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No anti-capitalist bloc on F15 march: good or bad?

Person | 17.02.2003 11:46

I can see the benefits of no anti-capitalist bloc on the march but also the downside. Read on....

Was I the only one to miss having an anti-capitalist meeting point and section on the march last Saturday?

The good side was that there were none of the usual lines of police and police photographers in everyone's faces.

And the rationale was that ideas could be spread more easily by different people all over the place handing out leaflets/papers etc.

BUT....I for one missed the bonhomie collectivitie. Also, the reverse of the arguments above is that people on the march don't see a nice big anti-capitalist section with appropriate banners - so you could say that the message is just as lost, if not more so.

Hey even French people had a vague collectivity with banners saying 'Cheese-eating surrender monkeys against the war' (a reference to some American official slagging them off).

Person

Comments

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We cant be stopped that easily

17.02.2003 12:46

Those of us with anti capitalist persuasions were there, dispersed among the greater crowd, with our banners and flyers. Quiet infiltration can go a long way. A suit from Guilford finds himself next to someone he would never dream in a million years he had something in common with - and viceversa. Quiet erosion of stereotypes and expectations can work pretty good sometimes. You are likely to listen to someones arguments and opinions if you are having a companiable chat about the world rather than cordoned off from them in a sea of police. Thats how ideas spread. I have met people whose lives changed just like that, because of chatting to someone handing out flyers who suddenly made more sense than the daily grind that they were living in. We can sometimes look scary and remote (if only cos of the police escort)to the people we most need to get on our side, and so a subtle approach even if more or less foisted on us could actually be quite positive. Yeh, its sick that we can't march together for fear of harrassment, but I dunno if we need to cling together like sheep either. We need to get out there and discuss our ideas with everyone, not just ourselves.

Phatpat

a ploy by the SWP & co

17.02.2003 16:05

this is the tactic of the ''centerist'' traitors to socialism; they want to drown out any authetic radical voices in a sea of unfocussed public sentiment. this enables the SWP to take power not in the name of marx but as a reformed ''old'' labour type party...

dgdugb

Agree about the scary look of some anti-c's

17.02.2003 17:10

Agree that anti-capitalists can look scary if there are a load of scruffy punky people together - maybe people could make an effort to look less subcultural and more individual plus look like they take care of their presentation.....???? WHY STYLE YOURSELF ON A STEREOTYPE?

Anti-capitalist

Spreading the word

17.02.2003 21:26

If we want to change things, we need to spread the word to a wider public. I was happy enough there wasn't any sort of Bloc and that we mixed with everyone else. I spent the day selling copies of the anarchist paper Freedom. If I'd been in a Bloc I would only have sold to people who probably broadly supported anarchist ideas, by being part of, rather than separate to the crowd I found a lot of people interested in anarchism who I wouldn't have met otherwise.

RPG