PNEWS Progressive News and Views Distribution List
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On Communication breakdown,
ideas and liberalismTo my opinion, there is no such a thing called failure or breakdown of communication (claims by W. Schramm and his followers in communication field are full of communication breakdown framework). What we describe as failure or breakdown is indeed a situational expression of a specific power relations and its specific outcome (Best example: labor disputes. When the negotiating parties leave the table in disagreement, it is called communication breakdown, when they return, it is restoration of the breakdown.) When dominant structure talk about "communication breakdown" It actually means either a zero-sum game because of failure to exert power to reach specified goals and decide to take all or an end to a form of communication (i.e. table talk) and start of a new form (i.e. threat of police action or military force). So here is the question: is it because "some men you just can't reach" because of the nature of their ideas, a communication breakdown, or "some men you just can't reach" because of the processes of maintenance of the position they hold in the material relations in the society?
When specific ideas and ideologies obscure the material relations base, them men's\women's mind seems like the one plays the determining role in conservation or change or anything else. If there was no destruction of our natural environment, would anybody think of ending the destruction and conserving the rain forests? Using ideas stem from the conditions and\or ideas that present themselves as the symbolic representation of the conditions, human beings react back to the conditions they find themselves in to maintain and\or change in a direction that they consider best for their present and future interests.
Time to time we complain by saying that "all this complaining and belly-aching is not going to get us anywhere." Yet, We've got to complain so that others hear our belly-aching. This is the most used form of protest of the oppressed which keeps the spirit alive and opens ways to organized protests and participation.
Can Liberalism be a big step forward for the people of the USA who are divided and set against each other? (a) If liberalism means Democratic Party, answer is a big NO, despite the fact that our household vote for Democratic party. (I hate to say and accept my proposition that if people of a country elect those who are the enemy of the poor, it indicates that the people who vote for the enemy are the enemy of themselves, their own kind and the ones economically below them. Unfortunately that's a part of my American experience accepting the very reality of the cool words of a monopolist boasting if necessary he would hire half of the working class to kill the other half. Do they need the half today? I don't think so. Can they do it? if necessary, yes. Can it be a real victory for them? Absolutely not unless mechanicle robots do the social production for them and they prefer power trip by having robots rather than wage-slaves.) (b) If liberalism means redistribution of wealth via reorganization of economic and political structure, answer becomes a hopeful one because liberalism with this definiton negates itself and becomes something other than itself.
irfan erdogan@consultant.com
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