Re: Stars and Stripes: "The whole city, from every side, was fighting"

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Davies wrote:
>
> oddly enough (or perhaps not oddly enough at all), this is taught in the
> business schools as the only way in which one ever gets a mass market
> product of any type off the ground.  It's the theory of the "early adopter".
>

Not odd, I think. Advertisers of a new product are expecting those it
reaches not just to buy the product (the equivalent of just voting for
the candidate in politics) but to _use_ it actively and to exhibit that
use to others. Since the election all sorts of left voices are calling
for leftists to follow the kind of building strategy that conservatives
followed after the 1964 Goldwater defeat. That, I think, is absurd, but
the mass marketing principle dd describes does offer an interesting
metaphor for left organizing.

The core difference between left political strategy and either liberal
or conservative strategy is that the latter calls for passive
acceptance, the former for active involvement. As between conservative
and liberal (a difference I'm not too interested in), the success of
their strategy depends on social and ideological factors over which they
have no control. Nothing Kucinich might have done would have made much
difference, just as nothing Bush/Kerry might have done would have made
much difference (i.e., would have elected Kucinich or Barbara Lee
president). The victory of Bush/Kerry was simply part of the terrain,
not part of their doing.

Carrol