[PEN-L:3662] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Don't just offer facts

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bigwayne19@xxxxxxx wrote:

> In a message dated 2/21/1999 7:54:55 PM Pacific Standard Time, cbcox@xxxxxxxxx
> writes:
>
> <<
>  We never talk to anyone except to those who already agree
>  with us but always thought it didn't make any difference.
>   >>
>
> --------  oh yes you do.   they're just not answering back . . .

So? And what else is new? I'm not talking about seminars. I'm
talking about 200 years of history of actually organizing people
in mass struggle.

The general point is that when people "see" action ongoing, people
out there in public picketing, rioting, holding silent vigils, passing
petitions door to door, parading, heckling speakers, beating up
wife beaters, etc. etc. etc. they begin to want to relate to it (mostly
negatively,. but in periods of rising activity increasing numbers
positively and they get involved without quite (except in the most
general terms) know quite why they are getting involved, but after
acting they begin to want to understand more deeply why they
are acting, and THEN we have the situation I speak of: of only
talking to those who already agree with one.

People may be swayed from Electoral Rat A to Electoral Rat B by
persuasion, manipulation, psychological (freudian?) playing on their
abstract heart strings, but they are not moved to *listen* and act by
such nonsense.

And I repeat, I'm not talking about what should be; I'm giving a simple
empirical summary of what has been the case for 2 centuries or longer.

Tick Tick Tick their little (rhetorical, empirical, freudian) iambics
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.

You get virtually identical stories from SNCC workers of the '60s,
from CP and CIO organizers from the '30s, from the struggle for
the 10 hour day, from all histories of the Russian Revolution,
from the abolitionist and suffrage struggles. It is always the same,
first people act, then they search for reasons for their action. And
it is the communist task to be prepared to give them reasons
that make sense AFTER they have been acting, and therefore
already in important ways agree with us, and therefore are ready
to listen to us.

I rather suspect that a detailed account of Joel Kovel's own career
as a political activist would make mincemeat of his psychological
theories (or at least of their political relevance).

A couple other notes from this thread. I of couse agree that "social"
and "historical" are (as Maggie argues) (a) identical and (b) the explanation
for racism long known before anyone started throwing around the term
postmodern. What I said was that in actual usage there is often confusion
about the *verbal* force of social -- that I have on occasion found
confusion to arise when someone said to me racism is a social
construction and I said yes it is and then it turned out that we had
violent disagreements as to what was going on out there in this
process of social construct ion.

All sorts of social constructions of the past 75 years have in fact been
constructed in the fevered imagination of a Time headline writer. That
kind of social construction is of trivial interest. So while "social" and
"historical" ought to be synonyms (and perhaps usually are), one
cannot depend on their actual usage being identical in a given
conversation or text.

Doug drags in "trade union consciousness" vs. "revolutionary" or
"socialist" consciousness. That is an interesting topic, but not relevant
to my remarks on Lenin, because I am talking not about "consciousness"
of any sort but the activity that creates the need for *some* kind of
selfconsciousness of one's political activity. Also, of course, that is
one of the less interesting parts of that rich and abused text, *What Is
To Be Done*, though the topics it raises are still of great importance,
just not of importance to the context in which I have been writing on
this thread.

Carrol