(The heading's a May '68 slogon, Luke, alongw ith another one I like: Be realistic: demand the impossible.)
Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote:Justin wrote:
>Big marches and mass movements rarely attain their announced goals, but they scare >the shit out of die Herrschenden, the masters, and curb their misbehavior. From the examples you cited, apparently this thesis at least occasionally holds. I wonder why? Justin: Because, as Gramsci taught us, hegemony rests on a mix of force and consent (or acquiesence, anyway). In stable societies, consent is dominant; a society where the ruling class rules mainly by force is liable to be unstable. Anything that brings hundreds of thousands or more into the streets is a signal that there is at least a partial withdrawal of consent. That's why oit scares the shit of the bosses. Now, well-disclined, routine demos, obviously are far less of an indicator of this sort of delegitimation. Maybe the complaints here are about the later sort. But then you never know ahead of time which it will turn out to be. Who could have predicated that Seattle would turn out the way it did? And the antiglobaliz
ation demos clearly do scare the shit out die Herrschenden. The problem with Nathan's patient living room teach-ins and letter writing campaigns--not taht there is anything wrong with those activities, I do them and advocate them them--is that they never scare the bosses. Which isn't to say atht they don't influence the bosses, as the Tip O'Neill story indicates. But polite letter writing and lobbying means you are still playing within the rules, not withdrawing consent, just differing about policy. Within every mass demo, however, is the potential for something unpredictable; the possibility of going beyond its stated ends, the threat of revolution. It's remote, but it is real. That is why, in the end, mass actions scare our masters in a way that nothing else quite does. jks
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