Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> I
> think his politics tend towards ultraleftism, and he thinks mine go in the
> direction of right opportunism, but so what?
Precisely. One might say that, everyone, at any given moment, is unavoidably either ultra-left or ultra-right*. (Plato tried to deny this.**) That's one of the reasons organizations with internal freedom of debate are so superior to any one person's judgment. It's also why principled debate is preferable to attempts at judging the agents involved.
> I doubt anyone on this list,
> Carrol included, would disagree that a) big political changes occur only
> when there are big changes in social conditions and b) it doesn't follow
> that you should therefore abstain from political activity aimed at more
> modest changes at other times.
Agreed. But my core argument has been that such "political activity aimed at more modest changes" must (a) be as continuous as possible and (b) carried out with awareness that, unpredictably, the activity may (in fact, at some point, _will_) find itself part of those "big changes."
> Differences usually turn on whether one has
> greater respect for the power of "agency" or constraint in human affairs,
> but that's a debate which long predates the socialist movement, one which
> we're not going to resolve here.
I'm not sure that that debate is (a) resolvable in theory or (b) _needs_ to be resolved in theory. It is continually resolved in practice. This is one of the things that can be learned from reading accounts of mass struggles (whether immediately successful or not) in different times and places. Consider the most (in)famous of such incidents -- the decision of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets to declare itself the government of Russia. Martov was obviously correct, Lenin and Trotsky wrong: the conditions [constraint] were wrong. The objective basis did not exist for building a socialist state. The working class was too weak. International capital too strong. The point was, however, that when revolutionary forces _could_ seize power, they had to, whether or not it was correct under the circumstances. This works in even very trivial ("super"-reformist) circumstances. The theoretical issue of constraint vs agency simply disappears.
Marvin and I disagreed sharply on this an other lists several times during the electoral campaign; I kept returning to his arguments for ABB precisely because he did not make the issue one of personal rectitude; and I argued several times on the marxism list that after the election ABBs and anti-DPs would have to work together. (I personally attacked John Lacny because of his personal attacks [Traitor! etc.] on those who would not support Kerry.)
Carrol
*"Ultra-"- This jargon I believe needs to be kept, but it needs to be used with minimal precision (as I believe Marvin does here), not as mere cursewords. There are several rough and ready ways to describe the two (omnipresent) tendencies. "Ultra-Right" or "Right Opportunism" is grounded in an overestimation of the strength of the working class, an underestimation of the strength of capital; "Ultra-Left" or "Left Opportunism" is grounded on an overestimation of the strength of capital, an underestimation of the strength of the working class. The result is "right opportunists" tend to treat enemies as friends; "left opportunists" tend to treat friends as enemies. Properly used, these phrases describe positions, not people; used to describe people they lead
**(Cornford translation; Thrasymachus speaking): "Would you [Socrates] say a man deserves to be called a physician at the moment when he makes amistake in treating a patient and just in respect of that mistake; or a mathematician, when he does a sum wrong and just in so far as he gets a wrong result? . . .A man is mistaken when his knowledge fails him; and at that moment he is no craftsman." This was a fundamental repudiation of democracy, of the acceptability of arriving at collective judgments through the collective struggle of fallible citizens. One needed 'statesmen' who were always correct in power.