[statecom] Ideas about party building

Tue May 22 22:13:04 EDT 2007

What Elie wrote may seem too abstract to be useful. That's what I thought until I read through to the end.

Another way to read the ten values would be to discuss each value in the light of each and all the others. I would love to have locals sponsor such discussion as a series. Annie has suggested something like this more than once.

This sort of discussion series should be open-ended, a cycle  passing through a changing context of activities, of other discussions, continually deepening our understanding and commitment to the PRACTICE of the values.

This sort of discussion/action model is employed successfully by all kinds of political and religious groups.

The Ten Key Values may not make great bedside reading, yet working together for a better understanding of them might lift our spirits. 

-----Original Message-----
>From: Yarden <yen.yarden at verizon.net>
>Sent: May 18, 2007 11:49 PM
>To: State Committee <statecom at green-rainbow.org>
>Subject: [statecom] Ideas about party building
>
>On May 14, I submitted to statecom-discuss site some remarks concerning 
>the SWPG's openness to ideas of people who were prepared to take its 
>work seriously, as well as its readiness to consider all suggestions 
>for party building.
>
>While some have doubts about proceeding to build without clarity as to 
>the purpose of putting a building up to begin with, there are others 
>who fail to see the need for examining what the desiderata of such a 
>building might be because they already know, and moreover have a 
>complete blueprint with architectural renderings to sell.
>
>I did promise to accept the invitation to offer suggestions to the 
>SWGP, and said that I would continue my contributions (my thoughts and 
>suggestions, rather than my conclusions).  Here is the third entitled:
>
>
>Fetishes and Values
>
>The culture of a society that relies on conspicuous consumption 
>(Veblen) or on commodity fetishism (Marx, et al) makes discussion of 
>values difficult. And, of course, the more the irrelevant information 
>one has about any thing, the more difficult it becomes to talk about 
>it.  To begin with: what kind of a thing is a 'value?'  Is it a belief, 
>a proposition, or statement of what is important. Right there you have 
>the question of ones ontological commitments.  Is the simple 
>proposition, "The earth is the only known habitable planet." a 
>statement predicating habitability as
>unique within the limits of our knowledge, comparable to a sentence, 
>"The earth is worth saving."  A question of this sort is not immediate 
>to the matters that I do wish to address, but ontologies always hover 
>in the background and it is foolhardy to deny that.  And perhaps it 
>will be necessary to return to the problem even in this brief attempt 
>to begin a discussion of the Ten Key Values.
>
>An enlightening feature of our party's statement of values, has to do 
>with its local history, and the explicit assertion that no particular 
>statement could be considered definitive.  The fetishistic aspect thus 
>minimized, leaving the Ten Values open to restatement for the sake of 
>understanding what was being proposed, may have led some people to take 
>the set of declared values for granted.  Others have been busy deciding 
>which ones they liked and which they did not, believing that the could 
>consider themselves 'green' if they accepted most.  I've been doing the 
>opposite, trying my hand at it rewriting, partly because when I first 
>read the available statement, I had not known enough about their 
>origin, and found some lines lacking grammatical ease, and others 
>seemingly fetishistic enough for totem construction.
>
>Look at how the concept of 'participatory democracy' is elucidated.  
>[GPUS] "Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect 
>their lives and not be subject to the will of another." And someone 
>must have noticed the grammar; because on the state party web-site, we 
>read [GRP] "Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that 
>affect their lives; no one should be subject to the will of another."  
>And a certain grammatical clumsiness remains to excite thought about 
>what is present.  The desire to achieve defensible clarity goes to 
>work, and this reader comes up with, [EY et al.] "All human beings 
>should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives; no one 
>should be subject to the will of another." An implied plurality in the 
>subject.  And the sentence's "their lives" no longer stumbles.  In the 
>process, the collectivity and the individual subject are brought 
>together harmoniously.
>
>But there is also ideological discomfort to be scratched.  What does 
>someone in this society imply with "deserve."  Raised my hackles the 
>first time I read it.
>--- No, you can't have any!
>--- Why? Why not?
>--- You don't deserve it!
>We need not go further: the very idea of being deserving, so deeply 
>engraved in the minds of people with subaltern status, whether child, 
>woman. or slave, and too deeply attached to the verb to be of much use. 
>  'Should' does the job very nicely.  And if ill-will dictates 
>opposition, it is dealt with far more easily than the arbitrary and 
>authoritarian notion of just reward -- an external objective judge 
>deciding, an implied entity.
>
>Reading any manifestation of the thinking of other people is very 
>different from reading an authorial text.  It sometimes helps if you 
>can get a sense of the ideological context, and a knowledge of the 
>history helps.  The history of the party is an area where my knowledge 
>is seriously deficient, and I'm looking to make up for it.  Helpful in 
>working over the Ten, is an early version that appears with the title, 
>"Ten Key Values of the Green Committees of Correspondence" (circa 
>1989).  It is framed as a series of questions, and however skewed they 
>may seem, the syntax (By what they ask you will know them) deprives the 
>Ten Values (answers, icons) of some of their fetish value, and restores 
>their eminent practicality.  Interestingly the order is different.  
>Ecological Wisdom comes in as #1.  And the elucidation of participatory 
>democracy second
>
>2.  GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY
>How can we develop systems that allow and encourage us to control the 
>decisions that affect our lives?
>How can we ensure that representatives will be fully accountable to the 
>people who elected them?
>How can we develop planning mechanisms that would allow citizens to 
>develop and implement their own preferences for policies and spending 
>priorities?
>How can we encourage and assist the "mediating institutions"--family, 
>neighborhood organization, church group, voluntary association, ethnic 
>club--to recover some of the functions now performed by the government?
>How can we relearn the best insights from American traditions of civic 
>vitality, voluntary action and community responsibility?
>1989
>
>When one looks at the questions being asked, especially the first, and 
>perhaps the third, the statement, "All human beings should have a say 
>in the decisions that affect their lives: no one should be subject to 
>the will of another." asserts the importance of human freedom, the 
>freedom of the person -- the living conscious individual of the 
>species, not a legal fiction.  A direction is suggested, " .   .   .   
>. develop systems [social ecologies] that allow [leave space for] and 
>encourage [remove the fear from desiring] .   .   ."  Completing my 
>reading of the the value listed first in our current statement, I 
>changed other sentences in a way that made it understandable to me.   
>[GPUS] "Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at 
>every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives 
>are fully accountable to the people who elect them." [GRP] the same as 
>GPUS.  And [EY et al.] " We work to improve public participation at 
>every level of government, and seek to ensure that our public 
>representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them."
>Note the changes: 1)  "Therefore" has been dropped.  2) "we will work" 
>has been changed from future (intention) to present (action).  3) 
>"increase" is replaced by "improve", (quantity -- more, by quality)  4) 
>complementation of clauses is eased by complementation of "work to 
>improve"  by "seek to ensure."  I am sure that with a little good will 
>we could argue about these changes, criticize, and make further 
>improvements sticking to the sense of what was earlier asserted.  The 
>elimination of the "Therefore," which seems crucial to me, might be the 
>most questionable change to another person.  But do read on.
>
>The last sentence, identically worded in both the GPUS and GRP 
>versions,  "We will also work to create new types of political 
>organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by 
>directly including citizens in the decision-making process."  [EY et 
>al.]  We will also work to create new kinds of political organization 
>that expand the process of participatory democracy by directly 
>including citizens in the decision-making process.  Only two word 
>substitutions, both more or less idiomatic, substituting 'kind' for 
>'type' (office illiterate) and 'that' for 'which' (grammatical).
>
>Thus (numbered only for reference here -- it reads better as a 
>paragraph):
>Grassroots Democracy
>1. All human beings should have a say in the decisions that affect 
>their lives; no one should be subject to the will of another.
>2.  We work to improve public participation at every level of 
>government, and seek to ensure that our public representatives remain 
>fully accountable to the people who elect them.
>3.  We will also work to create new kinds of political organization 
>that expand the process of participatory democracy by directly 
>including citizens in the decision-making process.
>
>The most important discovery that I made in studying this particular 
>'value' is that talking about values in the GRP, in contrast to values 
>talk in the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the duopoly, is talk about action 
>and strategy.  "Grassroots Democracy" is not a populist marketing 
>brand.  The 1st of our Key Values is a program of action!  The first 
>sentence states a value: individual liberty in human society. The next 
>two sentences are paired and set forth a strategy for achieving it.  1) 
>Improve democratic participation in the existing institutions of 
>government.  2) In the course of doing this create the new institutions 
>that are needed to replace the dysfunctional ones.  This is much too 
>comprehensive a strategy for the current needs of the SPWG, but has the 
>merit of providing a reference for the strategies that we develop for 
>achieving two- and three-year goals.  Our strategies can be examined in 
>the light of what reason we have for existing at all.
>
>Our party came into existence because of the need for an alternative to 
>a politics based on partisan play of congeries of interests against 
>each other according to the model explicated by Veblen (Theory of the 
>Leisure Class).  That kind of politics, promoting commodity 
>consumption, and constructing an economy dependent on waste of natural 
>and human resources was tolerable for only so long as the earth could 
>sustain that destruction of its resources.  The competition to consume 
>more energy than the other guy as a means to hegemonic advantage, 
>destroying far more of the earth's resources than our species requires, 
>began to be noticed when it became clear that concentration  of money 
>no longer contributes to greater wealth, but devastates, first, human 
>beings, and then everything else on this earth.
>
>Strangely, there are people like ourselves, who see what is happening 
>as well as we do, but believe that the politics based on the fetishism 
>of commodities, the economy of limitless growth, can be used to turn 
>things around.  We are convinced that they are seriously mistaken. Here 
>we must face the problem that we, no less than other people whose help 
>we seek, are members of society as it is, not as we might wish. And we 
>fail ourselves if we are unprepared to examine our ways of thinking.  
>Some of us believe that it is natural to behave as members of this 
>society do: that any vision for change will be corrupted as it gains 
>acceptance, that people are self-seeking, and that our opponents are 
>evil.  One could argue against this on a number of grounds.  But my 
>appeal is in my imagination.  There, I know the harm that good people 
>do.  I also know the daily atrocities of slave-holding societies, such 
>as lie at the foundation of this polity.  To say that there were slave 
>holders who were 'good people' two hundred years ago is true, as true 
>as to say that 'good people' do not do this today.  Perhaps 'good 
>people' changes.  It is equally true that injustice is rife. 
>Attributing this to circumstances is as insensitive to the realities of 
>the existence of real people, as is demonizing the propagators of 
>injustice.  Getting rid of the propagators of harm to other people and 
>to the earth is essential.  Screaming imprecations, and other forms of 
>magic, have high expressive value and when done correctly may excite 
>the conscience of sum.  But the effects of ontological commitments to 
>entities such as 'human nature,' or 'evil,' on our ability to think 
>clearly, will surely interfere with developing strategies for effective 
>opposition to prevailing ideology.  We will end up being merely 'more 
>of the same.'
>
>Those who most understand the need for 'another way' are the people who 
>will build our party.  Some of us are already beginning to doing this.  
>Perhaps a fellow party member who said that we have the ten values, but 
>this is not a program for action will look more carefully.  Let us 
>build the party.  But to what ends?  Let us get people into public 
>office.  But for what purpose?  This is what those who might join with 
>us need to know.  They might even ask questions.  Or they might say, 
>"But I'm not interested in politics."
>Elie Yarden
>Cambridge
>
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Bill Cunningham