shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> and by the way, while i appreciate that you were trying to address a common
> sentiment, i forgot to note that i think it's pathetic that *anyone*
> attacks people for being professionals in a social movement, feminist or
> otherwise. it's foolishness.
This is apparently not my week to achieve minimal clarity.
I tried to focus the term "professional" so that it represented _approval_, not attack.
Since this sub-topic is of general interest, let me try to clarify. Some history of the use and abuse of the word. Lenin, of course, introduced the phrase, "professional revolutionaries," but (as Draper pointed out in an essay 50 years ago and was reprinted in an early issue of Historical Materialism) he did NOT mean by that "Full-Time Revolutionaries." He meant workers who _thought_ in a professional way, who brought a professional _attitude_ to their political work, though obviously, a worker in Russia in 1904 would not have much time to devote to political work. And obviously in this context "professional" carries not a whiff of "attack" or "condemnation." And notice also, that in the interim between 1905 and 1917 such "professionals" would come to constitute almost the _whole_ of the socialist movement. Not only would they not spend much time on "revolutionary work," but wouldn't have an awful lot to do during the brief periods so spent -- probably spent in not much else but talking to each other. But they _did_ keep the movement alive, tough mostly in suspended animation as it were. I woudl think that we owe an awful lot to those few, those very few, like maybe the fact that Germany doesn't control the European continent today, and the Japanese India and Australia. And so forth.
But in the 3d Internatioal, which made a Bible of a pamphlet wrtten to apply to the specific conditons of Russia in 1904, that phrase came to mean full-time party cadre, whose main task probably most of the time was to keep rank-and-file members in line. And the word got identified with Professionals such as attorneys, physicians, etc. And as applied to political activists it became a sneer word, an attack, part of the culture of red-baiting. Is that what you thought I meant?
But as I have often discussed on this list, we are still in a very long "Interim" separating the explosions of the '60s from the present, and apparently continuinginto the future. And were it not for a few thousand people scattered around who in fact are acting _exactly_ like those professionals in _Lenin_'s sense, there would be no political activity on the left at all today. And for the most part they probably don't have much to do except to talk to each other, keeping the possibility of a future alive. If you aren't yourself a Professional in that sense, what in the hell are you. At one point a few years ago, the Bloomington/Normal Citizens for Peace & Justice shrank to about 5 people. Now its back to around 8 to 10, only two of which were among those 5. (Two are a couple that just moved to BloomingtonIn a year ago.) other words, BNCPJ except for Jan& Carrol would no longer exist. There are about 3 more people in it now we are beginning to feel a sense of responsibility for keeping the group alive. That sense of responsibility for keeping something alive is what I call professionalism or a professional attitude towards the group. What would you call it?
Praise and eternal Glory to the CPUSA hacks(1940 -1960) who were keeping somethng alive and without whom we woudl not be celebrating MLK Day today.
So what you reacted to as an attack was intended as the deepest praise.
Carrol