[lbo-talk] Kos on Marches

[Max Sawicky]

I made clear in my post, or should have, that his site is a considerable
achievement, for what it is.  Whether it becomes something else remains
to be seen.  Even so, I see little difference from Dem Party mainstream
sentiment, nor much in the way of intellectual depth.  It's interesting
to note that the other mega-blogger liberal, Atrios, has already had a
convention of his readers.  I don't know how many showed up.  Atrios is
a good guy too, as well as a real intellectual (he tends to hide it),
but like Markos he's only a limited number of degrees to the left of the
Dem Party center.  He makes up for it in militance.

THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!

Have a groovy day.

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org
[mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Nathan Newman
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 1:22 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Kos on Marches

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Max Sawicky <mailto:sawicky at epinet.org>  

 
-Kos is a fine fellow, but he has become a campaign consultant and media
entrepreneur, 
-and their business is to figure out -how to manipulate public opinion.

-He has never been an organizer, as far as I know.  But all of that is
utterly 
-divorced from what is involved in building a radical movement that 
-puts forward new ideas and that engages and changes hearts and minds.  
-That's not his business.

 
Max, Kos is definitely not an organizer in the traditional sense,
although his work has been far more than traditional media.  He has used
technology to create a community of people in constant dialogue who are
organizing day-to-day with each other for social change.  He has nearly
a million people visiting his site every day, with thousands posting
messages, discussing strategy and planning actions in response to that
discussion.

 
A whole range of organizations and organizing efforts have spun off
directly from his site with his assistance.   Folks around the site are
holding a massive founding convention next year, the Yearly Kos, and
other organizing campaigns have been launched not just for political
candidates but for a range of other campaigns were legislators have been
lobbied or corporations targetted.

 
There goal is explicitly not merely information but to influence action
in support of their agenda.   

 
So why doesn't Kos and his compatriots count as organizers?

 
And the idea that media has nothing to do with "new ideas" or engaging
"hearts and minds" is kind of bizarre.  Not all of organizing is about
the media, but many people saw the marches on Saturday were about
influencing the media and the public through the media.

 
Kos's whole orientation on providing alternative information on the war
has been to effect that public "hearts and minds."  Information is a key
part of organizing, so creating some complete separation between media
work and organizing makes little sense.

 
At Bard College, where I'm teaching a couple of course this semester,
the big banner recruiting people to the march said, "The Iraqis watch
TV, let them know we care."  That's a nice reformulation of public
opinion but it's still a media strategy.  And many people going to the
march-- as was evident afterwards by comments discussing how the media
treated the march -- were oriented to effecting the media.

 
Kos doesn't want to run any particular organization -- he's not a
bureaucracy builder, which I think is a problem in some ways for his
goals, but he's definitely an organizer in the sense that anyone who
brings together people who had not been together before, and encourages
them to take action with greater unity-- that's an organizer.

 
Nathan Newman