> Right. We should be spending our time selling the party newspaper on
> the
> streetcorner and at the factory gates.
No, but putative leftists might want to identify some kind of useful programme for engagement with ordinary people - people with bills and real economic problems, not students and kids. The kind of people with neither the time nor the inclination to get involved in reclaim the streets or whatever the leftist mode du jour happens to be.
> Yet those Carnivals Against Capitalism achieved more than all of the
> boring
> leftist organizing and hand-wringing that had been going on for 20
> years.
Really? I must have missed that. What changed?
> I'm interested in what works. What doesn't work is protest that is
> always
> serious and dully sacrificial. That's the Left that Was.
I'd agree with that. I'm not in favour of sacrifices and can't understand why people who claim to be of the left are. The problem is, I can't see any left now.
> Join our parties
> because we have the correct line and help us organize the working
> class.
>
> Boring. Doesn't work.
What's the alternative? Organise the bohemians who want to transcend capitalism through lifestlye?
> What does work is bringing creativity and a sense of fun to serious
> organizing and dissent.
>
> Find me somebody who doesn't like puppets at protests and I'll show
> you a
> burned-out leftist who doesn't understand why people won't join their
> dreary
> political program.
Being serious for a moment, puppets at protests seem to me to indicate protest as a lifestyle rather than protest as meaningful action on issues. There is quite clearly a subculture out there for whom protests are a form of entertainment. The real problem is, that the act of protesting stem from the identification of grievance and the desire to address it. If you treat it like a nice day out then that's all it will be. Yesterday's leftism at best offered some hope of amelioration. Today's protests don't even achieve that. It seems to me that they're not really meant to.
Perhaps I'm sliding into dreary reformism - or out of politics altogether - but protest for the sake of it doesn't seem worthwhile to me.
And don't get too angry about my attack on anarchists - if you're serious, and I'm sure you are, you'll have run into no shortage of self-described 'anarchists' who are nothing but self-indulgent super-liberals with a curious fashion sense. Didn't Bookchin go into this stuff in some detail?
Jason.