[lbo-talk] 300, 000 demonstrators, stretching to 10 blocks, in NYC

[Carrol Cox]

Michael Hoover wrote:
> 
> doesn't matter how many people attended, it really doesn't, lbosters
> carping about turnout is one indication that it doesn't matter, folks
> who are ostensibly on the same side make issue of such things when they
> are powerless, larger turnout is *better* than smaller turnout, but
> better is relative/situational/contextual, so 300,000 (or 150,000 or
> 450,000) would be prefereable to 30,000 (or 15,000 or 45,000), but the
> number the other day - whatever it was - will neither contribute to nor
> detract from existing anti-war sentiment (there ain't a movement at
> present)...   mh

This seems important to me.

Let's start with the last point: there ain't a movement at present. This
is related to the point I have made frequently for quite a few years:
There ain't A Left at present. There are anti-war activists and local
groups. There are local leftists and leftist groups. They don't jell,
and even collectively they exercise no even partial hegemony over the
rather large mass of u.s. residents who are in one way or another or to
varying degrees sympathetic to the general principles that might unify
and inspirit an anti-war movement or even A (resurgent) Left.

Such a resurgence has always in the past happened, to begin with, behind
the backs of current local, regional, and national leadership. That's
noting against those leaders -- it can't be otherwise because the
stimuli that lead to resurgence can't be predicted. (Leaders of the
left, incidentally, are _always_ self-nominated. Carpers at the margins
complain about "self-elected" leaders, but there are no self-elected
leaders, there never have been, there never will be. There _must_ be
self-nominated leaders for otherwise there will be no leaders or
movement at all.)

The big demos are a highly useful feedback to local organizers as to the
political 'temperature' of the nation; they do _not_, except sometimes
at the climax of a hugely growing movement, have any influence on the
decision makers in Washington. The November 69 Moratorium perhaps
stopped a nuclear war, but that was against the background, precisely,
of over a decade of growing popular activity in the civil rights
movement, in innumerable marginal movements, in urban riots, and in the
anti-war movement itself. I don't remember how many we had in a March in
Chicago in 1965 (66?) -- but I do know two things: (1) the importance of
that march was wholly the impact it had on the marchers themselves and
their subsequent activity; (2) without many such marches and rallies
(some with only a few dozen participants) there would have been no '69
moratorium nor would the warmakers have paid any attention to it.

As a result of the New York March there will be a few dozen or a few
hundred more determined local organizers. How many more we will never
know, but that is the number, not the number in the streets Saturday,
that really counts.

Carrol