--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> [an excerpt from Adolph Reed's column in The
> Progressive's November ish]
Excellent article! It's not "Reed on the Dems" though; it's Reed on us.
BobW
>
> <http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed1107>
>
> Unfortunately, like the Democrats, our side fails to
> learn from
> experience. Despite a mountain range of evidence to
> the contrary, we—
> the labor, anti-war, women's, environmental, and
> racial justice
> movements—all continue to craft political strategy
> based on the
> assumption that the problem is that the Democrats
> simply don't
> understand what we want and how important those
> things are to us.
> They know; they just have different priorities.
>
> That's why the endless cycle of unofficial hearings
> and tribunals and
> rallies and demonstrations and Internet petitions
> never has any
> effect on anything. They're all directed to bearing
> witness before an
> officialdom that doesn't care and feels no
> compulsion to take our
> demands into account. To that extent, this form of
> activism has
> become little more than a combination of theater—a
> pageantry of
> protest—and therapy for the activists.
>
> Then at the apex of every election cycle, after
> having marched around
> in the same pointless circle, chanting the same
> slogans in the
> interim, we look feverishly to one of the Democrats
> or some Quixote
> to do our organizing work for us, magically, all at
> once.
>
> We need to think about politics in a different way,
> one that doesn't
> assume that the task is to lobby the Democrats or
> give them good
> ideas, and correct their misconceptions.
>
> It's a mistake to focus so much on the election
> cycle; we didn't vote
> ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to
> vote ourselves out
> of it. Electoral politics is an arena for
> consolidating majorities
> that have been created on the plane of social
> movement organizing.
> It's not an alternative or a shortcut to building
> those movements,
> and building them takes time and concerted effort.
> Not only can that
> process not be compressed to fit the election cycle;
> it also doesn't
> happen through mass actions. It happens through
> cultivating one-on-
> one relationships with people who have standing and
> influence in
> their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families,
> and
> organizations. It happens through struggling with
> people over time
> for things they're concerned about and linking those
> concerns to a
> broader political vision and program. This is how
> the populist
> movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the
> CIO in the 1930s
> and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World
> War II. It is
> how we've won all our victories. And it is also how
> the right came to
> power.
>
> The anti-war movement isn't coherent or popularly
> grounded enough to
> exert the pressure necessary to improve the
> electoral options; only
> the labor movement has the capacity to do so, but it
> doesn't have the
> will. None of the other progressive tendencies has
> the capacity to do
> anything more than lobby or exhort. Effective
> lobbying requires being
> able to deliver or withhold crucial resources, and
> none but labor has
> that capacity. Exhortation works only with people
> who share your
> larger goals and objectives; other than that it's
> useless except as
> catharsis.
>
> We also need to think more carefully about what our
> demonstrations
> and protest marches can and can't do. Here we could
> take a lesson
> from Martin Luther King. His 1962 Albany, Georgia,
> campaign failed
> because the local authorities figured out that the
> success of King's
> mass marches depended on meeting brutal resistance
> from local
> officials. When they didn't forcibly stop the
> marches, the movement
> fizzled.
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