I thought it was important to have the whole of the original emails before us so I am sending them to the list in 3 parts.
On 4/14/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
Look, it goes without saying that if most people were organized, elites would not be able to do what they are doing. In fact, it is tautological, true by definition. The real question is not whether the elite would be able to hold to power if grunts were organized (the answer is obvious), but why aren't the grunts organized? How you answer this question determines what you want to do about it.
The above quoted passages suggest, at least in my mind, that the answer you suggest is insufficient organizing effort, as in the US, as opposed to better effort, as in France. I disagree. Organizing is important, to be sure, but it does not take place in vaccuum. There is a myriad of other factors that affect the level of organization. The fact that the US workers are not in rebellion is certainly not because of the lack of trying. I think there has been more conscious efforts to organize people in the US than almost everywhere else. In fact, the volume of organizing in the US was such that for every left wing organizer there were dozens of counter-organizers, organizing people for religion, consumption, right wing and patriotic causes, philanthropic causes, community concersns and what not.
Wojtek,
Let me say, from the evidence of your email, that your problem does not seem to be with the idea of education, organization, and mobilization but with the people of the U.S. or perhaps with U.S. workers.
Let me for a moment accept your point of view. Then where does that lead us? Should we simply give up on the U.S. and trying to build a social movement here? If we do then what? Should we simply hope that the U.S. is defeated by outside forces somehow? Collapses from within? Or perhaps we should hope that everyone in the world gives up and allows the U.S. rulers and owners have their way? Because if the rest of the world doesn't give-up then their will be unspeakable atrocities. If they do give up then their will simply be the triumph of a new form of slavery, the complete dominance of transnational corporations, international political and economic planning by the elite manager's of those corporations, etc. In your view we should just wait for the Great Disaster, and then start to do something. (See below) This is very chiliastic and seems to be the kind of irrationalist symptom that you would criticize if expressed by a fundamentalist Christian Republican. Your version of a rapture, is what you are telling me makes it impossible to organize when it presents itself in the "common folk." In this you are no different than the people you say we can't organize and it is precisely these views that we must fight against,
Essentially the choice that is presented to us is a variation of the old choice between socialism or barbarism -- between the spreading of democratic political and economic forms and a new dark ages. That is the way it seemed to me 25 years ago. But today the choice seems to me to be between human democratic movements and (near) extinction of our species by environment degradation or nuclear war.
I simply disagree with you about the amount of left organizing in this country. If you see how much effort goes into trying to organize people in places like Rio de Janeiro and El Salvador, as I have, and how many times people fail before they have any kind of success at all you would realize that the U.S. is different only in the fact that more U.S. people have given up on changing things than anything else. There are reasons for this and these reasons we have to fight. Some of the reasons are recounted in your previous email. But the point is, you either give up or you keep on fighting. There are no magic bullets. There are no exceptions. Besides the technological innovations, which are merely aids to organizing, there are no new fangled ways of organizing. The best ways are still face to face.
The best ways of organizing are not essentially different than the way religious people recruit... with this difference... we want to try to be Democratic and let people discover the world for themselves. We want both solidarity and independent thinking. If we don't allow for both then we may win some battles but in the long run we won't accomplish what we want. We will fail and we will have to start anew. And when we are defeated, thoroughly, the next generation will have to start all over again, with little memory of what we went through. It's been this way for at least 2,500 years maybe more, perhaps longer. The costs of failure keep on growing, but so do the benefits of success. "Fail. Fail again. Fail better." (Beckett). This has been my "writing motto" ever since I have been 20 and I first read it. It is another variation of Gramsci's oft quoted, "Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060419/1caade44/attachment.htm>