>You don't need to convince anyone that you've got a better idea,
No, what Carrol is saying is that, instead of trying to broadcast your idea indiscriminately, you (1) start with what you got (i.e., organizers and activists who already agree with you and are eager to work with you) and then (2) go to likely folks (i.e., regular and sometime activists who are likely to agree with you, though you have to ask them to get their commitment to take action) in critical constituencies (i.e., the most important constituencies for the growth of a social movement in question); only after you pull off (1) and (2) successfully and (3) sizable sectors of folks in critical constituencies beyond usual suspects get involved can you hope to (4) expect others (with the exception of a quarter to a third of the population who are and will be dead set against you) to come into contact with you directly or (in the majority of cases) indirectly. What you should keep in your mind is that, if you have necessary organizing skills and experiences, you can almost always get from (1) to (2), but that you may still be unable to leap from (2) to (3), much less (3) to (4), even if you give your all to the cause and you do everything right. It's an incalculable constellation of material and cultural conditions -- not your ideas, skills, and experiences over which you have some control -- that determines whether or not a social movement makes a leap from (2) to (3) to (4).
Even if luck favors you and you find yourself in the midst of (4), you may still end up losing. If you do win, against all odds, then, a struggle to defend your victory and to minimize demobilization begins.
Liza wrote:
>The dichotomy you're drawing - between working to defeat Bush and
>working to build a movement that demands far more radical change -
>is ridiculous.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "working to defeat Bush." If you are planning to "defeat Bush," even if Bush gains an electoral victory seemingly legitimately, in a way that the Venezuelan rich have continued to seek to sabotage and defeat Bolivarians by any means necessary (and you have to do this without their money and foreign assistance), there is no contradiction between "working to defeat Bush" and working to build a movement that demands far more radical change.
If your idea is to elect a Democrat to "defeat Bush," however, you can't be making demands for radical change and hope to appeal to swing voters to vote for your guy (even in Democratic caucuses and primaries, much less in the general election), for swing voters in the USA are not at all clamoring for radical change of the sort that leftists want (they don't even vote for Kucinich and Sharpton). Swing voters consider you to be a nut they don't want to be associated with if you bring any demands for radical change to them. (Cf. See my first posting in this thread and the posting titled "Caucus Class Demographics.) -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>