I'm not deriding people for going. I'm criticizing the leadership for how they are organizing the movement-- around one-shot marches with poor followup organizing in between.
-the only thing on offer is McDonalds, so I don't see any real practical -solution. You offer all sorts of interesting ideas--none of which, I would -argue are necessarily mutually exclusive to the march we had yesterday and, -as Mr. Cox has pointed out, are likely complementary.
They would be if the leadership of the marches had a strategy to integrate them. But the idea that everyone "does their own thing" is exactly why the left is losing. Strategy matters and coordination matters.
One reason I've increasingly given up on left organizing in favor of working with labor groups is that, however messed up various unions can be, they actually take seriously long-term strategy. The ones that survive have to. They need to worry about how to coordinate their organizing in the workplace with community support work with shareholder actions against corporations and with their political work.
But the rest of the left seems to think that one group can organize the marches, one group can do lobbying on this issue, another group on another issue, another group do local work, and another do consumer boycotts-- and somehow without coordination it will all add up to something politically successful.
Instead, it allows the rightwing to coordinate its resources to pick off each individual group and campaign one by one.
-- Nathan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky at bellatlantic.net> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2005 2:43 PM Subject: RE: Costs of big marches- Re: [lbo-talk] DC
> The presumption that the fabled $12 million is available for other
> purposes
> is groundless. It isn't. If people are willing to buy a million dollars
> worth of pizza, it does not follow that they would forego pizza and spend
> instead on Brussels sprouts.
>
> I also find it amusing that Nathan is aggrieved that more people gravitate
> towards fun than towards work. ANSWER is the McDonald's of today's
> protest
> politics. They know what people want. Nathan doesn't realize, life is
> short, so we eat dessert first. If we lived in Newman Nation, we wouldn't
> be having this conversation. We would be in earnest three-hour meetings
> on
> urban planning.
>
> For the maximization of fun,
>
> mbs
>
>
___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk