WD wrote:
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Carrol Cox wrote: Where have movements come from? As far as I can tell by various people continuing to monkey around with dismal unsuccess until a complex of condtions and the response to them created a wave which someone (or several someones) were able to generalize correctly into a couple slogans which energized the many local struggles at a national level. This never quite happened in the 1930s.
Why are posters expecting that we can excogitate a plan out of thin air then will it into action?
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WD comments: Why this straw man shit? I think you will acknowledge that the historical conditions that make movements possible won't always generate them unless the people trying to spark those movements are doing something that fits with the historical conditions. Hence the need to theorize and argue/discuss what is to be done.
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I'm not writing at my best these days; perhaps because it's a bit distracting as the realization slowly sinks in, for instance, that never again will one simply sit down in a chair, open a book, and read. But let me brainstorm a bit here and see what comes out.
I don't disagree -- but I think that process of theoizing what is to be done is terribly distorted by focusing on internal weeaknesses of a movement. Those "weaknesses" are (like the supposed weakness of Fanny Price in _Mansfield Park) are the appearance that the strength of enemy we are opposing. To see the weakness as primarily (or even at all) internal generates endless voluntarist fantasies and disrupts the theorizing you ask for. Put another way - At least _consider_ the possibility that the present left "movement" is as strong as it can be under current conditions.
If we are to theorize, we must look at the present from the perspective of the future: What can be done in the present that might contribute to making that future possible. Red Rosa: "The Final Goal is Everything; the Movement is Nothing" - by which of course she meant that the Movement is indeed everything but only if you recognize that it exists only by virtue of that Final Goal and is constantly informed by that Final Goal. If you start out endlessly 'theorizing' the present (which is what focusing on weaknesses amounts to) you will remained trapped forever in a mire of empiricism. You will be unable to understand Lenin's "concrete analysis of concrete conditions" in the light of Marx's "the concrete is the result of many determinations" where "determinations" means abstractions - NOT generalizations from empirical data.
Since any set of empirical data is easilty subject to an indefinitely large spread of generalizations, in practice such generalization represents merely a projection of the subjective musings of the "theorist." Then the empirical data changes and the "theorist" rationalizes his earleir errors with the lame excuse, "When the facts change, I change my mind." That of course is to be mindless, since the facts are endlessly changing. If we are going to theorize seriously we have to grasp the (relatively) unchanging within that empiricist Sargasso Sea, the reality which appearances hide and distort.
So in this framework, wht are the features of the immediate future (that is, the not-yet Movement we need to steer our present thinking by).? It must of course be pervasively international. A national movement is not a left movement. Hence two core demands that must structure that left to be: 1. Open Borders. 2. Close all foreign bases. A left that does not make those demands is a mere tinkling of cymbals.
That is our goal then. A mass left movement demanding open borders and closed bases, militantly making those demands in the streets.
How do we get there?
Carrol
P.S. Chuck Grimes wrote:
> This reminds me. The real trick is you have to offer something,
> protection, support, something concrete. Obviously, I can't offer
> anything. But under an organization, to get more members, you have > to offer what I think of as protection.
This is the economist's trick. Hypoethesize what we need. How can an organization which does not exist offer protection or anything else. The problem is how to move from here to there, without hypothesizing as a basis for our thought that we are already there.