It's worse than that, I concentrate on what makes us go from punctuation to equilibrium (although one shouldn't think of that as a frozen state). My guesses on the change from equilibrium to punctuation get tangled up in endlessly recursive causation and don't seem too illuminative.
>It seems
>to me that such periods are seriously unpredictable and probably can't
>be forced. I've got to do a lot more rereading of Gould to get a grip on
>this, but I think he claims that in evolution too the punctuations are
>mostly contingent and quite unpredictable.
Because of the large number of variables. Just because we can't predict something doesn't mean we can't analyze it while it's happening.
>If this is so, then it should be possible for "the left" to avoid a good
>deal of merely destructive self-laceration (called criticism), since
>such criticism seems implicitly claim that "things would be better" if
>"the left" would shape up. There _might_ and might not have been
>something that leftists could have done in the period of (say) 1970-74
>to carry the movement of the '60s forward, or even reignite it. But I
>myself am convinced that nothing leftists (or _the_ left) might have
>done in the last quarter of the century would have made any significant
>difference. This doesn't mean that we should have packed up and gone
>home. One keeps digging, in part because the next explosion is
>unpredictable, but the main task during such periods should simply be
>not to burn out and to maintain some sort of visibility.
Strike up a chorus of 'que sera, sera.' If (as I hope we do) we learn lessons from experience, then it follows that we could've done better. The other problem with this is that we need to be applying whatever we've learned now, not waiting until there's a crisis and they trying them out. For example, most organizations are not ready to quadruple their size in six months--do we wait for a 'crisis of success' to take a look at our past errors and ponder them? This is what a lot of the kvetching about WWP vs. UFPJ was about. Leave aside the politics (please), one group had the structure in place, the other one needed to build it from the ground up when the war was almost upon us.
>I guess another way of putting it is that the question, "What Is To Be
>Done?" is a question that is only intermittently relevant -- the answer
>to it most of the time being simply, don't tire out and don't get
>frantic. (A friend in the '60s quoted Lenin as saying there are three
>revolutionary virtues, Patience, Patience and Patience. I've never come
>across it in my reading of Lenin, but if he didn't say it he should
>have.)
There's a difference between Patience and Waiting Around.
>We entered some sort of period of growth, I think, on 9/11, and I've
>argued locally that our main obligation now is to hold together as best
>we can for the time being: that nothing very explosive is going to
>happen, but we should maintain exploratory activity so as to remain
>visible.
Let me get this right--you think we're in a holding pattern *right now*? I'll agree that direct third-party organizing is going to be on the back burner right now but what about everything else? Organizing on almost anything is like falling off a log. That's gotta be a sign of something.
>In 1968 there appeared to be a chance of a real merging of the anti-war
>and civil-rights movements. (Did the King assassination stop that?)
>Perhaps a sign that we are in a real period of punctuation is if
>different struggles do began to overlap or merge significantly. That
>isn't happening yet in the present.
I think it's unwise to wait for some Babylonian thunderbolt to forge these connections for us. The late Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) a few years ago gave his response to this line that capitalism is going down, why fight it so hard?... "Because if we don't fight it it's going to take us all down with it."
>And perhaps a sign of equilibrium is if too many activists desert
>political activity to line up behind the Democratic Party, which always
>I think is a signal of giving up.
Or it could be a sign of *thinking* that we have to give up (join the Dems), that is, underestimating what can be done at a given time.
Jenny Brown