Ten like-minded, highly disciplined individuals can outwit and outmaneuver a thousand loosely affiliated individuals every time.
Hooligan 300 Rule
Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration on January 2, 1980, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. My @ affinity group, Night and Fog Action, called an emergency anti-draft/anti-war meeting at UCSD on January 31. Over 200 people attended, three Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) members among them.
There was a lot of excitement and outrage in the room as people discussed what to do next. After instructive legal and informational presentations, someone suggested we form a new group, Students for Peace (SfP). We proposed future activities and events, but the conversations that followed were quickly derailed. The RCP effectively commandeered the debate with talk of digging capitalism’s grave and opposing both American imperialism and Soviet social imperialism. They all had the same political line and similar presentations, supported each other’s comments and called on each other in the discussion, and relentlessly pushed their position while attacking those who opposed them. Some of the unaffiliated participants began sympathizing with the RCP’s point-of-view while others quickly and vehemently opposed their brand of ultra-Maoism while still others became increasingly bewildered. Confusion and acrimony reigned. A friend, Eric, confronted a younger RCPer face-to-face in a yelling match that almost descended into a fist fight. We collected addresses and phone numbers for a contact list, then disbanded the meeting with little else accomplished.
A nucleus of frustrated student organizers retired to the UCSD Triton Pub to lick our wounds and regroup. We set up the skeleton of SfP and defined consensus-oriented procedures to insure that the RCP’s disruption could not happen again. (It eventually included a proposal for two-thirds vote in case consensus wasn’t possible.) Our subsequent meetings were jammed. The RCP and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) attended, but thanks to our new SfP “rules of order” they failed to dominate or disrupt our meetings. SfP went on to successfully sponsor a February 11 UCSD march and rally that drew three thousand people.
The RCP’s behavior held an inkling of what I call the “Hooligan 300 Rule” where a tiny highly organized cadre outflanks and defeats a far larger but unorganized foe. It’s a tangential reference to the 300 Spartans who held off the entire Persian army in 480 bce, and it’s an example of how the Left often operates behind the scenes to get its way. The following description illustrates this rule, as well as last column’s proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
When Ronald Reagan won the presidency on November 4, 1980, San Diego’s Left was poised to respond. Yet it was an obscure organization, the Committee Against the New Right (CANR), which stepped into the breach. I and two friends put together CANR over our kitchen table one afternoon, having discussed the idea in SfP. First we designed a snazzy logo, a “no right turn” symbol superimposed with a clenched fist. We reserved a community venue, then wrote a press release against the rise of the Weyrich/Viguerie New Right within Reagan’s ascendant neoliberal Right, which called for a unified progressive response to Reagan’s electoral victory. Two of us were fine graphic artists, so our efforts looked sharp. We took our finished product to a copy shop, made fifty copies, and drove around submitting our press release to local media, organizations, and individuals of note, including the Peace Resource Center’s popular progressive calendar.
The next day, when we realized how deep we’d stepped into it, CANR contacted the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD) to ask for help in moderating the meeting we’d called.
Two hundred people attended this March 26, 1981 “general assembly” for a temporary, non-sectarian, multi-issue coalition. We decided on late April dates for anti-Reagan marches and rallies, naming ourselves the April Coalition by default. The meeting formulated a set of demands, the usual general progressive laundry list of issues (An End To Racist And Sexist Violence, Production For Peace Not War, US Out Of El Salvador, Solidaridad Con El Pueblo Mexicano, etc.) They were generic slogans with broad appeal of a mainstream liberal, progressive, and Old Left bent. After a resounding, enthusiastic approval of the demands, a second meeting was scheduled for April 8. When Hinkley attempted to assassinate Reagan on March 30, the Coalition’s plans were upended. The smaller second meeting was secretly packed with members and supporters of the SWP and the Maoist Communist Workers Party (CWP) acting in conjunction, who proceeded to run roughshod over the NLG/CARD moderators to ram through their own highly specific demands. The CWP had been organizing at the San Diego NASSCO shipyards and claimed the FBI had entrapped and arrested two members and a sympathizer on charges of conspiracy to pipe bomb electrical transformers. They wanted “Free The NASSCO 3” on the Coalition’s demands. As for the SWP, they wanted their own set of demands (Victory To the FMLN, Solidarity With The FSLN, Free Francisco “Kiko” Martinez, etc.) to be included. The CWP/SWP success in replacing the Coalition’s demands proved pyrrhic, produced a negative mainstream Left shitstorm, and led to a third April Coalition “general assembly.”
CANR was anarchist/independent communist, part of the UCSD radical left scene. We fully supported revolutionary socialism, and were sympathetic in spirit with much of what the CWP/SWP stood for. At the same time, we worked with and had friends who were part of the San Diego mainstream Left, even while we disparaged their gradualism and reformism. But, bottom line, we were royally pissed at the CWP/SWP’s slimy meeting-packing tactics to force their demands on the Coalition. We started organizing against them in the lead up to the April Coalition’s Götterdämmerung-style third meeting, an example of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Coalition’s mainstream Left wing was now our friends against the CWP/SWP wing over whether to roll back the list of demands to the original, first meeting version.
The NASSCO 3 Defense Committee invited CANR to meet to “discuss our political differences.” Trotsky’s meeting with Makhno came to mind when we arrived at a skeevy restaurant at the old Horton Plaza to see NASSCO 3 defendant Rodney Johnson plus four others holding down the back booth. We cut a tentative deal. The CWP agreed to drop their demand from the final set of demands and had prevailed upon the SWP to do the same in exchange for secondary CWP/SWP speakers on the day of and extensive mention of NASSCO 3 and SWP issues in the April Coalition press packet. We agreed to not talk shit about the CWP and SWP or their activities in the April Coalition.
We didn’t feel right about the deal even before we left the restaurant. They were promising too much, we were being asked for too little in return, so we suspected we were being played. Plus, we were still angry over the meeting stacking. Later we heard indirectly the SWP had never heard of any deal. We went into full action mode as only a paper tiger organization with excellent graphic design skills could. We put together a kickass propaganda piece giving the five reasons why we supported the rollback to the original list of demands because of the offending Leninist parties’ heavy-handed behavior. When we distributed our flyer bearing our brilliant logo before the third meeting, CWP supporters cried fowl, claiming we’d violated our promise not to speak ill of the CWP/SWP. Minutes later the CWP handed out a shoddy, mimeographed leaflet insisting the second meeting’s set of demands be approved in full as the Coalition’s revolutionary duty.
Three hundred people attended the third meeting April 23. Discussion of the demands was limited to the first hour, to be strictly adhered to given a renewed fidelity to parliamentary process. I won’t go into details of the debate over the general vs specific demands, except to say it was bitter and rancorous. When the sturm und drang ended in a contentious vote, with many clenched fists raised on both sides, the mainstream Left won by a comfortable majority. A CWP member took the podium and suggested the meeting required a two-thirds vote to pass the demands rollback motion per the Coalition’s “founding documents.” I ran down to the podium and read from the paper the CWPer held aloft, pointing out it was only an SfP proposal, not a Coalition rule.
Game over.
The April Coalition continued under its original demands. I was mercilessly excoriated for betraying my radical leftism. Any further Coalition efforts to organize a broadbased protest to the Reagan administration collapsed from sympathy and sectarianism, with a postponed May 9 march and Peace and Justice Expo mostly limited to the San Diego Left. The Hooligan 300 Rule was born.
PS—The Trotskyist SWP and Maoist CWP also played “enemy of my enemy…” during the April Coalition. Anybody can practice the Hooligan 300 Rule.
PPS—https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/ for digital archives.
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