On Radical-Leftist Strategy: Propositions for Discussion, Part 1 of 3

posted by TheBirdAbout2Fly

Revolution is not just around the next corner. But it is necessary to ask, why isn’t it? What do we mean, we of the radical left, we of the movements and protests, we of no party, what do we mean by these words we’ve been using: capitalism, revolution, struggle? And who are we – we who in our suspicion of representation virtually forbid ourselves to use this word “we”?

Being a radical or a revolutionary requires a certain degree of bravery. We must stand up for what we believe is right and just, no matter the odds. We risk alienation from friends and family, our communities, and society at large. And, as we move forward, we increasingly risk violent State repression. But bravery is not required only in "Us vs. Them" scenarios. Sometimes being honest with ourselves requires bravery. It can be scary to test the foundations of our beliefs, because we risk it collapsing in on us. And what about all those tattoos? But despite the risks, we must move forward. After all, that's what makes us radicals and revolutionaries.

In this spirit Learning to Fly is posting the following text, originally from Left Curve no. 33, in a three part series. We do so with the aim of generating serious discussion, and this should not be taken as an endorsement of the ideas contained within the text.

So, let's be brave, and dig in.


On Radical-Leftist Strategy: Propositions for Discussion

by Alonzo Alcanzar

1. The party’s over. The great bubble of phantom assets has burst and the bill is coming due.

The heroes of capital have pronounced themselves ready… to pass the pain onto others. The poorest – billions globally – will suffer most. But even in the Global North, the squeeze now beginning looks to be deep and general. Will the economic crisis turn into a real legitimation crisis? Will the rage yield the conclusion, that capitalism fails us? If events are vindicating the anti-capitalist movement, what will the movement be able to do about it? Where is the organized counter-power ready to act in this crisis? How will the movement of movements clarify and decide what to do? In fact, both agency and strategy are missing. The movement seems rather to have put its faith in directionless resistance, in beautiful tropes of flight and exodus. It cherished the fine hope of changing the world without taking power. But what if it has fooled itself, in these decades? What if this politics of expression and invention and the refusal of power, fine as it is, is not a pathway out of capitalism? What if power and effective direction are the conditions of successful struggle? What if the organization of agency and strategy are indispensable? Is it time for a reality check?

2. The party’s over: the vanguard parties are gone, and hardly anyone wants them back.

Yet gone with them is the strategic focus of a whole revolutionary tradition. Orthodoxy finds few friends today. But the serious critique of orthodoxy would still seek to rescue the moments of truth that may be in it. To think the strategic deficit of this moment, to ask what a pathway out of capitalism could possibly mean and what it would practically entail, is to gain a renewed appreciation for the Marxist tradition – for its organization of collective experience and intelligence. Even to ask what went wrong, to inquire seriously into the defeats of the last century, is to come into contact with the core of truth in this tradition – a truth that survives its notorious disputes and splits, its terrible lapses and corruptions. Revolution is not just around the next corner. But it is necessary to ask, why isn’t it? What do we mean, we of the radical left, we of the movements and protests, we of no party, what do we mean by these words we’ve been using: capitalism, revolution, struggle? And who are we – we who in our suspicion of representation virtually forbid ourselves to use this word “we”? We who appear in the demos and protest actions of the Global North, we are a militant minority, whether we acknowledge it or not. We express our rejection of a capitalism that the majority should, we feel, also reject. But this majority evidently is not prepared, for now at least, demonstrably to do so. So we are also a vanguard, like it or not. True, we are not the substitutionist vanguard of old; we are not the professionalized germ of a future state. We want to learn from the struggles of the Global South, not control them. This has been our pride: we are a vanguard that rejects vanguardism, a vanguard without agency or strategy. In fact, there is little consensus among us regarding aims or means, and we’ve tended to avoid the work of clarifying either. We’re all tactics and no strategy, and we’ve let ourselves be reassured that this strategic weakness is our secret strength. Is this really more than a utopian feeling, and if it isn’t, is this feeling really enough? It shouldn’t be a crime, to ask these questions insistently. What follows doesn’t pretend at all to be a full-blown strategy. It merely asks what the conditions and basic principles of such a strategy would be. Strategy in any case is a long-term, collective project. What follows is a plea that this project be organized, that the movements acknowledge the strategic deficit as a problem and develop durable structures to recover strategic focus and intelligence. These propositions, arguments, provocations and provisional conclusions are a snapshot of a process – one attempt at critical reflection. They are offered to restart the discussion, not to be the last word in it.

3. Know the enemy, Sun-Tzu warned 2000 years ago, and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated.

Do we know the enemy? Do we know ourselves, we anti-capitalists? Strategy is the work of carefully thinking the pathway from here, where we are, to there, where we want to be. Do we have clarity about either the here and now or the other world that is possible? If we cannot fully imagine the alternative ahead of time, do we at least have enough shared clarity about it to reach it? The vision and concepts of traditional revolutionary theory have been poisoned by the experience of Stalinism and the repressive actuality of “really existing socialism” – and by the defeats of so many struggles in the twentieth century. This tradition appears to have failed emphatically, and many have pronounced it dead as a political force. With few exceptions, the remnant parties of the “Left,” long without revolutionary hope or aim, have become as opportunist and cynical as their competitors. A so-called radical or undogmatic left – us, the anti-capitalist minority in movement – positions itself outside this shabby politics and the legacy of monstrous orthodoxy that is behind it. And yet this revolutionary tradition is ours – is part of us, if we are honest. For us, it cannot be a matter of rejecting this tradition utterly. It is rather a process of appropriating it critically, of reaching an adequate understanding of the defeats and disappointments, of the mistakes that are not to be repeated. This is a necessary condition of a viable anti-capitalist strategy. Obviously there are many and divergent ways to interpret this tradition and history. We all operate an appropriation of some kind; it informs our assumptions, positions and actions, however conscious we are of it. And with our lives to live, in and out of the struggles of the moment, who has time or desire to relive it all – to continuously process the nightmares of history? Fine. Some people do it, historians, theorists, academics and more or less isolated para-academics. We read the results, sometimes, some of us. It goes into the mix. Is this enough? Does this suffice to replace the focus and urgency, relentlessly intense, of the old vanguard party – of Lenin’s dreaded Bolsheviks, of the dreaded Maoists, or Trotskyites? Certainly we could organize a collective strategic capacity differently, through other focused processes, networks, counter-institutions. But we would first at least have to agree that such a strategy is indispensable to effective agency – and understand what it means to struggle without it.

4. Where do we aim, where do we wish to go?

We walk forward, asking questions, as the Zapatistas appealingly put it. But having a strategy means we also risk answering those questions. We imagine vaguely a colorful world of many alternative logics, liberated from capitalist domination and violence. Well and good. We don’t usually call this socialism, because that word conjures up the bad dreams of last century. We don’t call it communism, because that conjures the bad vanguard parties. We sometimes call it autonomism, emphasizing the anarchist impulses of self-organization and self-valorization that also circulate in the movements. Some Italian comrades are calling it real or “absolute democracy.” It is not the case, however, that the vision aimed at by the revolutionary tradition is so different from the dreams we carry today. The goal was, and remains, a world of real, positive freedom, in which social relations are not based on exploitation, oppression and domination. If there is interest now in recovering and reinventing the notion of communism, it is because this notion belongs to the core of the revolutionary tradition – a core that retains a powerful appeal, because it is so obviously different than what was done under this sign by the parties and states that took it over.

5. True communism, as theorized by the young Marx, feels like where we would all like to go:

The reduction of work-time to the minimum possible; the liberation of free processes of self-realization, no longer constrained and distorted by antagonistic, competitive class society; the progressive dissolution of the division of labor, the free development of human powers and talents in all directions, the real education of the senses. This is a revolutionary macro-theory of biopolitics, the production of differential subjectivities, the release of new forms of humanity. The leap from necessity to the realm of freedom, the real beginning of human history, would be the liberation of difference and non-identity for the first time. The real disputes in the tradition were not over this vision, but over the strategy that could actualize it. Reformists saw it as the eventual result of a gradual evolution, utilizing the power of democratic institutions to redistribute the surplus produced by exploitative relations. Revolutionary anarchists held it to be conditioned on smashing the power of the state and its repressive bureaucracies, once and for all. Revolutionary socialists and communists held that there must be a transitional period of social reorganization, in which power must be seized and a transformed state utilized, to establish a base of production that can meet basic needs through non-exploitative relations. Others may disagree, but a serious critical appropriation of the tradition is likely to find the last position more compelling, because more realistic and strategic. This is not to say the old theory is flawless or that the mistakes of practice are not implicated in the defeats of last century. It’s not a matter of trying to repeat an inherited strategy considered to be perfect, but of collectively recovering every moment of truth from the tradition to shape a strategy to guide anti-capitalist struggle in contemporary reality. But so far, our new theories have not added up to anything approaching the coherence of traditional revolutionary theory: they don’t show us a plausible pathway, a realizable organization of effective agency, a viable coordination of means and ends in struggle. This is the task of a strategy.

6. Our rejection of capitalist normality is deep, intuitive and passionate.

But what is the capitalism we hate and oppose? The need today is not so much to repeat or redo the critique of capitalism. The critique exists and is there for anyone to study. What is more important is to understand how far our experience is once again confirming it. Capitalism fails us because it attacks the humanity in us, locking it up in an impoverished form. This has always been true, even if, historically, early capitalism played its positive role by vastly increasing human productive powers. Today we can experience what Marx, Luxemburg and others foresaw long ago: in a finite world, this form of society premised on ceaseless, profit-driven economic growth must have real limits. In numerous ways, including some that were not foreseeable, these limits are beginning to rear up on the horizon. And this transforms the situation. Historically, capitalist modernity – a nexus of relations and processes, as well as the culture inseparable from it – rose to global dominance by violent episodes of primitive accumulation. Still, as a pathway beyond the servitude of feudalism and the rule of arbitrary power, the capitalist revolution was not without moments of emancipation. The overcoming of scarcity and the promises of enlightenment culture and bourgeois law and democracy were real expansions of life, enrichments of human possibilities. Once its globalizing tendencies attained truly planetary scope, however, expanding capitalism began to close in on and push against its own logical and material limits. Today, the relentless imperatives of capital accumulation and the resulting cycles of competition, crisis and concentration are evidently undermining and destroying the conditions for life as such. Life today, globalized as well in the way it reflects its images back to us everywhere, reconfirms and clarifies what was sometimes obscured and forgotten: capitalism is a threat to humanity, from which humanity will have to free itself through strategically-waged struggle. It is the enemy.

7. Capitalism as a system is not an external thing separate from the people who constitute it.

It is the activity of those same people – all of us – given a specific form; social reality, the given, is not elsewhere. As a form of human activity and at the same time a form of humanity, capitalism is a product of history, not an invariable of human nature. More specifically now: it is a way of organizing the relations between people on the basis of a practical abstraction. This abstraction transforms labor into an exchangeable equivalent value. The valorization process is no less real for being this process of abstraction. “Congealed,” as Marx puts it, in fetishized commodities, the abstraction becomes social reality as a nexus of relations in the sphere of production. These relations are antagonistic. They produce and reproduce a division among people. This division is the hidden violence of exploitation, the theft by some of the labor of others. Passing their activity through the nexus of relations formed around this antagonism – that is, performing division and relations and thereby reproducing both – people sustain a whole social world and its form of humanity: capitalist humanity, the subjectivity that corresponds to competitive, possessive individualism. Out of this activity, over time, a powerful global logic has developed and installed itself in all the things and bodies of our social world: capitalist modernity. At every moment, what begins as the reasonableness and common sense of individual experience – each works to live, acts to satisfy needs and desires – ends as a global system that exceeds and escapes human control. As the totality of relations and processes unfolding according to logics that tend to become autonomous and override constraints, society takes on the mystical character of an alien external force, an inexplicable and uncontrollable second nature or fate out of which the storms of crisis and war are episodically set loose. History, made by people for themselves, becomes behind their backs an apparently separate reality that limits, dominates and does violence to them. And social reality is the activity that unintentionally performs this inversion. To regain collective control, capitalist power would need to be broken where it is incessantly regenerated. Capitalist relations – and with them this antagonism that splits humanity while forming it – would have to be replaced by others based on a radically different logic. This is the reach for emancipation, the aim of struggle.

8. Again: Exploitation is the concealed theft of labor.

Or better: the theft of value from the labor of others. Under capitalist relations it is legalized theft, instituted as property and ownership, yet theft it is and remains. It is the process of systematically expropriating surplus value by compelling workers, as the very condition of their working at all, to perform more labor than they are paid for. This trick of abstraction – the reduction of qualitatively different concrete labors to the single quantitative equivalent of abstract labor – disappears into the commodities that are produced by it. These get up and dance because they are charged by the real relations between people. There, where surplus value is produced and stolen, relations are structured as a fundamental antagonism between owner-managers who control production and workers who sell their labor from a position of dependency. This antagonism is the open secret, the irreducible core of capitalism. Its traumatic unfolding as social misery marks every aspect of capitalist modernity and the divided, contradictory and coercive character of our social world. Contemporary mutations in the modes of production and the forms of wage-labor – so-called post-Fordism – make the process of exploitation more diffused, in some ways more removed and difficult to see, feel and track. The dispersal of Fordist factories into networks of globally distributed sweatshops and the relative growth of the service sectors in the Global North have, together, tended to obscure the continuing basis of both in traditional manual labor and commodity production. Jobs are transformed into contract-labor and precarious “temp work”; some workers, forced continually to compete for and negotiate the terms of their contracts, are apparently transformed into entrepreneurs. Workers’ pension-funds, where they still exist at all, have long been invested in stock markets, apparently blurring the lines between owners and workers and encouraging a false identification with the profitability of corporations and the “performance” of the economy as a whole, the logic of exploitation itself. And so on. Exploitation persists, however, and generates the material inequalities and social misery that degrade life and block human possibilities at all levels. Exploitation is theft by the indirect violence of valorized labor. Historically, the conditions of exploitation were established by direct violence and theft – so-called primitive accumulation. But as we are forced to relearn again and again today, the indirect violence of exploitation and capital accumulation must have continuous recourse to direct violence in a world of shrinking resources, competing national economies and perennial revolts. New episodes of primitive accumulation, new wars of enforcement and new genocidal eruptions accompany capitalism as its necessary shadow.

9. All of us who work are exploited by this system.

Our labor, whatever form it takes, is valorized, the surplus turned into the profit taken by others. In addition, some of us, the luckier ones, are merely dominated by the social processes that make up our everyday life. We suffer the distortion and blockage of our potentials, our life possibilities, through the compulsive logic imposed on us. Forced to spend ourselves working, competing, chasing the fetishes we’re told we need and in any case are the only ones on offer, we empty our lives of the possibilities of living otherwise. We forget we share other needs, have other capacities and potentials. We forget there would be other joys to share, were we only free to realize them – and we are the lucky ones. Others of us have it much harder. The oppressed suffer direct repression and violence by the states that enforce this global order. Beaten by robocops, bombed and blasted from the air, walled into slums or driven into camps, starved or left to die on sick-beds of neglect, the oppressed are violated, brutalized, not just in their humanity but in their bodies as well. Exploited, oppressed, dominated: these terms refer to distinct processes of violence in capitalist normality. It matters, obviously, what kinds and intensities of violence we are exposed to in everyday life. But while they can be distinguished, these processes still hang together, are all of a piece. They form a single global system. And thus there is a common interest among all the exploited, oppressed and dominated in resisting and overcoming it. This is what, today, is again becoming acute, as a globally shared experience. The basic categories Marx developed to grasp this still suffice to a remarkable degree. Many of the old words hold after all. The relentless processes of capital accumulation, the global production and capture of surplus value, alienates us – yes, that is the word – from what we are capable of and would have liked or would like to become. A repressed negative humanity struggles to free itself from the divided and miserable form of capitalist humanity. Not because there is a fixed human nature, but exactly because there is not.

10. The pathway out of this global system could only be the process that would change it radically.

Reformist programs that seek merely to mollify the destructive effects of capitalism – global social misery – without aiming to reorganize the social relations that perennially produce this misery simply avoid the real problem. The reformist tradition and its Social Democratic parties imagined that with progressive reforms the power of the working class would eventually grow so great that exploitative relations could at some point be eliminated peacefully. Those who waited for this are still waiting. So long as the class basis of society persists, the exploited, oppressed and dominated only maintain their position in the balance of forces through continuous struggle. The moment that struggle stops or weakens, the position gained is quickly lost. Held within a reformist horizon, social rights gained through struggle immediately come under attack by systemic logics seeking to roll them back. Representative democracy and the rule of law are, to be sure, achievements of bourgeois revolution. Formal equality and the principle of consent are political compensations for submission to economic competition and exploitation. But this kind of democracy excludes a reorganization that would eliminate exploitative relations altogether; it couldn’t be a pathway out of capitalism without being at the same time the collective suicide of the class that dominates it. And the contemporary forms of capitalist democracy have long been compromised institutions. The influence of the power-money-media nexus over policy and the conditioning of public opinion probably has never been stronger. Contemporary democracies typically are little more than phantom processes for producing the gestures and illusions of consent and freedom. Never was the system’s indifference to expressions of real democracy demonstrated as vividly as in February 2003, when some ten million people took to the streets in cities around the world and, in the largest linked demonstrations in world history, responded to the imminent US invasion of Iraq with a resounding no! As for habeas corpus and the rule of law, civil and human rights are in theory precious protections from arbitrary power. But in practice capitalist power always has the option to ignore them by declaring a state of exception. When such protections are most needed, they revert to mere words on paper that cannot be counted on. They therefore cannot be the basis of strategy, though a strategic anti-capitalism would not be in conflict with them. When rights are abused and the rule of law degraded, as they are under the “war on terror,” then anti-capitalists are right to demand their immediate restoration. The revolutionary process cannot slip behind or below the level of bourgeois human rights, even if only a world beyond capitalism could be the substantive realization of their promise. Many today are spooked by the word “revolution,” and not without reason, given the carnage and catastrophes of the last century. Yet it cannot be avoided, if we want out of this social misery, permanent war, perpetual catastrophe. Only a revolutionary process could change bad reality by reorganizing it. And only reforms that function strategically within a revolutionary process escape the traps of reformism. The problem, always, is what to do and how to do it.

Part 2/3 will be posted Friday, June 12