If a date and route had been established two months earlier-- and the final route could have been-- then I think we could have had over a million people on the streets. That scale of protest would have registered a far larger message than just one more impressive but not unprecedented multi-hundred thousand person march.
Numbers matter and the organizers screwed up in negotiating too long. They should have sued far earlier for access to Central Park and if they were turned down, they could have gotten the word out for alternatives. They didn't and the numbers suffered.
Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Remick" <carlremick at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 9:59 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Matt Taibbi on RNC protests
I sympathsize with Chuck, who in an earlier comment in this thread said the Taibbi article was claptrap. But I think there's no question that there has been a diminishing return on sixties' style mass demonstrations -- that these demonstrations no longer have the shock value they used to have, that they have hardened into shtick, and that they are easily neutralized by the media and cops. The establishment was genuinely fearful of mass protests in the Vietnam era. No more.
Carl
>From: "T Fast" <tfast at yorku.ca>
>
>Carl is on to something here. The unity of 300,000 individuals all
>coordinated would have been an impressive and intimidating act of unity
for
>a whole host of reasons. But it is precisely this kind of discipline that
>is generally lacking.
>
>Travis
>
>>In the conformist atmosphere of the late 50s and early 60s, the
individual
>>was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so weak that it
>>was actually threatened by a single person standing up and saying, "This
>>is bullshit!"
>>
>>That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the
>>mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to
>>the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the
>>individual's every conceivable political action into mainstream
commercial
>>activity. It fears only one thing: organization.
>>
>>That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America
last
>>week wasn't "creativity." It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred
>>thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone
>>movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white
>>button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your
Town,
>>would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security
>>agency.
>>
>>Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and
>>discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march.
>>Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few
>>years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington
and
>>New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the 60s-and
>>this not only did not stop the war, it didn't even motivate the
opposition
>>political party to nominate an antiwar candidate.
>>
>>There was a time when mass protests were enough to cause Johnson to give
>>up the Oval Office and cause Richard Nixon to spend his nights staring
out
>>his window in panic. No more. We have a different media now, different
and
>>more sophisticated law-enforcement techniques and, most importantly, a
>>different brand of protestor.
>>
>>Protests can now be ignored because our media has learned how to dismiss
>>them, because our police know how to contain them, and because our
leaders
>>now know that once a protest is peacefully held and concluded, the
>>protestors simply go home and sit on their asses until the next protest
or
>>the next election. They are not going to go home and bomb draft offices,
>>take over campuses, riot in the streets. Instead, although there are many
>>earnest, involved political activists among them, the majority will
simply
>>go back to their lives, surf the net and wait for the ballot. Which to
our
>>leaders means that, in most cases, if you allow a protest to happen.
>>Nothing happens.
>>
>>The people who run this country are not afraid of much when it comes to
>>the population, but there are a few things that do worry them. They are
>>afraid we will stop working, afraid we will stop buying, and afraid we
>>will break things. Interruption of commerce and any rattling of the cage
>>of profit-that is where this system is vulnerable. That means boycotts
and
>>strikes at the very least, and these things require vision, discipline
and
>>organization.
>>
>>The 60s were an historical anomaly. It was an era when political power
>>could also be an acid party, a felicitous situation in which fun also
>>happened to be a threat. We still listen to that old fun on the radio, we
>>buy it reconstituted in clothing stores, we watch it in countless movies
>>and documentaries. Society has kept the "fun" alive, or at least a
dubious
>>facsimile of it.
>>
>>But no one anywhere is teaching us about how to be a threat. That is
>>something we have to learn all over again for ourselves, from scratch,
>>with new rules. The 60s are gone. The Republican Convention isn't the
only
>>party that's over.
>>
>><http://www.nypress.com/17/36/news&columns/Taibbi2.cfm>
>>
>>Carl
>>
>>
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