Phenomenology
of Dialectical Materialism Part One
We
create our reality through the interpretation of objective reality. The
subjective is our creation; the objective is independent of that
interpretation. The closer the two come together with the more influence we
have over our future.
We
create our gods and our explanations of creation through the way we understand
external grounded existence. The trick becomes realizing we are the products of
our social upbringing, set in a natural world.
Most
interpretations evolve over time changing because of faith, the crisis of
faith, and loss of faith, regaining faith only to repeat the cycle over and
over again never landing exactly on the same foundations. The purpose is an
ongoing creation. Yet humans must adapt to a pre-existing and continuingly
changing objective reality that constantly challenges our faith. We can and do
change that external reality by our actions, but only by changing the physical
and objective environment of the reality that is embedded in that setting, but
even with faith we cannot escape objective reality.
Historical
change places each of us on the border, between the settled lands that have
already failed and the frontier that we are only beginning to see. History is
this perpetual and continuing alteration. This has always been the case. But,
since the Reformation, the advent of science, the industrial revolution,
globalization of the colonial, post-colonial and neocolonial world, humanity
have been living in a constant emergency. Now with the failure of
neo-colonialism the crisis has deepened.
Today
academic fields like historical sociology and cultural anthropology wrote
extensively of the impersonal presenting the individual as an object in
controlling mass society. With the collapsing of cultural traditions comes the
redefining of those same traditions. With victimized groups, it is a matter of
survival, and with powerful groups, it is a fear of loss of control. But,
either way, the reinstitution of culture, that culture changes. Cultural
preservation is the result that history is a lie. Picking and choosing through
continuous legends can be saved through a reinterpretation of the past. Through
combining hermeneutics and materialist anthropology a vain but essential effort
is made to understand both the loss of faith and the revival of that faith in a
social identity that reestablishes a fictitious past that creates a real
historical and social identity. Deliverance and preservation become conflicting
attempts at national liberation and cultural preservation. Sometimes called
rationalism, dogma, nationalism, patriotism, or religious fundamentalism.
With
self-cannibalization of the global, integrated, liberal economy historical
memory collapses. Most historical memories are replaced by nationalism
that exposes the fable of newly made-up cultural traditions. The antique
stability is replaced by a cruel creed of the chauvinistic, artificial doctrine
of odium and indolence.
The
economy no longer works, nation states are collapsing, human survival is openly
questioned and there is little agreement on what to do next. With despair comes
opportunity.
This
opens the door to a science of society. Science as a method of arranging
information and not a conclusion is the definition of science. The method
itself is forever evolving, as conclusions themselves never really perfectly
match the ever-evolving external reality. But, with rigorous application of
data to systematic examination the contradiction between the realities we study
and our conclusions we draw upon these studies that become increasingly less
dramatic and we gain better opportunities for more control over our futures.
This stands in stark contrasts to the brutal fantasies of the good old days
that never were and traditions made up as we go along. The apriori is
always the result of aposterori speculation of empirical knowledge.
Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism
Part Two
Subjective
insight is gained from empathy, born from our ability to generate through our
imagination the experiences of another. This discrete knowledge can guide
our actions to resolve the social injustice that we have discovered. These
influences on our movements produce new difficulties that will demand
fine-tuning as we go along.
Once
we have a radicalizing experience to do nothing is not an option. We either
side with the oppressed or we side with the oppressor. Impartiality is a lie.
Neutrality is the cowards’ way out.
In
this action learning is an ongoing process. We act upon what we have learned.
Making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. With the evolving goal, we
are fighting for social justice. With every goal we achieve, we set the stage
for the next struggle. The conclusion is always the new introduction.
We
through this cooperative struggle move from being the results and product of
what happens to us, to learn to become the authors of our future through the
combined effort of working with others who are in the same or similar
situation. Likewise, through our mind's eye, we can gain an understanding of
the oppression and the struggle of others. This is the origin of empathy and
alliances of the fight for liberty, fairness, and solidarity.
This
is the foundation of the anthropology of historical sociology. The goal of
gathering objective data to analyze and then to discover patterns, from which
to generate a set of hypotheses, and to test those hypotheses against the data
collected. This becomes the guiding values of our actions. Learning from both
our successes and our failures. To create a new body of knowledge that will
guide our further actions.
By
acting on the environment we change that environment, but the environment
continues to set limits on what is possible through our actions. When we add to
the above statement the sociology of the oppressor and the oppressed we
establish a more complex environment. Different groups are acting upon and
dependent upon this social environment. This becomes the bedrock of our fight
for freedom. In the beginning the oppressors have more control over the
environment, but they are dependent upon the oppressed for their power and
privilege.
First,
we begin when we become aware of a profound injustice in this inequality.
Because not only is there the suffering that it causes, but also because the
oppressor will get an undeserved reward from the suffering of the oppressed.
Second, this relationship can be overcome to the benefit to the larger society.
This starts when we become aware that we can see others’ pain and then we
become the “they” that is born when we see our lives given over to the cause of
social justice. The third is when our personal realization cherishes itself in
another’s self-consciousness and becomes an identity of equal importance to our
own.
Michael Joseph
Francisconi
Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part
Three
Using
a model that studies society using how the various parts and institutions that
is both mutually supportive and how these same principles and traditions
represent patterns of competing interests exist concurrently through its
history. Following the examination of a single society, however defined,
societies for the most part interact and compete with other societies over
issues of sovereignty vs. dominance.
Which also includes the on going interaction between independent invention
and diffusion. With separate encounters, development and dispersal cultural
traits the definitions of society and culture are fluid. This model cannot be a
static look at civilization and peoples but at every turn evolution must be a
central concern of any genuine investigation.
With
this historical approach functional analysis becomes little more than
cataloging. Multiple variable interact driving this change. Each variable’s
influence has differing weights of significance and importance’s that change
over time. The complex of environmental, economic, technological and
demographic items that may take on more than one value during extended
historical tendencies but in the long run is mainly noteworthy.
Along these lines depending on the
unit of analysis even the most basic definitions of society and culture is
fluid not only reflecting the topic being studied but also the historical
position of the researcher within the cultural and social setting of the
researcher.
Patterns must be distinguished from
trends. Which reflect the degree of influences on the long-term changes and how
these items of effects in turn are affected by other interacting powers over
time.
By definition historical change is
both accumulative and transformative and given enough time one society replaces
another society and not simply a growth of incremental
variations. These causal chains are always on going creating sequences of contributing
associations. It is this process that answers
how and why complete social historical breaks follow long-term patterns of
minor changes.
Transformations then at the minutest
level, are a succession of a development of occasions of alterations in customs
and tendencies. But these events are developed through long term environmental
alterations, followed by crisis of faith and the birth of alternative faiths
and a developing ever-changing body of knowledge and relationship to the real
world data.
Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part
Four
Science
is a set research methods and not a unitary conclusion. Probability and not
faith are its defining principles. Patterns are discovered that helps to
explain history. History is nothing more or less than living individuals.
People born into, growing up, old and dying in a collection of individual
variously called society, community, nation or humanity.
Our
behavior collectively or individually happens in a pre-determined setting. The
potentials, the resources, the social relations and the exchange relations,
know-how and creative conditions already exist. Our actions operate in an
environment that is in turn modified by our movements. Existence
is not decided by our awareness of life, but
our perceptions by actual being within the
life we live. Choices exist, and no one can escape choice, but choices are
always limited by the social environment of the moment. But, once a choice is
made the social environments is forever altered if only very slightly. But,
also action not only moves in a desired direction, but unforeseen consequences
are the direct result of our actions and our choices. The results are never
predetermined, but only the resources that limit our choices are always
predetermined.
Thus the history of each society has
its own set of fixed systematic arrangements encircled within an environment
and with a prearranged range of choices. It is individuals within their
communities organized around dynamic social relations that are the actors that
drive history forward. Humans are animals with physical needs. People come
together to work deriving from their natural surroundings food, shelter, clothing
and other necessities required for life. Their tools and their social
organizations reflect this. Like any other species humans’ interaction with
their natural environment changes that environment. Adaptation is an on going
process. Because of this the natural and social environment, the current state
of technology, social arrangements for production and distribution and
consumption are the core of societies. This core is not the only driving force
of history. But, it does have a predominant role to play among the interaction
of every changing variables in the evolution of society and culture.
As these changes develop, societies
clearly change in significant ways creating new societies out of the remains of
older ones, only to be replaced as the core of society and culture changes in appreciably
sufficient ways to make either the continuation or the reappearance to the existing
society impossible. Once a society can produce enough of a surplus to support a
non-productive elite that are in charge of the redistribution of the yield produced,
by managing production and distribution, conflicting interests develop in a way
that demands compulsion of the fecund multitudes to preserve the durability of
society for the advantage of the leaders. Commandments replace conventions, constabularies,
judges, militia ruled by the sovereign, official religion and economic and
social classes expand.
The core of each society has its
unique philosophy, ethics, rules, art, creed, viewpoints, mindset
and ways of life. However this dominant ideology is interpreted differently by
each of the competing groups within the larger society. This multifaceted and
inconsistent set of social relations may appear to be stable, but strains and differences
are always present. But, as problems arise relations become strained, the
social environment changes and what worked before becomes increasingly unable
to deal with these changes.
The beginning of these damaged associations
develops out of discontent born from the increasing awareness of the injustice
of disparity and unfairness arising from the dispersal of prosperity, poverty
and reserves assisting the affluent at the detriment of the underprivileged.
The poor feel they create the wealth of the rich and share none of its
benefits. In this highly charged atmosphere feelings of vexation take over. The
drive for dignity is reflected in this inequality. Something must change. Hardship
and humiliation are the essential and enduring qualities of class society. The deterioration
in acceptability follows a crisis of faith in the defining creed, belief, justification
and instruction provided by the dominant class. Everything we believed up till
now is called into question. New beliefs are born out of this struggle and they
replace the older established certainties. The slogans embodying the actual world-shattering
philosophy produced from studying the drawbacks of what we have been taught
becomes our new language. This ideology spreads to more and more groups who
feel oppressed. This becomes a feed back loop. The understanding of the social
situation becomes the guide for our actions. This strategy once in place is
always modified to meet new needs as they come up. This in turn will meet
organized opposition of the privileged groups trying to stay in power. Thus we adapt
our tactics to take advantage of the weakness and mistakes of the rulers.
Hopefully learning from our own frailty and errors and turn them to our own benefit.
Phenomenology
of Dialectical Materialism Part Five
Beginning
with the concept of information
of evolution, construction, and performance of human society will lead to the epistemology of sociology,
ontology of cultural anthropology and the narration of history with its
description of origins with the study of human societies and cultures
and their development including being concerned with the way cultures has
developed and evolved through time.
Born
from is debate founded data and careful research. Comprehensive matching
competitions of the incomplete harmony of rival points of view that will be replacing
through differing influences is the linking to the reasonable dialog of
thoughts and substances undeniably
with the pretense settling arguments. This debate learns from opposing points
of view in strengthening ones own argument.
But,
behind this dialogue of competing interpretations of reality lies a material
reality that predates these opposing understandings of facts. We as living
human beings react to our social, psychological and physical experiences of
this external reality. This shapes and defines our personal explanations of
this existence from which we respond through our behavior on this actuality
altering this reality. Because other people also react in analogous respects
based on wholly dissimilar understanding, conflict arises having a direct
impact on the larger environment.
As
individuals living in a larger environment, we can only interact through our
conscious awareness of the environments. But, only through our interpretations
of these experiences does anything make sense. This creates a problem because
of the given historical, cultural, and individual eccentricities of these may
interpretations vary wildly, even of the same existential experiences. As long
as the misfit between knowledge and environment is not too extreme survival is
possible.
But,
the external world itself has a reality independent of our interpretations of
it. The contradiction between the external world and our awareness of it, is
founded upon discrepancies that create a whole set of difficulties that must be
dealt with. Changing our awareness of the existential reality, the external
environment, and finally ourselves brought about by our actions.
In
spite of this relations in which the awareness of the world give rise to an
interpretation of our sensual experiences of that world guiding our actions
within that environment and altering that environment. There remain elements of
that environment independent of any consciousness. This dynamic is historical
and on going. The closer our conscious interpretation of that external is the
more closely our goals will be met limiting unforeseen consequences.
Innate
formulae clarify development as an imaginable manifestation of the core in the indicating
the existence of a presence of
authenticity. This is defined as what makes something what it is. We define the
interaction of its parts, its boundaries, and its relation to ever-larger
wholes in our attempt to understand the world in which we are apart. Our explanation
of physical certainty in the concluding scrutiny is defined by material
reality. Sometimes the fit is sloppy and the world does not make any sense. We
alter our views of the world, trying to gain a measure of control over our
lives. The more we understand the unanticipated results the more we can deal
with unforeseen consequences. Evolution and revolution are the same; the timing
that separates them is our way of trying to understand change.
In
reason realization is communicating openly with sympathetic understanding. We
know what we know, in spite of our cultural interpretations, because we our
living animals interacting with nature. Survival or death, subsistence or
extinction relates on how closely our interpretations of the environment match
that environment. Because of our interactions changes that environment.
Readjustments between interpretations and reality are never ending. Sometimes
minor evolution and sometimes major revolution.
Thought is the
constructive outcome of individual awareness. Set in a “something”
observed has been sensed before as an influence involving the substances of the
earth. By examining varieties of groups with deriving meaning from standard appearances an explanation
will develop of the truth as we see it set in a social and historical setting. When wisdom is not considered as
objective and missing historical viewpoints, while going beyond personal action, but more exactly
as real manners of existing insightful communal habit, then we have joined the area of
social essence. This social essence is in fact social existence a commonly
shared reality.
The energetic ethical domain is the understanding of certainty in a specfic
historical, cultural ansd social setting. This will the foundation of
conscience or doing what is right within the view point of the individual.
Either conferming or challenging established norms.
This
culturally defined reality is the substance, which appears as the ultimate
foundation of being, knowledge, reality and values. But this truth is falling
apart before it even gets started. This leads to ever-new realities.
Phenomenology of Dialectical Materialism Part Six
Tradition looks upon the alternative ideology just beginning
to define its vision for and the new boundaries, now called progressives as
follows. Suspected of incomprehensible self-satisfied familiarity based upon
dishonestly maintaining obscure information empowering the renovation of the
human living energy as snobbish. Thus in
suggesting that apocalyptic rumors may tolerate moral blame for a make-believe catastrophe.
Tradition is the driving force of community health and
stability. But, tradition already being set is out of sync with an
ever-changing reality. Post or neo is a very poor way of describing this. All
sides are working from traditions of their own while making changes as
necessary to save what they can. Inquiries
into the historical philosophies of human nature, while challenging typical
ideas of both human partiality and objective representation while struggling to
move beyond ancient impressions of human nature lock into tribalism of the
past.
Conflict defines our
contemporary social life. This has always been the case. But, today i.e. the
last 250 years it is more extreme. It always seems we are entering a new and
even more dangerous breaking point.
With careful
and visible boundaries or shape the coming into being of the humility
leads to studying through experience via the agreement of speculation and
performance. Being and coming into being
is always both the same and opposed to each other, as this dynamic is the
definition of existing.
The individual creator is created through what is created.
In defending our viewpoint in the face of opposition we cannot help but to
redefine parts of are arguments. In spite of this there will always remain an
external reality that is independent of our awareness of the reality. Our
consciousness reflects that reality but that reality remains outside our
consciousness. But, that external material and social realty is constantly
being modified by our behavior individually and collectively. This
contradiction is the motor of evolutionary history.
Phenomenology
of Dialectical materialism Part Seven
The
ever-changing narrative of the history of history
Secular hermeneutics
teaches us that all meaning in the, historicity of thinking is
context-dependent and therefore unstable. Actions of today help define the issues of yesterday. Clarification
of the idiosyncratic and tangible potentials of the creation of lived action is
what incorporates the design we call our lives.
Interpretation of the subjective and objective qualities of the story is
what carries the narrative.
Meaning
is chosen, while acting in life. Acting is a manifestation of being. The act of
rebelling is taking responsibility for creating one self. Bohemian in
opposition to Revolutionary may be a typical example. In the 20th
century the same individual often held the two opposing lifestyles. In America
intellectuals drawn to the cause of revolution was often less disciplined than
their colleges in Russia, Europe of the third world. This was the dilemma of
the left intellectual in America, who struggled as an individual to resolve
that contradiction finding meaning in the collective group effort.
The
bohemian is the isolated individual, who was choosing to live free in an
un-free society. Who was living in the
moment? The revolutionary is part of a group, who was fighting to eliminate all
forms of oppression. The creating a
future society was the goal of the revolutionary. The bohemian openly challenges the
unquestioned core values of the dominant culture as the source of subjugation
and limits place upon individual liberty. The bohemian is the individual who
places individual liberty above that of the community. Only a community that
offers the greatest potential for individual development is worthy of
preservation. The revolutionary states an injury to one is an injury to all. If
anyone is not free no one is free. The revolutionary minimum goals are to
extend fortifications of well being, egalitarian human rights, democratic
decision making, equity and justice for everyone. The medium program is the
public control and ownership of industry, means of production and social
services. Worker collective, consumer cooperatives and community council’s
replace is all forms of economic enterprise and government the final goal of
the revolutionary. The bohemian is live and let live by harming no one else
while choosing to live free.
In resolving this contradiction,
many radical intellectuals modeled themselves after revolutionaries in other
countries. The revolutionary professional intellectual I must be willing to
commit cultural suicide as a class so I can be reborn as a revolutionary
worker. Then and only then can they fully identify with the most sincere and
reflective goals of the revolutionary working class? As a revolutionary
socialist intellectual should be able to accomplish complete identity with the
class I claim speak for. The job as the revolutionary scholar is to use their position
of privilege to carry out serious and objective studies to discover the issues
and to use that insight to give a voice to those whose voice will never be herd
by those in power. “For ourselves we ask for nothing for the workers we Demand
Everything.”
Find sounding words but when does
the struggle become the problem. In the Soviet Union Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was dishonest, violent
and a true believer. He was willing to betray his comrades for the greater
good. He put party above self-interest and saw that as a higher morality.
For an atheist History and the Dialectic became an infallible living god.
History could not make a mistake, thus he died not challenging what a greater
evil, the party he help found. On the other many radical intellectuals in
the United have no connection with any real social group other than their small
debating and quoting collectives. Academic isolation often comes from the job
itself. The intellectual is a product of the society one is born into including
the social and natural environment. The University is set aside to meet the
needs of corporate global capitalism. Technological research and training
professionals and managers to administer the day-to-day needs of commercial
comprehensive unrestricted organization of revenue are of course what keeps the
lights on at the Academy. But, the scholar is in a good position to discover
the damaged illogicality of neo-liberal decay.
The
social relations that define the ever evolving history of human interaction has
a both a practical and immediate implication, and an obscure and subsisted
unexpected a supplementary, resulting result intellectual inquiry. Though the direct result of lived experiences,
the post neo-liberal and neo-conservative reaction has created an increasing
popularization of anti-intellectualism of carefully manufactured ignorance. Yet
a new era of social movements is constantly being reborn. What was largely
ignored is the fruition of maps the birth of the new constructed world-view.
The logic of the struggle of those victims of poverty and the lack of education
finds common ground with the radical intellectual.
Social
movements are born out of real crisis of social, economic, cultural and
environmental emergency. The class or group that is most directly impacted is
of course the class of momentum and derivation. Other groups are brought into
the struggle often providing management, but never providing the characterization
of the root or undertaking. The labor movement was not that of a few
college-educated labor organizers but rank and file. Civil Rights movement was
the African American communities and not just a small group of University
trained ministers. At such point of juncture the contradiction between the
intellectual and whom the intellectual identifies with becomes a closer match.
The intellectual does not operated in isolation as a mental activity, but is a
part of a real considerable ecologist process of the historical nature.
Post
and neo are more apparent than real. Movements evolve in a real environment of
change in both a materialist and dialectical way. There is an objective world
that we act and react upon and change is that relationship. Thus, that
relationship can never be static. The rebirth of nihilism is the expression the
suffocation of neo-liberalism with its justification called neo-conservatism.
These movements are neither new (neo) or nihilist but negativistic narcissism
that allows the comfortable to enjoy their comfort without a need to defend their
position of privilege.
Scholarly
colonialism of completed contemporary trivial merchant cerebral aerobics frees
the intellectual from any moral responsibilities. This moves criticism to safe
margins of parlor games. Yet the corpse of revolutionary Marxism refuses to
stay buried. New struggles require careful studies of a real grounding of the
source of our current problems. Not all classes, groups and regions suffer the
same, and a dialectal study is required of the competing interests to see how
solutions manifest themselves.
Cultural
consciousness that is a emergence of feeling is always grounded in social
relations that in turn are grounded in a material environment. Collective
social change is undermined by isolated individualism by design. Ethnic studies
potentially revolutionary, Marxist sociology and anti-colonial cultural
anthropology was accepted as a safe understanding to replace its revolutionary
narrative. The University as the center of rebellion spilling over onto the
streets and into the factories taken up by the working class is now defined as
overly romantic. Now we can take advantage of this puerile storyline to give
birth to real revolution.
Phenomenology
of Dialectical Materialism Part Eight
Awareness of being and temperament
Consciousness
cannot but be related to the external at every moment of life. Consciousness of existence is the definition
on of essence. This is the interaction
between the individual and the external world. There is and external
environment. This exterior atmosphere is
experience by stimulus response modified by explanation. This understanding is altered
by and embedded in social education.
This interpretation of reality is the establishment of a cultural life
defined within a changing social and historical setting. For the individual
this means an emotional response a real social and natural environment.
Yielding
precondition in which human
performance and activities are merely decided by underlying occurrences. These
actions are only limited by real choices that are presented in the external physical
and social environment. There are elements of human free will. Which does exist
when outlined as the ability to act corresponding to one's awareness of those
same choices which is formed by environmental influences including but not
limited to genetics, culture, knowledge and background.
Choice
is unavoidable in a determined existence. What is chosen negates something to
avoided. What is chosen support something to be attained. With each choice we
choose not to be something, while choosing to be become something else. Choice
changes what will be determined in the future. This includes unforeseen
consequences driving us to react to problems our choices have pushed upon us.
What
we react to is our interpretation of the events before us. The closer our interpretation
reflects the objective external reality the more likely we will be successful.
Not all data is equal. In this relationship the universal is temporary. Reality
is an illusion defined by the interaction between objective environmental
realities, our lived experience or stimulus response, our collective understanding
and the actions we take.
These
in part define the self. The self-interacting with other selves redefines the
self. This is an on going process for all individuals. This on going interaction
is the history of culture. Culture is a set of social interactions within a set
of social relations. This is society, which is unstable with anon going
struggle for stability. This
contradiction both creates our reality and leaves vulnerable to even ore
unforeseen consequences. Culture is the sum total of all shared knowledge,
learned behavior, patterns of attitudes and perceptions of a people.
Terms needed at this
time
- Culture refers to socially shared and transmitted knowledge,
both how the world is and how it should be.
- Ideology is the openly expressed system of beliefs of a people.
- A common relation to the
economic foundation to society characterizes class; this is the means of
production and the socially organized patterns of distribution and
consumption. Class is a relation
between groups of people, the place these groups occupy in the social
division of labor with patterns of control over access to the means of production,
and the appropriation of social surplus.
Class is also characterized by a cultural and social life. Thus, members share a common life-style,
educational background, kinship, consumption patterns, and common
mythology, ideology and values. “Class
is defined as relations of production.
Relations of production are relationships of economic power or
property. Social relations with the
same relations to production, property, and economic power are in the same
class. Class is the most important explanatory
category in social science. Class
structures virtually all aspects of society, social conflict, and
historical development. Class
positions permeate not only economic life, but also consciousness,
culture, politics, and such ultimate things as life expectancy, sexual
realizations, marriage, religion, and the very possibilities of happiness
and mental health.” Al Szymanski
- Ethnic groups are separate groups or nations that both claim a
separate identity form the dominant group and as a group form a separate
nation within the larger nation with a separate relationship to the over
all economy. With in each ethnic
group or sub-nation is its own class stratification with each class having
its own separate relationship to the over all larger economy. The end result is there are more
differences of competing interests within each ethnic group than between
them.
The
above terms are made to assist us to understand not only the issues, but also
the possibilities before us. When used
in conjunction with the research method of dialectical and historical
materialism we have a tool to aid in gaining a richer understanding of the
discipline called history. The added bonus is we can also help map out our
actions to gain great control of the choices available.
Once
action is taken, the results become part of the environment. This means the
choices we make are very important. Thus, we need a clear idea, or as clear as
possible, what are the desired outcomes and are the resources obtainable for
the possibility of success. Then we need a vision of future actions for
progressive social movements. Not all choices are the same. Some are wide-ranging
and others limited. This opens up questions like which class or ethnic groups
benefit and what is the nature of the opposition and who are the leaders of the
opposition.
