Michael McIntyre wrote:
>
> I do remember that, quite a few years ago now, during my introduction
> to rational choice theory Jon Elster called our attention to a
> psychology experiment demonstrating that, when exposed to a fixed
> game, only depressed participants were able to identify the game as
> fixed. Which, of course, didn't get them anywhere . . . but at least
> they knew why they weren't getting anywhere. This, of course, raises
> the causality question. Does depression cause the ability to perceive
> a grim reality accurately . . . or does the ability to perceive a grim
> reality accurately cause depression?
Doug failed to recognize Justin's quotation from Beckett a couple weeks ago -- probably another instance of seeing what you expect to see.
I can't go on. I'll go on.
Note that Beckett's hero doesn't say "I will go on." That would reveal a (probably empty) moral promise to go on, while "I'll go on" is merely an empirical observation of what is. What this does, in part, is make redundant or unneeded Gramsci's "optimism of the will." One goes on whether or no.
Doug wants to see an impossibly tight fix between "psychological status" (or whatever the term would be) and relationship to the world and to practice. It's a variation of the hippie-lust of the '60s for an impossible harmony of thought, feeling, and action. It won't happen. But if one insists on having it, the only route is to develop illusions which allow one to pretend a unity that is not there.
The hope of what one might call the LEFT left liberal is that a large number of near-zeros in politics will add up to a positive. And that won't work. Those little rivulets running down the sand hill _would_ eventually forge a mighty river _if they were continuous_. But they aren't, and by the time the third drizzle of few drops lands, the minute trenches dug by the earlier drops have been filled in. Even if the Wellstones, the Sanders, the Obamas were really at all like the illusory Wellstone or Sanders or Obama in the heads of their admirers it would make no differnce: by the time any more like them come along their effect will have faded.
The history of the immediate post-war era is illuminating. There had been great victories for the left in the 1930s, and in the late '40s and early '50s there was a trickle of additional mini-victories. (E.g., the winning of employer-financed pensions first by the UAW and then by a number of other great industrial unions.) Those mini-victories can represent the illusions of the left-liberals: the illusion that a lot of little victories can add up to something. But of course all the victories of the '40s are gone now. (If you don't believe this, ask the workers at Delphi.) I'm arguing a general principle here which I think most history will confirm: Little victories come only as derivative from big victories, and moreover never themselves add up to any substantial victory but instead tend to be eroded in subsequent years.
The truth really is the whole -- and though we can't know the whole we can know anything only by some provisional grasp of it.
My position is that the whole now is in the relationship of u.s. imperialism (and its main imperialist allies) to the rest of the world, and that the principal (or dominant) aspect of that relationship (or contradiction) is u.s. power. Until the imperial hegemony of the u.s. receives serious setbacks, there probably will not be any mass movement in the u.s. of the magnitude of the '60s, the '30s, or the late 19th c. And pending such a movement, a little gain here and a little gain there is no gain at all.
This does not mean there is nothing for us to do. There is a great deal for us to do, but focusing on the likes of this election is a mere distraction from our tasks.
Carrol