Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Steven L. Robinson wrote:
>
> >So you have activists sitting down on a sidewalk and get arrested?
>
> As I remember my undergrad constitutional law course, taught by the
> reactionary Alexander Bickel, civil disobedience makes the most sense
> when you're violating a bad law itself. Getting arrested to protest
> something else is much less effective. I gotta say, I don't see how
> effective it would be to get arrested sitting in front of the White
> House. All you do is spend a few hours in jail and the war machine
> moves on. Am I missing something?
I've never thought highly of civil disobedience for the most part, but (1) the sit-down strikes of the '30s certainly worked, (2) as SR indicates, so did the Civil Rights marches work, by filling the jails and denoting that the struggle was not going to stop. But also there were the earlier sit-ins, which did not involve many people, and 'won' nothing right away, but were a vital part of the whole movement as it turned out. (There's a book I've never read, but it has a wonderful title: They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee_.)
And I think The Sandwichman is correct that _ultimately_ to turn around politics in the u.s. there will have to be massive and nearly continuous civil disobedience (and probably a goodly seasnoning of uncivil disobedience). And so we are back to Gramsci's manuring the ground. There won't be civil disobedience when it is needed and will work if there has not been fairly frequent civil disobedience when it wasn't needed and couldn't win. The tradition has to be kept alive, and those who merely sneer at it aren't just sneering at it, they are sneering at even the _potential_ power, ever, of the mass of the people. So I think we should admire and be thankful for those who do it, even while we try to convince them that there are better things to do just now.
Carrol