When do we discuss power? Long live the Oakland Commune?
Posted by Mike E on November 18, 2011
The communards' barricade in Oakland -- denounced on pro-police website
In their new poster for Saturday, the Occupy Oakland graphics crew (and who else? Oakland’s General Assembly?) raised the beautiful and visionary slogan
“Long live the Oakland Commune!”
What does that mean to them? And to us?
Reactionary columnists have attacked the Occupations for “playing at the Paris Commune, with barricades and visions of power.” How do we answer that? How do we build on it?
There has also been agitation discussion of “All power to General Assemblies” — raising the idea that society should be occupied generally, and that a new order could start with the formation of General Assemblies everywhere.
The following essay was submitted by Abbas to Kasama — and (obviously) raises precisely this.
By posting this essay here, Kasama is not endorsing this, nor even raising the slogan… but pointing to the various early glimmers of counter-power being felt and discussed.
This confronts revolutionaries everywhere with practical and theoretical question:
- Are we speaking to (or even seeing!) the ways our new generation is thinking about new power?
- What is the role for visionary manifestos of dreams? How do they relate to immediate plans?
- What would it mean to inject something into the air, before it can be realized on the ground?
- When and how do we raise the destruction of old power and the creation of new power?
- How do we envision and present our end goals and the transition to new society? Is it just in whispered discussions of one’s and two’s, or does it deserve space in slogans, posters and banners?
- How to we speak to the glimmers of new power in this moment? How we speak to those bold ones who are asking: Why don’t the 99% just occupy everything? What do we say to those aging heads who just think such things are merely naive, or divisive, or impossible?
- How do we speak to the forms, transitions, prerequisites and demands of discussing power?
- How and when does the visionary clash with the practical? When does it invent a new practical?
- How and when does the visionary clash with necessary alliances? And when does it transform those alliances?
* * * * * * * *
ALL POWER TO GENERAL ASSEMBLIES!
by Abbas Goya, November 5, 2011
In order to find out what the occupation movement is seeking we need to objectively pay attention to its background, its characteristics, its form of protest, its content, and finally the way it runs its occupied squares. This is a brief outline of the above, which comes to a logical conclusion as to what the 99% want and a resolution to the issue of leadership.
Characteristics of the Occupy Movement
The very first characteristic of this movement is its negation. It says no to the capitalist system, as illustrated by its various slogans, such as “End Capitalism”, “Death to Capitalism”, “This society doesn’t work, let’s build a different society”, “Abolish capitalism”, “Another world is possible”, “A better world is possible”, …
The form and the content of occupation movement
The second characteristic is the occupation form. By mere occupation, the Occupy Movement made a political statement. The occupation has both a form and an anti-establishment, anti-capitalism content in it. Once workers, for example, occupy the workplace, they claim power. Power is nothing but the ability to control. The workers claim power to control production. Occupy Wall Street was inspired by the Al-Tahrir (Liberation) Square occupation in Cairo by which people claimed the political power in Egypt. The occupation of Rothschild in Tel Aviv, and the occupation of Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid were also inspired by the occupation at Liberation Square in Cairo. Occupation is immediately tied to freedom. It is tied to the restoration of power to the people, it’s tied to direct control of society by the people. The Occupy Movement revealed its content via its occupation form; the abolishment of capitalist dictatorship and the installation of a free and equal society that is run by direct participation and decision- making by the people.
General Assembly vs Democracy*
Anyone who walks by an Occupy community can participate in its decision making body. The decision making process of general assembly(GA) might be long and dragging but we have to look at the bigger picture: The current GA decision making body is the most free, participating form of governing in the world. The GA is a parallel, direct-decision-making system as opposed to the ballot-box-election-parliament-democracy system.
We need to remember that occupiers are the people sitting in tents with absolute minimum resources, everything is done on a volunteer basis. Even the way that the kitchen is organized is iconic to controlling the means of production. The decision- making process being utilized can be considered a snapshot of the world we want to create.
The occupied territories are under constant pressure from the police, mayors, etc. The occupiers are doing the best they can to make the decision making as direct, and participatory as possible. If society as a whole were run by us, the decision making would be far more effective. In a socialist society we do not need to spend 5 hours a day to make decisions on the maintenance of a camp. If we had access to all resources of a society, the decision making would be as easy as the press of a button on our phone-pad, be it about camping or travelling to Mars.
Background to Occupy protests
The cause of current protests are the economic and capital crises. In October of 2008, the first $700bn business bailout was passed by Congress while at that very moment there were 9.5 million unemployed in the US. These figures increased to $1.5 trillion in the capital bailout and 15 million unemployed by September 2009.
During this period we had Chicago workers of Republic Windows and Doors occupying a plant (first of its kind in the US since the great depression) in protest to layoffs, Oakland riot ignited as a result of the murder of Oscar Grant, food-bank line-ups (40 million on food stamps as of May 2010), cases such as Heather Newnam, 28, who committed suicide because she was faced with eviction. In February of this year we saw the Wisconsin protests against the cutbacks. The estimated 50 million who have no medical insurance, the unbearable student loans which are a barrier for continued education and/or an unbearable financial burden after finishing an education. These are just a few examples of the kinds of events and situations that are indicative of the current state of affairs for the 99% .
What the US 99% Want
ALL POWER TO GENERAL ASSEMBLIES!
As the current political system belongs to the 1%, it has failed to provide the basic needs of our society such as housing, health care, and education. As a result, our standard of living has deteriorated substantially; the environment is being destroyed; continuous militarism, and the creation of a police state.
We, the 99%, therefore, demand the immediate transfer of power to us. We ask all people to start their general assemblies at their work places and their neighbourhoods in order to take over the power from the 1%. To address the needs of society, our general assemblies will decide and delegate people based on recommendations of various working groups.
Immediate transfer of power to General Assemblies from the 1%
Leadership
Occupy Movement has no political representation. It negates the system, the way it runs its occupied squares gives us a glimpse to the future freedom and the self governing system. However, none of the occupied assemblies demands the removal of political power. None of them seeks the takeover of power.
Only a political party with an anti-capitalist, socialist vision can link the Occupy movement to its destination by demanding “ALL POWER TO GENERAL ASSEMBLIES” and therefore emerge as the political leader of this movement. A political party is not a substitution to general assembly, nor a general assembly is a political party’s organ. They are different organs of the same movement. They are complementary to each other.
The mainstream political party’s approach in their attempt to manipulate the movement for the rich; the traditional left organizations in their populism (ie all ideas are welcomed and respected!! including the ideas of the rich) as well as anarchist leaderless approach to the point of suggestion on “banning” political parties (while at the same time they respect all ideas including that of the rich) are doomed to defeat the Occupy movement.
_____________________________________________________________________
(*) The following is an interesting observation by the Economist
“OWS is not simply a group of like-minded people gathered together to make a point with a show of collective force, though it is that. The difference is that it has developed into an ongoing micro-society with a micro-government that directly exemplifies a principled alternative to the prevailing American order.
The demand is a society more like the little one OWS protestors have mocked up in the park. The mode of governance is the message.
Abbas Goya II said
I’d like to elaborate on a point by responding to a couple of above questions:
“Why don’t the 99% just occupy everything?”
That’s a political party or at least a radical socialist tendency’s job. The Argentinian’s occupiers in 2001-3 did exactly that, it “just occupied everything”, well, almost. It created a unique phenomenon called “factories without employers”. It however failed to make the transition of power because it didn’t have that vision at all.
“How do they relate to immediate plans?”
A) In the aftermath of eviction from the Liberty Square in NY, this is a vital question for the movement. The movement was able to create the “micro governing system”, long enough to be observed by even the bourgeoisie. The next step after November 17 is this: Reach out to people in your neighborhood and workplaces, create the parallel power to that of establishment, everywhere.
B) General Assembly is just a variation of Council. Councils are GAs, only more structured. But the bottom line is, councils or GAs are direct decision making tools of the masses. I, as a worker communist, am seeking to create a state where all people are engaged. A socialist state is NOT a state where the power is on the hands of my worker-communist party. This is underlying reason for Lenin’s “All power to councils (soviets)” that now resembles to “all power to general assemblies”. If Soviet Union (which supposedly meant “union of councils”) failed to maintain the power in the hands of councils, it doesn’t mean that Lenin was wrong or he sought otherwise. Anyhow, I don’t mean to get into a historical debate. The point is, “ALL POWER TO GENERAL ASSEMBLIES” is the communists’ strategical structure of power in the aftermath of overthrowing the capitalist state. It is not a “tactical” one.
Abbas Goya II said
For clarification, I meant: “That’s a (radical, communist) political party or at least a radical socialist tendency’s job to ENCOURAGE the occupation of everything”.
carldavidson said
All power to the GAs? A bit premature. Now if they were all factory and neighborhood based, with a good cross section of the people, you might have a good point. But we’re not at the point of insurrection yet, and it doesn’t help to pretent that we are
Abbas Goya II said
Obviously I didn’t write the heading of this thread: “When do we discuss power? Long live the Oakland Commune?” The heading and some other questions raised, sometimes innocent, and sometimes leading questions, are worthwhile to respond to, one or two at a time.
>> “When do we discuss power?”
It is interesting that a communist suggests an “appropriate time” for discussing the power!!
“When do we discuss power?” ANSWER: As soon as you enter the politics arena.
One of the major problems with the traditional left is that it has created a “safe-heaven” of theories on “How NOT to touch the power issue”. It talks about power as much as s/he stays in opposition to it. In the best active involvement, the said communist acts as a “savior”, a “supporter”, “in solidarity” of worker strikes or for various right movements. However, as soon as you touch the issue of power, it appears to him/her as adam’s apple, the forbidden fruit.
It has forgotten that the politics is ONLY about POWER. Therefore, one can only project itself as a reliable alternative to the current political power when it talks and acts as a “position” (if we consider “position” as an antonym to “opposition”).
How can we project that? By being an agent of change in this very capitalist society you live in. Even if there were no Occupy movement, and no GAs, you need to project the power of people by addressing their issues such as Women/Children/Racism/Refugees/Executions/Stoning/Religion in Power/… WITHOUT compromising your radical, socialist ID.
Now that we Do have an Occupy movement and GAs, we can raise all the above issues from within this micro power structure of GAs and EXPAND it. On top of that, Occupy squares are capable of projection of a socialist society. A campaign for women’s rights, for example, can not at the same time project a society without wage-slavery, a volunteer system as a whole. An Occupy square CAN.
“Long live the Oakland Commune” on the other hand projects that power. The confidence, backed by the “micro society” of this community is way more effective than the traditional left “theories” and “supportive” acts. “Long live the Oakland Commune” says in a nut-shell what the ultimate goal is about.
SKS said
When a GA can effectively manage drum circles without making asses out of themselves, I will adopt the slogan.
Lets not be utopic here: GAs are not councils and not even proto-councils and to argue they are is to look at a leaf and call it a tree.
We need to put the question of power at the fore, but these are not achieved by raising clueless slogans that sound good but are confusing correlation (ie structures of power) with analogy (ie exertion of power)
The experience in Oakland, for example, has been the GA has been less effective than consensus agreement of pre-existing power structures, like organizations and affinity groups: electronic mailing lists and phone conferences are much more effective than the GA and the spokescouncil.
In NYC, the GA is worse: it mishandled everything from drum circles to sexual assults, to the response to eviction. You just have to contrast how different the organized defense when the “deadline” loomed a few weeks back to the inability to defend in the latest eviction. And the problem is structural: the GA is not a council – it has no social penetration, sectorial representation etc. It is the power structure of the occupation, no different than any of the plethora of sects in the left, or of a membership run NGO. Just like saying “All power to Food not Bombs” would be ridiculous, so is the slogan “All power to the GA”. Normal working people would be fearful of a bunch of dreadlocked teenagers running society, and rightly so…
We are years, if not decades away from politicization in society to this level. Lets not get ahead of ourselves…
Contrarian said
Gee, Carl, I guess back in the 60′s when I was in crowds of tens of thousands of people chanting All Power to the People! me and my many comrades were just misguided for raising that visionary slogan. The masses were just not ready. We obviously should have been shouting stuff like register to vote! Critically support Hubert Humphrey! Please reduce the murder of the Vietnamese people and the assassinations of Black Panther Party members a tiny bit oh all powerful rulers! We humbly beseech you!
I suggest people re-read Brecht’s powerful essay The Other Germany. People must grasp power and see an alternative way forward with their minds before they can ever attempt to grasp it with their hands.
And no, this is not the time to launch an insurrection. No serious person is raising that, so stop setting up straw men to knock down. What I love about slogans like long live the Oakland commune, or all power to the general assemblies is not based on some pretense that they are realizable now, but that they raise, nin a popular and understandable way, the issue of power, and indicate that what the Occupy movement is really about is not narrow limited economic demands (although fighting for those too, stopping foreclosures, canceling student loan debt, free health care for all, increasing Social Security benefits rather than cutting them, etc.) or even a laundry list of very good political demands (although fighting for those too, like immediate ends to the imperialist wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Puerto Rico, solidarity with revolutionaries in numerous countries and anti-austerity movements in Europe, an end to racist police repression in the U.S., open borders and full rights for undocumented brothers and sisters, liberation for our LGBT brothers and sisters, etc.), but about envisioning a whole different way of life here in the U.S. and worldwide, a world without Wall Street, a communist world where people work together cooperatively to help each other and “none will push aside another, none will let another fall.”
To raise THAT concept and banner, to at least propose that kind of future for my children and grandchildren, I would gladly sacrifice every material thing in my possession, every waking moment of the rest of my life, and take on any punishment or threat the rulers can dish out.
Without that vision and thrust, Occupy Wall Street (and everywhere) could all too easily get sucked into just reelecting Obama and fending off the Republican effort to control both houses of Congress. I’ve seen that happen repeatedly since 1964 (Johnson-Goldwater). In the late 60s andc early 70′s revolution was on the minds of millions. The birth of the Occupy movement has the potential to again raise that bright red banner. The opportunity must not be thrown away. To do so would be criminal in a new and deeper meaning than the term criminal has ever meant before, given what is currently at stake in terms of the future of 7 billion people and the fate of the planet.
t1201971 said
I think the thing about the Occupy movement that has been the most eye-opening to me is the speed with which it has brought people who were not previously active into political activity. There seems to be a perfect mixture of different crises that are happening (two wars, depression-level unemployment, the foreclosure crisis, mass deportations) along with the obvious fact that the Obama administration has absolutely no answers– all this gives people the sinking feeling that traditional bourgeois political structures just couldn’t give two shits whether of not they live or die, so the masses of people are really ready for something new that addresses their concerns for once.
I’m really amazed at how fast people’s viewpoints are changing. People who you never thought of as being progressive are saying very radical-sounding things. I had an interesting exchange today on my facebook page with a couple people I recently got back in touch with. 20 years ago, I used to be an anti-fascist skinhead. I used to hang out with these two other skins named “Joey” and “Danny” (not their real names). They used to have a little crew that used to fight with the Nazi skins (or whoever else they felt needed a beatdown at that particular moment). Back when I knew them, they used to be real thugs, some really scary motherfuckers, everybody was terrified of them. They weren’t interested in anything else other than getting drunk and beating people up (“boot parties”). “Joey”, the leader of that skinhead crew, is Filipino, “Danny” is white. I posted a video this morning of a middle-aged woman at Occupy Wall Street getting punched in the face by some ignorant pig. This was the response:
Pig punches a middle-aged woman in the face, Zucotti Park, NYC. Any of you pro-cop assholes got anything smart to say about this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxjLxoqVqGo&feature=player_embedded
Eric- From the Hypocrite-In-Chief: “I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” -Barack Obama, January 28, 2011
9 hours ago · Like · 1
Joey- ”change is coming to america”-Obama…change did come alright…ppl lost homes, the rich pay less tax,lost jobs and ppl went from middle class to working poor…a change u could believe in.
8 hours ago · Unlike · 1
Shannon- This all scares the shit out of me.
8 hours ago · Like
Joey- I shouldn’t put all the blame on obama..this all started w.bush..dems and gop..same side of a two diffrnt coin..we need a real liberal democratic socialist party to balance out the two ”right wing” party that’s runing the government right now
7 hours ago · Unlike · 1
Eric- I agree, workers need their own party. Hopefully, people’s experiences in the Occupy movement will lead to more of them coming to that conclusion.
7 hours ago · Like
Angie- Did you read the article I posted yesterday about cops killing a guy with schizophrenia? (Unfortunate) fact of life that this shit’s been going on for people with mental illness/people of color forever…
6 hours ago · Like
Joey- that’s your taxes at work, paranoid cops thnking everyones out to get them…shoot first,questions never..and I don’t understand why the majority of white working class vote against their self interest and vote for the republicants and join the tea baggers movement. maybe theres n underlying racial line that they won’t or will never cross..I just don’t get it.
6 hours ago · Like
Eric- Google up Tim Wise, he explains that phenomena pretty well.
5 hours ago · Like
Eric- Angie- missed that, but when I was living in Brooklyn, the NYPD killed this mentally ill man who was naked up on a fire escape, allegedly cos he had a knife.
5 hours ago · Like
Joey- eric, when u hung out w. us you never hesitated to back us up regardless of the way we treated u..but I never wouldve thought u and I would see eye to eye politically until 911 happened…I just can’t believe it happened the way it did and ppl believe whtever the gov.tells them..in other words I took the red pill to get in the matrix..or was it the blue pill.
4 hours ago · Unlike · 1
Jon- Pfffft, the “Land of the Free.”
4 hours ago · Like
Joey- I apologize for the way we were towards you
4 hours ago · Like
Eric- Thanks man. It’s no big deal, that was like 20 years ago. You work for Teamsters 705 now, right? Do you know Richard Berg?
4 hours ago · Like
Joey- 710
4 hours ago · Like
Eric- Oh OK. He’s an organizer for 705 I think. Thought you might have known him.
4 hours ago · Like
Joey- rich..is he w.ups
4 hours ago · Like
Eric- Possibly. We did some political organizing together a while ago.
Danny- In my opinion I think democrats and republicans are the same! they are both for big business, don’t give a fuck about the middle class and make decisions not based on ethics but who’s paying them off! and yes I agree, obama is a joke, too! lets see…the Gulf oil spill…he went down there for a couple of hours, and didn’t even see what it was doing to the wetlands! To me, (being from New Orleans) I thought the response was equal to that of hurricane Katrina. I am so sick and tired of these Republicans and Democrats not getting anything done while everything is getting more expensive, american companies are selling out their workers to get products made cheaper overseas(also not paying the overseas workers much), letting the hardcore polluters-Big oil, Chemical companies etc.. do whatever the fuck they want and if they fuck up- all they have to do is pay a couple of million(which is pocket change) while the environment gets fucked up…. Oh yeah, all the awesome wars to claim oil, when we need to use other forms of clean energy. And, if you stand up to the system, Big Brother comes after you! meanwhile all of the sheep in america are glued to television watching all these fucked up reality shows! I’m glad you all can see through all this bullshit! Cheers Joey and eric!
4 hours ago · Unlike · 1
Eric- Aaron I agree!
4 hours ago · Like
German- This is why I voted for McCain!!
4 hours ago · Like
Eric- I say we vote from the rooftops.
4 hours ago · Like
German- At least the republicans don’t give a fuck and make terrible choices without hiding it.. I think this will open more of the sheeps eyes in this country.
4 hours ago · Like
Joey- mccain…r u kiddin…talk about the end of the world uf he became orez
2 hours ago · Like
Joey- the only thing the rich are afraid of is our voting power but they are so good at dangling the carrot un front of u that one day if you work hard enough u to will belong in their club..which they know will never happen..all we are nothing but modern day serfs plowing the kings land
2 hours ago · Like
Danny- Right on Joey!! They don’t give a fuck about us! i fucking hate rich fucking white people from the suburbs and their elitist attitudes and materialistic ways
2 hours ago · Like
Danny- fuck you guys i am so angry right now!
about an hour ago · Unlike · 1
Danny- I mean Fuck! you guys i am so angry lol
about an hour ago · Like
Joey- …and did anyone notice how the media protraited the blacks when they looted the local groccery store..they called it stealing but when the whites did the exact same thing…they called it surviving. hhmmm…damn liberal media!!!
about an hour ago · Like
Joey- but that’s who we really are..we are nothing but peasents..overly taxed to keep us in debt, underpaid and under educated to keep us from finding the truth on how the government is controled by them not you..read orson wells 1984..its a fiction but so damn close to what’s happening now
about an hour ago · Like
Eric- Well, hopefully the Occupy movement will be a starting point to bringing forward an alternative to voting for the Democratic Tweedle Dee or the Republican Tweedle Dumber. There’s been lots of demonstrations in the Loop lately calling for things like a moratorium on foreclosures and demanding jobs. I think that’s a good place to start, and they’ve been drawing good crowds. The unions have been coming out too, I just wish they’d break with the Democrats, cos they’re leading us nowhere. If I know about anything coming up, I’ll let you guys know.
43 minutes ago · Like
Joey- exactly..dems take the union and minority votes for granted…perfect example..rahm emmenuel…that was the biggest mistake by voting in office..now we have to put up w.this union busting corporate controlled jagoff for a couple years.
19 minutes ago · Like
Eric- That fucker used to have a seat at CBOT, so guess who his best friends are? It’s no surprise he attacked Occupy Chicago last week. The only thing he’s had to offer so far has been school privatizations and attacks on the teacher’s union. Just wait til the NATO/G8 conference in the spring, shit’s gonna jump off then… The whole city’s gonna look like an armed encampment.
15 minutes ago · Like
Joey- hahaaha..I used to work at the cbot in the 10 yr treasury pit for a couple yrs as a traders.brokers assistant.in the mid 90s
2 minutes ago · Like
Joey- so did skinhead mikey..but he work at the cme
about a minute ago · Like
I am absolutely amazed by how much these guys have changed. It’s like night and day. I’ve been thinking about this conversation all day today.
Marq Dyeth said
Ok. I get that the General Assemblies are not councils. But what is a council? Or, more like it, what would a council look like in the U.S. in 2011?
SKS said
@T1201971 Lol I know who “Joey” is, lol… and I am surprised he now lefting it up, but he was never that scary at leats not to me, and am not at all a bad motherfucker… Also notice how he describes 911 as the Red Pill Moment – I do not think he is an exception in this sense. People kept quiet, but lets not forget marched against the Iraq war BEFORE it happened.
@Marq Dyeth
A council is a mass formation that assumes the role and functions of a State and Government is parallel to the previous State and Government – usually in revolutionary situations and usually at a local level – even at the point of production itself.
In history, it has usually been the way that Communes have organized their decision making, usually via a representative/delegated “Council of Councils”.
Rather than being purely political/ideological bodies, they where practical bodies, concerned with issues like law and order, military defense, service provision (transport, power, water), distribution of food, organization of health care etc.
In history, councils usually have emerged from the transfer of the political leadership of a bureaucracy to the communal: a council of trams would essentially have everyone remain in the same posts, except management (that is, the process of organizing schedules, etc) was horizontalized, and coordinated with interlocking interests.
One of the great examples of councilist government and proto-State is the Paris Commune of 1871. Another is the pre-Civil War USSR (soviet means council – Hence all power to the soviets is all power to the councils) – although the name remained the State transformed first into a parliament and then into a rubber stamp rather than a council, in particular when the councils became geographical rather than production based.
Left-communists and council communist make a fetish of this form. Anarchists are less fetishistic, but share this DNA.
In the present conditions of the USA, a country with a huge population that spans a continent, and whose State employs a bureaucracy of tens of millions at all levels of society, I think councilism is impossible as a way to win against the State, but certainly can still be a viable way under insurrectionary conditions to manage essential services: heart attacks and hunger do not go away just because the revolution started.
In the USA there is no escaping a Civil war as part of a revolution, which means in a concrete sense the capture of whatever we can of the existing State and the engagement of war communism – perhaps not the extreme of the USSR, but at least similar politically to Abraham Lincoln’s de facto military dictatorship. Councils would be crushed almost immediately by the white forces.
joshua said
I do believe SKS and Carl are way too dismissive of something as simple as a slogan. This is only two months old, let’s not get too taken away with every minutiae that we disagree with and coldly with snide remarks like SKS’s. Now I’m not under the impression that the ruling class has been shaken that they are teetering and we’re on the verge of overthrowing them but we’re only going to get morey sloganeering in an attempt to solidify or give this movement more clarity, density and propensity to gather steam.
Now there’s NOTHING about a GA that excludes those working groups from EVER joining in or making suggestions. In fact, I do believe that that is what is required right now; we do need better co-ordination and co-operation with organised labour and I have a feeling that their strength to disrupt “the chains of capitalism” is what will make power take notice of this Occupy movement.
This is an ideal situation for us revolutionaries to get talking and spreading the word BUT let’s not get frustrated if things seem slow or counter-productive. This is 2011 and this is one of the most diverse and geographically spacious nation with many problematic equations to factor in. We will make decisions and theorise and learn from mistakes.
Abbas Goya II said
@ Marq Dyeth:
A council is simply a structured General Assembly. When I talk about councils I’m not just referring to the Soviet and Paris Commune. Workers’ and students’ councils emerged after the overthrown of Shah regime in 1979. I was a member of a student council at my school. I’m sure if we dig into it we can find similar contemporary examples.
When I refer to Councils as the structured General Assemblies, I’m referring to their functions: We, the communists, seek direct decision making body of ALL, I repeat *** ALL *** members of society. That’s what makes councils and general assemblies identical.
Councils is more structured as in representation of people’s assembly for a given time for a given task(s). However, neither this representation can do anything BUT what the assembly has dictated NOR the council members are immune from replacement at ANYTIME if they divert from their duties. General assembly will be called with an absolute minimum requirement for the call, and the possible members in questions will be replaced, again, that is the direct action and decision making of ALL members.The current general assemblies in the US would inevitably be structured here and there as Councils wherever the needs be.
Abbas Goya II said
@SKS
You’re referring to such a limited history, to DNA, to labeling “left-communists” and “anarchists”, “revolutionary state”, anything but a simple logical argument.
Let’s just respond to this “revolutionary state”. Was the Argentine’s social state in 2001-3 revolutionary or not? What is the revolutionary state, putting it in a nutshell by Lenin? Formulating from the top of my head: A state where the rulers can’t rule and the ruled don’t want to be ruled.
This state applies to Argentina. So, were you for or against the GAs that took over factories, ran the neighborhood needs, from bakery to nursing home for children?
The problem with SKS is a FALSE ideological approach. S/he THINKS that GA is the domain of anarchists and the councils are stamped as communists!! How about the FASCIST “Islamic worker councils” of the IRI?
How about the “lousy and ineffective” Oakland GA in their call for a General Strike. A call that the WHOLE working class movement couldn’t make in the past 60 odd years in the US.
No SKS, the GA and Councils are not domains of two different ideologies. The two are the same and they both are the structure form of a socialist power.
What SKS seeks is political party dictatorship – as opposed to the proletariat dictatorship-, a post-revolutionary USSR system. Otherwise, go ahead try to decode this statement of SKS:
“A council is a mass formation that assumes the role and functions of a State and Government is parallel to the previous State and Government.” ???
Pay attention: Government is different from State in this view. STATE, supposedly run by councils, is deciding about the production line -I suppose- (like in Argentina) and the “innocent” Government is “”JUST”" holding the political power. No dear, in a socialist society the two are the same, State is the Government and the Government is State, the two are run by the GAs and Councils.
SKS said
@Abbas Goya II and Joshua
You both need basic reading comprehension – in particular not putting words into people’s mouth.
@Joshua
I am not making snide remarks. I have felt more welcomed at academic conference on cryptography that I have at some of the working groups at OWS. In fact, the division between uptown and downtown made fun of by Jon Stewart is sadly probably the defining fact-on-the-ground of the occupation, and this affects the working groups, and in particular, the Atriumburo spokescouncil. I wish things were different, but they are not: and no amount of wishful thinking changes the facts on the ground.
Furthermore, neither here nor in other similar threads, have I advocated a liquidationist path, as Carl does. I am a big advocate of socialist caucuses and working groups. OWS is the greatest thing to happen to lef tin the USA since sliced bread. It has all kinds of possibility. ETC.
But to advocate power for the GAs? That is trite and un-serious. And revolution is serious business. Slogans should reflect possibility and line of march, not wishful thinking that sows confusion rather than clarify reality.
@Abbas Goya II
1) Lenin’s definition of the State (Which is actually Engel’s!) is indeed my definition – whatever disagreements I might have with what Lenin and Leninists have done with this insight. Put simply, it is a body that is above but part of society that exists to ensure the rule of one class over the others by means of special bodies of armed men. The State is not the same of government, and government can exists outside of the State, although the State is administered via government.
2) I am absolutely in favor of what happened in Argentina – it was a revolutionary government, but failed to become, for many complex reasons, a revolutionary State, or more correctly, failed to destroy the bourgeois State. As such, the revolutionary government was unable to hold back the State as it re-established its class rule.
3) To call what happened in Oakland a General Strike its hilariously unscientific: it essentially turns a General Strike into whatever we call a General Strike. For me and my political training, a Strike is what stops production. A General Strike is what stops production generally. That stopage was not general in Oakland: only the port and some businesses (some even as a “lock out”, that is, they closed not because of workers forcing them, but out of choice or prevention). However, the awesomeness that happened in Oakland happened because it has one of the most mature left spaces in the USA, where groups that often have sharp differences are able to put them aside to move forwards, and in which the structures that existed before OWS have been used to great effect. In fact, the GA in Oakland largely played a reactionary, backward role, until the eviction mobilized people and then the usual GA was bypassed by a mass of radicals who had previously kept on struggling as they had before. The GA in Oakland has only been useful in a symbolic sense: hence there is truth is saying a commune exists, but this commune existed before the GA or OWS.
4) I seek no political party dictatorship, and it is slanderous in context for you to claim this here as I have said nothing to the effect. Please do not create strawmen. I actually, quite clearly, say that Councils ruled in the USSR until they were replaced by something similar to parliaments, and that this was a bad thing. However, I do believe in proletarian rule, which under conditions of a civil war will have to be a dictatorship – and there cannot be a successful revolution in the USA without a civil war: there is something like a third of the population that are unrepentant and reactionary and who cannot been won over or made quiet.
5) See my point #1: the confusion of State and Government lies at the heart of the problem with the slogan: class dictatorship (ie State power) cannot be weilded by the GA even in embryonic form, hence the slogan is at best an illusion, at worse a dangerous confusion.
Abbas Goya II said
@SKS:
Points 5 & 1:
>> “The State is not the same of government, and government can exists outside of the State, although the State is administered via government.”
Nonsense. An invention of Mr/Mrs SKS.
Point 3:
>>”To call what happened in Oakland a General Strike its hilariously unscientific”.
Go ahead convince the US working class who are discussing that call as a wake up to working class a “hilariously unscientific”! What an arrogant!
Point 2:
>>”I am absolutely in favor of what happened in Argentin”.
Spell it out, Are you for the GENERAL ASSEMBLIES in Argentine that created “what happened in Argentine”? YES or NO Please?
Point 4
>>”I seek no political party dictatorship”
but you seek a “government [that] can exists outside of the State”. Call it a sectarian circle, a political party or a one man dictatorship, I care less. This is any form of dictatorship BUT the proletariat dictatorship!
Note SKS. I won’t respond to you anymore if you continue throwing irrational, dogmatic, sectarian, arrogant scripts.
Red Fly said
I see the GA’s mostly as a beginner’s course in learning about and exercising political power. They help the people become more confident in themselves and in their ability to make decisions without the tutelage of the ruling class. I don’t think they should be fetishized as the answer to the question of organized political power.
Having said that, I agree with SKS that the shift in power away from the councils and towards a totalizing centralism was a bad thing for revolutionary Russia. Though obviously the primary cause of that shift, the all-out imperialist assault against the new revolutionary state, means that simply blaming the “authoritarian Bolsheviks”, as many reactionaries and some anarchists are wont do (though in the latter case the blame is at least understandable given the crimes committed against many anarchists after the revolution), is grossly inadequate to the historical context. Nonetheless, after the Civil War and its triumphant victory over the counterrevolution, I do believe there should have been a move back towards a balance between Party power and the grassroots workers’ power of the councils. And in fact I think that kind of dual structure, formalized and codified into the constitution of the new revolutionary state, should be the model for any future revolutionary society. Now precisely how this will be worked out I’m not sure: there is a danger of paralysis if its not correctly structured. But I do believe that there needs to be, after a period of crisis and “war communism” has passed, an outside check on the Party’s power. Now some may think of that as going soft or revisionism or whatever. I don’t care. History has shown us, over and over and over, that grave abuses are, if not inevitable, at least highly likely if there is no way for the people to effectively put a check on their representatives. Parliamentary politics, i.e bourgeois democracy, is supposed to one such way. But we’ve seen in practice just how easily parliaments are bent to the will of the interests of the few. There needs to be a direct check by the masses on the political representatives of a revolutionary state.
That doesn’t mean we give up class dictatorship. Reactionaries will not be permitted to wreck things. What it means is a deepening of the class dictatorship through the real, direct exercise of power.
SKS said
@Abbas
1) You call it nonsense, thne you are calling the entirety of Marxism non-sense.
For example, these quotes from F. Engels “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”:
As we can see, Engels clearly speaks of all the features I used to describe the State – and to describe how government and State are not the same thing. Lenin quoted extensively from these definition in “State and Revolution” and these became Leninist orthodoxy, to which as I explained, I subscribe to wholesale.
So this not nonsense, and you either lie in saying it is nonsense or demonstrate a total lack of knowledge of Marxism. Pick one or the other.
2) Who is the phantom working class you speak of? This is a working class with incredibly low self-consciousness. As I said, what happened in Oakland was awesome, but to call it a General Strike is to do a political disservice to the working class: a general strike is a hard thing to prepare, plan, and execute, often with terrible consequences, and more often than not unsuccessful. It doesn’t mean that when conditions are ripe we shouldn’t do it, but to claim Oakland was a general strike belittles the actual preparation and necessary participation. It is not arrogance, but caution: rather to self-immolation for the tender ideas of some cultists, I want concrete victory in reality.
We should built the consciousness and infrastructure that leads to real General Strikes, but a General Strike cannot be declared overnight, and most certainly it is not a general strike just because you call it one.
3) You dare compare the middle-class, hippie infected, graduate student led GAs of most occupations in the OWS movement with the point of production and distribution GAs that ran factories and logistics and became proto-communes?
We go back to need to be scientific: what we name something is much less important than what that something is. The Cuban Revolution is called by many a Socialist Revolution, yet it is not a Socialist Revolution. The Cuban Communist Party calls itself a Communist Party yet it is not a communist party. A General Assembly of OWS in 2011 might have the same name as a Asamblea General in Argentina in 2001 but it is not the same thing – far from it. You name this precision “arrogance” yet it is not arrogance.
4) I think you completely mistook the point I was making – perhaps a language barrier – I was answering a direct question on the nature of the State, not advocating any particular form of government or State. In any case, you completely ignored my clarification of this:
You claim I do not advocate ” proletariat dictatorship” yet that is exactly what I do! You continue to make strawman claims, which means there is no seriousness or goodfaith on your part. I will be happy to be proven wrong, but it will take you actually engaging what is being said, rather than making naked claims, to do so.
5)
– I have not done such a thing. In particular:
a) I have been extremely rational – none of the claims I make are based on unscientific idealism, nor in simple beliefs, but on deep investigation of complex phenomena, as well as active participation in the class struggle. This claim of “irrationality” is simply an unwarranted personal attack – irrational in itself.
b) when I have made claims, I am very specific in explaining and showing why I am making the claim – in other words, it is not dogma.
c) I am making no claims for organizational line – I am not advocating for any particular group or formation (unlike yourself, who have advocated for the Worker-Communist pro-imperialist cult), – so how can I be sectarian? Because I raise communist criticism of a non-communist mass movement? This would be like calling sectarian a communist that opposed the Ayatollahs in Iran!
d) “Scripts” belittles my mental process and is indeed a personal attack, however, if I am drawing my lessons from the body of works that constitutes Marxism, yes I am guilty of “scripts”, and proud of it.
Abbas Goya II said
@SKS
Point 1:
It remain nonsense. Now for 2 reasons. A) You can’t make sense of it relying on your own “Marxist” logic. B) The quotes you have provided PROVES NOTHING in support of your claim. Engels talks about the necessity of a state in a class society and YOU conclude that government, the core element of a state, is different from a state. huh?
Soviet Union was a precious experiment of working class state. We should examine and re-examine it. While I’m waiting for you quotes from Lenin (now that you claim it), Leninism was about establishing the working class in power, NOT the Bolsheviks. If it did, it was WRONG.
Point 2:
“a general strike is a hard thing to prepare, plan, and execute”, We, the Worker-communist Party of Iran called for a general strike ONLY three days in advance of May 13, 2010, as a protest to the execution of 5 political prisoners. The whole province of Kurdistan (from factories to schools, and to stores) was shut down. As opposed to a strike, for lets say wage increase, in a small factory, a general strike is a breeze to call, prepare, plan and execute. Once you call a general strike, you’re calling the whole society. You feel confident to do so BECAUSE the political state of the society is ready for the confrontation.
Point 3:
“You dare compare the middle-class, hippie infected, graduate student led GAs of most occupations in the OWS movement with the point of production and distribution GAs that ran factories and logistics and became proto-communes?”
I dare to call the above statement an arrogance of an academic whose concern is anything but the working class interest. Whose words (“middle-class, hippie infected, graduate student”) resembles to that of capitalist oppressors.
Point 4:
I did not ignore but I did brush it off: “I do believe in proletarian rule, which under conditions of a civil war will have to be a dictatorship – and there cannot be a successful revolution in the USA without a civil war”. What a fantasy, guerrilla warfare mentality! If there is anything “middle-class, hippie infected, graduate student” in this world that IS the above statement.
Point 5:
“I am not advocating for any particular group or formation”!!
Is that supposed to be a pride??? “unorganized Marxist” is a contradiction in terms. You are either a Marxist and politically organized or you ain’t a Marxist. No wonder everything is “personal” to you, the rational of A PERSON is limited to him/her and his world, it’s not coming from the needs and the interests of a class; a class that has no choice but to seek the overtake of power via organizations such as a political party.
Was I discussing with an academic this long? Don’t get me wrong, you could be the best debater in the whole world BUT my agenda, as an organized, activist Marxist, is to discuss with other fellow Marxist activists. I never debate for the sake of debate or for the satisfaction of my intelligence. Neither me nor the class I belong to have that luxury. Bye SKS.
Mike E said
moderator note: Please stop the personalization and mutual insult. The tone and argumentation that SKS and Abbas have both fallen into is contrary to the rules and culture of this discussion. Stick to substance and mutual respect.]
People2thePower said
MSNBC report shows how seriously segments of the ruling class are taking OSW. The American Bankers Association confirms that they received a proposal from the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford to design a public relations/smear campaign against OSW:
http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/19/8884405-lobbying-firms-memo-spells-out-plan-to-undermine-occupy-wall-street
laurie said
Glad the memo leaked! CLG&C should be occupied. Give ‘em a run for their money. That’s taking power!
People2thePower said
Typo: Meant to write OWS not OSW. Had my glasses on backwards.
Miles Ahead said
The following copied from right off the really striking poster, for today’s (Nov. 19th) day of action in Oakland; and calling Oakland “The Oakland Commune” is obviously a lot broader than those who would immediately think of the Paris Commune. Plus, for all those who keep harping on “making demands” — here are a few they can recite:
“LONG LIVE THE OAKLAND COMMUNE
• Solidarity with the worldwide Occupy Movement
• End police attacks on our communities
• Defend Oakland schools & libraries
• Housing for all, No more foreclosures
• Against a capitalist system built on inequality & corporate power that perpetuates racism, sexism & the destruction of the environment
called for by Occupy Oakland & Bay Area Labor”
People can go to occupyoakland.org for more info. and can see the poster too.
SKS said
@Mike,
Fair enough – somewhat difficult to parse, but lets do it.
@Abbas
1) Ok, let me repeat one of the quotes:
“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.”
A society, by definition, requires governance. That is the very definition of the word. If society can exist without the State, government and State are not the same.
While the State always requires government, government doesn’t always require a State. Communes, for example, are governments (ie they organize society) but are not States (ie they are hegemonic instruments of class superiority). It is in the transition from commune to State that a revolution happens. Any Marxist worth their salt agrees.
2) Again you universalize what cannot be universalized, and confuse calling something a name with it being what is being named. Without getting into the truth or lack thereof of the statement that the General Strike in Kurdistan in May 2010 was successful, the political mobilization of Kurdish society is completely different than that of the USA. We are talking a society in which even the most reactionary nationalists participate in strikes and militant action. We are also talking about Iranian Kurdistan, were US imperialism throws millions of dollars each year in order to undermine Iran. In the USA consciousness, capacity, political will, and resources are much more limited.
Hence, social capacity being different, call for different methods.
3) I am not an academic. I haven’t taken a class in a university in about 15 years. This view I express is a generalized view of nearly everyone in the USA’s left, not to mention general society. Granted, unscientific, but it is funny as hell…
4) I am not talking guerillas at all. I am talking a demographic reality. Polling consistently places around a third of the population as consistent reactionaries. These people can neither be won over in significant numbers nor will they give up without a fight. Hence, this suggests any successful proletarian revolution will include a civil war. We must be under no illusions it wont be.
5) You accuse me of being sectarian, yet when I explain I am not advancing a particular group, you then claim being a sectarian is a good thing? Makes great sense! Yes, we need organizations – but this is not the point you make: you say that if one represents an organizational view, then one is being sectarian, if one doesn’t represent and organization, one is an academic.
Certainly, that creates a non-win situation – in other words, nothing but full agreement will satisfy you. Ironically, that is the hallmark of both sectarians and academics, not to mention sectarian academics!
joshua said
SKS, could you expand on why you feel/felt that the GA was alienating and not welcoming of you. (Perhaps this would be a subject worthy of its own posting altogether as I have read many times how the OWS and the Occupy movement has not been the most pleasant of platforms for revolutionaries and communists alike, maybe mirroring an image of the organisers as skeptical of those who want to pull this opportunity into something towards a “radical” cause rather than one that only attempts for major reforms with the present system.) This matter makes me revisit Bring The Ruckus’ objections as the presence, or lack thereof, of a clear anti-racist agenda has made it look more like a petty-bourgeois struggle of an lower-to-middle class white privilege. It makes me think twice as how can one strong revolutionary mind from Kasama can feel this as a prime chance and others here can just look at this and say that it is not something they can support.
Is there any more information on what the organisers in Oakland really mean by Oakland Commune? The homage to the Paris Commune could not be plain coincidence. The fact that an anti-capitalist slant has finally emerge can only mean better things from here on in.
Red Fly said
Part of the difficulty in coming to a scientific understanding of the distinction between state and government is that, under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the term “government” has become synonymous with the state, so that when people talk about government they’re almost always talking about the bourgeois government of this or that nation state: e.g. the government of the United States, the government of Iran, etc. But Engels and SKS are right: strictly speaking, the term government refers organized society in general, whereas the state refers to a specific, class-based form of social organization. When there are no longer any classes there will be no state, but government as such will continue to exist. Perhaps in order to avoid confusion on this matter it would be helpful to refer to “governance” instead of “government.”
While I do share some of SKS’ skepticism with respect to the class makeup and general social makeup of the Occupy movement, I think it would be better to avoid overly general characterizations like “dirty middle class hippie grad students.” I think that characterization conceals more than it reveals. Indeed, one of the most hopeful and positive aspects of this movement is that, even though the majority of the movement consists of young people, it is very much inter-generational, in a much more robust way than, say, the movement of the 60s and early 70s. I think that one of the things that ultimately led to the defeat of the earlier movement was the very sharp antagonism between generations.
I also think that this movement, I think, starts on a much more solid class foundation than the previous one. While the movement and its unofficial leadership at this point can probably be characterized as majority middle class, there is a very strong working class element involved and I think it’s trending more in that direction every day. (And obviously it’s our responsibility as communists to accelerate and deepen this trend.) Calls for simply taxing the rich are being turned towards the question of the nature of the capitalist system in general and towards questions of political power (the statements coming out of the Oakland movement being particularly hopeful examples of this.) And of course the primary reason for this is the profound global capitalist crisis we’re in the midst of. The 60s movement came out of a milieu in which capitalism was still “delivering the goods” in the advanced countries, limiting its class character to something much more “petty bourgeois” than the current movement.
Another thing that has been very encouraging with this movement has been the growing politicization of the homeless. This is something that revolutionaries have tried for a long time to help bring about and those efforts have mostly failed. Now I don’t want to make too much of this because as of right now this politicization is very much still at a nascent level, and amongst many of the homeless still manifests itself more as an opportunity for free food than political action. (It’s not that the former is necessarily a bad thing — people need to eat — but we should hope that if they come for the food, they “stay for the revolution,” so to speak.) At our small Occupation (which, after a lot of rumors and confusion and premature reports of demise, is back up) the homeless have been the main overnight Occupying force. Many of them have remarked to me how they are feeling a real sense of community for the first time in their lives.
All of this is not to paint a picture that everything is ideal and just as we would like it. As we know, this is still a movement characterized by a lot of illusions. But we also have to remember that this is (hopefully) just the very beginning! It’s only been a couple of months and yet people’s consciousness seems to be much further along than most of us would have thought possible at this point. With the deepening of the current crisis that I expect within the next 12-24 months, if we do our work well, there’s a real possibility for things to get very, very interesting.
SKS said
@Joshua
I have written elsewhere in this site and other venues on the topic. Lets summarize:
In the main, the whole for a bunch of people who allege to be against hierarchy and representation, they have managed to create a decision making structure that rather than getting the best features of representative hierarchic structure (such as more dynamic decisions making, easier consensus etc) and of direct horizontalism (wide spread respect for different views, involvement of the masses is political processes) actually goes for the worse – we get bogged down consensus and paralysis and unrecallable power hungry working group bureaucrats fighting over meager funds.
But for me the straw that broke the camel’s back was the sexual assaults and rapes and how they were handled. It showed the worse of both the idealism and cynicism that lies in the majority of the Atriumburo. Of course, this is all NYC – in other places there are different experiences.
These people seemed more worried about someone stealing donations and food than about sexual assault: a clear class and racial perspective. Without naming names, some street gangs with an analysis with experience in handling effectively these kinds of matters were turned down for fear of “criminalization” and “violence”. Now, I can see that point, but then at least fucking have an alternative.
The idealism lies in the believe that in general people are good if they are treated good, and the cynicism lies in ignoring signals to the contrary to worry about public relations and the “image” of the movement.
The fundamental reason I have felt unwelcomed by the working groups I tried to work with had to do with the whiteness of the members and what their definition of consensus is. I am part of a consensus driven organization, and we have debates, even public ones, without this being taken as an offense to consensus. However, to these people any dissent is “divisive” any discussion is “unproductive” unless it is the contents of the “drafts” the invisible leadership puts forward. Yes they have had their setbacks – but they then quickly fix it to exclude doing things like moving meetings in the last minute to indoor locations that require ID (excluding undocumented immigrants for example) often in locations of suspect loyalty (like labor unions, NGOs, and even private business).
I could go on and on, but my point is that getting caught up in these details without facing up the real challenge, which is to really confront the problems of organization and mass formations – when do we discuss power? I say we always do…
SKS said
@Red Fly
I agree that the difference between State and government is not obvious. This is why both Engels and Lenin didn’t just write entire books about this matter, but spent a significant amount of their published works defending and exposing these views – against the generalized ignorance not just of the population, but of anti-marxists of various brands, against reactionaries, and against liberals – who even when accepting some of the basis of the argument saw it as ideologically dangerous, and rightly so. Part of political combat is that of precisely naming things as they are from the perspective of our ideology: just because someone denies that evolution happens I will not start saying: “when monkeys were created”. No, monkeys *evolved*.
We need to not be afraid to raise this difference if we really value scientific socialism: the question of the State is the central question for communists and anarchists, the very definition between reformist and revolutionary politics.
That said, governance and government are not the same thing and describe two very different things in actuality – not just in Marxist terms, but in general terms. Governance is the internal process of how things are done in a governing body – this applies to corporation, clubs, etc. Government is an actual body of organizing society, either to the service of the State, or in a State-less condition. In the case of State society, government is how the State exercises power and policy, and to an extent also how policy is determined via legislatures (even dictatorships act in a tight consensus: very few are individual dictatorships, but rather a collection of self-selected interests that haggle with each other, never forgetting to exercise class rule in this competition). In a state-less sense, we have seen governments emerge as the way services and needs that have no direct economic function, or that are collective societal responsibility, are administered: public transportation, health services, public safety (ie police without class nature), dispute resolution, armed forces, etc), but also as the body in which the collectivized economic interests plan the economy and share resources.
In the context of OWS these things become important insofar as the initiators make a bold claim: governance prefigures government prefigures society. In other words, a “horizontal” and “participatory” *governance* will lead to a *government* of the same kind, which in turn “infects” society. This “build it and they will come” approach, not only is idealistic, but counter-productive as it hides and smokescreens actual reality of social relations. By making governance the problem, not even administration, and not government, and not the State, the invisible leadership sells a Brooklyn Bridge to the masses. No! Capitalism and the State is the problem – not governance, not government.
This is a task *only* communists can and must take on: the scientific clarification of social relations is what makes us different from socialists and anarchists (although in this question some anarchists also get it right). It is the hallmark of all that is good in Lenin and Mao. To push this task aside is to capitulate and liquidate.
Yes, we must be massliners, but this here website, this is not a GA, this is were people who want to hear what we have to say come to. In our turf, they are to hear the truth, not what we bite our tongues not to say.
This also brings me to your other comments on “generations” etc. I have seen some informal polling that shows an interesting pattern: participation begins at the late teens, peaks at around 21-22 (ie recent grads) then slowly goes down to around 30 years then drops precipitously, only to rise again at around 55 years and then continue up until around the late 60 years, and then drops steady. What this means is that this movement is a coalition of the very young adults, and the veterans of the 1960s and 1970s. It also means it is a coalition of the unemployed recent graduates and college students, and the retired or semi-retired.
This is – interesting and telling politically, it means that it is those sectors whose economic position allows them to participate are participating, and that there is a layer of former radicals activated by OWS. This is a good thing.
Of course, generational demographics hide a lot of things that are much more important, like race and class and gender (ie how white male and middle class OWS is at all levels). I guarantee you there is not a single person of color or woman among those who control the websites, twitter, facebook, etc.
On the homeless, I am glad your experience has been a positive one.
The experience at Zuccotti has been terrible, from denying homeless food, to openly claiming they were being paid to be there by ex-Acorn, to their exiled to the western part of the park. The invisible leadership and the Atriumburo see the homeless as nuisance, a nest of police informants, troublemakers, and a drain on resources that should go to “real” occupiers. I actually had a discussion a few weeks ago in which a member of the Atriumburo argued to me that the homeless discredited the movement, because they were homeless because they wanted to, and that the NGOs and the city were dumping them at Zuccotti to disrupt the movement. I told him the second part was true but not the first, and that what we should do is organize multiple camps with multiple homeless under the banner of occupy: while a lot of homeless people had issues we were ill equipped to handle, providing them with visibility and organization would force the city and the NGOs to actually handle the issue, and concede us a victory – turn the situation around. He said that the homeless were not our problem – that all we could do was denounce the “dumping” and make it bad for the homeless to stay, and then ended the convo “cause he had stuff to do” – this was 2am on a Tuesday, when nothing was going on. Oh, he bummed a cigarette, the moocher!
Fuck the Atriumburo. Seriously, fuck em.
Miles Ahead said
Check out occupyoakland.org for some news on yesterday’s day of action…plus what happened early this a.m.
“…Occupy Oakland Liberates Vacant Lot at 19th and Telegraph: Saturday Nov. 19. 3000 occupiers peacefully enter the property and roll up the perimeter fence, carefully preserving the art which hangs on it. Interfaith tent first to go up then over 30 tents. Celebratory mood undampened by light rain.
Morning brings police and displacement at 19th. Snow Park still intact.
General Assembly meets Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings at 6 pm at Oscar Grant Plaza…”
PLUS, “Occupy Oakland Calls for TOTAL WEST COAST PORT SHUTDOWN on 12/12…”
Ajagbe Adewole-Ogunade said
All Power to the GAs is an excellent slogan. We should be promoting it and encouraging people to think in these terms. The sooner, the better. Why delay the inevitable? Ultimately, it’s about political power. Always has been.
stiofan said
All Power to the GA’s is terrible slogan because it is an explicit call for an insurrection and rests upon the existence of a people’s military capability. Try getting consensus on that one at the next General Assembly of your choice.
Without the ability to confront the state and its special bodies of armed men (i.e. pigs), the call for “All Power to the GA’s” is idealist at best and ultra left/divorced from reality posturing at worst.
By comparison there is an excellent slogan from the 60′s, “All Power to the People” which we can and should raise as loudly and militantly as possible.
The existence of these embryonic communes and the refusal to be sucked into politics on the regime’s terms is raising the question of power. By building a political identity with an alternate allegiance a new generation is facing the prospect of embarking on the revolutionary road. Don’t let the rush of events confuse you as to where we are on that path.
All Power to the People
Antonio Sosa said
“All Power to the GA’s is terrible slogan because it is an explicit call for an insurrection and rests upon the existence of a people’s military capability. Try getting consensus on that one at the next General Assembly of your choice. ”
I don’t really see this sticking here. Of course calling for revolution right now is premature and ultra-leftist but I truly do not see how this is adventurism. All Power to the GAs is not lofty, there should be real consideration given to forming society on a participatory direct democracy.
SKS said
@Antonio Sosa:
If the GAs as they exist – at least in NYC – is what you consider participatory direct democracy, then I am not for participatory direct democracy. It is really that simple.
However, the “Long Live the Oakland Commune” slogan, that is one I can live with – even if it is unscientific.
Why? Because it advances something embryonic that could work: while the commune is largely ideological and incidental (ie a large scale affinity) and hence it class character diffuse, it is actually a coalition of revolutionary organizations, community based organizations, labor militants and unionists, even small businesses, cooperatives, and enterprises. In other words, a representative slice of society at large, capable of self-sufficiently transporting, feeding, and leading tens of thousands of people in a day of action that culminates in a successful stopping of production – the most direct challenge to Bourgeoisie domination we can make short of an insurrection, that is, under the current conditions.
The commune set it self one goal that was of revolutionary class content: to shut down a major port of the USA. To stop production. And it did it.
And in order to achieve it they had to mobilize society at large: they correctly and masterfully exercised their power, which has taken years to build, and did so with minimal exposure of the commune. They came out stronger and re-moralized than before.
The role of the GA in all this was symbolic: it was the rubber seal to seize the moment. Calling for power to GAs is to tie ourselves to a rudimentary, sclerotic, politically suicidal form. There is no future in the GA. None.
If we want to talk about power:
“Long live the Oakland Commune!” …And may it become a base area of the people’s army when the time comes… and may one, two, three, many, communes emerge!
Ajagbe Adewole-Ogunade said
I wasn’t aware communist revolutionaries required the consent of the less advanced in order to raise a slogan. We’re not, hopefully, in the business of tailing the masses. They need guidance, right now, not timidity. And now is the time to raise these ideas. If not now, when?
Stiofan said
Communists do not need anyone’s permission to think strategically, critically,
and intelligently no matter how stressed, exhausted or angry they may be.
I am not going to trash the GA’s ala SKS because my critique of “All Power to the GA’s” is more practical. As I said before that slogan is a call to an insurrection and it was that slogan upon which the formation of military committees of the soviets were organized. It could very well be that at some point an Occupy Commune would need a self defense committee and throwing around slogans like “All Power to the GA” would be politically damaging and actually interfere in the work of doing whatever was necessary to insure physical safety.
Power to the People
mlw said
“Without the ability to confront the state and its special bodies of armed men (i.e. pigs), the call for “All Power to the GA’s” is idealist at best and ultra left/divorced from reality posturing at worst.”
All things you mentioned are based on ideas, dissolve the belief structures that they rest on and you dissolve them, also there is no such thing as the people.
Carl Davidson said
@SKS Where in the world do you get me as a ‘liquidationist.’? That’s the main target I battle day in and day out. I’m known for insisting on having and building our our own organizations before we can unite with forces we disagree with—’the harder the core, the broader the front,’ to use an old slogan of Uncle Ho’s.
@Contrarian ‘Power to the People’ is a fine slogan to raise anytime, including now. But that’s part of it’s problem. It applies anytime. It needs to be combined with others that are more timely. But that’s a far cry from ‘all power to the GA’–the clear implication is that you’re substituting the GA for the people, the ‘critical force’ for the ‘main force.’ It’s not a good idea to go there. the first question of any slogan is who is it aimed at? The second is who is it supposed to unite? ‘All power to the GA won’t even unite the GAs at this point, and certainly not the broader masses who have never been to a GA or know of anyone who has.
Back to the drawing boards on that one…..
pixie dust said
Carl, why do you always quote revolutionaries when you are the most obvious reformist. It’s a bit disingenuous.
Carl Davidson said
Well, Pixie dust, I certainly fight for reforms, but I’ve never been a reformist. What’s ‘obvious’ to you is thought otherwise by many others. I’ve spent nearly 50 years now working on strategies, tactics and organizations, on a wide variety of fronts, theoretical and practical, trying to figure out how to do revolutionary work in non-revolutionary conditions, to prepare for upsurges, and fan the flames and organize within them when they do appear. My main object is to get us to a new order that replaces the old one, and hopefully I’ll live long enough to see it.
I usually try to avoid the battles of quotations, though–been there, done that. But every now and then I’m reminded of one that’s appropriate and may share it, like the point above.
But what don’t you engage the argument in the discussion here, rather that take pot shots at me? The latter doesn’t get you very far, since my skin is rather thick and battle-scarred.
SKS said
@Carl
I have long since seen your trend
Contrary to others, I think you are not an agent of the bourgeois in our camp – I think you represent an inevitable line, that of right-opportunism, that in our present context means liquidation: rather than building proletarian political independence to engage in struggle, your line calls on proletarian forces to unite with liberals and progressives – the left opportunists of the ruling class – to advance the proletarian position in non-revolutionary times. That is a fair description of your politics in the concrete sense. Also in the concrete, this is indistinguishable from Social-Democracy, but I make no such conflation – a social democrat would never engage this crowd in struggle as you do – your position is that revolution is an objective process in which conditions exist or don’t.
The maoist position is that conditions are objective, but revolutionary consciousness is not, that creating this consciousness and celebrating it, and training the people and cadre for revolution is necessary and vital, and this cannot be done within the non-revolutionary parties. This is what I call liquidationism.
Now, if the term is inexact or wrong, perhaps. Yet I think my description of what the term means is correct, and it would take a hell of a lot convincing to make me think otherwise.
As to your claim I do not engage the argument here, well, it is ridiculous: That is all I have done!
chegitz guevara said
Stiofan,
“All Power to the GA’s is terrible slogan because it is an explicit call for an insurrection and rests upon the existence of a people’s military capability. ”
Lenin called for all power to the Soviets in March of 1917, long before a people’s military capability existed.While we are certainly not going through anything like the February revolution, nor should the fact that Lenin wrote something end the discussion, it does demonstrate that the call can procede, and even propel, the capacity of the people to make it a reality. Without making that call, Lenin could not have won the Bolsheviks to such a call. Without the Bolsheviks calling for it for six months, would October have been possible? We can only speculate, but I think it unlikely.
Of course, I don’t think we’ll be contesting for direct power with the U.S. Empire in six months time, but I do think it’s right to raise the questions, both of power, and the form of power, that the slogan, “All Power to the General Assemblies” raise.
Carl Davidson said
You might have a good point about right opportunism, SKS, if I were tailing Obama and the Democrats the same way, say, that the CPUSA has been seen to do. Instead I’m trying to develop both socialist and mass organizations with independent views, even if we do vote for some Dems over the GOP for the time being.
And yes, on immediate matters, we have a lot in common with, say, DSA. We have deep differences with them, however, on the matter of the state. But since we’re not on the cusp of replacing it yet, it doesn’t come to the fore so much.
I have a fairly good handle on the differences among us here on the question of consciousness. I agree it’s partly a subjective factor, in that we can play a role, even a very strong one, in shaping (and being shaped by) the militant minority, my term for the old terminology of ‘the advanced or purposive workers,’ who in turn can reach into the great mass. I would apply it to other strata as well as workers. But there’s a good deal of consciousness beyond our control, shaped by objective factors. Even this can change, but it’s more a matter of ‘the long march through the institutions’, to use Rudi Duetscke’s shorthand for Gramsci’s thought.
I don’t consider myself anti-Maoist, although I oppose many things Mao did after 1949. But I’m of the opinion that Gramsci and others dealing with making revolution in the industrialized West have much more significance for us. So I understand how that puts me on ‘the right’ in this venue. I can accept that, in that sense. I still think Kasama important both because of its final aim, which I share, and its audience, which I also want to reach. I make use of some of its postings in my other circles as well, and not just in a negative way
What pushed my buttons was ‘liquidationist,’ which is a label I strongly reject. I oppose that trend strongly, although not so much here. Here it mainly comes up in the ‘left liquidationist’ form similar to the old Otszovists, the semi-anarchist view from who ‘build a movement’ is nearly everything while building party organizations of workers is hardly anything.
SKS said
@Carl
Contrary to others, I do agree that your differences with DSA are not superficial. If I am in a room with a CCDSer and a DSAer I can immediately tell the difference, even if they are saying the same thing. So in this sense, I can say what you are explaining is true.
Yet being true doesn’t imply being correct in my view. I hope that makes sense.
On liquidationism, I am thinking more in terms of Browder and perhaps even Foster, that is, of American Revisionism. I think your politics are different only in the details, and perhaps in your personal case, the views on race (which you will have to agree are a minority view in CCDS which to a large extent retains the CPUSA line on this matter). I think in particular this moment shows why not putting more effort into political independence has not paid off any dividends: no matter how many progrssives we have elected, we still get foreclosed, tear gassed, and shot. The president is black and kids still lie malnourished by the millions in the black ghetto.
And people rise and all we have are lousy sects who do not measure up to the task.
Carl Davidson said
I agree we have a bunch of ‘lousy sects’ who do not measure up to the task. While I think my own group, CCDS, is the better of the bunch, we’re still in the same ball park, ie, inadequate to the task of coming to scale.
It’s one reason I put ‘left unity’ high on my list of priorities. I would just as soon have them all fold into something larger and better, or at least the best elements of all of them who did not insist on lugging old baggage around. The only reason I put up with the goofy name of my group is in the hope that it will be temporary.
I’ve been to Germany recently to take a look at ‘Die Linke’ and to France to look at the ‘Left Front.’ There’s a few ideas there, but their parliamentary system is so different from ours that it doesn’t help much. I think we’ll have to come up with something more ‘in the American grain,’ which is why I’ve looked over Browder again. His conclusions were dead wrong (whether they were his or the Comintern’s is an open question), but he was asking some of the proper questions.
At the moment, my working hypothesis is that we need two organizations, one to unite the militant minority, one to unite the progressive majority–or one to unite the Marxists, the other to serve as the electoral arm of a popular front against finance capital (and it’s NOT the Dems, save for a part we might break away).
But to get there, to come to scale, we’ve got to get out of these damned cul-de-sacs on the margins, or we’re going to see a huge opportunity wasted. Perhaps we can have some decent discussion at the Left Forum
And please, if you think everything reduces to voting for Obama, for or against, you’re way off base. To approach it that way is trivial.
Stiofan said
Chegitz wrote:
“Lenin called for all power to the Soviets in March of 1917, long before a people’s military capability existed.”
Part of this statement is right but the last part is wrong. Lenin called for “All Power to the Soviets” in a stirring speech in the Bolshevik headquarters made immediately after he arrived at the Finland station. The Tsarist government had collapsed and the army had dissolved with many soldiers retaining their weapons. The control of the Provisional government was tentative at best and the allegiance of those military units still under command was unclear. Soldiers deputies were well represented in the soviets and the people most certainly had a military capability.
To be sure this capability was disorganized and politically diffuse, but it was there. Under these circumstances every political party was a potential contender for power and Lenin call was most definitely for an insurrection which the military committee of the Petrograd Soviet launched later that year.
Having said all that I now believe that “All Power to the General Aseembly” can and should be used under some very specific circumstances. This would not be a call for insurrection of course, but there are locales where this slogan has the potential to confront the regime in a dynamic new way and significantly increase popular support of the occupy movement.
It is not a universal, good for all places slogan such as “power to the people” but it will work if done right.
SKS said
@Carl
Die Linke and the Front de Gauche are terrible examples, even if there are revolutionary forces within.
Better examples would be Raudt in Norway and in particular, the cadre-led, mass oriented Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal (an alliance that includes within and is led by Trotskyites and Maoists) – these are parties that retain revolutionary cadre while participating in elections, and which also present unity of the revolutionary left.
I think the Left Forum is marginal as a space to develop politics – and part of the problem not the solution. What the above examples have in common is being forged either in a revolution, or in the borders of the tensions of the Cold War, that is, forged in struggle, rather than in a think tank.
Die Linke and Front de Gauche are artificial creations of strategics and opportunists.
There are forces who understand this – whatever their differences – they are not waiting for the halls of the formal left to point the way forward, they are burning midnight oil in the class struggle. We need communes, many of them, we need them everywhere, that is what the moment demands.
We shall see what comes out the other end…
@Stiofan
Thank you for a needed response but I must add this: the military situation of the Soviets was not much different in February than in October. This is important in this context of slogans because it makes Chegitz’s point invalid entirely. When Lenin raises his call, he is identifying a concrete material reality AND HE WAS CORRECT. Lenin didn’t pull it out of his ass. He got the info, and just knew, based on the correlation of forces, of how weakened the SRs were militarily, of how tentative Kerensky’s hold on power was, of how penetrated was the Bolshevik party in the armed forces. He also knew that many Bolsheviks had *ideological* opposition to soviet power, being stagists of the Plekhanov type who had adopted this view dogmatically. Lenin knew this because it was him who trained them. That is why the April Theses were put forward, to un-educate Bolsheviks. This is why Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed October: they were dogmatists.
In the absence of a socialist party of combat cadre, and the social conditions that made its creation possible, to call for “All power to the GAs” is at best an exercise of revolutionary wit (and bad wit at that), at worse totally clueless spontex bullshit. It is a political dead end that obscures rather than clarifies the questions of power.
Long live the Oakland Commune!
One, two, three, many Communes more!
Surround the headquarters of greed with the force of one thousand Communes!
Stiofan said
@SKS
Not “All Power to the General Assemblies (or communes) but All Power to the General Assembly (or commune). That is to say that for very specific locations under very specific conditions this call would resonate and mobilize many, many people to support the movement. The reasons for that support are independent of the past problems of GA’s being unable to organize drum circles, etc.
I am thinking specifically of the conditions here where the destruction of local elected governing bodies by the state raises the possibility a significant fissure in the perception of legitimacy of the regime (at both the state and local level). If done right this call would become a rallying point for massive dissent from a number of directions in which people would both withhold cooperation from one authority and show support for the GA or commune as a form of protest. If done correctly this tactic could have enormous potential.
I am thinking beyond using the “All power” slogan as a form of creative engagement (to envision a radical new possibility) to make it an actual wedge to confront and de-legitimize these corrupt, crony dictators who have dispensed with all the illusions of bourgeoisie democracy.
Carl Davidson said
@Stiofan
I think you’re getting a little carried away by spontaneity here. I’m all for fanning the flames, but it’s also best to look at the situation as a whole, ie, what ALL trends among the masses think, and their relative proportions.
So far, the a majority of the public in most places sympathizes with standing up to Wall Street, ie, an incipient popular front vs finance capital. But only a small minority is will to say local government has lost all legitimacy. The first question likely to best asked of ‘All power to the GA!’ is ‘Who elected YOU guys?’ and it would be a valid point. If every neighborhood and workplace, or even a substantial number of key ones, sent delegates of their choosing to the GA or ‘Commune’, you might have a point. But I’ve yet to see anything close to that.
In Occupy Pittsburgh, there’s a decent working relationship between OWS and some of the main unions. They occupied a decrepit bridge together the other day, making a powerful point in the media about jobs, infrastructure and the parasitic role of finance capital. But most of these folks will be voting and working the upcoming elections.
In brief, there’s a ways to go before seriously posing dual power.Prepare the way by all means, but do it prematurely, and it turns against you.
Jan Makandal said
When do we discuss power? When we are suited for it. To compare this “Occupy” mobilization to the revolutionary movements that led to the correct call of All Power to the Soviets” is left infantilism and populism.
To become suited for power:
is to address the reality of the moment, be able to face all the necessities of the moment and not be on permanent defensive mode by simply reacting to the reactionary act of our class enemy.
is to define a political line and political orientation to transform this dominantly left populist mobilization into a powerful autonomous organized movements addressing a dual reality: The process of production of surplus value and proletarian dictatorship. This will require correctly addressing the role of the working class, not as a passive participant, but rather a principal and fundamental actor in the process of being suited for power and becoming a class fully capable to lead all dominated and exploited class to a new social formation.
Is to define the dialectical relation of organization and masses/ Party and Mass, not leftist parachuting in the struggle and offering call of actions totally disconnected to the objective reality and making these “leftist” dream with eyes wide open.
Is to achieve the political level that will enable us to now call for All power to the Soviets, a call reflecting class unity of two fundamental classes at the time, Workers and Peasants, under the leadership of the working class. This call was not a creation of a dream. This call was historically determined.
Is to recognize bourgeois democracy is bourgeois dictatorship. To Occupy a park, to have GA’s in a park on thing most of the time are secondary, is not putting us closer to power. The question of power is not a generation question it will always be, in any class divided social formation, a class problematic for its reproductions.
Is to wage struggle against opportunism and populism, all the concrete form of their manifestations such as pacifism, egalitarism, collaborationism, and adventurism…
Revolution is a process that is addressing the unifications of two factors the subjective with the objective: a class no longer able to dominate and another class emerging as an alternative, with is own emerging ideologies, politics and theories and capable to conceptualize all tendencies emerging in the “communist of movements”, not from a populist/ metaphysical approach but an approach entrenched in materialism in constant struggle against idealism.
At best Occupy is simply now, because of a lack of proletarian leadership an embryonic model of a communist of movement that could easily be deformed, co-opted due to the deficiency of a proletarian autonomous presence and quickly transform to right populism. Historically, left populism usually quickly transitioned to right populism, due to a lack of revolutionary class alternative, to serve the interest of sectors of the bourgeoisie.
The Bolshevik party was the proletarian leadership, with all its limitation, at the time of the call for All power to the Soviets. We shouldn’t put the cart before the horses.
Capitalism seems to be incapable to offer any viable alternative, even in its own interest, creating rift in it midst and those differences are progressively becoming more antagonistic. We do need to understand these contradictions in the different forms of capital concentration. Organize and unify our camps to construct a combative movement to wage struggle at all levels against capitalism.
Carl Davidson said
It’s worth noting that prior to ‘All power to the Soviets’, Lenin stressed the importance, among other things, such as organizing soldiers, of electing an RSDLP faction to the Duma, a crippled institution greatly lack in legitimacy. There an old pamphlet floating around, ‘Lenin as a Campaign Manager,’ if you want to look it up. Put out by the SWP, as I recall.
Stiofan said
Carl,
Listen carefully and learn something. Specific conditions here in Michigan have the potential to actually allow the occupy movement to discredit/de-legitimicize/directly confront the corrupt and authoritarian rule being imposed by a
a right wing governor on specific communities My comments have nothing to do with playing at recreating soviets and pretending to be Lenin. The political dynamic is local and you should probably do some research first before lecturing.
Being involved in this movement here I well know the weakness and limitations of “Occupy.” I also know that there are times when it will be possible to give voice to the enormous anger and frustration that has been building for years. The specific tactics of right wing rule are somewhat different here creating an opportunity that goes far beyond rationalizing the re-election of Barack Obama as the “left wing of the possible.”
Carl Davidson said
I am listening carefully, Stiofan. I’m all ears.
To parse your points:
It’s one thing to ‘discredit.’ and that’s not so hard these days
It’s quite another to ‘de-legitimize’, certainly in the sense of having a majority abandon and repudiate an institution. The vote results in the next election will tell a tale.
It’s still quite another to ‘directly confront’, especially if that is to mean more than a mass encampment outside a building, and then to sustain it in the face of police repression.
I am not pretending to be Lenin either. Far from it. I’m suggesting to those who would borrow Bolshevik slogans that it’s better to look at our realities, or at least understand the original context.
We’re back to the two groupings in our politics today–politics as self-expression and politics as strategy. To repeat myself, we need both, and the art is in finding the best ways to combine them. But don’t for a moment take you eyes off what ALL TRENDS among everyone is thinking, not just the thinking of the militant minority.
SKS said
@Carl
Re:spontex
You missed a great example of what you speak, which is Lansing Michigan, the state capital, in which the Occupy movement has the full and un-fettered support of the Mayor, who even went to the camp and gave a fairly left speech.
http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/10/14/344565/virg-bernero-99-percent/
People decry this as “Democrat opportunism” but the opportunists here are us. We need to be very clear about this and your point is well taken in that regards – this movement begins as a radical liberal one, and the traditional home of radical liberalism in the USA is the left of the Democrats.
This is why the point of the Commune versus the GA is so relevant: the Commune represents an embryonic power of the forces for whom the State is illegitimate. Our task is to promote this idea – it is both concrete (ie it flexed muscle and won) and aspirational (imagine a world ruled in that way!).
In that sense your point is not well taken: the labor unions in the USA today are part of the State apparatus, whose existence is bureaucratic, whose politics are electoral, whose outlook is systemically corporate and corporatist. Some of the largest investors in Wall St. are labor unions via retirement funds. There interests are melded and undifferentiated from Wall St. Yes they organize the working class, and in some places the bases are more conscious, but strategically the role of the labor unions is to de-radicalize the movement and channel it to the Democrats, lock, stock, and two smoking barrels.
SKS said
@Stiofan
Carl is an old horse, and those are harder to teach new tricks than an old dog… :)
Carl Davidson said
@SKS
Last I looked, the unions were part of civil society, not the state. The state imposes reactionary laws on them, such as Taft-Hartley, but that doesn’t make them part of the state. But even if they were, we should work in them anyway, simply because it’s an important arena to come into contact with the more progressive-minded and purposive workers, who are a key to building revolutionary organizations.
Obviously, the unions have a range of views. Fletcher and Gaspin’s book ‘Solidarity Divided’ does a decent job of summarizing it. Some want little to do with OWS. But others are lending their tactical support
The state in the West, and certainly in the US, is a castle surrounded by many moats, ring after ring of them, to use Gramsci’s metaphor. Part of the ‘war of position’ is to capture and make strong points in the institutions comprising these moats. That’s precisely what’s involved in de-obfuscating power, de-sanctifying authority and de-legimitizing our adversaries. You don’t just declare it; you have to win it. And in a period of strategic defensive, even with insurgent tactical ‘wars of movement’ , such as OWS, this is largely and best done from within.
By its nature, at least thus far, OWS has no common strategy. Thus for the moment, others, such as the unions, will make it part of their strategy. Trumka wants to wrest a financial transaction tax on Wall St out of Congress to fund job creation, and sees OWS as the best ally he’s had in some time. Likewise with the Progressive Caucus. But the Blue Dogs and the GOP want to crush OWS.
We live in interesting times. Hopefully we can make the most of it in advancing on the socialist path.
SKS said
@Carl
Civil society is a myth.
There classes, and there is the State that mediates them. What you call civil society is the State in its neo-liberal form. This includes, in the USA, labor unions and the NGOs they control.
In fact, the AFL-CIA was an essential part of the USA’s foreign policy during the Cold War.
Of particular import in this respect is the position of professional unionists – who on average earn more than the workers they purport to represent – and that of unelected or machine elected leaders who earn tens of times what the average member earns, and administer enterprises that dwarf most businesses in the USA. These enterprises function on behalf of the Taft-Hartley regime of labor relations, that exercises labor discipline and exists to ensure labor peace and employer-union cooperation – State policy. Unions are little more than labor cops, allowed to exist to provide a clear service: that of chanelling the anger of workers elsewhere. And they have done a good job so far. Of course, the State would rather do without them, and their leaderships have also helped along in this process, allowing “right to work” states to exists, accepting more and more egregious cutbacks on existing gains, participating in the lobbying scam, and most importantly, strategically positioning unions as service organizations which exist essentially on inertia alone, and who have lost most of their membership in the last 60 years to the point that unionization rates are lower than anywhere else in the advanced countries.
I am not even talking about union democracy, or other such stuff. I would give an arm and a leg to have a bureaucratic monster like the French CGT here. It at least does the minimal job required of it, unlike unions in the USA, which almost without exceptions are anti-communist cesspools of Democratic Party and Republican Party fundraising.
Unions in Cuba are more representative of the workers, and they are officially part of the State, so go figure…
Carl Davidson said
Civil society a myth? That’s a very odd claim, to say the least. Certainly a departure from Marxism as applied in the West. Of course, the bourgeoisie has hegemony over much of civil society, but that is far from its integration with the state. It means these are contested zones, or at least should be contested zones.
Walking out my door, i have the institutions of civil society all around me–the Baptist church on the corner that distributes food to the working poor and elderly in the hills and hollows of our township, the IBEW Hall were all the unions meet, not only for regular stuff, but to launch jobs demonstrations aimed at the state, our local community college where I can teach an independent class of US history, the Constitution and the nature of the state. I could go on and on. Again, these are largely under liberal bourgeois hegemony, but that’s a far cry from integration with the state.
I also think you’ll find a shift in the AFL-CIO from the AFL-CIA from our days in the 1960s. You’ll find key unions and even some at the top more in tune with left social democracy than the SDUSA social-imperialism of the Meany-Kirkland crowd of yore. It’s still problematic, but in a different ballpark.
But if you only read Lenin and Mao, who worked in situations where civil society was far weaker and their states more brittle, I can see why you might make such a claim. It’s one reason Gramsci is so important for us. He developed his critique looking more to the state and civil society as it exists looking Westward, rather than to Russia then eastward to China and the third world. We can and should learn from all of them, but the starting point is the concrete analysis of our situation here today.
There’s a new and interesting article out that I just posted on Progressive America Rising at http://www.progressivesforobama.net/?p=210 that looks at OWS as driving a wedge between civil society and the state, which is food for thought.
Stiofan said
Carl wrote:
“It’s one reason that Gramsci is so important to us”
You are lapsing into the third person here Carl. Who exactly is the “us” you are referring to. The Committees of Correspondence? Your own trend? Progressives for Obama? Please be more precise.
Carl Davidson said
‘Us’ in this context means everyone who wants, especially in the West, to replace the old capitalist order with a new socialist order, which is itself a transitional one to a classless society. There are people who take Gramsci seriously for today’s battles and goals across organizational lines, for the most part, to greater and lesser degrees–in the CPUSA, DSA, CCDS, ISO. Solidarity and even here at Kasama. I try to work with all of them in developing the line of march, with varying degrees of success.
Groups like PDA or web projects like Progressive America Rising, formerly ‘Progressives for Obama’, may benefit indirectly from the work of the left effort mentioned above, but not so directly, since they are a left-center range of politics, many of whom know or care little about Marxism or people like Gramsci. It’s noteworthy, though, that people like Rush Limbaugh have done a serious study of Gramsci, in order to try to run his ideas ‘in reverse’, so to speak–like the Army War College studying Mao. Many on the right explicitly state that Gramsci, in their view, is the most dangerous communist theorist of all regarding modern Western societies. That remains to be seen, but they have a point.
There are also academics who like Gramsci for their own additional reasons having little to do with the practice of revolutionary politics–but I’m not so concerned about them, at least at the moment.
Miles Ahead said
My two cents worth are undoubtedly going to sound muddled and perhaps confused, but I’m finding some of this thread’s commentary (along with a few other threads) confusing.
And it seems to me that a lot of the contradictions (and minutae) that are being debated supposedly on the “high plane” of revolutionary-think, are really a reflection of many of the contradictions (some, more contradictions among the people) that those within the Occupy movement are facing, and more so, trying to struggle with and over. And that struggle continues mostly without the input of some “revolutionary” sage.
And what has been a struggle – at least with the Occupy movement where I’m involved (which is very diverse), is to try and focus and refocus on the main target and enemy, which has been the impetus (and captured the spirit), of this movement—i.e., the ruling class and their capitalist/imperialist system; a system (economically, politically and ideologically) in total crisis.
Keep reading the condemnation of…the white workers (or white people in general), the unions—lumping the hacks in with union workers, those nasty progressives, or worse yet, liberals, etc., ad nauseum. Some here hammer away at gotta be a proletarian revolution, led by the working class, but who is the proletariat? (And who are the working classes’ allies?) And just because someone is from the working class, particularly someone of color, they are supposed to automatically be (or should be) a communist revolutionary, if not the most advanced. (IMO, that’s a liberal way of thinking.)
As people mount the political stage, some for the first time in eons, some for the first time in their lives, form a strong united front that crosses national, class, age, gender and political lines, do some revolutionaries really think that the majority of people aren’t learning precious political lessons every day, and more so, on those even more special days when en masse they confront the State—with all its apparatuses?
That those people who are involved (on different levels) aren’t thinking, or rethinking some old (or backward) ideas, that in this battle, this moment in history, that the fertile ground for more revolutionary ideas, strategy and tactics isn’t being nurtured, sown or debated?
It says a lot that, for instance, the struggle against national oppression (and police brutality) has been raised as a demand (and in some places a clarion call and point of unity), in every key city in the O. movement? (Flies in the face of the rulers’ age-old tactic of divide and conquer.)
That in the U.S., which is the most chauvinist, jingoist, xenophobic society on the planet, the banner of internationalist solidarity (a truly reciprocal relationship) has been raised and proudly held on high? (Example: after the great show of solidarity from Tahir Square for the Occupy movement, one of most popular refrains – in Oakland (NY, Boston) is “Oakland + Cairo, One Fist.”) That the O. movement in the main (along with a majority of those “yucky” white workers in Wisconsin and Ohio) have been keenly aware that the Egyptians in the thousands + have helped inspire the movements here (and now vice versa). That what happens in Greece, Spain, etc. has a direct relationship to all our struggles.
Or with the statement of solidarity to Occupy, from a wide array of comrades in México, people who face some of the worst oppression and repression imaginable, that their keenness and solidarity doesn’t have a rippling effect both on los mexicanos, as well as immigrants in the U.S. Makes the cry, “the whole world is watching” a whole lot more tangible, don’t ya think?
And while it is true that many, many unions have changed course over the last several years—with many of those union hacks feathering their nests even more so, and to the detriment of the rank and file…worldwide uprisings, including the Occupy movement, have also changed a lot of that political canvas.
Just one example—one of my family members has been a member of the local painters’ union in this area for 17 years since immigrating to the U.S.. He has an extremely high risk and dangerous job—no he’s not Adolf Schickelgruber (aka Hitler) painting someone’s house. His fellow workers have been in “negotiations” with “their” union and the city for almost two years—meanwhile the friggin’ union bosses tried to raise the workers’ dues to $300 a month (!)—dues for literally doing nothing. So, recently – (as he told me) “inspired by Tahir Sq., Wisconsin, and now the Occupy movement,” all the workers left this union, have to wait a year to be in another one, are continuing to work but are standing strong and united. No one sure of the results over the next year, but definitely these workers are feeling a new-found sense of empowerment.
While I am certainly a big advocate for waging principled struggle, and struggle for a more visionary revolutionary outlook and line, can’t help but sense there are some within “our” ranks who are still waiting for the perfect storm in an imperfect world. Or, perhaps view the proletariat and its allies as some malleable clump of play-dough, and are prone to targetting the wrong people as the ultimate enemy of the people. I hope some of that anger and outrage can be redirected the at people’s real enemy—and certainly during this historic conjuncture.
SKS said
@Carl
I am saying Garmsci’s placement of civil society in the superstructure, rather than Marx’s at the base, has led to a Civil Society Myth.
That a good chunk of Marxist thought in the West since the 60s buys into these ideas, in particular the euro-communist and other right-wing readings of Gramsci you seemingly subscribe to, doesn’t make them any real.
Civil society in the age of neo-liberalism is the neo-totalitarian democratic-bourgeoisie State – its tolerant repression, its labor discipline, its less-than-lethal lethality. They bringing you manufactured dissent, and revolutions that do not challenge capitalism, but enforce the neo-liberal version of governance and government.
SKS said
@Miles
A problem I have with the anecdotal is that it doesn’t reflect the wider society. Yes – we must see OWS as an opening, but this opening is not the same as a generalized social mobilization.
In the USA, something like Tahrir at its height would mean more or less 4,000,000 people in LA, NYC, or DC holding a square against tanks.
Yes, there is spirit an abstraction, but we need pessimism of the mind to go with the optimism of the will: we cannot allow the positive to overshadow the reality. To do so is to not *gain* from this moment, but to return to the status quo antebellum, of atomized sects and idle leftism.
It is not about waiting for the perfect storm: it will never arrive. It is however, to have sense of proportion and realism of what the moment can or can’t produce.
Push Carl’s reformist politics aside a second, and listen to wast he is saying: he is saying, “how can I turn and influence this around into a lasting thing”. In his view this is best done by organizing, not as revolutionaries, but as a pressure group around the liberals. Fuck that.
However, there is no possibility of this moment turning into a revolution. None. Zero. Zilch. Ninguna. So, what is to be done? Organize, raise the red flag, unite all that can be united.
Make socialism a realistic alternative again.
I think all groups that understand this, are having success, and those who are not, are having setbacks.
The socialist agenda is the most important victory we can gain from this: “End the dictatorship of the 1%” begs the question: “And replace it with what?”
50% of the people in this country do not vote. 40% are not closed to socialist ideas. 15% are anti-capitalists of some sort. These are millions upon millions of people. Why do we fail to organize these numbers for revolution?
Carl Davidson said
@SKS, who says: ‘Why do we fail to organize these numbers for revolution?’
Because they are not yet at that point in their political views, SKS.
A militant minority are, and we should by all means recruit them to socialist and revolutionary organizations, and unite various revolutionary forces that can be united as well–as best as we can.
But for the progressive majority, we have to go step-by-step. OWS, for instance, despite the claim above, isn’t united around anti-capitalism or anti-imperialism. At the moment, it is an incipient popular front vs finance capital with a range of views from reform to revolution and all points in between.. It has targeted Wall st over Main St, the 99%. That makes it a multiclass, multistrata pop front, not a united front for proletarian power. It may not stay there, but that’s where it is, and that’s why all the forces you don’t like are responding to it. Our strategic job is to unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle, then isolate and divide the right, so as to crush our adversaries batch by batch, not all at once.
OWS is the critical force holding up a mirror to society with some moral clarity, revealing what it has come to, and that it must change. But the critical force, when all is said and done, is not the main force. One of our tasks as revolutionaries is to continue uniting the critical force with the main force–but we have to start with both of these as they are, not as we wish them to be. Then in the course of struggle, the radicalization will deepen, our adversaries will strike back hard, and we will defend ourselves, growing both the militant minority and the progressive majority.
The alliance between the two forces will be around certain platforms. Right now the AFL-CIO and the Progressive Caucus are advancing one with both immediate and structural reforms aimed at finance capital. Out task is to make it better. Within the militant minority, our task is not only to advance the aim of socialism, but also define and construct the bridges and forms of struggle that will take us there, making timely use of both the war of position and the war of movement appropriate to each phase–strategic defensive, strategic equilibrium and strategic offensive.
That is a bare-bones outline, with no flesh on it yet. That’s ours task now and in the immediate future, and new wild cards along with the open nature of the future will likely require changes along the way, even major ones. Politics on this level is both a science and an art. No one wins leadership simply by asserting it; you have to win it, not only in general formulas, but in the ability to deploy organized forces in all the immediate and earthy details. Theory is grey, but life is green.
The ball is in our court as to whether and how we can make our politics meet the situation in front of us. And phrase-mongering along with playing at insurrection is less than useless.