[lbo-talk] Pre-Primer on Organizing

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sat Apr 4 18:53:02 PDT 2009


``For example: Education occurs _within_ a movement. A movement consists of people in movement, engaged in some collective action or (sometimes) related series of actions. It is only as those participating in those actions carry on lengthy conversations with each other that education occurs. So the first principle is GET SOME PEOPLE TOGETHER. To do that it is necessary to ignore the naivete of wankish onlookers who want the education to occur BEFORE ther eis anyone to educate...'' Carrol

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Agreed, strongly agreed...

But there's more. I think you can try to educate people more broadly by plain writing and reading. The problem with that is that it doesn't have the concrete example and the immediate human meaning --- shared together from just the experience of political action. Also later writers interpret the works and a whole tradition builds up around works that might have been originally inspired by immediate political, economic, or social experience.

So again, an example is needed to focus and explain. That's why I've been thinking a lot about Angela Davis. I was within the same general scope of the various political movements and their actions from which she derives her thoughts and her actions.

I also had to work out various concepts and discourses that came out of those actions---and later struggles within the UC higher education system as an employee. What does in mean to be white, male, educated? How was that a privilege even if I was just as broke? Was the Panther line about political prisoners true? I was going to find out when I got to jail for resisting the draft. Lucky I didn't have to learn that lesson by doing time. (A lesson in privilege)

Later I was in a series of potential employment discrimination cases, on the wrong side (by virtue of job status, political conditions etc) and had to meet with Elaine Brown (Black Panther, minister of employment or something title) several times. We had to directly discuss these issues and the polices behind them, and the nature of the political struggle against them, etc, etc,... I was learning many lessons on what's now called the intersection of race, class, gender, power, etc... In effect, I was learning a huge amount of material knowledge that now goes under various titles: postmodernist discourse, feminist theory, even Marxism, etc, etc, etc..

The difference is I was living out the kinds of events that later got written down and got turned into philosophy and literature.

Now when I look back, I can see the connection and philosophize about it, but it has lost its direct living understanding ... what can be called a forgetfulness. I am in something like Hegel's grey on grey position...

So, I got some of that living understanding back, for a few moments just by listening to Angela Davis speak --- Maybe I got some of the points wrong in a academic understanding, but that's a different problem...

CG



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