We infiltrated society – quietly pushing for our ideals. Affinity groups had proven too useful in practical terms to be abandoned-"they are to many people's minds both safer and more politically acceptable than the marshal system for organizing participants at a demonstration," an organizing manual of the period explained-but their significance and function began to change.29, "The reason it changed, and went from a violent to more of a nonviolent kind of thing," says Jeff Jones, "is because violent street fighting played itself out kind of quickly. We're going to utilize self-defense to get our movement forward." Many affinity groups were able to reassemble at the movement centers, but the government's action had the intended effect: Thousands of people-notably those who had been drawn more by the rock concert than the radicalism-decided just to go home, cutting the protesters' ranks by a half or more.43, Early on Monday morning, the 25,000 or so remaining members of the Mayday Tribe began moving into Washington to block their designated targets. A central theme of each was the question of representation: who speaks for whom; who makes decisions, and in whose name.21 As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton wrote in their influential 1967 manifesto, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, "Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that. "We discussed the functions of the affinity group, what running and fighting together meant, what leadership meant, and why leadership was absolutely necessary in a military situation." I was one of those arrested at the Selective Service HQ after blocking the entrance for a day and a night (where we publicly rehearsed our intention to go limp and be carried to the jail bus). One Gay Mayday leaflet called the Vietnam War "a straight man's game," created by "men who need to gain their masculine identity through the killing of women, children, and their own brothers." A military junta led by Major General Idi Amin siezes power in Uganda (Jan. 25). 4. Disrupted the capitol. Editorial Reviews. This flawed and daring action marks the birth of the style of radicalism that vaulted onto the world stage at the Seattle World Trade Organization protests, the forgotten segue between the activism of the New Left and the decentralized direct action movements of today. 40. The phrase "disruptive confrontation" is from a November 1967 article by Marty Jezer, reprinted in The Movement toward a New America: The Beginnings of Long Revolution, ed. The decentralized, affinity-group-based direct action techniques championed by the Mayday Collective would only begin to reach their democratic potential after they were more fully fused with feminist principles-and after women, especially lesbians, became key actors in direct-action organizing. For an account of how it was shot, see his book, Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station and the Catskills Collective That Turned It On (Hensonville, N.Y.: Black Dome Press, 1999). The remaining part of the antiwar movement ultimately renamed itself the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ), and was anchored by pacifist organizations ranging from the Fellowship of Reconciliation to the War Resisters League. The pre-dawn presence of regular army troops kept us out of the streets and circles, but did not prevent the pre-planned abandoning of derelict cars in the loops. "9 PCPJ didn't openly discourage people from attending the April 24 NPAC march, but focused its efforts on a multiday "People's Lobby," which consisted of sit-ins outside major government buildings. Alcatraz! The Mayday action came in for special criticism: "When people state that they are purposely and illegally attempting to disrupt the government, as the Mayday Tribe has done, they isolate themselves from the masses of American people."8. perhaps the most useful way to get it, and the way most people would read it, would be for it to be typed up as well. Robert Alden, "CORE Maps Tie-Up on Roads to Fair," The New York Times (10 April 1964); Joseph Lelyveld, "CORE Suspends Chapter for Urging Tie-Up at Fair," The New York Times (11 April 1964); Joseph Lelyveld, "CORE Split Grows over Plan to Jam Traffic at Fair," The New York Times (12 April 1964); and Homer Bigart, "Fair Opens, Rights Stall-in Fails; Protesters Drown Out Johnson; 300 Arrested in Demonstrations," The New York Times (23 April 1964). On the Iberian Anarchist Federation and its grupos de afinidad, see George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962), pp. 5. For PCPJ's perspective on the dispute, see David McReynolds, "Guerrilla War in the Movement," WIN (March 15, 1971). Radicals who aspired to create a mass movement-like the Socialist Workers Party with its 24 April NPAC march and rally-were reproducing the very structure they should be challenging. "16, The Mayday organizers hoped to tap into the revulsion many felt toward the tactics of the Weather Underground and other violent groups, while steering clear of the submissiveness and sanctimony radicals associated with nonviolence. The government initially prosecuted eight organizers, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin. 172-203, 212-19; and Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. The top hits on May 02, 1971 were Joy To The World by Three Dog Night, Put Your Hand In The Hand by Ocean, Never Can Say Goodbye by Jackson 5 in US and Knock Three Times by Dawn, Brown Sugar / Bitch / Let It Rock by The Rolling Stones, Double Barrel by Dave & Ansil Collins in UK. "In the pre-revolutionary period," they wrote, "affinity groups must assemble to project a revolutionary consciousness and to develop forms for particular struggles. On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. Luckily, there's a range of ways you can filter the library content to suit your needs, from casual browsing to researching a particular topic. The Motherfuckers viewed affinity groups in grander terms as well. guide to using ebook readers with libcom.org, New covid-denial single from Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, The Gift That Keeps on Giving…Hatred for the Ruling Classes, Gas Abuses In Indiana Prisons: The Cases Of Marshawn Weems, International Statement for the liberation of the political prisoners, arrested during the 2019 social revolt in Chile, The One Big Union Monthly (November 1937), The imaginary institution of society - Cornelius Castoriadis, How it all began: the personal account of a West German urban guerrilla - Bommi Baumann, US coal miners' strikes, 1894 - Jeremy Brecher. We immediately became very close and out of that was Gay Mayday. We hadn't spoken in over twenty years, but in 1995 she mailed it back to me. ", Morea and the Motherfuckers soon introduced the idea of affinity groups as teams for street combat to Weatherman, the faction of SDS that aspired to be a revolutionary fighting force and to "bring the war home" to the United States. Mayday Tactical Manual, p. 3; Gandhi is quoted in Harris Wofford Jr., "Non-Violence and the Law: The Law Needs Help," in Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, ed. Coffin interview; telephone interview with S.J. 64-65. "No one seemed to think the conference was functioning to resolve any political problems or effectively to plan any future actions," one attendee reported. Civil disobedience, the coalition's leadership believed, accomplished little while alienating many from the cause. This coalition boasted a long and impressive list of endorsers, but was centrally controlled by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its offshoots. United Kingdom 1971 – Calendar with British holidays. "We don't fight the mass (market) with a mass (movement)," the essay argued. "), which swelled the encampment to something like 45,000 people. "[We're] not going to put our bodies on the line, we're not going to get our heads beaten, but we can at least support these people," she explained. The looseness of the overall structure gave considerable autonomy to local groups, but it also meant there was no transparency or accountability, no way for affinity groups to have input into the overall decision-making or to dispute what the informal leadership was doing. "Affinity groups at Mayday," recalls John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, "were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people's linkages to one another. 285-99. This is assuming you are not interested in the dates for Easter and other irregular holidays that are based on a lunisolar calendar. 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