Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Since socialism will never be the explicit goal of a socialist
> > revolution
>
> Carrol, do you believe a revolution in the US would change things for the
> better?
Michael, I don't have the slightest idea whether it would or not. History is simply not predictable in that way. I just know that the present barbarism will go on forever without revolution. But revolution in itself oly provides a context in which forward struggle becomes possible. Not certain.
> And do you believe there is any chance of one happening in the
> next 50 years?
I do not have the slighest idea whether it is possible or not. I just knwo no other escape from the strangling grip of capitalism is possible.
>
> I don't believe either of those things.
So I have notieced.
>
> I also really don't understand what revolution has to do with this
> discussion. From your praise of the 60s, you clearly you think things
> short of a revolution can have a large effect. Maybe you meant "movement"
> when you said "revolution?"
But I don't think about revolution at all actually. I think inside the
context that fundamenal reforms and correction of fundamental evils is
only possible through mass movements. And I note the tendency within
such mass movements to develop revolutionary thought, and the tendency
of states occasionally to screw up royally in such instances. Beyond
that it is foolish to speculate. Perhaps humanity will win through to
socialism and beyond. Prhaps it will destroy itself. I have no crystal
ball.
>
> If your argument is that only mass action creates thought; and no one can
> know what will set off mass action; and that WITBD is to be done is keep
> making trouble creatively constantly and waiting until one of them is the
> fractal accident that starts the movement avalanche -- well clearly,
> within such a framework, all worrying about the inadequacies of how we
> speak and think is besides the point.
Not really. Have you noticed that people have an odd habit of always thinking, talkong, protesting against what they feel are outrages. Your paragraph above is, on the whle, a pretty good summary of the last 300 years of human history. Can you think of any great action of that period that was planned in advance in a series of rational steps beginning with a description of the present as real reality? I can't. Really, the few revolutions that have occurred, and the few fairly successful mass stuggles for substantive change, have all more or less caught by surprise those whose actions broguth them about.
Capitalism itself was one huge accident, not the natureal (progressive) emergence from earlier advanced civilizations as (for example) Max Weber and Jim Blaut believed. Advanced civilizations of Eurasia were too strong to allow such a virus to develoop; it sprang up, rather, from a series of contingencies in a little muddy backward spont on the far periphery of civlization.
>
> But from the POV of that theory, the whole question of why the right is
> more effective than the left is besides the point since in that framework,
> the left never gets anywhere by influencing people.
No. On the contrary. It is only by influencing people that the left gets anywhere. But people are only fundamentally influenced in so far as they find themselves acting in ways in conflict with their prior convictions. I don't think any higher of Saul Alinsky than Doug does, but he did push one very imfportant principle of political persuasion: Agitate with your ears not your tongue. I never "persuaded" anyone to become a socialist but I did several times listen as they persuaded themselve s to be a socialist. Nor did I ever 'convert' anyoje to Marxism, but I did 'rcruit" several marxists by listening to them rcruit themselves. And no one persuaded me to become a marxist; I recurited myself as I increasingly realzied that the activity I was engaged in made no sense in isolation, and I vaguely knew that the people who for a century or so had been opposing what I found myself opposing had been the Marxists. So first I became a Marxist, and then I began trying to find out what Marxism was.
You keep thinking I am propunding a theory, but I am only summarizing empirical history. There is nothing particularly new in what I'm argtuing.
Carrol
>
> Michael
>
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