<> On 10/27/2011 8:43 PM, Max Sawicky wrote: <>> You mean Carl, past SDS president? <>> <>> He's with the Committees of Correspondence. I knew they came out of <>> the CP, <>> didn't know they had morphed into democratic socialists. <> <> Yup. The point of the post was that friendship can exist across <> political differences. Doug responed to political criticism of Dean by <> assuming we hated her and he argued that she was a nice person.I'm <> arguing that niceness has nothing whatever to do with the correctness <> of <> political ideas. Doug still has said nothing about the political <> points <> shag or I made. <> <> We and Carl were in LRS together.He and Jan chat on Facebook. <> <> Carrol
To be fair to Dean, Carrol, she made some remarks in her comments section where she tentatively addressed this question. She was just spouting of comments, much as one muses on a list, but here's what she was saying.
She thinks that we should do something a bit like Ehrenreich has argued, only Ehrenreich's approach is to provide a leftwing version of what rightwing faith based communities do: help people solve immediate problems. Only in this case, for Dean, it's partly that, but also about being healthy and disciplined in terms of occupation and political action. Thus, the left needs to provide a network of organizations that meet people's needs for discipline, occupation, health, and political activity: The left would provide daily meals for whatever people can afford. Provide job networking opportunities, places to learn skills, trades, crafts, as well as opportunities to train and exercise - maybe do yoga?, and training for political action.
This would be organized when a small conference of intellectuals, experts, artists, tech people, media people, military tacticians, educators, systems engineers organizational planners, activists, and organizers, etc. Get together at a retreat and come up with a plan to as to how to eliminate capitalism, then work on the cadre needed to do so.
Those cadre would be recruited through the establishment of power centers that provide the all of the above: opportunities for learning skills, training and exercising, practicing the discipline necessary for political action, getting a daily meal based on what you can afford, receiving opportunities to learn a trade or craft, etc. It would be top-down, sure, but like modern coporations that borrow from Japanese managment techniques such as continual quality improvement, it would be important to move information back up the chain of command through localized opportunities to modify and amend decisions made from the top.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)