Ben, On the awkwardness: fair enough, and none taken. I'd rather be corrected than agreed with out of politeness, so let me state the objection once, plainly, and drop it if you still think it misses.
It was never about Hillary Clinton or anybody's private reasoning. It was about the salmon. You brought it in to make the point that class logic runs beneath the conscious intentions of the people enacting it and that what the fish believes about the waterfall counts for nothing. I accept that. The trouble is that a salmon acts correctly without any institution to sense, decide, or coordinate on its behalf. Your account of how a class rules is the reverse. It requires institutions precisely because a class is not an organism and cannot behave like one. Both can't bear weight at once. If the instinctual version holds, the condition of the institutions tells us nothing, and Bonapartism as institutional breakdown has no work left to do. Which brings me to the million people, and here I think the description settles more than you intend by offering it. A million people, unequal in wealth and power, holding different political ideas, some shaping events and some going along with what others shape: that is a population, not a subject. Populations do not delegate. And the reason I keep returning to the active/passive boundary you'd rather set aside is that your own best argument sits on the active side of it. "Use it or lose it" is a claim about a judgment made under a closing window. They had a choice: play the card or watch it disintegrate in their hand. Remove the boundary, and that argument has nothing to stand on. I'm not laying a trap. I think the asymmetry you identified is right, that weakness increases the danger rather than reducing it, and I've said so in print since. I think it is carried by the retinue, which genuinely does face a now-or-never, and not by the million, which does not. Now the crisis of theory, where you have the better of the framing and, I think, the worse of the diagnosis. I grant the premise without reservation. Ideas matter. Theory becomes a material force. What I don't grant is that the binding constraint is availability. The corpus has been free and searchable for a quarter century. MIA, the journals, the presses, the pirate libraries. An activist in 2026 can reach more of the historical experience of our movement in one afternoon than Draper could reach in a year with a Berkeley library card and a mimeograph machine. Access rose by orders of magnitude. Clarity did not rise with it. If anything the curve runs backwards, and the periods when American socialists argued most fruitfully about strategy were periods of worse communication and better organization. My explanation is that theory is not settled by circulation. It is settled by consequence. Questions get answered when a body of people has to decide something and pays a price for deciding wrong. What got clarified in the 1930s got clarified because there were organizations that had to choose whether to take the sit-down strike, whether to go for a labor party, or whether to stay in the AFL, and the wrong answer cost them something they could feel. Absent that argument does not converge. It accumulates. We are inside the experiment, and this is the part I'd ask you to sit with. This list is your platform in miniature. Serious people, no gatekeeper, open discussion, a signal ratio most journals would envy. In ten days it has produced the best sustained discussion of Bonapartism I have read anywhere this year, including in print. It has also produced nothing else. Multiply the subscribers by ten, and what you get is ten times the discussion. I don't say that to score. It is the only evidence available about your proposal, and it happens to be ours. Your own criterion is where I keep landing. Input, decision, motor output. The platform supplies the first two and supplies them well. Your sentence about correct ideas reaching the working class is where the third is supposed to arrive, and reaching is not carrying. Marx's formulation was that theory grips the masses by being demonstrated ad hominem, which is to say by answering the situation they are actually standing in. Transmission is not that. Somebody has to be positioned to act on the answer and to find out in the acting that it was wrong. That is what supplies the correction. No signal-to-noise ratio substitutes for it. So build it. I mean that straight. I would rather it existed than not, and I would argue in it. My disagreement is about what it repairs and on what timescale. It does not repair what has gone wrong in this thread, which is that a list of people capable of describing the mechanism with precision has, in ten days, reached no one who touches it. I said last time that I have no line into a postal local and that nobody here has answered. I'll leave that where it lies rather than ask a fifth time. Ballots go out this month. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43397): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43397 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121053097/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
