Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>
>
> There might even be a nontrivial conclusion hidden in there. Let's say we
> assume, like I think Wojtek implicitly did, that the real purpose of demos
> is to get the largest number of people to show up. Because by that act,
> they cross a line, they identify with our side, and when committed people
> are off later somewhere else breaking windows or writing articles or doing
> vigils and they read about them in the paper or see them on the news,
> these people who showed up once will see them as Us rather than Them.
> And some of them, having crossed the line, and done something unhabitual,
> the hardest step, will then think about doing something more committed
> later. Demos would then be seen a combination of an identification ritual
> and an entry level activity.
This is quite true -- only your next statement is, I think, false:
>
> If we accepted that as true, it would be a very different picture of demos
> than we currently have.
No. Of course that is the picture that, for the most part, actual organizers for the last 200 years or so have had in their minds. It is what informs my repeated statement (stupidly misconstrued and mocked m by Doug, Kelley, Dennis R & others) over the last several years that there is a fundamental sense in which we speak only to those who already agree with us. Until they "identify with our side" they aren't going to even know we have anything to say to them. So it's pointless to start to talk to them until after they have discovered that they agree with us. And there are, incidentally, even in apparently completely "dead" periods, a scattering out there who already agree with us. That's why it's useful to put on demos of various kinds in such periods as the Korean War: I never knew at that time that anyone was actively opposing the war. I didn't know that the Monthly REview or the National Guardian existed. But the activity of those papers and other (mostly innvisible) anti-war actions of the early '50s did produce some of the cadre who helped invigorate the early stages of the anti-Vietnam War effort, and thereby snagged people like me. (Not very many my age though. Almost everyone I worked with in the '60s was either quite a bit older or quite a bit younter than I.)
Carrol