Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >But in all that literature there is not one single word on the subject
> >of how marxists should _start_ a mass movement.
>
> And who said that was a goal? There are plenty of movements, though
> how mass they are is subject to debate. Even in the dismal U.S. we've
> got the globokids, unions, greens, community organizers, etc. I don't
> always like their analysis and wish more of them would act in common.
> But it's not a matter of creating a movement ex nihilo.
>
The main point is that _current_ discussion among leftists (aside from practical work within local contexts) must, willy-nilly, try to concern itself with theoretical preparation for, essentially, _we-know-not-what_, i.e. for The Mass Movement which will catch us by surprise when it comes.
And of course, "There are plenty of movements." (Note the plural.) I've even started half a dozen or so in the last 30 years, and a couple of them even had some local achievements. But it's like thousands of drops of water intermittently falling at the top of a large sand hill. They make little trenches as they flow down. If enough drops fall in to a single trench, it begans to achieve permanence. (This is a metaphor Gould uses in developing the point that there was nothing inevitable about evolution. He remarks that it would have beeen perfectly possible that when the sun went nova several billion years from now only a mat of gray-green algae would have been here on earth.) But of course most of those drops of water sink into the sand and leave no pathway for following drops.
But there have been relatively few mass movements in u.s. history -- in the last 80 years 3: the CIO, the Black Liberation Movement, the Anti-War movement, maybe, almost, the women's movement of the '60s & '70s would make a fourth.
What those movements all were were movements of a sector of the working class, but the sectors never merged into a working-class movement as such. Both King & Malik were feeling their way towards such a merging shortly before their deaths.
Carrol