[lbo-talk] Is Obama Running Interference to ProtectBankers' Pay?

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 31 13:27:30 PDT 2009


Miles Jackson

Look at this from a practical point of view: what is important is the social transformation that social movements can generate, not the mental state of the people involved. --Thought experiment: imagine that all the civil rights leaders in the 1950s were robots, and they were programmed to do all the things they did. The social results of the movement would have been the same, even though none of the leaders were motivated and guided by moral/ethical principles. A social movement is an emergent property of social interactions; it is not simply the product of individual psychological characteristics (beliefs, values, opinions). Thus speculating on the motives of people involved in social movements is irrelevant. Some could be in it because of moral principles, others because of conformity pressure, others because of a crush on the hot guy in the Che t-shirt. It doesn't really matter why they're part of the movement, because a social movement's impact is the result of the emergent properties of the social movement itself; it is not simply the result of the individual psychological characteristics of the individuals involved. Miles

^^^^^ CB: In this thought experiment, the consciousnesses of the people whose consciousnesses were changed by the actions of the robots did matter. The actions of the robots impacted the consciousnesses of masses of white people, who then caused changes in the law.

Notice that the formula that social being determines social consciousness ( resulting in social change) is a social constructionivist idea. But it does not exclude consciousness from the process. _Social _consciousness is thinking shared by individual brains. So, "it" is not _simply_ the result of individual psychological characteristics, but it is complexly the result of social action and individual consciousness.

Another point here is that many of the actions by social movements that change a society are speech acts, not just bodily motions. Even the bodily motions have social meaning. So, the consciousnesses of the social activists do impact their political speech and symbolic acts.



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