Marta Russell wrote:
>
> It would seem more productive to have a target action, to demand
> something from someone, to occupy a building, to get something done
> rather than to just show up and march in the streets. So many people
> and nothing concrete comes of it. Guess that is my complaint.
> Carol, this answers your question earlier as to what else could I
> expect? I could expect people to sit in Senator Feinstein's office
> until she agrees to our position, for instance. But I sense a
> timidity from the older organizers for anything but symbolic action.
>
If the struggle lasts long enough(and that depends partly on events outside our control, such as the magnitude of the resistance of the Iraqi people, whether the imperialists in D.C. carry their wars into Iran, etc. etc. etc.) -- under those conditions the actions you describe will occur.
There will always be leaders who are too timid, under all circumstances -- remember the resistance of nearly all the Bolshevik leadership to Lenin's demand for insurrection. But the presence of timid leaders is only _one_ factor. Some kinds of sit-ins can be (and will be) carried out by relatively small groups -- but a sit-in of the magnitude you describe ("until she agrees to our position) would simply demand more forces than we have. So if you want such a sit-in, you need to (temporarily) forget about it and focus on raising the troops. The same kind of mistakes can be made in mass movements as in military action. The lack of both sufficiently "timid" _and_ sufficiently aggressive leaders to the crushing of the the Communist movement in Indonesia and the deaths of maybe 2 million people.
When the troops are there (which it is our business to recruit now), if the leaders get in the way (in the words of an old song) we will roll right over them. I've seen it happen on a smaller scale. I've also seen those whose only criterion was "do something" make utter fools of themselves and break up a movement.
In the spring of 1970 the movement at Southern Illinois _closed down the school for the year_. One of the conditions of that success: the Weathermen had not succeeded in breaking up the movement at Southern as they had in so many other schools (including ISU).
Carrol
> marta
> --