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Post by BJ on Oct 25, 2005 18:52:29 GMT -5
As high as the stakes may or may not be right now, and regardless of what your interpretation of the mass line is and how it works, it does seem to me that in carrying out this sort of agitational/guerrilla theater activity at Hunter and other places, you do want to actually connect with the masses. Isn't it sort of pointless to go out and agitate in a way that doesn't connect with the masses, or some significant section of them (and I mean significant in a broad, not necessarily quantitative sense here).
Maybe other people see something different when they watch that video. What I see is a total lack of connection with the masses. I have run this by a number of people and they agree with me, so I don't feel like I'm going out on a limb with my own purely subjective take in watching that video.
So, no matter how high the stakes, no matter how you think about the mass line, doesn't it make sense to carry out this activity in a way where you accomplish something more than what is shown in this video? I just don't see how you can defend this sort of political practice as something to reproduce, as anything other than as a learning experience about how not to do mass work (and such learning experiences are, of course, somewhat inevitable).
The higher the 'stakes', the more important that the masses actually be won to fight, that an effective way be found to stir more and more people out of their passivity.
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Post by flyby2 on Oct 26, 2005 9:29:03 GMT -5
yes, i think obviously the point is to "connect with the masses" -- bring forward cores of the advanced, extend influence among the intermediate, raise the activity and determination of those on the right side, put opposing forces on the defensive and isolate them....
And sharply challenging people, especially when a horrifying gap exists between what isneeded and what exists, is exactly the way to "connect to the masses."
There are far too many people wandering around from class to work, oblivious to what is going down, or lulled by their own (rather idealist) summation that "nothing more can be done", or by the mistaken summaton that "things can't possibly be that bad, the pendulum will swing and then...."
there is an economist model where you painstakingly build mass organization around people's own direct interests, do some vaguely connected and otherwise vaguely focused political "education" (often through a prism of self-interest, i.e. identity politics or economist assumptions), and then project that (somehow, someday) this emerges as the kind o f revolutionary movement we need.
This is a model for missing all the events of our times, leaving the masses unprepared, and training the advanced to be social workers and trade union hacks.
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Post by trying very hard on Oct 26, 2005 10:42:21 GMT -5
I remember reading Avakian on Black preachers, and him saying something to the effect that we don't want to push them into the hands of the enemy through our actions by confusing Christianity with Christian Fascism. I'm curious if there aren't parallels here.
How do we judge if the consequences of our most advanced, most honest, most confrontational tactics are having the objective effect amongst other sections of society of pushing people away, and how do we respond?
I get sick of the smug self-assuredness of the liberals out there too, and subjectively I wanna smack some of them into reality--just go off on them. And I defend the actions of the agitators at Hunter because they are telling the truth, and fighting for what is needed. I also reject the whole idea of them "blowing through". Either what they're saying is true, or it isn't; either it should be defended and upheld, or it shouldn't.
But how do we sum it up if our actions actually push people away from involvement in this movement that needs so desperately to take hold throughout society? And how do we proceed? I don't have an answer.
Clearly more struggle is necessary there and everywhere--and no one gets to throw up their hands here, and walk away. The stakes are very high.
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Post by two cents on Oct 26, 2005 14:14:36 GMT -5
the problem with this last post is the strange assumption that our tactics "push people away."
That is pretty obviously not the case.
There is a whole logic in identify politics of "don't offend me" -- as if being offended is the ultimate sign of reaction.
But all of that is profoundly smug, subjective and passive.
How can you have a radical movement in the U.S. that doesn't offend some (or even many) people? How can we do what we need to do without shaking people up -- and going straight up against very very wrong summations (about the nature o f this regime, about the possibility of relying on the democrats, about the idea that "we have time and the world can wait.)?
If you think that a few"offended" people means "we are pushing people away" -- you will end up wasting your time on an approach that is much much less than what is possible and necessary.
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Post by still trying on Oct 26, 2005 14:54:00 GMT -5
There is a whole logic in identify politics of "don't offend me" -- as if being offended is the ultimate sign of reaction. But all of that is profoundly smug, subjective and passive. How about we don't call names here? I'm busting my ass to make this thing happen, and I'm raising what I think is a legit question. There have been posts which suggest that people are not getting involved because they don't want to be browbeaten by these organizers. I'm not making this up--it's right here! The response to my question is name-calling. What the fuck? If we can't even engage the question without name-calling ("smug, subjective and passive") we're not going to get far, I think. Would someone try to explain to me why it's ok to not care what college students think, but it IS ok to worry about Black ministers?
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Post by flyby2 on Oct 26, 2005 17:41:55 GMT -5
coverage in Berkeley's Daily Cal: www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=20154(i didn't read anyone calling names in this thread. There is a great deal of smugness and passivity and profound illusions -- and lets discuss how to deal with it without getting into the constant "you offend me, stop it" bag.)
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Post by two cents on Oct 26, 2005 17:43:21 GMT -5
the whole point of having actions on campuses is because what students think and do really matter.
But that precisely means we shouldn't TAIL what they currently think -- but should interact with it (in a challenging, provocative way that is in line with what the times demand.)
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Burningman
Revolutionary
"where it is by proxy it is not"
Posts: 194
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Post by Burningman on Oct 26, 2005 22:33:21 GMT -5
NOTE: This was in response to posts on the first page of this thread and I hadn't read the following discussion.
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First off, observer: what you know about me is nothing. If you want to pay my rent, then I'll gladly take to organizing full time. Otherwise, your shitty attitutde is exactly what's being criticized. That kind of moralistic and proudly condescending attitude is what I was trying to criticize in a comradely way. I know a few things about Hunter, and I was there the day after the protest talking with students, activists and faculty on campus. I figured you'd be interested in the response. If I had heard ONE PERSON say it was a good action, I would have included that. But I didn't. That's my reporting: not my agenda.
Second -- I have done some rapping about the protest, including but not limited to students throughout the CUNY system -- and including doing damage control for this particular event. Which was necessary.
Third -- "observer" is welcome to make it personal. It would just neatly illustrate my fucking point. If s/he wants to discuss the history of activism on the Hunter campus, I'd love to share some observations.
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This isn't the 1960s when people could go on welfare while being organizers, or go get high-paying factory jobs, or live off of mommy and daddy's money. Hunter is still an predominantly working-class college where most students have jobs and a full course load, plus quite a few people with children (and parents) to support. Telling these people to just drop everything is nonsense. Many of the immigrant students have their entire families expecting them to graduate and support them -- and are making painful sacrifices to bring that to fruition.
A bunch of people who are effectively strangers showing up and berating them doesn't change any of those real facts -- and your indifference to it leads me to wonder why it is you engage in poltiical work in the first place. Not knowing the conditions of people's life is a recipe for cooking inedible food.
What is the mass line? Tell me. What did Mao mean by it? And how did the Chinese CP apply it to such great effect that they were able to move mountains? By showing up in a village and insulting people? That's a "line," but it's certainly not the mass line. The young Mao wasn't just "urgent," he spent serious time learning to understand the conditions of life among the Chinese peasantry. Read his studies some time. And think about what it meant as a political objective to engage in that kind of listening.
Listen to people. Know who they are, what pressures they face, the conflicts they deal with -- their hopes and fears. NOT YOUR HOPES AND FEARS. You already know that.
You may think listening is "tailing" people -- you may think knowing who you are actually speaking to is somehow intrinsically opportunist. You may think that because you have read xyz essay, that translates to you understanding the "people." But I say you don't.
And if you did, this action would have been carried out differently. This was an old argument in the 1960s, when Maoists strove to "Serve the People" while moralistic bourgeois cretins like the Weatherman said "Fight the People." They said fascism was the danger -- when they were murdering leftists one after the other and there was real grounds for seeing that. And they substituted their own moralistic fanaticism for learning to unleash the proletariat, oppressed nationalities and youth in a revolutionary direction. Groups like the Revolutionary Union had a different method -- something people are hungry for.
There is story after story about Weatherman blowing into schools demanding students walk out and then saying they were "hopeless" because everyone wasn't on the same page as them, because SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. Well, yes -- it does have to be done. The question is how... and pragmatically hurling ourselves into an apparently "apathetic" mass of people will lead to burn-out among the activists, alienation from the base to be organized and what I would call "activism as usual" with a new brand name.
I'm not saying there's even anything wrong with the basic scenario. There is something powerful about the "take the leash" idea -- and worth emulating. I was speaking specifically about the yelling towards the end, when the crowd was largest -- and that IN FACT served to produce the OPPOSITE RESULTS to what was intended. It will DEMOBILIZE PEOPLE, strengthen both reactionaries and real opportunists -- who are there every day, after you've left the campus, a part of the student life and on a first name basis with the folks some guy felt obliged to call Nazis.
It is the very real stakes that mean you have to pay attention to the effect of your own actions. It's not about you. It's just not. Not how intense you feel. Not how much you can't sleep. That's moralism, not communism.
Hunter is subjected to several Trot groups who show up with their "analysis" and then try to explain why everyone who doesn't adopt it is full of shit. It hasn't served them well. Students pass through their groups like sand through fingers -- which the Trots just sum up as their inablity to grasp "the truth." They also innoculate students to Marxism by promiting it in a way that doesn't bring socialism up from the people -- but treats it like a catechism to be adopted.
My constructive suggestion was to send organizers to the campus (and others in the CUNY system) as matriculated students who can operate with both more liberty -- and be a part of the scene. Get to know students, faculty and campus workers. Identify which subgroups are in motion: the advanced, the intermediate and the backward -- and then work with real human beings and not "masses" who you treat as sounding boards to prove your own moral strength.
Or don't. But if you're really, really, really, really serious -- and you want to reap results, maybe even considering that there might be some truth to what I'm saying just might, maybe be in the interests of this campaign and its effectiveness. Because effectiveness counts -- it's the ONLY thing that counts. Being "correct" will reap nothing. We're not Christians. There's no heaven for the faithful.
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Without engaging them, these are counter-arguments to what I said that have literally nothing to do with what I said here, or have ever said:
I didn't say the mass line is a mirror. I didn't say revolutionaries should tail anyone. I didn't say we should limit the activities of the advanced to what the intermediate or backward already understand. Nor that "it's all good" and that we should just "muddle through."
I said clearly that I heard many students, some who are active and several who are not, who felt insulted by the action. Maybe "the masses" don't sum things up where you come from, but where I live they have names and lives -- and make choices everyday. Knowing why might help you break through -- and learning to really listen might help not just with politics, but the rest of your life.
Learning physics isn't tailing gravity.
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I think reactionaries are on the defensive in New York, are filled with bile -- not passion -- and are often frightened to run their shit in public forums. The point that we need to figure out is how to activate people is correct, exactly because the momentum is turning. But this begs the question of what terms that will happen on. And if those upholding a revolutionary pole do it in such a way as to alienate their natural social base, then who will pick up those pieces?
There's nothing opportunist about recognizing opportunities. There's nothing pragmatic about being practical.
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Burningman
Revolutionary
"where it is by proxy it is not"
Posts: 194
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Post by Burningman on Oct 26, 2005 22:37:51 GMT -5
Come now Flyby, why don't you get real specific about what you're saying?
I imagine most readers here don't know the subtext of what you are talking about... which, if I read it correctly, argues that organizing people around the conditions of their lives is inherently "economist," "identity politics," and so on...
Please detail the organizing programs at CUNY that real revolutionaries not prone to such vices have, in your estimation, carried out in the last few years. I'm all ears.
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Post by flyby2 on Oct 27, 2005 11:15:01 GMT -5
I am not deeply familiar with the political scene at CUNY, and certainly would not pretend to make some serious summation of that campus without real knowledge.
But this is not about CUNY.
Let me give an example from the 60s:
SDS was not built by years of micro attention to the conditons of college x, or y, or z. And it was not built around "student demands" (even though all kinds of forces insisted that "student power" should be the economist bedrock of any organizing.)
SDS was build on the sky-lighting issues of the day -- the war in vietnam, the cultural revolution in china, the black liberation struggle, the press for revolution in the mothercountry. Its organizers didn't first immerse themselves in the details of each campus -- they arrived and said "get with the revolution, down with the war." And it was that sweep, that "cut through the shit" that brought its growth -- combined with creative tactics and real militancy, and a fearless, righteous willingness to get in the face of the passive and reactionary. They acted as a small minority with a firm sense that "the vietnamese are dying" and this could not be allowed.
The famous story involved SDS activists taking a dog around the campus, on all the walkways, in front of the classrooms, with a sign on its back: "We will burn this dog tomorrow at noon in front of the libary. Signed SDS."
Not surprisingly, a huge crowd gathered at the library, outraged and more-than-a-little disturbed by the threat. And at noon, the SDS spokesperson stood up and said: "OK, you are concerned over the burning of a dog. But y our government is burning vietnamese with napalm this very minute. What are you doing about that?"
Whether or not this "famous story" actually happened like this, it makes the point.
This was not about "your tuition is higher because the war in iraq is taking money from social services" or similar bullshit. This is about "break out of your track, your rut, your fixation on your own life -- lets take a look at which future we are going for -- the future represented by Bush or the future represented by Bob Avakian."
Or to put it in a theoretical way: we need a movement that is not defined by (is not limited by) the "narrow horizon of bourgeois right." This revolution is not about "now i get mine" -- it is not the victory of the bourgeois pie-slicing of "resources" where "finally" the poor get the biggest slice.
We will not win this by "linking" the sweeping historical issues to whatever miopic and personal obsession people have at any moment. That assumption (that the self, the immediate, the economic is the best arena for political work) is economism, and it is opposed to a revolutionary approach to politics and this moment.
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Post by flyby2 on Oct 27, 2005 11:35:49 GMT -5
and in a very immediate sense, we need a movement that dares to take on the juggernaut represented by bush -- that is willing to "get on the tracks, and get in the way" and dares to bring other people with it. Opposition to all this will not be built "on the side" or piecemeal, or on a timetable that suits us. The pace of things is actually controlled by the ruling class. And the direction of things was confirmed again by the withdrawal of Harriet Miers who (apparently) was not sufficiently flesh-eating for those calling the shots -- despite all her born-again piety and personal devotion to His Bushness. This is not a time for business as usual. And more the point: we will not build what we need to build on a timetable that assumes years of work around small demands, building piecemeal to broader and broader demands. that is why the passage from the WCW call is worth grappling with deeply: "But silence and paralysis are NOT acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn — or be forced — to accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it."worldcantwait.org/theCall/Intentions are not the point. The question is the objective "logic of the logic." People intend to "build for change" -- slowly and painstakingly (because of their assumptions about how that can and must be done.) but where does that objectively lead -- where does it lead NOW in this moment? For example, forces organized around these economist and "identity politics" approaches: why did they so widely fold and disappear after 9/11? Wasn't it because they simply couldn't "deal with" such a massive shift in the terrain, and their micro-vision could not accomodate challenges on that (global) level? Yes. If someone is organizing people around "we need to get ours" (as the concentration and focus of method a nd approach) -- what happens when the whole world changes, when the issue becomes "the war on terrorism" and all that this brings with it? the very forces gathered around an economist approach are disoriented, divided and dispersed by the shifts -- the logic of their logic takes them there. Becuase revolutioinary politics does not (cannot and never has) emerged from a thousand micro-steps -- economic demands plus patient spoon-fed "educatoin" It ruptures out of chasms, vacuums, dangers and collisions. It is born of the rise of extremes, and the criminal acts the system aggressively takes up. It emerges from global events, and from people taking up global events. (Not the opposite: from the world being forced to take up their personal and micro-events, by teaching people to cling to "narrow horizon of bourgeois right." And all kinds of "turfism" and micro-fiefdom..... this is my hood, this is my campus, this is my creds, my chalked out arena, my movement corner, my niche, my capital)... well, they don't contribute much do they? Ultimately or fundamentally, or in this immediate moment?)
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Post by observor on Oct 27, 2005 11:49:03 GMT -5
burningman wrote "Telling these people to just drop everything is nonsense. Many of the immigrant students have their entire families expecting them to graduate and support them -- and are making painful sacrifices to bring that to fruition.
A bunch of people who are effectively strangers showing up and berating them doesn't change any of those real facts -- and your indifference to it leads me to wonder why it is you engage in poltiical work in the first place. Not knowing the conditions of people's life is a recipe for cooking inedible food. What is the mass line? Tell me. What did Mao mean by it? And how did the Chinese CP apply it to such great effect that they were able to move mountains? By showing up in a village and insulting people? That's a "line," but it's certainly not the mass line. The young Mao wasn't just "urgent," he spent serious time learning to understand the conditions of life among the Chinese peasantry. Read his studies some time. And think about what it meant as a political objective to engage in that kind of listening."
I disagree with every part of this.
Obviously not EVERYBODY will "drop everything" -- or grasp the need for that. But a key part of "making the breakthroughs we need" is having a significant number of people "drop everything." And that is possible.
Do some people have families expecting them to make money and send it? yes. Will some of them see that the world revolution is more important? yes. Many revolutionaries have "family responsibilities and expectations" that they have to reject -- because everyone in this society lives in a matrix of demands and necessities.
In Nepal, women warriers leave their children with strangers. When they join the revoluton and cut their hair, they are never able to simply walk down the streets of unliberated villages again. Many revolutonaries (men and women) break with their families forever -- and realize that their aging mothers are asking "who will care for me?"
Is it wrong for them to do that? Is it wrong for the Party to ask them to do that? No.
Is it wrong to look at our challenges through such a prism? No.
Will everyone do this? Is it the dividing line between progressive and reactionary? No, again.
And all this talk of "strangers" embodies a line -- it is an ideas at the heart of the economist assumption. Stalin argued that communists should be on the workfloor, and known as the 'best fighter in the day to day" -- and on that basis get respect and support -- with the assumption that when the communist then started raising the larger issues that the "fighters for one" would follow him/her into revolutionary consciousness and movement. But economism doesn't work like that. And political consciousness doesn't spread by familiarity build over a million small battles.
(Economism is wrong -- in its assumptions. It does not work in practice. It doesn't pull the masses "to the left" -- it pulls the revolutionaries despite "to the right." It turns radicals into social workers -- despite their intentions.)
As for mao -- your point is exactly wrong. He laid the basis for the revolution through the Chingkangshan base area and then the Long March. His forces appeared PRECISELY AS STRANGERS out of nowhere (disconnected with local conditions and the immediate struggles). They called on the youth to drop everything and join the revolution! They settled accounts with the evil gentry, divided up property and then moved on -- over thousands of miles and thousands of villages.
What would mao have thought about the argument of a villager "I can't come with you, my family is putting me through school, and I have to gather coins for a dowry"?
think about it!
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Post by observor on Oct 27, 2005 11:54:18 GMT -5
What is wrong with the approach that burning man describes: "Hunter is subjected to several Trot groups who show up with their "analysis" and then try to explain why everyone who doesn't adopt it is full of shit. It hasn't served them well. Students pass through their groups like sand through fingers -- which the Trots just sum up as their inablity to grasp "the truth." "
Is the problem that they don't adopt burningman's "get matriculated" approach -- or that the analysis they promote as "truth" is, in fact, not true?
Read over the call of WCW (http://worldcantwait.org/theCall/) -- doesn't this correspond with the real situation (in a way the Trot analyses don't)? Isn't it possible to form a national student movement around this, relatively quickly, now, irregardless of the conditions on each campus?
Obviously the revoluton needs to be "part of the scene" and ultimately "come from within." But if we follow the go slow approach now, we may wake up in a fascist America this spring. That's why several people talk about grasping the urgency and also grasping how that urgency can cause movements to jell relatively quickly and broadly.
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Post by History Professor on Oct 27, 2005 13:41:41 GMT -5
"As for mao -- your point is exactly wrong. He laid the basis for the revolution through the Chingkangshan base area and then the Long March. His forces appeared PRECISELY AS STRANGERS out of nowhere (disconnected with local conditions and the immediate struggles). They called on the youth to drop everything and join the revolution! They settled accounts with the evil gentry, divided up property and then moved on -- over thousands of miles and thousands of villages."
This is a deeply historically incorrect view of the history of revolutionary China. How long was Mao at Chinggangshan? 1 year. Why did he retreat from there? Do some investigation.
Tellingly, you refer to a period when Mao formulated some of his basic policies, not a period when he actually led the CCP through major advances in practice. (While the Long March was a great and heroic achievement, and forged the core of the later party, it was not important in the way you are making it out to be.) If you want to study the period when the CCP made the leaps necessary to seize power in 1949, you must look more closely at the entire Yan'an period.
I would write more, if I thought there was an audience here that wasn't entirely lost to idealist metaphysics. But since there isn't, let me just point out how wrong you are and hope you may do some further investigation, assuming you believe the sky won't fall on your head long enough for you to study something in a thorough-going and materialist sense.
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flyby
Revolutionary
Posts: 243
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Post by flyby on Oct 27, 2005 14:50:03 GMT -5
hmmmm.
Ok, well in the interest of opposing idealist metaphysics, lets be materialist:
Are you suggesting that Mao's approach of building base areas was a failure in Chingkang mountains? I.e. that Mao's early base areas are an example of what not to do?
Are you denying that the Long March was a seeding machine (as "observer" refers to)? And that in revolution, people often "show up" (as "strangers") and rally people to a revoltuionary line?
Are you trying to turn Mao (presumably the post ChingKang Mao) into an example of slow work around immediate demands?
In fact, Mao saw the Japanese invasion as stage manager, and suspended the focus on land reform (which was an immediate concern of the peasants, who often had to be brought a sense of the national liberation struggle "from without") and built the revolutionary movement on the larger question of resisting and defeating Japan.
Instead of dissing everyone here for "metaphysics" why don't you make a clear materialist and historical argument?
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