Dwayne wrote: "The vision appears to be of a self-propelled, collaborative, non-hierarchical species improvement program. I could be wrong but I believe it's quite novel for political/social activists to think in these ways. "
My own sense is that it's not entirely novel. Gramsci included such elements in his thinking regarding the reciprocal (and increasingly symmetrical) educational dynamics at work in the development of a transformative historic bloc. Some indicative passages:
"one could say that each one of us changes himself, modifies himself to the extent that he changes and modifies the complex relations of which he is the hub. In this sense the real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man [sic] who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in. If one's own individuality is the ensemble of these relations, to create one's personality means to acquire consciousness of them and to modify one's own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations."
(Gramsci, 1971: 352, emphasis in original).
"man becomes, he [sic] changes continuously with the changing of social relations...Each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations... The 'societies' in which a single individual can take part are very numerous, more than would appear. It is through these 'societies' that the individual belongs to the human race" (1971: 355, 353).
"An historical act can only be performed by "collective man," and this presupposes the attainment of a "cultural-social" unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world.... This problem can and must be related to the modern way of considering educational doctrine and practice, according to which the relationship between teacher and pupil is active and reciprocal so that every teacher is always a pupil and every pupil a teacher. ...Every relationship of "hegemony" is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilizations."
(Gramsci, 1999: 665-66; my emphasis)
"What matters is that a new way of conceiving the world and man is born and that this conception is no longer reserved to the great intellectuals, to professional philosophers, but tends rather to become a popular, mass phenomenon, with a concretely world-wide character, capable of modifying (even if the results include hybrid combinations) popular thought and mummified popular culture."
(Gramsci, 1971: 417)
I suppose what separates Gramsci from more anarchist-inspired modes of thought is the somewhat ambiguous role he assigns to the class-based Party in all of this, although I think it's possible to argue that the transformative process was fundamental for him in a way that the Party wasn't. Potential common ground between Old Left and New Left?
I would welcome your thoughts. Thanks,
Mark