[lbo-talk] Organized Political Expressions & Unorganized Mass Actions

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>I've taken some heat for interviewing Richard Burkholder, who 
>supervised Gallup's poll of Baghdad. A letter-writer said he 
>couldn't  believe he was listening to a progressive radio station - 
>I should  leave that stuff to NPR. And someone at the Monthly Review 
>Xmas party  told me pretty much the same thing. I guess these folks 
>know what  Baghdadis think, or should think, and any effort to ask 
>them somehow  promotes imperialism. But the poll confirmed what 
>Christian told me - that Iraqis are glad to be of Saddam (the guy at 
>the MR party tried  to convince me that SH was popular and had done 
>good things), don't  like being occupied by the U.S. and don't at 
>all trust Washington's motives, but are worried about what would 
>happen if the U.S. simply  pulled out. It's a complicated and 
>contradictory position, which  doesn't fit nicely with the 
>preconceptions of your average  metropolitan anti-imperialist. I 
>spent quite a bit of time getting  Burkholder to explain how you 
>accurately poll a population under  occupation (they used Iraqis who 
>didn't disclose that they were doing the poll for a U.S. firm - and 
>he said respondents were so thrilled  that they were being asked 
>what they think that they kept talking way  beyond the allotted 
>hour, and tried to get the pollsters to talk to their friends and 
>relatives too). He struck me as someone who was  serious about 
>trying to probe the state of opinion. But some people  didn't want 
>to listen to the results.
>
>Doug

That public and private opinions in the context of guerrilla 
insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare are complex and 
contradictory, some of them ambivalent to the point of paralysis, is 
a given -- not just in Iraq but also insurgencies and 
counter-insurgencies in the past and the future.  About such a given, 
it is not necessary to turn to left-wing writers such as Tariq Ali, 
Christian Parenti, MR contributors, etc. -- it's much better to 
carefully read the _New York Times_ and other bourgeois newspapers 
that actually have foreign correspondents on the ground every day 
(unlike leftists who do not have resources to field them).  E.g., Ian 
Fisher, "As Iraqis Become the Targets of Terrorists, Some Now Blame 
the American Mission," _New York Times_, December 17, 2003, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/17/international/middleeast/17HURT.html>.

That said, individual opinions, in Iraq or the USA or anywhere else, 
remain impotent as long as they do not become organized political 
expressions, i.e. political messages sent by political actions of 
organized social forces.

The only time when unorganized individual opinions become politically 
relevant is when they become _unorganized mass actions_ like mass 
desertions, e.g. "Faced with the desertion of nearly half the new 
Iraqi army, the U.S. military is thinking about raising the pay scale 
for Iraqi soldiers as it trains more to join the force, the commander 
of U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq said Saturday" ("As Recruits 
Desert in Droves, U.S. Rethinks Iraqi Army Pay," AP, 
<http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-12-13-iraq_x.htm>).
-- 
Yoshie

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