Eric Beck wrote:
>
>Carrol, it seems to me, is after something else.
You are right of course that it could be described better than I've so far succeeded in doing on this list. (And I agree with the rest of your post also.)
The essential point was made by Marx at the very beginning of 18th Brumaire. Of couse we make our history, and it is as historical persons that we do so. But we do not make ourselves; we do not come from nowhere; we do not exist outside history and choose how to enter it. I made my best shot at this in a lenghty article on Paradise Lost some 25 years ago. We are not Adam entering an world external to us. And simply insisting that people count is sortr of pointless. 300 million people (or 6 billion) count immesurably, but we don't advance an inch by simply proclaiming this over and over again.
And of course, as leftists, we 'count' only if external conditions bring about a situation in which people are suddenly very interested in what we have to say. In the meantime, we are, willy-nilly, merely talking to each other in a hidden corner. Up until the summer of 1965 (age 35) I had never thought what various leftists had to say was of any concern of mine. I had read Vol. I of Capital, and thought it a great book, but it had no political impact on me whatsoever, except some speculation on perhaps the best course for humanity was a return to feudalism. (That's not a joke. I've lost the notes, but I had really speculated seriously along those lines.) If Beulah Thornton, a Black woman who had attended ISU some years before, and hadn't like the atmosphere) had not decided in 1964 that there was a need for a local group that could work ouside the organizational constraints of the NAACP, and if some Unitarians had not been in that group, so Ilearned about it through my wife, and if I had not just finished a dissertation and felt rather bored, and so decided to attend it -- well, I don't know, but the odds are overwhelming that I would not be sitting here typing this post today.
So did Beuhlah Thornton make history. Yes and no. The Beulah Thornton who started that group existed only because of the 10 year struggle in the south which wa beginning to transform the sense of possibility of 10s of thousands of white and Black people in the United States. And without all that hullabaloo certainly that little group of 10 or 12 people would not have had the local impact they had.
So sure, "individuals" make history, but talking about individuals or endlessly prating that agency is important (it's all important) is pointless. We can only talk abut history (and ultimately only talkd about individuals) by talking about those "large social forces."
Carrol