Die Neue Zeit
29th June 2008, 07:09
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1152754&postcount=10
http://www.turbulence.org.uk/walkingintherigh.html
Discussions have been taking place within the radical left in Germany around precisely (if not exactly explicitly) this question. One possible solution which has begun to be formulated is the development of a set of so-called ‘directional demands’ (Richtungsforderungen). There is no single, unified position on what do or do not constitute directional demands. What follows should be understood more as an intervention into an ongoing discussion than as an introduction to a completed debate.
The article then goes on to mention "basic income," which fits right in to my mentioning of Robley George's "Socioeconomic Democracy" concepts:
The demands referred to as “reformist demands” should coincide with the “maximum demands” of the reformist tendency, most notably the demands associated with “democratic socialism,” along with other non-revolutionary demands that require a break from bourgeois capitalism. Unfortunately, for those subscribing to Trotskyist revisionism, such demands would also include the “transitional demands” of full employment, the institution of sliding scales of wages (to match inflation) and working hours, and the establishment of organizations of workers’ power beyond the labour movement (thus going beyond “employee empowerment” and parliamentarianism) – among other “transitional demands.” Much like the Erfurt Program of the German Social-Democratic Party in 1891 and the “revolutionary” coating added by Karl Kautsky in 1892, the revisionist notion of the transitional program being “revolutionary” suffers from “apocalyptic predestinationism” (in Trotsky’s words, “the death agony of capitalism”).
One particular “transitional demand” that has emerged with the development of information-communication technology is the demand for “socioeconomic democracy” as advocated by Robley George in Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System. In its narrowest form, there is some form of both “universal guaranteed personal income” and “maximum allowable personal wealth” that is democratically established and adjusted by society as a whole. This goes beyond the minimum demand in the Communist Manifesto for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”
Back to the article:
It would be well worth asking, then, how (or if!) directional demands are any different. What is it about them that offers more potential than these previous strategies? Indeed, are directional demands anything more than old ideas in new packaging? Seeing as, at first glance, there would appear to be a number of similarities (and indeed, there probably are) between transitional and directional demands, it is worth proposing a number of theses as to where they differ.
I. The realisation of directional demands (either individually, or when combined) would necessitate a break with capitalist social relations. Whereas transitional demands (nationalisation, employment for all, decent living conditions), like the minimum programme of classical social democracy, may be realisable within bourgeois society, the demand, for example, for a basic income looks for a way out. As such, the demand needs to be for its global implementation, for it to be unconditional (e.g. not dependent upon legal status), and to be sufficient to ensure that income becomes permanently de-linked from productivity.
II. Directional demands do not privilege any area of the multitude over another. Whereas Trotsky’s transitional demands (along with much of the rest of ‘orthodox’ Marxism) have placed primacy upon the role of the industrial proletariat as political vanguard, under conditions of post-Fordism where production has spilled out of the factory and into society at large, the project for the self-constitution of an anti-capitalist social subject must do the same. Efforts towards class recomposition today must base themselves on the constitution of the common amongst the irreducible multiplicity of productive singularities through a constant process of becoming.
III. Directional demands can only be determined and decided upon by the movements themselves. Whilst transitional demands were both articulated by, and had as their goal the strengthening of, the Party, directional demands are those that emerge from, and are taken up by, the movement of antagonistic subjectivities. In this sense, there is no limit upon the number of demands which can be articulated, nor upon those who can articulate them, nor the form that this articulation can take.
IV. Directional demands constitute what Deleuze might call ‘a line of flight’. Transitional demands aim towards the sweeping away of ‘bourgeois rule’, with a clear – and closed – idea of what should come next; namely, ‘the conquest of power by the proletariat’ (Trotsky). Directional demands, in contrast, seek to open up unlimited and undetermined possibilities for another world. The teleology of Hegelian and Leninist Marxisms is rejected. There is neither a predetermined destination, nor any necessary stages through which we have to pass. Directional demands seek to bring about a deterritorialisation, an opening up onto a ‘plane of immanence’. As the name implies, they suggest a direction; nothing more, nothing less.
Directional demands, then, aim to provide a point around which a potential movement could consolidate. Their realisation would necessitate not only a break with the present state of things, but open up the potential for (rather than have already closed down) possible future worlds. The articulation of such demands is the monopoly of no single social actor, but rather constitutes an expression of the material struggles of the multitude of productive singularities within a process of recomposition. And finally, it is not only key in which direction such demands point, but also where they come from. As with the condition for participation in the Zapatista’s Otra Campaņa, this can only be from below and – like the heart – to the left.
http://www.newleftreview.org/A2368
If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its demands. The three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance, calls for a universally guaranteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement of people across borders, and free access to new technology—which in practice would mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism).
http://www.turbulence.org.uk/walkingintherigh.html
Discussions have been taking place within the radical left in Germany around precisely (if not exactly explicitly) this question. One possible solution which has begun to be formulated is the development of a set of so-called ‘directional demands’ (Richtungsforderungen). There is no single, unified position on what do or do not constitute directional demands. What follows should be understood more as an intervention into an ongoing discussion than as an introduction to a completed debate.
The article then goes on to mention "basic income," which fits right in to my mentioning of Robley George's "Socioeconomic Democracy" concepts:
The demands referred to as “reformist demands” should coincide with the “maximum demands” of the reformist tendency, most notably the demands associated with “democratic socialism,” along with other non-revolutionary demands that require a break from bourgeois capitalism. Unfortunately, for those subscribing to Trotskyist revisionism, such demands would also include the “transitional demands” of full employment, the institution of sliding scales of wages (to match inflation) and working hours, and the establishment of organizations of workers’ power beyond the labour movement (thus going beyond “employee empowerment” and parliamentarianism) – among other “transitional demands.” Much like the Erfurt Program of the German Social-Democratic Party in 1891 and the “revolutionary” coating added by Karl Kautsky in 1892, the revisionist notion of the transitional program being “revolutionary” suffers from “apocalyptic predestinationism” (in Trotsky’s words, “the death agony of capitalism”).
One particular “transitional demand” that has emerged with the development of information-communication technology is the demand for “socioeconomic democracy” as advocated by Robley George in Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System. In its narrowest form, there is some form of both “universal guaranteed personal income” and “maximum allowable personal wealth” that is democratically established and adjusted by society as a whole. This goes beyond the minimum demand in the Communist Manifesto for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”
Back to the article:
It would be well worth asking, then, how (or if!) directional demands are any different. What is it about them that offers more potential than these previous strategies? Indeed, are directional demands anything more than old ideas in new packaging? Seeing as, at first glance, there would appear to be a number of similarities (and indeed, there probably are) between transitional and directional demands, it is worth proposing a number of theses as to where they differ.
I. The realisation of directional demands (either individually, or when combined) would necessitate a break with capitalist social relations. Whereas transitional demands (nationalisation, employment for all, decent living conditions), like the minimum programme of classical social democracy, may be realisable within bourgeois society, the demand, for example, for a basic income looks for a way out. As such, the demand needs to be for its global implementation, for it to be unconditional (e.g. not dependent upon legal status), and to be sufficient to ensure that income becomes permanently de-linked from productivity.
II. Directional demands do not privilege any area of the multitude over another. Whereas Trotsky’s transitional demands (along with much of the rest of ‘orthodox’ Marxism) have placed primacy upon the role of the industrial proletariat as political vanguard, under conditions of post-Fordism where production has spilled out of the factory and into society at large, the project for the self-constitution of an anti-capitalist social subject must do the same. Efforts towards class recomposition today must base themselves on the constitution of the common amongst the irreducible multiplicity of productive singularities through a constant process of becoming.
III. Directional demands can only be determined and decided upon by the movements themselves. Whilst transitional demands were both articulated by, and had as their goal the strengthening of, the Party, directional demands are those that emerge from, and are taken up by, the movement of antagonistic subjectivities. In this sense, there is no limit upon the number of demands which can be articulated, nor upon those who can articulate them, nor the form that this articulation can take.
IV. Directional demands constitute what Deleuze might call ‘a line of flight’. Transitional demands aim towards the sweeping away of ‘bourgeois rule’, with a clear – and closed – idea of what should come next; namely, ‘the conquest of power by the proletariat’ (Trotsky). Directional demands, in contrast, seek to open up unlimited and undetermined possibilities for another world. The teleology of Hegelian and Leninist Marxisms is rejected. There is neither a predetermined destination, nor any necessary stages through which we have to pass. Directional demands seek to bring about a deterritorialisation, an opening up onto a ‘plane of immanence’. As the name implies, they suggest a direction; nothing more, nothing less.
Directional demands, then, aim to provide a point around which a potential movement could consolidate. Their realisation would necessitate not only a break with the present state of things, but open up the potential for (rather than have already closed down) possible future worlds. The articulation of such demands is the monopoly of no single social actor, but rather constitutes an expression of the material struggles of the multitude of productive singularities within a process of recomposition. And finally, it is not only key in which direction such demands point, but also where they come from. As with the condition for participation in the Zapatista’s Otra Campaņa, this can only be from below and – like the heart – to the left.
http://www.newleftreview.org/A2368
If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its demands. The three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance, calls for a universally guaranteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement of people across borders, and free access to new technology—which in practice would mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism).