Doug Henwood wrote:
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> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
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>
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> So what's your vision? The U.S. left is very very weak. How to make
> it even as strong as the Venezuelan left?
>
Jesus! Yoshie has talked about almost nothing else for 5 years than her vision. Obviously all we can do now is plug away on (mostly) local anti-war groups (and on other local issues which, in a given locality, attract people.
Over and over again Yoshie and I have said (and Chip Berlet has said that fairly extensive research backs this up) the left grows through one-to-one conversation: A (already to some extent _in_ the movement is provided by her local group (through varius means) with a bit more confidence in and command of the basic agitational pitch on whatever the local issue is -- A thus prepared talks to people she knows, and with a little luck (contingency still rules on this), she finds B, who has been interested vaguely in the issue (or perhaps has been aggressively interested but just didn't know anyone was active on it, at least locally), and after one or several conversations gets that person to attend at least one meeting of the local group, and with luck*, again a strong element of contingency, finds the meeting interesting enough to come back a second time, even perhaps join one of the working "committees" or "teams" or "working groups" of the organization. And so it goes. Within this framework it is like Eliot said of critical method -- the only method is to be very intelligent. The tactics of this whole process have really been known for a long time, and the main "lesson" we can learn from history of the movement is not the mistakes that movement has made but the tactics which it has used over and over again. (Some of them are easily invented anew over and over again, but it is better if one knows them from history rather than through somewhat bumbling experience.)
People who have any real experience in working in mass movements (or in would-be mass movements because most of them fail because however intelligently they strike they the prairie grass is not dry enough or plentiful enough for the spark to ignite a prairie fire).
But now a question. I really can't believe that you really believe that posts like this throwing out some huge question as if you are daring the person addressed to answer it -- you can't really believe that such posts can be regarded by others as in good faith. Why do you write them. I'm really curious. I would _never_ write such a post _except_ when I am more or less malignantly trying to show how stupid such posts are.
At my grupiest I'm not as contemptuous of my reader or of the person I am responding to as you seem to be when you write such posts.
Carrol
> Doug