Jim Devine wrote: > >> okay, let's forget the stress points metaphor for now. The point is, > for what issues is there a potential that we can get people to agree > with us (more importantly, with me ;-)) when they don't currently > agree with us.
Here's the thing. Throughout its history capitalism has generated an unending stream of outrages, often affecting considerable majorities of the capitalist nations. Yet times and places where mass movements of resistance have materialized have been extraordinarily few. Moreover, there seems that those few occasions have no lessons to teach us -- or no lessons that we couldn't teach ourselves in weeks were we to find outselves in the midst of another such occasion. The French uprisings all eventually failed. The second Russian uprising succeeded thanks to a world war. The Vietnamese and Chinese Revolutions had as their condition a foreign invasion. The Cuban Revolution is clearly sui generis. I spent a lot of time from roughly 1975 to 1989 trying to dream up, reason out, discover, such issues, and explored a few of them, with some nice local results on a couple. But we really aren't going to discover them; they (if they exist or appear) are goind to discover us. So the main thing we have to do in any given year is _stay us_, by which I mean don't join the DP, don't go in for using low-phosphate detergents, etcetera. We can continue to organize around whatever local or natinal issues temporarily trigger active public response. Some will flourish for awhile and die. Others will be flat from the beginning. Under the right conditions (Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" is the right metaphor) those ongoing activities will flow into something bigger. And if they don't. They don't. I had a great uncle who organized sheepherders for the IWW in Montana early in the century. Nothing much came of it. When I visited with him for a couple days back in 1947 he wasn't weeping about it. Neither should we. Carrol
