[lbo-talk] Where Movements Come From

[Carrol Cox]

"For the last twenty-five years, students taking my college course on the
social movements and legacies of the 1960s have consistently found the
movement histories powerfully inspiring. Almost to a person, they find
considerable connection with the values and sense of empowerment alive in
that world. For most of these years, however, these same students have
concluded with a sense of resignation that they see few places in their own
culture where they can make a significant difference."

Edward P. Morgan, _ What Really Happened to the 1960s How Mass Media Culture
Failed American Democracy_, Ch. 13, " Media Culture and the Future of
Democracy"

Connect this, among other topics, to my empirical observation that all
movements necessarily direct their agitation to those who in some important
sense already agree with them. Ted Morgan's opening to his final chapter,
quoted here, pinpoints very precisely what is _always_ the case during those
periods that I have called Interims and which Charles Post assigns to the
fact that working-class movements are always episodic; that they cannot
endure for long for a number of material reasons. It's not the opinions of
those we must reach that we must change. Rather, we must change their (in
its way quite rational) belief that they are powerless and that action is
futile. And _this_  cannot be done by persuasion; they have to see the
opposite in action. Such action can only begin by something like a
spontaneous negative response to some outrage. What I keep trying to
introduce into lbo-talk culture is the recognition that such a response has
occurred, and we have to think in terms of how to follow up on that
response. Also, we can't try to discover by analysis whether it is a solid
response that   can be built on. No initial responses can ever pass that
test. Only practice can determine whether Wisconsin is an initiative that
will fade or whether it is the start of a new period of working-class
activity. Leaders (all participants in such a response) are those who are
willing to fail, knowing that only through such willingness can occasions
for success be discovered.

That was the point of my criticism of attempts to "criticize" Wisconsin:
such attempts are explicit declarations of one's lack of any interest in
changing the world.

Carrol