Re: Anti-war movement, WWP, Liberals et al

[Ben Courtice <benj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou Paulsen wrote:
> But if by "coalition" you mean a formal organization that is going to be in
> existence for a long period of time, more than a year, say, that will
> include as voting members all the forces that ought to be involved in
> anti-war work in the US at this time, and that will organize and plan these
> major actions, their political demands, their speakers' lists, etc. - well,
> who knows if there will be such a thing?  Doesn't that depend, not on you
> and me, but on a whole lot of people and forces that we don't control?  I
> might want to be in coalition with Operation PUSH, with the Greens, and with
> a lot of other people and forces, but do they want to be in coalition with
> me?  With ANSWER?  On what terms?  ANSWER is thus far a coalition which
> has -consistently- opposed U.S. imperialist war (including the sanctions).
> There are plenty of other forces out there which are against a unilateral US
> military attack on Iraq today, but not necessarily tomorrow, and not
> necessarily if the UN sponsors it, and who do not necessarily oppose the
> sanctions either.  On what basis do you want to create a long-term coalition
> with them, when we can't count on their agreement with us lasting beyond the
> short term?  That's not a rhetorical question.

This is all very interesting beyond the immediate debate. Something
that has puzzled me for some time is, how do the French left maintain
large ongoing campaign groups, almost mass organisations, when we in the
Anglo countries are largely restricted to ad hoc short term coalitions?
The French groups that I'm thinking of are ATTAC, Ras L'Front, Action
contre le Chomage, and probably others. Or indeed the Social Forums in
Italy. An obvious and easy answer is that in France they have had a high
level of working class combativity since the 1995 mass strikes, if not
before. But then the question is, when do such ongoing organisations
become viable in our own countries? How useful are they? How should the
organised left build them and how much or when should we prioritise
doing so? Some on the left have tried to transplant the Social Forums
into Australia (autonomists, the ISO). While this has created some space
for left dialogue, and even drawn in some fake-left unions I think, the
lack of mass militant unions in Australia, and the smallness of the
radical left in general, prohibits the development of mass forums at
this stage.
This post is just a lot of questions but I think they are worth
considering.
And for the record, despite not hearing a lot of good things about WWP
in the past (accusations of sectarianism, politically supporting the
Juche-ites of DPRK etc) the arguments raised here by Lou Paulsen sound
pretty convincing to me. Lou Proyect, I think, makes a bit of a
shibboleth of "broadness" which does add something useful to the debate
but he hasn't convinced me yet.
Ben Courtice


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