Curtiss Leung wrote:
>
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> Question: who do you think would provide the most/least favorable
> environment for organizing? Seems to me that Bush would be worst,
> then Lieberman, but I don't know how to rank them after that.
>
I'm becoming increasingly interested in the notion of "punctuated equilibrium" as at least a metaphor and perhaps an actual description of political history. Within this context a really serious version of ABB has to regard the Bush Administration as an actual or potential "Punctuation" in the equilibrium of neoliberal capitalism. That is, ABB represents the liberal analogue to that small number of hole-in-the-corner marxists & anarchists who think in terms of "revolution or nothing -- now."
[Digression here. "Punctuations," as Eldredge, Gould, et al use them are brief only in geological terms: i.e., a punctuation might last 45,000+ years. I don't know what the length of a metaphorical punctuation in history would be, but not "overnight."]
Political punctuations are _not_ predictable. There is absolutely no way now to select in advance the issue or the program or the strategy that would build a movement of the magnitude of the '30s or the '60s. Nor can we predict, or even sensibly guess at, which sectors of the working class will be the sectors in which new struggles will begin. Who in 1960 would have predicted the women's movement or the anti-war movement? And similarly, we simply can't predict (or even make sensible guesses) at what, next year or the year after, will be the best environment for organizing. Perhaps a DP administration would be best. Perhaps it would make no difference.
We can predict that the larger, the more experienced, the more varied networks of local activists are, the more quickly and effectively mass mobilization can occur when the next surprise catches us. The CPUSA didn't do much in the 1920s -- but the 1930s would have been rather different had it not plugged away at building itself during that period. The NAACP and other black organizers (including those in the CPUSA) didn't achieve a lot in the '40s and early '50s -- but without their work the explosions of the late '50s and '60s would not have amounted to much. (It was only in the '80s that I began realizing how much, without my knowing it, my own activity in the late '60s had been dependent on the work of the CP in the preceding 40 years.) And the present anti-war effort owes a great deal to linkages that go back to Central-America solidarity work or the anti-apartheid campaigns of the '80s.
I think the Bloomingto\Normal Citizens for Peace & Justice needs at least one member during 2004 who rejects participation in the DP campaign and continually acts as a reminder that there is life after January 20, 2005. I think the same is true of all other local activist groups.
Neoliberal capitalism may or may not be approaching some sort of crisis. But I don't think such a crisis is going to come 2005-2008. But the Bush Administration could represent the sort of catastrophe that justifies ABB only if we _were_ facing such a crisis. Or in other words, I think we will still be in a period of equilibrium in a second Bush term.
Would a Dean or Kerry or Clark administration _withdraw_, unconditionally, from Iraq? There is no middle path between such withdrawal and endless warfare there.
Would a DP administration repeal the Patriot Act? (More importantly, would it repeal the equally vicious Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act?)
And incidentally, if 2005 under Bush _does_ constitute a real crisis -- those best prepared to respond would be those who worked on organizing outside the electoral arena this year. We (the non-ABBs) are, I suspect, the ABBs Plan B. :-) We're also the kernel of Plan B if a DP administration turns out to be as vile as I suspect it will.
Carrol
> Curtiss