On 1/20/07, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jan 20, 2007, at 10:45 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Activists are not hibernating == but there is no definable
> > constituency
> > for our work (cf. students for the anti-war in the '60s, black
> > community
> > for the civil-rights movement, industrial workers for the CIO, small
> > farmers for 19th-c populism). It's hard to aim at "people-in-general."
>
> Something like 2/3 of the U.S. public opposes Bush's policies on Iraq
> (not my choice of words - that's the way the pollsters put it); 20%
> want to start withdrawing troops immediately, and another 40% within
> a year. If an antiwar movement can't work with numbers like that,
> it's hopeless.
Passive opposition will not affect the war. To affect the war the
opposition must threaten to make "normal" civic life impossible. That
kind of opposition can not be held together, cannot develop ties of
mutual solidarity, merely on the basis of shared passive oinion.
Also purely mechanical problems. You have money and energy (say) for
1000 leaflets. You have available 5 hours, divided among 3 volunteers,
to distribute the leaflets. Where do your volunteers stand? At what time
of day? Which day of the week? How do you focus the message (i.e., how
do you conceptualize your reader)?
I don't drr why it is so fucking hard for people to understand the
difference between active and passive agreement, and the political
difference that difference makes. All passive opposition to the war can
achieve is the election of more sophisticated and effective warmongers.
Active opposition is better than passive opposition, and we need to
think hard about why we have not been able to translate passive
opposition into active opposition and how we can change that.
But passive opposition is not entirely without effects, I think. It
can slow down the campaign against Iran, it can limit the range of
means used against Iran, and so on. Such delays and limits are not
meaningless, for Iran is not a basket case as Iraq was before the US
invasion.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
