And then I thought, well, I suspect that, in the past, it must have felt like "we" didn't know what the fuck "we" were doing either. And there must have been people in a corner wringing their hands at the timidity or paltryness of this or that action. I mean, how many actions were there that we'll never know about because they weren't big enough for anyone to take notice?
And then I thought, wait! Is the expectation that we can control the future, shape it, decide precisely what to do as if it were a science, not something recent? A new thing? Which is why we don't really have people sitting around, in the past, worrying about what, oh what, to do about "us" and "we" and an appropriate response to oppression and tyranny. In other words, is this just a peculiarity of, for lack of a better term, modernity?
I guess it's just a discomfort with radical uncertainty? With not knowing if we're on the right path? As I describe it, I'm reminded of novels of middle class angst where the protagonists worries that he's not on the right path to success in his career.
Rambling.... shag
The particular thread on which this appeared is not relevant here. Shag was on to something in writing this, but she falters when she tries to locate the 'problem' in some specific 'modern' malaise. What she describes has nothing to do with angst, midle class or toherwise, nor with at the philosophical level with "radical uncertainty." The first 'problem' in analyzing the attitudes she describees is to avoid misplaced profundity, which she fails to avoid in her closing remarks. And as perhaps she realized, hence the close, "rambling…"
What we are dealing with is the difficulty, in mass movements for substantial change of a staus quo, of coing to terms with the fact that the 'troops' to bring about such a change will never be able to agree in advance as to the _alternativ_ to the present that they fight for. This need to unite radically different "values" in the struggle provides a false impression of "incoherence" both to many/most of those actively engaged _and_ (more agonzinly perhaps) to those not engaged who can safely insist on "coherence" because they are not faced with the necessity to organize demonstrations, etc that bring together peole whose positions on "alterrnatives" are muutally incoherent.
My oft repeated (and equqally often totally misunderstood) statement that we address ourselves to thos who alaready agree with us is grounded in this unavoidable internal incohrence of any mass movement (which is always an unruly coaltion). Hence I assume that "those who already agree with us" do so at a auite generla and sloppy level, and that that "agreement" will conceal sharp disagreements - some of which can be worked out over relatively short periods of time, other s which can be worked out only when (if ever) "we" have state power.
Carrol