> Whether we like it or not, it is anarchists who lead
> the way in radical organizing, especially among youth.
Completely untrue. There are relatively high numbers of anarchists among the white youth who specialize in protest activities, but there is a difference between mobilizing and organizing. The best militant/radical youth organizing is done by youth of color organizations like Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) in the Bay Area, an organization that is now defunct but that left behind promising institutions like Third Eye. See also predominantly white student groups like USAS. More important than all of these, of course, are the mass organizations of youth where radicals are present, including MECHA among Chicano students or the multiracial United States Student Association.
Rhetorically radical and militant white youth tend to get a lot more attention than youth doing deeper and more profound organizing work, particularly among non-white youth. This is why youth anarchists get a lot of attention, but this doesn't only apply to them. For instance, the Campus Anti-War Network (CAN), which is an ISO front group, might get a lot more attention than it deserves even though the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) is larger and has more representative organizations as its members.
Of course, many of these groups are very weak, but that's a problem across left institutions. The point is that the effectiveness of organizers is to be measured by the degree to which they organize more and more ordinary people for effective action, rather than isolating themselves in sectarian ghettoes. The goal of a radical or revolutionary should not be to "convert" more people to radicalism, religious-style; it should be to put as many people into struggle as possible, always maintaining that mass perspective. This does not mean that I am against educational efforts to get more people to understand the nature of the system. But what I do mean to say is that radicals should inevitably end up leaders in a MUCH larger milieu of people who are less consciously "radical" than they are; if instead they spend their time talking only to eachother, and maybe getting really good at the logistical planning of protests or "actions" involving a few hundred people at most, then I don't think they're doing their job, nor frankly do I think that's very "radical" at all, objectively speaking.
> Actually, make that any type of left organizing.
This is even less true. Go around to anybody doing real left organizing today -- really improving people's lives by winning victories, including by moving legislation or at least blocking bad legislation, and above all organizing more and more oppressed people to win power -- in the remaining poor people's organizations and the shoestring non-profits; the workers' centers; the union movement; the immigrant rights organizing; local environmental justice and anti-toxics organizing (as opposed to predominantly white back-to-the-land-and-save-the-tress sort of environmentalism) -- and how many anarchists are you going to meet? A few here and there, but for the most part these organizers are going to have less than fully-defined ideologies, some (too many, probably) will cling to the Alinskyite ideological conceit of being "non-ideological" -- and to the extent you find people with a well-defined ideological framework, I think you will find more socialists and even M-Ls than you will find anarchists or "anti-authoritarians," and in some sectors (unions and workers' centers especially) this will be overwhelmingly so.
Of course, nearly all of these organizations are small and weak, and even the stronger ones are under relentless attack in the Bush era. But for better or worse, they ARE the US left.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny- http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories