> Rahul notes that the raids on Samarra and regular bombings of Sadr
> City and lack of US activists' organized responses to them. The main
> reason for the lack is the AnybodyButBush focus on the ballot box to
> the exclusion of nearly everything else. If many activists do not
> have time for anything other than electing Kerry to begin with, it is
> futile to debate what "transitional demand" might get them to come to
> a well-organized demonstration, let alone participate in rapid
> responses to Washington's new offensives.
Well, just speaking for myself (but perhaps for some others in this great land of ours), I don't even have time for working to elect Kerry, because I am working like a dog to make money to pay my debts. A couple of nights ago I pulled an all-nighter, worked all that day, and until 4 a.m. the next morning. Meanwhile a few hundred LBO posts accumulated, which I am just now skimming my way through. So there are other reasons why some of us are not marching along in the great parade behind Fearless Leader Furuhashi, besides our being egregious political sell-outs.
In addition, the ultra-radicals on the list fail to understand that, at this point, the Kerry supporters basically *are* the antiwar movement. As Thomas Seay says,
On Oct 7, 2004, at 1:20 PM, Thomas Seay wrote:
> The antiwar movement has not collapsed. More and more
> people are against this war, but they obviously dont
> see the value in attending these demonstrations.
> Without an attractive alternative, they will restrict
> their protest to talking shit about Bush and voting
> against him in November.
People with rigid categories in their minds often do not see that movements often tend to shift shape and metamorphose into strange forms under the changing circumstances, and then, when those circumstances change (for example, after an election), metamorphose back again, or perhaps to something yet more different. A lot of antiwar activists have dropped their "antiwar" work *temporarily,* because they consider transplanting Shrub from the Rose Garden the proper focus of their work for now. Who knows what direction they will take after 11/2 (win or lose)?
You may think this is a strange, even perverted idea, but at the height of the antiwar movement in the '60s, a lot of quite radical activists got "clean for Gene" and put a lot of work into trying to make McCarthy or Robert Kennedy into the Democratic presidential nominee, because they saw capturing the White House as what they had to do in 1968, even if they had to stoop to doing it with a "bourgeois" politician who wouldn't have put his hand on Das Kapital instead of the Bible when he was sworn in at his inauguration. It was the murder of Kennedy and the contemptuous treatment of McCarthy by the Humphrey people that set off the furor in Chicago and helped to radicalize many thousands of them. Most American leftists see participation in Democratic Party politics as an entirely proper kind of activity, because there's at least some chance of getting a Democratic president and Congress, and they feel that once in a while, at least, that's important.
You ultra-radicals obviously think that's a ludicrous idea, but that's your opinion. Others have other views, and they are as sincere in their political convictions as your are in yours. This kind of argument between radicals and ultra-radicals has been going on since at least ancient Greece and Rome, probably, and will go on until politics ceases. Let's just agree to differ, OK?
(BTW, tonight my wife and I took time to hear Staughton Lynd talk about the Lucasville 5. When I asked him what we outside the prisons should do about those hell-holes, his first suggestion was that since many judges are elected, and the others are appointed by elected officials, ... and he left it to us to draw the conclusion. Obviously, the conclusion was that we need to dirty our hands in electoral politics enough to get better judges and officials elected. His second suggestion was that we draw some inspiration from the Lucasville story to help us build solidarity among ourselves, as those prisoners did. (See his new book, _Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising_ (Temple Univ. Press)).
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt