On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 7:22 PM, Marv Gandall <[email protected]> wrote:
I wrote: >> This puts the onus on the left's theoretical/propagandistic work, especially >> with the youth, almost as an activity with ample autonomy from pressing, >> immediate political concerns. Marvin, > What more precisely do you mean? I typed that thing above on my phone. It was my segway to the URPE plug. URPE is a small group of economists (a few hundred paying members at a given point in time) trying to promote a radical critique of mainstream economics. It's been around a few decades, so it has a degree of historical robustness, as it's survived a host of very diverse conditions, some rather adverse (not serious repression, of course, but social disenchantment, etc.). It is important to keep the flame of these structures alive as they help people veer to the left or stick to it, given the stuff life throws at them. But also, because of its anti-establishment ideological or propagandistic role. The ideas that we share from our rather modest platform. Now, I had in mind Carrol's usual reminder that discussion of tactics, strategy, and all that is idle unless it is in the context of a concrete struggle, as well as his view that change-of-minds is the cart and change-of-structures is the horse. It is true, in general, that people will not change their minds in mass unless the cost/benefit ratio shifts sufficiently, and that entails structures in place that make mind changing easier or more conducive. But it is like saying that because the overall trend in the physical world is towards increased entropy, then life, intelligent life, etc. are impossible, as that entails an area of the world in which the trend is reversed. As we used to say back when, qualitative leaps need to be preceded by a patient, gradual accumulation of small quantitative changes -- changes in individual consciousness, even under conditions adverse to mass change in behavior, can lead to a tipping point in social structures, and then to collective shifts in behavior. Social structures, from those most immediate to left-leaning individuals, like trade unions, left-wing propaganda clubs (so-called "parties"), etc. to broader ones like political/ legislative/judicial process (e.g. "fiscal" or "monetary policymaking"), always start from individuals taking initiatives to form them. I cannot remember now the title, but Elinor Ostrom has a nice paper reviewing the literature on resource allocation/collective management of the commons and the ability of a community to go from a perverse equilibrium to a virtuous one (or vice versa) hinges on the initiative (or lack thereof) of the -- if I can put it this way -- the "vanguard." If I had time, I could go and find n quotes from Lenin or Trotsky where he'd be making a very similar point, without the technicalities. The construction of a "vanguard" is a very fragile phenomenon, because it depends on the initiative of individuals, and by the law of large numbers, small groups can wind up veering every which way. As they say in statistics, uncertainty is the largest at the level of the individual. Informational entropy is at its max in events whose probability is uniformly distributed. Our collective future truly depends on our personal choices about time use, which is both exciting and scary. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
