[lbo-talk] perceptions

[Carrol Cox]

Let's start with this. Whenever and wherever we find ourselves, we are
always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations and
responding (for reasons we cannot remember) to aspect of these
relations. Put another way, we do not _have_ a history; we ARE our
history. (By the age of 4 you had all sorts of opinions which were
simply aspects of that history which is you; they were not held
separately from that history any more than you skin exists separately
from the muscles it covers. You didn't _choose_ those opinions, and
don't even realize for quite a few years that you _have_ opinions. So it
is simply to claim that your opinions are affecting action at that
point. Aact and thought are inseparable. At some point we all (at least
in our culture) begin to separate off some of our stream of mental
activity and we label that alienated mental act an opinion about the
public world;  in fact making this separation betweenn our world and an
abstraction called the publicv world happens to us. That is, no one
remembeers when they first self-conscviously divided the world into
private life and public life but finds it simply part of their daily
life, of what they are. For example, when did you decide abstractly that
you ought to "think for yourself," and on what prior thougts was that
brand ndew (and quite ridiculous) 'idea' grounded. Almost certainly you
held it before you knew you held it -- i.e. let someone decide for you
(without telling you) that you must decide for yourself what ideas to
hold. That's part of what I mean by the incoherence of thinking that
opinions affect action: they simply don't exist independently or prior
to action. Crudely, your first thoughts (and this necer ceases to be
fundamentally the case) are attempts to make sense, to explain, what you
are already doing. One of your most important actions, incidentally, is
that you speak in complete and correct English sentences, and correctly
construe the complete and correct sentences of others. When did you
decide on this activity. What opinion affected it?

The only separately existing opinion that took me to the first meeting
of the US group at the Union Baptist Church in Bloomington was a vague
feeling that it might be interesting. (I had just finished my
dissertation and felt like being entertasined.) The conversation was
interesting. Thoe other people were interesting.  Before long I found
myself engated in trying to get people to turn out for City Council
meeting. It was kind of fun. (It didn't _conflict_ with all those
'ideas' that, like my skin and my breathing rhythm etc constuted the
history known as Carrol Cox, but it really sounds silly (and is silly)
to list all the formal "opinoins" of the preceding 34 years that
"affected" that decision. Also, involvement in these local activities
gradually dissolved the opinion, which I remember expressing to another
faculty member at a party a yer or two earlier -- something  like "If
the cibvil-rights actions in the South continue, we probably have to
support* them, but really they are premature. Something stupid like
that. But it was my most carefull formulated and c onscious "opinion" in
the year or so before I suddenly found myself on the road to socialist
revolution. Some of those opinions along the road to that were a bit
more self-conscious, elaborated specifially as  consequences of other
ideas, but _always- in the framework of activity I found myself engaged
in and the effort ot theorize that activity.

I'll stop here for now.

Carrol

SA wrote:
> 
> I don't understand this.....
> 
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> 
> > Opinons do not affect action.
> 
> Here are some opinions:
> 
> > In my pre-political days this  use to vaguely bother me on occasion. I
> > would read an article in a liberal journal about some public issue, some
> > injustice, some desperate need not being met by government
> 
> ...and then here is some action. :
> 
> > to the point where I,
> > casually to begin with, started attending the weekly meetings of a small
> > civil-rights group
> 
> Maybe the opinions weren't sufficient to cause the action. But if you
> had read the liberal magazines and your opinion had been "what a load of
> communist nonsense," you probably wouldn't have gone to the meeting.
> 
> So how can "opinions not affect action"?
> 
> SA
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