Remarks by Marilyn Levin at the New England United Conference, January 30, at MIT. Marilyn is on the UJP Palestine Task Force, the Planning Group, and is Co-Coordinator of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations.
I remember a discussion of antiwar strategy where a list was made of who really had the power to end the war in Iraq as the basis of where we should focus our efforts. The list started with the soldiers – if youth didn’t join the army or soldiers refused to fight, then the war would end. Second was the President and Congress – ultimately, they were the only ones who could stop funding the war and order the troops home. That was the list. When I suggested they were forgetting the most important and powerful group, the American people – working people, immigrants, people of color, students - who when mobilized in mass actions could bring the war machine to a halt and force the Congress to act – they looked at me like I was hopelessly naïve and living in a fantasy world.
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| Ashley Smith addresses the conference (Wright Salisbury photo) |
Howard Zinn understood this and that is his legacy. He showed that throughout history, social change occurs not from the top down but from ordinary people organizing in their own interests against the powerful. He said “It is not who is sitting in the White House that is important – it is who is sitting in.”
Some say that if we are not able to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, mass actions are not viable. This is simply not true. It is still how we get from small to large. We can’t wait until thousands are ready to come into the streets and then jump in and offer leadership. No, we keep protesting and connecting with those who are ready to join together in action at that time.
I have been privileged to be a part of some of the major victories of the last 50 years – the civil rights movement, the struggles for women’s, gay and immigrant rights, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and I know the power of these social movements. None of these movements began with mass mobilizations. In the civil rights era, we had small demos and large ones and we kept demonstrating until we won. Small demos don’t hurt the movement, they are simply ignored by the media. This does not mean it wasn’t effective in terms of movement building and reaching new activists. New people, especially youth, are always heartened by action.
People who are critical of mass action are not bringing many more people into the movement or increasing pressure on the government by their methods. Electoral action may bring people to the polls but it doesn’t sustain them in action organizations; just meeting with elected officials and calling their offices does not pressure them to change.
Periodic unified mass actions, along with other types of actions, are necessary for the following reasons: to forge unity, to provide continuity so that we build upon each action, to counter the propaganda machine of the mass media by keeping the issues in the public eye, to inspire and bring in new activists, to explain the connections between issues and bring social movements together for a common purpose, to expose our government’s role and real designs, to pressure the government to change, and to empower the opposition.
It is our historical and moral obligation to organize masses of people to challenge US imperialism and its war machine, the greatest threat to humankind and our planet ever known. A movement has no existence unless it organizes and is visible. It is imperative that we do this because the Afghans, the Iraqis and the Pakistanis need to know they have not been abandoned and left at the mercy of the U.S. war machine and the oil corporations. Soldiers and their families will not organize against the war until they see they will be backed by a strong civilian antiwar movement. Young people will not join the military, in spite of the economy, when they see support for redirecting the war budget into jobs. We need to play a leading role in a movement of international opposition to wars and exploitation.
What are the barriers to mass action? One is lack of unity in the movement. We have an antiwar movement that started large and was allowed to dwindle in spite of growing public opposition. We got lost in the morass of the last election and have not recovered yet. We also face the danger of getting buried again in the next election. (We’ve got to keep those Democrats in power so they continue their bipartisan war policies and drain our economy by trillions.) These elections are now continual without the breaks where we could organize between them that we used to have. We can’t afford to keep getting derailed and marginalized. Second is the lack of a mass action perspective that focuses on organizing masses of people in the streets, not on pressuring Congress. Third is maintaining an Out Now demand – Out now from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all the other places the US dominates by its military might. Not “Out Someday, Maybe”.
I am one of the National Co-Coordinators of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, a national network of organizations who formed in 2008 because of the vacuum of leadership and organization in the antiwar movement. We organized around five basic principles that we hold today as the basis for where we stand:
1) Unity – all sections of the movement working together for common goals and actions;
2) Political Independence – no affiliations or support to any political party;
3) Democracy – decision-making at conferences with one person, one vote;
4) Mass Action – as the central strategy for organizing while embracing other forms of outreach and protest; and
5) Out Now – the central demand to withdraw all military forces, contractors, and bases from the countries where the US was waging war on the people.
We will hold our third conference this summer in Albany, NY and we are expanding co-sponsorship to have a truly unified movement conference to project future mass actions. We supported and built last March’s national actions in DC, SF, and LA and we are actively building March 20. It doesn’t matter who initiates the demonstrations, we need to join all of our forces to bring out the most numbers and to get the US antiwar movement back on track to finally bring an end to these ever-widening and endless wars and occupations win the fight for jobs, healthcare, education, reparations for Haiti, and all the rest of the social necessities we need to have healthy and productive lives.
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