But what does the Left have to say?

Carrol Cox cbcox at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Wed Jun 3 10:13:10 PDT 1998


Lou Proyect writes: [SNIP]

It will have to be in the language of the American
> people, not in Marxist- Leninist jargon.

Lou, this again touches on what I believe is the biggest bone to pick between you and me, despite our nearly 95% agreement on everything else. This I call muddying the waters of discourse. It has the same personally offensive tone as does the traditional catch-we question: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? In fact it resembles asking that question not of a married man but of a 75-year old crippled widow.

Let me give a parallel from my experience in the Anti-Gulf War coalition in Bloomington/Normal. That coalition was stupendously successful. Within about 10 days we were able to mount a huge march and rally which dwarfed the best we could ever do during the Vietnam War. We had huge turnouts for our *Planning Sessions* that were larger than most public rallies we could pull off in the earlier wars. And those planning sessions (50 to 75 people) OF COURSE focused on how we could do more outreach, how we could communicate to the public, how we could make sure that our events were noticed by the government, etc. There was not a single peep, even from the two or three left-over weatherpeople in the crowd, about throwing stones or spitting on cops or whatever.

THEN one of our rallies (I forget how we labelled it) was a meeting in the local Mennonite Church with a number of speakers who knew a great deal about the Middle East, with opportunity for audience questions after the speakers. Any how the very first speaker (who didn't know a damn thing about the middle east, who had never participated in a political action in her life, who knew perfectly well what the parameters [implicit and explicit] of the coalition's planned activities were, got up and spent 10 minutes (instead of her scheduled 5) talking about how we absolutely must make sure that our activities were non-violent.

Lou, can't you just lay out your vision of the left without imagining that the whole fucking "left" is made up of the more obnoxious of your ex-comrades of the SWP? Do you have to dump on "the left" as though it constituted a disciplined, single-minded group rather than a huge collection of people who for months or years or decades have just been doing the fucking best they can under really discouraging circumstances to keep something alive?

Stick to principle and program. When you want to sneer at X, make sure X is a proper noun, not a vague abstraction like "we."

Carrol



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