Operation Enduring Protest

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>>  Note: by Doug's logic here, an Abolitionist living in the South in the
>>  early 1800s would be "evading reality".  We can't judge the ultimate
>>  success of a political viewpoint or strategy by how popular it is
>>  today.
>
>I'm not sure I follow you here.  Abolition in the North is a great example
>of an initially small, passionate minority eventually pushing their
>project through on a national scale (although the seemingly indispensible
>means of that success, we might ironically note in passing, was an
>astonishingly bloody war which they backed to the hilt).  But from the
>beginning they had a broad resonance in New England culture (and I mean
>from the very beginning, in the constitutional debates).  Abolition in the
>South, on the other hand, which had almost no resonance in the early 1800s
>(when the cotton gin first got going) had even less resonance on the eve
>of the civil war.  It seems like the model of a completely impotent, tiny
>minority that barely rates a footnote in the historical record.  They were
>certainly right in moral terms.  But their complete separation from their
>countrymen meant they had absolutely no effect on the course of events.
>So yeah, they would have been evading reality if they thought that by
>advocating such ideas to their neighbors they were pushing things along in
>the right direction.  Do you have a different take?  Is there new research
>that modifies this picture?
>
>Looked at this way, your example seems to suggest that resonance --
>building on truths that your audience considers self-evident -- actually
>matters quite a lot for political movements.
>
>Michael

The historical lessons of the abolitionist movement should include 
the fact that it took economic changes (= dialectic of forces & 
relations of production) _& the civil war_ (= violent political 
changes) to abolish chattel slavery in the American South.  Cf. Karl 
Marx, Eric Williams, etc.  We should apply the same historical 
materialist lens in analyzing the current conjuncture: the neoliberal 
impoverishment of the oppressed masses in many parts of the 
periphery; the end of the neoliberal boom in the USA; the continuing 
deflation in Japan; the expanding war in Afghanistan & beyond; the 
development of global anti-capitalist & anti-war movements; etc. 
Contradictions of capitalism -- between social production and private 
accumulation, between capitalist production and social conditions of 
production, etc. -- are reasserting their power.
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Anti-War Organizing in Columbus Covered by the Media: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/media.html>