[Marxism] National Assembly conference

[Christopher Hutchinson]

I thought the conference was overall successful in forging unity within the
movement and by that i mean there were no splits, no one walked out and it
operated in a very democratic fashion.  We in CT spent the last few months
going door to door and sponsoring fundraisers so that we could take a
chartered bus from CT (42 activists many new of them new to activism) to
Cleveland.  One thing was made abundantly clear from the day to day outreach
we did to working class families and individuals and that was the need
expand the antiwar movement in the broadest possible layers of society.

Believe it or not but most of the workers and students I spoke with still
harbor illusions in the Democratic Party.  As activists it is our
responsibility to win this layer of the population over to the perspective
of mass action and educate about how the Democratic Party is the place
"where social movements go to die".  However, we need to start at a place
where everyone can agree and unsurprisingly that single issue is Iraq.  It
has nothing to do with "accommodating Democratic politicians" but it does
have everything to do with relating to the masses of working people and
students who might not understand the connections between Palestine and
Iraq.

The below statement that Arthur makes is not accurate...
"1. The first debate was over the leadership's proposal to set a date in
December for a national mass anti-war protest. There was a counter proposal
to have the demo in October. The debate was really between protesting before
or after the election; the opposition argued that the leadership wanted to
avoid a pre-election demonstration in order to avoid embarrassing the
supposedly anti-war Democratic Party."

The debate was seriously limited because the October 11th proposal was
absorbed into the coordinating committees action proposal.  There was no
"counter proposal".  The reason for calling the ddemonstrations in
December was to win union support...the union bureaucracy would never agree
to build a demonstration when they send their members out hustling votes
for Democrats.  As everyone should know that throughout antiwar
history during the fall of an election year it is extremely
difficult to mobilize people it has nothing to do with "embarrassing the
supposedly anti-war Democratic Party".  In the end there was support
for both October 11th and the December demonstrations.

All in all it was a great weekend especially to have such a broad
representation of the movement in one room together.  Lets continue to build
the movement!  I am looking forward to Nationally Coordinated and Unified
Mobilizations in the spring!

Christopher Hutchinson
CT

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Arthur Rymer <arthurymer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Paul LeBlanc's report on the National Assembly meeting in Cleveland (posted
> by Fred Feldman) hints vaguely that "some amendments that passed add
> complications to what the National Assembly is trying to accomplish." He
> also takes a swipe at unnamed socialist organizations for "being mired in
> destructive and sectarian dynamics."
>
> Normally one would ignore charges that don't name names, but in this case
> Paul uses them to dodge reporting the debates and narrowly decided votes
> that actually took place. I wasn't there, but I've spoken to a couple of
> comrades who were, and here is the gist of what they said.
>
> 1. The first debate was over the leadership's proposal to set a date in
> December for a national mass anti-war protest. There was a counterproposal
> to have the demo in October. The debate was really between protesting before
> or after the election; the opposition argued that the leadership wanted to
> avoid a pre-election demonstration in order to avoid embarrassing the
> supposedly anti-war Democratic Party.  (That's always been the reason for
> the absence of anti-war demonstrations during election years.) The
> leadership motion passed, but not by much: the vote was 112-94.
>
> 2. The second big debate was over Palestine, long a contentious issue in
> the anti-war milieu. It became clear that the debate was between the
> Coordinating Committee's effort to restrict the Assembly to the narrow
> single issue of Iraq, and the other side's insistence on embracing
> solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as an essential part of the
> anti-war movement. This vote the leadership lost, 114-87.
>
> 3. Then there was a debate over "Afghanistan". The official name of the
> Assembly was   "National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation" – with
> the war and occupation of Afghanistan notably omitted. Again, the obvious
> reason for the omission was to keep the pressure off Democrats who favor the
> "justified" imperialist war in Afghanistan but not the U.S.'s quagmire in
> Iraq. Motions were introduced to change the name of the organization to
> include Afghanistan, and to add "and Afghanistan" to "Iraq" in the action
> proposals wherever appropriate. These motions were combined into one, and it
> passed decisively, without need for a count.
>
> These last two are presumably what Paul LeBlanc means by amendments that
> "add complications to what the Assembly is trying to accomplish." The
> complication appears to be that a major fraction of the conference  wasn't
> willing to accommodate to Democratic politicians who perpetually fund and
> support imperialist wars.
>
> Arthur Rymer
> League for the Revolutionary Party
>
>
>
>
>
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