This makes no sense. In the first place the IAC and the WWP have done the things that you say they have "NEVER" done. In the second place, even if it were true that WWP always organizes only peaceful protest, it wouldn't demonstrate that WWP thinks that mass rallies and marches are enough to change government policy. After all, you argue about four paragraphs later that WWP doesn't care whether we stop the war or not, all we care about is building our god damned party, so clearly we don't necessarily have any opinion about whether mass rallies are enough to change government policy, do we? In any case there are plenty of reasons for doing it even though it isn't enough of itself, as I outlined further on.
Anyway, I take this sentence as a RETRACTION of your earlier statement that ANSWER "CLAIMS" that non-confrontational rallies are enough to stop the war. Now you are saying only that you INFER that ANSWER THINKS they are enough.
> > Furthermore, this business of 'what would change things' is sort of verbal
> > sleight of hand, because in fact no antiwar force - not ANSWER, not the
ACC,
> > not ANYONE - has enough forces -in the U.S.- to 'change things' of this
sort
> > (that is, to stop an imperialist war drive which is central to the
currently
> > ruling elite's strategy for global domination) at the present time with
ANY
> > strategy.
>
> I'm sorry, but I don't share your defeatist attitudes about what we can
> accomplish. If you aren't willing to risk anything, you will gain nothing.
> That's why you, ANSWER and the WWP are the losers of the Left.
Yes, that's why nobody ever mentions us any more or gives a fuck what we do or think.
By the way, let me point out something here. There are two ways to "push the envelope". One is to push it toward more confrontational tactics, and another is to push it in the direction of more radical politics. For a year and a half now ANSWER has been building these rallies and marches which you believe to be tactically boring, while, however, all sorts of people were denouncing it as being a nest of wild-eyed loonies of the radical fringe, and were reading the last rites over it, because it was "clearly" unrealistic to suppose that people would come out in large numbers to oppose war in the shadow of Sept. 11 (9/29/01), or to support the Palestinian cause (4/20/02), or to oppose the war on Iraq straight-up along with Palestinians, supporters of Mumia, of the FARC, etc. (10/26/02, 1/18/03). After the fact, from the outside, you can of course take the position that we were never taking any risks, because the success of all these events was automatic, but before the fact, from the inside, it felt a lot different.
> I'm used to winning, so I'm going to pontificate on what I think should be
> done. ;-P
I admit that I was unaware of your long and successful history of stopping imperialist wars. Please enlighten me with a resumé.
However, if there is no such resumé, then I stand by my statement that your strategy, previously posted here, of having a thousand, or thousands, disruptive people run around DC throwing switches is not going to stop the war EITHER. In the first place you don't have several thousand people ready to do it. If you do, what the hell are you waiting for? Please don't feel that you have to wait for MY permission. Go ahead and stop the war please! But in the second place, even if you did have them, they would not be enough to stop imperialist war. And you know it.
So what you really mean, IF you mean anything at all, is something like this: "If the 'tens of thousands' (you can agree with THIS I hope) of people who attended ANSWER demonstrations were, instead, to become dedicated anarchist street fighters, and then each of them went and recruited 20 or 50 more people to become dedicated anarchist street fighters, they could bring down the system." Maybe they could. But you can't get 5 million dedicated anarchist or communist street fighters just by whistling them up out of the void, or just by putting "Street Fight" on the leaflet instead of "Legal Demonstration." Movements evolve.
> > The effectiveness of large demonstrations does not lie in the idea that
Bush
> > will be terrified by seeing a million peaceful people outside his window.
It
> > lies in (a) the fact that they are -part- of a global movement against
war,
> > each part of which emboldens and encourages all other parts, at a time
when
> > the US elite faces other obstacles to war including the economic crisis,
> > European imperialists pursuing their own self-interest, the dangers of
> > nationalist resistance in the Middle East, etc., and (b) the fact that
these
> > demonstrations bring hundreds of thousands of young people into the
movement,
> > excite them, inspire them [I know YOU think the DC rallies have been
boring
> > crap, but you are possibly a bit jaded, and I am telling you there are
lots of
> > people who went to them from Chicago who tell me that they were life-
changing
> > experiences], and start them on a trajectory which may lead them to study
all
> > sorts of new things and do all sorts of different things.
>
> The poverty of the reasonign behind these arguments is astounding.
I bet that 90% of the rest of this list understands it. I note that you ignore part (a) completely.
> This is
> just a warm re-hash of the losing strategies that dominated the American
Left
> before Seattle. We all know that a strategy of movement-building by relying
> on sectarian rallies and marches won't amount to a damn thing. The sectarian
> American left has been organizing this shit for years and they have nothing
> to show for it.
It doesn't matter what people did 'for years' because this is a different period. Conditions are different in 2003 from what they were in 2000. "To every thing there is a season, and a time for every tactic under heaven." A time for street fighting, and a time for large legal demonstrations, and then a time for street fighting again. Among your many problems, you are trying to apply to the year 2003 a strategic view which was NOT AS BAD under the conditions of the summer of 2001. I spent a fair amount of my time in August, 2001 defending the anarchists of Genoa against the various slanders, by the way, so this notion that 'sectarians' like myself have a fetish about peaceful rallies is just not tenable.
Furthermore, you are not using the word "sectarian" in a reasonable way. You are just saying that anything WWP is involved in is 'sectarian' because we are a party I guess. "My old man's a sectarian, what do you think about that! He wears sectarian glasses, he wears a sectarian hat! ..."
> This argument is also a deceptive excuse for the real agenda
> of the WWP, which is party-building on the back of some large social change
> movement. The goal isn't to stop the war, it's to build a movement that can
> be run by the WWP.
Bah. This is just silly. Suppose I wrote that you don't care about stopping the war or globalization, you just want to build a movement that can be run by Chuck Munson. Anybody can play this game. Would you think this was a clever argument? Would it convince anyone who didn't already dislike you? Wouldn't it just be REAL sectarianism on my part?
> Your second argument is pretty hollow. OK, we know that the sectarian left
> fetishizes "youth" as the salvation of the left. ...
I hereby cop to this charge, whatever it is. Call me a 'self-hating geezer' if you like.
LP