8. Use social connections to draw people into the actions that you planning.
They do not have to initially have to share your goals or views, the chances are they will when they get involved.
Wojtek
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:37 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> lbo83235 writes:
>
>
> On Dec 21, 2010, at 8:31 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> > It's showing in Fayeteville, Arkansas for fuck's sake.
>
> God this kind of shit is tedious. No wonder we're getting our asses kicked.
>
> -------
>
> Don't read it then. I've only sampled a few posts & agree with you it's
> boring. But the list _is_ for entertainment as well as solving all the
> world's problems, and people do have the privilege, do they not, of
> choosing
> their own entertainment without excessive kibitzing.
>
>
> The "no wonder the left...." cliché is pretty offensive. (I assume "we"
> refers to leftists or, worse, "the left.")
>
> First, it is devoid of sense except on the principle, clearly false, that
> defeat is always due to the internal weakness of the defeated party. That
> assumption, applied to "the left," is pure voluntarism, reflecting a blithe
> indifference to the normal balance of forces in capitalist history. It is
> periods of left resurgence that ate the special case requiring explanation.
>
> And at the present time, nothing that can reasonably be called "the left"
> even exists, despite what I believe to be a rather large number of
> radicals.
> But despite really rather heroic and intelligently carried out campaigns
> over the last 40 years (e.g. Cispes, the antii-apartheid movement,
> anti-war,
> living-wage struggles in many communities) no issue has arisen that can
> attract the amount of support necessary to fuel a serious resurgence of
> "the
> left." And there is no magic formula that can generate such support. Mao
> said a little spark can light a prairie fire -- but first the prairie has
> to
> be dry. And we don't know, it is not knowable.
>
> -----
>
> Some time ago you ended a response to one of my posts with the query: " But
> possibly the resolution lies in what's hinted at in the parenthetical. So
> I'll ask for elaboration: What in your view are those other reasons?"
>
> 1. Clarify one's own thinking
>
> 2. Maintain morale within a group united around a common purpose.
>
> 3. Attract those who already agree with you but have not recognized this
> agreement.
>
> 4.Give content to an action. I don't have a good label for this. But if
> (say) you call a march and ra. But if (say) you call a march and rally, you
> do have to have speeches. And those speeches have to be nominally aimed at
> persuading people to the purpose of the rally. (This is perhaps a variant
> of
> maintaining group morale).
>
> 5. Persuading those who share basic principles and goals with you but do
> not
> yet recognize all the implications of those shared opinions or goals.
>
> 6. Entertainment. One needs to go on living from day to day, which requires
> having fun once in a while.
>
> 7. While persuasion doesn't work on masses of people, even the mass
> gathered
> in an auditorium, one might once in a while persuade one person or two --
> and that one person may turn out to be important. As in most left endeavors
> one simply has to keep plugging on with the consciousness that the odds are
> against us -- or as Luxemburg realized in the midst of the horror of The
> Great War, the odds were against humanity. Barbarism, depopulation,
> exhaustion of energy, wrecking of the environment are probably our future.
> But what the hell. One keeps trying.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>