Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Sun, 24 Jan 2010, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > For a mass movement of the sort that would create the necessary public
> > pressure, it is eseential (as Eric Beck recently pointed out) to cast
> > your campaign in terms of a NO!
>
> Really? Only No, and never Yes?
Yes! Note that many No's do often enforce some kind of positive change as well. The importance (I would say necessity) of casting the core program in terms of No rather than Yes is that (a) positive programs require too much explanation, and (b) your constituency, those who will take to the streets, will begin to disagree over this or that positive proposal, andthe oomph will go out of the campaign.
It looks to me that there are several conditions that make it highly unlikely that the state will adopt a decent health program. (*These to be discussed on another time.) So leftists have nothing to lose and much to gain by 'shooting for the moon' on this issue. One possibility: a campaign of obstructing medical sites. Picket lines, etc etc. the slogan: Stop Paying yfour Medical Bills. I offer this just as an example of how positives can be expressed in negatives, and how negatives are more exciting. If you once get a cammpaign going you havd created a forum (among those participaing) for internal discussion of comlexities of positive 'solutions,' and that sort of discussion (even before the days of the internet) tends to spread out beyond the movement proper. Action activates, invidogrates, and rouses mental energy, desire to talk and persuade. Some people march or sabotage their work site --and some of those people, in fact many of them, will start arguing with, trying to persuade people they know (family, workplace, etc), some of which will be effective. And you develop an educational program as well as internal theoretical work around the dentral campaign which consists, crueely, in raising as much hell in as many different ways as possible. By 1968 I could talk to all sorts of people who were not in the movement, even racist relatives,in ways never possible before. Had we started out trying to "persuade" such people they either wouldn't have known we existed or would have shrugged us off in contempt.
[Note: One of the great achievements of a real upsurge of the left is that it enables huge numbers of people to say "we" in ways that ordinarily are impossible. I would not use "we" in this way in speaking of current activities.]
Engels quotes Napoleon with approval, saying "I act, then see what happens." I'm afraid the attorney who referred to the "paralysis of analysis" was mostly correct; premature analysis also paralyzes anlysis.
>
> If that's true we're fucked
We're probably fucked for the time being anyhow -- one can't predict changes in political climate or theorize the causes of such changes, but they do occur. That's why I've been giving so much thought to What Is To Be Done when there is nothing that one can do that has results in the forseeable future. You really can't get there from here -- but here does keep changing behind your back as it were. Actions such as that of Rosa Parks had been happening, with some frequency, for half a century or more, and there had even been deaths as a result. Who in 1930 could have predicted when sayin No would explode so. The only way to find out was to keep saying it once in a while, even if futile or disastrous at the time.
We are dealing here, among other things, with theorizing what can and what can't be theorized. It's possible, incidentally, that we are moving into a 'world' in which the only demand that can be usefully made is "No to C*apitalism!" It's also possible that Doug and Dennis are right and tha all that lies ahead is a long downhill slide into nothingness. We'll see.
and the anti-government Republicans have a
> structural advantage.
>
> I can see that stricture when it comes to imperialism where cessation
> really is 99% of what you want, but not for anything else. Then you've
> always gotta have how if you want to bring pressure to bear on the
> government to do something.
>
> I'm all for the simple 2 sentence part though. That's a large part of why
> I'm for single payer: you can explain in two sentences how and why it will
> work.
>
> But to say NO TO BAD HEALTH CARE without proffering any way to improve it
> -- that sounds daft, to be honest. Am I misunderstanding you?
I know. I've wrestled with it myself without coming up with anything very promising. But ideas really do flow from action, and we have'nt tried to act yet.
ALSO: Don't look at health care in a vacuum. One has to assume that _some_ issue, what we don't know, will trigger mass action, real movement. And one of the features of strong colective movement is that all sorts of other things become worth fighting for. If there were to develop a strong anti-war movement, or if the prison issue triggered real rage, or if X aroused 100s of thousands, in the course of their internal and external discussion sthey would almsot automatically start demanding free medical care and that producers of daingerous pollutants be hanged & so forth.
You have to be both patient and impatient. The patience is primary, but there comes atime to be very impatient.
Carrol
>
> Michael
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk