hello, philippe

kristin antin asked me to participate in the "new tactics" dialogue and i sent in my first post today---after realizing that what i'd written wasn't on tactics but rather strategy.  so i sent it to her anyway and found your discussion and thought my comments might be more appropriate here.

i'm probably nuts for thinking i can handle another online discussion, much less two, so i'll try to hang in there as much as i can.

here's what i sent to the "new tactics" group just now:

several of the points in your outline--particularly "non violent alternatives," "ways of engaging youth," "role of family, community, govt."-- lend themselves to good discussion and appropriately feature the importance of involving youth. 
one thing i've noticed after many similar discussions is they tend to focus--immediately or eventually--on important but narrowly-focused items, sort of a "best practices" listing of what activists have experienced.  what follows is usually a discussion of how we can do what we've been doing, but do it more/better/faster.  for sure we need to do more of the things we've traditionally done and learn how to do them better.  but if we stop there we'll mostly be talking tactically, not strategically, like the antiwar movement has done for so long. 

i'm no strategic genius, but here's what i've learned that seems to make sense regarding the kinds of discussions we're entering.

while we need to oppose war funding and numerous other pieces of congressional legislation;
while we need to support the few good bits of legislation that get introduced;
while we need to limit/eliminate the presence of recruiters in schools;
while we need to support g.i. resisters and petition against d.u. and point out the sexism in the military and the sexual abuse that is rampant and work against many other individual evils in this militarized culture or ours, it is helpful to keep a larger framework in mind.

there are many ways such a framework could be defined.  here's one that seems to make more and more sense to me.

historically we know and many of us understand that fundamental change doesn't come from the white house or congress or the courts.  it comes because of fundamental changes in the culture.  law follows culture.  national policy follows culture.  elections follow culture.
of course there are times when the courts or congress can help influence culture as well, but instances of real, fundamental change being espoused by political leadership before it's demanded by the citizenry damn rare.

so, what does that mean for our organizing?  well, i guess that's the $3 trillion question and i'm not going to say i can answer it completely and certainly not in one email.  but it suggests a framework for discussion.

for example, if we assume a focus on changing the culture, it will mean that by definition our work is long-term.  there are no shortcuts or silver bullets.  it means that grassroots work and building relationships among people also committed to social change and to a sustainable world is critical.  do we have to fight the really big evils and oppose the really bad legislation--yes.  but in my view we have to recognize that those things can't be where the majority of our effort goes and that even when we DO focus on those items, we do it in a strategic way.  by that i mean, if we're going to do a petition against d.u. or get people to call on a particular piece of legislation, the key thing is to build connections, relationships and power at the bottom.  so the most important thing isn't whether or not the legislation gets defeated/passed, it's whether we've built into our organizing a way to keep in touch with people who've identified themselves as interested and involve them in the movement.  simple as sign-up sheets at meetings, tracking who responds to email alerts, etc.  all things that are simple and pretty obvious, but also things which we either forget to do, or don't figure out a way to use the data once we've remembered to collect it.

we are living in a militarized culture.  you can readily see it all around us--a $20+ billion dollar a year recruiting budget gets turned into advertisements everywhere, promotional crap and recruiters by the thousands.  military values, symbols, uniforms, customs etc. are held in esteem by society.  mlk day parades in major cities, including the one where he was killed, memphis , are clogged with military units, etc. etc. etc., ad nauseum.   to change a culture so deeply rooted in militarism requires serious organizing and relationship-building.

and what would we like to see in place of the current culture of militarism, commercialism and death?  well, one that valued the earth, the human inhabitants along with the critters; that provided us all with a better life (not necessarily more "stuff") including things like health care, education etc.  and what stands in the way?  primarily the fact that we don't govern ourselves--hence a key to finding a common desire among people working for a better world in many, many different arenas.

a good example of long-term, attention to detail, relationship-based organizing that addressed fundamental issues of economic and political control is a movement like the populists of the end of the 19th century.  lots of lessons there that we don't take time to learn. 

after 15 years or so of hard, grassroots organizing, their aspirations came to be articulated in the form of a political party--the "people's party." 

typically, political parties aren't used for anything more than retaining power and the people's party may have suffered the same fate eventually.  but before that even had a chance to happen, they got co-opted into a "fusion" campaign backing democrat wm. jennings bryan , in 1896.  bryan got clobbered by mckinley (one of the several really crappy presidents from ohio) in the historic "front porch campaign" which he was able to wage because his operative, mark hanna, was busy tithing corporate heads to fund the first really organized, national political p.r. campaign and swamped bryan, destroying the people's party in the process. 

i don't want to venture too far into populist history and leave that to the real experts like lawrence goodwyn.  suffice to say that today's movement is hell of a lot of organizing away from having to worry about the dangers of becoming a political party. 

so that's my two cents (more like 12, i guess) on how to help frame a discussion on the problems of militarism.

mike