Learning to Fly

A Radical Spectacle?

2009-08-30T12:30:00.005-05:00

Here's an article taken from the Kasama Project website.

Politics in an Age of Fantasy
By Stephen Duncombe

REALITY, FANTASY AND POLITICS

In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles, it was well written, well researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn’t listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon-to-be-infamous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in oversized, multi-colored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn’t care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times’ liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.

What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I’ve had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much animosity among liberals and the left and felt something else: excited, inspired … and jealous. Whereas the commonsense view held that Bush’s candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.

How could my reaction be so different from that of so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there was something about progressive politics that had become increasingly problematic. The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The left and right have switched roles – the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. The political progeny of the protestors who proclaimed, “Take your desires for reality” in May of 1968, were now counseling the reversal: take reality for your desires. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”

Progressive dreams, and the spectacles that give them tangible form, will look different than those conjured up by the Bush administration or the commercial directors of what critic Neil Gabler calls Life, the Movie. Different not only in content – this should be obvious – but in form. Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it. Illusion may be a necessary part of political life, but delusion need not be.

Perhaps the most important reason for progressives to make their peace with the politics of dreaming has little to do with the immediate task of winning consent or creating dissent, but has instead to do with long-term vision. Without dreams we will never be able to imagine the new world we want to build. From the 1930s until the 1980s political conservatives in this country were lost: out of power and out of touch. Recalling those days, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s senior political adviser, says: “We were relegated to the desert.” While many a pragmatic Republican moved to the center, a critical core kept wandering in that desert, hallucinating a political world considered fantastic by postwar standards: a preemptive military, radical tax cuts, eroding the line between church and state, ending welfare, and privatizing Social Security. Look where their dreams are today.

PARTICIPATORY SPECTACLE

All spectacle counts on popular participation. The fascist rallies in Japan, Italy, and Germany; the military parades through Moscow’s Red Square; the halftime shows at the Super Bowl – all demand an audience to march, stand, or do the wave. Even the more individualistic spectacle of advertising depends upon the distant participation of the spectator, who must become a consumer. But the public in both fascist and commercial spectacles only participates from the outside, as a set piece on a stage imagined and directed by someone else. As Siegfried Kracauer, a German film critic writing in the 1920s about “the mass ornament,” the public spectacles that prefigured Nazi rallies, observed, “Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved in thinking it through.”

Ethical spectacle demands a different sort of participation. The people who participate in the performance of the spectacle must also contribute to its construction. As opposed to the spectacles of commercialism and fascism, the public in an ethical spectacle is not considered a stage prop, but a co-producer and co-director. This is nothing radical, merely the application of democratic principles to the spectacles that govern our lives. If it is reasonable to demand that we have a say in how our schools are run or who is elected president, why shouldn’t we have the right to participate in the planning and carrying out of spectacle?

A participatory spectacle is not a spontaneous one; an organizer… needs to set the stage for participation to happen. But the mission of the organizer of an ethical spectacle differs from that of other spectacles. She has her eyes on two things. First is the overall look of the spectacle – that is, the desires being expressed, the dreams being displayed, the outcome being hoped for. In this way her job is the same as the fascist propagandist or the Madison Avenue creative director. But then she has another job. She must create a situation in which popular participation not only can happen but must happen for the spectacle to come to fruition.

The theorist/activists of the Situationists made a useful distinction between spectacle and situation. The spectacle they condemned as a site of “nonintervention”; there was simply no space for a spectator to intervene in what he or she was watching because it demanded only passivity and acquiescence. The Situationists saw it as their mission to fight against “the society of the spectacle,” but they also felt a responsibility to set something else in motion to replace it. “We must try and construct situations,” their master theorist Guy Debord wrote in 1957. These “situations” were no less staged events than fascist rallies, but their goal was different. The Situationists encouraged people to dérive – drift through unfamiliar city streets – and they showed mass culture films after “detourning” the dialogue, dubbing the actor’s lines to comment upon (or make nonsense of) the film being shown and the commercial culture from which it came. These situations, it was hoped, would create “collective ambiances,” which encouraged participants to break out of the soporific routine of the society of the spectacle and participate in the situation unfolding around them: to make sense of new streets and sights, look at celluloid images in a new and different way, and thereby alter people’s relationship to their material and media environment. As Debord wrote: “The role played by a passive or merely bit-playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.” Whereas actors play out a tight script written by another, “livers” write their own script through their actions within a given setting. The ideal of the “situation” was to set the stage for “transformative action.”

TRANSPARENT SPECTACLE

Spectacle needn’t pass itself off as reality to be effective in engaging the spectator. At least this was the hope of the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was disturbed by what he saw of the theater that surrounded him in Germany between the wars. With most theater (and movies and TV) the goal is to construct an illusion so complete that the audience will be drawn away from their world and into the fantasy on stage. This seduction is essential to traditional dramaturgy. First theorized by Aristotle in his Poetics, it stresses audience identification with the drama on stage: when an actor cries, you are supposed to cry; when he triumphs, you triumph as well. This allure is aided by staging that strives toward realism or captivates the audience with lavish displays of full-blown fantasy… Such drama “works” insofar as the audience is well entertained, but there is a political cost. Entranced, the audience suspends critical thought, and all action is sequestered to the stage. A “cowed, credulous, hypnotized mass,” Brecht described these spectators, “these people seem relieved of activity and like men to whom something is being done. It’s a pretty accurate description of the problem with most spectacle.

As a progressive, Brecht was horrified by this response of the theatergoing audience. He wanted to use his plays to motivate people to change the world, not escape from it. He understood that no matter how radical the content of his plays might be, if his audience lost itself in the illusion of his play and allowed the actors to do the action for them, then they would leave their politics up on the stage when the play was over.

Brecht believed that one could change the way drama is done and thus change its impact on the audience. Borrowing from the Chinese stage, he developed a dramaturgical method called epic theater. Central to epic theater was the Verfremdungseffekt, a term he mercifully shortened to the V-effect, which, translated into English, means roughly “alienation effect.” Instead of drawing people into a seamless illusion, Brecht strove to push them away – to alienate them – so that they would never forget that they were watching a play.

To accomplish the V-effect, Brecht and others, notably the Berlin director Erwin Piscator, who staged many of Brecht’s plays, developed a whole battery of innovative techniques: giving away the ending of the play at the beginning, having actors remind the audience that they are actors, humorous songs which interrupt tragic scenes, music which runs counter to mood, cue cards informing the audience that a scene is changing, stagehands appearing on stage to move props, and so on. Brecht even championed the idea of a “smokers’ theater” with the stage shrouded in thick smoke exhaled by a cigar-puffing audience – anything to break the seamless illusion of traditional theater.

While the function of the V-effect was to alienate his audience, it is a misreading of Brecht’s intentions to think that he wanted to create a theater that couldn’t be enjoyed. Nothing could be further from his mind. He heaped ridicule on an avant garde who equated unpopularity with artistic integrity and insisted that the job of the dramaturge is to entertain, demanding that theater be “enjoyable to the senses.” For both political and dramaturgical reasons he rejected the preaching model of persuasion; he wanted his audiences to have fun, not attend a lecture. Deconstructing the mind/body binary, Brecht believed that one could speak to reason and the senses. One could see through the spectacle and enjoy it nonetheless: a transparent spectacle.

Brecht’s V-effect has been adopted, in some cases quite consciously, by some of the more theatrical activist groups. Recall the Billionaires for Bush. Wearing long gowns and tiaras, tuxedos and top hats, the activists playing billionaires don’t hope to pass themselves off as the real thing. Real billionaires wear artfully distressed designer jeans; these Billionaires look like characters out of a game of Monopoly. Because their artifice is obvious, there is no deception of their audience. They are not seen as people who are, but instead as people who are presenting. Because of this the Billionaires’ message of wealth inequality and the corruption of money on politics is not passively absorbed by spectators identifying with character or scene, but consciously understood by an audience watching an obvious performance.

Furthermore, the spectacle the Billionaires present is so patently playacted, so unnatural, that the absurd unnaturality of a caucus of “people of wealth” advocating for their own rights is highlighted. This is, of course, what American democracy has become: a system where money buys power to protect money. This is no secret, but that’s part of the problem. The corruption of democracy is so well known that it is tacitly accepted as the natural course of things. One of the functions of the V-effect is to alienate the familiar: to take what is common sense and ask why it is so common – as Brecht put it: “to free socially conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today.” By acting out the roles of obviously phony billionaires buying politicians for their own advantage, the Billionaires encourage the viewer of their spectacle to step back and look critically at the taken-for-grantedness of a political system where money has a voice, prodding them to question: “Isn’t it really the current political system that’s absurd?” The transparency of the spectacle allows the spectator to look through what is being presented to the reality of what is there.

Unlike the opaque spectacles of commercialism and fascism, which always make claims to the truth, a progressive spectacle invites the viewer to see through it: to acknowledge its essential “falsity” while being moved by it nonetheless. Most spectacle strives for seamlessness; ethical spectacle reveals its own workings. Most spectacle employs illusion in the pretense of portraying reality; ethical spectacle demonstrates the reality of its own illusions. Ethical spectacle reminds the viewer that the spectacle is never reality, but always a spectacle. In this way, ironically, spectacle becomes real.

REAL SPECTACLE

For spectacle to be ethical it must not only reveal itself as what it is but also have as its foundation something real. At this point it is worth reiterating my initial argument that to embrace spectacle does not mean a radical rejection of the empirical real and the verifiably true. It is merely acknowledging that the real and the true are not self-evident: they need to be told and sold. The goal of the ethical spectacle is not to replace the real with the spectacle, but to reveal and amplify the real through the spectacle. Think of this as an inversion of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous case to the United Nations for war in Iraq. Armed with reasoned reports and documentary photos of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, Powell employed the tools of fact to make the case for the full-blown fantasy of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Ethical spectacle employs the opposite strategy: the tools of spectacle as a way to mobilize support for the facts. As such, an ethical spectacle must start with reality.

An ethical spectacle must address the real dreams and desires of people – not the dreams and desires that progressives think they should, could, or “if they knew what was good for them” would have, but the ones people actually do have, no matter how trivial, politically incorrect, or even impossible they seem. How we address these dreams and desires is a political decision, but we must acknowledge and respond to them if we want people to identify with our politics. To engage the real as part of an ethical spectacle is not the same thing as being limited by the current confines of reality. For reality is not the end but a point of beginning – a firm foundation on which to build the possible, or to stand upon while dreaming the impossible.

DREAM SPECTACLE

The poet Eduardo Galeano writes of utopia: She’s on the horizon…

I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking.

This is the goal of the ethical spectacle as well. The error is to see the spectacle as the new world. This is what both fascist and commercial spectacle does, and in this way the spectacle becomes a replacement for dreaming. Ethical spectacle offers up a different formulation. Instead of a dream’s replacement, the ethical spectacle is a dream put on display. It is a dream that we can watch, think about, act within, try on for size, yet necessarily never realize. The ethical spectacle is a means, like the dreams it performs, to imagine new ends. As such, the ethical spectacle has the possibility of creating an outside – as an illusion. This is not the delusion of believing that you have created an outside, but an illusion that gives direction and motivation that might just get you there.

I would love to give an example of the ideal ethical spectacle, one which incorporates all the properties listed above. I can’t. There isn’t one. The ideal ethical spectacle is like a dream itself: something to work, and walk, toward. Progressives have a lot of walking to do. We need to do this with our feet on the ground, with a clear understanding of the real (and imaginary) terrain of the country. But we also need to dream, for without dreams we won’t know where we are walking to.

Progressive dreams, to have any real political impact, need to become popular dreams. This will only happen if they resonate with the dreams that people already have – like those expressed in commercial culture today, and even those manifested through fascism in the past. But for progressive dreams to stand a chance of becoming popular, they, too, need to be displayed. Our dreams do little good locked inside our heads and sequestered within our small circles; they need to be heard and seen, articulated and performed – yelled from the mountaintop. This is the job of spectacle. Spectacle is already part of our political and economic life; the important question is whose ethics does it embody and whose dreams does it express.

© 2007 Stephen Duncombe

Stephen Duncombe’s new book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy makes the case for a progressive politics that embraces fantasy and spectacle, images and symbols, emotion and desire. In essence, a new political aesthetic: a kind of dreampolitik, created not simply to further existing progressive agendas but to help us imagine new ones. These are extracts from the book, which was published by The New Press in January 2007. For more details about the book, the author and the publishers check out www.dreampolitik.org or www.thenewpress.com

"In Vietnam the Brass are the true Enemy, not the enemy."

2009-08-28T11:49:00.005-05:00

The following is a report written in 1971 by Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. on the state of the United States military during the Vietnam War. It has been edited for posting here so as to focus on the resistance of the soldiers to the war and the US military. There are many other useful things covered in this report, and you can find it in its entirety here.

As is always the case, this article is posted for discussion and should not be taken as having an analysis shared by Learning to Fly. This article is clearly written by a reactionary scrotch. Enjoy.

Introduction

The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress as well as the executive branch, distrusted, disliked, and often reviled by the public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professions who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.

The responses of the services to these unheard-of conditions, forces and new public
attitudes, are confused, resentful, occasional pollyanna-ish, and in some cases even calculated to worsen the malaise that is wracking. While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assessment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous support in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career noncommissioned officers and petty officers in all services.

Historical precedents do not exist for some of the services' problems, such as desertion, mutiny, unpopularity, seditious attacks, and racial troubles. Others, such as drugs, pose difficulties that are wholly NEW. Nowhere, however, in the history of the Armed Forces have comparable past troubles presented themselves in such general magnitude, acuteness, or concentrated focus as today.

By several orders of magnitude, the Army seems to be in worse trouble. But the Navy has serious and unprecedented problems, while the Air Force, on the surface at least still clear of the quicksands in which the Army is sinking, is itself facing disquieting difficulties.

Only the Marines - who have made news this year by their hard line against indiscipline and general permissiveness - seem with their expected staunchness and tough tradition, to be weathering the storm.

Back To The Campus

To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.

"They have set up separate companies," writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, "for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don't even put on their uniforms any more... The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key...There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion."

Can all this really be typical or even truthful?

Unfortunately the answer is yes.

"Frag incidents" or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield's Montana was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970(109) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96).

Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.
In one such division -- the morale plagued Americal -- fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.

Yet fraggings, though hard to document, form part of the ugly lore of every war. The first such verified incident known to have taken place occurred 190 years ago when Pennsylvania soldiers in the Continental Army killed one of their captains during the night of 1 January 1781.

Bounties And Evasions

Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.

Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969,the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, "G.I. Says", publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the officer who ordered(and led) the attack. Despite several attempts, however, Honeycutt managed to live out his tour and return Stateside.
"Another Hamburger Hill," (i.e., toughly contested assault), conceded a veteran major, is definitely out."
The issue of "combat refusal", and official euphemism for disobedience of orders to fight -- the soldier's gravest crime – has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry's mass refusal to recapture their captain's command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders.

As early as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused -- on CBS-TV -- to advance down a dangerous trail.

(Yet combat refusals have been heard of before: as early as 1813,a corps of 4,000 Kentucky soldiers declined to engage British Indians who just sacked and massacred Ft Dearborn (later Chicago).)

While denying further unit refusals the Air Cav has admitted some 35 individual refusals in 1970 alone. By comparison, only two years earlier in 1968, the entire number of officially recorded refusals for our whole army in Vietnam -- from over seven divisions - was 68.

"Search and evade" (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, "CYA (cover your ass) and get home!"

That "search-and-evade" has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted - not without foundation in fact - that American defectors are in the VC ranks.

Symbolic anti-war fasts (such as the one at Pleiku where an entire medical unit, led by its officers, refused Thanksgiving turkey), peace symbols, "V"-signs not for victory but for peace, booing and cursing of officers and even of hapless entertainers such as Bob Hope, are unhappily commonplace.

As for drugs and race, Vietnam’s problems today not only reflect but reinforce those of t he Armed Forces as a whole. In April, for example, members of a Congressional investigating subcommittee reported that 120 to 15% of our troops in Vietnam are now using high-grade heroin, and that drug addiction there is "of epidemic proportions."

Only last year an Air Force major and command pilot for Ambassador Bunker was apprehended at Ton Son Nhut air base outside Saigon with $8 million worth of heroin in his aircraft. The major is now in Leavenworth.
Early this year, and Air force regular colonel was court-martialed and cashiered for leading his squadron in pot parties, while, at Cam Ranh Air Force Base, 43 members of the base security police squadron were recently swept up in dragnet narcotics raids.

All the foregoing facts – and mean more dire indicators of the worse kind of military trouble – point to widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.

Society Notes

It is a truism that national armies closely reflect societies from which they have been raised. It would be strange indeed if the Armed Forces did not today mirror the agonizing divisions and social traumas of American society, and of course they do.

For this very reason, our Armed Forces outside Vietnam not only reflect these conditions but disclose the depths of their troubles in an awful litany of sedition, disaffection, desertion, race, drugs, breakdowns of authority, abandonment of discipline, and, as a cumulative result, the lowest state of military morale in the history of the country.

Sedition – coupled with disaffection within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable – infests the Armed Services:

At best count, there appear to be some 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas. Since 1970 the number of such sheets has increased 40% (up from 103 last fall). These journals are not mere gripe-sheets that poke soldier fun in the "Beetle Bailey" tradition, at the brass and the sergeants. "In Vietnam," writes the Ft Lewis-McChord Free Press, "the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy." Another West Coast sheet advises readers: "Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer."

At least 14 GI dissent organizations (including two made up exclusively of officers) now operate more or less /31/ openly. Ancillary to these are at least six antiwar veterans’ groups which strive to influence GIs.
Three well-established lawyer groups specialize in support of GI dissent. Two (GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee and new York Draft and Military Law Panel) operate in the open. A third is a semi-underground network of lawyers who can only be contacted through the GI Alliance, a Washing, D.C., group which tries to coordinate seditious antimilitary activities throughout the country.

One antimilitary legal effort operates right in the theater of war. A three-man law office, backed by the Lawyers’ Military Defense Committee, of Cambridge, Mass., was set up last fall in Saigon to provide free civilian legal services for dissident soldiers being court-martialed in Vietnam.

Besides these lawyers’ fronts, the Pacific Counseling Service (an umbrella organization with Unitarian backing for a prolifery of antimilitary activities) provides legal help and incitement to dissident GIs through not one but seven branches (Tacoma, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey, Tokyo, and Okinawa).

Another of Pacific Counseling’s activities is to air-drop planeloads of sedition literature into Oakland’s sprawling Army Base, our major West Coast staging point for Vietnam

On the religious front, a community of turbulent priests and clergymen, some unfrocked, calls itself the Order of Maximilian. Maximilian is a saint said to have been martyred by the Romans for refusing military service as un-Christian. Maximilian’s present-day followers visit military posts, infiltrate brigs and stockades in the guise of spiritual counseling, work to recruit military chaplains, and hold services of "consecrations" of post chapels in the name of their saintly draft-dodger.

By present count at least 11 (some go as high as 26) off-base antiwar "coffee houses" ply GIs with rock music, lukewarm coffee, antiwar literature, how-t-do-it tips on desertion, and similar disruptive counsels. Among the best-known coffee houses are: The Shelter Half (Ft Lewis, Wash.); The Home Front (Ft Carson, Colo.); and The Oleo Strut (Ft Hood, Tex.).

Virtually all the coffee houses are or have been supported by the U.S. Serviceman’s Fund, whose offices are in new York City’s Bronx. Until may 1970 the Fund was recognized as a tax-exempt "charitable corporations," a determination which changed when IRS agents found that its main function was sowing dissention among GIs and that it was a satellite of "The new Mobilization Committee", a communist-front organization aimed at disruption of the Armed Forces.

The Action Groups

Not unsurprisingly, the end-product of the atmosphere of incitement of unpunished sedition, and of recalcitrant antimilitary malevolence which pervades the world of the draftee (and to an extent the low-ranking men in "volunteer" services, too) is overt action.

One militant West Coast Group, Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM), has specialized in weapons theft from military bases in California. During 1970, large armory thefts were successfully perpetrated against Oakland Army Base, Vets Cronkhite and Ord, and even the marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton, where a team wearing Marine uniforms got away with nine M-16 rifles and an M-79 grenade launcher.

Operating in the middle West, three soldiers from Ft Carson, Colo., home of the Army’s permissive experimental unite, the 4th Mechanized Division, were recently indicted by a federal grand jury for dynamiting the telephone exchange, power plant and water works of another Army installation, Camp McCoy, Wis., on 26 July 1970.
The Navy, particularly on the West Coast, has also experienced disturbing cases of sabotage in the past two years, mainly directed at ships’ engineering and electrical machinery.

It will be surprising, according to informed officers, if further such tangible evidence of disaffection within the ranks does not continue to come to light. Their view is that the situation could become considerably worse before it gets better.

Desertions and Disasters

With conditions what they are in the Armed Forces, and with intense efforts on the part of elements in our society to disrupt discipline and destroy morale the consequences can be clearly measured in two ultimate indicators: man-power retention (reenlistments and their antithesis, desertions); and the state of discipline.
In both respects the picture is anything but encouraging.

Desertion, to be sure, has often been a serious problem in the past. In 1826, for example, desertions exceeded 50% of the total enlistments in the Army. During the Civil War, in 1864, Jefferson Davis reported to the Confederate Congress: "Two thirds of our men are absent, most absent without leave."

Desertion rates are going straight up in Army, Marines, and Air Force. Curiously, however, during the period since 1968 when desertion has nearly doubled for all three other services, the Navy’s rate has risen by less than 20 percent.

In 1970, the Army had 65,643 deserters, or roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions. This desertion rate (52.3 soldiers per thousand) is well over twice the peak rate for Korea (22.5 per thousand). It is more than quadruple the 1966 desertion-rate (14.7 per thousand) of the ten well-trained, high-spirited professional Army.
If desertions continue to rise(as they are still doing this year), they will attain or surpass the WWII peak of 63 per thousand, which, incidentally, occurred in the same year (1945) when more soldiers were actually being discharged from the Army for psychoneurosis than were drafted.

The Air Force, -- relatively uninvolved in the Vietnam war, all-volunteer, management-oriented rather than disciplinary and hierarchic – enjoys a numerical rate of less that one deserter per thousand men, but even this is double what it was three years ago.

The marines in 1970 had the highest desertion index in the modern history of the Corps and, for that year at least, slightly higher than the Army’s. As the Marines now phase out of Vietnam (and haven’t taken a draftee in nearly two years), their desertions are expected to decrease sharply. Meanwhile, grimly remarked one officer, "let the bastards go. We’re all the better without them."

Letting the bastards go is something the Marines can probably afford. "The Marine Corps Isn’t Looking for a Lot of Recruits," reads a current recruiting /36/ poster, "We Just Need a Few Good Men." This is the happy situation of a Corps slimming down to an elite force again composed of true volunteers who want to be professionals.
But letting the bastards go doesn’t work at all for the Army and the Navy, who do need a lot of recruits and whose reenlistment problems are dire.

Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., chief of naval Operations, minces no words. "We have a personnel crisis," he recently said, "that borders on disaster."

The Navy’s crisis, as Zumwalt accurately describes it, is that of a highly technical, material oriented service that finds itself unable to retain the expensively-trained technicians needed to operate warships, which are the largest, most complex items of machinery that man makes and uses.

Non-Volunteer Force?

If 45% of his sailors shipped over after their first enlistment, Admiral Zumwalt would be all smiles. With only 13% doing so, he is growing sideburns to enhance the Navy’s appeal to youth.
Among the Army’s volunteer (non-draftee) soldiers on their first hitch, the figures are much the same: less than 14% re-up.

The Air Force is slightly, but not much, better off: 16% of its first-termers stay on.
Moreover – and this is the heart of the Army’s dilemma – only 4 % of the voluntary enlistees now choose service in combat arms (infantry, armor, artillery) and of those only 2.5% opt for infantry. Today’s soldiers, it seems, volunteer readily enough for the tail of the Army, but not for its teeth.

For all services, the combined retention rate this past year is about half what it was in 1966, and the lowest since the bad times of similar low morale and national disenchantment after Korea.

Both Army and navy are responding to their manpower problems in measures intended to seduce recruits and reenlistees: disciplinary permissiveness, abolition of reveille and KP, fewer inspections, longer haircuts – essentially cosmetic changes aimed at softening (and blurring) traditional military and naval images.

Amid such changes (not unlike the Army’s 1946 Doolittle Board coincidences intended in their similar postwar day to sweeten life for the privates), those which are not cosmetic at all may well exert profound and deleterious effects on the leadership, command authority and discipline of the services.

Soulbone Connected to the Backbone

"Discipline," George Washington once remarked, "is the soul of an army."
Washington should know. In January 1781, all the Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops in the Continental Army mutinied. Washington only quelled the outbreaks by disarming the Jersey mutineers and having their leaders shot in hollow square – by a firing squad made up of fellow mutineers.
(the navy’s only mutiny, aboard USS Somers in 1842, was quelled when the captain hanged the mutineers from the yardarm while still at sea.)

If Washington was correct (and almost any professional soldier, whether officer or NCO, will agree), then the Armed Forces today are in deep trouble.

What enhances this trouble, by exponential dimensions, is the kind of manpower with which the Armed Forces now have to work. As early as three years ago, U.S. News and World Report reported that the services were already plagued with "… a new breed of man, who thinks he is his own Secretary of ?State, Secretary of Defense, and Attorney General. He considers himself superior to any officer alive. And he is smart enough to go by the book. He walks a tightrope between the regulations and sedition."

Yet the problem is not just one of trouble-makers and how to cope with them.

The trouble of the services – produced by and also in turn producing the dismaying conditions described in this article – is above all a crisis of soul and backbone. It entails – the word is not too strong – something very near a collapse of the command authority and leadership George Washington saw as the soul of military forces. This collapse results, at least in part, from a concurrent collapse of public confidence in the military establishment.
General Matthew B. Ridgway, one of the Army’s finest leaders in this century (who revitalized the shaken Eighth Army in Korea after its headlong rout by the Chinese in 1950) recently said, "Not before in my lifetime … has the Army’s public image fallen to such low esteem …"

But the fall in public esteem of all three major services – not just the Army – is exceeded by the fall or at least the enfeeblement of the hierarchic and disciplinary system by which they exist and, when ordered to do so, fight and sometimes die.

Take the case of the noncommissioned and petty officers.

In Rudyard Kipling’s lines, "the backbone o’ the Army is the noncommissioned man!"

Today, the NCOs – the lifters – have been made strangers in their own home, the regular service, by the collective malevolence, recalcitrance, and cleverness of college –educated draftees who have outflanked the traditional NCO hierarchy and created a privates’ power structure with more influence on the Army of today than its sergeants major.

Word to the Whys

"Discipline," wrote Sir John Jervis, one of England’s greatest admirals, "is summed up in the one word, obedience."

Robert E. Lee later said, "Men must be habituated to obey or they cannot be controlled in battle."
In the Armed forces today, obedience appears to be a sometime thing.

"You can’t give them an order and expect them to obey immediately," says an infantry officer in Vietnam. "they ask why, and you have to tell them."

Command authority, i.e., the unquestioned ability of an officer or NCO to give an order and expect it to be complied with, is at an all-time low. It is so low that, in many units, officers give the impression of having lost their nerve in issuing, let alone enforcing orders.

In the words of an Air Force officer to this reporter, "If a captain went down on the line and gave an order and expected it to be obeyed because ‘I said so!’ – there’d be a rebellion."
Other officers unhesitatingly confirmed the foregoing.

What all this amounts to – conspicuously in Vietnam and only less so elsewhere – is that today’s junior enlisted man, not the lifer, but the educated draftee or draft-motivated "volunteer" – now demands that orders be simplistically justified on his own terms before he feels any obligation to obey.

Yet the young soldiers, sailors and airmen might obey more willingly if they had more confidence in their leaders. And there are ample indications that Armed Forces junior (and NCO) leadership has been soft, inexperienced, and sometimes plain incompetent.

In the 82nd Airborne Division today, the average length of service of the company commanders is only 3 ½ years.

In the Navy, a man makes petty officer 2d class in about 2 ½ years after he first enlists. By contrast, in the taut and professional pre-WWII fleet, a man required 2 ½ years just to make himself a really first-class seaman.
The grade of corporal has practically been superseded in the Army: Sp 4s hold most of the corporals’ billets. Where the corporal once commanded a squad, today’s Army gives the job to a staff sergeant, two ranks higher. Within the squad, it now takes a sergeant to command three other soldiers in the lowly fire-team.
"This never would have happened," somberly said a veteran artillery sergeant major, "if the NCOs had done their jobs … The NCOs are our weak point." Sp 4 Gyongyos at Ft. Carson agrees: "It is the shared perception of the privates that the NCOs have not looked out for the soldiers."

When B Troop, 1st Cavalry, mutinied during the Laos operation, and refused to fight, not an officer or NCO raised his hand (or his pistol) or stepped forward. Fifty-three privates and Sp 4s cowed all the lifers of their units.
"Officers," says a recently retired senior admiral, "do not stand up for what they believe. The older enlisted men are really horrified."

Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., an ex-company clerk, was a platoon leader who never even learned to read a map. His credentials for a commission were derisory; he was no more officer-material than any Pfc. in his platoon. Yet the Army had to take him because no one else was available. Commenting on the Calley conviction, a colonel at Ft. /38/ Benning said, "We have at least two or three thousand more Calleys in the Army just waiting for the next calamity."

Albert Johnson, the tough Master Chief Petty Officer of the Atlantic Fleet, shakes his head and says: "You used to hear it all the time – people would say, ‘The Chiefs run the Navy.’ But you don’t hear it much any more, especially from the Chiefs."

A Hard Lot at Best

But the lot of even the best, most forceful leader is a hard one in today’s military.

In the words of a West Point lieutenant colonel commanding an airborne battalion, "There are so many ways nowadays for a soldier that is smart and bad to get back at you." The colonel should know: recently he reduced a sergeant for gross public insubordination and now he is having to prepare a lengthy apologia, though channels to the Secretary of The Army, in order to satisfy the offending sergeant’s congressman.

"How do we enforce discipline?" asks a senior general. Then he answers himself: "Sweep it under the rug. Keep them happy. Keep it out of the press. Do things the easy way: no court-martials, but strong discipline."

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, after years of costly, frustrating and considerably less than successful war, Britain’s armed forces sere swept by disaffection culminating in the widespread mutinies in most of the ships and fleets that constituted England’s "wooden walls" against France.

Writing to a friend in 1979, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty said, "The Channel Fleet is now lost to the country as much as if it was at the bottom of the sea."

Have things gone that far in the United States today?

The most optimistic answer is – probably not. Or at least not yet.

But many a thoughtful officer would be quick to echo the words of BGen Donn A. Starry, who recently wrote, "The Army can defend the nation against anything but the nation itself."

Or – in the wry words of Pogo – we have met the enemy, and they are us.

Written by Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., published in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971. Taken from libcom.org

Organizing Resistance Within the Military

2009-08-25T13:14:00.004-05:00

From Courage to Resist ...
GI Resistance Under the Radar

By Sarah Lazare, Courage to Resist for Truthout. August 3, 2009

An interview with two former soldiers who describe how they helped prevent their unit from deploying to a war zone.

What do you do if you are a soldier being asked to fight a war you do not believe in?

For two former soldiers whose unit was ordered to deploy to Iraq in April 2005, the answer came in the form of work slowdowns, letter-writing campaigns, and one-on-one organizing with fellow soldiers. The result: they helped prevent their unit from deploying to a war zone.

In this interview, Skippy and Robert, who did not give their full names for fear of military retaliation, share their stories, telling how they convinced several in their unit to deliberately fail physical training, called public attention to the insufficient training and gear they were being asked to fight with, and found creative ways to encourage soldiers to "drop the military before the military drops you." They tell how they dealt with the fear and intimidation of standing up to their command, and about friends and comrades who fell victim to "broken Joe" syndrome.

These stories give a glimpse into the world of GI resistance - the oft-hidden side of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the military is not forthcoming with information about the number of troops refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, statistics suggest military resistance overall is on the rise. Since 2002, the Army has court-martialed twice as many soldiers for desertion and other unauthorized absences per year than for each year between 1997 and 2001. AWOL rates in the Army are at their highest since 1980, with the desertion rate having jumped 80 percent since the start of the Iraq War, according to The Associated Press.
Skippy and Robert's experience shows that while some GI resisters go public, much resistance happens silently, under the radar, in circles of trusted friends, in the small acts that fly in the face of military obedience and command. Their stories serve as a reminder that there are multiple ways to resist military control, and despite military efforts to quash dissent, these varied forms of resistance are as ongoing as the wars themselves.

Sarah: I know that you two were involved in an unconventional form of GI resistance where you essentially ... organized your unit not to deploy to Iraq. Can you tell me the story of how that happened?

Robert: Sure; we were in Fort Polk, Louisiana, in an area called "the box," which is a large training area that is meant to resemble different areas of Iraq or Afghanistan. They basically employ civilians from outside the base and bring in interpreters to try to make a realistic training situation. We were training to go in and basically rebuild UNAID, which is military assistance to the United Nations operations. It can be very dangerous, because the Rules of Engagement that govern soldiers under the command of the UN are very limiting and create fear because they are unrealistic in the battlefield - they'll get you killed.

We weren't as a unit prepared for that, and that's where Skippy and I started to look for other actions. We were against the war and were hoping just to ride out the rest of our military career. We both knew that after that deployment, by the time the next deployment came up, we'd be getting out. As we started to gear up for going to Iraq we started to explore actions for getting out of the military. Skippy went towards a hardship discharge, and I went conscientious objector. And basically you could say we agitated several other soldiers to take other means to get out of the military.

Skippy: As concerned citizens and concerned soldiers, we were looking at the situation in front of us and saying, you know, this just doesn't seem right to us. And so we started to talk to our fellow soldiers about this to get a sense of, "are we alone on this, what's going on," and we did quickly realize that everybody else had the same kinds of feelings as us. They either felt that there was something really fishy about the war, in general, or particular, they would start to say that our leadership was incompetent, that we're totally dependent upon a leadership that obviously doesn't know what they're doing.

The other thing was we didn't even have the proper equipment to train, let alone mobilize. So it was like, "hey, here's this super dangerous mission, how about let's mobilize the guard for it, they've been in the box for a while, they might be able to handle this." But the reality was, we totally couldn't handle something like that, and we were actually struggling to do a good job in "the box" in my opinion.

So we endeavored to talk to our fellow soldiers, and we told them to call their parents and let them know what was going on and complain about it. So that's where the letter-writing campaign really came in handy, and the parents are really the backbone of this whole thing. Rob, maybe this is a good time to go into how you helped set up initially that conference call with Dick Durbin, senator from Illinois.

Robert: Ok, sure. So it was set up by my fianc√©e, who was working with different groups who were doing antiwar work, and they were able to set up a conference call, and basically we carried forth some of the demands of the soldiers there. You know, complaints about no body armor, our leadership was absolutely horrible - for example, in our infantry unit, our sergeant major had been a cook his entire military career.

Same thing with our company commander, who was absolutely horrible - there was no confidence, at least within our platoon, in his ability. You know, within the military it's very interesting, because you have a lot of the lower enlisted, you could say, specialists and below, basically people who aren't in a leadership position, for the most part coming from working-class communities. The military was a way to advance. For them it was pretty easy to get in discussions in which we were able to challenge the concept of authoritarianism a little bit. So we did seek out senators to help us, including Durbin and to my understanding other letters went to Obama, but we also sought self-empowerment amongst everyday enlisted soldiers. Within our platoon, if not at that deployment, shortly after, when we returned from Fort Polk, we had about seven people who sought some form of discharge, and that's almost an entire squad in a platoon. Within a platoon, you have four squads. For us I think it was a pretty big victory.

Skippy: It was during kind of this dialogue phase, we would cut out the various pictures in the magazines and we'd make these flyers and we'd put them up as another sign of resistance. Initially I think we would just distribute them in random places. I actually found this advertisement for the National Guard from way back when, and it was a guy's head yellin' "hoo-wah" so I cut his head out with the hoo-wah phrase kind of echoing from his mouth and I put it in the center of the toilet. We cut out these letters you know so that it says "drop the Mili before the Mili drops you."

It's really strange in the military, you almost feel like you shouldn't do these things, because somebody might catch you, but then when you start talking to people, it's like they have the same ideas that you do, in a way, so it's like you find yourself in this weird position where you feel like you're alienated but then there's signs that maybe you're not. So we wanted to create another sign to say that you're not.

Sarah: The latest study that was done, which was in 2006, showed that 72 percent of all the troops in Iraq are against the war and want immediate pullout. Do you think there was an organic natural sentiment against the war or at least skepticism within the ranks?

Skippy: I guess from my humble perspective it did seem like that was out there and a lot of that had to do with what people were getting from the news, mixed with what they actually saw on the ground. Since we were in a training scenario, it was a little different for us, because we weren't actually in country. We were just in Fort Polk, Louisiana. But I think the premise is the same because we were out there trying to mimic what was going on in country, so a lot of our missions would be very similar to what missions were like over there. So we could still connect the dots in a similar way.

Sometimes people would understand that a lot of the training scenario just seemed really bizarre in and of itself. We would play the bad guys some rotations and then we would play the good guys some rotations, so we would really get this juxtaposition of perspectives.

So when we did eventually engage in dialogue at chow or whatever, or when we were in down time, talked about how messed up would it be to go over there, how unfair that would be, how ridiculous this scenario was, etc. It starts to click together that all that's really going on is that there's this deep network of factions warring and backstabbing each other while we get caught in the middle. Folks didn't really want to be a part of that.

It reminds me a lot of how people felt about isolationism; it's like an isolationist kind of perspective. Like, "Well, what's our business over there, why is that our responsibility" kind of thing, like; "Why can't they just deal with their own issues." But Robert and I were relatively enlightened on these matters. At least in our small circle of influence, were able to put out the idea that this is sort of systemic. We'd make sure to point out that this has deep roots in capitalism and history, and that these are patterns that extend between nations and over time, and so we were kind of bringing that flavor to it.

Maybe it helped, maybe it didn't, I don't know, but I know folks really did begin to pick up the idea that they could resist. We did do something akin to a slow-down strike. I know personally I did encourage troops to not qualify as best as they could. When you get mobilized you have to qualify with your weapons and that kind of thing and we realized that we were just so ate up anyway that it really didn't matter anyway how well we did on these things because it's not going to really accurately reflect who we are. Our rationale was to just do the bare minimum, don't try to prop up what we look like on paper any more than it's already distorted.

It was kind of scary because we didn't want to publicly broadcast that we were doing these things to anybody, but we wanted to make sure that it was kept within like teams or squads, so I don't know how far it did get out. Then there were soldiers who were not too motivated necessarily against the war. For example, this one guy, you know that wasn't his big thing, I don't think that was really even on his mind, but his thing was, he just hated the military, and he wasn't gonna try.

There's this peculiar broken Joe syndrome you could call it, it's like where folks kind of see the despair already so they just kind of reiterate it in their own individual ways. It's like "Oh well, like the war is bullshit anyway it's not as if it's legitimate and I can feel ashamed, it's actually illegitimate and I can feel proud to dog it."

Sarah: Can you talk about the outcome of your organizing and what happened? You ended up not having to deploy, right?

Robert: Skippy got out on a hardship discharge for family-related reasons. I went out on conscientious objection; once the investigation started, things went really sour. Two weeks after I went conscientious objector, somebody else from another platoon within our company went conscientious objector too. I think they were kind of fearing that people are really looking for a way out. While we were there within our platoon, one or two people got out for drug-related reasons. Afterwards two more got out for the same reason. They would kick people out for, say, smoking pot. People would be like, well, do I stay in the military and go to war or smoke some pot?

After I left, I don't think there was a lot of momentum left within resisting; it was hard to have other people take initiative and be a strong voice against it. I'm not sure exactly how strong that sentiment against the military is within our old unit, but when we got back, about a year or two years after, there were people getting out or finding ways to get out. So that continued for sure, and then there were people who would have re-upped and stayed in the military decided not to.

Sarah: So the letter-writing campaign played some kind of role, in at least pressuring the military to not deploy you all; could you explain a little bit about that?

Robert: We don't know 100 percent if that's exactly the case. So the letters go in and we get a meeting at Durbin's office and we're basically on video cameras with some of his representatives in DC. I believe that there was around 2,000 letters sent out within a week, so for them it was probably like "OK, why are we getting hit with so many letters, what's going on, it's something we'll probably have to address." And then within our company and battalion, basically our entire leadership was constantly being brought out on these meetings, there was definitely a lot that was going on, you'd¬†hear people talking about the letter campaign.

Skippy: Remember that time we came back on leave and then they put the whole battalion into formation? They were like "who's writing, whose calling back home telling their family that the weapons are broken and the unit's messed up?" And meanwhile we're just standing there like [muffled laughter].

Robert: They brought a company in at a time to a church, and then they gave everyone an hour-long speech on how the unit is prepared, how you're not supposed to be calling home about this stuff, you have a chain of command, don't go writing home. Sergeant Major the cook, who all of a sudden became infantry, he was like you know, "When I call home I tell my wife I have a good weapon and I'm prepared to use it and I know how to use it. And I'll be safe." And I'm thinking well, maybe you have a weapon, but we don't have a weapon.

I was on CQ duty, which is, basically within the company they have a headquarters and the CQ sits there, you're at the desk if they need you to do something, you'll do it. It's a 24-hour watch, so I'd kind of hear what's going on with the other companies and they'd have their battalion meetings in there. And they'd be like "We've got to find out whose doing this," and I'm just sitting there like "Oh man, I know who it is."

Skippy: I believe there's another component to it. Remember when Private Joe shot himself in the guard tower? Private Joe was in another company, but in the same battalion. He had a lot of mental issues. He had gone to the Army shrink and everything, and for whatever reason they told him he was fine. So he's on guard duty in this guard shack and he convinces the other soldier to go grab the sergeant for something. Then he puts the barrel of his weapon into his mouth and blows the back of his brains all over the guard shack. So when Private Joe shot himself, that's when all of the leadership just went apeshit, I don't know how, maybe that played a factor too in our getting denied the deployment as well. I remember distinctly the next day being appalled by just the regularity of the military machine and it just not giving a damn about Private Joe for one second. It was almost like it was a joke to them, and they cleaned it up and everything marched right on; it was very surreal. They did eventually honor him and say something, but it took a while; it wasn't like an immediate concern of theirs, it seemed.

Robert: When you go conscientious objector the first thing you have to do is announce it; you have to tell your company commander. I was supposed to get promoted to sergeant like the next day and that got scrapped. The second part is you basically have to state your beliefs or reasons, motives of why you're going conscientious objector, and then you have to see the chaplain and then from there you have to see a psychologist. Then you have almost like a hearing within your company, with an outside company commander. In general I was trying to get basically diagnosed as having depression and anxiety. So the process says you have to first go to see the chaplain, which is interesting because on one hand it's a party that's outside of your chain of command, but at the same time it's also a chaplain, so if you're not very religious or whatever or a different religion, who really wants to go talk to a chaplain? I didn't. Then I tried to see a private psychologist, and I was able to see one in Chicago and basically was able to have myself diagnosed.

Skippy: A lot of the depression, I think, was real. You were close to broken Joe syndrome as well.

Sarah: Skippy, you were out already on hardship discharge when you heard that your unit was not going to be deploying, right?

Skippy: Yeah, I was long gone. It was in March 2005 that I officially got out. When I heard the news from Rob, I guess even then I really didn't kind of connect our resistance with the canceled deployment, because what we were doing kind of felt more instinctual than anything. A lot of our resistance just kind of felt like the thing that we should do at the time. Even though we did kind of have a broad articulated strategy between each other and amongst some sympathizers, it still felt like anything could happen at any moment. The atmosphere was totally precarious, and the uncertainty just made all of us so anxious. I remember Rob and I were coming up with just alternatives; we had like 100 alternative plans, like "If this goes wrong, if the other thing goes wrong ..." I remember us just revisiting it to each other constantly and now it just reminds me of how anxious we really were and how scary everything really was. So it was definitely a sigh of relief but really hard to put what caused it into a direct line.

Sarah: What do you hope GI's and the peace and antiwar movement can learn from your experience?

Robert: My reasons for going into the military were, I had a 1.9 GPA in high school, and right now, next semester at school I'll be student-teaching to fulfill the requirements to become a history teacher. But when I was younger I had no confidence in myself. I came from a working-class family, my dad worked at the post office and was a Nam vet, in the infantry. That was the reason I didn't at that time go active Army, but I had considered it. But looking back at it, there's a feeling of wanting to get ahead, of wanting to not be in such a precarious situation that my family was in. Not that we were poor, but we basically just got by. With having a 1.9 GPA in high school I was just wondering what I was going to do with myself. My parents can't afford to put me in school, so what I'm seeing in my future is just getting by, just working your ass off so hopefully you could retire.

So I looked at the military as a way of basically thinking that it would solve my problems. Whether you go in the military or not, the situation's gonna remain the same. There's much broader and larger economic forces at play.

So then from there it's like, who are you fighting for? Who is benefiting from Iraq? And then I think from there the question is, do you have agency in your life; are you empowered? You know, was my family empowered at work, in our community? In short, there's no running away from these authoritarian social relationships, and if you really want to make things better in your community then you have to take part in community struggle. And you have to take part in struggle at your job. I think that whether or not they're in the military, people need a sense of agency and empowerment.

If you look at WWII, and you ask people who were flipping the switches at Auschwitz, they say they were just following orders. It's a common thing in the military to say, "Hey, I'm just following orders, I'm just a soldier," and that's not the truth. You can determine what you're gonna do, you can take control of your life and you can do something. What fascinates me about history is if you look at pictures of the civil rights movement and you look at the National Guard's original role, it was breaking the strike movement. Shooting striking families, you know like literally mowing them down with machine guns. Of course the assumption is you're just following orders. So if a soldier wants to question or a soldier's opposed to war, then they need to find, or should be encouraged to find, ways to resist. You need to take control of your own situation, to take control of your life, or somebody who really doesn't care anything about you is going to control your situation and they're going to control your life. You have to take some accountability for what you're gonna do and stop just following orders and being some drone or little duck in a row.

Skippy: Echoing what Robert was saying, I certainly agree with the agency part and I certainly think that's the best message to get to GI's right now. To question everything and be critical; the trend in the military is to not be critical. In order to survive properly, you actually have to be very critical. That's the biggest one piece of advice I could or would give any soldier or GI in the military now. And then the second would be, you have to investigate different ways to get out of the military, and encourage others to get out of the military. You can do similar things that we talked about here today, which is just to slow down things, talk to your fellow soldiers, and just begin to realize that you're not alone in that sentiment and you can do something to get out of the situation.

I think that the peace movement can learn a lot from what we've said here, because they have a really important role to be playing that they seem to want to play, but really haven't articulated. In our little micro-scenario, you could say those parents who wrote letters were part of the antiwar movement just in that brief instance of time and space. They represented what a lot of people are trying to replicate in different places at different times. So it's really just about finding those opportunities for people to resist and then supporting them 100-110 percent all the way and responding to their needs and trying to play an auxiliary force to what the troops want. It's hard to communicate to the troops because they're either in country or on leave. If you can get veteran groups, I think antiwar movement people - if they're serious about antiwar - they would volunteer or get involved with organizations that are already formed for that purpose. Why reinvent the wheel when this stuff's been tried a lot? We also need to get our heads together to come up with new and surprising projects and tactics.

Sarah Lazare is a project coordinator for Courage to Resist.

Power and Revolution

2009-08-21T13:17:00.004-05:00

Andrej Grubacic has come up a few times in conversation on this blog, so it seems appropriate to familiarize ourselves with his work and engage with it. Grubacic is a Bay Area activist and co-author of Wobblies and Zapatistas, as well as other articles available at ZMag

Power and Revolution
by Andrej Grubacic

{This paper is a revised version of the essay co-writen with David Graeber: Anarchism or the Revolutionary Movement for the 21st Century. It is revised and will be revised further for the presentation for the June 1 - 7 2006 Z Sessions on Vision and Strategy, held in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. }

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It's becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty first century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

Everywhere from Serbia to Argentina, from Seattle to Bombay, anarchist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions. Often their exponents do not call themselves "anarchists". There are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, direct democracy... Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one's vision at the point of a gun. Above all, anarchism, as an ethics of practice-the idea of building a new society "within the shell of the old"-has become the basic inspiration of the "movement of movements", which has from the start been less about seizing state power than about exposing, de-legitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy and participatory management within it.

There are some obvious reasons for the appeal of anarchist ideas at the beginning of the 21st century: most obviously, the failures and catastrophes resulting from so many efforts to overcome capitalism by seizing control of the apparatus of government in the 20th. Increasing numbers of revolutionaries have begun to recognize that "the revolution" is not going to come as some great apocalyptic moment, the storming of some global equivalent of the Winter Palace, but a very long process that has been going on for most of human history (even if it has like most things come to accelerate of late) full of strategies of flight and evasion as much as dramatic confrontations, and which will never-indeed, most anarchists feel, should never-come to a definitive conclusion.

It's a little disconcerting, but it offers one enormous consolation: we do not have to wait until "after the revolution" to begin to get a glimpse of what genuine freedom might be like. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think. For an anarchist, in fact, to try to create non-alienated experiences, true democracy, is an ethical imperative; only by making one's form of organization in the present at least a rough approximation of how a free society would actually operate, how everyone, someday, should be able to live, can one guarantee that we will not cascade back into disaster. Grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all pleasure to the cause can only produce grim joyless societies.

These changes have been difficult to document because so far anarchist ideas have received almost no attention in the academy. There are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists. This lag is somewhat difficult to interpret. In part, no doubt, it's because Marxism has always had a certain affinity with the academy which anarchism obviously lacked: Marxism was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D. Most accounts of the history of anarchism assume it was basically similar to Marxism: anarchism is presented as the brainchild of certain 19th century thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin...) that then went on to inspire working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles, divided into sects...

Anarchism, in the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism's poorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and sincerity. Really the analogy is strained. The "founders" of anarchism did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The saw its basic principles-mutual aid, voluntary association, egalitarian decision-making-as as old as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means "without rulers")-even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related and reinforce each other. None of it was seen as some startling new doctrine, but a longstanding tendency in the history human thought, and one that cannot be encompassed by any general theory of ideology.

On one level it is a kind of faith: a belief that most forms of irresponsibility that seem to make power necessary are in fact the effects of power itself. In practice though it is a constant questioning, an effort to identify every compulsory or hierarchical relation in human life, and challenge them to justify themselves, and if they cannot-which usually turns out to be the case-an effort to limit their power and thus widen the scope of human liberty. Just as a Sufi might say that Sufism is the core of truth behind all religions, an anarchist might argue that anarchism is the urge for freedom behind all political ideologies.

Schools of Marxism always have founders. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists,, Althusserians... (Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors - who, in turn, can spawn their own sects: Lacanians, Foucauldians....)

Schools of anarchism, in contrast, almost invariably emerge from some kind of organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Councilists, Individualists, and so on.

Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never been much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for peasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is "leadership" necessarily a bad thing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What is direct action? Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of state? When is it okay to throw a brick?

Marxism, then, has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. As a result, where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of praxis, it's mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis itself.

At the moment, there's something of a rupture between generations of anarchism: I would like to express my affinity with what might be loosely referred to as the "small-a anarchists", who are, by now, by far the majority. But it is sometimes hard to tell, since so many of them do not trumpet their affinities very loudly. There are many. in fact, who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they refuse to refer to themselves as 'anarchists' for that very reason .

But the three essentials that run throughout all manifestations of anarchist movement are definitely there - anti-statism, anti-capitalism and prefigurative politics (i.e. modes of organization that consciously resemble the world you want to create. Or, as an anarchist historian of the revolution in Spain has formulated "an effort to think of not only the ideas but the facts of the future itself". This is present in anything from jamming collectives and on to Indy media, all of which can be called anarchist in the newer sense.

The new anarchists are much more interested in developing new forms of practice than arguing about the finer points of ideology. The most dramatic among these have been the development of new forms of decision-making process, the beginnings, at least, of an alternate culture of democracy. The famous North American spokescouncils, where thousands of activists coordinate large-scale events by consensus, with no formal leadership structure, are only the most spectacular.

Actually, even calling these forms "new" is a little bit deceptive. One of the main inspirations for the new generation of anarchists are the Zapatista autonomous municipalities of Chiapas, based in Tzeltal or Tojolobal-speaking communities who have been using consensus process for thousands of years-only now adopted by revolutionaries to ensure that women and younger people have an equal voice. In North America, "consensus process" emerged more than anything else from the feminist movement in the '70s, as part of a broad backlash against the macho style of leadership typical of the '60s New Left. The idea of consensus itself was borrowed from the Quakers, who again, claim to have been inspired by the Six Nations and other Native American practices.

Consensus is often misunderstood. One often hears critics claim it would cause stifling conformity but almost never by anyone who has actually observed consensus in action, at least, as guided by trained, experienced facilitators (some recent experiments in Europe, where there is little tradition of such things, have been somewhat crude). In fact, the operating assumption is that no one could really convert another completely to their point of view, or probably should. Instead, the point of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a common course of action. Instead of voting proposals up and down, proposals are worked and reworked, scotched or reinvented, there is a process of compromise and synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it comes to the final stage, actually "finding consensus", there are two levels of possible objection: one can "stand aside", which is to say "I don't like this and won't participate but I wouldn't stop anyone else from doing it", or "block", which has the effect of a veto. One can only block if one feels a proposal is in violation of the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group. One might say that the function which in the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of striking down legislative decisions that violate constitutional principles, is here relegated with anyone with the courage to actually stand up against the combined will of the group (though of course there are also ways of challenging unprincipled blocks).

One could go on at length about the elaborate and surprisingly sophisticated methods that have been developed to ensure all this works; of forms of modified consensus required for very large groups; of the way consensus itself reinforces the principle of decentralization by ensuring one doesn't really want to bring proposals before very large groups unless one has to, of means of ensuring gender equity and resolving conflict... The point is this is a form of direct democracy which is very different than the kind we usually associate with the term-or, for that matter, with the kind of majority-vote system usually employed by anarchists in the past. With increasing contact between different movements internationally, the inclusion of indigenous groups and movements from Africa, Asia, and Oceania with radically different traditions, we are seeing the beginnings of a new global reconception of what "democracy" or "revolution" should even mean, one as far as possible from the neoliberal parlaimentarianism currently promoted by the existing powers of the world.

Again, it is difficult to follow this new spirit of synthesis by reading most existing anarchist literature, because those who spend most of their energy on questions of theory, rather than emerging forms of practice, are the most likely to maintain the old sectarian dichotomizing logic. Modern anarchism is imbued with countless contradictions. While small-a anarchists are slowly incorporating ideas and practices learned from indigenous allies into their modes of organizing or alternative communities, the main trace in the written literature has been the emergence of a sect of Primitivists, a notoriously contentious crew who call for the complete abolition of industrial civilization, and, in some cases, even agriculture. Still, it is only a matter of time before this older, either/or logic begins to give way to something more resembling the practice of consensus-based groups.

What would this new synthesis look like? Some of the outlines can already be discerned within the movement. It will insist on constantly expanding the focus of anti-authoritarianism, moving away from class reductionism by trying to grasp the "totality of domination", that is, to highlight not only the state but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts.

This approach does not call for an endless expansion of material production, or hold that technologies are neutral, but it also doesn't decry technology per se. Instead, it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as appropriate. It not only doesn't decry institutions per se, or political forms per se, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism and for a new society, including new ways of meeting, new ways of decision making, new ways of coordinating, along the same lines as it already has with revitalized affinity groups and spokes structures. And it not only doesn't decry reforms per se, but struggles to define and win non-reformist reforms, attentive to people's immediate needs and bettering their lives in the here-and-now at the same time as moving toward further gains, and eventually, wholesale transformation. It rejects the very opposition between reformism and revolution.

And of course theory will have to catch up with practice. The problem at the moment is that anarchists who want to get past old-fashioned, vanguardist habits-the Marxist sectarian hangover that still haunts so much of the radical intellectual world-are not quite sure what their role is supposed to be. Anarchism needs to become reflexive. But how? On one level the answer seems obvious. One should not lecture, not dictate, not even necessarily think of oneself as a teacher, but must listen, explore and discover. To tease out and make explicit the tacit logic already underlying new forms of radical practice. To put oneself at the service of activists by providing information, or exposing the interests of the dominant elite carefully hidden behind supposedly objective, authoritative discourses, rather than trying to impose a new version of the same thing. How to move from ethnography to utopian visions-ideally, as many utopian visions as possible? It is hardly a coincidence that some of the greatest recruiters for anarchism in countries like the United States have been feminist science fiction writers like Starhawk or Ursula K. LeGuin.

One way this is beginning to happen is as anarchists begin to recuperate the experience of other social movements with a more developed body of theory, ideas that come from circles close to, indeed inspired by anarchism. Let's take for example the idea of participatory economy, which represents an anarchist economist vision par excellence and which supplements and rectifies anarchist economic tradition. Parecon theorists argue for the existence of not just two, but three major classes in advanced capitalism: not only a proletariat and bourgeoisie but a "coordinator class" whose role is to manage and control the labor of the working class. This is the class that includes the management hierarchy and the professional consultants and advisors central to their system of control - as lawyers, key engineers and accountants, and so on. They maintain their class position because of their relative monopolization over knowledge, skills, and connections. As a result, economists and others working in this tradition have been trying to create models of an economy which would systematically eliminate divisions between physical and intellectual labor. Now that anarchism has so clearly become the center of revolutionary creativity, proponents of such models have increasingly been, if not rallying to the flag, exactly, then at least, emphasizing the degree to which their ideas are compatible with an anarchist vision.

This doesn't mean anarchists have to be against theory. It might not need High Theory, in the sense familiar today. Certainly it will not need one single, Anarchist High Theory. That would be completely inimical to its spirit. Much better, I think, something more in the spirit of anarchist decision-making processes: applied to theory, this would mean accepting the need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives, united only by certain shared commitments and understandings. Rather than based on the need to prove others' fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to find particular projects on which they reinforce each other. Just because theories are incommensurable in certain respects does not mean they cannot exist or even reinforce each other, any more than the fact that individuals have unique and incommensurable views of the world means they cannot become friends, or lovers, or work on common projects. Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called low theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project.

Similar things are starting to happen with the development of anarchist political visions. Now, this is an area where classical anarchism already had a leg up over classical Marxism, which never developed a theory of political organization at all. Different schools of anarchism have often advocated very specific forms of social organization, albeit often markedly at variance with one another. Still, anarchism as a whole has tended to advance what liberals like to call 'negative freedoms,' 'freedoms from,' rather than substantive 'freedoms to.' Often it has celebrated this very commitment as evidence of anarchism's pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity. But as a result, there has been a reluctance to go beyond developing small-scale forms of organization, and a faith that larger, more complicated structures can be improvised later in the same spirit.

There have been exceptions, such as the North American Social Ecologists's "libertarian municipalism". There's a lively debate developing, for instance, on how to balance principles of worker's control-emphasized by the Parecon folk-and direct democracy, emphasized by the Social Ecologists.

Still, there are a lot of details still to be filled in: what are the anarchist's full sets of positive institutional alternatives to contemporary legislatures, courts, police, and diverse executive agencies? Obviously there could never be an anarchist party line on this, the general feeling among the small-a anarchists at least is that we'll need many concrete visions and many utopian dialogues. Still, between actual social experiments within expanding self-managing, ungoverned communities in places like Eastern Europe or Latin America, and of the efforts of new anarchists all over the globe, the work is beginning. It is clearly a long-term process. But then, the anarchist century has only just begun.

Winnipeg Police: The City's Biggest Gang.

2009-07-23T01:40:00.005-05:00

From yesterday's Winnipeg Free Press...

Former refugee alleges abuse
Claims harsh treatment at hands of police

By: Gordon Sinclair Jr.

We all know Winnipeg has a gang problem.

And that policing has never been more difficult or more dangerous for the officers who patrol the city's core. With that acknowledged, I have someone who wants to -- actually needs to -- tell you a story.

"ö "ö "ö

Jackson Nahayo had spent a sleepless night crying. And now, at the suggestion of a reporter from a Christian newspaper, he was emailing me, asking to meet.

So late Monday afternoon I joined him in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven at Ellice Avenue and Maryland Street, the place he encountered Winnipeg police officers early Sunday morning.

The following is his account -- his allegations -- of what happened there.

He thinks it was about 2:15 a.m. when it started.

The 23-year-old nursing student had just dropped off his girlfriend and was parked at the side of the 7-Eleven in her white Cadillac Catera.

A police cruiser pulled in beside him and an officer got out.

"He said, 'What the hell are you doing here?'"

"I said, 'I'm just texting my girlfriend. Is there something wrong, officer?'"

The officer, who was standing beside the driver's door, didn't respond to the question.

"He said, 'Put your hands where I can see them.'"

Jackson put his hands on the steering wheel. He remembered being spot-checked by police near Central Park before. Unfairly, he thought. This time, to feel safer, he told the officer he wanted to use his cellphone to record what was happening.

The officer reacted, Jackson said, by grabbing his hand, "rolling" his thumb back and takinghis cellphone.

"And I'm like, 'Look, you're hurting me.'"

The next thing Jackson knew, there were cruisers and cops everywhere.

"I was terrified," Jackson recalled.

He said two other officers climbed into the car, and the one beside him began searching the glove compartment. But when officer in the front seat reached toward him -- as if to frisk him -- Jackson was startled and pulled back.

"That's when he shoved me on the shoulder and jabbed me in the ribs with his fist."

There were people watching by this time and Jackson began yelling for help.

"I'm being mugged by the police," Jackson recalled screaming. "And I said, 'Look, I'm not a criminal.'"

Jackson said the officer who had first approached him and taken his cellphone reacted to that.

"He said, 'A lot of you guys are. And we are trying to get you off the streets.'"

Jackson said he told the officer he was being racist.

"I said, 'Sir, I hope that your children will grow up to have love and to accommodate other people despite their colour or anything.'

"And he said, 'Shut up already. My children know who is good and who is not.'"

Jackson alleges he turned to the one officer standing beside the car who seemed to be a "nice guy," and asked why he wasn't helping.

Why was he just standing there?

"He said, 'I'll explain what's happening here.' So he started telling me that someone called the police (saying) two males, driving a similar car -- a white car -- had guns and abducted a person."

Police later confirmed that there had been a call similar to that in the 800 block of Ellice.

Then, the "nice guy" officer just looked at him, Jackson recalled.

"He looked like he was embarrassed. He said, 'You're the wrong guy.'"

According to Jackson, the police returned his cellphone, but without some of the data that had been stored in it.

And then the police left.

Monday, in the same parking lot, Jackson described how he felt about what happened.

"They told me they were fighting crime. And they committed crime. That's what I think they did to me."

He said he is sure there are good police officers. But it is their responsibility to stop the bad behaviour of other officers. That was what he was hoping after police Chief Keith McCaskill returned my call about the allegations and asked me for Jackson's phone number. Jackson received a call from a member of the professional standards unit Monday evening and again Tuesday morning.

Jackson said the PSU member informed him the unit has seized some evidence -- surveillance tape from the 7-Eleven parking lot.

"ö "ö "ö

There's something I haven't told you about Jackson.

He was a refugee when he came to Canada in his mid-teens via his homeland of Burundi, then Congo and Zambia.

And he's had some experience with gangs.

When he was six, he and his nine-year-old sister were abducted by men with guns. They were rebel militia who later beat him and left him for dead in the jungle when he refused an order to shoot his sister.

Which explains, at least in part, why Jackson was so traumatized by what he experienced Sunday morning. To Jackson, it felt way too familiar.

"Guys with guns," he said. "Ganging on me."

Against All Odds: Revolution in Nepal Moving Forward

2009-07-20T18:30:00.009-05:00

Against All Odds:
Revolution in Nepal Moving Forward

Derek Rosin

Right now, communists are on the verge of what could potentially be the first successful revolution in over a generation. They're internationalists, who boldly proclaim that either we all get to communism, or none of us do. Yet, there has been a lack of discussion and popularization of this movement, not to mention a frustrating lack of internationalist support for the people now making history. This revolution is taking place in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world. Most people are poor peasants who can barely eke out a living in the rugged and remote valleys in the foothills of the Himalayas. It's a country dominated by foreign powers, especially by its southern neighbour, India, which has historically strangled Nepalese domestic industry and controlled its resources. Internally, the caste system and women's oppression weigh heavily. Communists have been active in Nepal for decades searching for ways to address these basic problems.

The People’s War

A turning point came in 1996, when an insurrection was launched by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – recently renamed the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Starting off small, theMaoist movement was able to strengthen and grow by relying on and leading mostly poor Nepali peasants to fight and overthrow the forces of government in the countryside, then represented by an absolute monarchy. In their place, they began constructing a new society – by taking steps to end gender and caste oppression, introducing forms of popular democratic government, and providing for people's needs like basic health care and education. The Maoists called this the “People's War” – a revolutionary war of the people that seeks to overthrow the old system. I was fortunate enough to have visited Nepal's Maoist base areas in the Western hill region in 2006 to witness some of these changes first-hand. There is one small incident I will never forget that speaks volumes to the liberating changes that are taking place. Together with some friends, I was in the village of Tilla in Rolpa district talking to a boy in his early teens. Rolpa, along with the neighbouring Rukum district to the north, is considered the heartland of the revolution, and it was here that the revolution began exercising power over ten years ago. Through a translator, we asked him about his life, including what caste he was in. At this question he paused and looked puzzled. He in turn told us that he was a Dalit, a low-caste untouchable, but that it was strange that we asked him that, since no one cares any more. He told us that his parents would tell him stories about caste discrimination and oppression, but that he had never experienced them. Throughout the base areas we heard similar stories: women organizing themselves to stop wife-beating; parents able to get medical care for their sick kids at a newly-built hospital; and villagers who no longer have to walk for two days to get salt because of a newly-constructed road. In the context of Nepalese development, these transformations are stunning. They help partially to explain the rapid advance of the revolutionary movement.

“Revolution Cannot Be Replicated, But Only Developed”

One aspect of the Nepali revolution people ought to be paying attention to is the strikingly creative approach of its leaders. Revolution – the Nepali Maoists are fond of saying – cannot be replicated, but only developed. In developing their strategy and tactics, the Maoists have made a serious study of the serious setbacks suffered by revolutionary movements in such places as Peru, Nicaragua and Malaysia after a certain level of development was reached. They aim to mobilize the Nepalese people to continually push their movement forward, without either being swallowed up by electoralism or scraping by in a perpetual military insurgency with no real hope of victory. An outcome of this approach has been the Nepalese concept of “total war.” By which they mean fighting on all fronts: military, cultural, political, and ideological. An example of this has been their deliberate tactic of alternating between political and military offensives. There were several ceasefires and negotiations throughout the people's war period, in each case the Maoists used the opportunities to reach out to different segments of the society, win new allies, and further expose and isolate their enemies. This was done with careful consideration to the specific ideological terrain they had to deal with. For example, the amalgam of comprador and feudal ruling classes in Nepal had for decades used the concepts of patriotism and (bourgeois) democracy to build hegemony for their rule. Feudalism was defended with the banner of patriotism and the comprador bourgeoisie wrapped themselves in democracy. The Maoists answered by turning these concepts on their head. They developed a new form of democracy (anti-caste oppression, anti-women's oppression) in their base areas to fight the feudal monarchy and rallied people with an anti-imperialist, anti-expansionist patriotism to attack the comprador bourgeoisie. This creative approach also informs the Nepali Maoists vision of the future society they want to build. They believe a major defect of previous socialist societies, notably in the Soviet Union and China, was the ease with which counter-revolutionaries were able to turn these revolutions into their opposites and restore capitalism. Their thinking on this problem has led them to emphasize the importance of strengthening popular militias under socialism, as well as developing plans for a socialist democracy in which numerous parties will compete in a politically communist “mainstream.” All of this unorthodoxy is not without controversy within the Maoist movement. Internationally, some former friends have distanced themselves from the UCPN(M), arguing that these developments are in fact an abandonment of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles. Within the UCPN(M) itself, line struggle has been intense. There has been serious concern among cadre, as voiced by senior member Biplap, that the negotiations and constituent assembly process will lead to a situation where the “party will be drowned into the swamp of reformism up over its head.” This danger is acknowledged and discussed by the Party in their many publications. However, as another party leader, Basanta, has argued, parties scared off by any danger have never been able to seize any opportunity.

A New Phase of the Revolution

In November 2006, the UCPN(M) decided to seize such an opportunity and end one phase of the revolution by signing a peace treaty with the government on the condition that elections be held for a Constituent Assembly – a temporary governing body that serves to write a new constitution for how society will be restructured. Although they then controlled 80% of the territory of the country and had built the powerful People's Liberation Army (PLA), they did not feel it would be best to try and capture the cities militarily. They faced several obstacles: weak support among the middle-classes in the cities, who would have to be important allies in any future society; an unfavourable international situation with no socialist countries who might assist their extremely undeveloped country; and the mood of the masses themselves, who were justifiably exhausted by a decade of bloody conflict and yearned for peace. The peace treaty gave the Maoists the freedom to begin doing intensive political work in areas they had previously been weak – namely in the cities and the heavily populated southern Terai region. A tactic during this time was to politically isolate the leadership of the mainstream parties and reach out to their supporters by demanding the unconditional dissolution of the corrupt and widely-hated monarchy. In April 2008 elections for the Constituent Assembly were held, and the Maoists emerged as the biggest and most influential party. This shocked everyone except, perhaps, the Maoists themselves, who knew the huge support they had been building throughout Nepal. In May 2008, the monarchy was abolished. The peace treaty has been misunderstood by some as a form of capitulation. However, the Maoists have shown no sign that they have swayed from their basic understanding that “without a people's army, the people have nothing.” They have not disarmed, but have instead argued for the integration of their fighters into a re-constituted army under democratic control. The National Army and their royalist allies have continually resisted this demand.

The Current Uprising

In May 2009, this controversy reached a breaking point when Army general Katawal, with United Marxist-Leninist encouragement (UML – a party which, despite its name, has been stubborn defender of the old Nepal and a violent opponent of the revolution), refused to follow government directives to resign. This in turn led to the resignation of the Maoist leader Prachanda from the post of Prime Minister – a move which marks a new phase in the revolution. Senior UCPN(M) leader Gaurav, speaking on May 17th, 2009 declared “now, we’ll spearhead the ‘third Janaandolan’ [people's uprising] against the president’s unconstitutional move to reinstate the Army chief and also complete our unfinished revolution.” Such an uprising may prove to be a component of the final insurrection that Prachanda has long argued is inevitable. The recent developments make sense when considering the UCPN(M)'s strategic approach as a whole. Revolutions without the masses are not revolutions worth having: the lasting success or failure of a revolution hinges on the genuine involvement of people in it – and their deepening mastery over all spheres of society. What we see in Nepal now is a living political process where the Nepali people are being convinced of the need for further change. Many Nepalis were rightfully elated when the monarchy was abolished, but now they can see that the continued presence of the National Army (among other institutions) is the biggest obstacle to progressive change. In other words, they are being shown through events that the revolution needs to seize state power. There is no guarantee the Nepalese revolution will succeed. Revolutionaries may be politically outmanoeuvred by the old political establishment and their allies like the United States, who still outrageously label the UCPN(M) a “terrorist” organization. They may be militarily defeated by remnants of the National Army, an Indian invasion, or a combination of the two. There is the looming difficulty of building a socialist economy in a country so undeveloped that even sewing needles have to be imported. Against all these obstacles, the Nepali people need and deserve our solidarity and support. •

Derek Rosin is a member of the International Correspondents' Group of BASICS Free Community Newsletter. Rosin visited Nepal in 2006 to observe some of the work being done by the Maoists in their rural liberated territories, and he has been a close observer of the developments in Nepal ever since.

This article originally appeared on The Bullet, the e-bulletin of The Socialist Project...
socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet222.html

And here is a useful resource for news, theory, and analysis for revolutionary movements in South Asia, including Nepal, India, Philippines, and more...
Revolution in South Asia

Winnipeg Group Mobilizes as New Protests Erupt in Iran

2009-07-09T11:09:00.002-05:00

New protests have erupted in Iran following a brief lull. Last month, thousands poured into the streets to protest obvious election fraud that returned hard-line conservative, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office. A Winnipeg group has been demonstrating in solidarity with the protests in Iran, and today will demonstrate on the anniversary of police raids on student activists in Tehran.

From today's Winnipeg Free Press:

U of M protest to target student deaths in Iran
Night raids by police on university dorms denounced

A human chain will be formed around a University of Manitoba dormitory today in memory of students roused from their slumber and slaughtered in Iran.

"The images are horrible," said one Iranian academic in Winnipeg who is helping to organize the event at noon outside the Arthur Mauro Residence.

Twice at 3 a.m., university students asleep in their dorms in Iran were beaten to death by armed plainclothes police. The first time was 10 years ago today after students protested the Islamic Republic of Iran's closure of a popular newspaper. Three students died. The second time was June 14 after demonstrators took to the streets to protest Iranian election results. Six were killed and hundreds were injured and arrested.

"I am mourning for these students," said the Canadian citizen, who didn't want to be identified. She has family in Iran and returns there often to visit.

"They are the best and the brightest in the country... Then the government kills the best of their young? Nothing outrages me more than this incident. Forget about the fraud in the election. If you let this happen to your country, you're incompetent. Your judiciary is completely incompetent. They should resign."

She, like many critics of the regime, stopped short of calling for the resignation of Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Removing the leader of the Islamic state, they say, could destabilize the country and make matters worse.

Winnipegger Abbas Rezai disagreed.

"The entire system should go," said the resistance supporter, who is lobbying Canada not to do business with the government of Iran, which he says has too much blood on its hands.

As long as Iran is a theocracy, elections don't mean a thing, Rezai said.

He and the Canadian Friends of a Democratic Iran want the Harper government to reject Iran's election and "appointment" of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and to demand a free, UN-supervised election "based on people's sovereignty and not the rule of the supreme religious leader." They want to suspend all diplomatic ties with Iran and impose a trade, arms and technology embargo on the regime and a foreign travel ban on its top officials.

"We want the regime changed," said Rezai, who said there is no substantial difference between the candidates Ahmadinejad and "green" candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi.

The supreme religious leader calls the shots and decides who can run for office, Rezai said.

"He has absolute power."

The resistance, which backs democratic reform, a separation of mosque and state and civil liberties, has enlisted the help of Manitoba religious leaders. They are calling for the support of 3,500 exiled Iranian resistance movement leaders in Iraq. Winnipeg Archbishop James Weisgerber and the United Church Conference of Manitoba executive have written to the U.S. President Barack Obama asking him to protect the people living in Camp Ashraf in Iraq.

They are members of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, the main democratic opposition group. They have been living legally in Iraq for the last two decades and surrendered their arms to the coalition forces in 2003. They are protected under the Geneva Convention, but have for the past several months been cut off from receiving supplies or visits from supporters and family.

The resistance movement has been fighting to get rid of its label as a terrorist organization in Canada and the U.S. so it can raise funds.

Pick a Point on the Globe, and the Picture's the Same.

2009-07-08T12:29:00.002-05:00

From today's Winnipeg Free Press...

Sex Slaves on Winnipeg Streets

The sexual enslavement of women and children is a global human rights issue in our own backyard. Manitobans and Canadians need not look to countries notorious for human trafficking for sexual exploitation, like Thailand, or developing countries, they only need to look at the streets of Winnipeg and other cities, especially those in Western Canada.

The "Stop Sex with Kids" campaign website explains "sexual exploitation" as "the exchange of sex for food, shelter, drugs/alcohol, money and/or approval. Sexual exploitation is not a lifestyle choice -- it's child abuse." Statistics at that site paint a picture of the extent of this abuse on the streets of Winnipeg and Manitoba: there are approximately 400 children and youth being sexually exploited on the streets of Winnipeg each year; 13 years old is the average age that children reported their first experience of being exploited; most (85-90 per cent) of sexually exploited children/youth are female; 70-80 per cent of adults involved in the sex trade were first exploited under the age of 18; most (70-80 per cent) of the children and youth exploited in Manitoba are of aboriginal descent; and about 72 per cent were in the care of Child and Family Services.

There is probably little understanding of what human trafficking is, and the full extent to which it is occurring in Canada. There is no universally accepted definition of human trafficking, but essentially it refers to the recruitment, transportation and harbouring of a person for the purposes of forced slavery, including the use of threat of force, deception, position of vulnerability, committed without the free and informed consent of the trafficked person. Human trafficking is often referred to as the modern day slave trade, and it is now viewed as a fundamental human rights issue.

A February 2009 United Nations Global Report on Trafficking in Persons found that the most common form of human trafficking (79 per cent) is sexual exploitation. That same report found that victims are predominantly women and girls; most trafficking is national or regional; and that the Americas are prominent both as the origin and destination of victims in the human trade.

U.S. and Canadian federal departmental reports document that aboriginal women and girls are at greater risk of becoming victims of trafficking within and outside Canada for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. Other research confirms trafficking between Canadian cities, especially those in the west, including Winnipeg, where there are networks.

It is time for Manitobans to become aware of this growing national problem. How many missing women and children are victims of human trafficking? In Manitoba, the provincial strategy on youth and child sexual exploitation was launched in 2002. At a November 13, 2008 Stop Sex with Kids Awareness Campaign event, and at a Roundtable on Sexual Exploitation of Youth and Children, both hosted by the province, myself and AMC representatives expressed the need for this strategy to reach on-reserve and for immediate federal action on this issue.

While most of Canada's efforts have been on punitive approaches to those caught human trafficking, public awareness is essential in protecting our most vulnerable citizens from modern day slavery.

I urge all young people to be aware. Human trafficking is not just something that happens overseas. It is here in Canada, and it usually starts with someone you trust, someone who promises you a better life, a new job, a new start. They'll find you in the city and even in a First Nation community. Be suspicious of anyone making you promises that sound too good to be true. Thoroughly check out anyone who approaches you with job offers that are vague -- if you have access to the Internet, Google their company; get a phone number to call; or quite simply, ask people you know if they know anything about that company. If you feel you are in immediate danger, call the police.

There are ways to protect yourself and those you love from becoming victims. A growing awareness of human trafficking is critical in the overall effort to preventing human trafficking and stopping sexual exploitation.

Ron Evans is grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs.

Socialist Organization Today

2009-07-06T14:26:00.009-05:00

One of our readers has suggested this document from Solidarity (U.S.) for posting. Learning to Fly encourages all its readers to engage as much as possible in the discussions that appear on this blog, including suggestions for posts, be it a general idea, topic, or event; or a particular document. If you have any such suggestions please e-mail us at: wirdmedia@gmail.com

Solidarity (U.S.) is a loosely organized Socialist group that emerged from the Trotskyist tradition in 1986. The name “Solidarity” is an homage to an independent Polish labour union of the same name that formed in opposition to the so-called “communist” government in the early 1980s. Since it's inception, Solidarity (U.S.) has been trying to initiate regroupment and “Left Refoundation”. They publish a journal called Against the Current.

Here's a link to the Solidarity (U.S.) website: solidarity-us.org

The following document was written in the mid 1990s and was reissued with a new introduction in 2006.

Socialist Organization Today

A SOLIDARITY PAMPHLET

By Charlie Post and Kit Adam Wainer

Introduction to the Second Edition, August 2006
The first edition of this pamphlet was written in the mid- 1990s and published in 1997. At that time, the left that had emerged during the struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s— the liberation struggles of African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, the women’s and gay/lesbian movement, the movement against the US war in Vietnam and the wave of wild-cat strikes that shook US industry—was in crisis. The nearly two decade downturn of social struggles, the employers’ offensive against the organized and unorganized working class, and the bipartisan Democratic and Republican attacks on social welfare and pro-worker government regulation had undermined the confidence of much of the US left. The collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the Chinese bureaucracy’s embrace of capitalist “market reforms” disoriented those on the left who believed the myth of that these societies were “socialist.” European social democratic government’s support for “social liberal” austerity and deregulation—their abandonment of any attempt to win reforms under capitalism—bewildered those on the US left who thought that the official leaders of the unions, women’s and civil rights movements could transform the Democratic party into a party that could both win office and carry out meaningful reforms.

The far left in the US reacted, in the main, to these developments in two very different ways. On the one hand, a majority of leftists in the 1990s who remained politically active abandoned building explicitly socialist organizations in favor of organizing a “progressive” opposition to the “corporate right.” Some of these comrades did important work organizing among workers, people of color, women and queer people. However, most adopted the politics of reformism—putting their faith in “progressive” labor bureaucrats, mainstream leaders of the civil rights, women’s and LGBT movements, and the Democratic party.

On the other hand, a minority of socialists embraced what we called “vanguardism:”

For the most part, the few revolutionary organizations which remain merely repeat the claim that they are the (nucleus of the) vanguard of the working class, and denounce those who deny their leadership credentials. Rather than attempt to analyze the crisis of the left which has disheartened so many socialists – and stripped even the ranks of these “vanguards” – they have acknowledged their shrunken size only to praise their own endurance. — (page 1)

Nearly a decade after the publication of Socialist Organization Today much has changed, but much remains the same. The capitalist offensive—with the spread of “lean production” and “neo-liberal” government policies—continued unabated. While rank and file caucuses and networks in the unions and community based worker organizations continue to struggle, the labor movement and movements of women, LGBT people and people of color remain weak and under attack. The explosion of global justice activism after the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle—the outgrowth of years of anti-sweatshop, “fair trade” and union reform organizing— went into decline after 9-11.

The most hopeful development of the past few years is the persistence of the movement against the US war and occupation of Iraq. While national demonstrations have declined in size after the massive mobilizations of the Winter-Spring of 2003, the emergence of resistance to the war among military families and active duty GIs, the growing opposition to the war in the ranks of organized labor and organizing against military recruitment (and the possible reintroduction of the draft) all point to the vitality of anti-war sentiment and organization. Equally encouraging are renewed signs of resistance among people of color—ranging from struggles for drivers’ licenses for undocumented workers to the defense of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Unfortunately, the US small far left has not solved the problems we addressed in Socialist Organization Today nearly a decade ago. The US left has not escaped the traps of adaptation to the Democratic Party on the one hand; and of “vanguardism” on the other. Often left organizations embrace both simultaneously! The revolutionary left remains weak, largely unable to affect political life except during episodes of mass upsurge—like the mass anti-war mobilizations of the Winter- Spring 2004. As a result, we have been unable to overcome our isolation from communities of oppressed people and the working population in general.

Socialist Organization Today made the case for an alternative to the abandonment of socialist organization and politics and the “vanguardist” pretensions of much of the revolutionary left—building an organization with clear socialist politics that was committed to rebuilding the organizations of working class and popular resistance. Solidarity, over the nearly two decades we have existed, has attempted to build such an organization. We have had some limited success. Our members are well rooted in the labor movement, where we help build the rank and file current committed to solidarity, militancy and democracy. We have become involved in global justice, anti-war and Palestine solidarity activity. Through these activities, Solidarity has recruited and helped educate a small layer of young activists.

Much more needs to be accomplished. In particular, Solidarity still needs to find ways to embed ourselves in struggles of people of color against racism, and begin the long and diffi- cult process of building a truly multi-national and multi-racial organization.

If you find the analysis and arguments in this pamphlet provocative, contact us so that we may begin a political dialogue on how to best rebuild the movements of social resistance and build an effective, non-sectarian socialist left. If you are convinced, join Solidarity in our attempt to provide a modest but real model for the renewal of revolutionary socialism in the US.

Following 9-11, the imperialist war in Iraq — and the threat of a U.S. attack on Iran, a potential catastrophe for the entire world — has become the central question for the American people and, of course, for the left. Building a powerful movement to ‘Bring the Troops Home Now!’, and stopping the growth of the police state at home, are essential for the future of the socialist movement, and of humanity.

- Charlie Post and Kit Wainer, August 2006

Introduction

We would like to thank Claudette Begin, Steve Bloom, Bill Briehan, Jack Cedar, Vivek Chibber, Steve Downs, Dianne Feeley, Kim Moody and Barbara Zeluck for their comments.

We dedicate this pamphlet to the memories of Steve Zeluck (1922-1985) and Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), whose work on revolutionary socialist organization laid the theoretical foundation for this pamphlet.

Socialists today are trying to chart their way through unfamiliar terrain. Socialist organizations seem to be weaker now than they have been at any point in the 20th century. At the same time, the unions and many of the movement organizations that we have expected to provide the basis for a working class and popular challenge to capitalism have declined as well.

The societies to which many on the left looked for examples are no longer of much use either. Most of the "Communist" countries have disappeared and the "Socialist" governments have become scarcely distinguishable from their conservative opponents. The regimes that some on the left looked to as models of "socialism" have collapsed, demonstrating the impossibility of building a viable post-capitalist economy and society ruled by a privileged, dictatorial bureaucracy. Similarly, the "Socialist" parties of western Europe have failed to establish an alternative to both "free market capitalism" and "authoritarian socialism." Instead, social democratic governments in France, Italy and Spain have been as brutal in deregulating their economies and dismantling their welfare states as the regimes of Thatcher or Reagan.

In spite of all this there are reasons for socialists to be hopeful. A small, but substantial number of people remain committed to socialist politics and organization. Within the left there has been a great interest in reexamining our pasts. Those who have remained active have been refreshingly willing to take a critical look at the history of the radical movement in order to overcome past mistakes. A larger number has remained committed to radical social change by building the working-class and social movements. Among these are activists in opposition/reform caucuses in the existing unions, in "workers' centers" among unorganized workers, and, while many of the social movements of the last three decades have declined precipitously, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual liberation activists have made their movement an important focus of struggle since the mid-1980s.

We in Solidarity are committed to building these movements and participating in the ongoing discussions about the left's history (both positive and negative), and to maintaining a revolutionary socialist tradition in the US. The question is how to do that in today's political climate.

I: The socialist left in the 1990s

It is difficult to be socialist today. In a period in which activism is on the wane, the idea of a revolutionary left seems more and more abstract. Not surprisingly, many have given up building socialist organizations and political activity altogether. Many others, while remaining active have lost confidence in the practicality of socialist organization. Recognizing the weakness of the left, these activists believe we need to put off the project of socialist organization--and even refrain from use of the term "socialist"--until some future time in which the balance of forces has changed. This current views the socialist project as irrelevant, or impractical, at least today. Today's task, on the contrary, is to coalesce a more vaguely defined progressive opposition to the "corporations" and "financiers."

Unfortunately, the revolutionary left has rarely offered serious answers to these critics. For the most part, the few revolutionary organizations which remain merely repeat the claim that they are the (nucleus of the) vanguard of the working class, and denounce those who deny their leadership credentials. Rather than attempt to analyze the crisis of the left which has disheartened so many socialists--and stripped even the ranks of these "vanguards"--they have acknowledged their shrunken size only to praise their own endurance.

For this trend the central task of revolutionaries is recruiting and training people around a fairly abstract understanding of the workings of capitalism and the necessity of socialist revolution. Refusing to prioritize the long-term reconstruction of activist movements, these organizations have fine-tuned programs which have little meaning for activists beyond their own memberships. In short, they have been guilty of precisely what their critics have associated with socialist politics in general.

The problem is that the "socialism is irrelevant" trend is partially right. The socialist project is far less viable today than at any other point in the twentieth century--not solely because of the collapse of the regimes that many on the left falsely identified with socialism. Movement leaderships--what we mean by the term "vanguard"--are small and embattled. For the most part they are not socialist, nor will they join a socialist organization until there is a level of mass struggle that would make the socialist project seem realistic to a large segment of this militant minority. Proclaiming one's unshakable fealty to revolutionary Marxism will not resolve this problem nor will it prevent anyone else from moving rightward.

We in Solidarity believe in a third course. We are committed to the revitalization of the organizations of social protest. At the same time we remain dedicated to the building of an effective socialist organization. That requires a willingness to understand how and why times have changed. Specifically, this pamphlet will offer an explanation of how genuine vanguard organization rose in previous decades and have faded more recently. From there we suggest a course we can take together to help rebuild the movements and a revolutionary left.

II: Key Questions

How do people radicalize?

Its a catch-22, but movements are built by people who are radicalizing and activists radicalize when they absorb lessons from their experiences in movements. More powerful than ideas themselves, activity in struggle teaches the centrality of self-activity and self-organization. In order for workers, women, racial minorities or gays and lesbians to win struggles, they have to force capitalists and their state to make concessions. In building movements powerful enough to defend past popular gains and win new ones, working and oppressed people have to develop the broadest solidarity, they have to build democratic forms of organization, and they have to take the risks involved mass, militant action at the workplace or in the streets. People engaged in struggle develop ideas to explain and justify their actions-- radical, anti-capitalist ideas. Very simply, the practical experience of strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and the like is the key to the growth of working class and popular radicalism.

Different generations have learned this in different ways. Anti-war activists of the 1960s built massive protests and educational campaigns in opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. As the horror of the Vietnam war stunned a generation, activists mobilized a public outcry against it. They brought thousands of marchers into the streets in national demonstrations, organized local committees, canvassed neighborhoods, occupied universities, shut down induction centers, engaged in various forms of civil disobedience and built grass-roots support. Activity yielded both small and large successes such as an endorsement of a rally by a union or community organization, or a declaration by a new politician of opposition to the war. The mass mobilizations made the war increasingly difficult to prosecute and forced the White House to abandon it by 1973. Yet, few activists could have known what Henry Kissinger revealed years later: President Richard Nixon was contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam but continuously postponed his decision out of fear of the anti-war movement. The eventual end of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam was a large victory for anti-war activism.

Anti-war activists did not invent these tactics. Rather, they learned them from the civil rights movement which had blossomed only a decade earlier. These activists for racial equality organized marches, boycotts, sit-ins and freedom rides that brought them into direct confrontation with the southern power structure. Gradually, they shook apart important elements of racial segregation in the U.S. south. These victories taught a generation of activists to rely on themselves and their own activities, rather than on the government and the courts.

The women's movement of the early 1970s also produced a layer of activists whose consciousness about gender relations and social change developed through struggle. Many "second wave" feminists were schooled in the anti-war and student mobilizations of the previous decade. They too mobilized themselves, created women's organizations and thereby raised the consciousness of millions of women.

In recent years, newly radicalized activists have learned some of what social movements can accomplish. Unfortunately, they have also seen some of the drawbacks of trying to force change in a period in which activism is at a low ebb. The movement against U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s radicalized tens of thousands on campuses and in communities throughout the country. Learning from the experiences of anti-war activists from the Vietnam days, organizations such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) organized rallies, petition campaigns, educational programs, and material assistance to the victims of the war. Many of these activists learned the value of self-activity and developed an interest in Marxism, largely because of their contacts with revolutionary organizations in Central America. However, the anti-intervention movement was bucking the trend--a pattern of movement decline and the fact that few U.S. soldiers were placed at risk of injury or death. It never developed the mass strength of the previous anti-war movement, and was not as successful in affecting U.S. foreign policy.

In the 1980s and 1990s gay rights activists have spear-headed the most substantial social movement of recent years. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) has organized marches and civil disobedience to demand government action to fight AIDS. These activists have seen government indifference and challenged it with sit-ins and street blockades. Thousands of activists are learning that their own activity has brought the AIDS epidemic to public attention. Unfortunately, however, they too are bucking a downward trend in all the movements and have had great difficulty winning reforms from government bodies whose budgets are being slashed. As a result, many gay and lesbian activists are quickly "burnt out" by their inability to win concrete gains, while many of those who remain consistently active tend to view their struggles in isolation from those of workers, racial minorities and women.

In the last year, new layers of activists have emerged in the struggles against the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in California, and in defense of affirmative action and other social gains of the 1960s. We hope that these movements will develop new strategies and organizations that can maintain the radicalism of these new activists.

Why isn't everybody radical?

Social movements have generated feminists, anti-racists, anti-interventionists, and gay rights activists. As we will soon see, labor activism has also produced several generations of worker militants. In all cases, a substantial minority has developed an interest in socialism and many have joined socialist organizations. Yet the majority of activists do not become socialists and the majority of people do not become active.

Political consciousness develops unevenly, both within the activist communities and over time. Waves of movement radicalism have schooled generations in self-activity while at their peak, but many of those same activists have withdrawn as their movements have ebbed and people return to the demands of private life. The success movements achieved at their high points often leave a lasting imprint on consciousness. The "Vietnam Syndrome", for example, still had a place in popular parlance at the beginning of the Gulf War. But the reforms they won are in danger once the movements recede.

The activist milieu shrinks as the movement is in decline and only the most committed remain. Again the cruel irony is that when movements are small it is harder to recruit new members and harder to radicalize new activists. When movement organizations lack the power to win immediate gains, only those with a long-term vision of social change stick around for the fight. In these circumstances, many committed movement activists tend to narrow their political vision in the hope of some how preserving their organizations and whatever gains they made in the past.

How do radicals organize?

Even in periods of little movement activity, some activists remain radical and some radicals remain active. They keep alive rank and file organizations within their unions and lead working class struggles within communities. They are the backbone of anti-intervention and anti-racist committees. They build women's rights organizations and movements for gay rights. They learn the lessons of their own activity and help younger people understand these lessons when they first come around.

These activists are what Marxists have generally regarded as a "vanguard" layer. While mobilizing others to act they confront every day the limits U.S. capitalism places on what is feasible. They see the intransigence of government administrators who will not fund AIDS research in a period of fiscal austerity. They see the resistance of the new right, whose repressive "pro-family" agenda has come to dominate mainstream politics. To comprehend why their opposition is so great and their gains so tenuous, they need a more sophisticated analysis of how capitalism functions and how it shapes U.S. politics. These activists are the audience for socialist ideas because their long-term commitment to social change encourages them to develop a broader vision of how society works and how it is transformed.

Yet neither their radicalism nor their activity are enough to develop a socialist vision or strategy. Among those schooled in the larger movements of the 1960s, only a small number remain active today. But a substantial portion of those who are still around joined socialist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. These vanguard activists best connected the knowledge they gained from their own experiences to a broader Marxist understanding of capitalism. Participating in organizations such as the Young Communist League, the Young Socialist Alliance, the International Socialists or one of numerous organizations which emerged from the Maoist left, they combined their own insights with those of activists from other sectors and drew general political conclusions.

Thus, a socialist organization can keep alive the lessons of the past and generalize from them. It allows activists from the labor upsurges of the 1930s and 1940s to meet militants radicalized in the 1960s or even in the 1980s and 1990s. Together they can put together a more sophisticated picture of how society works and radical movements are built. Its members can more easily connect their activity to their broader vision of how society is changed. A socialist organization educates potential socialists and acts as the "historic memory" of the mass movements.

Yet, having said all of that, building a vanguard and a socialist organization is not a matter simply of will. Movements are historical formations, arising when millions of people are willing to shout "no" and then do something about it. Similarly, revolutionary socialist parties that are real "vanguard" organizations arise when a substantial number of militants, in large movement organizations, come together to transcend the potential parochialism of their single-issue group and develop a more comprehensive strategy for anti-capitalist struggle. To understand how this has happened in the past, and how it will happen again in the future, we need a historical perspective on vanguard organizations.

III. The History of the Workers' Vanguard

We in Solidarity want to build a revolutionary socialist organization that can organize the work of socialists in the labor and social movements, educate its members as revolutionaries and Marxists, and win over new people to revolutionary socialism. However, we have created an organization unlike most on the revolutionary left today. Solidarity members build rank and file caucuses in the unions, workers' centers and the independent organizations of women, gays and lesbians and people of color, even if these activities do not immediately yield recruits to our organization.

We reject the ideas that capitalism can be reformed from within by the Democratic party or trade union bureaucrats; or that the socialism is possible without the fullest development of democratic forms of working class and popular power. However, we believe that revolutionaries can legitimately differ on a wide variety of questions, from the theoretical analysis of the former bureaucratic societies in the East to the tactics socialists should pursue in the labor movement. Solidarity is building this sort of revolutionary organization because we do not pretend to be either the vanguard party or its' nucleus. Therefore, we advocate revolutionary regroupment--the coming together of different revolutionary currents who agree on a common practice--as the best way to lay the foundation for a real revolutionary party in the United States.

Solidarity's attempt to build a socialist organization that is both revolutionary and non-sectarian, that has no pretense of being a party or "pre-party" is based on our understanding of the actual historical development of the workers' and popular vanguards in the United States and Europe in the twentieth century. Before the second world war, the layer of working people who, in the words of Ernest Mandel, "even during a lull in the struggle does not abandon the front lines of the class struggle, but continues the war, so to speak, 'by other means'" was both the sociological and political vanguard of the working class. Mostly shop stewards or rank and file militants in organized and unorganized workplaces, these worker activists argued for militancy and solidarity against the bosses, and for union democracy against the emerging bureaucracies in the established unions. They were also, in their overwhelming majority, socialists and revolutionaries. Put simply, the majority of militant workers before the second world war would have described themselves as "reds" of one hue or another.

In Europe this layer of workers grew massively before the first world war. Literally hundreds of thousands of worker activists across Europe organized in their workplaces and communities against capital and the state. Many joined revolutionary and socialist organizations. In Germany and Italy, skilled machinists in the large factories were the backbone of networks of shop floor militants who led strikes and slow-downs, often against the wishes of the officials of the Social-Democratic-led unions. These workers were the audience for Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebnecht, Antonio Gramsci and other left-wing socialists in the pre-war years.

As the left argued for revolutionary mass action, it often confronted the more conservative policies of the leadership of European Social Democracy. The social democratic parties had become advocates of routinized collective bargaining conducted almost exclusively by union leaders. Furthermore, within the social democratic parties, the originally revolutionary visions of Karl Marx and Friedreich Engels were giving way to strategies of parliamentary reform orchestrated by elected social democratic deputies and party officials. This more conservative, "reformist" strategy was most popular among socialist party functionaries, elected officials and trade union leaders. Reformism which became an obstacle to organizing the struggle against capital and the state even before the first world war.

The labor officialdom's desire for peaceful relations with the powers that be led them to identify the interests of the workers with those of the national state. Not surprisingly, they supported their own governments when war broke out in 1914. Thus, the social-democratic leaders pitted workers of one country against those of another in a brutal, inter-imperialist war.

During the first world war, left-wing workers formed the nucleus of the anti-war movement in the factories and worker neighborhoods as the official leadership of European social-democracy supported their own bourgeois governments' war efforts. After 1914, despite the initial wave of popular nationalism, pro-war hysteria and severe political repression, these workers argued and organized against the war. They joined the anti-war wings of the socialist parties in Germany and Italy.

In France and Spain, with their less developed industries, the workers' vanguard did not gravitate toward Marxist politics, but instead toward revolutionary syndicalism. The idea that direct workplace action alone could destroy the power of capital and initiate a new, egalitarian and collectivist social order made sense to highly skilled workers in smaller factories and workshops. They led on going struggles to limit the employers' control over the production process and were, as a result, able to exercise considerable job-control. In Spain, the anarcho-syndicalist workers' vanguard included both urban and rural workers. A significant minority of agricultural wage workers joined the anarcho-syndicalist unions, and led numerous, semi-insurrectional strikes on the capitalist latifundia of central and southern Spain. When World War I war broke out, the Spanish revolutionary syndicalists led the anti-war opposition, breaking from their French counterparts who supported their own government.

The political organization and consciousness of the European workers' vanguard reached its highest point in pre-revolutionary Russia. Revolutionary socialists, in particular the Bolshevik wing of Russian social-democracy, had been sinking deep roots in the working class and student struggles since the 1890s. During the massive strike wave of 1912-1914, the Bolsheviks won the support of the majority of militant workers, in particular the skilled metal workers in the large factories of Moscow and Petrograd. At the center of working class opposition to the war, these "worker- Bolsheviks" were overtaken temporarily by the semi-spontaneous February revolution of 1917. However, their deep roots in the factories and neighborhoods, and their commitment to uncompromising struggle against both the Tsarist autocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie allowed them to assume leadership of the mass movement in September and lead the first successful socialist revolution in October 1917.

The social-democracy's support for the first world war destroyed the internationalist ethos of the Second International. Angered by the rightward drift of European social democracy but invigorated by the Bolshevik victory in Russia, much of the European workers' vanguard shifted its allegiance to the new and explicitly revolutionary Communist parties after the first world war.

While unable to break the loyalty of the majority of workers to the social-democratic parties during the post-war revolutionary upsurges of 1918-1923, the Communist parties were massive. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist parties counted tens of thousands of worker members in Britain, Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia and hundreds of thousands in Germany, France and Italy. These mass revolutionary workers' parties were at the forefront of industrial and political militancy across Europe prior to the mid 1930s. They organized important "class struggle" oppositions in the social-democratic led unions and led unofficial strikes and demonstrations against the employers' offensive and state austerity policies.

In the United States, the pre-World War II workers' vanguard was both smaller and less politically homogeneous than in Europe. But even here, most of the militant and active workers identified with some variant of radical, anti-capitalist politics. Before the first world war, most worker activists were members of either the Socialist Party (SP) or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). At its height, the SP had nearly 100,000 members, scores of local newspapers and magazines and hundreds of elected officials across the US. While the majority of the SP's members were probably urban professionals and farmers, the SP organized a significant layer of working class militants. Rank and file SP worker members played crucial roles in "great uprisings" of 1910-1920 that established unions (the ILGWU and ACWU) among the predominantly Jewish and Italian immigrant and female garment workers. Often they clashed with fellow (mostly male) SP members in the emerging bureaucracies of the needle trades unions. The SP in the United States also recruited several hundred skilled metal workers in large factories like the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York. These machinists led attempts to democratize the International Association of Machinists and transform it from a narrow craft union into a broad industrial union embracing both skilled and unskilled in the metal working and machine building industries.

The IWW was the most important organization of militant and radical workers in the pre-war United States. Organizing upwards of 80,000 workers at the high points of the mass strike wave of 1907-1912, the "Wobblies" educated a militant minority of textile workers, "hard rock" (non-coal) miners, lumberjacks, farm workers, steel, rubber and auto workers in class struggle politics. They recognized direct action in the workplace and community and democratic self-organization as the keys to winning gains under capitalism and creating a "new society from the ashes of the old." Together with the immigrant workers in the SP, the IWW were in the forefront of the struggle against the United States' entry into the first world war. Despite massive and brutal government and private vigilante repression during and immediately after the war, left-wing SPers and Wobblies organized strikes and demonstrations against the war and against U.S. intervention against the Russian revolution. The massive Seattle General Strike of 1919 was one of the products of this struggle.

After the Russian revolution, the majority of the pre-war workers' vanguard gravitated to the newly formed Communist party. But a significant minority of these activists remained revolutionary syndicalists or left-wing Socialists. Though much smaller than the far left prior to 1914, the Communist Party in the United States organized some 10,000 worker militants in the 1920s. The Communists played a central role in organizing the Trade Union Educational League, a network of rank and file militants in the AFL unions. They led organized challenges to the bureaucracies in the garment and mine workers' unions, and established beach heads of industrial organization among unorganized workers in steel, auto and rubber. With the onset of the Depression, the Communists helped lead a massive and militant unemployed workers' movement that blocked evictions and won emergency relief on a local level. Numerous scholars have credited that effort with forcing the Roosevelt administration to establish public works programs and federally financed unemployment insurance.

Between 1933 and 1937 a wave of industrial militancy established the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The Communist Party played a leading role again and its membership grew to between 30,000 and 40,000 workers. During pivotal events such as the west coast longshore strike of 1934, the Akron rubber strike of 1936, and the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-37, the Communists' advocacy of rank and file militancy, self-organization and independence from the Democratic Party and the Roosevelt administration was essential to victory.

The Popular Front and the Transformation of the Workers' Vanguard

The seventh world Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935 marked a crucial turning point in the political and social history of the workers' vanguard in Europe and the US. Stalin and his bureaucracy now dominated the Comintern and were determined to reshape Communist strategies to meet the interests of the Moscow regime. Fascism had smashed the workers' movement in Italy and Germany. These defeats, particularly in Germany, were facilitated by the policies of the Social Democratic and Communist parties. The social-democrats counselled passivity and reliance upon the liberal capitalists who were expected to keep Hitler from taking power. The Communists, under the political guidance of the Comintern and the Soviet leadership, spent most of their energy denouncing the social-democrats as "social fascists" and down playing the threat posed by the Nazis. Despite calls by revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky for a "united front" of Communists and Social-Democrats to stop the victory of fascism, which threatened the annihilation of the workers' movement and its vanguard, the Communists and Social Democrats remained divided and passive. As a result, Hitler took power in 1933 without any opposition from the largest and best organized workers movement in the world.

At its seventh world Congress, the Comintern made a belated attempt to rectify its past ultra-left errors, by adopting the strategy of the Popular Front. The popular front was, in essence, the same strategy pursued by German social-democracy in the early 1930s--electoral alliances with liberal capitalist parties, participation in coalition governments, and the discouragement of all forms of worker militancy that could upset this alliance with progressive capitalists. Unfortunately, rather than preserve capitalist democracy as a lesser evil to fascism, the popular front strategy led to the derailment of revolutionary and pre-revolutionary upsurges. By 1940, the popular front strategy had weakened the labor movement, leaving it vulnerable to a right-wing offensive.

In France, the workers took the Popular Front's election victory in 1936 as a signal that "their government" was in power. While rank and file communists led a massive strike wave, including sit-down strikes at major auto and steel plants, the Communist leadership lectured its own members and the workers who followed them about the need to know "when to end a strike" that might strain relations with the bourgeois Radical party. The demobilization and demoralization of the workers over the next few years set the stage for the collapse of France during the Nazi invasion of 1940 and the emergence of the Vichy collaborationist regime.

In Spain, the results of the popular front were even more disastrous. The Spanish army, under the leadership of Francisco Franco, responded to the victory of the Popular Front coalition of bourgeois Republicans, Socialists and Communists with a coup d'etat in June 1936. It was only an anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary socialist led mass mobilization of armed workers' militias in the crucial industrial and agricultural sectors that stopped the initial military offensive. Many syndicalists and other revolutionary workers tried to deepen the revolutionary process in Catalonia in the Spring of 1937. The Communists, then in control of the Republican army smashed the workers' militia that had successfully stopped Franco. In the wake of the disarming of the workers, Franco's armies began their prolonged and ultimately successful offensive against the Spanish Republic.

The Popular Front approach wasted many revolutionary opportunities in the 1930s and led to reactionary victories in France and Spain. Furthermore, it began the long-term process through which the politics and social composition of the Communist leaderships in Europe came to resemble those of the social-democratic parties. Even after the Allied victory in World War II, the Communists continued to pursue alliances with progressive capitalists in order to create "advanced democracies," as steps on the road to a peaceful transition to socialism.

The rightward shift in Communist policies was designed in Moscow. Yet European and U.S. Communists accepted the change eagerly and quickly. The conservatization of the Communist parties both reflected and accelerated gradual changes in the character of both their memberships and leaderships. Beginning in the 1930s in France, and the 1940s in Italy, the Communists assumed the official leadership of the major union federations. By the end of the 1960s, Spanish Communists had become the leaders of the semi-clandestine unions. The systematic demobilization of worker activism in the interests of the popular fronts transformed the Communist parties' worker members from rank and file leaders into labor officials. Combined with the growth of the party apparatuses and their cadre of elected officials, the Communist parties of Italy, France and Spain took on the political and social characteristics of the pre-World War II social-democratic parties of Germany, Britain and Scandinavia. Communist labor bureaucrats and elected officials could deliver higher wages and increased state welfare spending during the long economic boom that began at the end of the Great Depression. But the integration of the workers' vanguard into the labor bureaucracy left the labor movement in Europe unprepared for the long bust that began in the late 1960s. The European Communists' attempt to continue the post-war labor-management peace during the global crisis of profitability failed to stop the capitalist employers' offensive and austerity drive.

The impact of the Communists' adoption of the popular front strategy had even more disastrous long-term effects in the United States. The Communists were transformed, almost overnight, from advocates of working class political independence from the Democratic party and capitalist state, and of the need for a labor party, into the foot soldiers of the CIO leadership's campaign for Roosevelt's reelection in 1936. In the United States, the Communists developed the "center-left" strategy of a long term alliance with labor leaders John L. Lewis and Philip Murray and the emerging CIO bureaucracy. The Communist Party deemed these leaders progressive because of their support for Roosevelt and a collective security agreement with the USSR. To maintain this alliance and win staff jobs for their members, Communist unionists used their influence in the newly formed CIO unions to successfully block the spread of sit-down strikes in the Spring of 1937 to Chrysler and other non-union corporations and to discourage the use of the militant tactics and forms of organization that had been crucial to the CIO's successes in 1936-37.

The first fruit of the "center-left" strategy was the unsuccessful attempt to organize the independent, "Little Steel" corporations in the Spring of 1937. While hundreds of young Communists served as organizers for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), they never challenged Philip Murray's undemocratic and bureaucratic organizing strategy. When the SWOC led a strike against Little Steel, the Chicago police opened fire on unarmed union members and their families during. The event was immortalized as the "Memorial Day Massacre." Murray and the Communists called on Roosevelt to condemn the steel bosses, the mayor of Chicago and the governors of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Instead, Roosevelt called for a "plague on both houses," refusing to rebuke the New Deal Democratic mayor or governors. The Little Steel strike was defeated, ending the CIO offensive in basic industry.

The Communists integration into the lower and middle levels of the CIO bureaucracy and their subsequent isolation from the rank and file deepened during the second World War. The Nazi invasion of the USSR and the latter's military alliance with the United States, France, and Britain led the Communist party in the United States to enthusiastically support the U.S. war effort. When the leaders of both the AFL and CIO signed a "no-strike pledge", giving up any workplace action in defense of wages and working conditions for the duration of the war, the Communists became its most zealous enforcers. Even more tragic than their public denunciations of the United Mine Workers' strike of 1943, was the role of Communist shop stewards, local officers and regional staffers in the auto, steel and rubber industries during the war. Communist union officials, often elected as militants, stood shoulder to shoulder with management in disciplining and firing workers who engaged in unauthorized, "wild-cat" strikes over wages and working conditions. By the end of the war, the Communists' role as enforcers of labor discipline thoroughly isolated them from the ranks of the CIO.

The advent of the cold war cut short the integration of the Communist element of the workers' vanguard into the CIO bureaucracy. As the U.S. ruling class assumed the leadership of the capitalist world after 1945, it broke its war time alliance with the USSR and declared a cold war against communism. At home, both Democrats and Republicans used anti-communism to launch a witch-hunt against all forms of domestic radicalism. To maintain its alliance with President Harry Truman's administration, which was demanding a politically loyal labor officialdom, the leaders of the CIO purged Communists and other radicals in the late 1940s and 1950s. This historic divorce between socialist politics and the life of the working class in the post war United States left the labor bureaucracy of the soon to be united AFL-CIO without significant opposition. Like their European counterparts, the U.S. labor leadership has proven incapable of providing any strategy to answer the employers offensive that began in the early 1970s.

The Crisis of the Revolutionary Left of the 1970s

The recomposition of the workers' vanguard in Europe and the United States radically altered the political terrain for the revolutionary socialist left in the 1950s and 1960s. Gone was the sizeable, if not mass, working-class audience for revolutionary socialist ideas that had existed up until the 1930s and early 1940s. The long wave of capitalist growth brought prosperity to large segments of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, undermining the need for the tumultuous struggles that had produced and nurtured a growing layer of radical worker activists in the early twentieth century. The revolutionary left, both in Europe and the United States was condemned to political irrelevance and isolation for most of the 1950s. The isolation of these small revolutionary groupings began to end in the 1960s, as they recruited from the student, anti-imperialist, feminist and anti-racist radicalization. However, when the capitalist crisis began in the late 1960s, and many of these groups attempted to implant themselves in the working class, they confronted a radically different situation than the one revolutionaries and radicals faced in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the 1960s, there simply was no large working-class milieu educated in the traditions of militant unionism and class solidarity in the U.S. comparable to that which existed before World War II. Government campaigns of murder and repression against African-American leaders and organizations such as the Black Panther Party had a particularly devastating effect on the small and beleaguered layer of activists radicalized in the 1960s. While younger workers, many of whom were influenced by African-American and anti-war radicalism, did lead numerous "wild-cat" strikes between 1969 and 1973, this layer of workers did not have the strategic vision to negotiate the changing political and economic terrain of class struggle that emerged during and after the global recession of 1974-75. Unable to pose a coherent alternative to the labor officials' strategy of reliance on the Democrats and routinized collective bargaining, much of this new vanguard was dispersed with the factory closures and layoffs of the 1980s.

The revolutionary left of the 1970s--whether Maoist, Trotskyist, syndicalist or left-socialist--did not recognize this changed political reality. Most of the far left assumed first, that a broad layer of workers were already taking action in the workplace and would quickly become radical and anti-capitalist; and second, that the deepening capitalist economic crisis would transform the embryonic rank and file movement of the early 1970s into a mass strike wave similar to that of the 1930s. Revolutionaries who "turned to the working class" in these years believed that their main task was to build their party. Their goal was to win the rapidly radicalizing layer of workers to the their "correct line". Competitor parties were seen as predators to be smashed. Unfortunately, all of the party building efforts were small and socially insignificant.

The expectations of the revolutionary left of the 1970s were unrealistic. Along with other factors, the embryonic rank and file movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was destroyed by the global recession of 1974-75 and the capitalist restructuring that followed. Much of the revolutionary left also underestimated the hold of the labor bureaucracy over the passive elements of the working class from which the officials derived their survival. A paralysis of nearly twenty years set in before sections of the class began to learn how to struggle under changed circumstances.

Much of the tragedy of the revolutionary left of the 1970s flowed from our failure to recognize the decimation of the pre-war workers' vanguard. The almost complete absence of a layer of workers who had kept alive traditions of working class self-activity and self-organization in the workplace and community were the reefs upon which all of the "party-building" projects wrecked. As the party-building groups, or what we in Solidarity have called "vanguardists", went into crisis, most of their members became disillusioned with the working class. The majority of the radicals and revolutionaries who emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s have moved to the right or become inactive. The minority of organizations and individuals that survived the 1970s with pro-working class and revolutionary politics either dug into their union and other movement work and wrote off socialist organization as irrelevant and unnecessary or reaffirmed their essentially vanguardist projects and declared that the main priority was still to build their "revolutionary party." Solidarity is a unique response to the crisis of the revolutionary left in the US. We are committed to building a revolutionary socialist organization that avoids the pitfalls of reformism and vanguardism by coming to grips with the actual situation radicals and revolutionaries face in the United States today.

IV. Building a revolutionary socialist left today

As revolutionary socialists and activists we confront a set of problems vastly different from those which our political ancestors dealt with sixty or even thirty years ago. The workers' and popular movements in the U.S. have suffered a series of profound setbacks since the 1970s. The employers' offensive has been largely successful. Unions are weaker today than at any time since the Great Depression of the early 1930s and those that survive have bargained away wages, benefits and working conditions. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans compete for corporate donations and upper middle class votes by outdoing one another in dismantling the social programs (unemployment insurance, social security) which the workers movements won in 1930s. Also on the chopping block are the greatly expanded Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, job training programs, educational loans--the conquests of the social movements of the 1960s.

There has been resistance to the employers' offensive and the state austerity drive. Unionized workers have challenged concessions. UFCW Local P-9 at Austin, Minnesota's Hormel plant, the Watsonville Cannery workers, the locked-out Staley workers in Decatur, Illinois, and more recently UAW members at GM's Flint, Michigan and Dayton, Ohio plants have tried to fight back. Despite a few victories, most of these strikes have been unsuccessful, primarily because of the strategy and tactics of the official AFL-CIO leadership. Consequently, their efforts and have had little resonance in the broader labor movement.

Networks of committed activists remain within the gay rights and women's liberation movements. They challenge the bi-partisan logic of fiscal austerity when they demand government action to fight AIDS and government funding for full reproductive health care. Activists of color also continue to battle police brutality, anti-immigrant policies and attacks on affirmative action. New environmental organizations, especially those that organize working people and non-white communities, are also an important center of resistance. However, the absence of a broad based fightback leaves these struggles isolated and weakened.

The struggles of the last twenty years have produced a new, but numerically small and politically diverse, workers and popular vanguard. Within the existing unions, there is a small and generally non-socialist layer of militant workers who have been the back bone of the struggles against concessions and for the revitalization of their unions. Active in such rank and file, reform caucuses as Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the New Directions Movement in the UAW, or leading militant local struggles such as those of UFCW Local P-9 in the 1980s or of the Staley workers today, these workers have developed a "solidarity consciousness." This new workers' vanguard opposes concessions and various forms of labor-management cooperation and embraces militancy and solidarity with the struggles of other workers in the United States and other countries.

The political orientation of this group of workers varies considerably. Within this very thin layer of workers, an even smaller minority consciously rejects the labor officialdom's model of "business unionism" and questions the logic of profitability and competition. With the exception of perhaps several hundred conscious socialists in the labor movement, the bulk of the workers' vanguard today has a contradictory political consciousness. Individual militants may reject concessions, "Total Quality Management" and other forms of labor management collaboration, but still accept the need for "their company" to be profitable and competitive. Other labor activists oppose the anti-labor "free trade agreements" such as NAFTA and GATT and recognize the need for a break with the Democratic party, but remain open to appeals from right wing populists like Ross Perot.

Perhaps the most exciting development in the last decade is the rise of community-labor activism, especially in efforts to organize unorganized workers in the growing low wage sectors of the U.S. economy such as garment, electronics, food processing, restaurants and other services. In parts of the country as diverse as Oakland, California, El Paso, Texas, Rocky Mount, North Carolina and New York City, working class activists have attempted to link labor and anti-racist politics in their efforts to organize immigrant and African-American workers. These "workers' centers", many initiated by veterans of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, help educate a layer of worker militants to see the big picture of capitalist restructuring that has transformed their industries, communities and struggles.

Solidarity believes that revolutionaries today need to help rebuild this vanguard and promote the development of a revolutionary socialist current within this layer of labor and social movement activists. In the absence of mass struggles, revolutionary socialist ideas will not have an immediate, large-scale response, even among the most active militants in the unions, workers' centers and social movement organizations. When people organize and collectively confront their employers or the government they develop social power and a radical consciousness. Without the lived experience of successful, mass self-organization and self-activity, the idea of a radical transformation of society will seem unrealistic to most activists. For the rank and file unionist desperately trying to build resistance to concessions or Total Quality Management, the workers' center activist embroiled in the difficult struggle to organize immigrant garment workers, or the reproductive rights activist organizing against the latest attack on the legal right to abortion, the notion of revolution often appears utopian.

While revolutionary socialism may make sense to only individual militants in the labor and social movements, revolutionaries can and must promote class consciousness and activism throughout the small and beleaguered workers' vanguard in the U.S. today. One of the main tasks of revolutionaries today is to organize and educate a broad layer of worker activists in the politics of militancy, solidarity, democracy and independent political action. The promotion of "class struggle" (but not necessarily socialist) politics through rank and file caucuses in existing unions, workers' centers, cross industry networks like Labor Notes, gay and lesbian, women's and African-American organizations and efforts at independent political action is both possible and necessary. Many of the activists we work with in our unions, workers' centers or movement groups may think that socialist revolution is impossible today, but they are open to the idea that direct action, alliances with other workers and oppressed groups, democratic organization and autonomy from the Democratic party are the basis for an effective strategy to defend past gains from the employers and the state.

The development of a layer of activists committed to class struggle politics will be essential to the success of the next wave of working class and popular struggles. In the absence of an alternative leadership, the labor officials and the middle class leaders of the African-American, women's and gay and lesbian organizations tend to derail these struggles into routinized collective bargaining, lobbying, Democratic party election campaigns and other political dead ends. A network of radical activists with a vision of class struggle will be able to provide an alternative leadership to that of the labor bureaucracy and the movement leaders who ally themselves with the Democratic Party, increasing the chances that the future struggles will be more successful and self-sustaining than those of the last two decades.

The presence of conscious revolutionary Marxists in this layer will be, in certain circumstances, crucial to the ability of militants to transform their unions into fighting organizations or building successful struggles against capital and the state. A new upsurge in the labor and social movements, especially among young people, will also increase the size and political radicalism of the workers' vanguard, creating the basis for the building of a revolutionary party in the United States. The practical success of a revolutionary strategy in a concrete struggle is central to winning activists to socialist politics and recruiting them to revolutionary organizations.

Although we believe that there is no large scale audience, even among worker and movement activists, for revolutionary socialist ideas in the United States today, Solidarity remains committed to building a revolutionary socialist organization. We publish pamphlets on the crisis of the labor movement and strategies for rebuilding the reproductive rights movement. We hope to attract those individuals in the union reform movement, workers' centers, anti-racist, reproductive rights or gay and lesbian movements who are interested in revolutionary socialist ideas. We continue to believe that revolutionary socialist organization is the best means of recruiting and educating activists as socialists and Marxists, of organizing and guiding our movement activism, and of developing a socialist analysis of the concrete realities revolutionaries face today. By building a socialist organization today, we hope to lay the foundation for a new revolutionary workers' party that could affect the outcome of a revolutionary crisis in the future.

In accomplishing these tasks, we believe that the classical tradition of Marxism is necessary, but not sufficient. The works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky provide a foundation for the development of a revolutionary socialist theory. But they are not a schema for solving the variety of situations we face today. They do not tell us how to organize workers without citizenship rights, to confront the difficult issues of the relationship of class exploitation to gender, racial or national oppression. The classical Marxist tradition does not provide concrete analyses of either the precise forms and limits of the current economic crisis of advanced capitalism, the global restructuring of the labor-process along the lines of "lean" and "flexible" production, or the road to working class and popular political independence in the U.S.

Solidarity does not have all the answers to these questions. No group does. The small size, organizational weakness and political diversity of the workers' vanguard in the United States today place severe limits on the development of any group of revolutionaries. We believe that none of the existing revolutionary socialist organizations groups--nor even all of them combined--can synthesize the experience of worker and social movement activists and provide a coherent strategy (known on the left as a "program") for socialist revolution in the United States today. Therefore, no one can claim to be the vanguard party or its nucleus.

We in Solidarity advocate revolutionary socialist regroupment--the coming together of different revolutionary currents on the basis of common practice and perspectives. In this process we believe that we have as much to learn as we do to teach from other socialist militants. We encounter many comrades from other socialist traditions in our activism in union reform groups, workers' centers and other movement organizations. Many of them do not share our assessment of China, Cuba, or the former Soviet Union. Some do not believe it makes sense to build a socialist organization today. Others do not share our emphasis on building rank and file movements in the existing unions. And many have unwarranted confidence in the potential of using the Democratic Party to build the workers' and social movements. While we believe we have many useful ideas to contribute, we also recognize that we have much to learn. Many of these comrades have extensive experience organizing the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. working class--the predominantly immigrant, largely undocumented, and often female workers in low wage industries in the United States. This experience gives them profound insights into several important questions. They have had to address the relationship between workplace and community organizing in concrete terms, not just in theory. They have strategized about how to deal with the existing bureaucratic unions while building rank and file workers' committees in the plants and workers' centers in the communities. Along with anti-racist activists, these comrades have strategized about how to rebuild social power within communities of color. On these, and other issues, we in Solidarity have much to learn.

Our open, experimental and modest approach to politics is essential to promoting revolutionary regroupment today and in the future. We hope that our perspective will allow us and other revolutionaries to develop a healthy give and take with the significant new layer of radical workers who will emerge from the next upsurge of working class and popular struggles in the United States. To prepare for this upsurge, the revolutionary left needs both a body of concrete strategies and tactics for the working class struggle to bring to these newly radicalized workers, and a method of work and discussion that will allow us to learn from this new vanguards' experiences and theorization. Only through this sort of synthesis of revolutionary socialists and a sizeable layer of radicalized workers will the real core of a revolutionary party be created in the United States.

Join Solidarity

If you are an activist and you find the analysis in this pamphlet convincing, we urge you to join us. We want to work with as many people as possible to both rebuild a layer of militant workers and activists and organize a revolutionary socialist presence in the movements. By joining Solidarity you are connecting yourself to a larger network of activists, many of whom deal with issues just like yours. You are also joining a socialist organization which values socialist theory and helps its members learn.

If your organization or collective finds these ideas convincing, we want to talk to you as well. We believe that bringing together groups of socialists and activists from different left traditions is one of the best contributions we can make to the rebuilding of a socialist left in the United States.

Discussion on Authority, Organization, and Centralization

2009-06-25T16:35:00.012-05:00

Posted by TheBirdAbout2Fly

From time to time the comments thread of an article will take on a life of it's own and generate useful, high level discussion on this or that topic. Learning to Fly hopes to keep an eye on these discussions and bring more attention to the ones we feel are of particular importance. An interesting debate on authority, organization, and centralization has emerged as a bit of a tangent on one of our threads that I feel deserves more attention and further discussion. The thread originally appeared in a post entitled The Deepening of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution and can be found in it's entirety here.

To start off, as Transcona Slim points out, the discourse between “authoritarian” and “anti-authoritarian” socialism goes back to the days of Marx and Bakunin. Of course, I wouldn't want to just position ourselves in relation to fossilised lines in the sand drawn 150 years ago and rehash the same old arguments here. But I wouldn't want to throw it all away, either. So, how to approach it in a manner befitting of the spirit of this blog? FOOD-FIGHT!!!

I think we would do well to discuss the meaning of some of these terms: authority, organization, centralization (and others)...

I said in the original thread:

Revolution is about transforming society and, of necessity, using violence to acheive that.

Any act of violence is an act of authority, as I see it. But the question is, “the authority of what?” In a revolution, it is the authority of the People over the oppressor. They are right and justified to stand firmly against the oppressors, not only to overthrow their power, but also to ensure that it doesn't come back. So, I'd say that because the necessity of the use of violence exists, and because the People are justified in using violence to overthrow the oppressors, it stands that the People are right to exert their authority over the oppressors for the purposes of transforming society. So, to me this “authoritarian/anti-authoritarian” dichotomy is false, if revolution is necessarily the exercise of authority over the oppressors. It seems to be more of a matter of the form that that authority will take.

Transcona Slim says:

I use "authoritarian" as someone who puts an emphasis on the "authority" of the state or individuals dictators. I'm not someone who is all anti-organizational, but there should always be a strong critique of power and authority and how it is used.

Here we begin to speak about the organization of revolutionary authority. In the original post I commented that organization means centralization. What I meant by this is that organization always has a basis of unity, a common understanding of the purpose of that organization, that lies at the very heart of the organization. Call it a “mandate”, call it a “basis of unity”, call it what you will, but all organizations are centred around something. Perhaps I was incorrect to call that “centralization”, but I'm not sure. I get the traditional understanding of the word “centralization” as the concentration of power in the hands of one person or a group of elites, and I wouldn't argue in favour of something like that. Still, the question remains, that if organization means having some sort of unity around something, what form does that take? How do we ensure that our organization remains true to the core idea(s) around which it was formed, and doesn't get pulled off course? And, how do we ensure that these core idea(s) are getting us to where we want to go?

Transcona Slim says:

half of the failure of "the left" was a tendency to "gathering around certain goals, principles, and strategies" while denouncing and competing with any and all alternative strategies.

It's with this sort of outlook that this project was created. Traditionally, political groups form by gathering like-minded people together, hammering out their basis of unity, and drawing strong lines of demarcation between them and other groups, and arguing why they are correct. The Learning to Fly project was launched with a very broad basis of unity: basically, we recognize the need for radical/revolutionary change. From there we set out to engage with the best that different trends and ideologies have to offer to come to a better understanding of where we are, where we need to go, and how to get there, both on the group level as well as broadly. That said, I think we should be working toward a more narrow understanding of our goals, principles, and strategies, and not just posture militantly with vague calls for revolution. What does revolution mean?

Transcona Slim continues:

Our organizations should be horizontal confederations with a base-theory/goal, but that gives free association to individuals and locals to chart there own path. Instead of disciplined/forced unity, we should create a collective harmony of tactics and ideas that work together.

It would be a mistake to think that revolution will look the same everywhere, and will take/should take the same path everywhere. It would be a disasterously huge mistake. At the same time, I'm not sure where we'd draw lines as to where one community ends and where the next begins, and I'm not sure how desireable that would be anyway. Given the interconnectedness of the global economy, is it possible? For example, Canada is a wealthy nation that has gotten rich off the backs of the “Global South” that it has plundered. If we worry only about socializing this wealth in our own communities (however we define that), reorganizing it amongst ourselves, we would only be socializing the plunder of imperialism. Because of our connections to the “Global South” we have responsibilities, so how do we organize that and coordinate that? Would local workers be interested in taking up that responsibility, and if they aren't interested in giving up some of that wealth, should they be forced? And if so, who would do the forcing, and with what mechanisms?

I won't touch on the idea of horizontal confederations just now, but I feel like that's an idea worth digging into as well.

I'm interested to hear what everyone is thinking on these and related topics. So, let's continue this important discussion.

Together they stand

2009-06-22T21:35:00.004-05:00

Today I stood on the busy corner of Osborne and Stradbrook in solidarity with the protesters or Tehran. The people are crying out for change. the world is crying out for change

Some words from a protester in Iran...

"Tomorrow is a big day, I may be martyred

I will participate in the demonstration tomorrow. Perhaps, tomorrows demonstration will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who are going to get killed. I am listening to all the beautiful songs I've heard in my life. I may even dance a few times. I always wanted to have my eyebrows really thin. Yes, before I leave tomorrow I will stop by the salon! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should stop by the library too; Forugh and Shamloo's poetries are worth reading once more. I should again look at my family's photo albums from the beginning. My friends, I should call them and say my goodbyes. All I have are two bookshelves which i told my family who should receive them. I only need two more courses till i Finnish university, but who cares about my degree. My mind is too overwhelmed now. I've written these scattered sentences for the next generation so that they know we weren't smitten by the atmosphere or emotional. So that they know for the improvement of their lives we did everything possible. So that they know if our ancestors surrendered to the attacks of Arabs and the Moghols, they did not surrender to despotism. So i am dedicating these words to the children of the next generation"

Today we face certain danger, only to bring hope and true freedom to all the people of the world. Let us do everything possible. this battle is about to get hotter, i feel it in my heart.

The Power of the People in Iran

2009-06-22T14:03:00.009-05:00

Despite calls by the Ayatollah to stop all protests and respect the results of the recent Iranian election, people continue to pour into the streets in revolt.

On Radical-Leftist Strategy, Part 3 of 3.

2009-06-17T14:55:00.002-05:00

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!”

Robin Hahnel in Winnipeg

2009-06-16T15:38:00.005-05:00

Posted by TheBirdAbout2Fly

Robin Hahnel, co-founder of Participatory Economics will be speaking in Winnipeg on June 20 and 21 as part of the Spirited Anarchy Festival. Here are the details:

Saturday, June 20 - 7:30pm Turning the Economic Crisis to Good Use: Robin Hahnel speaks at the Mondragon
Robin Hahnel is the coauthor of Looking Forward: Particapatory Economics for the 21st Century and a professor at Portland State University.

Sunday, June 21 - 2:00 Robin Hahnel presents an interactive workshop: Anarchist Planning - It couldn't be any worse than capitalist planning, could it?

See www.wpgdiy.org for more.

Here's an article by Hahnel for some primer and discussion:

Overcoming Blind Spots In Left Vision: Participatory Planning

May 16, 2009 By Robin Hahnel

Introduction

What can those who want to replace the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation in the twenty-first century learn from those who struggled to build socialist economies in the twentieth century? I think we should embrace our forebears' goals - economic justice and economic democracy - and honour the memory of the millions of socialist militants who dedicated their lives to pursuing these goals, often at great personal cost. But I think we can also learn from our forerunners' efforts and sacrifices what will NOT achieve these goals. Planning by an elite -- no matter how well intentioned -- will not achieve the historic goals of socialism. Nor will a retreat to markets when planning falters - well intentioned promises that market forces will be "tamed" or "socialized" notwithstanding.

I am under no illusions that we have reached a consensus within the Left on these lessons. A few continue to concentrate on how elite planning can be made more efficient and incorporate more input from consumers. While this is no doubt true, unfortunately it misses the major point: Planning by an elite reinforces worker and consumer apathy at best and degenerates into a new class system with accompanying privileges at worst.

Planning for people is not the same as planning by people. Serve the people is not the same as power to the people. On the other hand, many on the Left have recoiled from the negative experiences of centralized planning and bent to pressure from what can only be described as market mania over the past three decades to embrace some version of market socialism or eco-localism. While many of their criticisms of previous attempts at comprehensive, national planning are on the mark, unfortunately it also ignores a more important point: Markets reward the most greedy and anti-social among us while penalizing those who act out of solidarity. It is naive to expect some people to behave in socially responsible ways while others are allowed to benefit personally by behaving in socially irresponsible ways - which is what appropriating productive resources that should belong to and benefit all, and taking advantage of others in market exchanges amounts to. So while we must do all we can to tame markets for now, because markets are antithetical to building the economics of equitable cooperation we must also work to replace markets with an altogether different coordinating mechanism.

Hopefully more and more on the Left will learn these fundamental lessons. But as important as this debate is, explaining why elite planning, markets, and local self-sufficiency are NOT the answers we seek is not my purpose here.[i] When the Left does learn these lessons - and I do believe we are slowly learning what will not work - this will only equip us to win the last war, not the war that lies ahead. When we finally realize that elite planning, market socialism, and local self-sufficiency are all incapable of achieving the historic goals of socialism, what will be left? The answer is "democratic planning." But, besides a catch phrase and a prayer, what is democratic planning?

It is far from obvious how comprehensive democratic planning should be organized. As a matter of fact, I think many today who champion democratic planning as the best alternative to capitalism are blissfully unaware that many of their ideas about how to go about it are flawed. I think this intellectual failing stems from two blind spots in traditional Left thinking about democratic planning. The traditional socialist vision of democratic planning remains blind to the need to provide workers in enterprises and consumers in neighbourhoods with a considerable degree of autonomy over their own behaviour. On the other hand, libertarian socialist and anarchist visions are blind to the need for carefully designed procedures to help producers and consumers who should be autonomous in some regards but not in others plan activities that are highly interrelated both equitably and efficiently. A penchant for avoiding serious - not to be confused with contentious -- debate over exactly what procedures are best suited for different categories of economic decisions has hidden these blind spots for too long.

Early in the twentieth century most socialists thought that after capitalism was overthrown workers in different enterprises and consumers in different communities would plan their activities together with little difficulty. But if the history of twentieth century socialism has anything to teach us it is that this is most emphatically not the case. Planning by those Marx called the "associated producers" did not occur for many reasons that are important to study carefully. But one reason is that it is not as easy for groups of workers and consumers to plan together as early socialists naively assumed. Making decisions inside a worker or neighborhood council in ways that are not only formally democratic but also inclusive and truly participatory is difficult enough. But working out procedures that allow different worker and neighborhood councils to retain an appropriate degree of autonomy over their own activities, while planning their relations fairly and efficiently is even more difficult. It is not just that coordinating the activities of millions of different workplaces and neighborhoods democratically is hard to do. Figuring out how to go about doing it in ways that encourage participation on the part of ordinary workers and consumers and leads to plans that are fair and efficient is also not a trivial intellectual task. One of the greatest intellectual failures of twentieth century socialism was that it left twenty-first century socialists with precious little in the way of ideas about how to help groups of workers and consumers coordinate their activities themselves - fairly, efficiently, and democratically.

What democratic planning means and entails is still distant on agendas for most of the world - although not as distant as I believed only two years ago. However, deciding how to organize democratic planning is of paramount importance in Venezuela today, and may soon be in several other Latin American countries as well. Ten years ago socialists in Venezuela embarked on a new path and have accomplished a great deal. The norms of democracy have been scrupulously observed, major political initiatives have never lacked a popular mandate, and the building blocks for a new kind of socialist economy have been created. Educational Misiones, neighbourhood health clinics, people's food stores, worker cooperatives, participatory budgeting, municipal assemblies, nuclei of endogenous development, and communal councils together comprise what Venezuelans call their "social economy." However, Bolivarian revolutionaries have yet to decide how to coordinate the activities of different elements in their social economy. While they are highly critical of market relations, markets remain the de facto mechanism for coordinating relations among most elements of the social economy. On the other hand, our Bolivarian comrades insist they have no interest in replacing markets with traditional central planning. In other words, twenty-first century socialists in Venezuela have already arrived at the shores of the Rubicon none of their forebears ever managed to cross successfully.

Our Bolivarian comrades may well be better prepared for a successful crossing than others before them. But when they attempt what sceptics warn is a "mission impossible" and try to "go where none have gone before" they will need more than platitudes and vagaries about democratic planning. They will also need to eliminate blind spots that have hindered the efforts of others to forge procedures which allow workers and consumers to coordinate their own activities efficiently and fairly themselves, without getting bogged down in endless and fruitless debates. This is no trivial task.

The Challenge

The challenge is how to empower worker councils and consumer councils while protecting the interests of others in the economy who are affected by what these councils do. The challenge is how to give groups of workers user rights over parts of society's productive resources without allowing them to benefit disproportionately from productive resources that belong to and should benefit everyone.

What socialists have long understood is that what any one group in an economy does will inevitably affect many others. The conclusion many socialists have drawn from this fact is that democratic planning must allow all to have a voice and say regarding all economic decisions. This, of course, is correct as far as it goes. But different decisions do not usually affect everyone to the same extent. One might call this the fundamental dilemma faced by those of us who want to organize a system of economic decision making that gives people decision making power to the degree they are affected by different economic decisions: Most economic decisions do affect many people, but to differing degrees.

Market systems treat all economic decisions as if they affected only the buyer and seller since those are the only people involved in the market decision making process - thereby disenfranchising all others who may also be affected. On the other hand, a democratic version of centralized planning, where the values of different final goods and services are determined by some kind of democratic voting procedure, treats all economic decisions as if they affected everyone equally - failing to permit workers who are more affected by a decision greater say than those who are less affected . Unfortunately, most economic decisions do not affect only a buyer and a seller, nor do they affect all of us equally. Instead, most economic decisions fall into what we might call the "murky middle" -- affecting some of us more than others. Unless we organize economic decision making so that people have greater say over decisions that affect them more, and some, but less say over decisions that affect them less, we will continue to fail to achieve meaningful economic democracy. The challenge is how to give workers and consumers in their own councils a degree of autonomy over what they do that is appropriate.

But there is another way to see the challenge that highlights both its magnitude and importance. Encouraging popular participation in economic decision making is hard. After all, those who actually do the work have been discouraged from participating in economic decision making ever since humans "ascended" from hunting and gathering societies to class systems with ruling elites. And for the past 300 years workers have been taught they are incompetent to make important economic decisions, and to thank their lucky stars they have capitalist employers and managers to do their thinking for them. Developing a participatory culture that encourages those who have always been a silenced majority inside their workplaces to actively participate in deciding what they will produce and how they will produce it is difficult enough, even though these decisions have immediate and palpable impacts on workers' daily lives. Encouraging popular participation in coordinating the interrelated activities of millions of different workplaces and neighborhoods, and to participate in investment and long-run strategic planning, where the relevance to one's personal life is more attenuated and less obvious, is even more difficult. Yet this is the historical legacy of capitalist alienation that socialism must overcome. Moreover, the price of failure is monstrous. Biologists teach us that nature abhors an ecological vacuum, by which they mean that in complex ecological systems any empty niche will quickly be filled by some organism or another. If there is a single lesson we should learn from human history it is that society abhors a power vacuum. If people do not control their own lives then someone else will. If there is a single lesson we should learn from the history of twentieth century socialism it is that if workers and consumers do not run the economy themselves, then some economic elite will do it for them.

A Solution: Participatory Planning

How can we give workers and consumers in their councils the autonomy necessary to stimulate them to become and remain active participants in economic decision making while ensuring that worker and consumer councils do not make choices that are socially irresponsible? How is it possible to grant small groups of workers and consumers enough autonomy to encourage them to put time and effort into participating without disenfranchising others who are affected by the decisions they make, even though it be to a lesser extent? How can we grant groups of workers the right to use some of society's productive resources as they would like without allowing them to benefit unfairly from doing so? How can we convince ordinary workers and consumers who have been discouraged in every conceivable way from trying to participate in economic decision making that things will now be different, and participation will finally be worthwhile? The participatory planning procedure that is part of the model known as a "participatory economy" was designed to solve these problems.[ii]

The participants in the participatory planning procedure are worker councils and federations, consumer councils and federations, and an Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB). Conceptually, the planning procedure is quite simple: (1) The IFB announces current estimates of the opportunity costs of using all resources, categories of labor, and capital stocks as well as current estimates of the social costs of producing all goods and services. (2) Consumer councils and federations respond with consumption proposals. Worker councils and federations respond with production proposals listing the outputs they propose to make and the inputs they need to make them. (3) The IFB calculates the excess demand or supply for each final good and service, capital good, natural resource, and category of labor, and adjusts the estimate of the opportunity cost or social cost for the good up or down in proportion to the degree of excess demand or supply for the good. (4) Using the new estimates of opportunity costs and social costs, consumer and worker councils and federations revise and resubmit their proposals. Individual worker and consumer councils must continue to revise their proposals until they submit a proposal that other councils vote to accept. The planning process continues until there are no longer excess demands for any goods, any categories of labor, any primary inputs, or any capital stocks -- in other words, until a feasible plan is reached.

Households submit requests for private consumption goods along with effort ratings household members received from their workmates to their neighborhood consumption councils.[iii] Consumption "allowances" for any children, students, and disabled or retired members of households are combined with the effort ratings of working adults, and if the effort ratings and allowances are sufficient to warrant the cost to society of producing the household consumption request it is automatically approved. The neighborhood council can also approve requests in excess of what the effort ratings and allowances of a household justify if the council finds reason to do so. The consumption proposal of a neighborhood council consists of the sum total of approved requests for private consumption goods from its member households, plus any neighborhood public goods like sidewalks, playground equipment for a neighborhood park, etc. It is this neighborhood council consumption proposal that is submitted during each round of the planning process, along with the average effort ratings and allowances of all members of the neighborhood council. Federations of consumer councils also submit requests for public goods in each round used by all who live in larger geographical areas.

Members of worker councils will have to meet to discuss and decide what they want to propose to produce and what inputs they want to request. Members of neighborhood consumption councils will have to meet to discuss what neighborhood public goods they want to ask for. And representatives from councils that comprise a federation of consumer councils will have to meet to discuss what public goods larger groups of consumers want to request. However, these are all meetings within worker and consumer councils and within federations, not meetings between councils and federations. Moreover, these meetings are only concerned with what the councils or federations want to do themselves. The discussion is not about what people think the overall, comprehensive plan for the economy should be, but about what we might call "self-activity" proposals. The IFB merely performs a mechanical calculation to adjust estimates of opportunity and social costs between each round in the planning procedure. It does not "set" prices, much less dictate what workers or consumers can do. The IFB bears no resemblance to Central Planning Ministries which do have power over who will produce what, and how they will produce it. In participatory planning workers and consumers propose and revise their own activities in a process that reveals the social costs and benefits of their proposals. Not only do worker and consumer councils make their own initial proposals, they are responsible for revising their own proposals in subsequent rounds of the planning procedure as well.

When worker councils make proposals they are asking permission to use particular parts of the productive resources that belong to everyone. In effect their proposals say: "If the rest of you -- with whom we are engaged in a cooperative division of labor -- agree to allow us to use productive resources belonging to all of us as inputs, then we promise to deliver the following goods and services as outputs for others to use." When consumer councils make proposals they are asking permission to consume goods and services whose production entails social costs. In effect their proposals say: "We believe the effort ratings we received from our co-workers together with allowances members of households have been granted indicate that we deserve the right to consume goods and services whose production entails an equivalent level of social costs."

The planning procedure is designed to make it clear when a worker council production proposal is inefficient and when a neighborhood consumption council proposal is unfair, and allows other worker and consumer councils to deny approval for proposals when they seem to be inefficient or unfair. But initial self-activity proposals and all revisions of proposals are entirely up to each worker and consumer council itself. In other words, if a worker council production proposal or neighborhood council consumption proposal is disapproved the council that made the proposal revises its own proposal for submission in the next round of the planning procedure. This aspect of the participatory planning procedure distinguishes it from all other planning models and is crucial if workers and consumers are going to enjoy meaningful self-management. Participatory planning gives individual worker and consumer council's power over their own activities. They are only constrained by the legitimate interests of others whom they affect. As long as a worker council proposal does not misuse scarce productive resources belonging to all it will be approved by other councils because it will benefit them more than it costs them if the proposal is carried out. And as long as the social cost of producing what a consumer council asks to consume is justified by the sacrifices and allowances of its members, it will be approved because it is apparent that they are being fair to others.

Those interested in a more rigorous analysis should consult chapter 5 of The Political Economy of Participatory Economics for a formal analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions guaranteeing that the planning procedure will converge to a feasible plan, and for the feasible plan to be a Pareto optimum.[iv] Essentially the planning procedure whittles overly optimistic, unfeasible proposals down to a feasible plan in two ways: By multiplying the amount of different consumption goods requested by the current estimates of their social costs of production it is possible to calculate the social cost of consumption proposals. As long as average effort ratings of those making a request are as high as the social cost per member of a consumption request the members of the consumption council are not being too greedy or unfair to others. Otherwise, consumers requesting more than their effort ratings warrant are forced to either reduce their requests, or shift their requests to less socially costly items if they expect to win the approval of other consumer councils who have no reason to approve consumption requests whose social costs are not warranted by the sacrifices of those making the requests. Similarly, worker councils are forced to increase their efforts, shift toward producing a more desirable mix of outputs, or shift toward using a less costly mix of inputs to win approval for their proposals. By multiplying outputs by current estimates of their social benefits, and dividing by inputs multiplied by current estimates of their opportunity costs, it is possible to calculate the ratio of social benefits to social costs of any worker council proposal. Worker councils whose proposals have lower than average ratios will be forced to increase either their efforts or their efficiency to win approval from other worker councils. Efficiency is promoted as consumers and workers attempt to shift their proposals and avoid reductions in consumption or increases in work effort. Equity is promoted when further shifting is no longer effective and approval of fellow consumers and workers can only be achieved through consumption reduction or greater work effort. Each new round of revised proposals moves the overall plan closer to feasibility, and moves the estimates of opportunity costs and social costs closer to their true values. The procedure generates equity and efficiency simultaneously while leaving worker and consumer councils and federations in charge of making and revising what they propose to do.

The participatory planning procedure protects the environment in the following way. Federations of all those affected by a particular kind of pollutant are empowered in the participatory planning process to limit emissions to levels they deem desirable. A major liability of market economies is that because pollution adversely affects those who are "external" to the market transaction, market economies permit much more pollution than is efficient. The participatory planning procedure, on the other hand, guarantees that pollution will never be permitted unless those adversely affected feel that the positive effects of permitting an activity that generates pollution as a byproduct outweigh the negative effects of the pollution on themselves and the environment. Moreover, the participatory planning procedure generates reliable quantitative estimates of the costs of pollution and the benefits of environmental protection through the same procedures that it generates reliable estimates of the opportunity costs of using scarce resources and the social costs of producing different goods and services.[v]

While verifying that a planning procedure will promote efficient use of productive resources is of great concern to economists, socialists should be more concerned with whether or not a planning procedure promotes popular participation in economic decision making. It is my conviction that this is where participatory annual planning most outshines other versions of democratic planning. Of course a participatory economy cannot give every person decision making authority exactly to the degree they are affected in every decision that is made. Instead the idea is to devise procedures that approximate this goal. How does participatory planning do this? (1) Every worker has one vote in his or her worker council. (2) In larger worker councils sub-units govern their own internal affairs via one worker one vote. (3) Consumers are free to consume whatever kinds of goods and services they prefer as long as their effort rating is sufficient to cover the overall cost to society of producing the goods and services they request. (4) Consumers each have one vote in his or her neighborhood consumption council regarding the level and composition of neighborhood public good consumption. (5) Federations responsible for different levels of collective consumption and limiting pollution levels are also governed by democratic decision making procedures where each council in the federation sends representatives to the federation in proportion to the size of its membership. (6) But most importantly, worker and consumer councils and federations not only propose what they, themselves, will do in the initial round of the participatory planning procedure, they alone make all revisions regarding their own activity during subsequent rounds.

Who decides if proposals from worker and consumer councils and federations are acceptable? In central planning this decision ultimately resides with the central planning authority. The usual justification for this is that it is presumed that only the central planning authority has the information and computational means necessary to determine if proposals would use scarce productive resources efficiently, and if proposals would distribute economic burdens and benefits fairly. In other words, it is presumed that only the central planning authority can protect the social interest. But both parts of this presumption are false. Because a great deal of information about what different worker councils can and cannot do resides with those who work in those councils, and because there are perverse incentives that lead them to mislead central planners about their "tacit knowledge," it is false to assume that a central planning authority will have the accurate information needed to make informed judgments. On the other hand, worker councils would only harm themselves by failing to make proposals that accurately reveal their true capabilities during the participatory planning process since underestimating capabilities lowers the likelihood of being allocated the productive resources they want. Moreover, the procedure not only yields an efficient plan, it also generates accurate estimates of the opportunity costs of all scarce productive resources, the social costs of all harmful emissions, and the social costs of producing all goods and services.[vi] This means that everyone has the information necessary to calculate the social benefit to social cost ratios of every worker council proposal, and everyone has the information necessary to compare the social cost of every consumer council to the average effort rating of its members.

Allowing councils to vote "yeah" or "nay" on the proposals of other councils does not mean they must engage in a time consuming evaluation of those proposals. All they have to do is look at the social benefit to cost ratio for proposals from worker councils. When the ratio of social benefits to social costs of a worker council proposal is below average they are probably using resources inefficiently or not working as hard as others. When the social cost per member of a consumer council proposal is higher than the average effort rating of its members they are probably being too greedy and unfair to others. But otherwise, everyone else is better off approving a proposal from a worker council, and otherwise a proposal from a consumer council is perfectly fair. In other words, the participatory planning procedure not only makes it possible for each council to judge whether or not the proposals of other councils are socially responsible, it makes it easy for them to do so without wasting their time. So it is false to assume that only a central authority could have the information and means to protect the social interest. In the participatory planning process each and every council has the information it needs to make these judgments about the proposals of others, which is why it is possible for worker and consumer councils to decide on a plan of economic cooperation themselves, and why they need not delegate this power to a central authority, i.e. an economic elite.

Of course there may be special circumstances that warrant special consideration. Federations would play an important role in cases where a more careful and time consuming review of a proposal was in order. There will be cases where more qualitative information is necessary to form a responsible judgment, and cases where councils appeal a "nay" vote. Moreover, a unanimous "yeah" or "nay" vote of all other councils is unlikely, but also unnecessary. Rules for how large a super majority is necessary for approval would have to be ironed out, and federations might decide to draw the line in different places in this regard. But the important point is there are clear guidelines and mechanisms that give each council and federation autonomy while allowing all councils and federations to protect them from socially irresponsible behavior on the part of others without delegating decision making power over proposals to a central authority and without wasting a great deal of time studying others' proposals.

Does all this guarantee that if a decision affects me 1.24 times as much as it affects someone else, I will have exactly 1.24 more say than they do? Of course not. But I will get to decide what kinds of private goods I consume, my neighbors and I will get to decide what local public goods we consume, and all who use larger level public goods will get to decide what those will be, as long as our work efforts and sacrifices warrant the social expense of providing us with what we want. And my co-workers and I will get to decide what we produce and how we produce it -- as long as we propose to use society's scarce productive resources efficiently.

Dangers to Avoid in Democratic Planning

Authoritarian planning discourages worker and consumer participation because it disenfranchises them. While those who advocate democratic planning do so to give people more control over economic decisions that affect them, badly designed systems of democratic planning might continue to discourage worker and consumer participation in a different way. If worker and consumer councils have no autonomous area of action regarding their own work and consumption activities, but must submit to seemingly endless discussion, debate, and negotiations about what they want to do together with many others, in many different planning bodies, ordinary workers and consumers may well lapse back into apathy even if there is no authoritarian planning procedure to disenfranchise them. There is a serious danger that some forms of democratic planning can discourage participation on the part of ordinary workers and consumers by requiring them to engage in too much negotiation with others, especially if most of these negotiations are conducted by representatives. In this case, ordinary workers and consumers would no longer be disenfranchised as they are under authoritarian planning, but if procedures for involving all who are affected are cumbersome and clumsy, and if those procedures rely primarily on representatives they may become a practical barrier to participation that only the most dedicated and determined workers and consumers will be willing to fight through. In other words, when poorly organized, democratic planning can become just another bureaucratic maze from the perspective of ordinary workers and consumers leading to what Nancy Folbre warned could become a "dictatorship of the sociable."

Participatory planning is designed so worker and consumer councils can decide what they want to do as long as it does not misuse productive resources that belong to all or take unfair advantage of others. It is designed to help worker and consumer councils demonstrate to one another that their proposals are socially responsible by generating the information to form such judgments. And it is designed to avoid unproductive and contentious meetings where representatives from different councils make proposals not only about what those they represent will do, but about what workers in other councils will do as well. In participatory planning as long as the social cost of what consumers want is justified by the sacrifices they made in work their proposal will be approved. And as long as the social benefit of the outputs a group of workers propose to make outweighs the social cost of the inputs they ask to use, they will be permitted to do what they propose. The planning procedure may take a number of rounds before proposals are confirmed as fair and not wasteful of social resources, but rounds in the planning procedure are not rounds of increasingly contentious meetings between representatives from different councils to debate the merits of different overall, national production plans.

In each round a council whose proposal was not approved receives objective evidence why it was not acceptable to others.[vii] In each new round councils also receive more accurate estimates of the opportunity cost of using scarce resources, different kinds of labor, and different capital stocks as well as more accurate estimates of the social costs of producing and social benefits of consuming different goods and services - i.e. they receive updated information about how any proposal they make would affected others. There must be a new meeting to decide how to revise a proposal that was rejected. But this is a meeting within the council or federation, not a meeting between representatives from the council or federation with representatives of councils who voted not to approve the previous proposal. Members of each council and federation discuss among themselves how to revise their proposal with clear guidelines about what will win approval from others. If they submit a proposal that meets the guidelines they never have to plead their case. They can also submit materials they wish others to consider, explaining any human or social costs and benefits they believe cannot be captured in quantitative estimates of opportunity and social costs, or any special circumstances they feel should be taken into consideration before passing judgment on their proposal. And finally, if they wish to explain in person why they believe a proposal that fails to meet the guidelines should, nonetheless, be accepted by others they can ask for a meeting with representatives of councils who found their previous proposal unacceptable. But an important difference between participatory planning and other models of democratic planning is that councils never have to debate someone else's ideas about what they should do, councils have easy ways to win approval for what they want to do without having to plead their case in contentious meetings with others, and there is a clear agenda for any meetings to adjudicate special appeals.

Participatory planning is different from other conceptions of "democratic planning." It is carefully designed so as not to overburden the main planning process with meetings of representatives from different councils, and particularly meetings without clear criteria for settling disagreements for lack of reasonably accurate estimates of opportunity and social costs. Instead, the participatory planning procedure provides for meaningful deliberation through a carefully structured, social, iterative process where workers and consumers: (1) discover how their choices affect one another as ever more accurate estimates of opportunity and social costs are generated in successive rounds, (2) have a great deal of control over what their own economic activities will be since each council and federation makes and revises its own proposals, and (3) are protected from socially irresponsible behavior since they can vote not to approve wasteful and unfair proposals submitted by others.

In other versions of democratic planning it is common to give "stake holders" seats on enterprise councils when there is reason to believe that people who do not work at an enterprise are affected by enterprise decisions.[viii] But there are two disadvantages of this way of addressing the problem that people other than workers in an enterprise are affected by what an enterprise does: (1) How does one decide which other constituencies are affected and how many seats to give them? It seems naïve to assume there would be no differences of opinion on these matters, and in absence of any objective criteria decisions would be arbitrary even if not contentious. (2) If outsiders have seats, workers in an enterprise have no place where they can discuss what they want to do free from outside interference. It requires workers to hear from and convince outsiders before they can even formulate a proposal about what they want to do. If the only way to enfranchise outsiders were to give them seats on enterprise councils it might be necessary. But the participatory planning procedure provides others who are affected an appropriate degree of influence over enterprise decisions without infringing on the autonomy of workers in the enterprise. The planning procedure empowers others to reject any proposal a group of workers makes that fails to benefit those outside the worker council at least as much as it costs them, and does so without arbitrarily deciding which outsiders are affected and to what degree. Limiting membership in worker councils only to workers in an enterprise does not mean they get to do whatever they want irrespective of the affects on others. If they vote to use productive resources belonging to everyone inefficiently, their proposal will not be approved in the participatory planning procedure. In other words, the legitimate interests of others can be better protected through the participatory planning procedure than by denying workers the right to function in a council where only they have voice and vote.

Deliberative democracy can take place where the proposals are different comprehensive plans, and deliberation takes place at meetings attended only by a few representatives from each council. Or, deliberative democracy can take place by having councils propose what they want to do, i.e. submit "self-activity proposals," and deliberation takes place within worker and consumer councils among all members to formulate and revise proposals in response to feedback from others and more accurate estimates of opportunity and social costs. While the first conception of deliberative democracy may be more common, it has three disadvantages: (1) Only a few people from each council benefit from the deliberations - those sent as representatives - who then bear the burden of trying to convey their deliberative experience to those they represent. (2) Members of a worker council never formulate proposals for what they want to do. Instead their representatives together with representatives from other councils formulate proposals about what everyone, including them, will do. And (3) meetings of representatives proposing different comprehensive economic plans do not generate quantitative estimates of opportunity and social costs without which rational discussion of the merits of different proposals and plans is severely hampered, if not impossible. The participatory planning procedure, on the other hand, empowers worker and consumer councils to formulate their own proposals and generates estimates of opportunity and social costs that are as accurate as can be hoped for.

Conclusion

Unfortunately our socialist forebears failed to recognize that it is not easy to design democratic planning procedures that do not deteriorate into planning by an elite, or market coordination based on greed and competition. It's not just that doing it is not easy. Figuring out how to do it is alsonot easy. In some ways twentieth century socialists provided their twenty-first century descendents with a rich inheritance. But unfortunately procedures to ensure that ordinary workers and consumers determine economic decisions and encourage one another to behave in socially responsible ways, and procedures that avoid the predictable withdrawal of ordinary people from economic decision making leaving a vacuum for an elite to fill were nowhere to be found when the Will was read.

All versions of socialist democratic planning can be thought of as ways for people to discuss and decide on a division of labor among them -- having agreed to treat productive resources as the common property of all. One would hope the procedures used (1) permit people to influence decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected, (2) distribute the burdens and benefits of economic activity equitably, (3) use scarce productive resources efficiently, and (4) better protect the natural environment. One notion of how to go about this is for representatives from different councils to meet together where they propose, discuss, and eventually vote on different comprehensive plans for the entire economy. Another vision of how to organize the democratic dialogue is for different groups of producers and consumers to propose what they, themselves, want to do, and then refine those proposals in light of ever more accurate information about how their proposals affect one another, and what is therefore an efficient and fair use of the productive resources belonging to all.

I believe organizing comprehensive planning as an iterative, social process of "self-proposals" combined with information sharing, followed by democratic approval based on clear criteria of social responsibility maximizes the potential for popular participation in annual planning. (1) Unlike other approaches to democratic planning, the participatory planning procedure provides unprecedented autonomy for worker and consumer councils over their own activities. Since what they, themselves will do is what concerns people most, this is an important virtue when we try to convince those who have long been disenfranchised that it is finally worth their time to participate in economic decision making. (2) The procedure generates the information people need to make informed decisions about what is efficient and fair - reasonably accurate estimates of the social costs of producing different goods and services - including environmental costs -- and the opportunity costs of using different scarce productive resources, different kinds of labor, and different capital stocks. Without some idea of how valuable a productive resource is when used elsewhere, and how much it costs society to produce a good or service how can anyone know whether a work or consumption proposal is efficient or fair? Unfortunately, many versions of democratic planning fail to generate this necessary information for making informed choices even if they do arrange for decisions to be made democratically. The participatory planning procedure generates this information and makes it readily available to all councils, which allows them to vote on others' proposals with little loss of time so the power to approve or disapprove worker and consumer councils' proposals no longer need reside in the hands of a planning elite. (3) The iterative, social, planning procedure teaches participants how what they choose to do affects others, and how what others choose to do affects them. In other words, it teaches participants how our economic fates are linked. (4) Since discussions about proposals take place within worker and neighborhood councils rather than at meetings of representatives, everyone, rather than only a few, can participate in what is a social education process as well as a social decision making procedure. In other words, the procedure maximizes direct participation and minimizes participation through representatives. (5) The participatory planning procedure provides clear criteria for resolving disagreements about proposals and thereby avoids the possibility of getting bogged down in endless debates between representatives that end only when one side exhausts the other.

A Closing Caveat

When we talk about comprehensive national planning this really includes three different kinds of planning: annual planning, investment planning, and long-run development planning. Since the only difference between them is the length of time considered, at the highest theoretical level they can all be analyzed in the same way. Since my personal inclination is to think about things at the highest theoretical level that is how I first approached them. Moreover, I still believe that we should try to use the procedures of participatory planning whenever possible when making investment plans and development plans because those procedures maximize participation of ordinary workers and consumers in all the ways I described above. However, I want to make clear that what I have been discussing is annual planning. Unfortunately, in the real world investment and development planning differ from annual planning in important ways that must be taken into consideration.

The problem is not only that people's preferences change over time and uncertainty increases the farther in the future we try to calculate -- although these are problems as well. The problem is opportunity costs and the social costs that depend on them will vary depending on what investment and development plans we choose -- which means we may misevaluate investment and development options using today's opportunity and social costs. To all intents and purposes productive resources and consumer preferences are fixed when we formulate annual plans. That is why opportunity and social costs can be estimated with some degree of accuracy, provided planning procedures are properly designed to do so. But opportunity costs, and therefore social costs of production in future years as well, will vary to some extent depending on what investments we choose to make this year. And both will vary even more depending on what long-run development trajectory we choose. This means that evaluating different investment and development plans using the estimates of opportunity and social costs derived from this year's participatory annual planning process can be misleading.[ix]

Industry and consumer federations, rather than individual worker and consumer councils, should bear most of the responsibility for formulating, revising, and approving investment and development plans in any case. And "self-proposals" by federations can still play an important role, particularly in the initial stages of investment and development planning. But quantitative comparisons of the social costs and benefits of different investment and development self-proposals will be less accurate than comparisons of annual production self-proposals. This means that discussion and debate among representatives from different federations at national investment and development planning meetings must play a greater role than is necessary during annual planning. It means that formulation of alternative feasible, comprehensive investment and development proposals by teams of experts must play a larger role than is necessary during annual planning. And finally, it means that discussion and debate by representatives followed by referenda on a few alternative investment and development plans must play a greater role than during annual planning where self- revision of self-proposals can be relied on to generate an efficient and equitable annual plan, and where discussion can be concentrated within councils where all can participate.

I offer three observations in this regard that may be of interest: (1) While the participatory annual planning procedure is quite different from traditional conceptions of democratic planning which revolve around representatives meeting to formulate comprehensive plans, perhaps subjected to referenda, investment and development planning will of necessity have to look more like these traditional conceptions.[x] (2) Unfortunately this means it will probably be more difficult to stimulate popular participation on the part of ordinary workers and consumers in investment and development planning than in annual planning. This is not only because workers often see investment and development decisions as less crucial to their daily lives than decisions about what they will produce and consume this year. It is also because (a) representatives with the help of experts will play a greater role in formulating investment and development plans, even if those alternative investment and development plans are subject to popular referenda, and (b) "self-proposals," which hold greater interest for most people, will play a smaller role in investment and development planning than in annual planning. (3) Therefore, I believe it is all the more important to maximize popular participation of ordinary workers and consumers during the annual planning process by using the participatory planning procedure which (a) is a powerful school teaching people how their fates are linked and how to participate, and (b) is the most effective way to fill the power vacuum that a planning elite more likely to emerge from investment and development planning might otherwise usurp.

Robin Hahnel is Professor Emeritus at American University in Washington DC where he taught in the Department of Economics for over thirty years. He has also taught at the University of Maryland, Lewis and Clark College, the Catholic University in Lima, Peru, and Portland State University where he is currently Visiting Professor in the Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices. He has visited Venezuela a number of times over the past three years to work with the Centro Internacional Miranda, the Ministry for Planning and Development, and the Ministry for the Communal Economy. He has been active in many social movements over the past forty-five years, beginning with SDS and the anti-Vietnam War movements in the 1960's and most recently with the Union for Radical Political Economists, the Southern Maryland Greens, Economics for Equity and the Environment, and Portland Jobs With Justice.

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

2009-06-12T17:26:00.003-05:00

Posted by TheBirdAbout2Fly

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.

The Deepening of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution.

2009-06-11T14:40:00.012-05:00

Posted by TheBirdAbout2Fly

Being dedicated to radical/revolutionary change, we should be willing to engage with trends that claim to have a path for such change. Here's an article that touches on Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution for discussion.

The deepening of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution: why most people don't get it
Julia Buxton, 4 - 05 - 2007

The radical project led by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela can’t be understood through the distorting lens of its inveterate opponents, says Julia Buxton. This is a politics for the future with emancipation, participation – and popular support - at its heart.
4 - 05 - 2007

It is hard for an outsider to get a grip on Venezuela, or the country's President Hugo Chávez. Pick up a copy of the Financial Times , the Economist, the Independent, Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and you will be presented with a frightening vision of a "ranting populist demagogue" (In the words of a British former foreign-office minister, Denis MacShane), an anti-semite who has captured the hearts and purchased the support of hoards of irrational poor people while destroying the country's economy.

In the United States, the rise of "authoritarianism" in Venezuela has led to progressive increases in funding allocated to the country's "democracy promotion" agency the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), while the "security threat" posed by the country prompted the Bush administration to set up a special intelligence committee on Venezuela.

A cursory glance at the reports of the Inter American Press Association or NED-funded Reporters Without Borders reflects a country where freedom of speech is under threat and human rights under daily assault. The misiones, the Venezuelan government's extensive package of social policy programmes are also subject to blistering criticism. Variously described by critics as a clientilist tool, indication of fiscal profligacy and / or an unsustainable welfare initiative generating a culture of dependency, this $6 billion programme has no redeeming features.

The view from Venezuela

Contrast this with opinion-poll surveys, election results and statistical information "on the ground". Hugo Chávez was re-elected to the presidency in December 2006 with 1.7 million more votes than when he was first elected in December 1998. A March 2007 poll by Datanalisis shows that 64.7% of Venezuelans have a positive view of Chávez's performance in office. Moreover, the majority of Venezuelans are optimistic and confident about the future and there is a high level of support for the new institutional and constitutional framework that the government has established.

According to Latinobarometro polling, the percentage of Venezuelans satisfied with their political system increased from 32% in 1998 to over 57% and Venezuelans are more politically active than the citizens of any other surveyed country - 47% discuss politics regularly (against a regional average of 26%) while 25% are active in a political party (the regional average is 9%). 56% believe that elections in the country are "clean", (regional average 41%) and along with Uruguayans, Venezuelans express the highest percentage of confidence in elections as the most effective means of promoting change in the country (both 71%, compared to 57% for all of Latin America).

The economy is booming, country risk perceptions have fallen and despite the perception of antagonism, Venezuela remains north America's second most important regional trading partner, and the twelfth largest in global terms. There is a vibrant new community media and a highly combative and antagonistic opposition controlled private-sector media - despite the much publicised dispute that was sparked in January 2007 over the licensing of opposition stalwart RCTV.

As for the misiones, nearly three-quarters of Venezuelans receive some form of state-sponsored health, education, housing assistance or food provision. Poverty and critical poverty are on a downward trend and the World Bank has acknowledged that: "Venezuela has achieved substantial improvements in the fight against poverty".

Although critics have sniffed at the poverty reduction record - on the premise that high oil prices since 2003 should translate 2006 into an inevitable fall in poverty - the reductions achieved to date are a significant achievement given the critical situation Chávez inherited, the disastrous impact of opposition stoppages on the economy in 2001 and 2002, and the historical absence of state institutions capable of delivering welfare provision. In the Datanalisis survey of March 2007, the government's performance in education, food and health service delivery received high approval ratings (68.8%, 64.7%, and 64.2% respectively) - and, to give a human touch to a favourable picture, a second Latinobarometro poll of regional perceptions found that Venezuela (along with Brazil) is viewed as the friendliest country among Latin Americans.

Is the information cited above an example of naïve "solidarity journalism", an attempt to further embed new "myths" about the country by someone with no direct stake in the outcome?

Insights from the naïve

In one way or another, we all have a stake, direct or indirect, in the politics of Venezuela. That Venezuela's citizens have such a manifestly different perception of their democracy than that held by external actors such as the United States and its National Endowment for Democracy is significant and important. The disconnect needs serious discussion, not least because it may illuminate why US "democracy promotion" is proving so counterproductive, anti-American sentiment so prevalent and, in Venezuela, why NED-backed groups are so reviled. If the misiones are delivering improvements in welfare and poverty reduction, then they merit detailed consideration. If there are lessons that can be learned from one, some or all of the misiones, they should not be discarded simply because of subjective prejudices toward Chávez or critiqued merely as a means of de-legitimising his government.

Engaged and balanced reporting, analysis and discussion has been required for a long time. It is even more necessary now given the acceleration of the Bolivarian revolution following the presidential election of December 2007.

Toward 21st-century socialism

Following his victory in the December 2006, Chávez unveiled plans to deepen the revolutionary agenda of the government. Central to this process is the concept of the "five motors" driving the country toward the model of "21st-century socialism" first outlined by Chávez in 2005. 21st-century socialism is seen as distinct from the "failed" Marxist experiments of the 20th century, it is strongly nationalist in influence - responding to the social and economic realities of Venezuela, and its elucidation reflects the evolution of Chávez's thinking, away from an initial position exalting Tony Blair and the "third way" model and toward a new set of "socialist" ideas that emphasis cooperation, participation and organisation.

The five motors included: the granting of enabling powers to the executive - as a means of introducing reforms to the institutional and economic framework of the state; constitutional reform; educational reform; expansion of communal power and the creation of a new geometry of power, the latter intended to enhance the responsibilities and political importance of communal councils.

Communal councils are a vitally important element of this revolutionary deepening and planned restructuring of the state and constitution. The government has experimented with a variety of organisational forms as part of its quest to create a new model of "participatory democracy" and in response to the explosion of social organization across the country since 1999 (see Diana Raby, Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today, Pluto Press, 2006).

In 2006, legislation was introduced recognising community councils as a principle form of political organisation. The councils complement and bring coherence to the multiple networks of social organisations that deliver the misiones programmes and organise political activities, such as the water committees, land committees, health committees, electoral battle-units and endogenous development groups. Based on 200 to 400 families in urban areas and twenty to thirty in rural settings, the councils are governed by citizens' assembles and their financial affairs overseen by public auditing processes. By the end of 2006, there were 16,000 communal councils across the country.

With the injection of $5 billion in funding for 2007, the government aims to increase this to over 25,000, allowing communities to become the new "eye" of political power in a radical, bottom up vision of democracy in which national government is balanced by grassroots power.

The PSUV

Running parallel with the launch of the "five motors", Chávez outlined plans for a new United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The aim of the PSUV is to bring organisational coherence to the Chavista alliance of twenty-four party political organisations and the multiple grassroots groups that support the government. The new party is being constructed over a nine month period through a process of broad public consultation led by an intended 70,000 "promoters" (30,000 of which have already been sworn in) that aim to consult over 5 million people on the structure and role of the new party. The construction of the PSUV is to culminate in a referendum, scheduled for December 2007, in which members will approve (or otherwise) the programme of the new party.

An authoritarian lurch?

The acceleration of the Bolivarian project - in both ideological and organisational terms, has fuelled concerns over the deepening of the government's authoritarian tendencies. Established cynics in the media, who have seen leftwing ideals rise and fall, and opponents in the anti-Chávez movement have been quick to point to a frightening new twist in the evolution of the Chávez government. This is seen to be represented by the recent granting of decree powers to President Chávez, the move to extend state control over key sectors of the economy and the debate over the formation of the PSUV.

However, it is at this point that the delineation between popular perceptions of democracy on the ground in Venezuela, and "elite" perceptions, articulated by the media and US "democracy-promotion" groups are revealed. There is widespread popular support for this new trajectory in Venezuelan politics. The creation of the PSUV is seen to be in line with the demands of grassroots groups to have more influence within the organisational framework of the Boliviarian project, while Chávez's use of decree powers to revise the institutional structures of the state responds to grassroots pressure for more influence, power and resources at the community level. Put simply, many Venezuelans think they are getting more and better democracy through "21st-century socialism", not less.

Squaring the circle

The promiscuous use of the terms "populist" and "authoritarian" to describe Chávez is one of the primary reasons why the nature, appeal and the durability of Chavismo has been so manifestly misunderstood by detractors. "Populism" glosses over the complex mechanisms of linkage, reciprocity and accountability that exist between government and civil society in Venezuela and the dynamics that shape the relationship between the administration and multiplicity of grassroots organisations across the country, the majority of which are far more autonomous and organisationally coherent than is implied in the "populist" narrative.

Ordinary people feel empowered by this government, a development that can only be understood through reference to the highly exclusionary model of two-party "democracy" that prevailed in Venezuela before the elections of 1998. There are two important points following from this.

First, support for Chávez is not simply predicated on the government's capacity for economic redistribution. The appeal of Chávez and 21st-century socialism is as much to do with this being a project of political empowerment as it is one of oil-"rent" distribution. As such, a fall in the oil price will not necessarily herald the end of Chávez or support for the government.

Second, what is happening in contemporary Venezuela cannot be understood through the lens of liberal democracy. The NED, the US state department and the plethora of agencies that seek to "evaluate" democratic standards such as Freedom House and Transparency International have got it fundamentally wrong in thinking that democracy is judged through reference to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy. Venezuelans are, on the whole, contended with their democratically elected government and the radical model of participatory democracy that it is creating.

There is still a sizeable sector that lacks political representation - largely owing to the disastrous strategies of those in the anti-Chávez movement that claimed to represent them - and clearly stability in the future requires incorporating the newly excluded back into the political mainstream. But the immediate priority for the government is giving voice and power to those who have been politically marginalised since the 1980s. To date, and despite the best efforts of the NED and the perceptions created by the media, the Bolivarian revolution has been tremendously successful.

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

2009-06-08T09:50:00.017-05:00

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

Winnipeg Enabled

2009-05-31T20:01:00.000-05:00

by jay
I think Winnipeg has so much to offer when it comes to groups working for the greater good. They are not always easy to find but they are there. Making strides in the Disabled community is the Manitoba league of Persons with Disabilities (MLPD). They are a small non-profit advocating the concerns of those many people in Manitoba who cannot. If your not part of this community it can be really hard to understand the barriers they face everyday. The group has just celebrated their 35^th year in April. They are a tight knit group governed by elected members of a board. They put out a quarterly paper called “Alert” keeping the community up to date on all their achievements.

I got together with a member of the league to find out more. Born with cerebral palsy, Libby Zdriluk has battled the barriers all her life. Libby has personally been denied certain of her own rights because she was not aware. People really need to take it upon themselves to get what they NEED. Social assistance case workers do not actually take the time to tell their clients about what is available to them to spare themselves a few more pages of paper work. “ I often have felt like I was being bullied, and treated unfairly because I was poor and had a disability.” I learned that in the United states there is something called the Americans with Disabilities act, something we lack in Manitoba and much of Canada. “right now there is nothing to protect us, we solely fall under the charter of rights and freedoms”. This act would ensure that disabled people would be equals in the work place and social assistance would be much more accessible. “When Winnipegers were polled on what is important to them, Disabilities was last. We need more protection. We really need to change our attitudes and and update our policies” it is frustrating to see brand new buildings going up that are unaccessible. It seems thoughtless. There is legislation that suggest making buildings accessible to all people, but it is not enforced. “This is why we need the disabilities act.” This act would also help when it comes to the workplace. ”It would be great to see better work place accommodation. Work places assume that we will take up to much resource and money. It is rare to see a disabled person get a promotion within a company even if they are aptly qualified.

Through all bumps and scrapes there are still great people doing great things. One of Libbys personal Heroes; Jim Derksen. Jim pushed for all the curb cuts, and continues to work with the government on policy issues, and he is still really well respected. Jim actually received and honorable doctorate on Monday June 1^st.

How can we move forward? This blog is all about moving forward. How to get there and where to start. What does Libby do to move forward? She sticks out like a sore thumb, “we need to try and branch out to other communities. You cannot do everything alone, we all need to work together with all sorts of issues. We need to get out of this bubble. There has been a lot of community activism, Winnipeg is very lucky to have an active disabled community. There are always conferences and events where people offer lots of great information for people to use for themselves”. There are also a lot of great services for them, including SMD (Society for persons with Disabilities) who offer on site counseling, and a number of other aids. ILRC (Independent Living Resource Center) who help with independent living, like self managed support.

What else can we do to move forward for social change so we are all equal in this world? Who can we look up to? We're gonna start by branching out, challenging everything and looking up to the people who make change in Winnipeg... well, all of Winnipeg.

On Good Cops and Bad Apples

2009-05-31T19:58:00.008-05:00

by TheBirdAbout2Fly

There has been much press lately criticizing police conduct, from the Taser-related death of Robert Dzikanski, to the the execution style killing of a man by Bay Area Rapid Transit police in Oakland, to the death of Krystal Taman by an drunk driving off-duty police officer and the subsequent internal investigation.

All this has brought police conduct into the public realm with the usual arguments being made. Some call for more civilian oversight as the solution to curbing police misconduct, while others call for better training for police officers. Some are apologetic for police, arguing that though they make mistakes, they have a tough and dangerous job, and we should cut them some slack. Still others argue that, while there are some bad apples, we should not allow them to taint the image of good officers who joined the force for the right reasons.

I'd like to dig in and unpack these arguments here, and hopefully get some discussion going. I'll start with the latter two arguments first:

It's a tough job, people make mistakes, cut them some slack.

There is no question in my mind that police work is stressful and dangerous, but I think that we should be viewing this question with a wider scope. What is the job? I mean, to put it somewhat provocatively, being a rapist carries with it some risks, such as a counter attack from a potential victim. Should we cut them some slack because of the danger they put themselves in, or how stressful the situation is for them? No, of course not. So, then we can't justify police actions, or even police, based on these criteria, ie. that its a tough and dangerous job. We need to focus on the content of the job itself (and this will hopefully be touched on more through out this post).

It's just a few bad apples.

I don't think that there really is a difference between the “good apples” and the “bad apples”. These are just two sides to the same coin. Who doesn't understand that in the good cop/bad cop scenario, both cops share the same objective? These are two different methods used to acheive the same ends. So, the question, again, is what ends do police officers serve? What is the content of the job?

There is also another dimension to this question, which is that there are police who follow the letter of the law, and rogues who do not. Some of these rogues shunt the law for personal gains (bribes, links with organized crime, etc.), while others shunt the law in order to catch the “bad guys”. Again, this seems to be two sides of the same coin. The law is set up to maintain the current order. Those who break the law in order to maintain the current order are supposedly justified, because the current order is inherently good, though we're not told why. Those who shunt the law for personal gain are considered rare cases and are looked down upon because they are not serving the current power, but using their position to gain personal power. So, it's not so much whether police should break the law, but whose power that ultimately works for.

This discussion sharpens things up a little, I think, in that it brings into question the content of the current order more directly. Why are law-abiding police celebrated, why are some rogues justified, and why are other rogues put at a distance as “bad apples”? Utltimately I think it has to do with how the police serve the current order of things. In the service of the current order, police are justified in breaking the law. Even if the police were to follow the letter of the law, it would do nothing to challenge the current order, because the law serves the current order.

A Question of More Training?

The argument that what is needed is better training standards is generally related to the use of force by police. It's not a question of whether or not police are justified in using force, but rather when the use of force is necessary to acheive the desired results. More or better training would apparently give police the faculties to make better decisions when deploying force. The question, again, is what results are considered desirable, and whose interests do they serve? This, once more, brings us back to the nature of the current order.

Civillian Oversight.

The argument in favour of more civillian oversight of the police is wrapped up in ideology. Given that the job of police is to maintain the current order, civillian oversight of the police necessarily equates the interests of civillians with the interests of the current order, the interests of the system. They are brought forward as the functionaries of the system, where what is needed is for the People to come forward to get past this system.

All these arguments come from a perspective of the current system being the best of all possible worlds. But what Humanity needs is a radical break from the system. This, in my opinion, should be our guiding principle when approaching this question: Are we on the path to getting beyond this system?

Winnipegs Human Rights Museum

2009-05-31T19:50:00.000-05:00

After years of speculation and funding woes, construction of the Canadian Human Rights Museum has finally commenced. The 300 million dollar complex located in the heart of the city will dramaticly change the skyline of our urban center. An urban center which is ironically host to the poorest electoral riding in the country.

The museum boasts and ambitious student program which intends to bring as many as 20, 000 thousand students from across the country to the museum every year, with much of the cost taken care of. When these students arrive they can expect to learn from exhibits on a variety of issues that permeate Canada's history. Issues such as the Chinese head tax, the womens suffrage struggle, residential schools and of course the 1919 General Strike.

Exhibits will obviously not be limited to issues exclusively Canadian, with pieces dedicated to the holocaust, and presumably other serious war crimes and humanitarian crises, such as the violence in Darfur, religious oppression, and a host of other potential topics.

Though it is impossible to predict just what exactly the museum will look like when it opens 3 years from now, it would be safe to assume that the exhibits will focus primarily on the horrors of the past. Those we can denounce as we flip the the back pages of history, with the buffer of time freeing us from the duty to address our roles and responsibilities in many of these injustices.

Take the issue of indigenous rights for example. It is safe to assume that this will at least be touched on in some of the exhibits, as the audacity of omitting it from a museum built at the forks (a meeting place for indigenous people for thousands of years) would rob it of any legitimacy. While the museum will almost certainly touch on residential schools and the brutality of Canada's early settlers, it would be surprising, to see it discuss the fact that the UN has deemed a great number of reserves as on par with third world nations, or that some have been on boil water notices for as long as a decade.

Canada's role in Haiti will most likely be overlooked completely, as our involvement is far too recent to dismiss as the crimes of our forefathers. Haiti is one of the most impoverished nations on the planet and Canada's role in overthrowing the democratically elected Lavalas party in 2004 is known throughout the Caribbean nation. Not the case here at home, where the majority of Canadians are completely unaware of our role in the coup, or the fact that representatives of Canadian garment makers Gildan Activewear - whose clothing is produced in Haiti - sit on the interim government, known as the Provisional Electoral Council . These are the kinds of things that we as Canadians should ALL be learning about.

If the Aspers truly wish for their museum to be a beacon of human rights than it should challenge injustices that are currently unfolding, both locally and abroad. But for most Canadians, a few minutes with any of the the Aspers' Can-West 11 newspapers or their local Global TV affiliate will imply otherwise.

Of course not all human suffering can be documented in one building, but the question is, who determines what's in and what's out. With the Aspers getting the project off the ground, and the Canadian government footing the yearly expenses once the museum opens, what do you expect the museum to look like. What do you think we will or won't see and why. And most importantly, what do you WANT to see? Discuss.