How do
>we counter this? As I see it we have two options.
Why only two in this context?
The first is to continue
>on the destructive rut I fear we are slipping towards, allowing the image of
>violent protesters to hang like a veil over us.
"We" didn't create that image, the capitalist press did. A few folks were
"violent" if breaking a window or setting a dumpster on fire qualifies.
What the press DIDN'T do is more important. They didn't report the
coherent aspects of the protests, in planning, coordination, reasons, etc.
In other words, anything that might have connected the real message of the
events to the public.
The alternative is to stop
>feeding the media images of angry kids smashing everything in destructive
>temper tantrums and instead start acting like the political revolutionaries
>we claim to be.
Ditto above.
We need tight messages, better networks, and more attention
>to tactics. We need to outreach more, talk more and think more. We need to
>start building our own alternatives (like free schools) to counter the
>corporate system.
This is where utopianism and voluntarism take advantage of the prevailing
idealism and individualism of most petit-bourgeois radicals and infantile
leftists. All this stuff requires huge sums of money to even begin to be
effective in the face of the ruling class ideological apparatus.
Sigh.
"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
-Vo Nguyen Giap
"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
-Eleanor Burke Leacock
"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
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