Monday, April 30, 2007

"From Protest to Resistance!" A Bad Slogan... (Keith) by X.

One of the ironies of the mobilizations to stop the war in Vietnam was that as the majority of people in the country came to oppose the war they simultaneously increased their opposition to the formal anti-war movement. There are parallels with the present moment as the majority of the country now opposes the war, at least according to major news outlet opinion polls. The movement in the 60’s became increasingly alienated from the general population and as the movement came to understand the limitations of protesting (protest mode), they drew certain conclusions that had devastating consequences in the long run. The conclusion that was widely drawn from the critique of protest mode in the late 60’s was that protesting was not enough—“resistance” was necessary. The war would be stopped through sabotage, disruptions, blowing up ROTC buildings and so forth. The movement stopped organizing people and attempted to become a social force itself—a force that would make it impossible for the U.S. to continue the war.

The U.S. war against Vietnam ended for many reasons: the people of Vietnam’s commitment to independence and their military struggle, the resistance of U.S. soldiers who became increasingly mutinous, and the anti-war movement in the US are a few of the main reasons. So it isn’t that moving from protests to resistance failed to end the war, it played a significant role in ending the war, but it also played a
significant role in ending the movement itself. The corporations and capitalists seized upon the opportunity. With the election of Reagan in the 1980 capitalists began a major offensive against working people and small business so that real wages in the United States have continued to decline since the late 1970’s for the first time in the history of the country. The gains of the New Deal, the social safety net, welfare provisions as well as the gains of the civil rights movement have been continually eroded. A massive transfer of wealth has occurred over the last thirty years from lower to upper classes. To put it bluntly we have been getting our asses kicked in for the last thirty years. It is for this reason that the slogan “from prost to resistance” was a failure. That is to say, while it may have worked to help end the war it failed as a long term strategy to build a movement.

Unfortunately, the movement, such as it is, as a whole has yet to get beyond it. We have talked on the blog before about some of the differences between the advocacy or lobby left and the protest left. The “resistance left” is another version of the protest left, however they style themselves in even more militant postures, but they don’t consider how to actually organize a revolutionary movement, only how they can momentarily disrupt order. The resistance left is working under the same logic that led some in the late 60’s to embrace terrorism as a tactic. Terrorism is actually the hysterical response of intellectuals, often students or recent graduates, to their own inability to organize working people. They get increasingly desperate and begin to despair, and either act in the name of people, act to stir up people (propaganda of the deed), or begin to perceive the “backward masses” as the enemy. We must get beyond “resistance” to revolution. But revolution is not about militant postures it is about the long and often slow process of organizing people along revolutionary democratic lines to take control over the production and reproduction of their lives.