At 10:06 AM 2/17/97 -0800, Max wrote: >Maybe we differ in that one impulse is devoted to >creating a legacy of a vision which future >generations will find illuminating and useful, >and frankly I'm interested in work whose >beneficial, tangible effects I will live to see, >not least because I would like to be assured they >are indeed forthcoming. I think you could even argue that it doesn't make a lot of sense to create a vision of the future--except perhaps as an occasional mental exercise for opening your mind to new possibilities in the here-and-now. We're in the same position as someone in 11th Century Europe trying to imagine what capitalism would look like; it's a near-impossible task. Someone could argue that only by having a clear vision of the future we want can we hope to make progress. But I've been in plenty of meetings with lefties who have such a vision, and it doesn't seem to do much in helping to figure out what we do right now. As often as not, it turns into a reason to have a knock-down fight over differences that are trivial in the here-and-now, or it becomes a rationale for taking actions that at best could be called "liberal" (or simply "stupid," such as planning "revolutionary" actions with the assumption that your funding will mostly come from foundations). Of course, my feelings about long-long term visions may be colored by the fact that I don't find either market socialism or central planning very believable. I think market socialism suffers from from the problems that several Pen-lrs have raised. And given my limited experience with planning, either in the government, businesses, or community groups, I have a hard time believing that central democratic planning, even if it's driven from the bottom up, would work. Either system, even if it only worked in a half-assed, clunky, inequitable way, would be a hell of a lot better than what we've got now, but I can't see either as an end-point. It's fun to spin stories about what the future might look like, and I'm glad Pen-l is doing it, but right now our side needs more help in the present. If someone came to me today and asked, "what do lefties think the world should look like after capitalism?" I could give them a hefty stack of readings. If they asked me, "if a bunch of us start running for office and 8 years from now take over the California state government, what economic policies would we want to be fighting for," the stack would be pretty tiny. Anders Schneiderman Progressive Communications
