"the me-generation of the baby boomers...
>protested mainly because they did not want to give their privileged life style to fight in Vietnam, not because they opposed the war."
Social change can not only be a product of socially and politically aware radicals. Ultimately, individuals will organize against capitalism because it affects their personal, every-day lives. Abstract ideas of equality and peace are not as effective motivators as the infringement of your own rights, watching your own children go to war, seeing your community destroyed, or trying to get enough to eat.
I think it is incredibly egotistical to disregard social movements just because they might have originated in self-interest.
-Juliana
-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect [SMTP:lnp3 at panix.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 1998 12:14 PM
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Subject: Re: What did the Anti-War Movement Lead To? Gramsci and Civil Society
Wojtek Sokolowski:
>What movement? Feel-good identity politics of middle class draft-dodgers,
>maybe, but movement?
This is absurd. The Vietnam antiwar movement at its height included broad
sections of the working class and the oppressed nationalities. The Chicano
Moratorium was a powerful component of the antiwar movement and Martin
Luther King Jr. made opposition to the war a central part of his activity
in his final year of life. Some surmise that his antiwar activity had more
to do with his assassination than civil rights activity.
>I think Nathan is correct linking the steady decline of the progressive
>power with the ascent of the me-generation of the baby boomers. They
>protested mainly because they did not want to give their privileged life
>style to fight in Vietnam, not because they opposed the war. When not
>threatened by the draft, they cheered the televised Persian Gulf war from
>the privacy of their living rooms and suburan drinking holes.
More nonsense. People who became antiwar activists were the most
politically conscious people in the population. When you joined an antiwar
committee, you would have probably already read Bernard Fall, Howard Zinn,
Noam Chomsky et al. You are perhaps confused with people like Bill Clinton
who had nothing much in common with the people I worked with.
>
>PS. From what I heard from a historian friend of mine, the only anti-war
>movement that really mattered was the opposition to the war within the
>military itself, that left the army deeply divided and demoralized.
>
Poor comprehension of history from your historian friend. The ranks of the
military would never had courage to speak out against the war unless
millions of students and trade unionists had preceded them.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)