McKinney’s challenge(s)
It seems more likely each day that Cynthia McKinney is about to make a run for the presidency. This will alarm all the “realists” who consistently cling to the pantlegs of the Democratic Party through betrayal and capitulaiton after betrayal and capitulation.
This should mobilize the rest of us. Not because the often symbolic politics of presidential elections is important enough to trump other work, but because several trends seem to be coalescing in a very dynamic way; and because Cynthia McKinney’s candidacy at this point in time has tremendous catalytic potential.
Cynthia McKinney’s candidacy will be historic.
(1) Cynthia McKinney is a former Democrat who has had the courage now to turn deepening criticism of her former party into the action of leaving and running against it.
(2) Cynthia McKinney is a witness. She has experienced first hand how the DP attacks its own members when they deviate from the military-industrial, neoliberal, and-or Zionist-supportive script.
(3) Cynthia McKinney is an experienced politician of the Sunbelt suburbs, which now serve as a political bellwether for the nation.
(4) Cynthia McKinney is an African American who is not trying to be assimilated in order to be acceptable to white backlashers. This means she has access and authenticity when she speaks to African America, the most important bloc outside of the “swing” of the suburbs, and the most taken-for-granted population, within the Democratic Party.
(5) Cynthia McKinney is a woman who is not trying a la Clinton to be one of the boys by establishing some kind of psychic bona fides by expressing the willingness to kill people “in defense of the US” agaisnt hypothetical enemies.
(6) Cynthia McKinney is on the right side of the major issues. She opposes the war and wants out now. She opposes neoliberal “trade” policies. She supports women’s reproductive freedom. She opposes the racist “criminal justice” system and the prison-industrial complex. She recognizes the current economic malaise as class-war from above, and will take sides with those below. She will investigate our own government thoroughly — delegitimating power — and openly report the results of those investigations to the people.
Within the next year, the economy will become more unstable, the war and the region of the war more unpredictable, and the candidates of the two major parties more narrowly focused on immigrant-bashing and anemic liberal social policies… avoiding the war and all the other issues raised above. In particular, none of the D/R candidates will be able to explain the economy in plain language, because they all have a stake in bewildering the public about the root causes of our problems.
(1) If run off the corporate communication grid, McKinney’s campaign can reach a tremendous number of people with critical counter-narratives. This is a perfect opportunity to push the envelope with new techniques for corporate-media bypass communicaitons and networking.
(2) The basis of a successful campaign (measure success any way you like… I put it on a continuum, and not in a win-lose context) will be local organizing, which is also the basis for successful efforts in every other political arena. Her campaign can strengthen and expand local organizing.
(3) The three-P issues that have been buried by the Democratic Party (Palestine, prison, and patriarchal “real man” politics) can be used in the context of organizing around a McKinney candidacy to reach a broader audience that will be focused on the Presidential election of 2008.
Strategy (what to get done) needs to be simple and sequential. Tactics (how to get it done) need to be local and agile.
(1) The first and most important goal of such a campaign is ballot access in every state. This requires studying the ballot aqccess laws in your state, then organizing to do the incredible grunt work that is necessary to get a third-party candidate on the ballot. Do not underestimate the difficulty or importance of this task.
(2) The second goal is to get her and her candidacy known to the maximum number of people. This has three parts. (a) Get people to know who she is and that she is a serious candidate. (b) Get her positions clarified and understood. (c) Get the disinformation and distortions about her and her positions answered and neutralized (as early and often as possible).
(3) Expand the number of voters committed to the candidacy, and to actively supporting the candidacy in expanding and overlapping networks, block by block, precinct by precinct, district by district. Trying to contain such an expansion effort within some kind of schema will only stifle initiative. Stay prepared for targets of opportunity, and use the personal networks that we all already have… family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, co-activists, churches, temples, and synagogues.
(4) Stay in touch with the national campaign to find out what materials they have, and what her itenerary is. CDs, DVDs, webcasts, podcasts, and text. Identify networks and mailing lists (email and snail mail) that are ehtically available to the national campaign.
(5) Table for McKinney at events.
Best of luck to all. Order American Blackout now, and show it widely. Available from Netflix.
If you have $$$ to spare, give at http://www.runcynthiarun.org/
Legume Sam:
Re: Cynthia McKinney’s ballot access:
Barring massive infusions of cash to pay armies of petition-gatherers (who must collect hundreds of thousands of signatures statewide), a Presidential candidate hoping to gain access to California’s electoral votes must gain the allegiance of a political party. As I understand it, Cynthia McKinney has declared with the Green Party, a rather dysfunctional entity in California and elsewhere. Now, the existence of a Green Party in the US is not necessarily a bad thing — but the one we have now is in serious need of reform. As I see it, one of the potential contributions of a McKinney for President campaign could be an overhaul of the Green Party itself, which through parliamentarian manipulation got the 2004 Milwaukee convention to endorse David Cobb for President. Cobb, as you may remember, was a stand-in for the “Vote Kerry and Cobb” strategy. The Green Party in the US has been in decline ever since his nomination.
Perhaps the McKinney for President campaign could organize a meaningful alternative to the two-party system, either through the Green Party or by removing the Green rank-and-file from the co-dependent relationship it currently has with the so-called “leadership” by forming another, more meaningful, political party organization.
24 November 2007, 2:22 pmStan:
If I hear right, CM may be listing with Peace and Freedom in CA.
24 November 2007, 3:52 pmLegume Sam:
One of the perils of the US system is that, if one runs without the backing of a specific party, ballot-access and resource battles must be fought anew each time one runs.
This was something Ralph Nader’s campaign discovered to its dismay three years ago with California, when the Green Party “leadership” decided against the will of its voters to put David Cobb on the ballot, and when the Peace and Freedom Party decided, with the will of its voters, to put Leonard Peltier on the ballot. Yeah, Leonard Peltier, still in prison, and running for President because the Peace and Freedom Party of California wanted him to. So Nader was left without a party here, and since the petition drive was being harassed by the Democrats and had no sufficient resource base, he had to be a write-in candidate — and I’m not really all that clear as to whether write-in votes are even counted.
Thus my advice: may Cynthia McKinney either find or make a political party to her liking.
24 November 2007, 4:54 pmansel:
Stan, can you explain why radicals should devote funds and energy to a McKinney candidacy, much less any presidential candidate, rather than grassroots projects? Isn’t it clear by now that electoral politics are not a means for radical social change, especially when they’re dominated by a corporate duopoly? You’re encouraging folks to get her on the ballot, but you’re not suggesting she could actually win, are you? What’s the point, then? I don’t understand radical folks who dismiss Kucinich because he remains a Democrat, but are more than happy to support the latest third party candidate. At least Kucinich, through his membership in the party, gets noticed and pushes that whole debate somewhat leftward. Are you hoping to see the establishment of a viable third party in the long-term, or? Isn’t there a more effective and democratic way (i.e. revolution from below, building local alternatives, etc.)?
I still haven’t seen American Blackout, but I heard it was really good.
24 November 2007, 5:46 pmRB:
This news is a dream come article to read! ***!!!!!*** I’d like to hope there’s been allot of planning behind the launch of this third party with Cinthia McKinney ON the ballot for president!
I watched her daily last year in a clip to the show on FSTV, “Democracy Now” …she would say “We cannot be satisfied!…”. War and anger start the fighting, stop THE THINKING, which stop the teaching of responsible behavior/Dr. F. Cline.
This is the 20th century! The Peace and Freedom Party uses the brain we’ve been given to solve problems…combat is the ancient way of barbarians…treat not criminalize for prison reform….and all the other issues listed at the PFP site.
I do worry about Ms. McKinney’s voice and health. BTW who’s this other DN party flee-er Jack Sheppard of NH??? who also wants peace??
RB
24 November 2007, 8:41 pmStan:
Vote Kucinich in the primaries, then when he loses, work for McKinney. This IS a grassroots effort.
24 November 2007, 10:04 pmrootlesscosmo:
According to the California Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) web site, they’ll hold a primary (I assume on the same day as the Dem and Repub primaries since PFP has a ballot line) where registered PFP voters can choose among 11 candidates, including Cynthia McKinney; the site refers to candidates for President and Vice-President, which I don’t understand, since standard US practice for many decades has been for parties to choose their Presidential candidate who then selects a running mate.
24 November 2007, 10:32 pmansel:
That doesn’t answer my question. I don’t think it’s grassroots in the same sustainable and strategic way as, say, Copwatch or a local cooperative thrift store. I’m just questioning where our time and energy is best spent. And why participate in the primaries if you reject the Democratic Party?
*confused*
24 November 2007, 11:04 pmStan:
The confusion may be presumption. When have I ever categorically rejected participation in any election? or categorically “rejected” the Democratic Party? These things are part of our political terrain; and on that terrain we make tactical choices. Copwatch and thrift stores are not necessarily in some zero-sum competition with electoral activity. Synergy and symbiosis. Think about it. What voting Kucinich in the primaries and supporting McKinney both accomplish is strengthening a left-pole, independent alternative to the Democrat Party establishment. The grim reality is that the biggest obstacle to change right now is not the Republcan Party. It is the Democratic Party. It is there that the critical issues — antiwar, feminism, environmental justice, class struggle, national liberation — are being contained. When you have gangrene, sometimes you have to amputate. Defeating the Democatic Party from the left is the only practical exercise of political power the left has right now that can be exercised in the near term. That defeat needs to arrive with absolute clarity about why the defeat happened, and the practical infrastructure of resistance continue to be patiently grown. Abstractly “taking positions”, abstractly “supporting”, abstractly “rejecting” this and that is shedding “tears in the rain.” Practical and political work are not separate or survivable without one another. And both have to create real consequences. This return to the same political formulae over and over again is a kind of political autism. On the other hand, reduction of politics to statements of competing opinions as a demonstration of some kind of purity (categorical rejection of a tactical option, while calling this “principle”) is philosophical idealism (what someone once called an “infantile disorder”).
I appreciate your challenge on these points, because it is opening up a topic that needs to be addressed in much more detail by feminists, leftists, etc. We are way overdue for some new thinking on the strategic theory, beginning with a deep-down critique of all the assumptions that are the foundation of our ideas on strategy. Most of them are borrowed from the 20th Century left, who borrowed them from the 19th Century military. About 90% of them that worked, in my humble opinion, did so as much by chance as design, whereupon we retrojected some inevitability thesis on them.
Our opposition is studying Boyd, and we are still following Clausewitz and Bismark.
When you talk of “sustainable and strategic,” it would be helpful to explain what you mean by that. They are not the same. Some of us are having a conversation behind the scenes (and have been for some time) about what “strategy” is, and about the assumptions that are behind much “strategic thinking.” If we haven’t accounted for unpredictability and emergence, we are basing our strategies on archaic illusions.
Look into OODA Loops.
25 November 2007, 9:00 amLegume Sam:
Here’s a suggestion: read up on the 2004 Milwaukee convention of the Green Party US. My friend Walt went there but I stayed home to take care of his dog and possessions, so I didn’t go. I think that after hearing the results from him afterward, though, I’m not sure what point there is in voting for minor parties in the primary any more. Unless they’ve changed it, the Green/ P&F primaries are mere “beauty contest” votes, meaning that the ultimate authority to select the party’s nominee rests not with the voters themselves, construed any way you choose, but with the convention delegates. Until they change that system, and make the popular votes binding on the delegates, I’m afraid I see little point in voting Green/ P&F in primary elections.
Now, as for voting Kucinich, I can say that I’m not terribly fond of his “saving capitalism” plank — but obsolescent things tend to stick around in periods of great extinction, like the one we’re living in now. The rest of his platform, though, is really more than we can expect from a Presidential campaign, since very little of it reflects the real process of Presidential selection, in which corporate media oligopolies must be coerced into staging one’s campaign.
My own opinion on “what to organize for” is probably best expressed in thie essay (or in a quick-and-easy mode here), but that’s off-topic in this thread. Those are forms of activism which either 1) don’t require much time and energy or 2) they’re your life already, in which case you don’t need to be told.
Electoral politics is still a meaningful activist pursuit, as control of the state must precede its transformation.
Btw, if you want to find a large audience of activists dedicated to electoral politics, you need to be communicating with the Democratic Party, as 98% of the voting public is still convinced that electoral politics has to be done through the Democrats. Kucinich’s values are “mainstream” — his main stumbling block (beside the disdain he’s gotten from the mass media) is that the Democratic Party rumor mill imagines him to be “unelectable.” It’s all nonsense, of course — if he’s on the ballot, he’s “electable.” But if you want to see electoral activism displayed on the Web, check out the Kucinich diaries on DailyKos.com — start maybe here or here, then compare that with anything “third party” you can get onto your browser.
All that having been said, I still don’t know what Cynthia McKinney has in mind for ’08. It’s always good to destabilize the status quo, however, even if it isn’t effective. The illusion that all are happy with the current situation must constantly be re-proved wrong.
25 November 2007, 10:24 amStan:
What Cynthia McKinney stands to do is far more than Nader could ever have done… but it is not obvious to the average Nader voter, who is white. That she is an African American woman matters… a lot.
The bulwark of the Democratic Party is African America; at the same time AA is the most disrepsected and ill-”led” of any Democratic consitituency. Colonized people are in a unique position where the colonizers can invest tremendous resources (via the DP in this case) in creating civil and institutional defaults that select “leaders” for the colonized… leaders who are little more than comprador colonial surrogates.
McKinney’s experience with comprador Denise Majette, and McKinney’s representative authenticity in her lived experience put her in a very special position to call people like Black Democratic elected officials and all their minions in “civil society” to account, and further expose the cynical manipulation of African America by the Democratic Party apparatus with the able and willing and well-paid assistance of these compradors.
McKinney is already pouncing on the American criminal justice system as a population control mechanism against Black people. See how much play that issue — which affects nearly every Black family in the US — gets in the DP “debates,” on the nightly news, or within the mainstream discourse of the post-primary elections.
Anti-imperialism begins at home, y’all.
25 November 2007, 1:15 pmLegume Sam:
My questions about political party have a point. It’s clear that Cynthia McKinney plans to organize African Americans — but to do what? And what happens after the gatekeepers (which at this point include the folks who rigged the ’00 and’04 elections) make it nearly impossible for her to win? Is she planning to leave any infrastructure behind after the election?
25 November 2007, 3:26 pmPhilip:
Although I have enormous respect for Cynthia McKinney, I still need to be sold on the idea that her candidacy is worth returning to the electoral process. As a third party candidate who is not a billionaire (e.g., Perot), she has no chance of ultimate success. This may be an acceptable outcome for what is essentially an organizing effort, but I question the huge diversion of resources and energy to a futile project like this.
Further, the very idea that she is running without a party, without a real base of support, tells us everything. Any success McKinney garners will be through the force of her personality, not the power of a collective effort, a political party. Stan’s comments about her race, her gender, her personal background, are all compelling, but tell us nothing about her politics. She should be building a party, a movement, with a program we can all support. It should not be about Cynthia McKinney but about all of us unrepresented by the 2 property parties with one name.
25 November 2007, 3:37 pmStan:
I’m not sure CM is the one to leave infrastructure. That responsibility would seem to be ours. What are we calling infrastructure? A party?
What happens to these questions if we repose them organically, not mechanically?
Will there be any fertile soil left behind? Who will leave it? What do we want to grow?
Just asking… I don’t have the answers. My own instincts are just to try different stuff and see what happens.
25 November 2007, 3:41 pmLegume Sam:
I suppose there are a lot of creative options. A 501(c)3?
25 November 2007, 5:40 pmPhilip:
We are too far gone as a society to approach these things haphazardly. Yes, we want any effort by CM to be a part of a political movement, a political party, not a personality cult. It is not a question of what is left behind, but of what we are building. Right now, she is a personality shopping for a vehicle, and I think we all know this is backwards and doomed to failure. Let’s get serious. Let’s build our own party, organize our own communities and workplaces, then talk about national representatives of our movement.
25 November 2007, 6:07 pmStan:
Excuse me while I vent…. haphazardly my ass! No one is proposing haphazard anything. I’m saying get over the insupportable assumption that “we” or anyone else can predict complex systems. It’s just scientistic (male) arrogance, and dangerous arrogance at that.
Arguing for tactical agility is not calling for anything “haphazard.” It’s admitting complexity and learning to work with it instead of against it.
And if I’m not mistaken, McKinney is going to run Green. That’s a party, no? If that’s what tickles yer innards. I, for one, have had my belly full of “parties,” with their top-down jackassery, their grandiose programs, their inbred bureaucratism, and their bickering over angels on pinheads.
If we have to have a Party to get on a ballot, then by all means make up a name and register it with the state. But if I hear one word about democratic centralism, I’ll be headed for the door. Like I said, this is Bismarkian centralized authoritarian aim-the-main-blow bullshit, and we are well into the era of Boyd. Think big dinosaurs and small mammals.
Again, I suggest a cultivation metaphor to replace the “building” metaphor.
I also suggest all the Party-Builders learn a few concepts that came around after Lenin died: emergence, self-organization, complexity/chaos, OODA loops, Dunbar’s number, and maybe even Black Swans.
As one of Boyd’s friends explains the OODA loop:
This is the kind of tactical agility that a bureaucratized Party is quite simply incapable of… one, on account of structure, two, on account of the incessant self-mystification of Party orthodoxy.
You cannot know when you Act how it will change the situation that you will subsequently Observe… that’s why the loop begins again. But you do have to act. It is not haphazard.
This stuff is essential if you are a weaker force facing a very strong force. And we are. Weaker. Much weaker.
25 November 2007, 8:40 pmLegume Sam:
I’m sick of them too. Part of me wishes she would just bring in a lot of new people into the Green Party to outnumber the old ones; part of me imagines the Green Party as a sort of millstone which will just drag her down.
Ralph Nader ran w/o a party last time ’round and got 0.4% of the vote. Whaddaya gonna do?
26 November 2007, 12:21 amRequired:
Stan, I’ve heard you talk about OODA loops before, I think in FSD was the first time. From the limited amount I understand I think it’s part of a sound theory but I have trouble thinking of how to make it applicable to social change.
When I think about it working, it’s in the context of an insurgency like Iraq. The insurgents attack different places, not really as part of some over all scheme, but just to keep the initiative and to keep the US responding to what they’ve done.
I can’t think of (dog fenced?) anyways that the same principle is applicable to social change. Our actions are different to insurgents. If they set off a bomb, some one has to attend to that ASAP. But if we organize a film screening, or collect petitions, or a rally, or write an article, or plant some food, nobody has to respond to that. It could go unnoticed for ever.
26 November 2007, 4:25 amStan:
Required just asked the right question, imo.
There are differing paradigms in any intentionally competitive (antagonistic) phenomenon. Likewise, there are different dimensions of activity. Games reduce these contests to conceptual essences; that’s part of their appeal for diversion and entertainment. But in the same way that life can imitate art, we can begin to apply our experience with games to the action-questions raised by political opposition.
There is a different essence in a game of hearts than a game of chess than a game of Go than a game of soccer. This subject has even spun out its own academic niche with “game theory” to study capitalist “economics”. Better than claiming it’s a science, I suppose.
In games, the action focuses on the dynamic contained within the game parameters. Soccer has rules, a regulation sized field and ball, a set number of players. Hearts has rules, a standard deck of cards. Chess has a spatial grid which defines the potential of each piece in relation to all other pieces. Go has a set number of stones with a set number of positions (with game combination possibilities that approach infinity).
What tactical agility theory does is integrate the focus from the externalities and essences (the physical context) with the neuro-psychology of the actors. Because it was originally a warfighting theory, it dispenses with grids and rules. Moreover — and this is key — it takes a philosophical position on the nature of all reality that is intentionally weeded out by games (like establishing control measures in a lab). It says that the game-board, as it were, is multi-dimensional and complex to a point of unpredictability… as a constant state.
This is what makes the OODA loop applicable to political struggles. We are dealing with a system — social power — in which unpredictability is a constant.
Since the Opponent is still human, and since we are opposing the opponent (the decision about how and where to oppose is a strategic one… that is, seen as necessary to achieve some overarching objective), we have to figure out how to beat the human Opponent. Later on, we can talk about human groups, from kinship to institutions, and how to analogize this out to greater and greater scales.
Once again reviewing:
“The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your opponent
while you simultaneously clarify his intentions. [the role of intelligence]
That is, operate at a faster tempo to generate rapidly changing conditions
that inhibit your opponent from adapting or reacting to those changes and that suppress or destroy his awareness.
Thus, a hodgepodge of confusion and disorder occur to cause him to over- or under-react to conditions or activities that appear to be uncertain, ambiguous, or incomprehensible.”
The key elements in making this successful are (1) assimilation in advance of a good “bag of tricks,” that is, tactics and techniques, to throw at one’s opponent, and (2) the ability to make decisions and implement them more quickly than one’s opponent can orient on them.
What we have to do is push the opponent to act out of a mismatched perception of reality while we remain open to the changing dynamic. That’s why immediately upon taking any action, we have to learn to instantly drop all pretense of prescience and all attachment to desired effects, and switch back into Observation mode. When the soccer player kicks the ball, the Action is taken. She now has to watch the ball and the players to see what happens next. She has changed the situation, but that does not translate into controlling the situation. As the ball descends, she is looking at the players change position and converge. Her experience tells her how to Orient on the emerging reality… what becomes more and more likely as the situation comes together around the ball. It is on this basis that she decides her next action, then takes it. Observe, orient, decide, act, observe…. ad infinitum.
In August 2005, Veterans For Peace had a convention in Dallas Texas. While we were there, we got news that George W. Bush was coming to his Crawford “Ranch” for a vacation. Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan was at the convention as an invited speaker. Cindy decided almost on the spot that she would go to Crawford and encamp outside the ranch, where she expected she would get arrested.
Many of our organizational (“strategic”) types argued against this, because it hadn’t undergone some kind of “collective, strategic” review. But Cindy has a hard head, and when she decided to go on and do it, a VFP bus with about 30 vets drove her down to drop her off in the 95 degree heat. At one point, she was taken to the ER after collapsing from heat exhaustion, whereupon she went right back.
There was no advance notice that this was happening, because it was decioded upon and acted upon within less than two days. The Bush adminsitration had no idea what was coming. None of us had any idea how it would play out.
But the combination of a Gold Star mom and George Bush’s ranch proved irresistable to the press, and a competitive frenzy broke out whereupon national and international media descended on Crawford like locusts, where this woman whose son was killed in Iraq was asking George W. Bush to meet her and answer a few questions. The protest grew into a camp. The camp grew into a kind of mom’s movement. National bus tours took off from Crawford… and Cindy Sheehan’s little unpredictable action went as far as any single act of resistance to the war in delegtimating the adminstration and the war.
This action wrong-footed the adminstration for weeks. The reason the Big Guys can deal with these situaions at all is similar to the war itself… they can spend ungodly sums of money and energy to deal with them. Is this a strength? Or is this a weakness? What guerrilla warfare –whe properly practiced — does is conduct actions that are low risk to their own combatants, but that force the stronger opposition to commit further resources… stretch their lines, create more strain on their base of support. it wrong-foots them. It sets them up for some inevitable (yet unpredictable) stupidity. It “inhibits the opponent from adapting or reacting to those changes and suppresses or destroys his awareness… a hodgepodge of confusion and disorder occur to cause him to over- or under-react to conditions or activities that appear to be uncertain, ambiguous, or incomprehensible.”
Now let me turn my attention to Dunbar’s number.
Wiki:
Groups can act as one, exercising the OODA loop. But the OODA loop is spatiotemporal. Dynamics happen in time and space. We orient within fininte space; and to outrun our opponent’s decision-cycle we have to be able to go through the OODA cycle more quickly than the opponent can, in order to exploit the changes we generate with our own actions.
Once ANY organization reaches a certain size, the imposition of “more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion” amounts to management. Management is inherently if not synonymously bureaucratic. The codification of group behavior sets up a dynamic of dogwaggery. Managed organizations do not have the flexibility or the agility to go through OODA cycles as quickly as an organic network of like-minded people. Period.
When we conducted the Veterans and Survivors March for Peace and Justice in March 2006, we were faced with what some organizers called “a logistical nightmare.” Unknown numbers of people (200-300), from all over the ocuntry and the world, moving overland down Highway 90 from Mobile to New Orleans, for six days. And we were faced with immense logistical challenges. But the action went off without any disastrous hitches, not because of prior planning — which consisted of coordinating campsites, food, travel, and portapotties — but because the group’s interpersonal cohesion was so reamrkable. With minimal direction, all the unpredictables that we encountered were solved the same way a few friends might get together to repair a roof. What happened cone the people got together was a form of self-organization… which is a far more stable formation than, say, a True Revolutionary Party that is based on abstractions like platforms, and that functions like a corporate bureaucracy.
The relationships were not directed or planned. They developed, organically, within the context of the event. And they were responsible for the best aspects of the action.
When we think of the relationship between strategy, campaign, and tactic, the old schema is mechanical and hierarchical. The strategy is the Great Goal, which can be ostnesibly reached by achieving A, B, C, and D… which become the subjects of campaigns, each campaign of which then consists of a series of tactics (which many presume are tricks, but which in military parlance are battlefield techniques learned through drill).
The belief in this shit is supported largely by historical selection, what Taleb calls “narrative fallacy,” that is, “creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause.” The fact is, weather and disease and dumb luck have been far more determinative of tactical outcomes in war as any of the puffed-up theories of Generals.
Any national campaign that is top-down will be bureaucratic. This is inevitable, because of Dunbar’s number. We may be innately incapable of non-hierarchical cooperation beyond that Neolithic band of 147.5. When Boyd proved that he could defeat any opponent in air-to-air combat within one minute (he did), his actions could not be subject to management. Therefore, we can assume that with greater size and more formal divisions of labor within organizations, tactical agility will always decrease. It is an inverse relation.
There are two ways to get around this to some degree (that I can think of right now): (1) The military chain of command tries to limit the size of a rifle company to less than 150 (Dunbar’s number), and it reduces the actual command-relationship to between 3-5 to 1. A team leader has to subordinates. A squad leader has two team leaders. A platoon leader has four squad leaders. A company commander has four platoon leaders. That responsive structure and aboslute authority give the company commander and each subordinate leader a lot of potential tactical agility (in reality careerism and stupidity often subvert this). (2) One can set out a single strategic objective, and allow decentralized (locally-based, or affinity-based) organizations to pursue that objective within their own scope of influence without centralized interference.
The trick to achieving tactical agility for social movement groups, I would think, is to encourage generalism, and stop diagramming organizational charts. I hate to keep brinigng up the military, but that’s what I know… and the beauty of a Special Forces A-detachment, as well as the reason they can do stuff for which there is not model, is that each team has five specialties (weapons, engineering, medical, communications, and intelligence). There are two people in each specialty (creating redundacy and the ability to further divide into two teams), but once on the team, all are cross-trained in other specialties. If the mission is to build or destroy a bridge… then the main go-to person is not the ostensible team commander, but one of the engineers. If the mission is humanitarian-civic action, the medic might be in charge of planning. Organization is task-organization. Flexible, redundant, and generalist.
Our organizations should pay attention to how they can observe, orient, decide, and act, not how to elect executive committees. There are way too many executive committees, and they always act like executive committees.
Using a McKinney campaign as an example, if there were a camapign executive committee in San Francisco that had to bless every action taken in Rochester, Raleigh, New Orleans, Orlando, Cody, Montpelier, St. Louis, LA, Columbia, and Portland… how can that EC in San Francisco possibly appreciate the history, structures, personalities, traffic patterns, local organizations, gatekeepers, weather, meeting places, ongoing activities, etc etc etc in each of thise highly unique settings. All they need to know in each place is what is our goal? Let’s say the goal is ballot access. There is ZERO need for a national executive committee to get this done. In fact, an EC could screw this up quicker than anything I can think of by imposing some cookie cutter formula on all these locations. Does McKinney need a campaign staff? Sure she does. But their relationship with the grassroots should be characterized by mutli-path communications. Maybe McKinney wants to come to Portland. This is a task organizaiton between Portland activists and the campaign committee… not a diktat from some Central Committee. McKinney doesnlt need some unified campaign. Her candidacy is not Rommel in the desert. She needs 5,000 campaigns, conducted by groups of people who are deeply embedded where they work, and who have the environmental awareness and agility of alley cats. People who can take broad guidance (similar to the kind above) and say, hey, here’s how we can get this done here. I know so-and-so, we can do this. You know so-and-so, maybe we can try that. Collectivity as a fetish stifles initiative and creativity; and it is slow as pond water. Small groups of tight friends can pull off some amazingly creative and povocative things.
Cross-pollinization of these efforts happen through lateral-network communications, without the heavy hand of a Central Committee.
That’s also what our resistance politics needs more generally. I think.
26 November 2007, 11:27 amRequired:
I think I’m beginning to see why I couldn’t comprehend how it could be applied. Tell me if you think this is some where on the right track. I was focusing purely on getting them to respond. This seemed to make actions that didn’t demand a response to be useless. What I was missing was the focus on agility. The more agile we are, the more opportunities we will have to be able to carry out those actions that do require responses.
The way that I’ve seen the Great Goal strategy play out, was in the revolutionary youth grouplet I belonged to. We would recruit people with a passion for various different issues. We would sucker them in with the promise that we too cared about “X”. But inevitably when they became involved, they would be told while we do care about “x”, we just don’t have the resources to conduct more than one campaign at the moment and so we are focusing on “y” at the moment. Because “y” is what people are interested in. The insanity of telling someone just joined that we aren’t going to join people by devoting any effort to the issue they are interested in never seemed to occur to us. Even arguements of a greater rate of joiners fall flat when you know we would only recruit a handful of people in any 6-12 month period.
26 November 2007, 7:39 pmStan:
De and I have had more than one conversation about dogwaggery… her coinage for when organizational tails begin to wag the purpose-dog. Plenty of the more thoughtful marxists out there have pointed out how division of labor creates deskilling, and with it heavier and heavier reliance on specialists. Illich has some very valuable insights on what he calls watersheds. Dunbar’s number may explain the persistence of bureaucratism even within groups that claim to oppose whatever-they-think-it-is. What they generally replace bureaucratism with is authoritarianism… to regain the ability to maneuver (look at Workers World Party and the way they dived into various protest milieux and scarfed up all the parade permits).
The ideological tunnel vision of many on the left is a habit borne of incessant serarching for support of their own positions, and the concomitant habit of paying little attention to anything that does not have polemical value. Since Dunbar’s Number cannot be construed to be for or against socialism, for example, it doesn’t get close enough attention… even though it may be the very source of some of our most stubborn organizational problems. Mix a little warlike and grandiose masculinism, shake well, and you have a Main-Blow cocktail.
What then develops is a string of excuses and explanations about why the revolution hasn’t arrived, along with belief in some deux ex machina that will cause everyone to flock to the mighty red flag. In fact, what people flock to are jackleg preachers, psychics, con men, and fascist politicians.
27 November 2007, 7:18 amCharles:
“Emergence” is pop lingo for “qualitative change” in dialectics. Revolutionary theory of the last 150 years is saturated with the concept. It is not new.
27 November 2007, 12:38 pmCharles:
Complexity is not a new concept either (smile), even as presented in the new theories. The idea that some phenomena is too complex to predict is hardly new. It’s common sense in our society. It’s what we mean by the word “complexity.”
For example, the weather’s _partial_ predicatability ( it is not utterly not predictable) has always been attributed to
complexity.
Also, the difficulty in predicting human social developments is due mainly to the fact that humans are conscious beings who sometimes change their minds or have their minds changed by events. Humans are sensitive information feedback loops without comparison in other parts of nature. It is more this than the complexity of human society that has allowed capitalism to revive and roar on.
So, for example ,the capitalists ,conscious human beings, have made adjustments to the rise of socialist countries that have preserved capitalism, thwarted the first historic efforts to “cultivate” socialism.
It is not revolutionists who have emphasized prediction. It is positivists. Revolutionists emphasize changing the human world through activity. By the way, this activity is mainly trying to persuade other human beings of “a better way. It is not “physical” activity, moving _things_ around, but human communication activity. This may seem to be idealism, but it is not. I’ll explain if needed , why this is _not_ idealism.
The prediction that capitalism continuously produces mass poverty ( at the opposite poll of producing vast wealth; socalled The Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation) has been constantly coming true. The prediction that capitalism in its imperialist phase will continually produce wars and threats of wars has very much come true. The prediction that the bourgeoisie would remake the whole globe in their own image as bourgeois is definitely coming true. The latest phase is termed “globalization.” There are othere predictions that have come true and are coming true every day.
So, the predicting record of revolutionary theory is not nearly a bad as implied.
27 November 2007, 1:11 pmLegume Sam:
Stan/De:
Have you considered posting at Docudharma? They seem pretty disgusted with the Democrats at this point & are looking for an alternative…
27 November 2007, 3:57 pmG.:
“She needs 5,000 campaigns, conducted by groups of people who are deeply embedded where they work, and who have the environmental awareness and agility of alley cats.”
In my humble mind’s eye, you hit the nail on the head with the notion of an organic, as opposed to mechanical approach, for the latter simply cannot last, and will ultimately collapse. People, like you and me and everyone else caught in the machinery, know what it means to do what’s right, to take care of those they love; all that’s left is to awaken them from their television-induced comas, awaken them to the reality that change will not come from the cold, sterile corridors in Washington, but in their own backyard. The task we face is to open the eyes to the many, not simply to the harsh truth that is conveniently kept from them by their “national security”, but to awaken their spirits, to restore their faith in themselves and their fellow being, their faith in the love lying within, so that we, as people – living, breathing, loving human beings – can render the pillagers and plunderers powerless. Neither elaborate planning nor scheming are necessary: simply a bit of faith in ourselves and each other; the rest will come.
This revolution cannot and will not be fought with the instruments of hate, fear and death, but rather with love, kindness and compassion. Our future depends on it.
I haven’t much wisdom – what I have pales in comparison to a fraction of what one of you here possesses – nonetheless, I wanted to share my thoughts on this matter.
27 November 2007, 9:57 pmStan:
Believe it or not, I couldn’t agree more. Revolutionary faith is the key missing ingredient in our resistance.
28 November 2007, 6:42 amStan:
Last night, I met for two and a half hours with Jeff Sparrow, an Australian journalist visiting here in NC. He gets the hat tip for Joanna Bourke. He read Grossman’s book on killing, then Joanna Bourke’s counter-conclusions, then Sex & War. Bourke and I reject Grossman’s theses… but that’s another story.
In this process of his interrogating me on various pronouncements as well as on American political culture, my own thinking was further clarified regarding this issue of third-party politics… and it relates in some ways to G’s point that our lack of faith in ourselves — as well as our often sterile masculinist instrumentalism — runs us into one political impasse after another.
None of this is original, but the emphasis on what I’m about to say seems important at this point in our conversation.
He asked about the malaise of the antiwar movement, and how that plays locally.
I was explaining to him that there are actually quite a few dedicated activists and initiatives going on all the time here. The chair of our state NAACP is arguably a Christian socialist. We have put 8,000 people around the state capital to protest war and injustice, and 7,000 once to get one kid out of prison. The NC Council of Churches is on record against the war. We have dozens of organizations based in the Black freedom struggle, in immigrant organizing, in labor, in the fight for women’s social emancipation, on issues like the death penalty and regressive taxation… the list is quite long, and the energy expended has been and remains substantial.
What we are stuck on — in relation to the war in this instance — is that we have bused to DC again and again, held demonstrations here, done speak-outs and teach-ins, harrassed elected officials, and we have won the ideological fight for the most part. Support for the war has dropped from 75% to less than 30%, and the right wing pronouncements that (1) “we” are winning in Iraq, (2) and that carbon emmisions have nothing to do with global warming, have made them the subject of nearly universal ridicule.
Moreover, the “middle-class” anxieties about debt and recession are rising… very serious stuff.
Yet people have done what they did, and been ignored by the government. So what can they do to make the government listen and respond? The 2006 election has demonstrated that the heads of the Democatic Party have not the slightest intention of ending the occupation of Iraq except hypothetically.
The majority of the people believe that the poltical process has little to do with them, because they are powerless within it. This is actually an accurate assessment, contrary to all the cheerleading by liberals.
The US system is brilliant in this way. We can rant on blogs or public spaces and lampoon our leadership and call criminality what it is… but we are structurally prevented from giving any of that a political expression.
The wealth primary, restricted ballot access, and winner-take-all elections — in combination — are an insurmountable political barrier to anything resembling a functional democracy.
A McKinney canididacy, with its necessary emphasis on ballot access, simultaneously challenges the claim of democratic government in the US and exercises the only political agency we really have on the left… to undermine the position of the good-cop Democrats. Defeating Democrats with a third-party candidacy is a win for democracy… and most of us have been demoralized by our continuing string of losses. And independent left, given this political expression, will piss off Democratic partisans and scare the majority who still fear their captors in the two-party system. But once actualized, if this independent current holds steady, that resnetment will turn to acceptance when people realize we are not going away, and that a real choice exists whether it scares them or not.
28 November 2007, 7:43 amPhilip:
Stan noted:
“Excuse me while I vent…. haphazardly my ass! No one is proposing haphazard anything. I’m saying get over the insupportable assumption that “we” or anyone else can predict complex systems. It’s just scientistic (male) arrogance, and dangerous arrogance at that.”
Now please excuse me while I vent. Running a lone wolf “candidate” (CM) IS haphazard. This is real life. We cannot “predict complex systems” my ass. We can predict that various authoritarian laws/executive orders/signing documents now sit like a loaded gun for the next (or current) executive to use on the population and there is a pretty good chance they will be used. The domestic spying apparatus is up and running and we can predict that mass detention of dissidents is on the way. We can predict that the Iraq war will not end (or the Iran war won’t start) because we elect another Democrat or Republican, and we can predict that neither will address the broader issues of torture, surveillance, and vote-stealing in the upcoming “elections.”
CM is an African-American woman from the south, yes she is brilliant, yes I like what she has done politically, but she is ONE PERSON, and she is one person who has already been defeated twice by forces more powerful than herself. She was defeated precisely because she was a lone wolf. What we need is real democracy, based in our workplaces, in our communities, and beyond. We don’t need a personality cult. You can bitch about Leninism and soviet bureaucratization, but what does that have to do with being serious about social change? I don’t give a crap about the “elections,” presidential or otherwise. They will change nothing, and voting will change nothing. We need serious action to organize our forces, speaking to our own people about what really matters to them, and taking collective action. We need to organize independently of the twin parties of capital, and we need to be serious and deliberate about it. None of us can do it alone.
Or alternatively we’ll wait and see what Cynthia tells us to do, then see how the “complex forces” interact, see how the polling goes, then maybe reassess (among 150 people or whatever “Dunbar’s number” is thought to be) and act spontaneously, without a political program, without planning, without knowing where we want to go. That sounds haphazard.
28 November 2007, 12:40 pmCharles:
The human body is a very complex system, yet there are _some_ predictions that can be accurately made about it. The solar system is a complex system , yet we can predict that the sun will “rise” relative to the earth tomorrow.
28 November 2007, 2:15 pmJames M:
Perhaps the organizational model of the MLK wing of the Civil Rights Movement might be a paradigm worth considering in this discussion? About this, I’m almost wholly ignorant, but my impression is that it was a loose aggregation of semi-autonomous “cells,” a.k.a. churches. What was its structure? How did this contribute to its failures and successes? What aspects of it apply to this conversation?
Like Stan, I’ve lost interest in top-down centralism. Unfortunately, the only major example I’ve experienced of the alternative was the Gulf March, but that turned out to be a pretty sterling and affirmative example. In my film about it, Stan talks about how “the quality of the people” present made it a success, and how planning was only about 10% of the reason for its going off so well. (And I think it’s worth noting that this hands-on experience, along with military experiences described in FSD and elsewhere, have doubtless brought him to these conclusions about effective organizing and action, and not mere abstract theorizing. This is not to accuse anybody else of that — just making the point that his thinking about this isn’t materializing from thin air.)
But this brings up some concerns: 1) Are semi-autonomous cells not at greater risk of performing counterproductive actions, actions that run the risk of broad-brushing the entire movement and scoring propaganda victories for the other side? And 2): Is the risk of agent provocateurs not magnified by this model? (You don’t have to be a conspiracy-paranoiac to know they’re out there and active.)
It seems like “the quality of the people” is very, very crucial within each grouping. And how do the well-functioning groups move to correct bad behavior on the part of dysfunctional ones? I can almost see something like Pauline Epistles being written to the “faltering churches” …
Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here; just thoughts.
28 November 2007, 5:01 pmStan:
Read what complexity/chaos theory is before taking up a semantic cudgel against it (substituting the general adjective “complex” for the scientific meaning of it, eg). One cannot reconcile them with the actual practice of democratic centralism.
As for this:
…can someone get a translator? Serious action? Our own people? Collective action? Organize independently?
And what the heck does this mean?
Can more than one person run as one candidate in an election?
God save us from phrasemongering.
28 November 2007, 5:19 pmjon:
As I see it, the whole point of Cynthia McKinney running isn’t about electoralism and getting elected.
The reason I’m supporting Cynthia McKinney for President as a Green is what that campaign – or more hopefully, the 5,000 little campaigns – will do for movements in the US. No, I don’t mean just the propaganda, per the usual Leninist reason for an electoral ‘statement’ – though that is something and I’ll mention it below. Movements in the US are divided and waste their energy giving support to the Democratic Party. I hope a McKinney candidacy can unite us outside the Dems.
From where I stand, it seems the biggest political divide in the progressive movement is color. From mostly white anti-war movement events to 50,000 people in Jena, 98% of whom were black, we are confronting the same oppressive elephant while focusing on the part (whether the tusk or the feet) that hurts us most. So most blacks that vote still vote for Democrats because of how they feel the weight of the elephant upon them. I have a hope that McKinney can speak to both the mostly white anti-war movement and to people of color and that we can listen to her and find each other at the same event. (Yes, I have gone to the Jena events here, just as I went to NOLA – but it hasn’t _yet_ worked to bring enough white progressive comrades around.)
Currently a lot of well-meaning energy from progressive movements is stolen by the Democratic Party. While there are honest progressives in the Democratic Party, as a whole its a part of the system of oppression. It captures progressive energy that would otherwise go toward change and channels it into support for the system. Access is an illusion offered by strategists that calculate how far to the right they can go before progressives turn away. In return for that access – and for funding – the movement people moderate demands, relegate themselves to just pressuring the Dems, etc., and accept Bullshit like Pelosi’s excuses on impeachment or troop withdrawal, let alone equality in sentencing, trade agreements, etc.
But I know the difference between Democrats and Republicans is real. I accept that a lot of people feel that difference is space they need to survive. The damn thing is that while there remains a difference between the Dems and the Republicans, they each move more the to the right each election. That’s the story of US politics outside of movement explosions like the 30s or the 60s – a drift that makes Nixon’s administration objectively more liberal than Clinton’s. In the meantime, I think that politicians like Kucinich, honest or not, channel support that would go towards building an alternative and bring it to the system. Will the Kucinich campaign in 2008 make more of an impact than it did in 2004? Will it make as much an impact as the Jackson campaign did in 1988? What did progressives get for their support of Jackson in 1988? What would have happened if we’d started building something to the left of the Democrats in 1988 instead of waiting until 2000?
As far as I’m concerned as a Green Party member, the Green Party’s ballot lines belong to the “movement.” Having that ballot line shouldn’t be discounted. 2004 showed how the difference between a quixotic write-in, even with Nader’s name recognition and relative access to money, and being on the ballot as an alternative can be huge. Even if we don’t win – that ballot line is a concrete example of an accomplishment, proof that we have forced the political system to recognize us. There are plenty of people that are disgusted with the political system but don’t see hope for change. As said above regarding “restoring our faith”, we need to believe that another world is possible, one that includes us. I think such an anti-war pro-people power campaign is a part of that. I hope that’s reason enough for folks to join the Greens and work to prevent another bureaucratic debacle like in 2004.
Back to that Leninist propaganda point: in July of 2004, a Gallop poll reached a peak of 50% of respondents that thought the war was a mistake. In September of 04, that number dropped to 38%. While it wasn’t the only thing going on, I’m sure the piss-poor way the war was/wasn’t a part of the presidential debates was part of that drop. It would be June of 05 before that poll would again show over 50% thinking the war was a mistake. The movement needs a candidate that will push “Troops Home Now” in a way that will reach people. I think McKinney can be that candidate.
PS: who is this Boyd and what did they write?
28 November 2007, 10:37 pmStan:
John Boyd was a very heterodox Air Force colonel and fighter pilot, who developed a new warfighting theory. As messed up as that context is, much of what he said — at least as it applies to the issue of intentional conflict strategy — is dead-on. It gets misused a lot (ie, as a way to beat business competitors) and misread (as Rumsfeld and the US military have done… (the mismatch beween bureaucratism and tactical agility is irreconilable, and the guerrillas can beat the conventionals on OODA every single time).
At its bottom, it is the acceptance of “chaos” (unpredictability) and the incorporation of it as an ally.
29 November 2007, 7:30 amCharles:
Stan:
Read what complexity/chaos theory is before taking up a semantic cudgel against it (substituting the general adjective “complex” for the scientific meaning of it, eg). One cannot reconcile them with the actual practice of democratic centralism.
^^^^^
CB: In reading about them, it doesn’t seem a scientific concensus that the scientific terms are applicable to political parties or politics , and therefore to democratic centralism. Your claim that it applies to social science is still a hypothesis.
I first read about complexity and chaos theory about twenty-years ago in the Peoples Weekly World , by the way. I think there was an article in Political Affairs. There probably have been articles in _Nature, Society and Thought_ too. I’ve been reading and thinking about it for twenty years due to it being raised by Communist Party writers. So, the CP ain’t so out of touch with what you are talking about. The CP keeps up on science.
3 December 2007, 2:43 pmCharles:
Sure scientific complexity theory has meaning more than common meaning of “complexity”, but to keep emphasizing that complexity theory means unpredictability is to point to something that the scientific meaning shares with the common meaning of “complexity”.
Chaos theory refers to the socalled butterfly effect, in part. If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it may result in a hurricane in Florida. Ok but how does that type of knowledge, transferred to the social sphere, help us end male supremacy ? The whole point seems to be that we cannot anticipate that some social butterfly flapping his wings will cause some other social effect.
We need a theory as to what social actions will cause desirable social results, not that they will cause unknowable results.
3 December 2007, 5:25 pmPhilip:
Let me be more clear, and thank you for bearing with me. The problems we face in this society will not be fixed, or even improved, by an election. All of our righteous anger and legitimate concerns are to be channeled into the electoral “process,” which at best results in a Democratic victory but no real changes. Every two years, we are told to put down our independent (from Democrats) antiwar organizing, our prochoice organizing, our labor organizing, so that we can pick our favorite Democrat. Any other option is considered to be “unrealistic” despite the massive evidence of vote fraud (see http://www.blackboxvoting.org) in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006.
We are living in the most militarized society since 1930s Germany, with upwards of 2/3 of our national budget allocated to war-making. Both parties support this ratio, though most of the population does not. After the overwhelming majority of voting Americans held their noses to vote Democratic in 2006 to end the war, we got a troop buildup (the “surge”) instead. Democrats voted for the torture-loving attorney general, they have no issues with massive secret surveillance efforts, they support the mythological and never-ending “war on terror,” they even used General Sanchez (of Abu Grahib infamy) to deliver their “rebuttal” to Bush last week. I won’t even get into the 2.2 million imprisoned in this country (1/4 of the world’s total) or NAFTA/CAFTA or a hundred other issues on which the twin parties agree yet on which most of the population does not. Ok, can we agree that the Democrats are useless to us if we want to change anything important?
Cynthia McKinney is expected to run not as a Democrat, but as a “Green,” the party that coordinated its “electoral strategy” in 2004 with the Democrats. We know that the odds of her winning are worse than my odds of winning Power Ball, but the point is to…build a “people’s power” movement of some unspecified sort? “Pressure” the Democrats and Republicans? Make some sort of rhetorical point? I honestly do not know what her candidacy is intended to accomplish because she has not put out much in writing, but apparently her limited “phrasemongering” is comprehensible to you, Stan.
Here’s an alternative. “We” (meaning the majority of people who work for a living and earn wages, or who are retired or unemployed, as opposed to the 5,000 or so who comprise our parasitic ruling class) need to organize our own party, a labor party that represents the interests of the majority of people in this country. (Yes, it has been tried before and failed, but so has the Green Party.) An overwhelming majority want the war over, want an end to government spying, want decent wages and social benefits, want universal health care, and want an end to the war economy, among many, many common issues. To achieve these goals, we need to organize a party/group/collective action (whatever you want to call it) independent from the existing parties, whose goals are not our own.
People who would be leaders need to organize, educate, and listen to our people (that is, the majority) about the historical crimes of our criminal ruling class, the ongoing outrages being committed in our names, and ways to move forward without funding from Wall Street, Texas oilmen, or the pharmaceutical industry. CM could such a leader in this effort if she wanted to create something that was going to last, that was bigger than her own formidable personality. But if she simply runs a lonely Green campaign, vying for time with Hillary and Guiliani, she will lose badly and, worse still, she will have accomplished nothing. But if she were a part of a larger effort to pull together union members, antiwar activists, inner city families and youth, retirees, people with disabilities, veterans, and the millions upon millions of disaffected Americans who do not vote but who want a future, she might accomplish something for the future.
4 December 2007, 12:19 pm