Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >Doug Henwood wrote:
> >>
> >> Charles Brown wrote:
> >>
> >> >CB; I hear people say fairly commonly that "they are wiping out the middle
> >> >class; there will just be rich and poor."
> >>
> >> True enough, but it's another matter to talk about this in the first person.
> >>
> >
> >Isn't this sort of shuffling aside of theory what you objected to in
> >your activistism article. Who's talking about agitational slogans? What
> >is the relevance of the problems of agitation to attempts at
> >understanding the fundamental dynamics of capitalism. They only
> >intersect at a point near infinity.
>
> I know that human agency isn't your strong point, but how do you
> expect to develop a class-based politics if people are filled with
> mystifications about the class nature of the society they belong to?
> This isn't a matter of "agitational slogans," and since it's an
> attempt to take seriously the role of social psychology in politics
> it's hardly anti-theoretical. If a lot of people shy away from the
> term "working class," don't you think you've got a problem on your
> hands? Or are you just waiting for that sudden, inexplicable,
> never-to-be-rushed lightning moment of enlightenment?
You finesse other theoretical questions in your rush to what is close to mindless practice, or so it seems to me. At a national level now we have one clearly defined task, that of establishing a framework for the anti-war movement, a framework within which the most varied local groups, at the most varied levels of sophistication, can find a place. And it is in those local frameworks that organizing decisions encompassing what you call "human agency" need to be made.
And as a matter of fact that _is_ my strong point, and has been for 40 years; it is precisely on those grounds that someone introduced me the other day as the "backbone" of BNCPJ. (It isn't true; Jan is.) And it can't be theorized except in terms of rules of thumb derived from experience. Any theory of human agency worked out at the same level of theory as class analysis would be as irrelevant to practice as quantum physics are to baking pastries. At best such theories could only summarized practice after the fact, and explain why it worked. (Failures are too varied to provide an grist for theory.)
There was a powerful episode on _Real Sports_ some time ago (perhaps it was in an anthology of earlier programs). It took off from a focus on the high level of suicide among retired NFL players. It was a lengthy report & I can't remember many of the details, but one emphasized point was that a substantial majority of such men really did not know what to do with their lives after retirement. And it certainly did not occur to any of them that the life of a rentier could be a very satisfactory life. In other words, these millionaires are probably better understood by seeing them as working class than as "middle class" or new capitalists, though some of them do certainly become the latter, but not very many.
I think a class analysis which, at least to begin with, ignores what you term "human agency" can, ultimately, and for reasons you give in your activistism article, be even better at solving problems of human agency. You clutter the whole discussion by leaping so precipitously from abstract theory to practice.
Carrol