Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> [clip]
>
> Hey, I like Chuck. I don't always agree with him, but I think he & I
> are more or less on the same side. So when I argue with him it's
> because I like him, not because I think he's an irredeemable hack or
> an amusing punching bag or any of the other things that can also make
> people fun to argue with.
>
I like most people I know personally, and I'd probably like him. But the relevant point is that I gathered he was for keeping the demonstrations free of "super leninist" types or whatever -- and I was arguing that in practice that never works. In coalitions that have any mass base at all, one can always defeat those who want to narrow membership -- and that forces them to make the decision of whether to stay a s a minority group or split. Sometimes the coalition can survive such a split (I would suspect that in this case it would); sometimes it will disintegrate (as SDS, essentially a coalition though it was never called that) did in 1969. Had Weather and RYM 2 been willing to stay in an SDS with a national office controlled by PLP SDS might have lived -- or at least many of its local chapters could have kept operating. And it might have made one hell of a big difference.
Carrol
P.S. Someone was speaking of Arab unity. That falls in with one of the original ideological supports of Zionism: the claim that all Arabs were simply Arabs (and hence there was no such thing as Palestine). It is no more sensible to look for Arab Unity now than it would have been to look for European Unity in (say) 1905. Iraq, Syria, etc. are _nations_. There is no a priori reason to expect them to be unified.
Carrol
> Doug