Comrade-Z
13th October 2011, 08:38
"The message is that there is no message": Countering apolitical hogwash in OWS
Many people participating in Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere have said, "We don't want demands." There are also people (some of them even self-described "anarchists") participating in Occupy Wall Street who are saying things like, "the message is that there's no message."
We're not writing a Seinfeld skit here people! Either these "no message, no demands" people are intentionally staging a self-mocking theater of the absurd, or they have unfortunately overshot an important lesson of the revolutionary left in the 20th century.
They are correct in suspecting that posing demands often corrupts movements and organizations, but they clearly do not understand why, or what to do about it.
The Ghost of Anarchism Past
It's a pity that "anarchists" are behaving this way, really. Once upon a time, anarchists knew how to win demands. Here's a small passage from Franz Borkenau's "The Spanish Cockpit," page 35:
"...the CNT rejected all sorts of agreements with the employers. Strikes ought to lead, in their conception of trade unionism, to the de facto application of better wages and shorter hours by the employers, but without any obligation, on the side of the workers, to keep to a settlement for a given time. The state of war between employers and wage-earners must be continual...With the creation of the CNT...Spanish anarchism transformed itself into 'anarcho-syndicalism'. The strangest thing about it is that it [anarchism] continued to exist successfully under these conditions. Other labour movements, such as that of Norway, have lived through the same attempts to create a trade-union movement based on syndicalist ideas; but invariably, after a time, the trade unions reverted to the typical trade-unionist mentality, to regular settlements with the employers, to the keeping of strike funds and social insurance funds, to completely pacific methods of action. Only Spain makes an exception. The Spanish CNT is perhaps the one genuinely revolutionary trade-union movement of large size in the world."
The lesson I draw from this is that you can make "demands," but it very much matters about the way that you go about doing it.
If you wish to avoid reformist corruption, as the CNT successfully managed to do, you cannot formulate your demands as proposed agreements with employers/the State/etc., not even implicitly, and, as shocking as it sounds, you must voice your demands in the language of extortion rather than "fairness" or justice."
The Pitfalls of Demands
If your demands are essentially proposed agreements with the class enemy, then what do you do if you win some of your demands, at least partially? Then you've got to hold your part of the bargain. What the capitalists and their State giveth, they can take away. That is the constant reminder. Time after time again, this dynamic tends to lead to reformism and degeneration into bread-&-butter unionism and tepid social democracy.
You can deny that you owe the class enemy any part of any bargain, as the CNT did (and thus avoid becoming reformist), but it only rings true insofar as you have formulated your "demands" in the language of extortion, not justice.
Opportunistic Appeals to Bourgeois Morality
We all know perfectly well that any compromise with the capitalist class or its State is still going to be unfair. True "justice" will only be possible when the working class directs its own future. Yet, we understandably feel the temptation to opportunistically appeal to the persisting bourgeois sensibilities of the majority of the population and say that they should support this or that demand because it is "fair" or "just." No, it is not fair or just. It marginally improves the position of the working class and weakens the capitalist class. That is why we demand X, Y, and Z. But we don't want to say that for fear of alienating supporters with bourgeois sensibilities (the vast majority still), who won't support the demand if it is about unabashedly strengthening the working class rather than about some moral idea of "justice."
If we have formulated demands in the language of justice, and then we turn around like the CNT and say to the class enemy, "We owe you nothing. The class war goes on," we appear to be dishonest and unjust. Bourgeois commentators get to take the "justice" discourse that we have promoted and rub it back in our face, charging us as "unjust extortionists."
Very well. Since this is the response we will be met with anyways, why don't we openly proclaim ourselves as extortionists for the working class?
Doing Demands The Right Way
When advocating demands among the OWS movement, our language should explicitly be, "We, the working class, are realistically not yet united and class conscious enough to take power ourselves, but the working class is strong enough right now to extort X and Y from the capitalist class and its political servants in the State. Tomorrow, if we are stronger, we shall try to extort Z as well, and so on. We will give the capitalist class and its State nothing in return, ever—not even a promise of social peace that we know, and they know, we have no intention of keeping insofar as it suits us to not do so."
This suggestion is hardly novel. I do not wish to appeal to the Communist Manifesto as holy writ, but merely to establish a precedent. The Communist Manifesto had basically the same approach with its list of 10 immediate demands in chapter II. The last thing Marx would have done would have been to opportunistically appeal to bourgeois concepts of morality and justice. No, the demands expressed in this portion of the Communist Manifesto are formulated clearly in the spirit of giving the working class a position of greater strength to work from. That's it. No talk of "justice." Marx even says that the demands "cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production." Marx acknowledges that, from the standpoint of bourgeois morality, we communists will always be despotic extortionists. So be it!
Similarly, "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Enough stealth politics!
You might object that the working class in the U.S. right now is not strong enough to win such demands on its own in this way, and that it can only win demands by appealing to the moral sensibilities of bourgeois sympathizers. (Much the same argument could have been voiced in 1848 when Marx wrote the Manifesto).
Very well, you might win demands if you are willing to opportunistically appeal to (and strengthen) bourgeois ideas of moral justice (and concomitantly weaken support for the idea that there is a distinctly class nature to morality, and that morality does not just Platonically float up in the air free from class interests), but you have not made the working class stronger. You have only made the working class dependent on bourgeois sympathizers rather than the capitalist class directly. What the bourgeois sympathizers giveth, they can take away. Now you cannot offend the bourgeois sympathizers in your movement, or you will lose the critical support for your reforms, and the capitalist class will repeal those reforms. Now you must de-radicalize your organization. You must follow the signpost pointing to the putrid cemetery that says, "Here lies Tony Blair's Labour...(and too many other erstwhile revolutionary political organizations to count)."
Conclusion
The people in the "Occupy..." movement who refuse to pose demands to the existing order, and who enjoin others to refuse to do likewise, are not entirely off the mark. There are obvious historical reasons to be wary of the dynamics of making demands to those in power; it has corrupted movement after movement.
However, a movement must obviously have goals and a message, and understandably many people will not be satisfied with "the political and economic rule of the working class" as an immediate goal. Very well, then. Let us formulate goals and make demands on the capitalist class and its State, but let it be clear that we do so not from the standpoint of pleading with powers possessing the moral authority to dispense "justice" in the form of compromises with our class enemy, but rather from the standpoint of extorting whatever we think we are strong enough to attain from this class enemy for the meantime, in preparation for greater extortions from the capitalist class and its State in the future...and eventually the wholesale overthrow of this obsolete class and the establishment of the political and economic rule of the working class.
Many people participating in Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere have said, "We don't want demands." There are also people (some of them even self-described "anarchists") participating in Occupy Wall Street who are saying things like, "the message is that there's no message."
We're not writing a Seinfeld skit here people! Either these "no message, no demands" people are intentionally staging a self-mocking theater of the absurd, or they have unfortunately overshot an important lesson of the revolutionary left in the 20th century.
They are correct in suspecting that posing demands often corrupts movements and organizations, but they clearly do not understand why, or what to do about it.
The Ghost of Anarchism Past
It's a pity that "anarchists" are behaving this way, really. Once upon a time, anarchists knew how to win demands. Here's a small passage from Franz Borkenau's "The Spanish Cockpit," page 35:
"...the CNT rejected all sorts of agreements with the employers. Strikes ought to lead, in their conception of trade unionism, to the de facto application of better wages and shorter hours by the employers, but without any obligation, on the side of the workers, to keep to a settlement for a given time. The state of war between employers and wage-earners must be continual...With the creation of the CNT...Spanish anarchism transformed itself into 'anarcho-syndicalism'. The strangest thing about it is that it [anarchism] continued to exist successfully under these conditions. Other labour movements, such as that of Norway, have lived through the same attempts to create a trade-union movement based on syndicalist ideas; but invariably, after a time, the trade unions reverted to the typical trade-unionist mentality, to regular settlements with the employers, to the keeping of strike funds and social insurance funds, to completely pacific methods of action. Only Spain makes an exception. The Spanish CNT is perhaps the one genuinely revolutionary trade-union movement of large size in the world."
The lesson I draw from this is that you can make "demands," but it very much matters about the way that you go about doing it.
If you wish to avoid reformist corruption, as the CNT successfully managed to do, you cannot formulate your demands as proposed agreements with employers/the State/etc., not even implicitly, and, as shocking as it sounds, you must voice your demands in the language of extortion rather than "fairness" or justice."
The Pitfalls of Demands
If your demands are essentially proposed agreements with the class enemy, then what do you do if you win some of your demands, at least partially? Then you've got to hold your part of the bargain. What the capitalists and their State giveth, they can take away. That is the constant reminder. Time after time again, this dynamic tends to lead to reformism and degeneration into bread-&-butter unionism and tepid social democracy.
You can deny that you owe the class enemy any part of any bargain, as the CNT did (and thus avoid becoming reformist), but it only rings true insofar as you have formulated your "demands" in the language of extortion, not justice.
Opportunistic Appeals to Bourgeois Morality
We all know perfectly well that any compromise with the capitalist class or its State is still going to be unfair. True "justice" will only be possible when the working class directs its own future. Yet, we understandably feel the temptation to opportunistically appeal to the persisting bourgeois sensibilities of the majority of the population and say that they should support this or that demand because it is "fair" or "just." No, it is not fair or just. It marginally improves the position of the working class and weakens the capitalist class. That is why we demand X, Y, and Z. But we don't want to say that for fear of alienating supporters with bourgeois sensibilities (the vast majority still), who won't support the demand if it is about unabashedly strengthening the working class rather than about some moral idea of "justice."
If we have formulated demands in the language of justice, and then we turn around like the CNT and say to the class enemy, "We owe you nothing. The class war goes on," we appear to be dishonest and unjust. Bourgeois commentators get to take the "justice" discourse that we have promoted and rub it back in our face, charging us as "unjust extortionists."
Very well. Since this is the response we will be met with anyways, why don't we openly proclaim ourselves as extortionists for the working class?
Doing Demands The Right Way
When advocating demands among the OWS movement, our language should explicitly be, "We, the working class, are realistically not yet united and class conscious enough to take power ourselves, but the working class is strong enough right now to extort X and Y from the capitalist class and its political servants in the State. Tomorrow, if we are stronger, we shall try to extort Z as well, and so on. We will give the capitalist class and its State nothing in return, ever—not even a promise of social peace that we know, and they know, we have no intention of keeping insofar as it suits us to not do so."
This suggestion is hardly novel. I do not wish to appeal to the Communist Manifesto as holy writ, but merely to establish a precedent. The Communist Manifesto had basically the same approach with its list of 10 immediate demands in chapter II. The last thing Marx would have done would have been to opportunistically appeal to bourgeois concepts of morality and justice. No, the demands expressed in this portion of the Communist Manifesto are formulated clearly in the spirit of giving the working class a position of greater strength to work from. That's it. No talk of "justice." Marx even says that the demands "cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production." Marx acknowledges that, from the standpoint of bourgeois morality, we communists will always be despotic extortionists. So be it!
Similarly, "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Enough stealth politics!
You might object that the working class in the U.S. right now is not strong enough to win such demands on its own in this way, and that it can only win demands by appealing to the moral sensibilities of bourgeois sympathizers. (Much the same argument could have been voiced in 1848 when Marx wrote the Manifesto).
Very well, you might win demands if you are willing to opportunistically appeal to (and strengthen) bourgeois ideas of moral justice (and concomitantly weaken support for the idea that there is a distinctly class nature to morality, and that morality does not just Platonically float up in the air free from class interests), but you have not made the working class stronger. You have only made the working class dependent on bourgeois sympathizers rather than the capitalist class directly. What the bourgeois sympathizers giveth, they can take away. Now you cannot offend the bourgeois sympathizers in your movement, or you will lose the critical support for your reforms, and the capitalist class will repeal those reforms. Now you must de-radicalize your organization. You must follow the signpost pointing to the putrid cemetery that says, "Here lies Tony Blair's Labour...(and too many other erstwhile revolutionary political organizations to count)."
Conclusion
The people in the "Occupy..." movement who refuse to pose demands to the existing order, and who enjoin others to refuse to do likewise, are not entirely off the mark. There are obvious historical reasons to be wary of the dynamics of making demands to those in power; it has corrupted movement after movement.
However, a movement must obviously have goals and a message, and understandably many people will not be satisfied with "the political and economic rule of the working class" as an immediate goal. Very well, then. Let us formulate goals and make demands on the capitalist class and its State, but let it be clear that we do so not from the standpoint of pleading with powers possessing the moral authority to dispense "justice" in the form of compromises with our class enemy, but rather from the standpoint of extorting whatever we think we are strong enough to attain from this class enemy for the meantime, in preparation for greater extortions from the capitalist class and its State in the future...and eventually the wholesale overthrow of this obsolete class and the establishment of the political and economic rule of the working class.