[the following is an unsolicited email I received offline regarding Woodstock, that I have redacted slightly, and my response] I dreampt I wore a white shirt and tie to woodstock From: D. Hi Tom Cod
You wrote at Re:[Marxism] "So where I actually was that weekend, as we were gearing up for the big anti-war protests of Oct-Nov 69, was at a meeting of the Young Socialist Alliance at Georgetown University where Peter Camejo was showing a slide show" I'm truly amazed how quickly the antiwar songs at woodstock thread morphed into "Notwithstanding Marx and Engels and their dialectical materialism". I'm sorry I wasn't at Woodstock - I was in the navy at the time - because I missed the biggest and most important antiwar protest of the 60's-70's. You don't think Woodstock didn't empower our generation and put wind in the sails of all the demos that came after it? Arlo Guthrie- "We shut down the New York Freeway!". Country Joe Macdonald- "And it's 1 2 3 what are we fighting for?". Crosby, Stills, Nash- "By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong." and many, many more songs and statements protesting the Viet Nam war that were cheered wildly and spontaneously for three days and nights by all the acid freaks and stoners attending their first protest ever, not knowing that when they said good-bye to mom that weekend as powerless individuals they were about to kick start a revolution. For me, that's dialectical materialism. You were in Washington for a vewy, vewy important YSA conference. Were you wearing a white shirt and tie too? Camejo kept getting mistaken for a Mormon. Talk about freaks! A couple years later I made the mistake of joining that super sectarian vanguard grouplet with the no weed policy and wasted countless hours at endless meetings - when I wasn't out doing sales of the "organ", but I eventually managed to auto de-program and get a life and a big bag of B C bud Reply: D: I'm sorry you think there is some kind of implied sectarian critique of Woodstock in my post. There isn't. No, I don't-and didn't see Woodstock and the radical youth culture as having been counterposed to the anti-war movement, although as you suggest the hard core sectarian did. I do, however, see the work that we did in building the mass movement in that period as important. For what its worth, I think I was wearing "bell bottoms" as was the style at the time. Actually, I left the SWP and the trot sectarian mileu in the mid-70s with a similar attitude to yours. If I had known that the masses would charge the gate and get in for free, I would have considered going to Woodstock more seriously with the other "freaks" from my high school, but back then 18 bucks was a lot of money. Later,Tom Cod _________________________________________________________________ Get your vacation photos on your phone! http://windowsliveformobile.com/en-us/photos/default.aspx?&OCID=0809TL-HM ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
