>>Then why are they organizing these mass, pointless spectacles? Since ANSWER,
>>and by extension the IAC and WWP, have a track record of NEVER organizing
>>confrontational protests, civil disobedience, or anything that pushes the
>>envelope, it is reasonable to assume that they think that mass rallies and
>>marches are enough to change government policy.
>
>
> This makes no sense. In the first place the IAC and the WWP have done the
> things that you say they have "NEVER" done.
Really? Where? When? I have never seen members of the IAC/WWP do anything that made the police unhappy.
> 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.
Since the WWP is notoriously bad about talking with other activists, we have to infer what the WWP's strategy is. I see no reason to change what I've written. The nature of the protests organized by WWP front groups suggests that they seek to maintain the illusion that these protests in themselves are anough to effect social change, with the hidden agenda of using these protests to build the WWP.
> 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.
I think you just don't understand me because what I'm saying creates conflicts with the WWP paradigm you subscribe to.
>>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.
Only in the sense of when the WWP manages to pull a few quick things to put its leaders on the platform of the movement.
> 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.
Oh brother, revisionist WWP history.
Look, one of these days I'll get around to refuting all of this nonsense on my anti-WWP webpage. Have you heard of something called the "anti-globlization movement?" If not, it's this really cool radical movement that has been pushing radical politics through radical actions for the past 4-5 years. It had a big coming out party in Seattle in 1999.
Seriously, if you want to talk about specific protests, I'm ready to grab your scrawny steer by the horns and poke it to death. My group (the ACC) had spent 6 MONTHS organizing protests for September 2001, along with the Mobilization for Global Justice. The ONLY reason why the WWP was able to form ANSWER and have that fucking protest is because WE HAD DONE A FUCKING AWESOME JOB ON INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH FOR THE WB/IMF PROTESTS. What's more, we had a fuckign excellent unpermitted protest that month, despite the fact that ANSWER had stolen the spotlight and other activists had pulled out.
You want to talk about the April 2002 protests? Fine, let me go talk to the local activists to get some quotes about how mad they were about how ANSWER fucking hijacked the protests outside of AIPAC.
By the way, I didn't see any of ANSWER's token Palestinians at the January 18th rally. Was organizing all those buses too much of a distraction. or was the Palestinian thing less sexy?
>>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.
I wasn't referring to stopping imperialist wars.
> 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.
Look, we know that your way of doing thing can't get media attention, not to mention stop or slow down the war. The first step in figuring out what to do is to be honest about what works. That requires dispensing with popular mythology about the Vietnam War and admitting that the sectarian left strategy of endless rallies has accomplished zilch.
> 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.
You are so incredibly ignorant and stupid. The goal is not to create an army of anarchist street fighters. If you think that is the anarchist strategy, you couldn' be more off.
I'm not going to bother telling you what strategy book I'm using, but I'll say that it's worked wonders so far.
> 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.
Oh brother, not more of this sectarian socialist nonsense about periods!
Don't you understand yet that you have to go MAKE history, not wait for the right historical period to come around?
What the sectarian left did for decades is indeed an important, because it was a failure. I don't see much difference between now and back in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan sucked and activists thought they couldn't fight him. If we were to listen to people like you, we'd be stuck listening to speakers and hawking newspapers until the right "period" came along.
Of course, if you want to sit around and wait, that's fine with us anarchists.
>
"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.
Street fighting? Why are you counterposing street fighting to the sectarian left's way of doing shit? I'm not putting up street fighting against rallies. I have nothing against rallies per se, but a strategy that is ONLY rallies and marches is a waste of time. I'm arguing here for a return to *normal protest*, which you see around the world.
> 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! ..."
I'm using the word "sectarian" to describe left groups that are oriented around a party.
>>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?
Sigh. I'm not interested in running ANY fucking movement. That would suck. I'm simply arguing for a more intelligent way of thinking about organizing dissent. It's pretty clear now that ANSWER doesn't know what to do next. Do they even have a long term strategy?
Other than trying to run the peace movement?
Chuck0
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