andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> Carrol, your own repeated "maybe the beans are really
> magic, who knows" is not going to persuade anyobe
> either.
I'm getting ready to leave town for 9 days so this will be hurried & inadequate.
I'm not sure what you think I want to perusuade people _to_!
My working assumption is that people move towards a _socialist_ vision (of some kind) when and only when they are involved, deeply involved, in mass struggle for immediate or at least shortrun goals _inside_ capitalism. And it is to such struggles that I wish to attract people.
And as has happened many times in the last century, within such struggles when they become large and active enough, many of their participants begin to see the impossibility of capitalism, and _that_ is the basis upon which one begins (tentatively) to discuss and debate the details of a socialist future.
And in order to build such 'reform' struggles inside capitalism why do I have to have a "persuasive" picture of a socialist future?
We can debate more or less in the abstract the viability of capitalism and the nature of its political strengths and weaknesses. I say "in the abstract" because a maillist is almost by definition separated from any concrete struggle, and that means _all_ our discussions are necessarily abstract.
This is so even when the immediate topic of a discussion concerns current events & the analysis of empirical fact. For example, in the summer of 2003 a number of people on this list made a big deal out of the fact that on an opinion poll only (_only_) 14% of the Iraqi population favored immediate withdrawal of u.s. troops and approved of violent attacks on u.s. forces. That figure was said by some to mean that "Out Now" was an incorrect slogan, since the Iraqi people weren't in favor of it. I argued that 14% was so LARGE a percentage in absolute opposition that the occuapation was doomed and that opposition to it would grow steadily. That discussion was abstract on the list because the debate did not directly impinge on decision making within an actual coalition against the war. It could be concrete within the various local, regional, and national coalitions against the war.
There was a theoretical question at issue, however, which could have been more fruitfully discussed on this list: how are leftists to make maximum use of opinion polls (assuming the rough accuracy of such polls)? We still need to hash that out a bit more. Some people seem to assume that the mere figures can dictate a political position. It seems to be hard to convince people that that assumes that the future is an imitation of the present.
But I've run out of time.
Carrol