On Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 4:15 PM, // ravi wrote:
> On May 3, 2012, at 2:42 PM, Alan P. Rudy wrote:
> > Alan It was this claim that Marv's extensive experience in working across a wide range of communities - an experience I think we can agree is wider than Carrol's long history of local organizing - indicates that the kind of political (or at least ideological) purity Carrol frequently advances is incommensurable with the work of organizing outside of small circles of people. Furthermore, while I took this to be implied in the "art of defensive formulations" passage, Marv is also saying that a certain amount of pragmatic politics is necessary in order to defend existing terrain, much less construct the terrain for the next struggle, much less have the next struggle… and that this doesn't mean that those working locally with the DP don't have a clear sense of the contradictions of doing so nor that they fail to have a vision of where they're headed not unlike that embedded in Carrol's perspective (even though we're not allowed to have such visions according to Carrol).
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> I do not intend to speak for Carrol, but rather state my impression of his view based on his responses… and that has always been that “we” cannot insist on ideological or methodological purity but find common cause with other groups where it is possible independent of each group’s ultimate goals. For example, my own keyboard activism for animals may not be of much interest to Carrol and he even objects to any prescriptions I (and real activists) have on the consumption choices of others; yet, he has written that that does not preclude him from finding areas of intersection w.r.t action with me or such activists. These are to me very much pragmatic considerations, albeit not at the cost of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: it is perfectly legitimate for Carrol to think or argue that those working with the DP are deluded or self-defeating. That’s a substantive argument and one that we can engage in productively, or so it seems to me. OTOH, talk of small towns, or small circles, or whatever, is not just patronising but empty. In other words, rather than arguing the theoretical or pragmatic considerations, one side is claiming the ground for itself (we are the pragmatists) - a technique of argumentation, not reasoning.
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I think I totally agree with you about Carrol's position on seeking partial common cause with folks to build a presently non-existent left. Yet, and this is the whole point, we also get non-stop assertions that - as before - making arguments about the ways that savaging public education and its associated services hurts children is a fools errand because we must at all times and in all circumstances advocate for teachers, teachers' unions, and teachers' working conditions. Now, I think it seems to both Marv and I that it can't be had both ways. Either you work with who you can on what you can given what's apparently possibly (while keeping the absolute perpetually in mind and intention) or you polemically attack those who - well aware of the priority of teachers in order to serve students in a contradictory institution - have anything to say about students. His list rhetoric, in other words, is often a condescending rhetoric of just exactly throwing the baby out with the bath water. The position you say he has staked out - that he can't work with you w/r/t animals or anyone who's working on consumption - is exactly what sets Marv and I off. It is one thing to say that Ravi has a commitment to animals and consumption that I don't share but has a wider sense of where the problems with animals and consumption come from and only needs a different set of conditions to focus on that wider issue… it is another altogether to write in a manner which seems inextricably based on the assumption that folks working on animals and/or consumption are political dupes or intellectual idiots incapable of seeing the obvious truth you then inflexibly flame forth. I don't see why folks accept Carrol's patronizing claims about folks and what they write - much less Michael's - while excoriating Marv
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> I do see why Carrol at times infuriates Doug. But everyone has got their styles and the things that infuriate them. I found Marv’s response to me on Indian political parties incorrectly dismissive, and Wojtek’s characterisation of my off-list message to him as [the equivalent of] “gossip” unfair. But slowly and steadily, I hope, I am becoming a big boy and trying to learn (from Michael P, Joanna, others) the attitude so well captured in Michael Y’s message.
Yes, and yet you are trying to learn something that is not something Carrol's posts to the list suggest he is interested in learning… posts which infuriate some of us some of the time. I know part of the problem is Carrol's eyes but I also know that I've not seen a change in tone from the past to the present.
> > Alan Additionally, it was Marv's claim that the "enjoyment, win or lose" position was insensitive at best, irresponsible at worst, but most importantly never something someone hurting as a result of austerity/restructuring and involved with those struggles on the ground (see the point above) could ever make.
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> I think this is a misreading of Carrol’s post. Carrol can correct me, but I believe it was us he was exhorting to enjoy the fight and not sink to despair. His post itself I believe was a misreading of Doug’s response to Jordan (in which Doug predicted despair not for us but for the Greeks and Spaniards).
But isn't that exactly the issue. Carrol has acknowledged that he misinterpreted Doug's response to Jordan, which is great, but it is exactly the general refusal to stop and take a breath that's at issue, to stop and think about how folks here deserve credit for not being fools most of the time. Does anyone here REALLY think that Marv's unaware of the fraught history of lefts and the DP? Really? Are we so dismissive of his life's work to make that the predicate of our responses? Whether or not he went over the top in his response, the responses to his post haven't been all that different in their attempt to treat the object of their scorn with any kind of fairness or camaraderie.
> Apologies to Carrol for a long post dissecting his person and posts.
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> —ravi
I'd apologize but this is such a long-standing issue I'm not sure I feel like. At the same time, it doesn't mean I won't read the whole of his next posts nor argue with him - should I disagree - rather than treating him like the fool I know he's not.
Alan