You've proven my point. Most of the nonviolent protests that got media attention happened long ago. Sure, ACT-UP has certainly gotten its share of attention, but it shares more in common with today's in-your-face style of creative direct action than it does with standard Left activism. I've read Saul Alinsky, in fact I first read Rules for Radicals when I was a young student activist in the 1980s. There is alot of wisdom in that book, but he was mostly talking about local activism, not a coordinated campaign against international capitalism.
The corporate media still has a hard time covering activism. I was a bit surprised to see a big photo from the weekend anti-biotech protests in San Diego, in the Business section of today's Washington Post.
> >You are pretty far removed from having to work shitty jobs
> >under capitalism. All your talk about Zizek and Foucault aren't going to
> help
> <you understand the working class young person who gets fucked by Greenpeace
> as a
> >door-to-door canvasser.
>
> Chuck, now you are really just playing the lefter-than-thou bullshit in a
> way that shows you talking out of your ass. First, I've never read Zizek so
> try a different target.
If it's not Zizek, it can be some other Lefty who writes for the Nation, the Progressive, or Z Magazine. There's a generation of Left writers who are ensconced at these magazines and they are talking out out of their asses when it comes to contemporary activism.
> Second, I spent at least two years total of my life as a door-to-door
> canvasser and then phone canvassser, fought knock down battles as a student
> member of the MASSPIRG board demanding labor rights, then as a phone
> fundraiser (at an outfit raising funds for pro-choice, enviro groups, etc)
> tried to organize a union and faced a savage union-busting campaign.
Good for you. Perhaps you can compare stories with my friends who were screwed over by the PIRGs they worked for. It's commonly known among activists that working as a grunt for an NGO or nonprofit is often worse than working for some capitalist company.
> >Throwing rocks at cops can quickly become attractive to
> >a young person who makes a pittance begging for money so some soft NGO
> flacks
> >can put their feet up in their Washington office suites.
>
> All nice for such NGO flacks-- personally, I've never made more than $5000
> in a year from non-profit sources, so someone whose made full salary from
> non-profit sources should probably keep their mouth off such topics and stay
> to the issue at hand.
I've never worked for an NGO, so you are getting off topic here. You know the NGOs I'm talking about. I respect the work that many NGOs do, but they shouldn't be surprised at the hostility they get when they try to tell other people how to protest.
> Cut the holier-than-thou crap.
OK, Mr. MASSPIRG veteran.
> > And one thing all the former Panthers on the panel made clear was how
> > protesters lose if they give into a spiraling escalation of violence
> against
> > forces that have a lot more guns and repressive surveillance technology.
>
> -I agree. But I don't see any interest in spiraling into an escalation of
> -violence. Yeah, rock throwing is more violent than those boring Lefty demos
> -we've been subjected to for all these decades, but I haven't heard anybody
> -talking about guns or escalating the level of violence.
>
> Wait til the cops shoot a few people in these protests. Which they will,
> specifically to provoke folks into escalation and the cops will have plants
> to egg on the escalation. And when folks start bringing guns to the demos,
> are you going to hold out for the individual right to "do their own thing."
> Believe me, they will be using your holier-than-thou arguments against you
> if you do.
Do you honestly believe this liberal crap? Is rock-throwing a gateway drug to brandishing AK-47s? You have a rather ignorant view of the current generation of militant activists. They have a better head on their shoulders than the dumbshit Leftists of the 1960s who started crap like the Weather Underground.
It's really unfair to use this hypothetical situation about guns to argue for less militant protests. Have you learned anything from the successes of the anti-capitalist movement in the past two years?
> >Let those of us who take the streets figure this out. Why don't you give
> >rank-and-file activists more credit for creating strategy? What is really
> >fascinating is how many of the moderate and liberal activists have become
> more
> >militant after Quebec City.
>
> As someone who's been in the streets and working with those doing mass
> defense, I'm part of that "rank-and-file" so my comments are all part of it.
> As I said, your proler-than-thou rhetoric just gets in the way of exactly
> the strategic discussion thats needed.
Your comments are elitist apologia for timid activism. Your views are not typical of any ran-and-file activists that I know.
> > For all the propaganda value of protests and even trials, as the
> roundtable
> > noted last month, the imprisonment and trials of leaders like Bobby Seale
> > ended up taking them away from tending to movement building for literally
> > years, even as the cops were using subtler methods to tear the movement
> > apart.
>
> -So, we should just sit on our asses, take no risks, an go back to being
> -marginalized? Are you suggesting that we can get rid of capitalism by
> holding
> -hands, singing Kum-bayah, and voting for the next Al Gore?
>
> If you think rumbling in the streets by itself will bring down capitalism
> will bring down capitalism, you are more delusional than the 60s radicals
> you mentioned.
No, I don't believe that and I never said I did. Any strategy that intends to bring down capitalism has to be mulitfaceted. The street actions at the major anti-capitalist protests are just one part of this successful strategy.
> Sorry, protests are all to the good but they are just a media event that
> SLIGHTLY inconveniences capital. As THE ECONOMIST notes this week, global
> capitalism can always just pick more remote places - read Qatar - for
> meetings if necessary.
That's certainly a big victory for a movement that couldn't get a minute of air time several years ago. These new institutions of international capital thought they could go about their plans without anybody noticing. Now, thanks to all of these protests, people know about the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and FTAA. This is a tremendous victory for our side, but it's only a small part of an ongoing war against capitalism. And protests aren't the only thing that we are doing, as I've often pointed out to critics of "summit-hopping." Every anti-capitalist protester that I know is involved in local campaigns and struggles. Many are busy building counter-institutions and networks that will be useful in the long struggle ahead. It's really awesome that we are accomplishing these things using new methodology. The old Leftist strategy of building mass parties has finally been consigned to the dust heap of history.
> Real radical change requires organizing of not a few thousand street
> radicals but hundreds of millions of workers and families across the world.
> It requires unions organized globally, electoral mobilizations, consumer
> boycotts and a range of actions that leverage real POWER, not mere media
> gestures. Protests will be used to supplement that power organizing but the
> street protests are a tool, not the ultimate focus of power organizing.
I agree that real radical change involves organizing millions of people around the world. Unfortunately, you are still repeating the same mistakes that the Left has been engaged in for the past half century or more. You need to get over this fetishism of workers, unions, consumerism, and electoralism. All of these approaches only serve to keep capitalism running. Organizing workers on the job is all well and good, but you neglect the fact that people are more than just workers and consumers. Thge Left continues to use the terminology of capitalism and continues its uncritical acceptance of the canard that real power comes from organizing workers. This is a hopeless task as long as you have to fight business unions who have no qualms about working with the bosses. This is a hopeless effort as long as organizers have to waste their time reforming unions instead of fighting the bosses. It's a hopeless effort as long as the focus is on building labor organizations instead of fighting capitalism.
<< Chuck0 >>
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INTERNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE
An American soldier in a hospital explained how he was wounded: He said, "I was told that the way to tell a hostile Vietnamese from a friendly Vietnamese was to shout ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ If he shoots, he’s unfriendly. So I saw this dude and yelled ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ and he yelled back, ‘To hell with President Johnson!’ We were shaking hands when a truck hit us."
(from 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg).