Subject: Re: AUT: Reply and question for Harry on consciousness
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 14:39:40 -0600


Harry, thanks for the response.  Very thoughtful and I will prolly end up
using those basic ideas in another context today.  Spent a VERY long bus
ride back from NYC anti-WEF demo arguing with an RCP Maoist for about 4-5
hours, trying to keep awake (just so happens that she and I drove back to
back, hence 4-5 hours.)  They really don't get it, but unlike many other
people, I think that their not getting it is very damaging.

Thomas,
We went through the same stuff here.  Everything has to be about unity in
the way you and Harry have discussed it and it causes nothing but misery.
Unity on that basis always meands some kind of ideological unity.  One No,
One Yes, Several Coalitions, Tiny Anti-war Movement, the new essay by
Various Alienated Communists United On Struggle (I always wanted to be
vacuous, and since I write for a local journal called the Co-Depenedent, I
figure now is the time.)

Nate, for what it is worth, the vanguardists mugged the Direct Action
Network initiated events and quickly killed them.  We had 400 people at the
first event which they quickly 'unified' into 30-40 people over a few weeks.
Note, the apparent ease of US victory did much damage as well, of course,
but that was not all.

Cheers,
Chris

> Here in San Francisco we have see the problems of the
> old vanguard notion of building "unity" within the
> anti-war movement.  One of the vanguard party's seized
> control of the movement and forced its politics as the
> organizing principles of unity.  There were quite a
> few
> people who, for example, wanted to condemn the 9/11
> terrorist attacks, but because the vanguardists saw
> that as an "objectively" pro-imperialist stance and
> managed to get control of the movement, those people
> got isolated.  What began as a huge first
> demonstration against the war here 15,000, within one
> month, at the next demo, had diminished to half that
> size.
>
>
> Unfortunately a lot of people are hypnotized by these
> groups, like Workers World, that appeal to
> unity...which in their parlance means that everybody
> has to agree on everything...more or less.
>
> Thomas
>
> ====> "The tradition of all the dead generations
>  weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
>
> -Karl Marx
>
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