Individual or not what is an e-list?

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Comrades,
    We have arguments here, we talk back and forth and celebrate the life of
a comrade, Jim Blaut, who was a great voice.  Are we more than just
individual voices?

    What really is the conversation?  Is that really just disparate
individuals speaking into a void?  Or is there structure to the network that
is not about the individual and about the collective?

    One of the central issues of the Western left is about sectarianism.
>From my perspective that is an overlap with disability rights.  But on a
larger level what is a group?  What does an e-list really do?  It is a group
of people who talk back and forth.  But how much do we really consider the
community and collective features of this work site we use to advance the
Marxist movement.  Are we ready to step beyond traditional means of
organizing, to leave behind such concepts as sectarianism whose root is
attacking a disability?  Why would I say this, because an e-list that is not
open to disabled people conflicts with a fundamental disability right of
access to obsessive compulsive people who take the brunt of criticsim for
sectarianism.  We therefore must think for the whole working class.  And if
we do then we must start seriously thinking about the colletivity of the
brain work site.  What is not individual and what is the whole of doing
brain work.

    I think that an e-list foreshadows how to think about the Marxist
future.  The point is that groups of people are not individuals, but a
collective structure.  We don't discuss here what the potentiality of the
medium we use.  Of course we consider the practical elements of what e-mail
is readable for people around the world, but we don't argue about the
structure of the collectivity.

    The collectivity is much more important than the individual voices.
Many people have a great voice here.  I get more news here, more debate than
anywhere else.  Thanks to Lou Proyect who is a great voice for the people.
But the debate ought not to be about an individual moderator, but about the
collectivity of the people in a working class Marxist thinking work
environment, or the e-list.  What I mean is that an e-list is a place for
brain work which advances the deepest elements of developing the working
class.

    A conversation to get technical is an exchange of files with certain
properties.  The files we exchange here are low memory files.  Just a few
words typed and recorded and then exchanged.  Keep in mind with productivity
increases over time and with advances in the tool we use there are many
different aspects of the collectivity which will have to do with increases
in file size that cannot possibly be managed by a human being.  The time for
a man like a Lou Proyect as a moderator will certainly pass by us in our
life time.  We will have to face that automation of communications demands
more and more a machine to use and add to our words.

    What is the collectivity?  How do we think not of individual voices but
of the whole of us starting to be a clear and strong voice in the world?
That is central in our task ahead.  I am not talking as someone promoting
the internet, I am talking about us facing and starting to talk about what
the collectivity we can create really is.

    It is impossible for someone to read thousands of e-mails a day.  What
must we do to begin to think of the properties of what a collective really
means.  This is a deep issue.  Not something about opinions.  It is about
how human brains work.  How the world wide computing industry works, and how
we as Marxist understand the world.  There is much work to be done.
Comrades arise this is a new revolutionary work site for us to create a new
collectivity.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor