Posted by David Searles on January 01, 2009 at 14:16:02:
In Reply to: Re: SIU to TOTALLY supplant state? posted by David Searles on January 01, 2009 at 05:17:51:
Very happy to see that there is so much agreement.
A long explanation for something that I wrote.:
"No thanks to the visuals "
I didn't mean to disparage the visuals which I still haven't looked at. It’s one of my personal quirks that I have a very distractible mind - ADD to beat the band. One of the things that I do to keep me sane (although it may not appear as such from the outside) is to limit stimuli so I can concentrate. This seems stupid but when I'm dealing with written words I find it best to limit myself to written words. When I speak to someone face to face and I'm trying to focus on the content of the conversation I have a very hard time looking at the person's face to whom I am speaking. People who aren't used to me find that it unnerving.
Another quirk that I have, and I find this very useful in cutting to the core of a subject is that I try almost as much as possible to avoid analogies. It took me years find this technique but it is very useful. Read the DeLeon editorials - my favorite example taking a dog to the beauty parlor as THE official explanations to analyze the difference between reform and revolution. The problem was that it was such a powerful analogy that we all substituted it for actual thought..
Even my own illustration today about moving into a house I find very distracting because it's probably going to take me another ten years to get it out of my head to be better able to analyze the topic.
Do you remember Walter Steinhilbur? Wonderful gentleman and his wife - Julia as I recall. Remember the SLP sketch of the SIU with the different industrial departments showing how they would take the place of political government?
After Walter did this sketch it became THE SLP way of looking at SIU and political government to the point that it became impossible for me for decades to see that it could or should be any other way.
I had the opportunity to have many personal conversations with Walter and Julia. One time I asked him about the sketch. He was a very modest individual although he was one of the few individuals were modesty would have always been inapplicable. He told me that he made the sketch not to enunciate party position but as a way that HE could better understand the idea for himself. He made the sketch, showed it to the party, and the party took off with it. (It literally took me decades to figure out the import of what he said about merely sketching it out so that he himself could understand it.)
I went back to the 1905 DeLeon speech to the IWW where he first talked about the industrial govt. supplanting political govt. Where did that come from? You can search in the editorials before and afterward for years and you will find practically nothing (if not absolutely nothing) about this idea.
It took the SLP 7 years to incorporate the idea into its national platform. It wasn't until another year later that DeLeon wrote an editorial specifically in verbal (but not logical) support of the idea.
I have to kick myself for not seeing this 30 years ago. Of course we didn't have the internet and it was hard to analyze these things as we can today.
Anyway I am rambling.
I have to admit that I am a quirky dude and can seem to be quite cantankerous, for which I can explain but probably will actually do very little to amend my ways, if the past is any indication of the future, but
Happy New Year to every one.