I recently read Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, which is an incredibly detailed account of the post-1968 new Communist movement in the U.S. It’s a rich and fascinating book, worth reading even if you don’t identify as a Communist; it’s a key piece of history that tends to be left out in discussions of the 1960s protest movement, which is amazing when you consider that tens of thousands of people belonged to Leninist and Maoist organizations before those groups dwindled into the weird, ineffectual sectarian cliques we see today.
After I read it, the friend who’d loaned it to me asked why there’s not currently that same sort of groundswell of revolutionary fervor. Popular opinion in both the U.S. and Canada seems to largely be against the war on Iraq and the Bush administration. (To a lesser degree, Canadians are generally unhappy with our role in Afghanistan and the Harper government, but we tend to be far more passive about demanding change, as much as we might complain.) We went through the obvious ones: The draft during the Vietnam war spurred otherwise apolitical young people to resistance, the concentration of the corporate media has deeply brainwashed the working class to vote against its own interests, and the left, for its part, has no grassroots base.
The prevailing mythology of the 1960s left is that mass protests stopped the Vietnam war. It isn’t true, though it’s in some ways a useful bedtime story to tell young activists. “Yes,” we say. “You have a voice. You can make a difference.” It’s this desire to see history repeat itself—or rather, a fictionalized version of itself—that has been incredibly destructive to the budding anti-war movement today. The left remembers its own history as a sea of tie-dyed hippies flashing peace signs and apes the form rather than the content. Rather than study the American protest movement as an outgrowth from particular conditions of the time, it becomes the end rather than the means; imitate it, and the war will end. It’s magical thinking, but tempting, as it eliminates the sort of prolonged and difficult political work that Elbaum describes in his book.
Accordingly, we have people running around with t-shirts and placards that read, “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam” (or the less-popular but no less tiresome “[Star of David = Swastika]“). Problematic, because an equal sign in politics is evidence of sloppy thinking, because it’s an easily debunked statement, and because it skirts the very sort of analysis that the left needs to make in order to be effective. We need to ask ourselves why one unjustified, illegal, and unpopular war is not like the other.
I don’t agree at all with the solution that Matt Taibbi proposes in The American Left’s Silly Victim Complex, which is that we should put away the giant puppets and start acting like responsible citizens, but he hits the nail on the head when it comes to identifying some of the problems:
Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.
The 2007 anti-war movement, as far as I can tell, is a mishmash of single-issue activists, fringe ideologues, 9-11 conspiracy theorists, and college students nostalgic for the “Good Sixties” half of the Good Sixties/Bad Sixties construction. I hate to say that the solution to this is actually, well, prolonged and difficult political work (as Wilde put it, “the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”), but it is. It’s about understanding history rather than trying to copy it, and placing the Iraq war within its broader political and economic context. Doing so won’t end the war (an American military defeat will), but it might very well prevent the next one.
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