The weakness of the anti-war movement is that the majority want nothing more than a return to capitalist "peace" rather than the overthrow of the system that causes war
According to the Guardian government ministers were genuinely surprised at the estimated 40,000 plus demonstrators who turned out for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) peace march against the war in Afghanistan. The editors of the Guardian themselves must have been surprised, since earlier the same week they had published opinion polls showing 86 percent support for the war. Opponents of the war have already had a number of surprisingly large turnouts, given the short notice and word-of-mouth methods of announcing their meetings. In clear distinction to the recent "anti-capitalist" demonstrations, these events were attended by an immensely broad range of background and age. One of the demonstrators was old enough to recall being handcuffed to a Socialist Party member, as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Compared with crowds at other political events, they were relatively receptive to taking the literature being distributed by Socialist Party members present. Alongside this various committees have been formed: "Media Workers Against the War", "Artists Against the War" and "Lawyers Against the War", usually with a significant SWP-leninists-twatskyists) organisational input. This mushroom-like proliferation of organisations and their prominence within the anti-war movement that exists demonstrates the degree to which it is dominated by leftist notions and agendas. The aim, indeed their very existence, is focussed on the war itself, as an immediate crisis, without developing any broad analysis of the system of society that spawned it, with themselves as the unifying organisations drawing together the disparate groups and agendas involved in opposing the war. Many of the protestors are dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, whilst others are leftists, and still others Islamists, united only in their opposition to this particular war, not their reasons for opposing it. This was made abundantly clear at the CND march. Trafalgar square had been booked, some time before the September 11 attack, by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) for their own cause, but they handed it over to CND for their anti-war march. A number of speakers, including one from the PSC, used the occasion of the war to push the Palestinian nationalist case as a cure for international terrorism. The number of mosques thanked by the meeting chair for their help in organising the event indicated why slightly more turned out in opposition to this war compared with the Kosovan conflict. The chair also thanked the Stop the War Coalition for helping organise the event. So, the front of a front was working in a front with CND to hold the march. Speaker after speaker at each of the meetings have trotted out a long list of reforms, from George Monbiot's suggestion of a Tobin Tax and an International Clearing House to alleviate world poverty, to Tariq Ali's more conventional leftist approach of assessing the situation in national terms such as placing the Palestinian question at the centre, to the general cry for a standing International World Court to try "crimes against humanity". The best CND could manage was a weak call to "negotiate". The only glimmer of hope has been that the nebulous threat from "terrorists" has made the situation resistant to attempts to nationalise the problems into a conflict between specific states, thus speakers have had to talk much more in terms of a world solution. The problem with this approach, above and beyond the mendacity of leftist fronts, is that it fetishises the crisis (both in philosophical, and more popular usages of the word, the latter, specifically for all the "activists" who long for a campaign to throw themselves into). It sees the immediate situation of open conflict as the problem, the simple solution of which is to simply pull back the troops. It doesn't go beyond that to examine the fact that if states have weapons and armies, they are there to be used. It fails to look at how conflict is actually continuous in the present world. It simply adopts (and promotes) a simple moralist position, "War is bad, mmm'kay?" http://communities.msn.com/realworldsocialism __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
