> I suppose you could infer that from what
> I wrote, but that's not my position. I
> agree that people have motives and attitudes,
> and those individual characteristics can
> affect the interactions they have with
> others. What I'm challenging is the
> common-sense belief that all social
> interactions, social conditions, and
> political action are the product of the
> free choices of individual agents.
You just accused me, in your prior post, of misrepresenting your argument. Now you are saying that your argument was against "the common-sense belief that all social interactions, social conditions, and political action are the product of the free choices of individual agents." Well then, wouldn't it have been easier if -- instead of running with the assumption that *such* belief is implied in what I wrote (or Howard Zinn said) -- you had actually shown us that?
What, in my paraphrasing of Zinn's exhortation (that people consciously take whatever political action is within their immediate reach), made you think that it contains the belief that "all" social interactions, conditions, etc. are the product of free choices of individual agents? And, I guess, it'd be nice to know whether you were free to reply the way you replied, or merely compelled to reply that way under the pressure of social conditions.
> Well, I'm a pragmatic guy. What matters are
> the results, not what was in the minds of
> the people who engaged in the political
> action. One person participates in political
> action because of a conscious individual
> decision; another because she's conforming to
> family expectations; another because he has a
> crush on a political activist. So what? The
> important thing is the political work, not
> the content of people's minds.
Again, the context of Zinn's remarks, which I just tried to parse, wasn't a theoretical explanation of all possible motives underpinning people's actions, political actions in particular. It was about calling people to take political action willfully, in the face of whatever constraints each individual social context may impose on her/him. (By the way, freedom is always defined against the backdrop of necessity, and vice versa. You would not be free to fly if the law of gravity didn't exist, because the freedom to fly is defined in opposition to gravity. Thus, all choices are at once free and constrained.) And the conscious choice of taking political action, as it stems from an ethical consideration of how the world revolves and how that affects you individually (ad hominem), need not be ineffective just because it is a well-pondered ethical decision.
Motivations do matter. In the tactical short run, the motivations underlying people's actions may not make much of a difference. But if we're discussing the struggle for communism overall, then the content of our consciousness is of the essence. To put it in real blunt terms, if what underpins our actions is shit in our heads and hearts, then we will only end up creating more shit -- a shittier society.
Casually, I've been re-reading Rudolf Bahro's Alternative. Bahro wrote his work in the early and mid 1970s. This book remains, to my knowledge, the sharpest insider critique of "actually existing socialism" from an explicit, radical Marxist perspective of overall human emancipation. After Miles' comments below, I will quote Bahro in extenso.
(I went back to Bahro, because David Barkin, the editor of the Journal of Radical Political Economy, recently ask me to write a review on a new book on the economy of the GDR. Even though I may not be the most qualified person for this, convinced as I am that the experience of the former Soviet bloc has not been even superficially assimilated by the left, I decided to accept the assignment.)
> The ultimate goal [in politics] is not to create
> some change in people's minds; it is to implement
> some extra-psychological political initiative. I
> know you claim that "changing minds" is a crucial
> step in that process; however, history doesn't
> support your claim. As a general rule, social
> change is the product of a dedicated minority of
> activists in the right place at the right time.
> They do not typically have the support of the
> majority and do not achieve their political goal
> by changing the minds of the majority.
>
> According to Marx, it is the social conditions of
> a socialist society that make possible the "full
> development" and "many-sidedness" of individuals
> (cue Ted here). The fully developed people of
> Marx's communist society are not free of social
> constraints and social forces; rather, the ensemble
> of social forces in a communist society facilitate
> the creation of fully developed people. We are
> always and inescapably the product of social
> relations.
When discussing the perspectives for general emancipation, Bahro makes these remarks [his emphasis]:
"Even mechanical materialists today have an inkling that the 'growing role of the subjective factor' involves something quite different from the mere conscious execution of historical laws. Marxism has always claimed that being can determine consciousness precisely to determine being *anew*. Human nature, itself a social creation from far back, goes into the laws of history *from within*, with its fundamental needs and strivings, and becomes the source of change if its contradiction with the objective circumstances that arise from material practice become too painful for it. Consciousness is ultimately its most prominent organ. Today we have for the first time in history a really massive 'surplus consciousness', i.e. an energetic mental capacity that is no longer absorbed by the *immediate* necessities and dangers of human existence and can thus orient itself to more distant problems. [...] The problem is to drive forward the 'overproduction' of consciousness, so as to put the whole historical past 'on its head', and make the idea into *the decisive* material force, to guide things to a radical transformation that goes still deeper than the customary transition from one formation to another within one and the same civilization. What we are now facing, and what has in fact already begun, is a *cultural revolution* in the truest sense of the term: *a transformation of the entire subjective form of life of the masses*, something that can only be compared with that other transition which introduced humanity into class society, by way of patriarchy, the vertical division of labor and the state. In this second cultural revolution man will found his existence on his consciousness, on the 'highest mode of existence of matter', and concentrate on the social organization of this noosphere, so as to regulate his natural relationship anew from this point of departure." [pp. 256-257]
And, when discussing the struggle for communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Germany, Bahro wrote:
"What is politically decisive is the relationship between the emancipatory interests and the consciousness tied up in the [party and state] apparatus. These are the two poles, and the forces that crystallize there struggle for their influence to be dominant on the mass of conscious potential that lies between, tied up in necessary labour and in compensatory satisfactions. They must strive to isolate their antipodes ideologically. As long as the apparatus is dominant, the emancipatory interests are confronted by the overwhelmingly subaltern behavioural tendency of the remaining three fractions of social consciousness. Subaltern behaviour is then 'normal' behaviour. Individuals subject themselves to alienated authority and seize on the rewards for good behaviour that are held out to them. There is logic in the fact that the apparatus threatens isolated representatives of emancipation with the madhouse. In the cultural revolution, the preconditions for which are maturing, the problem is conversely to isolate the ruling apparatus from all the remaining fractions of social consciousness. This is a process of construction: the penetration of the integrally oriented behavioural tendency, that oriented towards insertion into the whole and the positive appropriation of this by individuals, into the field of forces of social consciousness, gradually robs the domination of the apparatus of all raison d'etre. In particular, it makes the necessary organizational functions, which the apparatus originally existed to institutionalize, accessible to social self-management, in other words, prepares the subjective dispositions for this, so that their bureaucratic and etatist imprisonment is reduced to the simple goal of exercizing power.
"I must discuss once again here the theoretical justification for analyzing the potential for the impending social transformation in the this way, as a question of a structure of social *consciousness* [Bahro's emphasis]. Consciousness is involved here not in its function of reflection, but rather as a factor of social being, whose growing role itself possesses a 'consciousness-determining' significance, i.e. a significance that alters its *content*, something that is expressed in the spread of the emancipatory needs or interests. [...] Social consciousness is considered in its quality as the precondition for any kind of human activity, 'free' or 'necessary', as the embodiment of society's subjective productive force, and therefore as a completely material and economic reality, on which attention is now focussed because the appropriation of the means and conditions of enjoyment and development is coming to the fore in social struggles."
Rudolf Bahro, _The Alternative in Eastern Europe_, NLB, 1977, pp. 314-315