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Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:33:46 Julio Huato
shag wrote: what's at stake in that debate [clip] is "minds changing minds"?
Believing that we cannot, or need not, make a conscious effort to change individual minds is tantamount to believing that we cannot, or need not, change society consciously.
[Cbc] NOTA BENE: Julio, like everyone else, _begins_ by assuming the existence of a WE, a _We_ that aims at social change. He also implicitly agrees that this We is a minority, probably a very small minority, of the population. The debate, then, is how this minority can bring about the social change it desires. I emphasize this because in past threads on this the question of a "starting point" has been raised. But we are always already at the starting point, as Julio agrees here, so the question is a false one.
Julio then argues that we must then "a conscious effort to change individual minds:; that without such change of minds no social change shall occur. (Elsewhere he retreats to the chicken/egg nonsense, but that is a separate issue..)
Julio] Supposedly, society will evolve blindly, spontaneously ...
[Cbc: This is the claim, made repeatedly, that is difficult to see as other than a conscious lie on his part. But apparently he does believe it, and that raises questions as to Julio's literacy, his capacity to read text that does not merely echo his own presuppositions.
If and when Julio understands this point, then it will be possible to have a conversation with him. But if he cannot see his error here, conversation is pointless.
Julio] -- hopefully for the better,
[Cbc; Actually, I would presume that most such "spontaneous" change (and it does occur) is usually for the worse. At the very best, it is random.
Julio] although who can be sure of that. Supposedly, our minds simply trail, react to the automatic evolution of social conditions.
[Cbc: Miles, shag, & I have over and over again argued the exact opposite of this. Such change only occurs through conscious effort by a minority, an effort which by existing changes not only society but human nature. And the kernel of such change always exists, as Julio, by using "We" above agrees. So "We" exist; we act in such a way as to attract others who _also_ want change, and that increses our number. As our number increases, our actions become increasingly visible, and at some point (as has happened numerous times over the last two centuries in different nations) our numbers though still a minority) increase sufficiently as to attract the attention of those who only _partly_ agree with us, but who find that partial agreement confirmed and expanded by the visibility of our actions. (This process is illustrated in several places in Ted Morgan's book). So at some point, that is, we have reached out to a large enough minority that the intellectual, political, and emotional reality of the nation has changed (by our actins, collective actions, not our "arguments"). Also, as Miles pointed out, there are always those who join such movements for quite superficial or flippant reasons, and then through participaton both in the planning of actions, the actions themselves, and discussion within the movement of aims, come to embrace the theory and thought of the movement.
(That, incidentally, was my own personal experience. At every step of the way my action was ahead of my thought. No one convinced me until I had already in effect agreed and was actively looking for arguments, facts, etc which would deepen and make more intelligible the viws that I had already fundamentally agreed with. I came to oppose u.s. aggression and noted that those who had been doing so for a century were mostly Marxists, so I first became a Marxist & then began to read Marxist works.) But my reason for that first vital step was quite flippant: I was bored and tired after finishing my dissertation, and I had always been nominally anti-racist though I had been skeptical at first of the Black Movement in the South as "Going too far.")
The process that I have just described is the basis of Kautsky's division of political discourse into agitation, propaganda, theory. Agitation depends on spontaneously agreement by those who encounter the movement. Propaganda is the deepening of that agreement _inside_ the movement; theory is a summing up of what humanity has achieved to that point and a pointing beyond that.
More later.
Carrol
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