Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jan 24, 2010, at 11:27 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 24 Jan 2010, Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> >> ideas really do flow from action, and we haven't tried to act yet.
> >
> > Carrol, I think this is the first time since Doug started this list
> > 10 years that I've finally understood what you've been getting all
> > these years.
>
> On the other hand, a lot of activism is all about action, and opposed
> to reflecting on it. That's the whole point of the piece that Liza,
> Christian, and I wrote all those years ago:
Some Observations - In no particular order:
Observation 1: That's true -- in fact one of the more discouraging phrases is "Let's do something." But that's a moment in a continuity. People have to _learn_ to think, and (in left/resistance politics) most will only learn the excitement of thinking as part of a process. And here Luxemburg is crucial: unless this activity is informed by a (SIMPLE) final goal, that thnking won't take place.
Observation 2: People are NOT stupid, though as individuals they almost always reach stupid conclusions. Hannah Arend in one of her books offers a scathing critique of the results of plebiscites. The same applies to voters. Two features of both plebiscites and elections: 1) The voter is all alone in the voting booth making an abstract decision and 2) the descitsion is always an either/or. A or B. Yes or No. Period. No qualifications. And of course the alternatives are always posed by those over whom the voter has no control. Mao: "Trust the People." Arndt and Mao are both correct, though either one in isolation is incorrect. (This raises another problem at a later stage: Mao: Meetings should not be too long! And unfortunately some people love long meetings and keep stretching them out; other people are too damn impatient and won't sit through a long enough meeting.)
Observation 3: Let's consider that lawyer who objected to the paralysis of analysis. I don't know (or remember whether you described) the context: What brought you together in that room in the first place. We have here what in the New Communist MOvement we called "Principles of Unity." (Now we defined those principles all too rigidly, but that's another issue involving the history of "Leninism" [which I define as StalinistmTrotskyism].) Principles of Unity can and do change, but they can't be challenged right off the bat. What were (roughly speaking) the principles of unity that brought you and the lawyer into the same room discussing what is to be done?
Observation 3a. "Goals of Struggle" are radically different from Congreessional Legislation: The former have no immediate effect whatever. They don't even have an effect ths year and often this decade. So it's not all that disastrous if the goals set are all wrong. I agree with your point that small business tends to be more exploitative etc of workers. But no small business woudl havebeen created nor big business destroyed by that group starting off and spending a year trying to encourage small business. Along the way members would have gotten to know each other better, learned how to converse with each other, laarned a bit more about how "small business" really operates, perhaps discovered that in a rough and ready way those infamous "objective conditions" detrmine the mix of biag and small business, had some time to discover and talk about the way local goals get absrbed and made futile because of larger contexts (state budget, national budget, war goind on, court decisions, all sorts of things.) And in many cases, the group simply dissovled; in other cases members discover they want to dissolve but out of the dissolution create another group, mostly but not wholly sdame members, with different implicit or explicit "principles of unity." A friend told me years ago (but I have never seen it in anything I've read by Lenin) that Lening declared there were three essential revolutionary virtues: 1. Patience 2. Patience 3. Patience. I think that is prettyu correct in creating activist groups and in getting them to think.
Observation 4: Even if the 'main group' is an utter mess with no future, one meets various people along the way, some of whom are more intersting to talk to than others, and a few people can go together to a local coffe shop after the meeting to chat about this or that. I've initiated at least two groups which dissolved after the first meeting. The world didn't end.