>Pretty disgusting.
>
>Chuck
Take to the streets about _what_ exactly? A lost election? Vote fraud that _both_ sides engaged in? Bush? I can get behind racism, but how exactly do you explain that kind of structural racism in a society where people think racism has to be something overt, like thinking blacks are inferior?
WTF would Dean call for street action? He's a democrat for fuck's sake. He wants to be _part_ of the establishment -- merely the democratic wing of the democratic party.
Unlike you, people have jobs, careers, and people who depend on them. They can't just start throwing rotten tomatoes and causing a ruckus in the streets.
And _for_ what exactly? Oh, great. Let's tear down capitalism. Then the fuck what? What next? People need something to protest _for_, not just protest against_. It's like your complaint that no one gives you money. For what? People like to know they're giving money to get something accomplished, not just tossing it at someone and saying, "have a ball. do what you will." Maybe that's wrong of them, but them's the facts.
Just like them's the facts when it comes to the ordinary person's ability to hit the streets protesting whenever they're pissed. If you're going to ask them to sacrifice, you bet your ass you better give them something to sacrifice for and not some abstract ideal or some promised utopian future that no one can exactly flesh out in any concrete way.
What is really annoying is that you DARE call anyone a lazy ass. Talk about calvinism. Not only are they supposed to sweat blood for capital, they're supposed to shout "how high?" when you bellow, "jump!" People work their asses off. The put in 9 hrs at work if they're lucky, around here they have 1/2 hr to 1.5 hr commutes, one way. Then they make dinner, do housework, play with the kids or help with the homework. Some of them have parents to take care of or relatives to help. The next thing you know, it's 9 p.m. and you're exhausted. You maybe get an hour to yourself -- if you didn't bring home work. Alas, you seem to want these people to give up even that lousy hour to themselves.
Oh, I know a lot of you think that, if everyone would just starting marching in the streets, the system would come crashing down around us. You're right it would, but you need a social movement infrastructure. AND, you need to cultivate a form of participatory citizenship. Our institutions and practices do not do this and, indeed, they actively subvert substantive democratic practices.
I have a lot of sympathy for the anarchist critique of planning. But, I tend to gravitate toward it because it's closer to what I think needs to happen than the model Carrol advocates. I believe that, if anything like a revolution is _ever_ to occur, it can only do so with a strong civil and social _infrastructure_ that instills in us the ability to run our own lives. Right now, it's bread and circuses, as Woj says. The skills people need -- working together, volunteering, helping others, organizing, planning, etc. etc. -- they have to be nourished. We have to have democratic structures that nurture substantive participation in the running our daily lives and ordering our obligations to one another. We don't have institutions and practices that foster that at the moment.
If we are _ever_ going to be successful, we need to nourish them. We need to learn how to take care of ourselves.
Which is why anarchism appeals to me: _when_ it focuses on building those small scale institutions and practices that cultivate citizenship in our imagined socialist democracy.
It is why I have said it's too bad we don't organize around the unemployed. Not so we can wave leaflets in their faces and get them to trot along to some boring meeting where they'll listen to someone drone on. That is self-serving, egotistical bullshit designed to advance an organization, not designed to nurture the kinds of people who can sustain a revolution and create a healthy society.
It's why I've advocated a kind of lefty transition program for the unemployed. People need help getting jobs. Instead of the fuckers at the unemployment office doing it or the xtians doing it, lefties help people help themselves. It doesn't have to be that, it can be anything at all. It's just an example I used this summer and sent poor Carrol into a tailspin.
The experience of doing something, of accomplishing something, of helping others, of working together
that is what nourishes the kinds of people who are capable of running their own lives under anarchist conditions.
The project --and we could think of all kinds of others like it--would be something doable. People need small scale successes to stay motivated. Asking people to protest for years and years and years, without _any_ to work toward except some distant anarcho-socialist future, with no demonstrable successes along the way, they will give up.
That's why I think it's great that you do the infoshops. Those are ways of building the infrastructure we need to build a social movement.
Marching in the streets, as Jon says, is only part of a must larger project.
I don't mean to antagonize you, but I really get sick of this continual flogging of anyone who lives their life differently than you do or has different ways of achieving their goals. I'm sick of the endless demands to "jump" and the accusations that we are lazy asses.
Whatever. Rant Off. Kelley
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling