Michael Smith wrote:
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> My own shorthand for this is "stop traffic." You don't necessarily have
> to kill anybody or burn anything up. But you do have to be disorderly.
Yes. What constitutes disorder does vary according to partiular conditions (which is one of the reasons one cannot specify WITBD very well in advance). For example, one of my first acts which obviously was seen as somehow disorderly was to quietly sit in the back of a small courtroom while some trivial civil case was going on. I don't remember what the case was or why some of us in a small group thought it would be userful to observe. I do remember that it really discombobulated the judge to have an unknown observer. Twice during the preoceedings he leaned over the bench and inquire almost querously if there was something I was there for. Ditto when about 20 people sat in the audience at a City Council meeting. (It took the Council about a year to get used to that.) And then the whole twon was thrown into a conniption fit when we entered a black Santa in the annual xmas parage. So his car followed the parade -- at some distance, since t hey had nearly the whole fucking police department out to keep him at a distance. A photograph of him holding a little blonde girl (my daughter) appeared in Jet and apparently tickled black people all over the u.s. This was about 8 people in a community of about 40,000. A year later a brilliant black grad student organized marches in Normal Illinois for a housing ordinance -- and then we literally tied up traffic so badly in the afternoon that driving through the two-bit town of Normal almost looked like a metropolitan traffic jam. (Lots of 4-way stops.)
Note that these things only worked in the midst of a growing national uproar, including not just the civil-disobeience in the South but also the northern riots, the Panthers, etcetera. It takes it ALL, but when you get that large a context almost _anything_ out of the order gains resonance. There's a matter of timing (not reducible to a formula or theory). What the Weather people did a few years later was not wrong morally or in principle; it was plain stupid because mistimed, not appropriate AT ALL to the level of struggle and mass mobilization which had been achieved by that po8int.
Incidentally, peacefull mass marches can be, if you look under the surface, as "ultra-left" as the weather bombs. The principle the SWP pushed of single-issue peaceful marches was grounded in the ultra-left ideology that there was only one very precise correct politics, that of the SWP, and that no one should be allowed to develop politically except under the close tutelage of the SWP. The largest of such marches was held (in New York I believe) a year or two after the anti-war movement was in effect dead, without a context of general uproar that made the marches (such as the '69 Moratorium) effective. Large marches are effective only in terms of what people do locally before and after the marches themselves. It is that local activity leading up to and following the large marches or demos in which political radicalization takes place.
Carrol