Yoshie reads me as saying that organizers have to "start with folks who hate your guts." Needless to say, I didn't suggest any such thing, but her reaction indicates the emotional underpinnings of this subject. Embattled radical organizers can indeed get the feeling that the whole world outside their circle "hates their guts," but that just isn't true. A lot of people who, at first glance, don't seem to share your ideas would be sympathetic and friendly, if you approached them as fellow human beings, not as "Organizers," capital O. But it does take a little courage, some faith that those horrible "right-wingers" (or at least a good proportion of them) might in fact have some common ground with you.
She has also intuited from what I wrote (I don't know how) that I think that organizers should work as isolated individuals, without a single, solitary companion. Where did I say that? Heck, even Mormon missionaries go around in pairs! Of course, you start with small groups. The question is: what kind of group? How do such groups operate? Do they operate from a hyper-defensive, closed-off position, or an open, two-way-communicating position? It seems to me that the feminist, civil rights, labor, etc., organizations which have had success have operated the latter way.
Carrol assumes that I have never had any political organizing experience. I wonder how he obtained that knowledge. I've had a modest amount of such experience, as a matter of fact, going back to the '60s. But I have never enjoyed the experience of huddling in a small group of ideological soul sisters/brothers, sheltering each other from the alleged hostile, "brainwashed," "ignorant," "racist yahoos" outside our cave. The result of that huddling together, I think, is that these folks often become incapable of communicating with anyone who doesn't share all of their assumptions and language. No wonder that they usually remain small, splinter groups.
All too often, radical groups develop in what I would call a hot-house atmosphere -- only talking and listening to themselves, only reading literature on an approved reading list, looking down on the rest of the world as ignorant, unenlightened, uninformed, etc., etc. They assume that their communication process must be one-way -- they need to communicate their truth to a world that doesn't yet know it, and that world should just shut up and listen to them.
I am only suggesting -- and I am not laying down any laws, or "bellyaching," as Carrol has it, just making a suggestion and raising a question or two -- that more progress might be made (though it might take some time) if we reversed this assumption, at least for a little while. Radicals might try keeping their mouths shut and listening to the people they are trying to organize for a change.
Look, I'm just suggesting that workers, even American workers, might possibly have minds which do work, in some fashion. They might just realize, in their own way, that the system is screwing them. They might have an inkling of an idea that "another world is possible." They may express their insights in terms that mystify or even disgust us enlightened lefties -- religious language, capitalist language, even -- horror of horrors! -- "right-wing" language.
But I think that they know, just as well as we do, that the system needs to be changed. The problem, perhaps, is that the language most leftists use is one that average Americans don't "get." if you get below that language level to the emotional level where non-intellectuals (and most people, unlike most of us on an e-mail list like us, are non-intellectuals) live most of their lives, you might be surprised to find that there is more sympathy there for the idea of changing the capitalist system than you might think. (Of course, you also have to some practical ideas about what you would change the system *to,* which few anti-capitalists have these days, in my estimation, but that is another topic.) You might find a strong yearning for a society based on solidarity rather than on commodity fetishism (they don't have the vocabulary to express themselves in those terms, but they do feel it). Most American adults today (except for the oldest ones) grew up in a commodified society where they had to pay for everything they needed, and had to work to be able to pay for it. So of course their minds are focused on money, and can easily belief the Bush BS that the government is "taking away their money," etc. But if leftists could learn to listen to the emotions under the words, they might be able to find the language in which to speak to their condition, as Quakers say.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax