There are "hard core lefties," and there are "hard core lefties." Some "hard core lefties" are intellectuals, professional or otherwise, who leave organizing work to others; others are organizers with valuable mailing lists and phone trees (such as yours truly) -- the sort that smart local union officials need to get to know, ignoring the parts of our political views that they find unpleasant.
At 11:36 AM -0500 11/5/02, Nathan Newman wrote:
>But even subsets of those groups, local affiliates and so on, are reluctant
>to even promote rallies by other groups when they think their members will
>be lectured to by Stalinists from the podium.
Well, union leaders don't mobilize their members for actions organized by such decidedly non-Stalinist organizations like CUSAS (against sweatshops, obviously), PAN-Ohio (focused on prisoners' rights, the war on crimes, etc.), and The Contact Center (working on welfare rights) in Ohio. At best, they send some union reps to speak at rallies. By and large, working with union officials tends to be one-way street; they ask for our support, and we do offer support, but never the other way around.
At 11:36 AM -0500 11/5/02, Nathan Newman wrote:
>Unions and the mass membership groups do, when they
>choose -- see the Solidarity Day, Millenium March, and Webster abortion
>marches for the scale they can do when they choose.
Unions can function as mass membership orgs, but in day-to-day running of organizations, they don't; local union meetings are, more often than not, unattended by most of the members, unless they are about to go on strike or strikes are already going on.
At 11:36 AM -0500 11/5/02, Nathan Newman wrote:
>Most of the time they don't, because they are skeptical of big
>rallies except at dramatic moments.
What's so dramatic about Solidarity Day?
At 11:36 AM -0500 11/5/02, Nathan Newman wrote:
> >NION,
>>etc. -- were all smaller than Oct. 26; Mobe on Sept. 25-6 was a
>>disappointment.
>
>Not in New York- NION was 25,000 people, far larger than anything IAC/WWP
>has organized in the city. Oct 26th was large because it became a national
>date and because a lot of folks decided, because of the urgency of the war,
>to go with that date rather than set up competing actions. But if that
>goodwill is going to be used as an argument for general support for the IAC,
>that's all the reason not to ever support their rallies.
You don't have to support WW/IAC/ANSWER at all, provided you can organize something bigger and better. We do need to go beyond what WW/IAC/ANSWER can do; 100,000-200,000 in DC against the war at this point ain't as shabby as you guys have us believe, but peaceful rallies and marches in DC do need to attract at least several millions soon. I just don't see the axis of loose cannons on LBO-talk providing any viable alternative in practice to WW/IAC/ANSWER.
Such organizations as the Green Party, NAACP (@ <http://www.naacp.org/news/releases/uniraq102402.shtml>) and NOW (@ <http://www.now.org/issues/global/101402iraq.html>); unions like Teamsters Local 705 (@ <http://www.teamsterslocal705.org/resolution%20against%20the%20war.pdf>); and most mainline Protestant denominations have passed resolutions against or otherwise said no to the war on Iraq. I'm not sure if WW/IAC/ANSWER can tap into their mobilization capacity, but I don't see any other org taking leadership in building a broader coalition for mass actions either. (It's exceedingly stupid for the Green Party USA not to have taken leadership in it; perhaps, it, too, is too decentralized to do anything about it.)
Mass direct actions would be even better than mass actions plain and simple, but the Anti-Capitalist Convergence and the like would be lucky if they could get 2,000 out on their own; the unfortunately named "People's Strike," as well as the broader Mobe event, was a (literal and figurative) bust (Monte Reel and Manny Fernandez, "Protesters' Momentum Weakens as Crowd Thins," _Washington Post_, Sunday, September 29, 2002, Page C01, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A17468-2002Sep28¬Found=true>). The police, having learned from Seattle and other prior mobilizations, can easily overwhelm ACC (and they did in DC). Direct actions in the USA post 9.11 have to be reorganized to become effective. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>