On Radical-Leftist Strategy: Propositions for Discussion, Part 2 of 3

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On Radical-Leftist Strategy: Propositions for Discussion, Part 2 of 3

by Alonzo Alcanzar

11. Again: Overcoming capitalism as a global system of exploitation and control means breaking the hold of capitalist power and reorganizing relations in the sphere of production.

The redistribution of power there, in the organization of the labor by which humanity produces its basic needs, would be the precondition of a non-exploitative society. Systematically eliminating exploitation would not automatically liberate humanity from all forms of conflict, domination and oppression. But it would be the necessary beginning. On this basis alone could further steps be taken, aiming to liberate humanity – all people everywhere – as far as possible from the burdens of labor as such. This is the point on which traditional revolutionary theory is most cogent. In volume three of Capital, Marx makes clear that we can’t expect to eliminate work completely. The requirements of materially reproducing humanity – of feeding and sheltering our bodies and meeting our basic needs – means we will always have to share a minimum of labor, even in the most egalitarian society. But the prospect of a socially liberated and collectively managed technology promises that this minimum could be reduced through automation to something humane and tolerable, something we could live with, globally. Basic needs met, to really decide together freely about further production and surpluses would truly be a new beginning. The leap from necessity to the realm of freedom becomes plausible with this reduction of work time, with free access to and democratic control over education and culture freed from the pressures of an antagonistic social context, eventually with the progressive dissolution of the division of labor and the state itself. If the sobering constraint of needing continuously to meet basic human needs at every moment of the revolutionary process is kept in mind, then it becomes clear that there could not be an immediate global leap to reconciliation and positive freedom. The conditions have to be constructed through a transitional period of radical reorganization. Despite historical bad blood, anarchism, autonomism, socialism and communism converge on the far other side of a successful struggle with capitalist power. The socialists and communists are perhaps more realistic in pointing out that the state can’t wither away without the mediating period of transition in which the passage out of capitalist relations opened by the revolutionary process is defended against organized global reaction. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” is indeed a monstrous name for this transition to socialized production, but the moment of realism expressed in it should not be lost: revolution will be attacked by material force, and if it cannot organize an adequate counter-power to defend itself, then it will not survive. This constraining reality cannot be avoided. It points to a weakness in some of the theories that inform versions of contemporary autonomism. And whatever we provisionally choose to call this projected form of new social life – autonomism, radically democratic socialism, libertarian communism – its actualization cannot be immediate, but will only be won by successful struggle on a global level. Hence the urgent need for strategy.



12. The strategic problem lies in the tension between two justly famous passages by Marx.

It is not a matter, here, of citing scripture or unquestionable authority. The idea that Marx could see everything and made no mistakes is ridiculous and misrecognizes what he did achieve. If these sentences stand the test of time and can help us focus a strategic reflection, it is because they vividly express the difficult passage that any adequate revolutionary process would have to make. The first passage, written in 1844, points to the material force that is the ever-renewing source of the revolutionary process: “Clearly the weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons, and material force must be overthrown with material force. But theory too becomes a material force as soon as it grips the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But the root for humans is humanity itself.”

13. The argument is rigorous, the conclusion strategic: humanity is the ultimate stake of social struggle.

This is to say that humanity is a social concept, a product of human activity. But also a negativity: the non-identity and promise of reconciliation that haunt antagonistic social life. The revolutionary material force of the exploited, oppressed and dominated is the insight – embodied, grasped by the senses, lived as an urgency – that human beings can be more, that they are, in their very humanity, an open process that points beyond the socially crippled forms of life lived under capitalism. Beyond the struggle to reproduce bodily life, we all have needs and potentials that develop along with the level of collective human capacity, the so-called general intellect: productive forces, technology, the sum of human knowledges in all the arts and sciences. By exploiting human labor and organizing life as a war of each against all, capitalism drove this process of expanding human powers and needs. But the social forms that at first enriched humanity, and promised its liberation and enlightenment, eventually blocked and impoverished it. As a logic that developed an autonomous power of its own, capitalism made and remade human beings according to its needs, and not theirs. It produced a certain kind of humanity, but the poverty and limits of this humanity are everywhere visible, even on the glossiest surfaces of commodified abundance. More than that, beyond even the social misery that exposes the paradoxical anti-humanism of this system, ecological degradation and global climate change teach us today that this form of life is irrationally destructive of the shared conditions of life on earth and thus hostile to life itself. All this we experience as the need for a leap beyond this form of humanity to a better one – to a form of social organization that would help us to develop and realize our human powers without exploiting, oppressing and dominating each other and without ruining our shared ecological base. The whole of this experience – which is a radical knowledge, a bodily knowledge that grips us, a lived conclusion of the senses – is a material force and biopolitics, our revolutionary power.

14. In this first passage, then, Marx points to our strength, our material force, an indispensable source of our collective will and agency, our power to create our history and change our world.

Against more orthodox and mechanical forms of Marxism that would arrest or even suppress the dialectic of spirit and matter in struggle, the young Marx reminds us that spiritual strength is itself a material force, a real strategic factor in the balance of forces in struggle. The philosophy that so far has merely interpreted the world is theory cut off from revolutionary praxis. By radically reposing the problem of humanity as an open and socially produced concept, theory returns to the spiritual source of historical agency.

15. In the second passage, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte of 1852, he points to the constraints on our agency, the power that opposes us, that of our enemy, the system itself: “Humans make their own history, but they do not do it just as they please; they do not make it under conditions chosen by themselves but under conditions directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Here Marx is criticizing the tendency to repeat the forms of past revolutions without going beyond their content. The revolutionary process that will open a pathway beyond capitalism “cannot draw its poetry from the past,” he goes on to say, “but only from the future.” The content of that future is the better, enriched, transformed humanity struggling to emerge from the current, blocked and crippled one. Out of the inherited conditions – the given social misery and the dominant power of the given order, its institutions and apparatuses, techniques and processes of reproduction and enforcement – we must create a “revolutionary point of departure, the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone modern revolution becomes serious.” The revolutionary process of reorganizing the relations between us – our social forms and institutions, in short the whole social process of life – has to be developed from current reality in all its fluid weight and dynamic inertia.

16. We have to get there from here, the social given, the real world:

This is what the passage tells us. The struggle is here and now, and the revolutionary process must open a pathway to the future from the given reality. Otherwise: bad utopianism. And here and now, the enemy is powerful – overwhelmingly, terrifyingly so. Giving due weight to each of the two passages, and looking soberly at the character of the here and now, we can draw a provisional conclusion. The revolutionary process cannot be a matter of fighting a war of annihilation against the class enemy who directs and benefits from this power of the system. Given the balance of military and economic forces, this would not be possible, in any case. It is rather a matter of developing a strategy grounded in our true material force, instead of a false strategy grounded in the power of the enemy.

17. The exploited, oppressed and dominated – we could call this the revolutionary class, as long as we understand it is only potentially so, and not automatically or mechanically – cannot directly confront the main material force of the enemy.

The global state apparatuses of enforcement, repression and terror have become too strong to attack head on. And even in places and moments where one state may be weak, the other states of the global system collectively are not weak at all and will move swiftly and ruthlessly to crush revolutionary openings. This has been the experience of the last century. In the twentieth-century, revolutionary movements to establish socialism suffered costly defeats – corrupted by counter-revolution within or ground down by it from without. Fascism – capitalism’s emergency mutation for attacking revolutionary movements – did awful damage to the revolutionary process. This attack dog was put down by the allied states of liberal capitalism and the Soviet Union – but not before it was allowed to do its work. In the world that emerged from this traumatic experience, the struggles of decolonization and national liberation were pulverized, even where they appeared to win, between the two dominant forms of post-1945 imperialism, US and Soviet. Such was the Cold War. The system proved resilient, riding out the global revolutionary upsurges of the late 1960s and 70s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire of so-called Peoples’ Democracies was experienced as a political liberation from repressive state regimes. But it was not only this. The removal of capitalism’s ideological other, however false or cynical that ideology had become under Stalinism, at the same time removed the only counterweight within the inter-state system to the global expansion of capitalism in untrammeled form. The intensification of exploitation by enforced structural adjustment programs – so-called neo-liberalism – led to deepening social misery for millions of people. A resurgence of protest and resistance – from Chiapas, to Seoul, to Durban, to London, Seattle, Genoa and dozens of other places – quickly ran up against the limits and intransigence of the system. These converging social struggles, however, were soon overshadowed and displaced by the bold and appalling attacks of al-Qaeda. The permanent, dirty so-called war on terror that followed opened the doors to a new politics of fear and a possibly qualitative expansion of the security-surveillance state. Under these conditions – “directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” – emancipatory social struggles remain fragmented and incoherent, unable to develop global critical mass or collective agency.

18. Capitalism is not centrally controlled, but capitalist power is strategically coordinated through states and globalized institutions and enforced by state security forces and their various proxies.

The Communist International and vanguard party-form once played a similar strategic role for the working class. With Stalinism, “socialism in one country,” and the subordination of internationalism to Soviet national interest, the parties and Comintern were corrupted beyond any possible rescue or repair. The working class itself belatedly rendered its verdict, carrying out a “practical critique” of the party-form by abandoning it en masse. Given what it had become, the workers were not wrong at all. In the wake, however, there is an organizational vacuum and strategic deficit. The exploited, oppressed and dominated have no way at this time to organize their material force and shared desires into a collective agency capable of countering or defending themselves against capitalist power. Today, there are no viable global organizations to strategize and coordinate the revolutionary process, the struggle to open – and defend – a passage out of capitalism. The development of an adequate and effective revolutionary strategy requires the critical study of the defeats of the last century. But it also requires the close and continuous study of the enemy’s current forces, strategies and tactics. Beyond the capacity of any individual, this is necessarily a collective task and project that must be organized. The enemy has war colleges and funds think tanks; it systematically develops weapons systems and contingency plans, and it trains its forces incessantly. The revolutionary process cannot mirror these institutions without becoming the enemy itself. This, too, is a lesson of the last century. Nevertheless, the revolution needs to develop its own qualitative organizations – and these, minimally, would need to be able to support strategic activity in an equally focused, sustained and committed manner. The tactical affinity groups and alter-globalization networks of the movement of movements now have to build up more durable and strategically effective forms of internationalist struggle.

19. The exploited, oppressed and dominated – we, that is: the whole global aggregate of latent revolutionary subjects – are still a potential class, but one in reality fissured by stratifications and conflicts of interest that continuously deepen and exploit difference and pit groups against each other.

At the top, the merely dominated in the Global North enjoy high standards of living and remnants of relative autonomy; at the bottom, in the sprawling slums and shantytowns of the South, a billion people deemed unneeded are left to rot or implode. As a whole, the sum of these groups still produces all the social wealth. Were this aggregate to organize itself and act collectively, it would still wield the power of withholding its labor and could potentially launch projects of radical social reorganization. Evidently, it does not do so. In the old language, it is a class in-itself that is not yet (or no more) a class for-itself. The reasons why lie in the defeats of last century, but also in real social processes of class decomposition. The social effects of contemporary capitalism and reactionary politics have tended to disintegrate the social bases of internationalist class struggles while simultaneously integrating populations through national and ethnic identities. Recomposing a revolutionary process of struggle from these social givens, here and now, could only mean rebuilding mass movements from alliances of class fractions of the exploited, oppressed and dominated. Obviously the members of this aggregate do not share identical life possibilities and expectations. Some have much to lose and will tend to be conservative. Others are pushed by conditions into perspectives that are or could easily become revolutionary. The gap between these two social positions and the subjectivities that correspond to them is immense. However, organizing an overcoming of this gap is not necessarily impossible.

20. The struggles over so-called identity politics – epitomized in their emancipatory form by feminism and the great anti-racist struggles of the last century – have been inspiring and, obviously, are to be supported as resistance to persistent forms of oppression and domination.

They cannot, however, replace the struggle against exploitation at the strategic level. Where the struggles of oppressed and dominated minorities do not link up with the struggle against exploitation, they offer no resistance to capitalist power Indeed, to the extent that the social antagonism of exploitative relations goes unaddressed, identity politics becomes a divisive displacement of the antagonism – a displacement that contributes to the decomposition of the larger, potential class in struggle and actually aligns with processes of capitalist rationalization aiming to make the system function more efficiently. The way to global re-composition through struggle passes through the open question of humanity as a whole. Global crises – not just economic but ecological now as well, including resource depletion and species extinction, climate change and extreme weather events – potentially reanimate the problem of humanity as such, as soon as the causal links that connect them to capitalism and its systemic logics are demonstrated and clarified. To reach the level of interest shared by all members of the exploited, oppressed and dominated, it is necessary to go back to the root – to return the focus to the disastrous planetary inadequacies of the capitalist conception of humanity and the possibilities of going beyond it.

Part 3/3 will be posted Wednesday, June 17.