My problem with pragmatism is thus: if you decide that action cannot succeed, you will not take action, which means it will not succeed, which means the status quo remains unchallenged and supreme.
I can come up with a million reasons why something will not work. It isn't hard. Most of them will even be plausible! Likely, even!
And so, it takes significantly less energy to decide that fighting won't work, so why try, it's a waste of energy/resources/blah blah blah.
This is an op, friends.
1/
You've been acculturated into believing several "facts" that, quite frankly, are less factual than you think.
Things like "change is never quick" and "politics is always about one step forward and two steps back" and "human nature is fundamentally violent, rapacious, and everyone wants to murder you"
Another is that your best bet when deciding what to do is to...try to see the future?
It's absurd on its face, right? But that doesn't stop "serious, mature" people from trotting it out.
2/
"Now see here: I've thought about this and have read summaries of the literature produced by white Western capitalists on this subject, and [beneficial action/effort] is actually *~impossible~* and *~could never succeed~* so you shouldn't even try it" literally comes out of people's mouths so frequently it should be on a sign people can point to to save them the trouble.
But - and I remain flabbergasted that I have to say this - *you cannot predict the future*.
3/
Pragmatism is *predicated* on the idea that some people are so smart they're literally *Seers* and *Oracles*. They couch it in rhetoric about "probability" and "likelihood" and (always, always) Hobbsian ideas about "human nature" - but it's still casting the bones.
They elide/erase that humanity exists because of a series of *extremely unlikely* occurrences in both nature and society that, had a pragmatist been in charge, would have *never happened*.
4/
"It seems *extremely unlikely* that a single-celled organism could evolve into a sentient ape" they would opine.
Indeed, pragmatists put Semmelweiss in an insane asylum for asking them to wash their hands. They supported chattel slavery for a half century, despite widespread opposition to it amongst regular people, "because abolishing it is disruptive and impossible!" Most scientific breakthroughs came from extremely un-pragmatic efforts. The light bulb took hundreds of failures.
5/
Pragmatism is a *destructive ideology*, not a worthwhile way to use your brainpan.
As I always have to, I need to distinguish it from *practicality*. Practicality takes a goal and lays out the steps, resources, and likely challenges it will face as you work to achieve it. Then it requires you to create likely solutions to those challenges ahead of time and secure those resources.
Then you *do the thing*. Despite the chance of failure.
Pragmatism just says "don't do eeet". End of story.
6/
None of this applies to shit like "I will jump off a cliff and fly!!!!" Bro, I gotta predict you will not fly.
Because like most pernicious and hard to dislodge ideologies, Pragmatism is a deformed version of something very useful: knowing what is realistic and what isn't.
If your project is to, say, breed a kind of puppy that produces fusion power, I can confidently say you will not succeed. As an example.
When you weaponize that common sense into Oracular certainty, it's Pragmatism
/fin
Here at the end is where the thread goes astray -- because at the beginning there's an ambiguous use of the word "you". Does it mean you as a person? Or you as a collection of people pursuing a joint social project?
So if they are personal projects, sure I should go for them, within the limits of common sense informed by my knowledge of my own abilities. If they're collective projects, I have to use whatever knowledge I have about society.
And someone looking around at current US society is going to say that common sense means we can't do a lot of things, because as collective projects they need many people. This isn't a matter of "we don't have votes in the Senate". It's a matter of "there isn't a popular left ideology even in existence".
That could always change, even suddenly. If it changes in a day, we should change our common sense in a day. But saying that you, as a personal project, can and should be one of the few to bring that collective into being -- it's not only "there is no alternative", "nothing can change" propaganda that has made people suspicious of that idea.
But the op exists precisely where you find the flaw.
Individualism was part of the neofascist acculturation in large part to disperse the collective *and try to ensure it never formed again*.
In fits and starts, tho, it *is* reforming, because neofascism is based on a fundamental error: a centering of cynical Hobbesian ideas of the "nature of mankind", which are bupkiss.
That's why I say Pragmatism is a *deformation* of a useful skill for nefarious purpose.
Individualism has been American since long before neofascism: it was part of settler colonialism without a defined source culture.
Sure, neoliberals want to exaggerate the decline of any collective. But I can also see other people with my own eyes. To the extent that some people are coming together they are doing so around Blue MAGA values i.e. neofascism.
It's not that it didn't exist, albeit it was something so tame comparatively that most people would see it as hardcore communism today.
Cultural revolutions don't happen out of nowhere: inception is a myth.
Rather, movements like neofascism and its babies identify extant things that can be used as Trojan Horses or be deformed in specific ways to manipulate people towards their ends.
The left fails because it declines to do this most of the time.
It's not really "declines to do". One of the things that I learned as an environmental activist is that the right has immense monetary resources: they can fund all right-wing institutions *and* a whole set of mock-left institutions. The left doesn't have someone who can decide to do this.
But even more so: the legacy of the USSR's failure, which was only 35 years ago. One of the few empires to collapse from within.
I think the left competing on that level (money, broadcast) is why they fail. Masters tools masters house etc
The left succeeds when it builds granular personal community, and uses the necessary good of that to pull folks in.
Sure, but that means that the left can't really decline to do anything (or agree to do anything). We do what people are broadly ready to do.
And people in the US broadly are not good. Not even at a level of political education or something like that: they are broadly people who I wouldn't trust to watch my kids when my kids were young.
But you're negating the left's ability to radicalize from within communities, which is what the right did to drive their cultural transformation in the 70s/80s.
Readiness isn't as important as trust. Allowing leftism to be associated with liberalism was *extremely* foolish, largely because liberals can't be trusted at all.
Building that trust is the first step.
Tankies to every other leftist who has an idea: "It's utopian socialism, bro. Never gonna work without a scientific foundation based on the material conditions of society."
John
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