[Marxism] 100,000 March Against Iraq War in Washington D.C.

[Louis Proyect]

Pat Costello wrote:
> well, whatever that missing "something" was (that you
> could sense from hundreds of miles away) it was NOT
> people. 

Pat, I went on a number of Workers World Party sponsored demonstrations 
in Washington that were a lot larger than the one today, including one 
protesting US intervention in Central America and the other was about 
NATO's attack on Yugoslavia. Neither protest had any material effect on 
the progress of US foreign policy. For protests to have an impact, they 
have to be *massive*--like the ones that took place before the war in 
Iraq began. At that time, the NY Times described the global antiwar 
movement as a kind of ongoing factor in the war, so much so that Turkey 
could not be used as a launching pad. If you think that yesterday's 
protest can lead to the reassembling of such forces in the USA, you are 
sadly mistaken. No protest that ANSWER has organized for the past 3 
years at least has had that possibility. The only way that such a 
powerful response to the warmakers can be organized is through what can 
be called a united front, even though it is not the classic united front 
of the 1920s which was made up of workers party.

We are dealing with sectarian tendencies in the American antiwar 
movement, which ANSWER displays no matter the lip-service they give to a 
broader movement. This is something that goes to the heart of their 
party-building methodology which considers their own group as having the 
inside track on the American revolution. Considering the fact that they 
probably have no more than 200 members, this is sheer madness. No amount 
of energetic organizing can compensate for this fatal flaw.