On 8/11/2011 6:55 PM, Alan Rudy wrote: [clip]
Alan] So, your argument is that folks in Wisconsin, or Michigan, or Illinois, or Florida or a plant in South Carolina should organize transnationally to address issues of state and federal budgets or local labor practices? The teachers, or librarians in the state library/museum, or prison guards, or sanitation workers being attacked or devastated by defunding in so many states should organize transnationally first? I am not discounting horizontal and/or transnational organizing but if you don't have critical mass and decent organization locally - whether as a vestige of previous organizing, an emergent condition or something made possible by outside engagements - the rest is impossible, however much it is a key goal.
Carrol: Dennis only exhibits in an extreme form a fundamental error over the relationship of theory to mass movements. Like so many, he thinks one can or needs to theorize from outside and in advance the goals of the movement(s), and this is the one area in which 'outside' theorists have no role whatever to play. "No recipes for the cookshops of the future" - AND It's turtles all the way down. The rule the Bolsheviks proposed for membership in the RSDLP has an equivalent evn when not Party exists: Those who want to participate in determining the goals of any mass movement must be active and responsible members of some local (activist) group that is more or less part of that/those movement(s). This, I suspect, is the background for Mao's "Trust the People" and Lenin's "Trust the Workers." (I'm not interested in comment on that second slogan by anyone who has not read Lars Lih on Lening.) For Mao & Lenin there was "people" and "workers" had a visible and precise referent in the struggles they were in; that is of course not the case (yet) for us, so the g round of the principle must be otherwise formulated. Trust people/workers to get a movement going because otherwise no one is going to listen to your proposed goals. And also, since we do not have a Party (and are not going to have a single Hegemonic Party, ever), the only way to be in a position to discuss goals is to be actively involved in one of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) oflocal activist groups no existing, whether in the "community" or in the work place. (More of the floating radicals should belong to existing national left organizations too, but that is not my topic here.)
[Detached theorists have a tremendously important roleto paly in any mass movement - just not in telling that movement what its goals should be.]
Alan] This is a wildly complex issue but it needs to be addressed in that complexity, evaluating spatial and temporal issues at appropriate scales not with superficial glosses like Woj's or Dennis'.
Carrol: I agree with Alan here, with a qualification. He seems to be on the verge of assuming what I have just argued against: That detached intellectuals can/should theorize the political goals of left movements, only they should do so with proper respect for the complexities of building a movement, and how those complexities are constantly varying form ne time to another, from one locality to another. But my argument would be that there is no way for anyone not involved actively in some local group (and in contact with others similarly involved) can achieve this respect for complexity.
Carrol
P.S. How do goals get defined and theorized then? That's another topic.