But to imagine you can create strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of mass activity in the streets through the sheer power of ideas, where the conditions for those ideas to take root are largely absent, strikes me as -- well, idealism.
You are setting up a straw man. No one has suggested here that we can organize a mass action even when and where there is no desire for such an action on the part of people. My posting was in response to the remark that militant demonstrations in the streets are "tactics of another era" and that protests that are more theatrical than militant are merely "marginal."
At 12:52 PM -0400 8/10/04, Marvin Gandall wrote:
I can't speak for others, but I've indicated previously that I think the most meaningful mass political activity which is currently taking place in the US is among rank-and-file Democrats and others you (contemptuously?) refer to as "ABB'ers". The current election has the character of a referendum on US economic and foreign policy, which distinguishes it from the usual run-of-the-mill electoral entertainment in liberal democracies, and the unusual intensity of feeling between the Democratic and Republican ranks, and within the left, testifies to the importance attached to it.
A minority of workers, intellectuals, and capitalists probably think that "[t]he current election has the character of a referendum on US economic and foreign policy," but that doesn't make it effectively so in practice.
At 12:52 PM -0400 8/10/04, Marvin Gandall wrote:
But the objective conditions clearly don't exist for that, and your efforts to build support for such a movement through tireless propaganda do, alas, appear mostly frenetic and incomprehensible -- and antagonistic -- to the overwhelming majority of well-intentioned intellectuals and workers who have consciously determined that a repudiation of the economic and foreign policies of their government requires throwing out the Bush administration. I don't think you'll ever persuade them that goal can be realized by voting Green as opposed to Democratic.
I don't believe that Nader/Camejo this year will be able to persuade the "well-intentioned intellectuals and workers" who are committed to voting for Kerry or Bush to do otherwise, nor do I think that persuading them to change their mind in time for the November election is the task of this year.
It will be politically significant, however, if all who have said that they support Nader/Camejo -- to say nothing of all who have said that they consider voting for Nader/Camejo -- will actually be able to vote for them, and I intend my remarks for this sector of the working-class population -- roughly 2-7% of the voting-age population, even if we count only those who have actually expressed support in the polls, which is to say, approximately 4.4 to 15.4 million people.
At 12:52 PM -0400 8/10/04, Marvin Gandall wrote:
Finally, I don't think participation in this process is in contradiction to organizing parallel antiwar actions among antiwar Democrats and ABB'ers, as you suggest. It would, in fact, complement such efforts.
All indications are that those who want to elect Kerry at all costs have made conscious efforts to silence voices against the occupations, keeping Nader/Camejo off the ballots, toning down the DNC protests, etc. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
