I used to believe that it doesn’t matter what your intentions are unless you act. That doing is determining; thinking is unreal. This belief didn’t correspond to my own behavior though, mucking about in the superstructure of ideology and culture all my life, even when I had jobs in places where opportunities for battles abounded on the economic front.
I missed those opportunities, didn’t even see them because of the political orientation I’d been trained in by the group I was part of for 15 years of my young adulthood. Though for revolution against capitalism/imperialism, they had lost their focus on the core of class struggle.
The misalignment persisited for decades. Even when I saw it and tried to flip it, with my limitations I just ended up reinforcing it. Now I’m too far down a path that’s shaped me into who I am, and I probably won’t find my way back to those kind of ripe workplace situations in this lifetime. Though who knows.
Anyway it’s not that I ever thought that superstructural activity was useless, far from it — I spent most of my efforts there. But I considered it a means to another end. I understand now that I had a non-dialectical approach to the intertwinement of ideology and practice.
The way we think about things, and even more fundamentally (I never would have previously entertained this because of the prevalent political gaslighting that targeted codependent-conditioned people like me with “objective=good, subjective=bad”) FEEL about things, is what leads us to corresponding actions.
We may do the thinking and feeling for a long time in a more-or-less politically dormant state, but when conditions are ripe, what we’ve been thinking and feeling all that time is going to determine what side we take, what we do when faced with an opening or a calling into being of social forces.
The internal nature of plants at the seed stage determines the very specific range of potentials of who they might become. They will transform into their next way-of-being only if and when conditions enable it.
At the same time, actions make thoughts as well as the other way around, maybe moreso even, so I don’t want to imply a mirror image of my former belief to now say that thoughts are more important than actions, no way.
What I want is to get at is to take the long view; instead of assuming that what a person is thinking/feeling is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is what they DO NOW, is to grasp that they may not be in conditions to fulfill their potential actions at this moment, but the thoughts and feelings that they are cultivating in themselves all the time will have tremendous impact on what those actions may be when they are taken. Or, they may never act bodily during their entire lives, and the only way that their thoughts/feelings will have social effect is by mixing in with the collective unconsious.
And also I must nod to the fact that social or survival pressures may negate and flip all previous thoughts and feelings, taking the person by total surprise. That happens sometimes too.