Ummm, then read Sennett's The Hidden Injuries of Class, now 30 years old, but still recognizable. I think there's actually a lot to be learned from Fanshen, or even older stuff. I'm reading Thucydides now, and finding it very much on point. jks
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Fanshen is a difficult book to describe to anyone who hasn't read it. To begin with it is a very beautiful work. In one of the Pisan Cantos Pound quotes someone saying "Slowness is Beauty," and Fanshen has some of that quality. I don't know any book quite like it; in a very general way the books that come to mind are Boswell's Johnson, Moby Dick, Grant's Memoirs, Matthiessen's American Renaissance. All large books, which move slowly, and which embody a struggle to get a large mass of detail just right. Perhaps even Thycydides, though it's been so long since I read it (or Gibbon) that it's really not part of my active awareness anymore.
And it is a book of which one can say, in reference to the struggles which it records, that it keeps up human courage. A couple years ago I summarized a passage in it in which the twin goals of the struggle in Longbow, for "modernization" and for democracy, came into savage conflict. Someone on the list pronounced boldly that there was no doubt what the village CP group should have done. So perhaps what one can learn from Fanshen is thar real contradictions do exist, and that in actual political struggle, they are not that easily resolved.
That is virtually a copybook maxism. But Fanshen gives it an edge.
Doug's reminds me Mine made on m-fem a few years ago, of airily dismissing any possible analogies between events under different circunmstances. As I pointed out to her at the time, some aspects of organizing do not differ whether one is oWe have very little material treating in detail of the experience of people in the midst of transforming struggles. My reply to her at the time, which I reproduce below, seems to apply to Doug's argument here.
Carrol
Subject: Re: M-FEM digest 241 (fwd)
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 09:57:05 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu>
md7148 at cnsvax.albany.edu wrote:
> "community organizing, as practiced everywhere"? the conditions
> in the capitalist periphery of the world economy are much worse than the
> conditions in the capitalist core of the system. people living in the
> third world get fucked "twice"-
Mine, Katha knows this. Practically all who even vaguely call themselves Marxists or radicals or progressives know it. Hundreds of thousands who call themselves (and mostly are) liberals know this. In repeating points like this you are insulting Katha, you are insulting all the subscribers to this list. Even the FBI agent assigned to monitor the list probably knows this. Who do you think you are teaching with teaching with what is for marxists (i.e., most of the subscribers to this list) such grade school material?
And yes, "community organizing" of essentially the same sort *is* practiced everywhere. The tactics under actual combat conditions in China and Vietnam and Laos did not differ essentially from the tactics used in San Francisco to get a stop sign at a dangerous intersection or in Manchester in 1840 to build a Workers' Shakespeare Discussion Group. There is little variation possible.
And of course those tactics have to be adopted to local conditions. No one tries to get a stop sign placed at the intersection of two mule trails. No one tries to initiate the making of home-made weapons in Omaha. But the mode of organizing remains essentially unchanged.
Did you know that 3 + 5 equals 8; that Albany is the capital of New York. That Denver, Colorado is closer to the Rockies than is Rollo, Missouri. That's the kind of information you are giving us.
It is impossible to carry on conversation, or even sharp polemics, unless the participants make some attempt to recognize shared knowledge. Your posts recently have mouthed pure truisms as though others really did not know that 3 + 5 = 8.
Carrol