On 12/1/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.)
Even WWP has only added mentions of various larger problems -- like
Palestine, Afghanistan, and South Korea -- of US imperialism here and
there to the main focus on the Iraq War.
Neither a single-issue approach to the Iraq War nor a laundry-list
approach to various hot spots of US imperialism can work. Neither
approach begins with people -- citizens and immigrants, documented and
undocumented -- who live in the United States of America, an
increasing number of whom have concrete connections with the rest of
the world.
Secular leftists need to learn the ABC of organizing and
institution-building from the religious, who don't begin with this or
that issue but start with an enduring but ever-changing worldview that
encompasses whole lives of whole individuals.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
