Comments on: Dare to fail, dare to win

By: Alan Keenan

Alan Keenan — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:51:54 +0000

A very nice article. Oddly enough, though, I agree with both previous comments. Perhaps the most important way in which progressive and left activism can go beyond success and failure is to see and experience the process of meeting, demonstrating, arguing and protesting as its own reward, giving people the experience of collective action and solidarity, sharing and teaching each other new ideas and practices, and helping people overcome their fear and disconnection and hyper-individualism. This is even more the case if such action builds relationships and networks that lay the foundation for further radical action and new institutions and political habits. If anything gives sustenance to meaningful democracy and a just society, it is simply the experience of acting together. When it also helps solve problems and create new, fairer, more humane ways of being and living together, that’s even better.

By: Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:55:35 +0000

So even though the overwhelming majority of political protest is clearly a waste of time and wont even have the belated and dubious “success” mentioned here (I suspect there would be many other factors behind Nixon’s stance on this occasion than just domestic politics), we should keep on doing it anyway because we dont know when it might actually be making a change somewhere. Sounds like an act of faith to me. I dont see real social change as coming through a process of embarrassing the likes of Nixon and Kissinger so they will opt to use slightly less harmful weaponry. From my reading it looks like modern political protest emanates from the bolsheviks: we have rejected everything else about the bolshevik experiment by now (thankfully) except for this crude allegiance to protest and “practical” demands. Ah well, at least its “doing something”. Who knows, maybe if we stopped our addiction to protest we might get the mental space to step back and then set the agenda, rather than just always kick against it

By: Dave K

Dave K — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:29:58 +0000

Your article should be required reading for activists everywhere. This is indeed how progress happens. It is rarely happens like in the movies. As the late lamented french marxist and militant, Daniel Bensaid said revolutionaries need a ‘slow impatience’. I particularly liked your point about how in every walk of life we have these crude divisions into success and failure based on artificial, dubious targets most of the time. Just think of how it works in education…