Daniel Davies wrote:
>
> Kelley very sensibly wrote:
>
> >>. being an activist tends to
> require a certain lifestyle and not everyone can obtain those lovely
> conditions for the entirety of their lives.<<
>
> Furthermore, what ever the conditions of their life, it is highly unlikely
> that everyone, or indeed a particularly high percentage of people, have the
> personality type to be an activist. It looks like a pretty difficult job
> to me; not unlike being a salesman for an unpopular product. Casual
> empiricism suggests to me that there are few people as unhappy an
> ineffectual as people who have gone into sales jobs but aren't really cut
> out for them, so I suspect that anyone trying (from the best of motives) to
> put pressure on people to do their duty and be activists, is most likely
> causing avoidable misery.
>
> dd
I think a somewhat unrealistic concept of "activist" is involved here. In my own definition of the term (based on my own experience and that of people I've known well or worked with) one can be an "activist," even a "leader," giving only a couple of hours a week to said activism. It's _easier_ perhaps if one has an easy job that pays well, or in some way has a lot of spare time. But most activists over the last century and a half have been ordinary people who have to earn their own living (often not a very good living at that).
The last national organization I belonged to went into its final tailspin because it took on tasks that couldn't be performed by its members and leadership -- because neither could take the time from earning a living to perform those tasks, or wage those battles.
Carrol
P.S. The romantic conception of "activists" involved here may go back to gross misinterpretations both by Third International leadership _and_ by anti-leninists of what Lenin meant by "professional revolutionaries." He did _not_ mean people who spent all their time as revolutionaries. He meant people who spent _most_ of their time earning a living but gave serious thought to how they should organize the few hours a month they could give to political activity. See Hal Draper, "The Myth of Lenin's 'Concept of the Party': Or What They Did to _What Is To Be Done?_" _Historical Materialism_ No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 187-213, esp. pp. 192-194.