Re: Legal? Peaceful?

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Seattle *has* to be regarded as the *beginning* of something, and
this carping at one or another of the elements there is ahistorical. <<

Yes, it seems like a new beginning. I don't worry overmuch about the
storefront windows; everyone has insurance nowadays, indeed the reaction by
and large as far as I've been able to gauge has been something like, oh
dear, smashing windows, now isn't that downright ... quaint! Seriously, I've
yet to meet ANYONE who is seriously bothered by the "violence" on Tuesday.

Much more of a question is the deeply projectionist tone and bent of a lot
of this. Yet, to "old radicals" 40 years ago, a lot of the "third campism"
of the ban-the-bomb-type protests must have seemed just as off-putting. Yet
that was, in the real world, the road the radicalization traveled.

BTW, catch the Cuban delegation's speeches at Seattle. Know what they're
calling for? "Affirmative action" or (for those from Britain) "positive
discrimination" by another name.

José

-----Original Message-----
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, December 03, 1999 7:44 PM
Subject: Re: Legal? Peaceful?


>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
>
>
>