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Stories from the Million Worker March
- Talked to two Marxists today. One was a kid from the Boston chapter of the Progressive Labor Party, a group that he repeatedly referred to as "hard line." Once we established that I wasn't going to buy his paper we had a pleasant chat. He was impressed when I knew both the name of the Marxist sect who kept bothering them (Spartacist League) and their origin (one of the remnants of the breakup of SDS at its 1969 convention). The PLP, he told me, refuses to support any of the world's Communist states, referring to them all as "deformed workers states." I asked him how if the PLP acknowledged (quite rightly in my view) that all Communist states throughout history have been appalling they could still sensibly call themselves "Communist." Isn't it a little bizarre to claim to adhere to an ideology while opposing its every manifestation? He said that he'd have to think about that, and that I'd obviously thought this all through. Hopefully he will, as he seemed a pretty nice fellow, but frankly it doesn't take that much thinking-through to see the innanity of the PLP and related groups.
The other was a member of the Freedom Socialist Party and an administrative law judge in Seattle. He presides over administrative hearings for claims to unemployment benefits. I asked him if his pro-worker bias makes it difficult for him to render impartial decisions. He told me that his understanding of the science of Marxism gives him the ability to truly understand what is going on in the cases over which he presides. He said that he has a better record for not being reversed than other administrative law judges he knows, so if that's true I guess he has a point. He asked for my email address and I gave him the Goshen one that I don't check much.
I'd never really spent much time talking with assorted Marxists at demos before, and this was actually more interesting than I anticipated. But don't get any ideas, LaRouche people. I will still blow you off.
- It's illegal to sell anything without a permit on National Park Service land, and the Park Service won't give you one. The courts have carved out exceptions for political materials, which includes buttons, stickers, and literature because to forbid the sale of those items would violate the First Amendment. T-shirts, however, are not within the exception. Local 10 had made up a bunch of t-shirts for the rally and was trying to sell them for $20 each to raise money. Being as the shirts were ordered by longshoremen the sizes ranged from large to larger.
And they weren't supposed to be selling them. Around 1pm the Park Police started to shut down all t-shirt sales. At first it looked like a big deal, longshoremen yelling at park police and vice versa. I pushed myself right up next to it for a while, but then I noticed Zak hanging back some and stopped for a moment to think. Really, what was going to happen here? The police are going to shut down t-shirt sales but not arrest anyone. There isn't much to see.
So for a while they kept bickering back and forth with the police insisting that you needed a permit and longshoremen arguing variously that selling things shouldn't be prohibited, that there isn't any meaningful difference between buttons and shirts, and that they were just going to start selling buttons for $20 and including a free shirt in the deal. There wasn't much to see until at one point Officer Young said that he was going to get the Lieutenant and a dredlocked longshoreman replied that "that doesn't mean anything, your higher-ups don't mean anything, this isn't top-down, this is a grassroots movement, this is bottom-up." Even if he did have to close the t-shirt box after a few more minutes of shouting, that, ultimately, is the point.
posted by weiss @ 8:45 PM
