Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

On 2021-01-15 10:55, William Waites wrote:

> These days I spend most of my time in some sort of no-man's land 
> between
> theoretical computer science and applied mathematics. I don't know much
> about the philosophers that you quote.

Everything I know about philosophy I learned from Existential Comics. 
The people I quote are mostly organizers and educators.


> I think you are relying too
> heavily on names and labels at the expense of simple ideas which might
> make what you are saying inaccessible to many people.

My goal was to explain things clearly in a way that requires no 
knowledge of the people I cite, that's why I reduce it to "problems and 
loops" and explain why. I make the citations not to engage in argument 
by citation, but rather because there is only so much I can explain in 
this limited context and space, so provide the links out for more.


> The kind of iterative process that you describe can be observed
> throughout nature. It's a way of doing optimisation. There's something
> that we want to optimise, perhaps a personal notion of fitness or
> well-being in the game theoretic sense, perhaps out of a sense of
> altruism it's the average fitness of the group, or the society or the
> world. It would be useful to articulate specifically what you think
> we should be optimising for -- I don't think that you have done that.

Well, outside of the high level, improving the conditions of the people 
around us while confronting the aggression of our countries abroad, it's 
not for me to do that.

I think the main reason Jane Addams's Hull House was such a fertile site 
for the intermingling of socialist ideas and had such widespread impact 
in the USA's Progressive Era is the idea of residency. The key approach 
of the "residency house" movement inspired by London's Toynbee Hall was 
to move in to areas with the poor communities whose lives they sought to 
improve, and then figure out how to be a valued part of those 
communities and to move together towards mutual goals.

When we are resident where we are active we are most effective. Freire's 
problem-posing model and the "deep organizing" model that McAlevey 
practices depend on this. So, what we are optimizing for is maximizing 
people's own agency and involvement in their own liberation.


> Your iterative process is a kind of evolutionary algorithm.

Indeed. It is no coincidence that Darwin and Marx where contemporaries. 
Mix Darwinism with Dialectics and you get the The Dialectical Conception 
of History that is at the root of the Marxism.

Much of Marxist theory is best understood as describing the outcome of 
evolutionary forces from the view of the capitalist market and class 
struggle.


> Humans are a bit different because we can consciously change 
> strategies.
> This means change can happen on much shorter time-scales than, for
> example, genetic evolution.

Yes, this is exactly what Freire argues in his most philosophical 
passages, that to be human means to understand yourself in the context 
of society and history before and beyond the timeline of our own life.

As such, he describes the "central problem" as follows:

"The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, 
unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their 
liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be “hosts” of the 
oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating 
pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be 
like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is 
impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their 
critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are 
manifestations of dehumanization." -- Paulo Freire

One of the major ways the people in this community here at nettime are 
"hosts of the oppressor" is on one hand, seeing the oppressed as an 
undifferentiated mass that needs to be "convinced" and led by our 
virtuous ideas, another is the inability to shake free of imperial 
propaganda seeking to fan the flames of fear of foreign countries and 
movements, and instead turn our weapons against the class enemy at home.


> Can we see why pundits of western left as you put it appears to be 
> stuck
> in a local optimum? Well, that's just it. There's not a huge amount of
> pressure to do things differently.

Not a lot of pressure for the hip embedded left, no. But many 
communities are under tremendous pressure, even within the imperial 
core.


> Discomfort far away is hard to feel here.

Very much so, all the better to focus on the discomfort where you are 
resident, and reject efforts to convince you that the enemy lays abroad, 
always focusing on the class enemy at home.


> So here we sit at the bottom of the well. The western left as you
> describe it cannot be a source of change.

Indeed, all the more reason to take a step back and see that we are part 
of a much bigger team, the global left, and that our prospects as an 
isolated embedded left are slim to none, but our prospects as part of a 
connected global left are world changing.

A dialogical internationalist approach is the way to resolve this 
contradiction, think globally, act locally, as even the patches sewn on 
to student backpacks and bumber-stickers on hybrid cars tell us.

Cheers,


--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: