On Feb 14, 2012, at 11:19 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> teaching is a position of authority, and authority
> often attracts twisted personalities, and often gives
> 'em another twist or two that they didn't already
> have.
Ah, so we trust the workers - just not with any authority? ;-)
More seriously: from the standpoint of permanent conditions of false scarcity and non-consensual power relations, sure. Of course, you ignored my other point: "It's not an empirical claim; it's a revolutionary postulate." I'm not satisfied with the phrasing, but I was trying to highlight the perspectival difference between bourgeois consciousness and revolutionary consciousness.
Carrol was (IIUC) writing from a "future-historical" perspective from which alone it's really possible to project possibilities for "revolutionary" action in the present. (Broad strokes, I know. Time is short.) If we want to build the world we want, we have to imagine it. And that world includes each other. As Emerson put it, "Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is." (And there's a nice point to be made here following on his post about leadership and democracy, about the importance of *collective* imagining. But I'll leave that aside for now.)
Of course, you're being "realistic" - trying to mitigate damage and tinker improvements. That's an okay thing to do in any given instance, as long as you don't slip into accepting the falsely constraining imaginary horizons imposed by bourgeois consciousness under capitalism.
My sense is this difference is one of the main ongoing sources of irritation on the list: Carrol has learned, or trained himself, to think about action today from the standpoint of an imagined tomorrow (however vaguely and imperfectly imagined). And that's alternately confusing or irksome to those who haven't learned to make that leap, or aren't comfortable making it, or have lost their taste for the desperate, constant longing of hope, ever suspended over the abyss.