I have an awfully hard time understanding why this really simple and commonplace point is so difficult for so many to grasp. I guess I'll have to go through it in pre-primer style.
Bill does not realize it, but his argument assumes the following: The world is divided into two groups, group A and group B. Everyone in Group A disagrees on every single point with everyone in Group B and agrees on everything with others in Group A. Given that, you can only talk with people who agree with you completely on every single point or talk with people who disagree with you on every single point. And in order to change their opinion to agree with you, you have to change every single opinion they hold.
But of course the world doesn't work like that. It is impossible to find two people who agree on everything, just as it is impossible to find two people who disagree on everything. So even if you tried you wouldn't be able to find anyone who agreed with you completely to talk to. So the supposition of some on this list that that is what I'm proposing _either_ exhibits complete idiocy over how the world works _or_ they are deliberately trying to defame me by deliberately misunderstanding what I have been saying. But of course there are alternatives in this case too. There are probably two reasons for the gross misunderstanding on this point: (a) ideology: many people on this list, though they would reject it if explicitly expressed, are imbued with rational-choice individualism and can't really see any argument that contradicts that argument; (b) they have never really tried to do anyorganizing: so we have spontaneous ideology plus sheer amateurism equals writing idiot posts on lbo-talk.
(Incidentally, someone who knows their bible better than I do might post a copy of the parabvle of the tares.)
Now let's trace the course of a single individual becoming an active leftist.
I remember in 1963 when listening to Walter Cronkite report on Vietnam (it was just getting underway) thinking, well as long as the casualties are regular army men it's o.k. (And of course, not giving a second thought to the Vietnamese dying.) That is, I was vaguely bothered by the war but shuffled it off.
A couple years later I participated in my first anti-war demonstration: About 30 people (a statewide mobilization) held a 30-minute silent vigil in front of Vachel Lindsay's old home in Springfield. (Don't ask me why the organizers chose that place.) At the end of the demo an AP reporter went around asking various of us what we thought the government _shouldd_ do. I stumbled and stuttered, and I don't think I said anything very intelligent. In other words I still thought that what was involved was a rational disagreement between rational individuals on a u.s. policy. The general anti-war movment (as reported on here or there) had reached me on just one tiny point of agreement: that probably the war in Vietnam should end. Sometime later I remember a conversation with a colleague in history in which in arguing for getting out of Vietnam I CONTRASTED it to the Korean War. The Korean War was o.k. I still thought, but on various v ague grounds not the Vietnam War. (Vital to moving this far was that almost as a lark, having just finished my dissertation, I joined a local group called US, which had been started by a wonderful woman, Beulah Thornton (later Beulah Thornton Kennedy), who thought the town needed a group not limited by the constraints of the NAACP, of which she was also a leader. Anyhow this got me involved in a weekly meeting of about 10+ people and sort of thinking about what organizing was.) I still didn't think of it at all as involving any real full-fledged commitment to anything. I voted FOR LBJ in 1964, not merely against Goldwater.
Things began to move fast for me as well as for 10s of 1000s of others about that time, but it was pretty much the same for everyone I met the next few years. They attended a demo or rally or joined some group on the basis of prior agreement on SOME point, without ever anyone persuading them to change any opinion they held, but just persuading them (or some persuaded themselves) that the one or two points of agreement were enough for joining in the collective action. And by this time it was the general atmosphere more than any argument that was doing the persuading: one was involved in action, more and more serious action, and one's opinions (without external persuasion) began to change as one sought to make sense of the collective action one was part of.
And of course those many movements, local and regional and national, grew and grew, no one ever persuading anyone to change their opinions but only trying to persuade them that the opinions they already had (slight perhaps to begin with, like unease at the casualty rate) were worth acting on. THAT is what all our persuasion was aimed at: persuading people against the war or for open housing or against segregated barber shopes that on the basis of those opinions they already held they should get involved.
Now I did once persuade a person to decide that she would be a communist, a person who had voted for Goldwater in '64. I forget how it came about, but about 50 or so people were gathered in aroom in the Union talking about the war. This colleague of mine startyed a spiel about how Ho was not really a "Communist" and I broke in something to the effect that (a) Ho really was a communist, and so was I and look at me, two eyes, two ears, etc. just like everyone else. Lo and behold this woman who was there started thinking a bit, and decided she would become a communist too. She was about the best organizer SDS at ISU had.
Now where the fucking hell is there a conspiracy in all of this. Or where the fucking hell is there an instance of people sitting in a corner and talking only with those who are in complete agrement with them. And yet never did we or anyone else focus on "changing minds"; we focused on getting those who had PARTIAL agreement on some point to join in the action, and if they changed their minds, as I did, it was through trying to make their thought fit their activity or picking it up from the atmosphere around them or from conversation with others in the movement. I once watched a young woman sit on the floor in a friend's living room and talk herself into socialism. I had recruited her to SDS but I never tried to "convert" her or convince her that socialism was right or capitalism bad; she had started her 'radical' career by attending meetings in Bloomington about the need for a Civil-Rights Commssion in Bloomington, and gradually got more involved. And then as I said, one night at the house of this high-school physics teacher, she was sitting on the floor and we were chatting, and she began in front of our eyes to"convert" herself to socialism. All I did was shut up my friend when he started to interrupt her thinking with arguments and persuasion (and he was the one who a year or so before had introduced me to the idea, which is mostly ture, that one organizes with one's ears, not one's mouth.
Now at any one time about 90%+ of the population won't listen to you anyhow, even those that would agree with you if they did listen. And the one's who really disagree on the main point (stop the war; integrate barbershops, have a black Santa in the xmas parade) cannot be persuaded no matter what you say. You build and make yourself visible by activating those who agree but who, so far, have been passive, or thought it wasn't worth while, or didn't even know that action was possible. Those you work on. But even with those who agree with you it isn't for the most part "argument" or "persuasion," it's merely being visible and providing convenient slogans on that main point.
And incidentally, no one ever persuaded me to Marxism; I don't believe it is possible to persuade anyone to Marxism. I persuaded myself.
Carrol