Ian: " Reducing hours is one *good* idea. We need many more, no?"
Some rambling remarks: I'm not sure. The Jacobin revolutions of the 20th-c (Russia & China) could focus with a very few analytic ideas: Peace & Land. The 2dI did make some headway around the 8 hour day -- and the resistance of labor to the initial capitalist onslaught was around the 10 hour day. Marx's aphorism, " The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses," also implicitly asserts the contrary: Ideas are _not_ a material force so long as they do _not_ grip the masses. And the ideas that grip the theorist or analyst may or may not be the ones that go on to become a material force. The preceding paragraph is mostly playing with words -- but not wholly. It seems to me that ideas never catch on until in some form they arise more or less spontaneously from practice. The Eleventh Thesis holds as a basic epistemological principle. We owe one hell of a lot to the Luddites and the Parisian mobs. And as an empirical observation, perhaps pointing to something more fundamental: left politics do lead to environmental activity, but damn few environmental activists become leftists! And the horrors promised by global warming have turned a lot of leftists to Disciples of the (alleged) Possible. The fact that former Mayor Bloomberg could join the climate march ought to generate some caution. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
