John, we are closer than the thread suggests. You now want a defense committee built on the Minnesota model: sustained, willing to stand in the cold for weeks, not a single day of witnessing. I proposed county-level election-defense committees. Those are the same animal, or could be. So the argument worth having is about what the committee does and who is in it.
On who: a committee formed by agreement among the leaderships of DSA, CPUSA, and Freedom Road is a coalition of organizations. That can be useful, but it isn't a united front in the sense Lenin and Trotsky meant. A united front forms around a task concrete enough that people who disagree about everything else can be held to it in public. "Oppose the real threat" is not that kind of task. " Have forty people trained and on call to show up at the county elections office when the canvass is challenged". Organizations that won't do the second thing will show you who they are. You won't need to denounce the sects; the task sorts them. Now the part where I think you are wrong, and it matters for the committee. You explain the passivity of young DSA members as learned conformity; children are taught not to touch the flame. Some of that is true. But people conform because their rent, their health insurance, and their kids' futures run through an employer and a state they cannot do without. That is a material relation before it is a psychology. The sixties generation you admire moved in a period of near-full employment, with a draft that put the war into every household. They could take risks we are asking people to take with much less cushion. If we tell today's members their problem is bad upbringing, we will lose them. If we give them a job that fits the conditions they actually live in, some of them will surprise you. The Sunrise example is well chosen, by the way. It is exactly why the committees have to stay accountable to their members and not to whichever candidate offers staff jobs in October. I'd put that into the committee's founding terms in writing. I haven't seen you take back the Palestine comparison. I'd still like you to. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43529): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43529 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121405050/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
