Ian Murray wrote:
>
> --> [clip]
> That's a lot of people's frustration with the A crowd right now.
> There's an impatience borne of the notion that the system has a
> slow mo' death wish, that as a species we're wrecking everything
> we touch.
I'm working on a longer response based on one of Kelley's posts (which have been quite good on this topic), but I'll insert a couple of preliminary points here.
Agreed, one can't base either strategy or tactics on frustration or _immediate_ anger. And it's a step forward, but only a step, to "Don't get mad, get even." A friend once quoted Lenin (though I've never seen it in anything I've read by Lenin) to the effect that there are three revolutionary virtues:
1. Patience
2. Patience
3. Patience
And while I tend to be cautious in carping from the sidelines (where I am currently located), I also tend to think that the focus of many on the mass demos (peaceful or not) AT THE PRESENT TIME is mistaken: Except from you perhaps I have seen almost no discussions of the Demos that really discussed what kind of base those Demos had in local organizing. 50,000 (or 1000) demonstrators, violent or non-violent) only really demonstrate anything if there is evidence that every demonstrator there represents 10 or more back home. And I have never seen a peep concerning _support_ demonstrations in localities on the same day as the big demos. As a result some people (on these lists) who I respect greatly are beginning to speak as though the demonstrations _all by themselves_ are real battles. They are not. Rather they remind me of that animated cartoon cliche where the character suddenly finds him/herself walking on air, and plunges straight downward.
(For example, when some global organization planned a meeting someplace in central Canada last year, several people on one list exulted that it would be easy for small groups of people to block the roads to the conference, or something like that -- which was utterly silly because it assumed that stopping a conference wfas in and of itself a blow to capitalism. One does _not_ at this time measure success or victory by "damage" one does to the enemy, but in the growth of the numbers of people who listen when we talk. The opposite idiocy has characterized many on this list: they believe that we must first talk to others -- who of course aren't in the auditorium to listen to us until our _actions_ have brought them there.)
But undoing/reconfiguring the institutional dynamics
> that precipitate those feelings calls for a creativity based on
> biophilia even more than anger.
Pish. This is what you have to demonstrate, not assume. At the present time "love" for others can only embody itself in deep and prolonged (and therefore patient) hatred of their oppressors. That too of course needs to be demonstrated, and I'm not tryign to do that here, but simply place my blank assertion against your equally blank assertion. The Black Blocs and anarchists in general have never illustrated anything that convinces me they either love or hate anything beyond the degree to which they do or do not satisfy themselves of their own moral superiority to the rest of the human species.
In the medium-long run anger is
> a waste of time. If we can't get beyond anger we'll stay stuck
> in a cul-de-sac.
Frustrated anger is worse than a waste of time -- it is utterly disastrous. Had Kelley given into the anger she describes on a particular occasion she would not be alive to describe the anger to us now.
Carrol
>
> Ian