what the masses do

Alan, Louis and all:

Interesting discussion of anti-globalization movement and anti-Vietnam War
movement.

I believe the movie "The War At Home" captures something that tends to be
missing from any account of various leadership factions and the strategies
they promoted.  The film shows the rapid radicalization of large numbers
of Madison college students following the use of civil disobedience by
protesters and the use of violent repression by the authorities.  A mood
of quasi-revolutionary opposition arose, expressed not through political
groups for the most part, but by networks of friends in a
"counter-culture."

The majority of these radicalized young people were not primarily acting
on behalf of the Vietnamese, or the working class (and therefore could not
be guilty of either Third Worldist or workerist deviations!), but rather
were just trying to live, and came to see U.S. society (run by
power-hungry politians and greedy businessmen, and enforced by the
pigs) as their enemy.

I don't think this points to any of the organized groups' strategies as
being the correct one.  It simply points to the fact that "the masses" 
(including those shot down at Jackson and Kent State, for instance) had
their own views of the situation that did not correspond to the views of
any of the "politicos."

I'm broad-minded enough at this point to say that the SWP may have had a
good point or two in respect to tactics, but this fails to account for the
role of emotion at the high tide of movements, as well as the role of
culture.  The youthful "masses" were not just isolated individuals in some
sort of herd, in other words, waiting to be organized by the vanguard.  
They had organization, albeit of a loose decentralized sort.

RH