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On 3/13/2016 9:49 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote:
We should not expect the younger activists to listen to us unless they see us
as fellow fighters, as people on their side.
Standing with them on the street, we may get a hearing for our views.
And maybe not even then.
My own experiences both as a young activist @ Pentagon '67 and an old
activist @ OLA '11 is that many young activists will largely discount
the advice of old people, even activists, in any case. Of course they
are wrong to do so but they are young. This will be all the more the
case if we are not providing, or even attempting to provide leadership
but instead tailing behind their "leadership" and merely cheering them on.
So, I don't know what requirements young activists should have for
listening to those with more experience but I don't think it should be
limited to those who already support their specific tactics. Even if
that is the case, I think we would be tailing behind to endorse that.
And in that regard, I would like to take special exception to your last
sentence above and explain why the requirement to be "Standing with them
on the street." to get a hearing really rubs me the wrong way.
It has to do with Occupy LA. Occupy LA was rather unique among the big
city occupations in that the city conceded to us the legal right to
occupy city hall park - city council passed a resolution 2 weeks into
the occupation. I have written about this in great detail on my blog,
the DailyKos and WL Central. As a result the infamous LAPD was on their
very best behavior.
This "peaceful" co-existence was allowing us to build an extremely broad
and stable occupation - before things turned we had 300-400 tents all
around city hall and regular protests of 10K-15K, even middle class
older whites, people you might today see at Trump rallies, were starting
to show up with their tents and sleeping bags.
From the POV of this old activist this "legal" occupation [full
discourse - I helped engineer it the evening before day 1 and joined the
OLA city liaison team in its final days in an effort to extend it.] was
paying big dividends for the movement both locally and nationally.
Of course, not everybody saw it that way. In particular there was a
group of young activists, anarchists some of them, that wanted what
Oakland had. They wanted confrontation with the police and they actively
worked to undermine the peace with the police. They were
opportunistically joined and supported by "Marxists" from the PSL and
WPP that came to the occupation late and were looking for a way in.
Eventually they got their way, but that's a longer story. Anyway back to
this line "Standing with them on the street."
We had many marches during the 60+ days of the occupation, more than 1 a
day, some were huge and filled the streets others were smaller, and
permit of not, the LAPD was cooperating. If we had a lot of people they
would block the streets, if we had not so many, they would ask us to
confine it to the sidewalks. But no matter what, there would be this
small anarchist/ulta-left "streets belong to the people" group that
wanted confrontation with the police. Even if we only had a hundred
people, they would still try to march in the streets.
We are bring families with strollers out to march against the big banks
and the 1% for the first time and these youth wearing black bandana want
to get their rocks off by street fighting with the police and for sure
they don't want to hear from anyone not already "Standing with them on
the street." Just sad to see that backwardness endorsed on a Marxist list.
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