[lbo-talk] Adolph Reed on BHO

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Fri Jul 18 11:32:46 PDT 2008


Miles wrote:


> The social change--public
> desegregation--came first; the white population's support for
> desegregation came later.

It seems to me that you don't want to read what I actually write. Please go back to the previous posts and see how this all started. I linked Howard Zinn's article, who discusses the question people often thrown at him: what is one to do? How do we drive social change?

The question is not about how to adapt one's behavior or conform to laws, price changes, or other objective social structures already in place. It's about what choices one is to make to *lead* the changes our society needs, to change our social structures.

Unless you are arguing that people cannot intentionally change their social conditions, that social structures cannot be altered by human action, that we live in a world in which humans are mere toys buffeted by supra-social laws, my point (and Zinn's point) is rather trivial. People start by changing the things that they can change immediately to the extent they can change them, namely their minds, their behavior, at first individually.

Consider the problem of an overweight person. Apparently, it has to do with one's genes and "lifestyle" (diet and exercise). Genes evolve, but their evolution may take many generations. So, as far as one individual life is concerned, genes are beyond one's control. Diet and exercise may already be hardwired in one's behavior and changing the neural pathways that keep those behaviors in place may require a lot of conscious, painstaking effort. If these behaviors have been in place since early on in one's life and lasted for long, they may have already turned into pathologies, which may be harder to reverse. So, harder-wired constraints -- including aging and objective external conditions -- may frustrate or assist one's conscious efforts, but cannot replace them. If we are talking about human beings, then there's always some room for human will. Nelson Mandela, who recently turned 90, showed that even in prolonged captivity and isolation, individuals can wield tremendous amounts of power. If one is still capable of changing one's mind, not once, but many times, persistently, repeatedly, one may be in a position to alter one's diet and increase physical activity per unit of time, and thus actually be able to lower one's weight, increase muscular tone, etc. If we have some measure of social influence, we may use it to create external conditions to assist our effort. If we have resources, access to knowledge, medical care, etc. medication and even surgery may help. So, depending on each individual case, this may be easier or more difficult. But without deliberate human action to start it all off, the problem is not likely to go away.

Similarly, in social life, we can only start individually, in conscious response to our social environment, with the will to change it, and as a result of human interaction, this can go from mere individual initiative to collective action. Then, in undertaking social change, we better start by operating in the areas of social life that are more immediately malleable to social action, e.g. the social consciousness, the ideological climate of our society. Depending on existing social conditions, the shift in the ideological mood of a society can be harder or easier. But it cannot be accomplished without the sustained action of individuals. In a different ideological setting, changes in the political life and in legislation can be implemented. More difficult, but also ultimately plastic to human action, are the social relations of production, the fundamental economic conditions. And ultimately, how capable we are to change our social conditions depends on how productive we are.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please" -- wrote Marx. Zinn emphasized the first sentence. But that doesn't negate the second sentence. This is all from the ABC of historical materialism.

If you have been reading, then you'll note that, to use the case of desegregation in the South to test my point, the question in Zinn's article wouldn't refer to whether or not humans adjust their behavior to pre-existing changes in political, legal or economic conditions. Of course they do. But that's not the issue Zinn was addressing. Zinn was referring instead, to use that case, to the change of minds that *predated* and *accompanied* the political activism that redounded in changes in legislation, etc.

In other words, Zinn was referring to the change in minds that *led* the changes, not to the change in minds that *trailed* the changes. I admit that I'm not an expert in the history of the U.S. But I'd bet 100 to 1 that those changes in legislation didn't happen accidentally, they didn't fall from the sky. There were people with certain mindsets advocating for those changes in the law, doing the political footwork to get them passed and enforced. Our minds can trail social change. But our minds can (and should, increasingly) also lead social change.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list