Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 1:53 PM, SA wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I can understand the position that you could never describe in
> operating-manual detail what a socialist society of the future might
> look like. But you have to have some ideas to guide you in the right
> direction in doing politics today, no? There's a way in which
> revolutionary socialists imagine some sort of Rapture, in which
> everything is transformed through some magical intervention. But
> that's not the way we're likely to get there. It's going to be by
> messing with existing institutions and changing them in a desirable
> direction. Presumably one's idea of what's desirable is informed by a
> set of principles that point to some better, socialist future.
> Otherwise, what are you supposed to do, just hang back and wait
> hopefully?
Maybe I can give a partial answer to part of this.
First of all. I reject the notion of a single hegemonic party or even the notion of a single heemoic coalition of parties. History, including the '60s, never even comes close to repeating itself, but the '60s, if you draw way back from them so all the details disappear, offers a snapshot of a huge complex of movements that more or less presents a 'coherent' ment, most but not all of the elements of which will off and on comee together as it were around some (temporarily) dominating isseu. The vague goal of socialism will emerge in SOME but probably not most of this mescellany of forces. And some of them will be explicitly socalist and some of them will (wrongly but interestingly) present something close to the clear goal you desire (but you and I and shag) will probably all just hate some elements of that articulation of the goal, but there will be enough variety of opinion on one hand and on the other hand enough agrrement on who and what the IMMEDIATE enemy is, that a rought unity of stuggle will hold.
I would bet that if both you and SA and a couple others on the list decided to spend six months cooperatively answering your own questions about what socialism is or should be, you would all end up either coming out with a very vague general and unsatisfactory answer or you wuld come out hating each other. But despte all that, and despite the negative reavytion on this list to my bare naked slogan, Abolish the prison system, if we were to concentrate on that some real agreements would emerge, with disagreements aplenty but all non-antagonistic.
The reason we can't just really hash the prison issue out on this lsit is because there isn't a really militant and visible mass demand for ti right now. That brings me back to the mpossiblity of predicting or willing into existence what will energize into action some sizable element in the working claas. Until that appears, we all keep working like hell (not waiting passivelyh) for whatever issue we are excited by and can excitre at least a few others on. It is out of such continuous actions that always the enertizing issue for mass struggle emerges, which energizes many o fthe other non-central struggles and some sort of coherence can emerge.
But you've got to accept that the world is not predictable and that victory, however we define it, is not certain, and that we may fucking lose!
Carrol