Legume Sam: Stan says: Leftists to this day invest 90% of their capacity and effort into convincing people of the validity of their arguments. That this might be a strategic error does not in any way invalidate the theoretical arguments. It simply means that we have not found a way to practice what we preach.
We have copped to the notion that bad ideas produce bad practice, and in the process we have implicitly accepted that better ideas will produce better practice. So we lay out all the items we would like to see, then set about making elegant arguments for each of them… programs. The arguments are logically sound for the most part, but they never translate into changed practices in society at large. Maybe the ideas still aren’t good enough, then, because they don’t reach into the domain of practice. The idea of TINA, “there is no alternative,” seems to gain its rhetorical force from the seeming inexorability of capitalist discipline, the force binding individuals to the capitalist system. As the capitalist system has removed the possibility of living off of the land from the people, thus the people are obliged to work for money, within the money economy, for a living. What follows is capitalist discipline: the individual is trained to be a cog in a system producing products, but also a surplus, thus ulitmately profits. Within this money system, money itself is a claim upon wage labor, its labor-power — detach the workers from the system, and money no longer buys labor-power, thus the workers are freed to decide how work is to be subjected to what discipline, and toward what end. Thus the dawning of another discipline — ecological discipline. But how? The urban community garden thing looks like an opportunity to detach money from wage labor, if it doesn’t just get stuck in the wage-labor system. From there you can get people to organize a movement with the spare time they’ve created, within the space created away from capitalist discipline. Otherwise, you can save the world all you want; but ask others to save it with you and you’ll get one unanimous response: “Sorry, I’m busy.” From all I’ve heard of him, Obama impresses me as one such respondent. Yeah, the first Black President, possibly. But “sorry, I’m busy.” _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
