed." It should be
> obvious that the person who accepts such a false axiom is giving prima
> facie evidence of his own state of internal mental life; he obviously
> has a bourgeois character-structure, with its reductionist monad-
> persona dynamics and its cohering reductionist outlook on the universe
> of the monad's experience. This pathetic element of the worker's usual
> bourgeois character-structure is at the same time an axiomatic basis
> for rationalization of the inevitability and permanence of capitalist
> control of the productive forces. A society of individual-greed
> optimizing monads could only be a pluralistic parody of a capitalist
> form!* "Human nature will never change." "I'm minding my own
> business." "We can take care of our own interests by ourselves without
> outside interference." "That's his problem; I've got to get mine where
> I can." "You couldn't understand, since you're not black and not a
> woman." "Local control." These and similar prima facie evidence of a
> bourgeois character structure more or less directly indicate the
> reasons why no socialist transformation could occur without an
> accompanying and preceding destruction of the personality
> characteristics reflected by such alienated, anti- human rubbish as
> these commonplace slogans. Indeed, precisely as the cynical critics of
> socialism charge, to have socialism it is first necessary to "change
> human nature," or, more exactly, to conquer the bestiality of the
> bourgeois character-structure.
> <snip>
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