On Radical-Leftist Strategy, Part 3 of 3.

Posted by TheBirdAbout2Fly

21. The old high bourgeoisie, for its part, has also been decomposed and transformed.

Degraded into a global capitalist class of the super-rich and chief executives, it no longer shares much common culture beyond an instrumental commitment to profit and privilege as such. This class of those opportunists who, at any given moment, occupy the dominant positions and largely monopolize the benefits is, however, a class for-itself in the strongest sense: it watches vigilantly and moves decisively against all emergent class enemies. As long as they do occupy their positions, the members of this class can count on the support of the durable institutions and state bureaucracies that organize the powers of repression. These bureaucracies employ millions of people whose self-interests tend to align automatically with those of the capitalist class. Every state is singular force-field of interests, traditions and identities. Fissured by contradictions that must be continuously managed, conflicts that must be negotiated and renegotiated, states are dominated and directly responsive to the national capitalist class to differing degrees. But in the current global system, all states are at least committed to enforcing the conditions of capital accumulation. This is to say: states can be counted on to protect the most vital interests of the capitalist class as a whole. All this belongs to the constraining reality, the conditions that do not permit us to make history just as we please. From a strategic perspective, the most important form of the antagonism is between, on the one hand, the capitalist class, together with those bureaucratic fractions whose loyalty is tendentially dependable, and, on the other, the potential class of the exploited, oppressed and dominated. In the traditional categories of military logic, any global revolutionary struggle against capitalist power is obviously asymmetric. At the extreme – beyond the pale, but nevertheless existing as demonstrated and deployed powers, in short as historical givens – are so-called weapons of mass destruction, the reserve arsenal of state terror. To accept combat on these terms would certainly result in another defeat. To break the hold of capitalist power, the overwhelming military and economic advantages of the enemy must be neutralized by other, indirect means.


22. The highest strategy, Sun-Tzu tells us, is to attack the enemy’s strategy:

To win not by entering into direct combat but by preparing and shaping the conditions of encounter so that it is decided before the long-awaited combat even begins. Again, this is not a game of citing scripture or authority. If this is the core of strategy, it will stand up to all critical interrogation. One does not oppose the enemy exactly where it is strongest and most unassailable, and there enter into a war of annihilation. (The name for this is suicide.) Instead, one moves the ground of struggle to the place of one’s own greatest strength, where the enemy’s strength is at the greatest relative disadvantage. In the asymmetrical struggle to supersede capitalism, this means: mobilizing the material force that is stronger than the enemy’s economc and techno-military power. And here the argument that the young Marx makes in the first passage cited is sound. It tells us that the biopolitical material force we need to mobilize is a conception of humanity that is superior to the form of humanity capitalism produces today. Moreover, it tells us that it is not merely a matter of formulating this vision of potential humanity in theory or a rigorously rational discourse. Nor is it a matter of programs and blueprints for future social forms, though these would also have to be produced by a revolutionary process. Mobilizing our material force means transforming our misery, disgust, rage and despair into the courage of a hope beyond any need for naïve optimism. It means forging an unbreakable hope that has pushed through the cage of the given humanity and now insists on more. It means mobilizing this hope radically, as affect and urgent bodily tension, and organizing it as a weapon for struggle. This is not a morality, though it has to do with what is called morale. It also, obviously, converges with solidarity, though this, precisely speaking, is a product of shared experiences of struggle itself.

23. It is not enough for a revolutionary process to open a pathway out of capitalism.

This pathway would also have to be defended in a tumultuous and vulnerable period of radical reorganization. Any emergent revolutionary process will certainly face repression by the combined forces of capitalist power. In every nation, practical critics of the given order are immediately put under pressure by police and state security agencies, and often by paramilitary proxy forces as well. The security-surveillance state tirelessly scours the urban environment for signs of dissent and revolt. Today London offers a glimpse of the future: above the city, where every inch of every street is monitored by recording cameras, additional cameras and sensors keep watch from unmanned drones flying at high altitude. State techno-military resources are indeed formidable. In the jungles of Colombia, a careless call on a mobile phone has brought missiles raining down on guerrillas. But such advantages can never be absolute. Again, the problem is not how to defeat the forces of repression in a war of annihilation. It is rather how to prevent them from being used against the revolutionary process. In revolutionary situations, when people are massively in motion, it is the action of the military, rather than the police forces, that will be most decisive. The situation must be shaped in such a way that the soldiers in tanks don’t shoot and the pilots in jets refuse to bomb. In this regard, it is worth remembering the conclusions of a dedicated student of insurrection and revolution. Lenin, trying to process the lessons of the Moscow uprising of 1905, tells us that “unless the revolution assumes a mass character and affects the troops, there can be no question of serious struggle.” Great attention and effort must therefore be directed toward radicalizing soldiers. Their wavering “leads to a real struggle for the troops.” Lenin was not infallible; his remarks arguably assume the war of annihilation that we know today must be avoided. But they point to the need for a minimum of strategic subtlety – something that so far has not been a conspicuous strength of the movement of movements. Obviously the forces of repression are diverse and call for a discriminating analysis. While some élite forces and rightwing paramilitaries will never waver or be won over, in general there are many wedges of division to drive. There will always be ways to neutralize conventional military forces without firing shots, through political education and fraternization aiming at insubordination and desertion. This direction can be pursued intelligently and inventively on many levels, if only it is effectively organized.

24. Consider some indicative “social facts” about the military force most directly involved in global enforcement.

The US military sucks up roughly half of all military spending in the world – $669 billion in 2008. Just over 1.4 million soldiers are on active duty contracts in the US armed forces, with another 850,000 in reserve branches. In class terms, this volunteer force is recruited from the exploited, oppressed and dominated. The capitalist class does not serve or send its children to serve. Enlisted troops come from the traditional working class, with African-American communities contributing more than their share (13 percent of the US population but one in every four soldiers). Recruits typically have no more than a high school education. While patriotism is obviously demanded from those serving in the voluntary force, it is not necessarily a motivation for enlistment. For families of the working poor, it is often the one available pathway for secure employment and the possibility of advanced education for its children reaching adulthood. The officer class, as well as the National Guard and other reserve branches, comes from the so-called middle class: it tends to be ethnically white and college or university educated. By 2008, some 1.6 million troops had returned to civilian life after serving in the dirty wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, some 300,000 – roughly one in five – suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. Many tens of thousands no longer have health insurance and now find they have to fight to receive adequate medical treatment; a class action lawsuit representing veterans had to be filed against the government’s Department of Veteran Affairs. This scandalous treatment of the men and women sent into combat in the nation’s name is of course well known to the troops on duty. Veterans from all wars make up 11 percent of the US population, yet they account for 25 percent of those who are homeless. Currently, on any given day, some 200,000 US veterans are sleeping in vehicles, tents, or on the streets. Half a million veterans were homeless at some point in 2006 and another half a million were deemed to be at high risk of chronic homelessness. Before the Iraq war, the suicide rate among soldiers on duty was less than one per day – a rate below the rate in the general population (22 suicides per 100,000). By early 2008, no less than five soldiers were trying to kill themselves every day, and now the actual suicide rate has for the first time since records began climbed above the suicide rate of civilians. Since the “war on terror” was launched, the US military unsurprisingly has had trouble maintaining its volunteer forces. Consistent with the public mood at the time, patriotic enlistment surged after the attacks of September 11. But once combat began, recruitment and reenlistment levels have repeatedly failed to meet goals, despite ample enticements and coercions. (And it gets ugly: in return for a period as fodder for the war machine, Latino migrants are offered citizenship and legal status.) Hence the growing reliance on mercenary forces such as Blackwater Worldwide, which claims to be able to draw contractors from a pool of “21,000 former Special Forces operatives, soldiers and law enforcement agents.” In the first three years of the dirty wars, at least 8000 soldiers and sailors deserted. Some troops become politicized by their experiences. Some, on returning to civilian life, have joined a growing veteran’s component of the anti-war movement. Clearly, to simply condemn soldiers as “murderers” or abandon them to their oppression by the war machine would be a reductionist piece of idiocy. For the radical Left, it would also be a fatal strategic blunder.

25. Reiteration: Revolutionary strategy today can be neither a war of annihilation against the capitalist state nor a pacifist avoidance of confrontation as such.

The first is suicidal, the second reformist. Neither offers a passage beyond the given global order. The struggle against capitalist power will need to mobilize and organize our material force and put it into action against the enemy obliquely and indirectly. The revolutionary process will have to refuse the terrain of the war of annihilation, where it would be crushed, and struggle instead on the terrain that poses and prefigures a superior vision of humanity. On that terrain, capitalism is vulnerable because it is, in its innermost logic, hostile to humanity – an anti-humanism.

26. The precise forms of struggle – the specific organizations and counter-institutions, the tactics and local terms of confrontation – will have to be developed from the struggle itself and cannot all be foreseen or set down in advance.

Radically democratic forms of socialism, libertarian communism and autonomist councilism offer the positive elements of a new society; although these could not be fully realized until capitalist power is broken on a global level, they can be prefigured and partially realized here and now, in the forms and organizations of struggle – assuming that the deficiencies of past models and attempts have been critically processed. But again, strong and durable organizations of some kind, adequate to conditions and capable of effective action, will have to be invented and built up from the remnants of inherited forms. Certainly these can be more radically democratic than the old vanguard party model. But they must also be more effective than the direction-refusing networks and ephemeral swarms of a still directionless movement of movements. At least, the basic strategy that this struggle will need to follow today begins to emerge clearly. It may be helpful at this point to recall, by way of a mediating image, the Aikido master, whose awesome poise is the result of diligent training but is also the condensation of his own spiritual-material force. Refusing to be drawn into a crude slugfest with a giant opponent, the master calmly anticipates the aggressor’s attack. Once it is launched, he steps into it and, with great finesse, blends into its force and momentum so closely that he is able, without any visible exertion, to tip and unbalance it. Using the opponent’s committed momentum against him, he then steps out of the attack, letting the opponent throw himself to the ground.

27. The metaphor is not perfect. (What metaphor ever is?) The state is too strong to await its attack in this way.

Against small groups in fixed locations, the state’s special forces and paramilitary proxies can strike with devastating speed. But generally, strong mass movements are not easily destroyed by these kinds of surprise attacks. (The coup in Chile in 1973 and the mass arrests in Italy in 1979 are sobering exceptions.) In liberal democracies, state offensives are sure to be signaled ahead of time in numerous ways. The institutions and bureaucratic apparatuses of the enemy’s war machines can be studied and anticipated. Their strategic and tactical doctrines generally are not secret. Despite the rhetoric of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, beloved of Rumsfeld and company, state forces remain relatively slow and clumsy and are put into large-scale motion only as a result of public processes that normally are not terribly difficult to read or predict. Finally committed to a direction, the bureaucratic machines adjust and change only with difficulty, by overcoming their own internal momentum. Thus a skillfully conducted struggle built on a strong social base could first aim to constrain the war machine to the maximum extent possible, by working with critical media, radical scholars and left-leaning NGOs – and, yes, even despised politicians from the compromised parties of the Left, if something crucial can be gained – to organize relentless critical scrutiny and robust civil and human rights campaigns. In the current context, that would mean attacking the discredited but still dangerous “war on terror” and politics of fear in a much stronger way than established parties have been willing to do; this resurgence of military logic has to be rolled back and buried by going on the offensive and imposing stronger legal and institutional constraints on the security-surveillance state. At the same time, educational and fraternization work directed to the troops themselves would aim to counter and undo the effects of indoctrination and official ideology and to close the gap between the troops and the potential class in struggle. Granted, these would be difficult and long-term projects, but they indicate what serious anti-capitalist struggle would entail, how much there would be to do and organize. Were these goals pursued effectively in a context in which the main lines of social struggle continued to develop further, actualizing a class re-composition and reaching critical mass, then the revolutionary process could plausibly accompany and imbalance the military in all its major movements, because it will have merged with the troops to the degree that their loyalty to the state could no longer be taken for granted. At that point every political form of struggle that mobilizes a critical mass (demos and blockades, but above all occupations and general strikes) would potentially be an internal crisis for the forces of repression. Such a strategy does not aim at the literal annihilation of the enemy’s military forces or the liquidation of the members of the class enemy. It aims rather to undo the machines of repressive enforcement by blending with and decomposing them. It aims to tire and slow these machines before they reach deadly top speed, by constraining, dividing and demoralizing them, by fighting for the real people who operate them. In this way, the enemy’s force is neutralized, its power to damage us contained. For state terror must be neutralized; it cannot merely be ignored and by-passed.

28. This disciplined dance of asymmetrical struggle, however, must be more than a tactic.

The endgame, the strategy, must at all times remain clear. The pathway beyond capitalism is opened up in the first place by mobilizing the material force of a superior vision of humanity. And it is held open and advances only by continuously moving the ground of struggle to the biopolitical root, to the radical question of humanity as such. That is: how do we want to live, what kind of human beings do we want to be? (Not like this, obviously, and not this kind of crippled, servile subjectivity.) To always return there, to the source of our material force, and to refuse direct combat with state war machines that, on their own terrain, cannot be defeated, is to struggle radically, strategically. For, there, on this terrain, according to these terms of engagement, we are at our strongest and the enemy at its weakest. Such is the material force that is ours, the one the enemy cannot match or overcome, strong as it is.

29. But this also means: against capitalist power, anti-humanist forms of struggle are to be refused as far as possible. The problem of violence remains a source of divisive disputes within social movements and struggles today. Negri has compellingly elaborated a “right to resistance”: the exploited, oppressed and dominated always have the right to defend themselves from processes that are already violent. The radical part of the movement seems to have adopted, if only sometimes intuitively, the correlative principle of “autonomy of struggles”: no one has a right to tell others how they should conduct their struggle. In any case, violence will not always be avoidable – the state and its ferocious proxies will see to that. However, these two principles put no limits on violence and, taken alone and without qualification, are strategically problematic. They must be accompanied by a situational ethics that carefully takes into account relevant historical, contextual and strategic factors. Violence is a tactic, but the problem of violence is a strategic one. Precisely because it has to do with ethics and human relations, it goes to the biopolitical root and touches the question of humanity. Certainly, the given world is founded and maintained in violence, and the goal of liberating the world from the structural barbarism we now endure will not be reached by pacifism. Discussing violence in the revolutionary process, are we talking about resistance to domination in the Global North, or to relatively much more brutal oppression in the South? The moralizing condemnations of “terror” broadcast incessantly from the North tellingly ignore the differences in everyday global reality. Obviously, the official security discourse of the “war on terror” must refuse to acknowledge history and context, for these would quickly expose the overwhelming and asymmetrical reality of state terror. (And after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, we know what powers of violence state terror holds in store.) The scandal is that the Left of the parties willingly participates in this offensive discourse. A situational ethics would recognize a right to resist an intolerable context of violence, but would still be capable of asking critical questions in solidarity. From a strategic perspective, struggles cannot be absolutely autonomous. It matters, whether the means of struggle are capable of attaining their aim. If these means draw a struggle into a war of annihilation that cannot be won, then they fail strategically. And in the globalized context of a struggle to supersede capitalism, the difficult balance is between the means of local resistance and the better humanity the revolutionary process aims to release. If the gap between this end and the means deployed in its name grows too great, then the struggle is discredited. This balance thus involves both ethics and strategy. It can only be assessed by taking into account the whole context of struggle, its situated character. Ideally, the struggle for a better humanity would never deploy alienated means. In the real world, the untrue given, this is a demand for purity than cannot be met. But if the gap between end and means grows too glaring, the gap itself becomes a strategic factor.

30. Defensive violence – when it is clearly that – protects the struggle and does not harm it.

The official security discourse of the politics of fear suppresses history and context, in order to dress state terror with the claim of defensive violence. This inversion of reality is the ideological core of the “war on terror.” At this writing, it is sickeningly on display in the new carnage inflicted by the Israeli war machine on the people of Gaza. The Palestinians are resisting what, in context, is an ongoing imperialist occupation: they are suffering vicious forms of daily exploitation, oppression and domination by the Israeli state and its global backers. In this context, Israel’s attempt to justify its new massacre of Palestinians as a defensive response to comparatively ineffectual rockets fired by Hamas is grotesque. And the historical trauma and injustice behind this situation makes it even more painful. The state of Israel was created in part as a response to the Nazi genocide; the trauma of having been targeted and annihilated as Jews makes the claim to a state that would guarantee Jewish safety a compelling one. But there is also no denying that the Israeli state was created only by displacing Palestinians. Within a region dense with colonialist histories and neo-imperialist occupations, the Palestinians suffer the structural barbarism of Global North against South in extreme form. In view of the continuing everyday oppression against them in Gaza and the West Bank – including political detentions, colonizing settlements, plunder of water resources, apartheid walls and restrictions on mobility, in addition to direct violence by military force – their right to resist is clear and obvious. Moralizing criticism of their means of resistance from the North, without acknowledgment of history and without the solidarity with the Palestinian people that this situation calls for, is hypocritical and obscene. Anti-imperialist struggles in ugly situations of protracted and brutal occupation, exploitation and oppression tend inexorably toward brutal means. In such situations, the oppressed may be driven toward terror by the intensity of violence they endure and by the constraints imposed on their other means of resistance. This is disastrous, in human terms. But it is a disaster that the imperialist powers involved impose by their presence and activity and drag on by their persistence. Any serious discussion of terror has to take all of this into account. In general, any recourse to terror as a means of revolutionary struggle represents a strategic defeat, for it means that a struggle has been drawn into the logic of a war of annihilation – a terrain of escalating and possibly unlimited violence on which the state can deploy all its advantages of repressive power. In light of all this, a compelling ethico-strategic principle could be derived from the insight of the first passage by Marx, cited and elaborated above. The right to resist is incontestable, but terror as a means of struggle is to be refused wherever possible, for the simple and clear reason that it is strictly incompatible with the possible humanity that is our greatest material force. To give way here is to mock and damage this humanity in ourselves and sap the force that is our radical biopolitical asset in struggle. And that, in the long run and overall, could only be bad strategy.

31. With regard to struggles against forms of domination in the Global North, a relatively more restrained context in which loss of life is the exception, the debates over violence are different in character.

They tend to open between those in the movements who, hoping to expand the social base of struggle, argue for non-violent or even strictly pacifist means and activists prepared to engage in more direct forms of confrontation and action. As confirmed by the uprisings in the French banlieues in the fall of 2005 and in Greece at the end of 2008, as well as by the protests against the G8 summit in Germany in 2007, the consensus is fragile on the left regarding the destruction of property and the tactics of so-called black blocs. The differences in position are routinely exploited by state forces, who use them to divide the movement and isolate militants for direct repression. Still, they can’t be ignored and avoided by the movements; the only way to move toward resolution and a common position is by a process of critical discussion and debate – conducted respectfully, with patience instead of rancor. Debates on tactics, however, only make sense in light of a clarified strategy. On this problem, traditional revolutionary theory offers a reflected, non-moralizing position that remains perfectly valid today. It tells us that the pressure for radical social change has to be organized patiently, from the bottom up, into massive movements that progressively engage and mobilize the whole class in struggle. In parliamentary, liberal-democratic contexts, such movements should work openly and as far as possible by non-violent means. No shortcuts in this. When movements have reached critical mass and, pressing for change, have become seriously threatening to established power, then direct repression by the state is to be expected. The means of state violence will depend on the state and the context, but certainly can be broadly anticipated and prepared for. The spectrum runs from robocops with tear gas and water cannons, to clampdowns, curfews and states of emergency, to military coups and full-on dirty wars. But only with direct repression does the option of revolutionary violence become viable and urgent, because in that case a movement already massively in struggle (or a people under occupation) will know how to draw the lesson from the situation. It will conclude on its own that the limit of what can be achieved by legal and parliamentary means will have been reached, and that to go further the movement will have to defend itself from state forces. Short of this kind of scenario, direct actions by a militant minority will generally have, at best, a merely symbolic value. Depending on the context, they may be effective as tactics for spreading awareness and building support. And as many have noted, demos that do not end in clashes and cause no disruption at all seldom have impact. But if militant forms of protest impatiently run too far beyond their social base – and especially if their actions result in serious injuries or loss of life – then they risk alienating it and becoming an obstacle to the expansion of struggle. That said, pacifism is not a viable strategic alternative. As typically advocated and practiced today, pacifism is merely a withdrawal from confrontation as such – an avoidance of the social antagonism. Ward Churchill has pointed out that the exemplary pacifists of twentieth-century struggles – namely Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. – did not avoid the confrontation with power; in fact they deliberately provoked and then calmly endured direct repression, in order to expose it. Admirable as this may be, it is too much to ask of anyone, and in any case offers no strategic pathway beyond capitalist power.

31. In uprisings the problem is different.

If an incident of police brutality or murder unexpectedly ignites a social explosion, as happened in France and Greece and rather routinely happens in the USA and other places, then some significant part of the oppressed and dominated has temporarily reached the limit of what it can tolerate and has passed into open revolt. At this point the challenge for those in revolt is to organize their uprising into a durable political struggle, by reaching out to and allying with other local groupings and fractions of the exploited, oppressed and dominated, while internationalizing the struggle through networks of solidarity. In any case, a war of annihilation with the state is to be avoided at all costs. The Zapatistas in Chiapas offer an inspiring example of what can be achieved by responding to acute local social misery through a combination of patient, long-term political organizing, inventive and poetic deployment of the symbols of resistance and revolution, and savvy appeals for globalized solidarity. The EZLN appeared as if out of nowhere. With a declaration of armed struggle, it picked up the gun and donned masks to establish its political presence and visibility. But then it quickly drew back from the war of annihilation with the Mexican state. Even so, it probably was saved from fatal repression by the global scrutiny and solidarity organized in its support. However, this certainly doesn’t mean that Zapatismo can simply be imported as a style into very different contexts. Moreover, the relation between the EZLN and the corrupt Mexican pseudo-democracy remains tense, fraught and ultimately constraining. There as everywhere, the endgame of revolutionary struggle would have to reach and pass through the point at which the state has lost all legitimacy among a clear majority of those called citizens. Radical transformation is unlikely so long as the spell of constitutionalism prevails. Historically, large parts of the exploited, oppressed and dominated have tended to identify deeply with their national “democracies.” Beyond expressions of a disgust that most often proves merely superficial, they see these institutions as “theirs.” There is still a stubborn core of faith, that these institutions will secure benefits for them and protect them. This identification – a legacy of a welfare state era that since then has reversed into its opposite – easily links up with the toxin of bad nationalism. Where democracy objectively ends and repression begins, the potential class in struggle will have to learn for itself how and why the liberal state belongs, not to it, but to its capitalist enemy. The strategic point, again, is that struggle has to be meticulously organized and to reach what, in context, is critical mass before it can exert effective pressure for radical change and become a political factor of emancipation. This is true of revolution and also of every leftist program aiming short of it.

32. Our world degrades. This is where we are, the here and now.

Crises loom, planetary misery is about to worsen. In our hearts and nerves and senses, as well as our thinking minds, we will experience the world as capitalism’s failure. And yet, in this conjuncture, we are unprepared. We lack the organizations and strategy we need to cope with and overcome it. We may produce what is needed, under pressure of necessity, as our activity increasingly takes the form of struggle. Or we may not. It’s not up to anyone in particular, although it’s up to everyone as the sum of all of us. It’s a dizzying prospect, a huge and frightening task, even to contemplate, the radical transformation of our whole social world. If we could, we would certainly prefer to avoid it. We might rather be satisfied to join or remain among the merely dominated, the great middle class. This undoubtedly was the prevailing shared hope, open or secret, a global common sense. We all want to better our lives materially, to ease our share of misery, add what we can to our share of comfort. As long as capitalism delivered that – as long as this promised way of life demonstrably existed somewhere and therefore seemed reachable – and as long as we could see nothing better on offer, then we gave it our tacit loyalty, resigned ourselves, took comfort as we could. We could bear our misery as a momentary condition – or even come to see our poverty as our own defect. But capitalism will not and cannot deliver this dream to all of us. It cannot turn the whole world into one big, reconciled, happily consuming middle class. That promise was always a lie. The cost of securing this for even some of us has been continuing misery and deprivation for most. The Global North was built and is sustained on the backs of the South; wherever the sweatshops relocate, they still are there. The antagonism divides and relentlessly produces its effects: competition, imperialism, war, genocide. Streets of gold, walls of tears; shantytowns and gated communities. And now also: depletion, the return of scarcity, ecological ruin, planetary meltdown. If we cannot expect our “standard of living,” as defined by capitalism, to go on rising, we at least will not accept that it should go into freefall. Should capitalism fail to protect the little we have, there will be revolt. The current global economic crisis has already produced the stirrings of uprising. But if we want out of this miserable picture, the given reality, it will only be by breaking its logic, by releasing the negative and critical force of a different humanity. Either we struggle out of barbarism, or we go under in it, time alone will tell. But if we struggle, then we had better win, for to lose would be terrible – truly terrible. We will see if our hope and courage in ourselves are stronger than our fears. Strategy can only point to a plausible pathway; it doesn’t suffice. Only the massive reality of struggle itself – confirming or correcting assumptions and conclusions in a continuous feedback loop of global collective practice – could open and defend a passage out of capitalism. That said, the struggle needs to organize its strategic intelligence and capacity, as an open process nourished from the bottom up but still aiming at an effective internationalist coordination of struggles. The recovery of strategic focus would be a necessary condition, a helpful step and contribution toward restarting an arrested process.

33. The collective leap from necessity to freedom is not guaranteed.

After the traumatic catastrophes of last century, the myths of automatic progress are dead. The dialectic that thinks and negates the given social reality is not an unfolding of certainty, written in advance – no permission for that kind of optimism. Nor can history any longer be naïvely conceived as a positivity that recovers all loss and disaster as returning profit, the final solution of an ultimate identity. Reconciliation – the resolution of the social antagonism – would rather be the condition for the long-sought liberation of difference and non-identity. Until then, we live and struggle in unfreedom, imperfectly. The refusal of exploitation, oppression and domination and the struggle to reorganize life according to other logics has to engage the given totality, the whole global nexus of social relations and processes, tendencies and counter-tendencies, potentials and constraints – all so many force-fields that are incalculable in any complete sense because they are irreducibly open and in perpetual motion. Between necessity and partial freedom, structure and agency, no scenario is inevitable. We make our own history, but how we can do it and with what results, we can only ever learn by risking the struggle. Promises and predictions about the outcomes of strategy are speech-acts, no more or less: factors striving to become facts, rather than givens in advance. (If, due to the global economic crisis and shrinking demand for commodities, the sweatshops begin to close, what will the numerically awesome Chinese workers do? This is a strategic question no one can pretend to answer with certainty.) What we can know is this: “humanity” names what is at stake, nothing less. This struggle has been going on for centuries, and it will continue, because the antagonism persists and we bear it in our bodies. And because by opposing it, by naming it as the enemy and living accordingly, we discover and liberate some of the negative humanity we also embody. The better humanity that could emerge only by remaking the world more humanely is nevertheless grounded in the social realities we now endure. We don’t get there, except from here. That is sometimes difficult to see and remember. The attempted passage beyond capitalism has already been a long one, with many false starts and many turnings through terrible defeats that still throb like open wounds. Yet this is the way, our indestructible material force, however it appears, moment to moment. This is the revolutionary process Marx saw and fought for in one of its forms, the process that criticizes itself constantly, interrupts itself continuously in its own course, falls, gets up, wanders, returns, learns, forgets, learns again, always seeking and sometimes finding the openings in social reality, always pushing against the given with a radical material force, until once more “a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Here’s the rose, the moment of truth; here dance, the leap begins!”