There's a good discussion going on over at NYC Indymedia on the UFPJ sponsored march in Wash DC, on Jan 27th.
[Incidetally RedFlags is having the same discussion, with many of the same posts]
Of particular interest is this comment from Max at Left Turn magazine:
Getting serious about building the anti-war movement
Jan 29, 2007 02:09PM EST
max@riseup.net http://www.leftturn.org
"I appreciate what WCW is doing trying to spearhead an upsurge around impeachment. But I think the question of how different the EFFECTS of its demands end out being from UFPJ's involves a move from protest to resistance."
Just got back from DC, been following the conversation above but have not been able to slip away from work to comment.
I have to say that it feels a little bit like im living on bizarro world, trying to figure out how my friend BM tries to re-package the message of the WCW campaign into something that has not already been said a million times before (all by good and sincere people).
You think people have not been organizing around Impeachment since now? I know several groups (ANSWER being one of the more prominent) that have been doing this since early 2002 for gods sake. Are you telling me this is different because of some organge placards? Am i the only one who finds this argument completely bizarre, especailly coming from such a smart guy as BM?
Organge jump suits? Our friends with Witness Against Torture and other groups have been doing this for two+ years. They straight up went and did a direct action AT GUANTANAMO! I mean really, the assumptions that somehow this is different... i dunno maybe im just not getting the point.
I think this is why the RCP & the WCW decide to "not engange with the left" and instead opt for a strategy of "organizing the unorganized" (which i personally think is completely right on if you are able to fill that void) - but i think they are forced to do this because they patronize everyone else and dont give due to the other work that folks have been doing for years in a really harsh post-9/11 climate.
When i was organizing with college students at NYU (i didnt attend), we did more confrontational direct actions in *1 month* then this WCW campaign has done in nearly two years. We were occupying Clintons offices and embarrased her staff into making Clinton have a one hour sit down meeting with us (i mean whatever not like she is going to change her mind, but you get the point, she has not even offered to have such a sit down with the 9-11 families for peacefull tomorrows).
We were rushing MTV's live TRL show with graffiti stenciled t-shirts, getting covered in rolling stone magazine, leading 1500 person walk-outs (which the pre-WCW front group 'NION' took credit for of course). We did a lock down in the UN general assembly hall while 170+ delegates were debating the Iraq war resolution. We had huge pictures and stories in the New York Times etc etc etc. THOSE THREE ACTIONS WERE ORGANIZED IN THE SPAN OF ONE MONTH!!! (Oct-Nov 2002). Not to mention we didnt have any money or budget that NION/RCP/Refuse & Resist Artist Network could provide.
In 2005 BM was trying to tell us that Sunsara and the WCW had gathered some student conference together with "200 delegates", and that this was a really important event that happened etc etc. Well, where are these people? Where are all these campus chapters/delegates who are have been "raising the stakes"?? Im not holding my breath for Sunsara's (I knew her under her last stage name 'Jana') next college tour...sorry. You have sneaking suspicion that 200 people will come out to a talk by her? Well i got a bridge in brooklyn i would love to sell you.
When i analyze the WCW and its continued hollow rhetoric along with its consistantly dissapointing 500 person rallies (Was't Oct 5th gonna really escalate shit? like for real this time??), its not because im being sectarian, and its not because im getting sucked into the CP-USA "controlled" UFPJ united front strategy, its because when you looked out over the 100,000-300,000 people on Saturday, you actually saw the sectors in motion that were going to stop this war - steelworkers from pittsburgh, peacegroups from Montana, Inner city youth from Atlanta, tons of new SDS campus chapters, the arab american community from DC, survivors from New Orleans etc.
Compare this to the few hundred kids that came out for the Nov 2nd (2005) and Oct 5 (2006) WCW rallies. When i talked to them (my sister had a bunch of her friends roll with her from her local public high school), they were happy to miss class and put on those shiny neon-green stickers. Of course when i read BM's blog i see that really this protest had a "more proletarian character" and thus the smaller numbers and higher level of rhetoric meant "a step forward". I mean you have to really take a leap of faith to believe some of the logic here.
Im afraid that much of the hollowness (i just dont know what else to call it, but thats what it is) eminating from the WCW campaign is due to this insurrectionary maoist philosophy (something they share with anti-organization insurrectionary anarchists to be sure) that resistance can just happen if you will it to be. It can just happen with one little spark here or there, that the masses will come out of their houses and "break their everyday routines" if they just see or hear something radical happen at some point in time.
Unfortunately for those of us who have to do the much harder work of relationship,community, and network building (instead of life inside the party, out for its personal aims in the so-called name of the masses of course), this kind of theory does not apply to political life inside the US right now, nor will it for the for-seeable future.
Im afraid that other responsibilities will not allow me to engage this conversation to the fullest, but i will be checking in and look forward to what others have to say. Thanks to BM as always for the thoughtful analysis, even when i largely disagree with him, he certainly does it better then most.
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/01/82356.html