Ted Winslow wrote:
>
Carrol Cox wrote: 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.
Ted: This has nothing to do with what Marx means by the "education" required to produce the degree of "integral development" - the "virtuosity", the "free individuality" - required to initiate the kind of "revolutionary praxis" that will then "educate", in this sense, the individuals whose praxis it is to the further degree necessary to "fit" them to imagine and create the penultimate social form.
In this case, even if Ted is correct here (and I'm neither disputing nor affirming that), it doesn't affect what I wrote. we are talking about local organizing under current conditions. When we set out to "get some people together" we tacitly assume some level of prior education (e.g., we assume our immediate constituency shares a language (English, Spanish, Arabic, whatever). And "education" in my post is not education for a new society, or even in the first place for significantly fuller understanding of our present society. In fact it probably means mostly finding out on what points the membership at any given time share and on what points there is disagreement. But this gets us bneyond the pre-primer levl I posited in my original post.
I do want to stress again, however, what was implicit in the original, and which I tend to take for granted, but I'm not sure I can on this list. The most powerful and well-written analysis conceivable witll not persuade anyone who does not know it exists or has no reason to read the first paragraph. And that brings us back to reaching people before we can talk to them or give them things to read.
Incidentally, the next point in the pre=primer is that after collecting people, you begin by listening to wht they hae to say. Eric's gripe is relevvant here. I suspect eric is too fucking suspcicious and worried about manipulation etc. but he still has a point that needs to be honored.
Carrol