Rebuilding the Infrastructure of Dissent

north america / mexico | the left | review Monday January 28, 2008 00:24 by Alex - Common Cause

Alex went to a talk at McMasters University by Alan Sears and sees a point to his argument that we need collective investigation into how today's movements and oppressed communities are rebuilding the infrastructure of dissent.

Neoliberalism as an ideology is exhausted. Every move of its backers, be it war in Iraq or Afghanistan or economic policies such as the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership meets with global opposition. But while those of us who resist are clear on what we don't want, we are less clear on what we do want. We have not been able to sustain meaningful debate within our movements about what an alternative world might look like at a level resembling anything sustained by past movements such as the labour movements of the 1930s-40s or the social movements of the 1960-1970s.

At least this is how Alan Sears sees it. A gay rights activist and sociology professor at Ryerson University, Alan was invited by the Labour Studies department at McMaster University this past January 16th to present his talk on "Worker Activism and the Infrastructure of Dissent."
According to Alan, who draws on interviews with long-time grassroots labour activists in Windsor's (dwindling) auto workers movement, the inability to sustain meaningful debate on what a radical alternative to capitalism might look like, is due to the decline in what he calls the “infrastructure of dissent.” This broad concept refers to any number of practices, collectives and spaces, both formal and informal, that collectively develop a movement's capacity to engage in grounded debate and analysis, to sustain movement memory and build collective dreams that give voice to alternatives.

Some of the examples given by Alan of the kinds of things making up the “infrastructure of dissent” of past movements in Windsor included formal organizations such as left caucuses in unions and anarchist, socialist, communist and social movement organizations. However, Alan argued that a more important role was played by informal organizations such politicized immigrant community networks, independent or community media, radical gathering places such as bookstores and cafes, and any number of cultural activities from music to political debates in “bars and taverns.”
According to Alan, little remains of this “infrastructure” in Windsor and more broadly (it wasn't clear from the talk how broadly though it seemed clear that he was referring to Canada at the very least) and there are few signs that it is being replaced. He offered two main reasons for this. First, economic restructuring or deindustrialization carried out by governments and corporations since at least the late 1970s with the aim of destroying the working class communities that were the base of the Canadian labour movement during its most militant phase (pre-1950s) as well as the social movements of the 60s and 70s. His second reason for the decline of the infrastructure of dissent might seem surprising.

Allan argued that its decline was due in part to the victories of the labour and social movements which then led to mass depoliticization. These movements have been able to win what Allen called “full citizenship” by which he means formal political equality and the ability of workers to reproduce themselves and their communities via wage labour and access to social services (though Allen quickly pointed out that this is not the case for a number of groups including indigenous people and undocumented immigrants). In other words, these movements won the right to consume according to what to so-called middle class levels which is in fact a significant victory given the extreme poverty that people were living in prior to this.

According to Allen, with these victories in hand, workers began to feel included by the capitalist system and thus gradually abandoned the spaces and practices (the infrastructure of dissent) that they had built when excluded from the capitalist public sphere. And because capitalism was not defeated, it was able to recuperate the material gains made by the movements by launching a new round of commodification or mass consumption. Allen expresses this well by stating that the move to the suburbs was the commodification and privatization of the collective dreams of factory workers to escape the misery of the inner city of the pre-War II era.

A similar thing might be said about the current seemingly rampant “Yuppie” culture which can be seen as the commodification and privatization (in the sense of isolating individuals) of the desire of young workers in the 60s and 70s to escape the misery and meaninglessness of the factory floor. We can read this in two ways. First, what doesn't kill capitalism makes it stronger. Second, and I think more accurate (but this is a whole other discussion), our victories force change upon capital in ways that ultimately or in the long-term strengthen our collective capacity to self-organize and do away with capitalism for good. A better way to put this is that capitalism has recuperated our victories but at a potential cost.

But all this remains abstract and at the level of potentiality unless grounded in actual movements that begin to transform our potential and hope into real practices and counter-organization. And a key part of this process is, according to Allen, rebuilding our infrastructure of dissent and his talk ended with his thoughts on how we might do this. First, he stressed that this is not about feeling nostalgic for a romanticized past of factory workers discussing radical politics at the local pub before marching to the picket lines to fight it out with the forces of capitalist order. Not only can we not go back, but such thinking ignores the ugly side of these movements (such as patriarchy, racism, homophobia etc.). Rather we need to look at our movements and oppressed communities and see the signs that point to new forms of the infrastructure of dissent. Some of the examples he gave included the global justice movement, the subversive use of new communications technology (like the website where you're likely reading this), the (brief) emergence of flying squads in the Canadian Auto Workers and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. We could of course add a lot more to this list (it wasn't meant by Allen to be comprehensive).

Ultimately, Allen is calling for collective investigation into how today's movements and oppressed communities are rebuilding the infrastructure of dissent in order to participate effectively in its development. The model he gave was the Italian workerists of the 1960s who carried out investigations into the daily work and community lives of Italian workers and sought to base a political program and forms of organization in the desires and informal networks expressed and created by these workers in their day-to-day struggles. In many ways Allen's call is similar to the one made by Ed Emery (who is also inspired by the Italian workerists) in his 1995 article “No Politics Without Inquiry.” Its a call worth making again since this kind of investigation remains an exception among both academic and activists.