When workers individually struggle, e.g., raising the rate of absenteeism, lowering the birth rate, etc., as cumulative results of their individual struggles, they may not have any consideration of what their struggle is for, much less of "cookbooks of the future." Nevertheless, such individual struggles shape the course of history.
When workers collectively struggle, they have their immediate goals in their minds, e.g., making employers continue to pay for employee health care, fighting against two-tier wages and benefits, etc., but they may not have any consideration of "cookbooks of the future." Regardless, such collective struggles shape the course of history.
A minority of workers, consciously anarchists or socialists, have various conceptions of how (A) their immediate goals of struggle may relate to their desire to establish (B) a mode of production to meet needs and desires, not for profit for the sake of profit. Even then, it is impossible for them (or others) to know in advance whether or how (A) will lead to (B).
Walter Benjamin wrote: "[N]o fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years" ("Theses on the Philosophy of History," <http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html>). Future generations will establish the historical meanings of struggles today that are not available to us.
>[lbo-talk] Nietzschean visions
>Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com, Fri Mar 12 11:56:14 PST 2004
<snip>
>Ted Winslow wrote:
>
>>How does this vision of human authenticity differ from the vision
>>set out in the passages from Zizek I recently quoted or from the
>>identification of Marxian politics with "struggle" disconnected
>>from any consideration of what struggle is for, from any
>>consideration of "cookbooks for the future"?
>
>Not dissimilar. And compare the neocons' attitude towards
>prosperity with that of our hair-shirt leftists, who hate the
>decadence of modern consumer capitalism, as a distraction from the
>real business of life, which is...struggle.
>
>Doug
Frederick Douglass = a hair-shirt leftist? :->
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will" (Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation," speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857, _The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass_, 1950, ed. Philip S. Foner, vol. 2, p. 437). -- Yoshie
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