> My understanding of Miles' position is that people's subjective states
> of mind do matter. However, what changes those subjective states is
> best understood not as minds changing other minds but as social
> conditions changing minds. He's not denying the role of, say, learning
> to have different attitudes and beliefs. He is saying, however, that
> the learning takes place *because of* social conditions. He wrote this
> last year, I've quoted it below.
I don't see how this can work. If subjective states of mind do matter, presumably that means they have the power to change things. Well then, what can/do they change? I understood Miles' position to be that they can't change anything.
> At the time, Julio wanted to know why blacks ever bothered to protest
> their conditions. To which I responded (see link) that the answer was
> obvious: there was never a time when there wasn't some form of protest
> among slaves and, later, freed blacks under Jim Crow. So, slaves and
> freed blacks engaged in social struggle, building a movement -- which
> means they were building what Sarah Evans and Harry Boyte called "free
> spaces" where they nurtured practices and and norms that nurtured
> practices of freedom and commitment toward liberatory struggle. In
> other words, they created alternative institutions. And engagement
> with those alternative institutions is what brought those opposed to
> ending slavery and those opposed to the civil rights struggle "change
> their minds".
I agree completely, all the way up until this point: "And engagement with those alternative institutions is what brought those opposed to ending slavery and those opposed to the civil rights struggle 'change their minds.'" What does "engagement" mean here? That's the crucial point.
> I would add that my hunch is that while people might become
> "enlightened" through reading, hearing speeches, and encountering
> other forms of rhetorical persuasion, I suspect that these "changes"
> are very superficial. They can be undermined simply by encountering an
> opposing rhetoric. The changing of minds (of subjective states), I
> think, is probably deeper, richer -- permanent, if you will -- when
> people are engaged in what Marxists sometimes call "political
> practice" (which some people interpret more broadly than merely being
> engaged in some sort of "conventional" politics.
I'm not of the belief that "getting the facts out there" or "making a good argument," in the absence of political practice, can achieve anything. There are some people who think that, but it's not my position.
> Miles wrote:
> We know what came first here; there's no "chicken and egg" problem.
> The vast majority of Southern whites were opposed to desegregation in
> the 50s; the end of public segregation occurred prior to that vast
> majority "changing their minds" about desegregation. (Segregation
> forever!) There is no ambiguity in the data here: The social
> change--public desegregation--came first; the white population's
> support for desegregation came later.
I think the civil rights struggle is a very ill-chosen example for Miles' argument. The reason should be obvious. Yes, the vast majority of Southern whites were opposed to desegregation for the South. But that was not true of the vast majority of American whites. In the North, segregation was almost universally deplored (for the South, of course; not for the North). The Little Rock Nine were part of a vibrant movement that created free space and engaged in political practice. But Little Rock High School was literally integrated at the point of federal bayonets. The Supreme Court decision that led to it (Brown) was upheld unanimously, and the State Department under John Foster Dulles filed a brief in favor of it. The New York Times and the Ford Foundation supported it strongly.
Clearly, much of the American Establishment would have much preferred that the civil rights movement never have happened, they would rather not have been bothered, they didn't appreciate being forced to make disruptive changes that destabilized their cozy arrangements and didn't like the U.S. being made to look bad overseas. But they strongly supported desegregation. The Civil Rights Act passed the House 290-130, and almost all the nays were from the South.
> All this is predicated on the false assumption that changes in
> attitudes can somehow shape social conditions. Even if people have
> attitude X or have been persuaded to have attitude X, social change
> can only occur through social processes and institutions that are
> independent of any one individual's thoughts and behavior. Simple
> example: imagine a very greedy person in a hunting and gathering
> society who wants to be wealthy. Regardless of that person's
> individual desire, he will never be wealthy, because that type of
> society does not sustain an infrastucture that allows immense
> accumulations of wealth. --And just so with any psychological
> characteristic: attitude X cannot create social facts; only social
> processes can do that.
This is a weird analogy. Not even the most naive "winning hearts and minds" liberal think changing a single person's mind makes any difference. The usual argument is about changing the minds of the teeming millions. Obviously, in this example, if the greedy hunter-gatherer somehow persuaded the other members of the tribe that greed is good, they might agree to change the infrastructure so that a single person can become wealthy. So the question isn't about a single mind being changed. The question is, how are the teeming millions' minds changed? How does that happen?
That's a complicated question. On the one hand, there's no slogan, or argument, or fact that can change the mass mind "if only the message could get out there." So there Miles and I agree. Political practice is really the only way, for the most part. But political practice has to be carried out *in a way* that can change people's minds. If political practice is carried out in a way that fails to change people's minds it won't accomplish anything. This is the conclusion Miles seems to resist at all costs, forcing him into the disastrous robot-freedom-riders argument: If only we could imagine a social movement made up of robots, that would get around the tricky fact that people's states of mind matter.
["Memo to the collective: Last week's demo, the Puppy Torture-A-Thon For Socialism, was less successful than we had hoped. There were some reports of vomiting. However UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES are we to interpret that as evidence that people's subjective states of mind were the cause. If this particular instance of political practice turned out to be unsuccessful, we must simply attribute it to the desolate randomness of the universe and move on to the next idea."]
By the way, "changing people's minds" doesn't necessarily mean "John Smith was pro-war last week and now he's antiwar." First of all, most people's minds are not really made up. Even if they tell a pollster they are "in favor," they might just be saying the first thing that comes to mind. That's why pollsters often ask if people if they favor/strongly favor, oppose/strongly oppose. If a social movement caused those answers to go from 25-25-25-25 to 0-50-50-0, then technically, the public's mind hasn't changed at all (it's still 50-50), yet the movement would have won a huge public opinion victory. Secondly, a lot of people "don't know" they agree. They discover that as the result of being exposed to political practice. I would venture the guess that in America today the number of people who agree with a social-democratic program without knowing it is much greater than the number who agree with a Salafist Islamist program without knowing it.
> From this perspective, spending a lot of time and energy "changing
> minds" is an ineffective political strategy. The history of social
> transformations and revolutions is quite clear: a committed and
> well-organized minority can foment significant social changes, even if
> they haven't persuaded the majority. (The American Revolution is
> another example that comes to mind. Only about 1/3 of the colonists
> supported the revolutionaries. According to the "first step is to
> change minds" argument, the revolutionaries had it all wrong to take
> action before they had majority support!)
It seems to me like this whole argument is meant to justify the idea of using violence or seizing state power without any expression of majority support. That's what creeps me out slightly. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. (BTW, the shooting in the American revolution began after a Continental Congress had already been constituted - in protest - by legislatures elected according to the norms of representational legitimacy of the day.) Isn't this whole objectivist point of view one of the philosophical props Lenin conscripted into use in his polemic with Kautsky? (That's a real question, I don't know the answer.)
SA