Thomas:
>The democratic centralists can now put plumes in their hats and strut...IF their central committee permits that kind of behavior.
There is a whole spectrum of organizational structures between network and democratic centralist. I suspect that both extremes are more suitable for military organization than for grassroots political organization. Flexible, egalitarian, majority rule groups with control by members, plenty of room for internal dissent, and paid staff (if they have the resources) are the most effective and resistant to turning tyrant in the long run.
Nathan
>Why should anyone be impressed with an antiwar movement that had two-thirds of the populations' support for ending the war in 1971, yet couldn't stop the carpet bombing and mass murder in Cambodia in 1973?
Gimme a break. That question is so loaded it can't even step up out of the gutter.
Any the people win a major victory (like both the civil rights movement and the anti-vietnam war movement did) the mainstream propagandist will give the standard line: "Oh you people had nothing to do with it. We granted this concession because we ar nice people, smart people, good people. In fact all those nasty demonstrations made it harder to get consensus to do this thing we were going to do all along. You never scared us. N'uh Uh. No fear here."
The anti-Vietnam movement could not end the bombing of Cambodia in 1972? Remember they had just won popular support. I think 1971 was pretty close to first year there even an an antivietnam majority. And it is tough to translate majority support into policy change when the people in charge like the current policy.
And the demonstrations were effective. They were not all of the battle But they played a huge part in ending the Vietnam war. Pick the memoir of your choice by an leading establishment figure who supported the Vietnam war and then turned against it. (I'll stack the odds a bit. Elsberg may have been an exception to what I'm about to say.) In almost every case you will find something along the lines of: "This horrible war dividing the country. Defeating the Viet Cong was not worth the harm being done to the soul of America." Very seldom will you find horror at the number of Vietnamese being killed. Agony over the cost in American Soldiers lives or money being spent was usually either absent or pro forma. The anti-vietnam war movement raised the cost of intervention to the point where the established had more to lose by continuing it than by ending it. I don't think there was ever any danger of a revolution. But there was a real danger in continuing disturbance of the smooth operation of capitalism.
And I honestly doubt that the fragging of officers or the bombing of ROTC buildings and Bank of Americas were the main thing that frightened the ruling class. The thing about the demonstrations was that they were growing in size. More and more of the public opinion against the war was turning to public *action* against the war. That was the scary thing that had to be stopped. From the ruling class perspective, god forbid a substantial minority of the U.S. public ever become *actively* involved in politics - even if it is only demos and door to door activity.
Now none of this means Demos are necessarily the best to way to go today. War strategy today has been refined for over thirty years specifically to be resistant to anti-Vietnam war type tactics. (And BTW, this is in itself a victory of sorts. War planners face constraints they did not pre Vietnam.) But even if the tactics and strategy need to be different, one core remains. Victory on such issues is won by winning the hearts and minds of a large segment of the public, (perhaps a majority, perhaps not) and converting this into action sufficient to raise the cost of war to the point where it is greater than the cost of peace. I would add that action by a tiny minority that remains a tiny minority is not likely do this. I would also add that acts of civil disobedience should not be of a type to alienate the overwhelming majority of people. We do need to increase not decrease popular support.