ANSWER's office space, etc.

["LouPaulsen" <LouPaulsen@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> If you were open to a more democratic process,
> somebody might have told you a long time ago that ANSWER needs its own
> office if it is to give the appearance of independence. Obviously you
> are not interested in appearances.

Louis, I utterly cannot believe that you think this is a real issue.

1)  In the first place, which of these analyses do you really honestly think
makes more sense:

[a] There is a wave of red-baiting going on against ANSWER because a faction
of liberals, based on their own class loyalties, and in the wake of the
success of the October 26 actions, are attempting to sabotage a movement in
which they perceive that socialists have gotten ahead of them, and may also
be planning some kind of coup whereby they will take the leadership of the
movement themselves, now that the October 26 actions have demonstrated that
being anti-war is not a "fringe" position.

[b] There is a wave of red-baiting going on against ANSWER because they made
a mistake and didn't get their own office.

I mean, REALLY.  If ANSWER had its own office, you believe that Gitlin
wouldn't have written his article, and Henwood's list wouldn't have been
converted into the chuck0/seay/newman list for griping about ANSWER and
about WWP, and David Horowitz wouldn't have written an article entitled
"100,000 COMMUNISTS MARCH ON WASHINGTON", and Corn wouldn't have written his
article which should be entitled "100,000 Dupes of Communists march on
Washington"?  All of this would have been forestalled if ANSWER had ITS OWN
OFFICE SPACE?

[This reminds me of those people who are always saying that the rebels in
some country or other, who got smashed by the United States, would certainly
be in power today if they hadn't committed this mistake or that mistake.
"Cleverness" is a good thing, but this notion that the imperialists and
their allies can just be OUTWITTED at every turn, if you are clever enough,
doesn't carry much weight.  (Isn't this Blanquism, basically?)  Sometimes
your opponents are going to do whatever the hell they are going to do, and
"cleverness" doesn't solve all your problems.]

2) In the second place, ANSWER doesn't share office space with WWP.  ANSWER
shares office space with the IAC.  If you are arguing that IAC is some kind
of tainted organization, "damaged goods" to use State Department language,
because of WWP's role in the IAC, and because of all the red-baiting of IAC
and the slanders of Clark that have taken place over the years, let me point
out that all of that happened EVEN THOUGH THE IAC HAS ITS OWN OFFICE.

Furthermore if the IAC has a reputation that is as bad as all that, then
nothing is going to save ANSWER's reputation, because it would be impossible
to hide IAC's role in ANSWER no matter how sneaky and conspiratorial people
were, even if Ramsey Clark wore a hood over his head and identified himself
only as "Commander R" when he spoke at rallies!

But is the IAC's reputation really so bad as all that?  There are a great
many people who apparently think that IAC has a GOOD reputation to say the
least.  In fact I would venture to say that there are a fair number of
people in the movement who think that IAC has an absolutely excellent
reputation, based on its work over the last decade, and that if ANSWER
operates out of the IAC office, this is a guarantee of ANSWER's ability to
carry out its plans, and carries the message that "you will not be sorry if
you endorse and mobilize for this action."

3) In the third place, you write as if it were a trivial matter to just go
set up another office whenever one pleases, in New York, complete with staff
and volunteers and office equipment and so on, and there are NO material
barriers at all, and the only reason why ANSWER didn't do it is that they
just plain didn't THINK of it - it never entered the MIND of anyone in WWP
or in IAC or in ANY of the constituent groups of ANSWER besides IAC that
"Hey, wouldn't it be good for ANSWER to have its own office?"  You must
think ANSWER has been awash with money and volunteers over the last year.

4) Furthermore, as a historical matter, ANSWER was organized in
mid-September of 2001 and sponsored the September 29 anti-war demonstration
in DC within days after its creation.  Do you think the first thing on
anyone's mind at the time or during the invasion of Afghanistan was that
people should run out and rent another office and get phones and office
equipment???  In that kind of war crisis situation, if you are forming a
coalition of ANY kind, and one of the member organizations says "we have
office space, with phones, copy machines, computers, etc., that we are
willing to offer to the cause," is it such a mindless thing to accept?
Coalitions have been doing this since forever by the way.  In Chicago there
are a ton of coalitions which operate out of the American Friends Service
Committee's office, or the 8th Day Center for Justice (these are cool
militant Catholics), and so on.  They operate out of the office of the
organization which is going to be putting the most people and resources into
the coalition's work, out of considerations of plain ordinary efficiency.

5) Finally, you are trying to make this an issue not merely of office space
but of coalition structure: ANSWER made this disastrous decision about
office space because it is a closed coalition, "UNACCOUNTABLE" to the
movement as a whole whatever the heck that is, in which nobody had the
brains or independence of thought to even think of the office space issue,
whereas if it were "ACCOUNTABLE" to a broad democratic coalition then
someone would have suggested at an open meeting "hey, ANSWER needs to have
its own office" and this would have passed by acclamation, and Corn and
Gitlin would have had nothing to write about!

On the other hand, if I had to speculate, I would guess that the office
issue came up within ANSWER very early on, and that people decided that it
just wasn't the priority.  This is not an arch way of saying that I know all
the little details of ANSWER steering committee meetings - I don't.  But I
do know from my own experience that people think about these things and are
not developmentally delayed in the way that you think we all are.
Furthermore, I have seen meetings of open coalitions where someone suggests
it should have its own office but then people say "We don't have the
resources for that.  Let's just operate out of the X office if they are
willing to do it."

There, that is about 500 words more than I think this issue really deserves
on its merits.

Furthermore, you wrote to GD,

> I have no idea what your "personal" views are. We know and you know that
> if you agreed with my analysis and said so here, you'd be brought up on
> charges for breaking discipline. Of course, it is helpful for the
> discussion to have WWP views expressed here since they need to be held
> up for the revolutionary left to examine. There are many different
> ideological currents represented here and they should know how WWP does
> business.

I honestly don't think you have much idea about how WWP does business, or
you wouldn't be writing about people being "brought up on charges for
breaking discipline" as if we had a Night Court functioning out of 17th
street where people were getting hauled in and fined all the time or some
god damned thing.  I grant you that I am not likely to come on this list and
trash ANSWER's decisions about office space or anything else, should I
happen to disagree with them, but on the other hand nobody is ASSIGNING me
to write particular things here, let alone to tell lies about what I think,
so, speaking for myself and probably for anyone else in WWP who turns up
here, if I actually DO come along and make statements here, it is because
those statements are my views and because I believe them to be true.  Of
course you could then say that "WWP could have ordered Paulsen to write the
last sentence", but how paranoid do you want to be?

Lou Paulsen
Chicago


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