[lbo-talk] More on BB antics and their defenders

[// ravi]

On Feb 10, 2012, at 5:47 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
> Ravi wrote:
> 
>> Kidding aside, I get your point, but I think you fail to
>> see how your own criticism applies to you. “Diversity
>> of tactics” is itself an argument, which you are
>> refusing to engage in by dismissing it as a “fetish”.
> 
> I believe I engaged the argument.  But in case it wasn't clear, here's
> the idea in different words:
> 
> It is not possible to reorganize our social life consciously, on a new
> foundation, without the collective processing of one's individual
> information sets in the civic arena.  (E.g., it is not possible to
> make political inroads without our some way of critically aggregating
> our tactical views and concerns.)  We do this one way or the other,
> because we can only live through the mediation of the social
> structures we build, and those social structures are reproduced by
> action or omission.  So we either do it via processing mechanisms that
> escape our control and weigh on us (e.g. markets, states), or we do it
> directly, controlling to the extent possible the processing mechanisms
> (e.g. civically with the assistance of things under our shared
> command).  In any case, *processing* our individual perceptions,
> valuations, etc. we must.
> 
> This "diversity of tactics" approach is about rationalizing our
> inability to process our information sets directly, instead letting
> other uncontrolled mechanisms take that processing over by default,
> which only reinforces such mechanisms.  We may get the illusion that
> by acting as a small individual group willing to take more "militant"
> actions than the crowd, we are making real progress.  But that is not
> the case, because we're in fact withdrawing from the challenge of
> doing the heavy lifting of processing our stuff directly, civically --
> including our tactics.  We are yielding to the "marketplace" of
> tactics to do this -- whoever has more saliva eats more "pinole," as
> they say in Mexico -- as opposed to whoever makes more sense prevails
> via argument and persuasion.  That is really what the "diversity of
> tactics" translates into.  It's founded on the liberal myth of
> individuals as self sufficient -- as we used to say, a bourgeois or
> petit bourgeois myth.
> 

[I am leaving all of the above intact because I am responding in whole to it. Apologies for the extensive quoting.]

This is certainly better than calling it a fetish, but where you see individualism and resort to the market, I see methodological anarchism. The point being that when we collectively confront a problem and attempt to understand it and solve it, even what best action or remedy is applicable is not something that can be settled purely through argumentation. Especially since there is not one single type of action that works. We try different approaches to the problem learning as we go. Sure, some lines of action can be shelved a priori because they [to some degree of satisfaction] demonstrably aid the enemy and harm the collective. It has been argued that “black bloc tactics” are one such. Fine, perhaps they are. I do not know. But that in itself is not an argument against the idea of diversity of tactics.


> I am fine with people overcoming, transcending Marxim, and leaving it
> behind.  But that's going to take more than ignoring it.

But why do people have to transcend Marxism? Perhaps they ignore it because it does not need transcending any more than intelligent design needs transcending. People I respect think that Marxism has something useful to say, so I tend to accept that it cannot be ignored, but that does not permit such preconditions for solidarity, does it?

	—ravi