>When you speak about a division of labor, I understand you to be
>advocating a much broader understanding of how a social movement
>grows/might grow. Obviously, people who want to _base_ _a_ left
>social movement on party-building understand the need for a division
>of labor. So, it's not that they reject a DoL. It's that they are
>marking a distinction between those who plant seeds and cultivate
>the sprouts as their vision of party building, and those who prepare
>the soil for planting as their vision of building left social
>movement (i am using movement here as bell hooks does in Feminist
>Theory: From Margin to Center_).
>
>What you're saying is that building _a_ party (planting a seed and
>cultivating the spout into a flowering, fruit-bearing plant) must be
>done in soil that needs to be tilled, fertilized, and prepared by
>others in order for the plant to flourish, nourished by the work of
>the soil tenders. (*sigh* I miss my garden and I hate this sand!)
Yup, I agree with this. I am very torn, though. Lots of people who advocate party-building are thinking of One True Party, but that just doesn't seem right in this place and time. But I'm also worried about fragmentation and lack of focus. I find the idea of a "movement of movements," as Michael Hardt and the Italians like to say, appealing, but I worry they'll devolve into typically American activistism, localism, particularism. How to get the parts to work together without freezing into one homogenous or authoritarian whole?
Doug