<div>On 4/14/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <<a href="mailto:sokol@jhu.edu">sokol@jhu.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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.</blockquote><div> 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."  </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The point I am making is that the reason why US workers have not been in rebellion is not because they just don't give a shit or that activists did not do a very good  organizing job.  It is because the elites and fellow travellers had the capability of spoiling the organizing-for-rebellion efforts, and managed to counter-organize US workers, often with eager support of the grunts themselves, as church-goers, NRA members, patriots, consumers, proud white men and what not - anything but left-wing organizations.  It seems that they mastered this art of organizing so well, that they routed not just the left, but Democrats as well (gerrymendering, identity politics, fear mongering).   If Democrats, who had much larger organizing resources and experience on their disposal, have been reduced to impotence and disarray,  what makes anyone think that a "third party" or a bunch of protesters would do any better?</blockquote><div> And here it is:  We should give up!?  Perhaps as some psychologists believe depression is just another form of realism.  In that case your depression about the US is simply realistic.  But let me state, the problem Woj, is not U.S. workers, it is you and me.  We have the privilege and more time than most U.S. workers.  Why aren't we working harder?  Why aren't we on street corners handing out leaflets.  I keep on asking myself this about the TWU strike.  Why didn't I go out and try to talk to people, as many people as I could? Why didn't I organize better....  Since the late 80s I have asked myself everyday: Why haven't I done better?  Now my experience traveling the U.S. as I used to do is much different than yours.  Most of those church goers could be on the side of more democracy, anti-racism, anti-war, better and more democratic economic organization.  The same can be said for many NRA members and poor white men.  But especially church-goers.  There are large number of church goers who are "left" and just don't know it.  Doing Central American solidarity work I met church goers who were appalled about U.S. policies in Central America.  But I must remind you, we in the U.S. are in the belly of the imperial beast.  And there are a lot of perceived benefits of our extraction of profit from the rest of the world.  We are also the result of a huge continental wide empire, which has "dealt" with its problems of geography, ethnicity, religion, and and race by divide and conquer.  We constantly have to overcome these problems and constantly have to start over again.  Almost by definition, large ruling classes start out with high level of organization, and "the rest of us" with low levels of organization.  What you are saying is that what organization there is among "the rest of us" is dysfunctional. But that only goes to show that we haven't worked hard enough.  Or perhaps it says we have been to jail too often, and broke too often, and bought off too many times to think that anything we do is worth it.  But I have to say to you that this kind of thinking seems to be a particularly middle class disease.  (I don't want to sound like a vulgar marxist here.  But after seeing people in El Salvador, whose families have been massacred, trying to start a coffee cooperative, and trying to get a nurse and teacher to start a clinic and school in their village, it is hard for me to take seriously the idea that we in the U.S. are just defeated. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">So while it is obvious that things would be much different if people just said "No" to elites, the  real problem is how to get there.  As I see it, it is not possible right now, because the right has everything going for them - from mastering the art of marketing and opinion manipulation, to having the best experts on their side, to having the comunications technology on their disposal to providing the goodies everyone wants and, most importantly, the grunts themselves eagerly identifying themslves with the right.   It will change only if an external force or a natural disaster takes away the right's capacity to manipulate public opinion, manufacture "safe" identities, and deliver the goodies everyone wants. As I read history, succesful revolutions occurred only AFTER the power and control capacity of the ruling elite had already been broken by external forces (wars, foreign occupation, or natural disasters).</blockquote><div> And there it is again:  What you are articulating is a very specific type of ideology, that is often articulated by the relatively well-off. It is precisely this world-view, this defeatist ideology, that we must educate people (like you and me) out of accepting.  We must do this in order to get started again and again.  If thousands and thousands of educated people like you and me would just postpone our belief that it is all useless and that we are isolated, and all the lesser folks who are not as smart as us are manipulated, and that there is no way to break through, if we could give up on this "realism" then we would begin to break through.   It is "not possible" you say to do anything right now.  If it is not then we should just give up and  accept the state of the world and wait.  We should present our throats to the knife or try to come oppressors ourselves, and go somewhere where we can be left alone.  These are the only conclusions I can draw from what you have written.  And then in your previous email you tell me that you don't think people should resign and that you are not a defeatist?  Well give me another name for your "realism", for your depression.  If this is not defeatism then what is it?  And what is your ultimate solution?  That we should wait until some deus ex machina of a disaster saves us?  Historically, such defeats have led to the destabilization of ruling groups.  But the usual result is very, nasty.  People turn against all outsiders, destroying each other and anyone not like them.  Tyranny, fascism, slaughter.  This is the usual result of such disasters down through history.  Unless, before the disaster there is organization and education and a good 33% of the people are already well enough organized to get something good going again.  I am sorry I feel like I have been harsh in this email.  I don't mean to be.  I want to be generous, but I see no other conclusions from what you have written.  Jerry </div> </div>-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture <a href="http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/">http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/ </a>