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Recent articles by S. Nappalos
Democratic Centralism in Practice and Idea: A critical evaluation 0 comments Un regard panoramique sur le Mouvement libertaire du Chili 0 comments Entrevista con Felipe Ramírez, del FEL de Chile 0 comments Recent Articles about North America / Mexico The LeftThe Right’s Fantasy of a “Marxist” Threat Feb 14 22 Did the System Work? Aftermath of the 2020 Election Dec 30 20 Another Sanders Betrayal Apr 15 20 Nature of our period: looking to an autonomous working class alternative
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Tuesday January 25, 2011 01:08 by S. Nappalos - Miami Autonomy and Solidarity s.nappalos at gmail dot com
towards theory of political organization for our time part III The end of the twentieth century was a time of transition. The regime of low-intensity warfare, the dismantling of the welfare state, and neo-liberal privatization schemes ultimately was running its course[1]. The final defeats were to be dolled out across the world in the eventual collapse of finance bubbles, widespread resistance to austerity, and the implosive of the economies of Latin America[2]. Before this was all but said and done, there was the gradual and later meteoric rise and fall of social movements against neo-liberal reforms and the militarism leading to the afghan and Iraq wars. Revolutionaries played an active and disproportionate role in mobilizing the social actors in what would become the largest mobilizations of their kind. Time has passed, and the limitations and deflation of the early 2000s anti-globalization and anti-war movements are becoming clearer to many revolutionaries. Though massive mobilizations occurred, little lasting organization was built. This means that the militancy we witnessed in the streets had a very short shelf life, and much of the work can reasonably be said to have disappeared. Millions of people engaged in various forms of resistance to the wars, globalization, and the new forms of capital and state; however the left was not able to produce a sustained alternative that was able to engage, nurture, and develop that activity into a lasting movement against capitalism and the state. While seemingly militant direct action was relatively common, this militancy rarely led to further radicalization or the popularization of struggle. Power was built, but dissipated. The left had not developed the ability or perhaps the orientation to build movements, either mass movements or revolutionary ones. “We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital[13]”.In so far as membership is engaged at all politically (beyond high sounding lectures), it is to mobilize with de facto support of capitalist social and political institutions even when under a red banner. The most naked display of the embrace of playing the “cop within the movement” was shown in leaked emails from NGO staff in the Bay Area during the Oscar Grant trial. Advance the Struggle, a bay area revolutionary organization, published an expose of sorts clearly demonstrating the way in which local NGO bureaucracies embraced a role of trying to work with local city and police authorities in diverting organizing and anger surrounding the police brutality in favor of “voicing one’s opinion” and “making music”[14]. The Urban Peace Movement sent an email in which it revealed that they had “…been in preliminary conversation with some of our partners an allies up to this point including the Ella Baker Center, Youth UpRising, Oakland Rising, BWOPA, The Mayor’s Office and the City of Oakland regarding these suggestions. Let’s continue to be in dialog and hold each other close in the challenging days ahead.”[15] Note that Oakland Rising is one of the groups represented in Organizing Upgrade’s Electoral Organizing article, and the NGO staff proclaims “We don’t believe in struggle, we believe in winning”. The Urban Peace Movement staffer lays out the method that this grouping of state and NGO officials will use to contain coming agitation surrounding the immanent letting loose of Oscar Grant’s murderer. Whatever critiques there are of symbolic protest violence, and I think there are, it is not random that the response of the NGO bureaucracy is to defend the state in this instance and to consciously “inoculate” and “create avenues of expression”. The position of NGOs constitutively within capitalism reinforcing its social relationships, hierarchies, and distribution of power pushes radicals in these directions, often in contradiction to their self-conception and their language. The issue is not whether these institutions do some good. Humanistically they do improve humanity and this should be supported. The problem is that these institutions consistently rally behind ruling class interests, often against the working class, and are organized against the building self-activity of the class. Noticeably off the table are fighting mass organizations whose basis and activity are founded on the collective interest and activity of a class working autonomously. There is a glaring absence of organizations working to build up a class alternative of workers acting directly and collectively to build independent class power capable of breaking with capitalism. Whatever struggles can emerge outside of these institutions find themselves facing significant repression, cooptation, and difficulty taking an organized and sustained path. The left is generally isolated both in practice and ideologically from the oppressed classes. Whatever exceptions there are remain localized, cordoned off, and contained at this time. This is not to dismiss out of hand the crucial work occurring in various NGOs, unions, academic circles, and revolutionary organizations. It is not difficult to see what would occur without a positive social force fighting back. Still it is important to ask harder questions about why the good work has systematically been retarded, and why the bureaucratized movements are so dominant. This situation has meant that whatever solutions and responses the revolutionary left is developing at this time is largely internal to the left, and without sufficient practice to clarify our attempts. In the recent history of North America, this has generally been the case. This severing of theory from practice has contributed to our problems moving forward, building organized revolutionary forces capable of contributing to mass movements, and developing revolutionary consciousness, practice, and catalysts. With the unions, the social democratic trends, and NGOs lining up behind an increasingly desperate attempt to save capitalism through populist-electoralism and state-interventionist measures, the necessity of an autonomous working class alternative is pressing. There is broadly speaking a crisis in the institutionalized left and its allied radical currents. The path to an autonomous working class alternative is not merely a matter of organizing, or being proficient. There are objective forces that necessitate a strategy, and one that meets the reality of our time. The method for this is intermediate organizing, which I explore in my companion article Towards Political Organization for Our Time: trajectories of struggle, the intermediate level, and political rapprochement[16]. [1] Midnight Notes Collective. Work, Energy, War: 1973-1992. Autonomedia, 2001. [2] Wallerstein, Immanuel. Structural Crises. Originally published in New Left Review #62 March-April 2010. http://www.khukuritheory.net/what-does-the-present-cris...sent/ [3] Federici, Silvia & Montano, Mario. Theses on the Mass Worker and Social Capital. http://libcom.org/library/theses-on-the-mass-worker-and...ntano [4] There are too many places to look to here. For a start see Don Hammerquist’s Thinking and Acting in Real Time and a Real World. http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/01/thinking-and-....html and Karl Heinz Roth’s Global Crisis – Global Proletarianisation – Counterperspectives http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/actual/e068roth_crisis.html [5] See an interview with Stan Weir by Insane Dialectical Posse here http://www.flyingpicket.org/?q=node/42 as well as Weir’s article on the Reuther-Meaney split at the Marxist Internet Archive http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1967/...r.htm [6] Weaver, Adam. On Van Jones Resignation. http://machete408.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/on-van-jones...tion/ [7] Davidson, Carl. Mondragon Diaries. http://zcommunications.org/mondragon-diaries-5-days-on-...idson [8] That is by one of Freedom Road’s predecessor organizations. See Jamala Roger’s A Rainbow Coalition a Second Time Around. http://freedomroad.org/index.php?option=com_content&vie...ng=en [9] Freedom Road. The 2008 Electoral Dilemma. http://www.freedomroad.org/index.php?option=com_content...ng=en [10] Freedom Road. Savor the Victory, Get Right to Work. http://www.freedomroad.org/index.php?option=com_content...ng=en [11] http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2010/01/fast-forum-ele...zing/ [12] From Aufheben #18 2010. Reclaim the ‘State Debate’. http://libcom.org/library/reclaim-%E2%80%98state-debate...80%99 [13] Organizing Upgrade. New Kids on the Historic Block. http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2010/04/new-kids-on-th...bloc/ [14] http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2010/06/27/nonp...2%A0/ [15] Ibid. [16] Nappalos, Scott. http://miamiautonomyandsolidarity.wordpress.com/2011/01...ment/ |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3As this piece notes, it's not very crowded up front. But if you want to develop some revolutionary practice in non-revolutionary conditions, my suggestion is to take stock of that situation, make an estimate and put your ideas into practice. If they're good ones, you'll grow.
But first you have to realize it's not a matter of what YOU want to do, but what the more militant fighters among the masses are willing to do.
Progressive Democrats of America, the main mass group I work with, and which has no official connection with the Democratic party, is actually doing quite a bit and is organizing workers, putting them in the streets and growing. That's because its platform and tactics match what the left edge of the masses are actually ready to do, not what we would WISH them to be doing.
'Progressives for Obama', by the way, is simply a web educational project, which changed its name long ago to 'Progressive America Rising' after the election period.
But I think it rather foolish to blame everyone else simply because you can't get your own ideas off the ground. We can suck all sorts of strategy and tactics and goals out of our thumbs, and make up whatever we please. But the problem is to come up with something containing your core values that resonates with the working class. They are their own emancipators, and if you can't help formulate approaches that they can embrace as their own, what good are those notions?
This is an excellent statement. I especially like the beginning discussion of the world crisis. It indicates that--while there will be ups and downs--the long-term prospect is for stagnation and decline of world capitalism. This implies that our approach should not be based on the current consciousness of the workers and oppressed (as per Davison orthe other "revolutionaries" who are cited) but primarily on the objective crisis. What is the solution tothiscrisis, to save the working population andthe wold? (The subjective awareness of the people determines how we express the revolutonary program, how we persuade people.) The "revolutionaries" (reformists or centrists) are properly critiqued in the article.
However, there is a confusing melding of different types of organizations. Specifically unions (as organizations, formed by the workers but dominated by the bureaucracy) are different from the NGOs (middle class, essentially pro-capitalist organizations. And organizations which seek to channel unrest into the imperialist Democratic Paraty are simply crossing the class line and are our enemy. The weakness of the left in the US is directly tied to its program of joining the Democrats. (Trotskyist-derived organizations, such as Solidarity or the ISO dream of a third capitalist part, such as a reformist Labor Party or Green Party, whkose only advantage is that it is not the Democratic Party.)
We revolutionary anarchists (which Davison does not claim to be) should be arguing for independent mass struggles, particularly for general strikes, to fight for popular needs. We should call for expropiration of big and many smamm businesses to be ttaken over by the workers and communities, to be democratically managed, and to federate together towards a deocraticly planned economy.
The point about the unions is not to aim to take them over by electing "good leaders" to them, but to see them as arenas for struggle and as structures twithin which to raise programs. It is clear now that the capitalist class prefers to get rid of unions for its own interests.
Carl-
"first you have to realize it's not a matter of what YOU want to do, but what the more militant fighters among the masses are willing to do."
I agree with the general thrust of this. If you mean that the movement determines the direction and its not up to revolutionaries to decree the strategy, we're on the same page. Willingness though is another matter. There's what people are doing, and what they could do. The real debate is about what is possible. A populist orientation is just to re-assert what is already happening, for instance in the democratic party or it's left-wing, and rename it as revolutionary. That has deeply reactionary potential, and is tied to bureaucratic practices that have proven disastrous for humanity particularly in national liberation struggles. Just because something is happening and is nominally progressive doesn't mean it's actually posing any threat to capitalism or oppression. In fact such left activity actually constitutes capitalism, and in a way strengthens the capitalist system by integrating otherwise threatening elements. Green capitalist initiatives that try to separate out progressive and reactionary parts of capitalism can be said literally to be serving capitalism's hold on us, and should be viewed as the left-wing of capitalism. The left wing of capitalism is still capitalism, and the working classes struggle lies outside and against the capitalist class.
"Progressive Democrats of America, the main mass group I work with, and which has no official connection with the Democratic party, is actually doing quite a bit and is organizing workers, putting them in the streets and growing. That's because its platform and tactics match what the left edge of the masses are actually ready to do, not what we would WISH them to be doing."
I'm a union member. I fight at my work, and attempt to implement my vision through the struggles around my labor. If all that I did was what people were actually doing, I'm not sure how or why I would be a revolutionary. Capitalism is reproduced through the actions of working people everyday in our social relations. Only in breaking with and producing ruptures with capitalist social relations is change even possible. Otherwise we slip into again populism which has deeply reactionary and right-wing tendencies of trying to bring the proletarian movements within the capitalist class and system.
"'Progressives for Obama', by the way, is simply a web educational project, which changed its name long ago to 'Progressive America Rising' after the election period."
Is this perhaps a recognition that the working class of the United States was not quite as actually WITH Obama so much as were the reformist left WISHED they were?
"But I think it rather foolish to blame everyone else simply because you can't get your own ideas off the ground."
The reality is that increasingly autonomous anticapitalist tendencies are precisely the people who are building proletarian movements in the United States and Canada. There is an ever deepening crisis in the social democratic and reformist left precisely because of a fork between a failure of the social democratic strategy in an era of austerity or isolation from actual struggle. This theory I attempt to elaborate was not invented by a professor in Europe, but is part of the collective products of decades of struggles in workplaces, housing, anti-police work, transit organizing, etc. That movement work is solidifying into militants, organizations, theory, and the embryos of mass organizations. As new struggles and movements produce its revolutionaries, increasingly the leftists tied to the system will be put into antagonistic roles based on their vested interests in preserving the system and integrating struggles within its limitations. We need to be conscious of this and understand that work, those ideas, and those people and see where they stand.
Wayne
"Specifically unions (as organizations, formed by the workers but dominated by the bureaucracy) are different from the NGOs (middle class, essentially pro-capitalist organizations. And organizations which seek to channel unrest into the imperialist Democratic Party are simply crossing the class line and are our enemy. The weakness of the left in the US is directly tied to its program of joining the Democrats. (Trotskyist-derived organizations, such as Solidarity or the ISO dream of a third capitalist part, such as a reformist Labor Party or Green Party, whkose only advantage is that it is not the Democratic Party.)"
I agree unions are fundamentally different from NGOs and I apologize if I didn't make that clear enough. The problems with unions and ngos are different, and differ from their class basis and how they struggle and function. The collaborationist orientation of most union bureaucracies has ham-strung the movement, but it's not random. Some unions actually accumulate more money from investments via pensions and the like than they do from dues, creating a a direct incentive to shrink in a way. There is some similarity to the bureaucracies of NGOs and unions in general how they deal with their members and the class as a whole, but my attempt was not to try and fold them but show more the alienation of the left from direct struggle and its context. There are many of us who are fighting and who are in unions, and this work should be lauded, but it should also be placed in a material historical context.
"The point about the unions is not to aim to take them over by electing "good leaders" to them, but to see them as arenas for struggle and as structures twithin which to raise programs. It is clear now that the capitalist class prefers to get rid of unions for its own interests."
To me the key question is not should we fight as workers in union jobs (if you can even get a union job), but how should we fight wherever we are, and what are the strategic fights and methods we should take on.