On 12/1/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Many activists, Marxists above all, thought that they could replicate the anti-Vietnam War movement if they could get everyone single-mindedly focus on the Iraq War, excluding other issues which might prevent broad unity. Since the Iraq War is not like the Vietnam War, and our social conditions are not like those of the long sixties, that single-issue approach did not work. Not that any other approach would have worked to create and sustain the anti-Iraq War movement, but a different approach could have helped to keep up activists' morale.
do you really think that the strategies applied to build up an anti-(Iraq War) movement represent the application of some sort of Marxism? It seems to me that the sectarians who organized some of the demos (the Workers' World Party and its later incarnations) were applying the worst kind of Marxism. _And it didn't involve single-issue politics_. I remember that at one march, they delayed the march clearly in order to induce us to listen to a bunch of speeches on all sorts of issues (including South Korea) that reflected the WWP party line and had no direct connection with the Iraq War. (In one of the very few times my personal actions actually affected the world, by the way, I and another guy (who I don't know) got the labor contingent to start chanting "no more speeches! let us march!" or something like that.) -- Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht
