Now, _given_ a movement in motion; _given_ a visible emergent left; given some issue around which more or less coherent activity already exists -- given these factors, I could offer all sorts of rich suggestions of WITBD. So could others.
For example: Back in '69 & '70, thinking in terms of a living movement (i.e., deluded as to the actual direction of events) I noted that one disturbing factor (on campus) was the difficulty in finding a time at which all members of the group were free to meet. I came up with the idea of The Z Hour as a demand on the university: No classes, no conferences, would be scheduled at 2pm any day of the week That would be a free hour shared by everyone. But of course such an idea is utterly empty unless a Movement, a fairly vigorous one, already exists. I continued for nearly a decade to dream up such tactics, all presupposing A Movement in Process, and hence all empty given the actual conditions of the world. At about the same time a friend at the U of Chicago came up with an equally brilliant and (under the given conditions) empty proposal: That department heads and deans be replaced by Departmental Secretaries (who were already doing all the work anyhow).
I would still insist that _neither_ of those ideas was in any way impractical: they would have worked in practice. They were nonsense because no movement to move them existed by that time (though we didn't know it yet). Do something and all sorts of ideas sprout. But that doing presupposes embryonic masses already in motion: and we don't know how to create motion when none already exists.
This is the content of a major proposition I have been insisting on for about 15 years: "The Left" doe s not exist at present and because it does not exist it is profoundly false to criticize it.
Moreover. Analysis of what society (or the working class) needs can not answer WITBD. Such analysis is of course vitally important: but it can't dictate what the (non-existent) left should demand. As an actually existing Left emerges (from struggles over demands or issues not now known, probably not now knowable), that left will draw on the body of analysis built up in the present. (In the meantime analysts will resent the failure of the (non-existent) Left to accept dictation from intellectuals, mistaking that non-response from a non-entity as anti-intellectualism.)
Muddling On
There will be two gatherings in Washington D.C. these next two weeks. One, on Aug. 24, will attempt to revive the power of MLK's Movement. The other, Aug. 28 will have the central purpose of barring or at least confusing any such revival. If revived, however, that revival will point back not to "I have a Dream" but to the symbolic and material meaning of MLK's presence in Memphis in 1968, where he was attempting to draw together what must be (at the most general level) the three prongs of any future left offensive in the U.S.: Anti-War, Public Workers, and the Racialized structure of U.S. society.
I'll break off here.
Carrol
P.S. On Class Consciousness: It can only have one concrete meaning: recognition by a mass of advanced workers that the working class must abolish itself.