> if only we could be so sure. Maybe even as
> recently as ten years ago this would be more
> or less true, but the internet really has
> changed things. I found out to my
> unbelievable surprise a month or two ago that
> a flamewar that I was having about Darfur on
> the Guardian website was being followed in
> Sudan, by people who were actually in a
> position to influence real events. You
> really can't assume any more that you are
> totally without influence; it's pretty
> frightening.
Right. A couple of months ago, I put up a little blog following up the events around the Mexican election. I wasn't even able to keep it up as much as I wanted. Yet, I've got feedback from people in the opposition's decision making circles about the influence my arguments were having. It was -- as you say -- frightening, writing from afar, physically detached from what's going on there.
Re. the philosophical debate on responsibility -- we are responsible insofar as we have some degrees of freedom -- and we have them insofar as we are not dead! At the same time, our responsibility is limited to those *finite* degrees of freedom. For many working people, experiential frames of reference and basic livelihood concerns make it harder for them to assume conscious social responsibility. But others don't have that kind of excuse.
I take Chomsky a million times over those who sell passivity under the cloak of patience. Giving up in our attempts, however limited they may be, to influence government policies is philosophical fatalism and political defeatism. Chomsky is correct in emphasizing the active side of our personal potential. Because responsibility is always accompanied by power. It all starts with our assuming our inalienable individual power -- small as it may be. And taking it from there, leveraging it through cooperation and organization with others.
One of my favorite capsules of Marxist wisdom against contemplative materialism (even if disguised as cool political wisdom) is the first theses on Feuerbach:
"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in "Das Wesen des Christenthums", he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of revolutionary, of practical-critical, activity."