> Ten thousand participants can be objectively disappointing if one
> uses numbers criteria to judge success. But what if we use
> message content to judge success? The speakers I raptly watched
> used terms like "capitalism" and "socialism." These kinds of terms
> are very rare in movement public discourse
If we use "message content" to judge success, there are plenty of sectarian parties that are wildly successful. Perhaps the most successful is the Progressive Labor Party, which literally argues that we should immediately implement communism. Like, right now. Sounds like success to me!
It's a problem that we can't talk about capitalism and socialism. But the reason we can't is not timidity or "betrayal" by "bureaucrats" or some other myth of bad motivations that left-adventurists always love to attribute to people who are better organizers than they are. The real reason that we can't use words like that is that there's virtually no one left in this country who has any interpretive framework to evaluate those terms or understand what they mean. That framework needs to be built through education, but political education needs to actually put workers into struggle. You can gather a crowd of the usual suspects just about anywhere and get rousing cheers by talking about revolution. I don't think it accomplishes much beyond boring me nearly to death, though.
So far, no one has given a plausible explanation for what the so-called "Million Worker March" (I am tempted to paraphrase Voltaire and point out that it certainly didn't have a million, was not mostly workers and wasn't even a march) was intended to have accomplished. In a number of the cities where the marchers probably came from in the first place, hotel workers are out on strike and in need of serious support from other people. That's a concrete struggle to get involved in, but the organizers of this demonstration wanted to have a catch-all rally in Washington instead, with lots of fiery speakers, but no concrete task to accomplish. Maybe that makes some people feel good; I just find it tedious. It's the kind of thing that only the faithful can get behind -- and then only when the faithful are interested primarily in hanging out with one another instead of talking to the rest of the country and trying to move masses of people in a more radical direction. Large numbers of real workers get involved with something when it has a point. A general march like this, with broad themes as its demands, might be appropriate in another situation when a real mass movement is afoot and needs to have organized expression in a demonstration. Perhaps even after the next presidential inauguration, whoever that might be. But now? An exercise in futility.
- - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!