ravi wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> is this true? my father marched with others down in madras and
> participated in various such activities - he did correspond with gandhi
E-mail posts leave out thousands of pages of qualification, support, exceptions, etc etc etc. But I think it's true. Note that non-violence is always just the same. You go there. You stand. They clobber you. You stand it as long as you can and then run. What this takes is discipline, and masses who act in the same way. Only marginal opportunities for participation in planning, for responding to the particular situation. Also there is no room for independent action. Read the two chapters on women in Jack Belden's _China Shakes the World_. The first of them tells of an action by a guerilla group _not_ under the discipline of the Red Army or of the official guerilla groups. Peasants acting on their own, but their independent action still compatible with the overall strategy of the revolution. (The local Party Committee got rather excited about Belden sneaking off with an informal group on a military action. They were afraid of a big hullabaloo if an American got killed in a guerilla zone.)
A mass movement (revolutionary or reformist) simply canNOT be uniform; it has to involve a multiplicity of semi-cooperating groups, local, regional, national. The current fight going on between ANSWER and A20 is highly desirable. It's forcing people to think about things. It's getting more people involved in a way that leads to political education. It is already, just by the chatter on lbo, beginning to expose some fakes -- those adhering to what Doug accurately called Anti-Sectarian Sectarianism. They're all for democracy as long as they get to define who counts as _demos_. Learning how to work in coalitions containing wreckers (not deliberate wreckers -- wreckers in spite of themselves) is a vital part of political education within mass movements.
> but i dont know if he ever met him. from my conversations with my
> father, i dont get the feeling that he felt excluded. of course he could
> have been part of the elite coterie headed by gandhi that, if i
> understand you correctly, expelled the masses from politics...
I'd like to learn more. I would imagine that many felt included. But just as in older revolutionary movements (and even in single strikes) "women's issues" would get postponed, so it seems Untouchable Interests got postponed in the Indian Independence Movement.
Carrol
>
> --ravi