> his point is that, once such an army gets off the ground, they are
> going to start asking the questions themselves. out of those
> discussions, informed by exigencies on the ground, will come the
> answers. if they start asking leaders, without thinking of themselves
> as being full of all kinds of answers and ideas themselves, without
> the excitement and energy to want to come together and hash it out
> with others, then we're 'doin' it rong.' Under such conditions, people
> aren't going to be sitting by passively asking questions of leaders.
>
> usually, the people who ask me what socialism is going to look like
> are people who aren't seriously looking for an answer. they are
> looking for ways to say "no" to getting rid of capitalism.
>
> in that case, my answer usually is: "the whole point is not to tell
> everyone in advance what society is supposed to be like. that's a job
> for us to do as we fight for a better world. why organize and plan it
> all out now? we know what's wrong now, let's focus on that. as we
> focus on getting rid of what's wrong now, we'll come up with the
> answers. we're the ones who are supposed to make the rules about how
> we are to live together. it would be inviting tyranny to divine the
> future, to know in advance how we'll organize food production or
> anything else. if anything, socialism is about people having control
> over their lives, not about people following a plan!"
>
> if they dig that, cool. it's a kind of litmus test. if people respond
> positively to that, then they are the kind of people who are going to
> join. the rest were never going to join anyway. the former are the
> kind of people capable of building such a world.
There's something odd about this position. Both you and Carrol say you're always encountering people, both sympathetic and not, who, once socialism is mentioned, very much want to talk about what exactly this socialism is. So clearly a lot of people *want* to talk about it. Yet you and Carrol both want to more or less forbid discussion of it. And then you say it's those who *do* want an open discussion who are somehow being undemocratic!
If you're in an anti-death penalty group, it can be a narrow group solely focused on ending the death penalty (or whatever set of concrete issues you're dealing with). Or it could be a socialist death penalty group that sees ending the death penalty as part of a larger socialist project. The group has to be one or the other. It can't be both. If you say at a meeting, "I propose that this should be a socialist death penalty group," people will naturally ask you: What do you mean by socialism? If you can't give an answer, then unless everyone is already a socialist, the group will just be a plain anti-death penalty group. No socialism.
But - according to Carrol I'm missing something here: There will "naturally" come a point in the movement's advance when the participants in the group will suddenly realize that you can't really fundamentally change the death penalty (or whatever) without socialism. To that I say: oh you think so? First of all, obviously you can get rid of the death penalty without socialism. In fact you can have radically low levels of imprisonment, and good prison conditions, without socialism. You can do lots of amazing things in a society without socialism.
But that's not my point. My point is that I think Carrol is extrapolating from his experiences in a particular time and place. In 1968, the idea of socialism was a live possibility, a vital alternative to present-day society, a doctrine espoused by movements, armies, governments, guerrillas, millions of people. It was in the news every single day. Today socialism is retro. Not only is it mostly in the past, but even that past is mostly rejected by its few remaining advocates. The idea that people will "naturally" come to socialism because they'll inevitably see that capitalism must go to achieve what they want is an incredible piece of superstition. It's as much a superstition as the idea that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable. People could just as easily come to fascism, or New Age spirituality, or Scientology, instead of socialism. In fact, they're much more likely to.
I know Carrol didn't invent this idea, it comes straight from Marx - the unity of theory and practice, and all that. But I want to point out that this is a scientistic idea. The point is to sweep aside mere "ideas," since ideas are invented by mere human beings and human beings are fallible. Rather than socialism being the product of someone's fallible "ideas," socialism should be the product of objective things that happen in the world, which are real and therefore infallible, or at least not subjective, and thus scientific. The problem is that "the things that happen in the world" are in fact done by human beings on the basis of their subjective *ideas* (ideas about the objective conditions around them). You can neve - ever - ever - get rid of "socialism as somebody's plan" since socialism, if it happens, will inevitably be someone's (i.e., some people's) plan. Socialism in the Soviet Union was the result of plans formulated by a relatively small number of men in the Soviet Politburo, largely basing themselves on ideas they got from the German war economy and its institutions. Of course, there was many a slip between plans and execution, as there always are. But they came out of the brains of a small number of people.
The idea of devoting your life to a struggle for something you cannot describe is something only somebody steeped in the Hegelian mysteries of the great texts can embrace. It's like those mid-20th century Protestant intellectuals who felt like they needed to reject the old "unsophisticated" image of god as an old man with a white beard, but all they could come up with were extremely abstract and intellectualized descriptions, like Paul Tillich's "God is the ground of our being." Only intellectuals can devote themselves to such abstractions. The vast majority of people need something more tangible to hold dear.
SA