Re: Legal? Peaceful?

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

After 30 years I have not quite gotten over my grudge at the
ultra-left Weatherman faction in SDS which helped tear that
organization apart.

But But But.

Seattle *has* to be regarded as the *beginning* of something, and
this carping at one or another of the elements there is ahistorical. I
have been arguing for several years that "we" (whoever "we" are
who make up "the left") cannot will into existence a new movement
but must rather primarily prepare ourselves for a new period of
activity when it arises (from where and in what form being
unpredictable in advance). If out of some  50,000 demonstraters there
were only a few hundred (I believe there were fewer) "anarchists"
(self-labelled or so-labelled by others), that is rather remarkable.And
as some have suggested, an "ultra-left" fringe is probably always
needed so the core forces cannot be isolated as that fringe.

The Chinese Revolution really began around 70 years ago when
Mao recognized something was happening in Hunan which communists
had to take seriously, even though that peasant uprising was not
a marxist thing. And Lenin insisted that Trotsky was a blowhard
for stating that there would be no more Father Gopans and that
the RSDLP had to generate their own. Lenin insisted that there had
to be thousands of Father Gopans. That is the way to look at
Seattle.

(The point about these references to Mao and Lenin are not that
their exact circumstances are relevant but that both exhibit a powerful
openness to the new, unblinded by arbitrary expectations of what
the new will look like.)

I suggest the graybeards on this list not grumble too much about all
the things that weren't right (or they think weren't right) in Seattle.
"Seattle" doesn't even really began until those 50,000 go back home.
What they do then, not anything that happened in Seattle this week,
will decide whether Seattle was a blip or something like the events
that were memoralized in a book entitled, *They Should Have
Served That Cup of Coffee*.

Carrol