As an activist since the Southern Freedom Movement of the early sixties forward in many social justice causes I fault Juan Cole for an apparent lack of understanding of the way in which grassroots organizing can build mass demonstrations and in which, in their turn, mass demo can build power focused on the key demands of grassroots organizing. I fault the Climate Change March for its lack of making highly visible those several key agreed demands. It's much to be desired to be radically inclusive and to bring a wide spectrum of social groups together--but it is essential as well to build focus on a limited agreed set of political demands as was done in the case of the 1963 March on Washington, the1968 Poor Peoples Campaign, the cited 1969 Vietnam Mobilization, the April Actions and Contra-war demos in the 1980s, and so forth, in numerous cases where there have been succinct demands associated with base-level built mass actions. These have not always born immediate results, but they can be seen as stemming from months and sometimes years of base-level organizing and as returning energy and momentum to that same organizing focused on a cohesive set of demands. It is this process that in most cases led to concrete social change.
As an activist since the Southern Freedom Movement of the early sixties forward in many social justice causes I fault Juan Cole for an apparent lack of understanding of the way in which grassroots organizing can build mass demonstrations and in which, in their turn, mass demo can build power focused on the key demands of grassroots organizing. I fault the Climate Change March for its lack of making highly visible those several key agreed demands. It's much to be desired to be radically inclusive and to bring a wide spectrum of social groups together--but it is essential as well to build focus on a limited agreed set of political demands as was done in the case of the 1963 March on Washington, the1968 Poor Peoples Campaign, the cited 1969 Vietnam Mobilization, the April Actions and Contra-war demos in the 1980s, and so forth, in numerous cases where there have been succinct demands associated with base-level built mass actions. These have not always born immediate results, but they can be seen as stemming from months and sometimes years of base-level organizing and as returning energy and momentum to that same organizing focused on a cohesive set of demands. It is this process that in most cases led to concrete social change.