>On Behalf Of Patrick Bond
>
> > From: "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu>
> > "The highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's plans
Tssk, tssk, Patrick-- I complain about simplifying tactics to a unidimensional standard, and the first thing you do is clip the Sun Tzu quote down to only one dimension. So for the sake of the discussion, here's the fuller dimensions mentioned:
Sun Tzu- "The highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities."
> But Nathan, Clinton's plan has been pretty clear the whole way
> along (ranging from grassroots environment and urban struggles to new
> int'l financial architecture debates): to divide the opposing forces
> between ones who desperately want a seat at the table--and who in the
> process can be denuded by way of coercive harmony--and those who are
> dissatisfied by the inexorably neoliberal outcome.
> So, by rejecting the table you attack Clinton's plans, do you not?
First, you are mixing the distinction between attack on plans versus attacks on alliances.
Clinton's and the WTO's plans were to launch a new WTO trade round. And Clinton has a second plan to pass the China WTO deal. The goal of the Seattle protesters were to disrupt the launch of that trade round.
So the next analytic step is what was needed by the protesters to disrupt the trade round. The goal was to hold their alliance of labor, environementalists, third world development activists and others together, while dividing the neoliberal alliance. (And Clinton et al had the reverse tactical approach). So we are at the second level of targetting opposition alliances to win at the first level of attacking enemy's plans.
And the blowup of the Seattle trade talks show that the protesters were the more successful in this battle.
Yes, Clinton sought to divide the protesters with offers of compromise - of offering a seat at the table in your words - but his offer in this case did more to undermine his own WTO alliance than to divide the protesters. Which was the point of putting pressure on Clinton, forcing him to stretch and straddle two incompatible alliances he had made (with labor electorally versus alliances with international capital) and he was unable to make the straddle - the exact way most alliances are broken or at least bent.
> Likewise, by explicitly avoiding a tens-of-thousands-strong
> fortification of the non-violent Convention Center demonstration two
> blocks away, which would have changed the balance of forces quite
> considerably between sitdowners and cops, Sweeney implicitly endorsed
> Clinton's plan.
First, the Seattle WTO round was derailed, so you seem to be Monday-morning quarterbacking an overall alliance and strategy that worked. Always reasonable to think about what could have done better, but let's look at your language:
"could have changed the balance of forces"- okay, we've now dropped to Sun Tzu's third level, trying to destroy the opposition army, the Seattle police. But that army was never going to get destroyed; it might have been forced to retreat for a bit longer, but they were inevitably going to stay intact given overwhelming force. This is the Gandhian/MLK twist on Sun Tzu in regard to civil disobediance: having less weapons, we never have the greater physical balance of forces, all we can ever have is the greater moral balance, which assists us in dividing the opposition and breaking its alliances.
Would a few more unionists getting tear gassed and arrrested have helped. Marginally probably, although burly Teamsters facing off with cops might have also created images more sympathetic to the police in arguing the need to use force. The public is notoriously unsympathetic to union folks when force is used against them, but rather softhearted when they see young activists they identify with their own children being attacked by the police. MLK's most crticized tactic was to take use of that sympathy to the extreme when he sent the little children of Birmingham out into the streets to face the cops, provoking the sympathy of the nation.
There have been a number of analyses that there was tremendous synergy between the young DAN activists blockading the streets combined with the sober rallying of the union folks. The union presence gave a political weight and heft to the meaning of the mass direct action, that might have been dismissed as marginal student activists, while the militancy of the DAN blockade gave the labor march a more threatening perceived meaning, when it might have been dismissed as merely symbolic if done alone.
And the point is that Clinton's plan at the WTO failed. You are implying endorsements that I don't believe are there, but if this is what happens when labor endorses Clinton's plans, then Sweeney should be out there endorsing more of them :)
But this really brings us to this horror image you conjure of "the table" that everyone must avoid sitting at at all costs. The point of every organizing drive anywhere in the world is to force the opposition to the table to negotiate, in the ideal to negotiate surrender but in the interim to negotiate the sacrifice of plans that improve your sides position. The Sun Tzu point is that any warrior who belittles diplomacy and negotiation in favor of the romance of unmitigated battle is ultimately a poor and losing strategist.
Now, your real concern is not the negotiations itself, but the likely product- "the inexorable neoliberal outcome." Fine and if negotiations happen and that is the result, that would be worth criticizing. But you seem to have premature antilaborism, attacking them for a sellout that hasn't happened yet.
But what amazes me is people who despite a clear announced alliance between AFL types with other progressive forces and actions at Seattle that demonstrate the alliance (however much you may criticize the specifics), there is this band of odd lefty folks going out of their way to try to divide that alliance - doing Clinton's and the Right's work for them. There is no reason for blind trust in the AFL-CIO, god knows their history warrants none, but that is a separate issue from the declarations of the labor movement as an imperialist enemy. Given the fact that there are both conservative and quite radical forces contending for power within the labor movement, with the radicals fighting to hold the left alliances tight while the capitalist forces seek to break them, it seems incredibly destructive to have the Left joining in with the capitalists to denigrate the labor alliance made in Seattle. It seems to me a self-destructive attempt at a self-fulfilling prophecy that follows exactly the lack of subtly in approach to alliances that Sun Tzu criticizes.
-- Nathan Newman