I wonder Lou Paulsen of the Workers World, who used to post here. has any critical self reflection concerning the choices made by ANSWER. I have read outsiders' comments suggesting that the "split" between the Brian Becker wing and the other wing may indicate disagreement over ANSWER's roles in the anti-war movement and electoral politics, but I have never had a chance to hear about it in depth from all sides of that formation.
The main problem of ANSWER and UFPJ has been that the two coalitions, when they worked together at all, mainly fought on whether to focus more on opposition to the Iraq War or advance oppositions to other aspects of the US empire, especially Washington's support for the Israeli occupation, at the same time in the context of anti-war mobilization, which led to mutually frustrating fights over speakers, literature, lead contingents, etc. Each position has its own merits and demerits, and achieving a compromise should have been possible, but the two never came to a mutually satisfying balance between them. Despite the difference between them, though, the two coalitions also had a common problem: their muted criticism of the Democratic Party's position on the Iraq War (to different degrees, to be sure), which, too, had an effect of setting people up for disappointment and demoralization.
>ANSWER stepped into the power vacuum
With the diminished position of ANSWER and UFPJ's decision to change its "Strategic Framework" to more sharply focus on opposing the Iraq War alone (compare the 2005 framework <http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=2676> with 2003 framework <http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=1731>), a power vacuum has once again emerged on the anti-imperialist wing (i.e., composed of activists, organizers, and intellectuals who oppose US imperialist interventions in principle, not just the Iraq War, and generally believe that US imperialism is rooted in its political economy at home, whether or not such activists, organizers, and intellectuals are socialists or individuals who came to that understanding out of their experience on working on particular issues -- generally also opposed to a liberal imperialist argument for an alternative occupation of Iraq) of the anti-war movement. It would be interesting to see who will step into that power vacuum, and I hope that it will be activists and organizers like young people, many of whom are working-class youths of color, who participated in school walkouts on January 20th. UFPJ declining to take a lead role in the Counter-Inaugural, preferring to simply support the DC Anti-War Network instead, might have given ANSWER a second wind, but neither coalition has been able to fully engage Black, Muslim, and other communities in which opposition to the Iraq War has been the strongest.
>The inability of anti-war activists to understand that national
>mobilizations don't work. They may have some effect in the lead-up
>to the war, but nobody pays attention to national protests in
>Washington unless they are bigger than the biggest mobilizations
>(Promise Keepers, MMM). People in the red states tend to dismiss
>Washington protests as something that always happens in Washington.
>This is most aptly symbolized by Washington tourists who like to
>pose for pictures in front of protests.
<snip>
>The movement has done a poor job of talking about the history of
>anti-war activism in the U.S.
<snip>
>Mythology about the efficacy of past movements that clouds judgment
>about what the current movement should do. The myth that the 60s
>peace movement "stopped the war" when the movement died out years
>before the war ended. This mythology also fails to give credit to
>forms of activism, such as the G.I. coffeehouse movement which had a
>significant effect on dissent among the troops.
<snip>
>The movements have done a poor job of training new activists.
<snip>
>The national mobilizations in Washington demonstrate a second grade
>level understanding of appropriate targets. Marches in Washington
>are conducted because "the government is there." No, the government
>is everywhere, especially in the heads of those who support Bush and
>his wars. There have been ZERO efforts to organize national
>mobilizations in the Midwest or the South.
In mobilizations before the invasion of Iraq, organizers and intellectuals should have strongly emphasized that, while big national demonstrations are important in making the anti-war movement visible, such demonstrations have never and can never stop the war by themselves. Talking about the history of anti-war activism would have helped. Joel Wendland wrote that "[c]lear arguments about how people can make it happen, without abstract references to mass mobilizations and people power (insert blah, blah, blah here) etc. are also helpful" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050221/004164.html>). I agree. There may be several equally plausible anti-war campaign sketches, and it would have been good to set up occasions to lay out what each school of thought would have to say about them and discuss them in good faith. It's not too late to do this either, locally or nationally.
I also agree with Chuck that the Midwest has been neglected to the movement's detriment. If there is something wrong with politics in Kansas, as Thomas Frank says, why not go to Kansas? If Ohio is the most important battleground state, why not come to Ohio, not just in election years? You don't need one million to make a big impression in states like Kansas and Ohio. 50,000 would do.
As for the South, I hope March 19, 2005 will begin to change the pattern, making the Fayetteville action one of the biggest mobilizations on that day.
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>Radicals in the anti-war movement have dropped the ball in doing our
>own organizing. We've opted too often for pointless radical
>spectacles at national mobilzations. We haven't set our own agenda,
>we haven't organized our own campaigns, and we've been generally
>lazy.
Here, I think reasonable people can have different opinions: to what extent radicals should organize our own campaigns and to what extent we should work to help big national coalitions grow without letting it implicitly become a movement wing of the Democratic Party's mobilization machine? Both need to be done, but how to strike a balance?
>Radicals haven't been very radical. Let's face it, "breakaway" and
>"feeder" marches are still *marches*. The best examples of radical
>anti-war dissent have been seen in the Bay Area. Lately there have
>been some isolated attacks on recruiting centers, but for the most
>part, American radicals have been living in a comfortable bubble. We
>need to "bring the war home."
I think that there will be two ways the war can come home. One is that the most disenfranchised section of American workers, some of whom will be Iraq War veterans, will explode spontaneously (as in the riots in Cincinnati in April 2001 and in Benton Harbor in June 2003 but on larger scales), unprepared for repression that angry uprisings invite. The other is a politically conscious, well planned, and yet decentralized way of stepping up pressures through actions in streets (like the Battle of Seattle in 2000) and at points of production (like port truckers' wildcats <http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2004/06/articles/a.html>), without repeating same actions as rituals and letting them peter out. Without the latter, we end up making the former more likely.
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>I hope that, if not you and Doug who appear committed to denying
>>_any_ responsibility for the lose-lose-lose disaster in 2004, the
>>rest of Americans on the (broadly defined) left are too
> >disappointed, disgusted, or outraged by the John Kerry debacle to
>>give as much support to the Democratic Party presidential candidate
>>in 2008 as they did in 2004.
>
>Bet you're wrong. Take a look at the last couple of Nation covers -
>John Nichols has found yet another "fighting Democrat," and there's
>the whole Howard "Street Fighting Man" Dean thing...
>
>Doug
No surprise there. Once I saw _The Nation_ getting excited by Nancy
Pelosi: <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20010806&s=nichols2>.
:-0 But most Americans don't read _The Nation_ or any other journal
on the left, for better or worse.
>Yes, I was using Eudora's search tool. But weeding out
>"greensfornader" would eliminate posts that also had Nader in the
>body of the text - and it would be misleading, because by including
>that in her sig line, Yoshie was shilling for Ralph in every post
>she wrote! 491 in all of 2004 is 1.35 a day, or one every 18 hours.
>
>Doug
You have become really adept at changing the subject. :-0 Counting my posts with "Greens for Nader" in the signature line says nothing about the claim that "the number of posts pummeling Nader supporters/Nader would be quite a bit less than the number of posts pummeling Doug and others for not supporting Nader" (<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050221/004235.html>). You can corroborate that claim only by counting all posts from all LBO-talk posters criticizing Nader/Nader supporters and criticizing ABB Democrats. Your ability to block out all points other than one sentence about Nader in my comments on your post-election analysis says a lot about your denial about the nature of the lose-lose-lose disaster -- a prelude to more of the same in 2008. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>