{Note: A post from David McReynolds in respect to the Feb. 15 mobilization is the last piece quoted . If you have no interest in the preceding material you might want to take a look at that.)
Contexts of Discourse
Shuffling through old papers I came across the following statement. I'm not sure whether I wrote it or not, but I probably wrote the first draft anyhow. Jan and another woman presented it to the Bloomington Board of Education at a public meeting of the Board during negotiations over a new contract for the teachers. The "Committee" was of course a paper organization (a "Front" if you will), its only members being those of us who constituted the local "Friends of The New Voice." Under different circumstances (higher level of activity and more aggressiveness on the part of the BEA (Bloomington Education Association) probably we would have (on subsequent rounds of petition gathering) tried to make the Committee a real committee of parents & workers, not merely a "front" for a red group. (The facts in the statement are correct: our 'red' group did include two hospital workers who were exploring union possibilities and one campus office worker who had already formed an organizing committee there.)
October 13, 1976
Statement to the Board of Education, Bloomington from the Parents and Workers
Committee to Save the Teachers' Union
I speak for the Parents and Workers Committee to Save the Teachers' Union - a group organized by several hospital and office workers who want to build unions of their own and know that what hurts one union hurts all unions. I'm here to present to the Board a statement of solidarity with the teachers signed by 400 local working people. The statement is simple: "We, the undersigned parents and workers, declare our solidarity with the Bloomington Education Association (the teachers's union) in its dispute with the Bloomington Board of Education. We demand that the Board of Education accept the contract proposal put forward by the BEA." In the neighborhoods we have canvassed so far, well over 90% have signed. But many did also have criticisms of the teachers, criticisms with which our Committee agrees. The chief criticisms are as follows.
1) The teachers should have demanded more pay. 2) The teachers should have resisted staff reductions and speed-up. 3) The teachers probably should have gone out on strike. They probably still should. 4) The teachers should have opposed, not supported, the tax referendum. District 87 suffers from misallocation of funds, not lack of funds.
All of our signers were very clear on one point - tht the Board's actions have had only one purpose - that of union busting. Most of our signers were also aware of another point - that administrative costs have increased while services to students have been cut.
Our committee intends to continue canvassing, continue talking to parents and workers in District 87 and begin investigating what the real situation is in our schools.
Thank you.
@@@@
Soon after the teachers accepted the Board's contract offer, general popular activity was in any case ebbing in 1976, and we never carried on this work. I give the statement here as one example of one kind of "left rhetoric," though hardly the rhetoric I would use on this list.
@@@@
Except for one post, all my postings to the maillist of the local anti-war group (called Bloomington/Normal Citizens for Peace and Justice) have been merely forwards. The one post I wrote in my own person follows:
Subject: Re: [BNCPJ] National organizations
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 17:53:08 -0600
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
To: "bncpj at yahoogroups.com" <bncpj at yahoogroups.com>
huckelberry at softhome.net wrote:
>
> I don't want to stir the pot, just ask a simple question: is there an
> official (or unofficial but generally held) position on the part of BNCPJ
> regarding each of the three nominally large national anti-war organizations?
> These would be A.N.S.W.E.R., Not In Our Name, and United for Peace and
> Justice. I ask only because I'm finding there's a lot of divisiveness and
> I'm trying to figure out if this is even an issue in a lot of places.
>
> - Phil
>
There needs to be discussion of this question so that no one feels deceived. And there is a good deal of (often _very_ divisive) discussion (perhaps a weak word here) around the nation of those umbrella groups.
There is no _need_ for local groups such as ours to affiliate formally with _any_ national group. That too probably should be discussed (but I don't think it urgent to decide quickly). Probably of the three groups you name, United for Peace and Justice would come closest to reflecting the views of a majority of members of BNCPJ, but as far as I have been able to tell from following national debates on several maillists, all three groups _so far_ have operated in a principled manner.
Quarrels, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, since heat does sometimes produce light) are unavoidable in mass movements involving a multiplicity of organizations (including paper organizations put together for immediate purposes) -- at least they always have been in past. I have been involved in various ways in left political activity for over 30 years, and am not particularly fond of the core organizations in any of the three groups. But they have met a real need of all who wish to protest the war -- it would not have been possible for 100 or 200 or 300 thousand separate individuals to decide spontaneously (and without inter-communication) that January 18 was the day to go to Washington D.C. Whatever our discontents with one or another or all of these groups may be, we have have A.N.S.W.E.R., Not In Our Name, and United for Peace and Justice to thank for coming to agreement on the dates and arranging for the logistics. There were _far_ too many speeches at the event, and they went on too long -- but it isn't really necessary to listen. :-)
Whoever wrote the NION statement which so many of us signed, they did a good job, and what they wrote was the truth.
Don't worry about stirring the pot. It ALWAYS gets stirred anyhow.
Carrol Cox @@@@
Now a recent post from David McReynolds from another list:
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [R-G] Join me in New York February 15! / Noon at the United Nations Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 23:50:51 -0500 (EST) From: DavidMcR at aol.com
Friends,
This may well duplicate others posts you've gotten - if so, I know you will forgive me. If you have friends, would you post it on to them?
The basic info at this time is that the police have granted a permit for assembly for a noon rally on First Ave. stretching north from 49th Street. United for Peace and Justice has filed suit in Federal Court to require the NY Police Dept. to issue a permit for a march.
Don't wait for information on the march. What is important is that we show up at THIS Saturday, February 15th, noon at First Ave. from 49th Street on north. We need to be peaceful, nonviolent, but determined. Calling the cops names will not help. It will only make us look like Rumsfeld - leave the name calling to him. Bring your own signs.
I hope I don't see you - because I hope there are so many of us, that old friends never get a chance to meet! It's a good time to make new friends.
The importance of this rally cannot be overstated. The world as a whole is extremely reluctant to see this war, and each day men like Rumsfeld and Perle make it clearer that Bush's Administration is genuinely out of control. People are frightened. Not just in Iraq, but in all of the Middle East and Europe. Saudi Arabia announced today that as soon as the Iraq crisis is over it will ask the US to withdraw all its military bases.
I attach a letter an old friend of mine, Roget Lockard, sent to his lists. He speaks to the issue - we "can't not go". A genuinely massive rally on the 15th may actually determine whether Bush can continue to intimidate the United Nations.
Peace - it is up to us,
David McReynolds
<<
Dear Ones -
I can't not go. It's that simple. It seems that we are, as a country and perhaps as a global society, at the single most decisive turning point in my lifetime. That's saying a lot, considering that I was born during WWII, and have witnessed the human capacity for rapacious ugliness play itself out over the years in many settings -- conspicuously, in the criminal chapter in American history making up the war in Vietnam.
Meanwhile I grow more and more deeply in love with humanity -- warts and all. We Americans are so dreadfully, wonderfully human. I will be in New York on the fifteenth of February on behalf of my dread - on behalf of my love.
February 15th will be one day short of being the thirtieth anniversary of my involvement in what was, at the time, the largest peace demonstration in Washington since pre-WWII. Over the course of two days - Feb. 16 and 17, 1962 - ten thousand students marched peacefully in front of the White House, then on to the Lincoln Memorial for a rally. The second day of the protest a few of us met in the basement of the White House with three of then-President Kennedy's advisors; McGeorge Bundy, who was eventually to become one of the principle architects of the Vietnamese atrocity, Theodore Sorenson, and Jerome Weisner. I quote from a paper I wrote several years ago:
So there is, for me, a kind of looking back from this moment's rolling wave of history to other waves behind me, which seem part of the same wake, somehow -- resulting from the passage through time, and lives, and cultures and societies, of some great striving which is all wrapped up in control and addiction, defeat and despair -- and the alternative possibilities of surrender and transformation. I suspect that this striving is a part of the life process, or evolution, if you will, of our host being which we call Earth.
So I go to New York on the fifteenth of this month because it feels that I must -- as a citizen of the United States, as a citizen of the world, and as part of a movement to help humanity give birth to its capacities for love and consciousness. I go to New York as a midwife.
Please join me there -- in spirit if not in body. We are all needed. We all need one another.
Much love, Roget >>
_______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list Rad-Green at lists.econ.utah.edu @@@@
Note for further development. As illustrated on LBO (and elsewhere too) there seem to be three general categories of posts expressing a negative view. I will label those three Criticism, Polemics, and "Polemics Disguised as Criticism." Examples of the first two may be valid or invalid, well or badly written, etc., but they are legitimate forms with a long and honorable tradition on the left. (I am speaking now of discourse within the left, in contexts in which it is assumed that all readers and responders are in some sense "leftist.") The third category is always illegitimate and disruptive of conversation within the left. It is objectively dishonest, though I do not think it is consciously so on the part of the writers. In future posts I will be examining instances of all three categories.
Polemics: the writer openly blasts a position -- not a person, though usually polemics will, not for the better, incorporate personal attacks. There can be a wide range of styles and tones here, but in so far as a text maintains the decorum of the genre it will always return to a central thesis upholding a principle or set of principles (and condemning another principle or set of principes).
Criticism: the writer points out to someone with whom he/she has fundamental unity that he/she is fucking up in some way or that such and such an argument is not consistent with the principles shared. Criticism always specifies its targets (proper names: persons or group), and always makes clear the fundamental unity of critic and criticized. It is important to maintained a principled stand in polemics. An unprincipled stand in criticism reduces the criticism to pure babble.
"Polemics disguised as Criticism." I'll leave this undefined for now.
To be continued.
Carrol