Die Neue Zeit
4th December 2011, 03:47
Demands, State Power, Political Struggle, and Economic Illusions
“At the heart of the problem was the Left's often uncritical embrace of one of the most oppressive, disempowering and alienating institutions that most working-class people ever have the misfortune to interact with in their lives: the modern state. At some point, the Left dropped its former aim of encouraging the ‘self-emancipation’ of working people, and replaced it with an aim that to most people seems like its opposite: technocratic ‘public administration’ by state agencies.” (Steve D’Arcy)
In September 2011, hundreds of protesters heeded the months-old call of the Canadian-based Adbusters Foundation for a peaceful occupation of Wall Street as a form of sustained protest against growing inequality in wealth, corporate influence on the political process, and relative legal inaction in the wake of the recent financial and economic crisis. Only a short time passed until police brutality against sustained protests elsewhere in New York City unintentionally popularized this initial protest movement all across the United States, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and elsewhere worldwide. All over, the broader political movement used the left-populist slogan “We are the 99%” to refer succinctly to all those outside the wealthiest one percent of society.
Though unsurprisingly only token support came from the corner of mere labour disputes, the kind of popular support given to this left-populist movement came from all other walks of life. Lucy Sherriff of the Huffington Post noted this example of working professional support by one Aneurin Rainbird in Occupy London:
Despite bold headlines screaming about "Defecation and drugs" at the camp, there are clear signs of it being a "drink and drug free" zone.
Aneurin Rainbird, a regular participant at the camp, said there was a strict no alcohol policy and drugs were also banned. "I was concerned it would regress into some stupid hippy camp at first but it's actually amazingly organised. There are various groups to establish a harmonious atmosphere at the camp: waste management, noise control and so on."
The 23-year-old described the media portrayal of the camp as "incredibly frustrating".
[…]
"Unfortunately I can't be involved as much as I would like to be because of my job. They all know I work in the City. They don't care or judge me for that.
"I am thankful to the people who are there all the time because it means I can keep my job and still show my support by going down there in the evenings. I don't feel like I need to quit my job to get involved.
"The guys running the camp full-time wouldn't expect me to either", he added.
And what do his colleagues at [Price Waterhouse Coopers] think of his involvement at the camp - whose ideals seem to contradict everything his company stands for?
"I don't try to hide my views but at the same time I don't go around work saying I'm down at St Paul's every night. I don't know if they'd judge me if everyone knew – I guess they probably would."
So you don't feel your job impedes on your credibility of being at the camp?
"No, not at all.
"Although", Rainbird adds, "I spend my days in a suit working for one of the Big Four and my nights discussing corporate greed and how the current capitalism is damaging to society at a makeshift camp.
"I guess that's pretty ironic, isn't it?"
A few sections have issued preliminary lists of substantive and semi-substantive demands, such as in the western Canadian city of Vancouver:
1. We demand that the wealthiest 1% pay their fair share by the closing of tax loopholes […]
2. We demand that the banks be nationalized […] The mandate of the Bank of Canada must now include the pursuit of low unemployment in addition to low inflation.
3. We demand that crimes committed by banks and corporations be prosecuted more rigorously – a dedicated justice fund for white-collar crimes must be created. Canadian corporations must also be held accountable for crimes (such as bribery and pollution) committed abroad.
4. We demand that all income tax for those who make less than the living wage be eliminated.
6. We demand a higher minimum wage – one that equals a living wage. Those unable to work due to disability or infirmity should have a guaranteed income which will allow a dignified existence.
12. We demand that corporate person-hood is repealed.
13. We demand the influence of lobbyists and influence peddlers be reduced by requiring all lobbyists and corporate representatives conduct all meetings with representatives out in the open, with records of what was said and what was spent easily accessible to the public.
15. We demand the installation of a proportional representation system in all municipal, provincial and federal elections […]
18. We demand the elimination of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which criminalizes activities similar to the ones conducted by the French Resistance in WW2 and Nelson Mandela's ANC in South Africa.
26. We demand that "none of the above" be an option on all electoral ballots.
29. We demand massage [therapy], dental and eye care be covered under the health care system.
30. We demand an end to gender and racial discrimination in the workplace. We demand pay equity and employment equity. We demand equal pay for different but equivalent work.
42. We demand an end to the corporate funding and control of [colleges] and universities.
59. We demand protection of water rights and transparency in all Canadian water deals.
By and large, however, only the bigger issues which inspired the protests and scattered demands by individual protesters and groups have been discussed, as opposed to unified platforms of demands. According to Miranda Leitsinger of msnbc.com:
As the "Occupy Wall Street" protest enters its third month, members are wrestling with an issue as old as the Athenians who first hatched the idea of democracy around 500 B.C.: Should we issue a set of demands and, if so, what should they be?
The debate has taken on new meaning with this week’s removal of the protest camp at Zuccotti Park. Some in the flagship occupation in the heart of America’s financial sector believe the police action provided them with the perfect moment to put forward specific demands and build support among the so-called “99 percent” of Americans outside the economic elite.
But opponents argue that not making demands will strengthen the “Occupy” cause by keeping all options on the table, including the sort of systematic changes that they believe are needed to address the economic inequalities that are at the core of their anger.
[…]
"Inherently, in asking for demands, you are accepting that there is a power greater than yourself, which is something that this movement is categorically against," Patrick Bruner, a 23-year-old protester, told the group. "This movement is founded on autonomous action and collective wisdom."
Indeed, Steve D’Arcy of the Huron University College made similar statements just before Occupy Wall Street began:
In part, that means replacing the utilitarian and technocratic images of a post-capitalist social order with more appealing images of radically democratic forms of community-based egalitarian economic democracy. But, in more immediately practical terms, it means a strategic reorientation of the Left: a turn away from the habit of engaging primarily with state institutions (parliaments, regulatory agencies and the welfare state) […]
The Left, in other words, must turn its attention back toward civil society: union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies and other community associations. These expressions of grassroots democracy and popular self-organization -- operating independently of both the market economy and the state -- offer the Left the crucial benefit that they do not replicate the alienating and disempowering character of corporations and governments (although the Left is unfortunately overpopulated with bureaucratic and staff-led union and NGO apparatuses that today emulate the administrative systems of elite institutions).
Superficially, the mention of “union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies, and other community organizations” might evoke the SPD model. However, there is an implicit “movement of movements” premise, and there is also the danger here of all this fostering a "change the world without taking power" illusion, to quote the explicitly anti-political John Holloway’s book and book title. After all, D’Arcy himself drew rather questionable conclusions about approaches to be taken in different political periods, ironically based very much on an orthodox Marxist framework. As noted at sufficient length:
[Strategic] principles that comprise the most distinctive and controversial elements of Lenin’s first-order strategy are as follows: First, that the organizational form of the political party should be the central vehicle for leading the anti-capitalist movement, rather than, say, unions or cooperatives, as proposed by some syndicalists, anarchists and others.
[…]
For my purposes, five of Lenin’s meta-strategic principles stand out as especially important […] as long as the balance of forces favours the ruling class and its allied social forces, the revolutionary struggle must be preparatory in nature, and hence protracted and asymmetrical, but as soon as the balance of forces favours the oppositional class and its allied forces, so that a rapid and fundamental strategic reversal seems possible, the struggle passes from a preparatory into a critical phase […] the strategic orientation appropriate to protracted and asymmetrical struggle, that is, to the preparatory phase of anti-capitalist struggle, is that of an attrition strategy, whereas the strategic orientation appropriate to the critical phase of anti-capitalist struggle is that of an overthrow strategy.
[…]
The occasion for Kautsky’s introduction of the attrition/overthrow distinction was a debate between himself and Rosa Luxemburg, over how best to advance the aim of winning universal suffrage across Germany […] In both Lenin’s reply to Martov […] and Luxemburg’s reply to Kautsky […] the authors introduce evidence, such as strike levels and other data, to demonstrate that the workers’ movement is stronger, and the ruling class is weaker, than Martov and Kautsky have suggested.
[…]
Because it is clear, at least in reference to today’s North America, that the balance of forces between the contending classes makes revolution an unlikely outcome in the foreseeable future […] several of Lenin’s first-order principles – namely, the first, third, fourth, and sixth – have little or no strategically sound application under circumstances where a first-order strategy of attrition is called for. This is especially so under circumstances of legality (low levels of anti-radical repression).
Consider the first principle, that the political party is the central vehicle for leading the anti-capitalist movement. The whole conception of a ‘political party’ that Lenin takes for granted – whether he depicts as his paradigm case the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the decades immediately prior to World War I or the Russian Communist Party after 1917 – presupposes that the party will be a mass organization, with real influence among millions of members of the working class […] Such a party cannot exist today or in the currently foreseeable future.
[…]
In the short term, that means systematically encouraging the development of an oppositional rather than an integrative politics: a channelling of popular political engagement away from the ‘official’ forms of political participation within the framework of the capitalist state, such as voting or joining electoralist parties, into specifically extra-parliamentary modes of civic engagement, notably protest movement activism and other forms of grassroots, community-based civic activism. In the long term, though, building an alternative politics will mean fostering the re-emergence of counter-capitalist, parallel political institutions beyond the control of capital and the state, such as popular assemblies or community councils.
The problems with such a conclusion are manifold. First, most community-based civic activism revolves around Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) amateurism and other single-issue advocacy, including the mislabelled “identity politics.” Second, much if not most protest movement activism, being too cozy with the rule of bourgeois law, downplays the role of publicized civil disobedience and organizing mass civil disobedience campaigns. Third, that very same activism tends to have peculiar views about democratic processes, ranging from illusions in the effectiveness of formal consensus beyond small meetings and small groups to anathema towards concrete unity in concrete action, as expressed in the “diversity of tactics” accommodation of Black Bloc hooliganism and other faux-“militant” tactics. Fourth, cynical yet ineffective abstention instead of spoilage and mass spoilage campaigns is implied in trying to sidestep “official forms of political participation,” including referenda, and this only reinforces the bourgeois notion that abstainers are either stupid or content, or just plain lazy. More broadly, while the state is by no means the only acceptable arena for worker-class political activity in general, it cannot be dismissed. As sociologist Michael Neocosmos explained while criticizing political liberalism:
I shall be commenting here on theoretical problems inherent in thinking the neo-liberal state in an African context and also concerning the relations between this state and what has come to be referred to as ‘civil society’. The dominant theme of this paper is that, in an African historical context, the liberal conception of politics, which forms the globally hegemonic discursive framework within which much of the debate on democratisation operates, and which outlines both ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ for Africa, is authoritarian to the core. Moreover, it will be argued that both alternatives proposed by power for Africa, namely neo-liberalism and state nationalism, are founded on liberal precepts and are fundamentally authoritarian. An alternative conception of emancipatory democracy has to reject liberal thinking on the state and politics […]
Central to liberal discourse has been a conception revolving around the idea that politics is reducible to the state or that the state is the sole legitimate domain of politics. For liberalism, ‘political society’ simply is the state. This idea has permeated so much into African political thinking for example, that it has become difficult to conceive of an opposition political practice that is not reduced to capturing state posts or the state itself to the extent that it seems to be universally assumed that ‘politics is the state and the state is politics’
[...]
While the state cannot substitute itself for social activities, it should not be assumed a priori either that any social institutions can be substituted for the state itself.
[...]
The one-sidedness of a statist conception is thus not unconnected with its apparent mirror image, the tendency to analyse social relations abstracted from state activity. After all, a whole academic discipline of Western Sociology has largely been content to study society and culture while assuming their ability to reproduce themselves of their own accord, without state intervention in society—a position perhaps most clearly expressed in Durkheim’s work (at least in its structural-functionalist readings). For such a sociology, political power could easily be seen as a feature of society abstracted from institutional control, thus diluting its political character.
Therefore, it is necessary to press forward or issue demands of an immediate, intermediate, and threshold nature that explicitly include the bourgeois-capitalist state as an elephantine component of the political audience, but that also give no legitimacy whatsoever to the rule of bourgeois law simply by the mere proper acknowledgement of civil disobedience.
There is yet another problem with D’Arcy’s conclusion: this almost anarchistic-leaning left orientation lumps goals pertaining to two or more forms of class independence together, and conflates them. The politico-ideological independence of the working class is embodied in its very own party-movement of class-strugglist labour, existing on the premise that real parties are real movements and vice versa, yet criticized just above was in fact a rejection of achieving this imperative “today or in the currently foreseeable future.” Even if such a rejection were not made, goals of politico-ideological independence have been, to at least a considerable extent, lumped together with goals of economic independence, echoing the overly broad and extremely vulgar assertion that “the economic is political” (courtesy of ever-crude economic determinism). From the long-lived cooperative movement to the premise of collective bargaining representation to the various residential anti-gentrification campaigns to the social movements for local currency alternatives to government money, the respective histories of all these and more have, individually and combined, demonstrated that economic independence for the working class under bourgeois-fied commodity production is wishful thinking, since related demands pressed forward have not and cannot be established on the level of society as a whole except through the overall body politic, let alone enforced by the modern state.
One last criticism of issuing demands must be addressed: the toxic notion of managing the bourgeois-capitalist state, or of managing bourgeois capital, state capital, and so on. In more technical terms, this means that reform struggles do not really benefit the working class, but instead facilitate capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power. What these particular critics simply do not understand is that there are times when these two outcomes intersect; there are measures strictly for facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power, measures strictly for labour empowerment (politically and economically), and measures that can achieve both in varying degrees. While it should be acknowledged that even the economically-inclined demands based on the game theory concept of maximin – by enabling the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” (Kautsky) and, in the cases of immediate and intermediate but not threshold demands, by “mak further progress more likely and facilitat[ing] other progressive changes” (Hahnel) – involve some degree of facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power, maximin yields little in the way of this other side and much more in the way of labour empowerment. Meanwhile, the economically inclined demands that result strictly in labour empowerment – and necessarily require the working class to expropriate, beforehand, ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas – are simply of a directional nature.
REFERENCES
[i]A Civil Society Strategy for Revitalizing the Left by Steve D’Arcy [http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/543.php]
Adbusters founders cheer their Occupy idea by The Canadian Press [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/10/14/occupy-canada-adbusters.html]
Occupy London: An Accountant By Day, An Anti-Capitalist By Night, Who Are The Protesters? by Lucy Sherriff, The Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/25/occupy-london-view-inside-camp_n_1112947.html]
Rough Draft of Demands for Occupy Vancouver by Occupy Vancouver
[http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111104/bc_occupy_vancouver_demands_111104]
[http://www.cbc.ca/bc/news/bc-111104-occupy-vancouver-demands.pdf]
To demand or not to demand? That is the 'Occupy' question by Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45260610/ns/us_news-life/t/demand-or-not-demand-occupy-question]
Negative critique and positive alternatives by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=764]
Strategy, Meta-strategy and Anti-capitalist Activism by Steve D’Arcy [http://socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/view/85/82]
Consensus Democracy and the Left [http://www.revleft.com/vb/consensus-democracy-and-t162706/index.html]
Thinking the Impossible?: Elements of a Critique of Political Liberalism in Southern Africa by Michael Neocosmos [http://www.codesria.org/IMG/pdf/neocosmos.pdf]
"Politics is the state and the state is politics"? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/politics-state-and-t161109/index.html]
AWL Up To Their Misrepresentation Again – Part 4 by Arthur Bough [http://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/awl-up-to-their-misrepresentation-again_30.html]
“At the heart of the problem was the Left's often uncritical embrace of one of the most oppressive, disempowering and alienating institutions that most working-class people ever have the misfortune to interact with in their lives: the modern state. At some point, the Left dropped its former aim of encouraging the ‘self-emancipation’ of working people, and replaced it with an aim that to most people seems like its opposite: technocratic ‘public administration’ by state agencies.” (Steve D’Arcy)
In September 2011, hundreds of protesters heeded the months-old call of the Canadian-based Adbusters Foundation for a peaceful occupation of Wall Street as a form of sustained protest against growing inequality in wealth, corporate influence on the political process, and relative legal inaction in the wake of the recent financial and economic crisis. Only a short time passed until police brutality against sustained protests elsewhere in New York City unintentionally popularized this initial protest movement all across the United States, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and elsewhere worldwide. All over, the broader political movement used the left-populist slogan “We are the 99%” to refer succinctly to all those outside the wealthiest one percent of society.
Though unsurprisingly only token support came from the corner of mere labour disputes, the kind of popular support given to this left-populist movement came from all other walks of life. Lucy Sherriff of the Huffington Post noted this example of working professional support by one Aneurin Rainbird in Occupy London:
Despite bold headlines screaming about "Defecation and drugs" at the camp, there are clear signs of it being a "drink and drug free" zone.
Aneurin Rainbird, a regular participant at the camp, said there was a strict no alcohol policy and drugs were also banned. "I was concerned it would regress into some stupid hippy camp at first but it's actually amazingly organised. There are various groups to establish a harmonious atmosphere at the camp: waste management, noise control and so on."
The 23-year-old described the media portrayal of the camp as "incredibly frustrating".
[…]
"Unfortunately I can't be involved as much as I would like to be because of my job. They all know I work in the City. They don't care or judge me for that.
"I am thankful to the people who are there all the time because it means I can keep my job and still show my support by going down there in the evenings. I don't feel like I need to quit my job to get involved.
"The guys running the camp full-time wouldn't expect me to either", he added.
And what do his colleagues at [Price Waterhouse Coopers] think of his involvement at the camp - whose ideals seem to contradict everything his company stands for?
"I don't try to hide my views but at the same time I don't go around work saying I'm down at St Paul's every night. I don't know if they'd judge me if everyone knew – I guess they probably would."
So you don't feel your job impedes on your credibility of being at the camp?
"No, not at all.
"Although", Rainbird adds, "I spend my days in a suit working for one of the Big Four and my nights discussing corporate greed and how the current capitalism is damaging to society at a makeshift camp.
"I guess that's pretty ironic, isn't it?"
A few sections have issued preliminary lists of substantive and semi-substantive demands, such as in the western Canadian city of Vancouver:
1. We demand that the wealthiest 1% pay their fair share by the closing of tax loopholes […]
2. We demand that the banks be nationalized […] The mandate of the Bank of Canada must now include the pursuit of low unemployment in addition to low inflation.
3. We demand that crimes committed by banks and corporations be prosecuted more rigorously – a dedicated justice fund for white-collar crimes must be created. Canadian corporations must also be held accountable for crimes (such as bribery and pollution) committed abroad.
4. We demand that all income tax for those who make less than the living wage be eliminated.
6. We demand a higher minimum wage – one that equals a living wage. Those unable to work due to disability or infirmity should have a guaranteed income which will allow a dignified existence.
12. We demand that corporate person-hood is repealed.
13. We demand the influence of lobbyists and influence peddlers be reduced by requiring all lobbyists and corporate representatives conduct all meetings with representatives out in the open, with records of what was said and what was spent easily accessible to the public.
15. We demand the installation of a proportional representation system in all municipal, provincial and federal elections […]
18. We demand the elimination of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which criminalizes activities similar to the ones conducted by the French Resistance in WW2 and Nelson Mandela's ANC in South Africa.
26. We demand that "none of the above" be an option on all electoral ballots.
29. We demand massage [therapy], dental and eye care be covered under the health care system.
30. We demand an end to gender and racial discrimination in the workplace. We demand pay equity and employment equity. We demand equal pay for different but equivalent work.
42. We demand an end to the corporate funding and control of [colleges] and universities.
59. We demand protection of water rights and transparency in all Canadian water deals.
By and large, however, only the bigger issues which inspired the protests and scattered demands by individual protesters and groups have been discussed, as opposed to unified platforms of demands. According to Miranda Leitsinger of msnbc.com:
As the "Occupy Wall Street" protest enters its third month, members are wrestling with an issue as old as the Athenians who first hatched the idea of democracy around 500 B.C.: Should we issue a set of demands and, if so, what should they be?
The debate has taken on new meaning with this week’s removal of the protest camp at Zuccotti Park. Some in the flagship occupation in the heart of America’s financial sector believe the police action provided them with the perfect moment to put forward specific demands and build support among the so-called “99 percent” of Americans outside the economic elite.
But opponents argue that not making demands will strengthen the “Occupy” cause by keeping all options on the table, including the sort of systematic changes that they believe are needed to address the economic inequalities that are at the core of their anger.
[…]
"Inherently, in asking for demands, you are accepting that there is a power greater than yourself, which is something that this movement is categorically against," Patrick Bruner, a 23-year-old protester, told the group. "This movement is founded on autonomous action and collective wisdom."
Indeed, Steve D’Arcy of the Huron University College made similar statements just before Occupy Wall Street began:
In part, that means replacing the utilitarian and technocratic images of a post-capitalist social order with more appealing images of radically democratic forms of community-based egalitarian economic democracy. But, in more immediately practical terms, it means a strategic reorientation of the Left: a turn away from the habit of engaging primarily with state institutions (parliaments, regulatory agencies and the welfare state) […]
The Left, in other words, must turn its attention back toward civil society: union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies and other community associations. These expressions of grassroots democracy and popular self-organization -- operating independently of both the market economy and the state -- offer the Left the crucial benefit that they do not replicate the alienating and disempowering character of corporations and governments (although the Left is unfortunately overpopulated with bureaucratic and staff-led union and NGO apparatuses that today emulate the administrative systems of elite institutions).
Superficially, the mention of “union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies, and other community organizations” might evoke the SPD model. However, there is an implicit “movement of movements” premise, and there is also the danger here of all this fostering a "change the world without taking power" illusion, to quote the explicitly anti-political John Holloway’s book and book title. After all, D’Arcy himself drew rather questionable conclusions about approaches to be taken in different political periods, ironically based very much on an orthodox Marxist framework. As noted at sufficient length:
[Strategic] principles that comprise the most distinctive and controversial elements of Lenin’s first-order strategy are as follows: First, that the organizational form of the political party should be the central vehicle for leading the anti-capitalist movement, rather than, say, unions or cooperatives, as proposed by some syndicalists, anarchists and others.
[…]
For my purposes, five of Lenin’s meta-strategic principles stand out as especially important […] as long as the balance of forces favours the ruling class and its allied social forces, the revolutionary struggle must be preparatory in nature, and hence protracted and asymmetrical, but as soon as the balance of forces favours the oppositional class and its allied forces, so that a rapid and fundamental strategic reversal seems possible, the struggle passes from a preparatory into a critical phase […] the strategic orientation appropriate to protracted and asymmetrical struggle, that is, to the preparatory phase of anti-capitalist struggle, is that of an attrition strategy, whereas the strategic orientation appropriate to the critical phase of anti-capitalist struggle is that of an overthrow strategy.
[…]
The occasion for Kautsky’s introduction of the attrition/overthrow distinction was a debate between himself and Rosa Luxemburg, over how best to advance the aim of winning universal suffrage across Germany […] In both Lenin’s reply to Martov […] and Luxemburg’s reply to Kautsky […] the authors introduce evidence, such as strike levels and other data, to demonstrate that the workers’ movement is stronger, and the ruling class is weaker, than Martov and Kautsky have suggested.
[…]
Because it is clear, at least in reference to today’s North America, that the balance of forces between the contending classes makes revolution an unlikely outcome in the foreseeable future […] several of Lenin’s first-order principles – namely, the first, third, fourth, and sixth – have little or no strategically sound application under circumstances where a first-order strategy of attrition is called for. This is especially so under circumstances of legality (low levels of anti-radical repression).
Consider the first principle, that the political party is the central vehicle for leading the anti-capitalist movement. The whole conception of a ‘political party’ that Lenin takes for granted – whether he depicts as his paradigm case the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the decades immediately prior to World War I or the Russian Communist Party after 1917 – presupposes that the party will be a mass organization, with real influence among millions of members of the working class […] Such a party cannot exist today or in the currently foreseeable future.
[…]
In the short term, that means systematically encouraging the development of an oppositional rather than an integrative politics: a channelling of popular political engagement away from the ‘official’ forms of political participation within the framework of the capitalist state, such as voting or joining electoralist parties, into specifically extra-parliamentary modes of civic engagement, notably protest movement activism and other forms of grassroots, community-based civic activism. In the long term, though, building an alternative politics will mean fostering the re-emergence of counter-capitalist, parallel political institutions beyond the control of capital and the state, such as popular assemblies or community councils.
The problems with such a conclusion are manifold. First, most community-based civic activism revolves around Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) amateurism and other single-issue advocacy, including the mislabelled “identity politics.” Second, much if not most protest movement activism, being too cozy with the rule of bourgeois law, downplays the role of publicized civil disobedience and organizing mass civil disobedience campaigns. Third, that very same activism tends to have peculiar views about democratic processes, ranging from illusions in the effectiveness of formal consensus beyond small meetings and small groups to anathema towards concrete unity in concrete action, as expressed in the “diversity of tactics” accommodation of Black Bloc hooliganism and other faux-“militant” tactics. Fourth, cynical yet ineffective abstention instead of spoilage and mass spoilage campaigns is implied in trying to sidestep “official forms of political participation,” including referenda, and this only reinforces the bourgeois notion that abstainers are either stupid or content, or just plain lazy. More broadly, while the state is by no means the only acceptable arena for worker-class political activity in general, it cannot be dismissed. As sociologist Michael Neocosmos explained while criticizing political liberalism:
I shall be commenting here on theoretical problems inherent in thinking the neo-liberal state in an African context and also concerning the relations between this state and what has come to be referred to as ‘civil society’. The dominant theme of this paper is that, in an African historical context, the liberal conception of politics, which forms the globally hegemonic discursive framework within which much of the debate on democratisation operates, and which outlines both ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ for Africa, is authoritarian to the core. Moreover, it will be argued that both alternatives proposed by power for Africa, namely neo-liberalism and state nationalism, are founded on liberal precepts and are fundamentally authoritarian. An alternative conception of emancipatory democracy has to reject liberal thinking on the state and politics […]
Central to liberal discourse has been a conception revolving around the idea that politics is reducible to the state or that the state is the sole legitimate domain of politics. For liberalism, ‘political society’ simply is the state. This idea has permeated so much into African political thinking for example, that it has become difficult to conceive of an opposition political practice that is not reduced to capturing state posts or the state itself to the extent that it seems to be universally assumed that ‘politics is the state and the state is politics’
[...]
While the state cannot substitute itself for social activities, it should not be assumed a priori either that any social institutions can be substituted for the state itself.
[...]
The one-sidedness of a statist conception is thus not unconnected with its apparent mirror image, the tendency to analyse social relations abstracted from state activity. After all, a whole academic discipline of Western Sociology has largely been content to study society and culture while assuming their ability to reproduce themselves of their own accord, without state intervention in society—a position perhaps most clearly expressed in Durkheim’s work (at least in its structural-functionalist readings). For such a sociology, political power could easily be seen as a feature of society abstracted from institutional control, thus diluting its political character.
Therefore, it is necessary to press forward or issue demands of an immediate, intermediate, and threshold nature that explicitly include the bourgeois-capitalist state as an elephantine component of the political audience, but that also give no legitimacy whatsoever to the rule of bourgeois law simply by the mere proper acknowledgement of civil disobedience.
There is yet another problem with D’Arcy’s conclusion: this almost anarchistic-leaning left orientation lumps goals pertaining to two or more forms of class independence together, and conflates them. The politico-ideological independence of the working class is embodied in its very own party-movement of class-strugglist labour, existing on the premise that real parties are real movements and vice versa, yet criticized just above was in fact a rejection of achieving this imperative “today or in the currently foreseeable future.” Even if such a rejection were not made, goals of politico-ideological independence have been, to at least a considerable extent, lumped together with goals of economic independence, echoing the overly broad and extremely vulgar assertion that “the economic is political” (courtesy of ever-crude economic determinism). From the long-lived cooperative movement to the premise of collective bargaining representation to the various residential anti-gentrification campaigns to the social movements for local currency alternatives to government money, the respective histories of all these and more have, individually and combined, demonstrated that economic independence for the working class under bourgeois-fied commodity production is wishful thinking, since related demands pressed forward have not and cannot be established on the level of society as a whole except through the overall body politic, let alone enforced by the modern state.
One last criticism of issuing demands must be addressed: the toxic notion of managing the bourgeois-capitalist state, or of managing bourgeois capital, state capital, and so on. In more technical terms, this means that reform struggles do not really benefit the working class, but instead facilitate capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power. What these particular critics simply do not understand is that there are times when these two outcomes intersect; there are measures strictly for facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power, measures strictly for labour empowerment (politically and economically), and measures that can achieve both in varying degrees. While it should be acknowledged that even the economically-inclined demands based on the game theory concept of maximin – by enabling the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view” (Kautsky) and, in the cases of immediate and intermediate but not threshold demands, by “mak further progress more likely and facilitat[ing] other progressive changes” (Hahnel) – involve some degree of facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of labour power, maximin yields little in the way of this other side and much more in the way of labour empowerment. Meanwhile, the economically inclined demands that result strictly in labour empowerment – and necessarily require the working class to expropriate, beforehand, ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas – are simply of a directional nature.
REFERENCES
[i]A Civil Society Strategy for Revitalizing the Left by Steve D’Arcy [http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/543.php]
Adbusters founders cheer their Occupy idea by The Canadian Press [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/10/14/occupy-canada-adbusters.html]
Occupy London: An Accountant By Day, An Anti-Capitalist By Night, Who Are The Protesters? by Lucy Sherriff, The Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/25/occupy-london-view-inside-camp_n_1112947.html]
Rough Draft of Demands for Occupy Vancouver by Occupy Vancouver
[http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111104/bc_occupy_vancouver_demands_111104]
[http://www.cbc.ca/bc/news/bc-111104-occupy-vancouver-demands.pdf]
To demand or not to demand? That is the 'Occupy' question by Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45260610/ns/us_news-life/t/demand-or-not-demand-occupy-question]
Negative critique and positive alternatives by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=764]
Strategy, Meta-strategy and Anti-capitalist Activism by Steve D’Arcy [http://socialiststudies.com/index.php/sss/article/view/85/82]
Consensus Democracy and the Left [http://www.revleft.com/vb/consensus-democracy-and-t162706/index.html]
Thinking the Impossible?: Elements of a Critique of Political Liberalism in Southern Africa by Michael Neocosmos [http://www.codesria.org/IMG/pdf/neocosmos.pdf]
"Politics is the state and the state is politics"? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/politics-state-and-t161109/index.html]
AWL Up To Their Misrepresentation Again – Part 4 by Arthur Bough [http://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/awl-up-to-their-misrepresentation-again_30.html]