Re: [Marxism] Towards A Left

["Richard Levins" <humaneco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some notes following up the discussion in Carrol's posting on "the left"  :
1. The main long-range objective of political action is to change thinking. All 
politics in the US is episodic, expressions of outrage or demands for some 
action by government or a challenge to some corporate power, etc. The episodes 
may have a short life, from days to weeks or in some cases persist for years, 
but they all finish one way or another. We have to ask, when it is over, how 
has the thinking of the onlookers, the targets, our adversaries  and ourselves 
been changed? (Yes, I include our adversaries. Most of the people who are 
against us belong on our side and eventually must join us if we are to win).  
Does it prepare us better for the next round? Have people's notions and 
feelings  about how things work or about the left been improved or made worse? 
Has our commitment, unity, and capacity  been strengthened or undermined? The 
Women's Pentagon Action against the Viet Nam war was a model of this kind of 
thinking.
2.In every situation, we have to ask, what ideas related to this situation  
need changing ,are vulnerable to change, and how can we promote that change?
3. Ideas do not change by simply advocating a better idea. They change from a 
combination of experience and analysis, with experience often opening the mind 
to look at analysis.Therefore we ask, what kinds of experience increase 
people's openness to a fresh way of seeing, and which divert their attention to 
side issues? 
4. The central intellectual problem around political action is working out the 
structure of the idea system we want to change. There are core ideas that are 
strongly protected , peripheral ideas that can be modified as needed to protect 
the core,  (from "the police serve and protect" to "the police serve and 
protect except for a few bad apples" or "mistakes happen, but it is dangerous 
out there" ) and outer defenses that divert attention to the protesters instead 
of the abuses that are protested. Bad ideas are not maintained by repetitive  
"propaganda" alone but by ideology that workably explains experience, by  
experience that reinforces the ideas, and by feelings that allow the dominant 
ideas to be comfortable. But in an unjust society this structure of ideas is 
vulnerable when the barriers between contradictory ideas are breached so that 
people have to confront the contradictions or when new experience contradicts 
the core notions. Our job is to help create the experience 
 that contradicts the beliefs deeply enough to affect the core in each 
situation. In each campaign and in each action, we should pick out which of 
whose  ideas we can and want to challenge taking into account also ourselves, 
our capacities and levels of commitment. After the event, we evaluate what 
happened inlight of these goals, not in just in  indicators of attendance or 
numbers of leaflets distributed or even the neat things speakers said.
5. I propose inviting discussion using these criteria on the economic crisis, 
the illegal actions of the Bush government, and the Israel-Palestine war.



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Richard Levins

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