> I'm taking this lack of communication and
> misrepresentation of arguments as another
> unfortunate consequence of the insularity
> of academic disciplines.
Can you be more specific about where exactly I'm misrepresenting your argument? I have avoided economics jargon. I don't know your background, but we've used standard terms. I admit though that it is possible that I'm not really understanding your point. Let me try and summarize how the issue looked from my side:
This discussion began because I linked Zinn. Zinn's point seems pretty reasonable. I still believe it is. We have to start with ourselves and those around us. We should engage, proselytize, organize, cooperate, combine our individual efforts into a collective effort, bring our individual perspectives to the collective synthesis.
How else can we *consciously* change our social conditions?
You rejected that claiming this was wrong: the change of individual minds doesn't lead to a change in the social conditions. Individual minds can only change after the social conditions changed. I said it's chicken and egg, and wrote long posts trying to explain the point. It's on the record.
In your first reply to me, you alluded to empirical "socio-psychological" studies that have found that people's "attitudes" (a state of their minds) can be correlated to existing social conditions. That is *not* controversial. I didn't deny that. I wrote it's chicken and egg. These findings don't contradict what Zinn wrote or what I wrote. But, again, the question is not how to adapt our minds to different social conditions. The question raised by Zinn is, how do we consciously change society? You cannot say we change society by changing it, because that begs the question of mediation. As far as I could understand, from these studies, you conclude that it is either impossible or unnecessary to proselytize people one by one, engaging them as individuals, persuading them, etc.
Social conditions, existing social structures, what economists would call "constraints" (e.g. the initial distribution of wealth, the state of technology, existing relative prices, laws, political conditions, social customs and norms, etc.) change us, but they don't bend to conscious human action. The true, only proselytizers are the existing social structures. Individual persuasion is impossible or sterile. That was the argument implicit in what you wrote. Or so I believe.
In one of your posts, you invoked "political action," leading to changes in legislation (in the U.S. South). But you disconnect the action from the individuals involved in the action. It seems as if, in your world, individuals can take action in combination with other individuals, but that this is all just some sort of automatic response to social conditions in place. It's all unconscious, since minds are not required to change.
In another post, you referred to changing individual minds as a "political strategy." But changing minds is not a particular political strategy. *Every* political strategy requires that those who take the political initiative (an individual, several individuals, small groups, large groups, classes, or class alliances) set out to consciously change the minds of the others. Those who take the political initiative use the means at their disposal to persuade others, to attract them to their agenda, to paralyze them. That is, to change minds, to alter the behavior of individuals. You may add, to suppress them as well. Indeed, that is the exception, the ultima ratio -- as the Romans used to call it. So, again, how can you implement *any* political strategy without setting out to change minds?
To alter our consciousness, social structures have to emerge and evolve in the first place, i.e. they have to be produced and reproduced. So, how do social structures (those that constrain and shape up the minds of individuals) change in the first place? Unless you argue that societies do not change at all or that all social change is 100% spontaneous, 100% alienated, i.e. that human history is effectively indistinguishable from natural history, then social change must result *to some extent* from the *deliberate* actions of individuals. What else is there? Societies exist as *individuals* interacting, relating to one another.
I don't make the claim that social conditions *only* change as a result of deliberate actions. What I do claim is that, partly and increasingly, they change as a result of deliberate actions. In Marx's tradition at least, no claim is made that social life is 100% pre-ordained, pre-programmed in the existing conditions. If it were, then purposefully building an association of *free* individuals in full and transparent control of their social products, social processes, and social relations (i.e. communism) would be precluded ab initio. How can individuals be *free* if they are always toys of social forces beyond their control?
The possibility of building communism has to come from somewhere. If there's no room for individual consciousness and action, then social life would always be garbage in-garbage out. Marx's view is that the possibility of placing our collective life under our collective control stems from the nature of our specifically *human* labor. In other words, communism is simply an expansion of that "realm of freedom" that germinates even in the simplest, most primitive labor process conceivable, expansion of the "realm of freedom" at the expense of the "realm of necessity" -- i.e. the realm where what we do escapes our control, turns against us, and oppresses us. Communism is expanding the control any immediate producer exercises over its immediate product to the whole gamut of our social relations, because so far in human history, people has largely produced and reproduced a host of those social relations without full consciousness and control over them.
I made the reference to Marx's view that the intrinsic characteristic of human labor is that, before we undertake properly human production, we start with a mental image of the finished product, and that such mental image guides our work. Of course, as a result of our engagement with the world, we get feedback and update our mental image of the finished product, we correct, refine the image, etc. Our actions on the world around us cannot be arbitrary. We act on nature as another natural force. The world around us has laws, the laws of nature, and the laws that emerge as a result of the nature-like character of those social relations we produce and reproduce in an alienated form, i.e. without full consciousness and control over them.
Thus, as we set out to change the world via our deliberate conscious effort, we also change ourselves, our minds, our behavior, and what results from it. Basically, we are in the business of expanding our power to objectify our highest aspirations as humans in the whole spectrum of our social conditions.
I got too much sun on the beach this afternoon. It's late. Must go to bed. Forgive the long winded reply.