Michael Pollak wrote: My main point is your argument in a different form: that to influence someone, you have to phrase your argument as a contradiction between a conviction you share with the person you are trying to persuade, and something else you are against.
Carrol: But I don't want to _persuade_ anyone, at least not until they express a desire as it were to be persuaded, but rather to involve them in a shared _practice_ which, for some will lead them to see the need for a new perspective. The starting point is similar but not identical to yours. You start with merely a shared opinion; I start with a shared _practice_. The shared practice (which does NOT necessarily stem from trhe same opinions) raises the need for a ratioale beyond the original impulse (whatever that might have been). Over time the various people invovled spend a lot of time talking about this or that or the otherthing, not particularly focused on anyone persuading anyone of anything. That is not _necessary_ because they already share enough to keep the activity goingm. Within this ongoing conversation, including discussion of tactics, programs, guest speakers, etc, often overe time it appears that one or two people are beginning to feel dissatisfied with their initial reaons for joing the activity, and then you can explore _that_ with them. But (usually) even then the topic is not socialism but, fundamentally, the need for building a movement independent both of the DP and elecotoral politics in general. That is the jump, not socialism or revolution. Further discussion tends to revolve around strategy and tactics in the mass movement, alliances, etc, not about "what we bleieve," though that often enters in marginal covnrsation and sometimes does gradually slide into much deeper agrrement, perhaps even to the need for deeper undersstanding of just what Marx's Critique of Political Economy is really about, which might then lead to…….who knows. Thjere are, in fact, two, maybve three, people in the local anti-war group that we will be talking to in this way - but there I sno great rush.
Michael] Then you have a chance to persuade them they should be against too, precisely because it contradicts something they deeply believe in. A feeling you understand because you sincerely share it -- and which you can make even more unsettling to them because you do.
Carrol: But this only gets you to shared opinions, which are nice for married couples or people who like to sit around and drink covvee and chat, but I don't see the connection to building a militant mass movement of protest.