Not in our name, ANSWER

Nathan Newman nathanne at nathannewman.org
Tue Mar 4 08:00:04 PST 2003


----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck0" <chuck at mutualaid.org>
>It is a form of civil disobedience, but my point is that WWP/IAC/ANSWER are
>opposed to civil disobedience. The arrests on A15 were not sought by the
IAC
>and came about because the cops sought to take as many people off the
street
>as possible before A16.
>The arrests weren't organized. And if they were sought by the IAC
leadership,
>the crowd wasn't told. What happened is that the IAC event was marching
>around the streets and the cops decided to pre-emptively arrest the entire
>march to take hundreds of people off the streets.

Got to side with Chuck on this one, since I was down there for almost the whole week preceding the DC events. The IAC of course was doing their own thing, instead of working with the broad-based movement.

Here's the irony-- because the IAC went off on their own with a rather small contingent (so much for their vaunted organizing ability when they can't sucker in other groups), they were rounded up for doing a pretty tame march.

Compare that to the mass civil disobediance of the weekend, where most of the downtown roads were blockaged by the mass antiglobalization movement groups. Because of the solidarity involved, almost no arrests happened on the mass day of action (although some did on Monday when the numbers dwindled.)

This is the problem with the WWP/IAC. They promote tame protests, yet don't get the mass numbers because of their alienating rhetoric. It's the worst of all worlds as far as activism goes. Chuck and I might argue over the relative gains from smaller militant actions versus mass more mainstream appeals (although we'll agree that a mass militant action like A20 is at points the best of all worlds), but at least we both recognize the tradeoffs.

Since the WWP's goal is maximing its own power over the movement, not the influence on public policy, it's calculus on tradeoffs is very different. It likes tame marches because more militant actions require more decentralized, democratic control by multiple groups, and they also dislike mainstream ideological appeals to maximize numbers, because then they get marginalized in control of the speakers forum.

So it is based on their self-interested organizational needs that they promote tame marches with marginalizing rhetoric. It's stupid from political influence goals, but makes sense from WWP's own self-interested goals.

-- Nathan Newman



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