Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement

["David McInerney" <borderlands@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thiago,

The points you raise are interesting - I would add one more ...

> ...but: I think this antagonism to organizations is counterproductive.
What
> you have to ask is: what happens between organizations? How do people deal
> with one another? Who is it that is creating and discarding organizations?
> When I look at that closely, I see people scheming and operating in a
> political element that is every bit as ordered and hierarchy-inducing as
the
> maligned organizations. Worse, in fact, since the whole thing is informal
> and far more fluid, and so capable of avoiding any of the criticisms which
> are so pointlessly easy to level against some party. You have the whole
> clique dimension, which becomes very difficult to control, and very
> unpleasant. Boy, I just love coming home from meetings feeling like a
leper
> for eating meat... Or enduring the whole 'cool' thing... Or hearing the
> endless bitching that passes for political discussion...  I'd rather take
my
> chances with Leninists. They are, by comparison to the anti-Leninists in
> Sydney, models of openness, tolerance and self-awareness.

If these people have so much trouble communicating with and accepting you -
for example, your omnivorous disposition - then how will they ever relate to
the masses?  This was a major problem for me a decade ago when I took up
vegetarianism for a few years.  I come from a working-class family and none
of them could understand what I was doing.  Most importantly they took what
I was doing as a sort of attempt to assume social distinction, to show that
I was somehow "better" than them.  While I don't think that we should
encourage an uncritical attitude towards existing working class culture, or
any culture for that part, it seems that in creating our own cultures within
the left sometimes we just create little cults whose attraction is precisely
that they represent a break with the mass of the people.

That said, it seems to me that the crucial thing is to enable new forms of
thinking - not necessarily imposing these on people but enabling them to
develop out of discussion.  Sometimes this might involve unfamiliar concepts
etc.  So long as it does not become a source of social distinction and is
not used to stupefy (here I'm thinking of Ranciere's analysis of eduction in
_The Ignorant Schoolmaster_) the masses in order to fill their heads with
the Truth according to whomever then I think we have to allow for
considerable scope to discordance and dialogue.  I guess the challenge is to
come up with forms of organisation that would allow this - as you say, of
'openness, tolerance and self-awareness'.  I'm not saying we must efface the
self - that is only a way of constructing one form of self to lord it over
the others - rather we need to find ways of allowing difference to co-exist
productively.

DM



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