On 12/1/06, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> If the home front will stay as quiet as it is now, this will last
> years and years. -- Yoshie
Yes. And the home front _will_ stay as quiet as it is now. There is
nothing in the world today the equivalent of the black liberatin
movement of the '50s and '60s, and it was that movement which made
possible an anti-war movement of the strength and militancy of the
anti-Vietnam war movement. No one as _ever_ successfully predicted the
next upsurge in the series of upsurges that have marked the history of
capitalism for four hundred years. No one saw either the '30s or the
'60s in advance. Even in 1966 no one had any idea whatever of the
magnitude of what was coming in those climactic years of that era. But
of course the work people were doing then (and had been doing, for
example, 15 years earlier in the anti-war movement of the Korean War)
made possible the upsurges that followed.
We have to keep organizing against this war while knowing that our
efforts will fail to effect it, barring events of which we have no
knowledge now.
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.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
