Pinthouse Pizza
Autocritique Rather Than Habit
RECEIVED Mon., Feb. 5, 2007
Dear Editor,
I like that Michael King says he "dutifully joined" the Jan. 27 anti-war protest (“Point Austin,” News, Feb. 2). Like serving on a jury, voting, or visiting your parents at Thanksgiving, at this point attending those things does seem merely like a duty, a content-free, apolitical gesture that resembles work more than it expresses any sort of collective political will.
I understand that the hectoring calls of Trotskyist sects (www.internationalsocialist.org) and professional activists (www.thirdcoastactivist.org) can be quite seductive, but it seems like it might be worth considering, at least for a few seconds, both the efficacy and desirability of these (always-reactive) actions before hitting the streets. Besides allowing the police to refine their crowd-control techniques, they give the Bush administration occasion to trumpet how great our political system is that such vigorous opposition can have a voice, to point out that they merely want to spread this to Iraq, to indicate that they are listening to "their critics," etc. But of course they could care less how much hell is raised or how many pots and pans are banged. Instead, their response to worldwide opposition and even domestic electoral defeat is not to end the war but to escalate it; indeed, while protesters were in the streets, they made earnest noises about expanding the war. Clearly, something is not working.
A left and anti-war movement that had an imagination and relied on autocritique rather than habit would realize this, cease its co-opted and utterly ineffectual strategies, and set to work creating new techniques and devising new ideas that might evade the traps set by the war machine rather than walking into them.
I like that Michael King says he "dutifully joined" the Jan. 27 anti-war protest (“Point Austin,” News, Feb. 2). Like serving on a jury, voting, or visiting your parents at Thanksgiving, at this point attending those things does seem merely like a duty, a content-free, apolitical gesture that resembles work more than it expresses any sort of collective political will.
I understand that the hectoring calls of Trotskyist sects (www.internationalsocialist.org) and professional activists (www.thirdcoastactivist.org) can be quite seductive, but it seems like it might be worth considering, at least for a few seconds, both the efficacy and desirability of these (always-reactive) actions before hitting the streets. Besides allowing the police to refine their crowd-control techniques, they give the Bush administration occasion to trumpet how great our political system is that such vigorous opposition can have a voice, to point out that they merely want to spread this to Iraq, to indicate that they are listening to "their critics," etc. But of course they could care less how much hell is raised or how many pots and pans are banged. Instead, their response to worldwide opposition and even domestic electoral defeat is not to end the war but to escalate it; indeed, while protesters were in the streets, they made earnest noises about expanding the war. Clearly, something is not working.
A left and anti-war movement that had an imagination and relied on autocritique rather than habit would realize this, cease its co-opted and utterly ineffectual strategies, and set to work creating new techniques and devising new ideas that might evade the traps set by the war machine rather than walking into them.
Eric Beck,
Lockhart
Lockhart
[Michael King responds: I'm truly sorry Eric Beck finds jury duty, voting, visiting his family, and joining public demonstrations all equally onerous, but I reject his conclusion that large public protests against the war are therefore counterproductive. Certainly street protesting is not all we should do, by a long shot, and my immediate point was that organizers should do less ideologizing and more outreach to a broad public that is clearly looking for many ways to engage the war-makers. Beck's own "imagination and autocritique" are more than welcome – if they are more, that is, than an excuse for doing nothing.]