A Civil Society Strategy for Revitalizing the Left
What happened to the North American Left? Why is it that, even now, when capitalism seems so obviously unappealing, unsustainable and unfair, the Left cannot mount a more serious challenge to the Right or its grim austerity agenda?
Indeed, what happened to the Left's former ability to mobilize huge numbers into powerful social movements, to inspire working-class people with appealing visions of post-capitalist alternatives, and to strike fear into the hearts of elites who once worried that the Left posed a credible threat to their power and privilege?
If we are serious about figuring all this out, and reversing this trajectory, we have to be willing to take some responsibility for our predicament. We can't just blame the ‘propaganda’ circulated by the corporate media, the repressive role of the police and the courts, or the way electoral systems are stacked against our efforts to promote social and environmental justice and political and economic democracy. The news media, the police, and state institutions have always waged a determined struggle against the Left; but the Left used to be able to overcome these obstacles and make real gains, building powerful mass movements that sometimes racked up real victories. Above all, the Left was once able to claim the allegiance of huge numbers of people, but at least in North America this is no longer the case.
The Left's Role in Its Own Decline
My questions here can all be boiled down to this: What has the Left done, or failed to do, that might have hastened or exacerbated its own decline, and what can we do today to help turn things around?
There is, of course, a conventional answer to these questions. Some people on the broad Left, and almost everyone on the Right, would say that the Left's historic error was to articulate a political vision (‘socialism’) that strayed too far from capitalism. Its supposed aim to introduce democratic and egalitarian economic planning, they say, made socialism unable to handle the overwhelming demands of information-processing that arise in a complex modern society. Only market regulation and profit-motivated investment decisions can handle these demands, according to this view.
But I would argue that the real story is almost the exact opposite of this more familiar one. The real-world experiments in ‘socialism’ during the 20th century did not fail because the distance that separated them from capitalism grew too great, making them unworkable. On the contrary, they failed because the proximity between those efforts and capitalism made these ‘socialisms’ – Stalinism and social democracy – too difficult to distinguish from the capitalist system that they were supposed to replace. These supposedly socialist political projects actually embraced most of capitalism's worst features: its bureaucratic mode of governance, its technocratic approach to designing and implementing public policy, its hierarchical and authoritarian norms of workplace organization, its Realpolitik patterns of international relations, its cultural celebration of productivity and growth as ends in themselves, and its elitist understanding of who is best suited to exercise political power and spearhead social change.
At the heart of the problem was the Left's often uncritical embrace of one of the most oppressive, disempowering and alienating institutions that most working-class people ever have the misfortune to interact with in their lives: the modern state. At some point, the Left dropped its former aim of encouraging the ‘self-emancipation’ of working people, and replaced it with an aim that to most people seems like its opposite: technocratic ‘public administration’ by state agencies.
This shift, from the anti-statist ‘community-based socialism’ that dominated the early Marxist, Owenite, Guild-socialist, syndicalist and anarchist Left in the 19th and early-20th centuries, was replaced in the years after the First World War by the two most influential forms of ‘socialism’ in the 20th century: statist command planning, typified by the USSR, and Keynesian welfare state expansionism, typified by European social democracy.
In the course of this fateful shift, the Left gave up almost entirely on the emancipatory promise of liberation from alienation, exploitation and bureaucratic administration that had once been its stock in trade – a promise which had only a few decades earlier led European radicals to embrace the bold ‘smash the state’ ethos of the Paris Commune. In place of this earlier promise of sweeping social reconstruction based on popular self-organization from below, the post-WWI public-administration Left now promised two things: ‘development’ and ‘rising living standards.’ For a while, both Stalinism and social democracy seemed able to deliver on these promises. Later, notably during the structural crisis of Keynesian demand-management capitalism in the mid-1970s and the stagnation crisis in Eastern Europe during the 1980s, these promises began to ring hollow.
But the more fundamental problem wasn't that the Left could no longer deliver on its promises. The problem was that it was making the wrong promises altogether. The ideal of a community-based, egalitarian and participatory economic democracy that had once inspired millions had been replaced with an unappealing vision of a regime of public administration and economic management – whether Stalinist or social-democratic – that delivered ‘benefits’ to a passive, alienated, but well-fed populace.
This ‘administrative’ (or ‘coordinatorist’) vision of a post-capitalist world is not utopian or unattainable. But why would anyone be inspired to struggle for it? This, I believe, is the question that the Left must address if it is to revitalize its project and recapture the allegiance of people who have learned to associate the radical Left with government bureaucracy and alienating public administration.
A Left That No Longer Identifies With The State
Having made this fateful wrong turn so long ago, what can the Left do today to set a new course, to restore the viability and the appeal of its project?
What the Left needs above all is to rupture its identification with the capitalist state. Government is not an actual or potential ally of the Left against Big Business. In part this is because, especially in this neoliberal epoch, government is in fact already an arm of Big Business. But more importantly, it is because the bureaucratic structures of the capitalist state are incapable in principle of serving as a vehicle for the self-liberation of people who aspire not to be administered by a welfare-maximizing state apparatus, but to participate in the democratic self-organization of their own workplaces and communities. What is needed, in short, is a reassertion of the classical leftist ideal of a community-based socialism, a socialism of popular self-organization and horizontal democracy, not one of public sector maximalism.
In part, that means replacing the utilitarian and technocratic images of a post-capitalist social order with more appealing images of radically democratic forms of community-based egalitarian economic democracy. But, in more immediately practical terms, it means a strategic reorientation of the Left: a turn away from the habit of engaging primarily with state institutions (parliaments, regulatory agencies and the welfare state), toward engaging primarily with grassroots, community-based forms of popular self-organization.
A Civil Society Strategy
The Left, in other words, must turn its attention back toward civil society: union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies, and other community associations. These expressions of grassroots democracy and popular self-organization – operating independently of both the market economy and the state – offer the Left the crucial benefit that they do not replicate the alienating and disempowering character of corporations and governments (although the Left is unfortunately overpopulated with bureaucratic and staff-led union and NGO apparatuses that today emulate the administrative systems of elite institutions). Instead, these grassroots civil society organizations embody the ‘every cook can govern’ spirit of the classical (pre-WWI) Left.
When the Left does engage with the state, as it sometimes must, its default demand should be to transfer power from corporations and the state to civil society. Such a civil society strategy is arguably already implicit in the notion of a community-based socialism. For example, whereas a statist strategy would demand that the government's budget adopt welfare-maximizing priorities, a civil society strategy would demand that budgeting power be ceded to a grassroots participatory budgeting process, centrally involving open public assemblies. Whereas a statist strategy would demand ‘public housing’ owned and operated by the state, a civil society strategy would demand that state funds be used to establish democratically self-governing non-profit housing cooperatives, collectively owned by their members. And whereas a statist strategy would demand ‘nationalizing’ banks as ‘public enterprises,’ a civil society strategy would demand that banks be dismantled and reconstructed as genuinely democratic and member-controlled financial cooperatives (‘credit unions’), operating in the public interest. This transfer of power and control from corporations and governments to civil society associations should be seen as the main aim of the Left. From this point of view, ‘winning’ for the Left means replacing the power and prerogatives of corporations and governments with empowered participatory self-governing associations within civil society.
How We Resist Neoliberalism
There is no doubt that a civil society strategy for the Left raises a number of difficult questions. Above all, it poses a very serious set of questions about how the radical Left should fight back against neoliberalism, notably in its contemporary guise of the ‘austerity’ agenda. Given that neoliberalism's primary policy aspiration is to privatize public services, and to replace public administration (the ‘public sector’ economy) with market regulation (the ‘private sector’ economy), shouldn't the Left be defending the state (the public sector) against neoliberal privatization?
For better or for worse, what the Left needs in addressing this question is nuance. We have to be able to distinguish between (for example) transferring control of a public housing complex to a private landlord (‘privatization’), in pursuit of the corporate/neoliberal agenda, and transferring control of that same public housing complex to the residents themselves (‘cooperative conversion’), under pressure from grassroots popular mobilization. If we refuse to make this distinction, either by celebrating privatization as a victory against the state or by vilifying cooperative conversion as if it were itself a type of privatization, we fall into one of two familiar traps: the temptation to see the state as the main enemy, letting corporations disastrously off the hook, or (more likely among leftists) the temptation to align ourselves politically with the ill-fated project of ‘public administration socialism,’ in which the Left plays the role of supporting the capitalist state as a bulwark against corporate power.
This is at the heart of the Left's historic failure to champion freedom and democracy against not only their corporate enemies, but their bureaucratic-statist enemies, as well. Once taking this path, the Left quickly finds itself defending the state against the negative experience of it that so pervades the lives of poor and working-class people, even to the point of championing the increase of taxes on workers as ‘progressive’ because it supports the state.
The Left, or at least the radical Left, needs to remember that its project by definition demands that sweeping social reorganization and reconstruction from below be entertained and where possible carried out. Sometimes, this means tactically defending public services, run on a non-profit basis by the state, against the immediate threat of profit-motivated privatization, which we rightly oppose as a step in the wrong direction altogether. But ultimately, the Left must aim higher than state-administration: the Left must aim to replace both the profit-motivated private sector economy and the bureaucratically administered public sector economy, in favor of a community-based, democratic and egalitarian post-capitalist economic democracy. This means that we must admit the obvious: that publicly owned enterprises and public services offered by the capitalist welfare state do not meet this standard by any stretch of the imagination. Our project demands a civil society strategy, not a statist one. What we fight for is not a bigger, more expansive state, but more democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots popular self-organization: a more participatory and community-based set of economic and political institutions, controlled from below by working people themselves.
Above all, a civil society strategy is necessary because our world needs a Left that can inspire hope, not just for a more productive and well-administered society, but for a freer, more democratic, less alienating society, controlled directly by its members, as opposed to being controlled by administrators, supposedly acting in the public interest. This ideal of a ‘community-based socialism’ was a vision that once united the entire radical Left – Marxists and anarchists, guild socialists and Owenites, syndicalists and council communists – and I think there is reason to hope that it could some day do so again.
Steve D'Arcy is a climate justice and economic democracy organizer in London, Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at steve.darcy@gmail.com. This article appeared as part of Rabble's “Reinventing democracy, reclaiming the commons” series.
ZNet Articles
Kudos
By Hahnel, Robin at Sep 18, 2011 23:07 PM
I particularly appreciate:
Pointing out that the only useful reasons for our weakness worth focusing on are the mistakes we make ourselves. As Steve points out, so many on the left look elsewhere for why we are not more powerful and influential.
His point that the two dominant recommendations that came out of the left last century were both flawed. Both Marxism/Leninism combined with Central Planning and Social Democracy were seriously in error and THAT is the major reason the left does not command more support than it does today. To a significant extent we did not earn more support.because the alternative many of us championed turned out not to be all that attractive.
In an earlier period -- the late nineteenth and early twentieth century -- a far greater part of the left subscribed to a much more attractive vision. Steve doesn't use the phrase, but broadly speaking what he is championing is what many have called a libertarian socialist vision and program which was, and is, more attractive than Marxism/Leninism/Central Planning or Social Democracy. It was too bad so many twentieth century leftists abandoned what was the original socialist idea and project. We need to rethink a libertarian socialism appropriate for the twenty-first century, and if the left does not it will become even less relevant.
But there are hard parts that I think bear more thought:
Often those who champion and work on democratic community based solutions fail to confront fundamental issues of economic democrcy and economic justice. Small is not always beautiful. Sometimes small is still unfair and even undemocratic. And sometimes small is wasteful when we really cannot afford to be. Moreover, saying communities should be self-governing is not the same as offering concrete suggestoins for how that can best be accomplished.
If participtory community builders do not successfully confront the market sytem and corporations they can only hope to build small, imperfect islands of sanity that will not be able to change the course of history. Too often community projects become an excuse to absent oneself from necessary mass struggles if we are to turn back the tide of neoliberalism run amuck.
One concrete example of a serious problem that must be overcome by the kind of efforts Steve is praising:
I call it the civil society, NGO, or "my project" small business mentality. There are more progressive projects out there than the dominant interpretation of realilty acknowledges and even than most progressives who participate in these projects realize. And that is a good thing since it means the world is not as a ugly place as most think it is. However, for the most part these small projects do not interact with one another in a strategic, much less solidaritous way. If we believe in an economy where resources are not the private property of their possessors, an economy in which all resources are part of the public patrimony, and should benefit all equally, then how can we justify a left projectism where each project fights for its own resources -- money, people's time and energies, means of communication, etc. -- and guards its private assets just as jealously as private corporations do? Our actual practice is certainly not prefigurative of what we supposedly believe in, and that is a serious problem. At a minimum it creates an hypocricy which sooner or later will exert a corrupting influence.
Reply this comment
Re: Kudos
By D'Arcy, Steve at Sep 20, 2011 03:01 AM
Thanks for your kind comments and the important and interesting questions you raise.
First, I would like to underline the fact that this piece is a sort of programmatic sketch of a general approach to thinking about how the Left should understand its project, and what I take to be the 'wrong turn' it took about a century ago, namely, its turn towards statism and away from its earlier emphasis on grassroots self-organization aspiring to challenge the rule of both market regulation and bureaucratic administration. The article offers a way of thinking about the Left, its history, and a possible future in which it returns to what has always been its most attractive aspect.
What the piece does not attempt is either (1) to articulate a detailed strategy for defeating capitalism and establishing a post-capitalist egalitarian economic democracy in its place; or (2) to develop a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of today's fledgling efforts to build community-based prefigurative forms of grassroots economic democracy, within the context of market-regulated capitalism.
I probably should have made more explicit these limitations on what I was attempting in the article. Several readers have conveyed to me that they interpreted me to be saying that that building cooperatives within capitalism would suffice, more or less, as an anti-capitalist strategy. This is not my view, in spite of the reference to "strategy" in my title (which may have been a mistake).
I actually have offered a much more detailed account of my views on anti-capitalist strategy, right here on ZNet, in a longish article called, "Environmentalism as if Winning Mattered: A Civil Society Strategy." There I talk about the need, while the Left remains weak, to pursue four strategic objectives:
-
To build cost-raising protest movements
-
To construct an anti-corporate labour/community alliance at the grassroots level;
-
To create and support anticipatory community-based alternatives to capitalist production that model sustainability and social justice;
-
To (re-)establish vital currents of anti-capitalist radicalism
Once the Left is strong enough to take up a direct struggle against capitalism (which it would be, if it actually carried out 1-4, above), it could take up four further strategic objectives:-
To organize a common front of radical community organizations (social movement organizations [SMOs], class conflict organizations [CCOs], and grassroots democratic organizations [GDOs]), capable of tactical concentration for united action;
-
To establish the hegemony of the anti-capitalist common front within labour and social movements, so that it exercises a consensual, acknowledged leadership role in pointing the way forward for the broader movement (of movements);
-
To gain for the common front and its allies a degree of community-based "social" power, resting on the capacity to deploy general strikes, mass protest, and mass civil disobedience campaigns, on such a scale that the community-based opposition constitutes a community-based counter-power that can effectively challenge the economic power of corporations and the coercive power of the state;
-
To use that social power to secure the transfer of ever more extensive governance functions to community-based self-organization (SMOs, CCOs, GDOs in civil society), ultimately displacing -- rapidly whenever possible, gradually whenever necessary -- both "private" and "state" sector institutions from their role in running the economy, the healthcare and education systems, providing social services, etc.
So, that's basically my "civil society strategy" for defeating capitalism. Building 'prefigurative' projects like cooperatives is only a key part of the third of these 8 strategic objectives. But the strategy outlined in the longer article embodies the same "civil society" point of view expressed in the article under discussion here.The reason I think a detailed anti-capitalist strategy, like the one outlined in these 8 points, is needed is that forms of community-based economic democracy that exist today -- such as cooperatives or elements of the "solidarity economy," and so on -- are bound to be distorted and limited as long as they attempt to survive as islands or outposts of a possible future of egalitarian economic democracy, in a sea of market regulated capitalism.
So, in that sense, I agree with your worries, Robin, at least to the extent that I see them as pointing to limitations on community-based economic democracy within the context of a society in which capitalism is the dominant "mode of production." Of course, there are important issues of coordination and scale in a fully post-capitalist society of the future. But on these questions I think we also agree: I think about them in terms of "participatory economics," which I believe is also a type of "community-based" or "civil society" socialism, to the extent that workplace and neighborhood councils are empowered to run the economy democratically (to make a long story short).
You, of course, have offered a much more detailed set of strategic proposals in your excellent book, Economic Justice and Democracy (book interview here). I agree with some, but not all, of those proposals (as you'd be able to guess). I'm also quite keen on a lot of the ideas in Erik Olin Wright's also-excellent book, Envisioning Real Utopias (book interview here). So, I certainly don't claim to have all the answers re: strategy; but I think it is important for people to be talking about these issues, to foster more 'strategic imagination,' so to speak, and to discourage people from just taking up some old strategy from several decades ago that has probably shown itself to have important limitations and weaknesses, which I find happens a lot (and of which I've been guilty at times, too).
Thanks again for the comments.
In solidarity,
Steve.
Reply this comment
Re: Re: Kudos
By Hahnel, Robin at Sep 20, 2011 17:32 PM
I actually cannot guess which of the proposals I outlined in Economic Justice and Democracy Steve disagrees with. I do know that book was published in 2005 and mostly written in 2003 and 2004. A lot has changed in the world since then! Those proposals were made during the worst of the Bush period, before the greatest economic crisis in 80 years had struck, and before US voters voted overwhelmingly for "change we could believe in" only to be followed by Obama ineptitude and betrayals. The general problem remains the same -- how to build stronger and larger social movements and left organizations, since we have neither yett, and as Steve points out, we cannot fight a war for power until we have armies to put on the battle fields. But the context is quite different today than when I was writing that book, and some of my thinking about how to best take advantage of new opportunities has changed as well.
One change is that the passing of one generation to the next is more closely upon us -- both within the left and within mass social movements. I now believe that rekindling and rebuilding old social movements and organizations will play a smaller role in moving forward compared to the emerging of new initiatives outside old frameworks. Where old forms of resistance are stronger, as they are in Europe, this will be less so, but in the US where older left and social movements are weaker new generations of activists will have to build more from scratch.
Also, just as union-ism suffers greatly from stagnation, alternative community-ism suffers from some stagnation as well. The alternative community movement has also been around for awhile and has developed some bad habits that it will have to overcome if it is to draw in more people. The greatest danger faced by those building alternative communities is isolation from the overwhelming majority of the population. How to break down what has become a serious cultural divide between those who now live and work in alternative communities, and what at a minimum must be 95% of the population who do not, will be key.
In any case, I think this is a time for those who are actually quite close to minimize our differences and unite on the basis of overwhelming agreement.
Reply this comment
There is no 'The Left'
By Davidson, Carl at Sep 17, 2011 00:34 AM
You come group them it various ways--the left that is against working elections at all, the left that will sometimes vote but never vote for any Democrat, ands the left that will sometimes vote for Democrats of a certain type, and the left that will always vote Democratic. Then if you pick one of these, you can do a reasonable inquiry as to way its has or hasn't succeeded.
But here's another way to start. Are YOU a member of a grouping that calls intself socialist or communist? If not, then explain why, in some detail, that you refuse to join any of the range of groups. Once you spell out why you won't take the leap, you're halfway home to understanding why all the others won't, and thus why left groups are so weak--or those who think they are 'left' are so lame and wimpy.
If you are a member of a socialist or communist group, then tell us your group's problems and what it is that it needs to grow.
Then we can have an interesting discussion.
Reply this comment
Re: There is no 'The Left'
By D'Arcy, Steve at Sep 20, 2011 02:15 AM
I don't really approve of your suggestion to classify Left formations based primarily (exclusively?) on their attitude toward the Democratic Party. For one thing, the Democratic Party is explicitly a big business party, and I advocate political independence (from big business) for labour and social movement organizations. So, I think framing questions of political differentiation within the Left in terms of how groups relate to an organization that (in my view) is not part of the Left, and which opposes popular mobilization and anti-corporate class struggle, seems fundamentally wrong-headed to me. (I am writing from Canada, but I don't think I would view this issue differently if I lived in the US.)
You ask whether I'm a member of any Left organizations, and the answer is that, yes, I participate (as a member) in the Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly. Obviously, it is a small group, with a few hundred members on paper, about a third of whom participate in its' quarterly assemblies. So, like all anti-capitalist organizations in Canada and the United States, it remains quite marginal to working-class politics and has only a very limited capacity to influence debates on the broader activist Left in Toronto. I'm not sure it would be too fruitful for me to go on and on about its problems, however. I will say this: it is better than what it replaced, that is to say, it is a step forward for Toronto's Left.
In solidarity,
Steve.
Reply this comment
Re: Re: There is no 'The Left'
By Davidson, Carl at Sep 20, 2011 16:02 PM
Better to segment the business community into productive vs speculative capital, then 'high-road' vs. 'low-road' The strategy then is a popular front vs finance capital, with the working class at the core, along with base communities, but with a few high road allies.
For instance, in Pennsylvania, the Steelworkers joined with the governor and a Spanish firm, Gamesa, a state-of-the-art producer of wind turbines. Together they reopened three closed plants, two to make the turbines, one to make the blades. Gamesa agree not to oppose union elections, so the 1000 new jobs created building the machiery of green manufacturing anbd clean energy are all USW now. In doing this, this bloc opposed the old practice where plants were shut down and gutted, the the capital used to buy oil futures for speculation in oil futures. The last owner said. 'I'm in business to make money, not steel.' That's low-road finance capital, and our main enemy at the moment. Gamesa is a tactical ally in that battle. That doesn't mean we can't also develop green energy startups as worker and community owned startups. The USW is exploring that option with the Mondragon coops.
Without an electoral component to your strategy, or at least an unstated one, you fail to find ways to break up the neoliberal hegemony's use of the state apparatus. You leave them unchallenged in that sphere, save for the direct battles you'll have with police in other spheres. The Tea Party, for example, is making good use of its posts to spread its influence into some sectors of the working class. We can't cede that battleground to them. Breaking up hegemony best includes a component to desantify it and strip its authority from within as well as from without.
I picked the Dems and elections as a pivot because, practically speaking, that's roughly how the US left divides among itself when in comes to developing common plans. By avoiding the question altogether, you put yourself in the first grouping. Of course in Canada, with a parlimentary system, you have more rational election options than we do. Our limitations are the most backward in the industrial world.
Reply this comment
Let's consider an example
By Emersberger, Joe at Sep 15, 2011 16:19 PM
You wrote
“…the Left must aim to replace both the profit-motivated private sector economy and the bureaucratically administered public sector economy, in favor of a community-based, democratic and egalitarian post-capitalist economic democracy. This means that we must admit the obvious: that publicly owned enterprises and public services offered by the capitalist welfare state do not meet this standard by any stretch of the imagination.”
Let’s consider the concrete example of one publicly owned enterprise in Canada – where both you and I are from- the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
If there is a movement out there seriously pushing to reform it I am (shamefully) not aware of it. What prevents people from organizing for the following reforms to the CBC:
-
Greatly expanding its board of directors and making 1/3 of members elected by the general public rather than appointed by the government, another 1/3 chosen by lot from among the public, 1/3 elected by CBC workers.
-
Eliminating any reliance on advertising revenue
Seems to me reforms along these lines would be very much worth fighting for and yet (to my knowledge) they aren’t. I think the Left would get up in arms about a serious attempt to privatize the CBC outright – but not for ways to make it vastly better and more accountable to its audience and its workers. Why is that? Can this really be explained by saying Leftists too uncritically embrace “the state”?Reply this comment
Re: Let's consider an example
By D'Arcy, Steve at Sep 20, 2011 01:57 AM
The reform you propose would create a type of partial worker/community control over the CBC. In my way of thinking, it would not really be a fully 'statist' type of institution, any longer, in the sense that it would essentially have been brought under community control, to some possibly significant extent (although, given that you only refer to the Board of Directors, saying nothing about the actual forms of management, etc., I would need to know more before I gave an opinion on how much effective worker/community control there would actually be in this scenario). Of course, it would still be subject to various distortions, both because it would remain partly funded by the state and hence partly beholden to the government of the day, and because the extent of its democratic control would be limited by the fact that it would still be embedded in a market economy and competing with ordinary capitalist firms for 'market share,' and so on (in addition to the limitation implied by your reference to the Board of Directors, but not management, as I said).
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking about how the Left might react to such a proposal, as compared to how it might react to the proposal to privatize it. In any case, as you yourself note, such an attempt to bring the CBC under (partial) worker/community control has not been attempted, and is not widely discussed or proposed. I guess I would want to suggest that the Left needs to put much more emphasis on the contrast between community control versus either market regulation or bureaucratic administration, and less of a near-exclusive emphasis on the contrast between 'public ownership' and private ownership, because it is crucial to revive the notion that the Left is about the assertion of community control by means of self-organization and horizontal democracy, not about 'nationalization' and the creation of bureaucratic 'public enterprises' that are no more controlled by workers and communities than Wal-Mart or General Motors. I hope these comments are responsive to your question.
In solidarity,
Steve.
Reply this comment
Re: Re: Let's consider an example
By Emersberger, Joe at Sep 20, 2011 03:57 AM
Thanks for the reply Steve:
You worte
"I'm not exactly sure what you're asking about how the Left might react to such a proposal, as compared to how it might react to the proposal to privatize it. In any case, as you yourself note, such an attempt to bring the CBC under (partial) worker/community control has not been attempted, and is not widely discussed or proposed. "
Some anarchists speak in vague terms about the "state" being fundamentally reactionary and that any attempt to wrench state power from elites is either doomed or even a sign of treachery. Hence I posed a concrete example of reforms to a state institution to see if you considered it "statist". To my great relief, you did not. I agree that my proposal could be made better - as you suggest - and would be subject to limitations of like other positive proposal that falls short of a massive long term overhaul of society.
I think that a vague anti-state attitude can be as couterproductive as one that declares victory just beause something has been nationalized.
I think there are many reasons the left is stuck fighting defensive battles rather than offensive ones (for reforms like the ones I suggested and countless others I'm sure we could all think of). Lack of vision is one reason, faulty vision is another, but I think there are many others.
?
You wrote
"I guess I would want to suggest that the Left needs to put much more emphasis on the contrast between community control versus either market regulation or bureaucratic administration, and less of a near-exclusive emphasis on the contrast between 'public ownership' and private ownership, because it is crucial to revive the notion that the Left is about the assertion of community control by means of self-organization and horizontal democracy, not about 'nationalization' and the creation of bureaucratic 'public enterprises' that are no more controlled by workers and communities than Wal-Mart or General Motors. I hope these comments are responsive to your question."
I agree completely and yes, you did address my question (and concern).
Reply this comment
new tactic
By Tatsuo, Miyachi at Sep 15, 2011 10:56 AM
1.There are only two method to change capitalist society. One is to take over the means of production occupied by bourgeois class. The latter is to refuse to work under capitalist society. The former is fundamental concept of Marxist, and it achieved in Russian revolution 1917. The latter has only supplement of the former as community building. Below is that the latter become more realistic when bourgeois revolutions Are completed,development of capitalist matures as real tactics of revolution The period form 19 to 20C were bourgeois revolution. The distinctive feature is that under feudal system capitalist class emerged and then became political forces, finally took over political power from feudal system representatives. It began in England and spread to France, but their productions were inevitably emerging worker class who spread as political revolution force and spread its forces finally achieved proletariat revolution. According this idea of permanent revolution. In period of bourgeois revolution, Proletariat must adjust the political environment. According to Marx’s permanent revolution, Lenin success in proletariat revolution in which bourgeois change occurred. It succeded in Rusia but in other countries, it defeated.Within bourgeios system Proletariat were given as supplemental position,ahd this system became stability was post-war period. Thus enviromnet of political arrangement radiccaly chnaged compared with Marx,or Lenin’s period. Tactics of using bourgeis revolution and gaining political power was not to be accepted.
2. Today, tactics of permanent revolution lost its ground, How doe means Russian revolution and its collapse? Lessons from Russian revolution results from analyzing the degeneration of proletariat dictatorship. Various factors existed, in today, we must be clear to abolish commodity and money due to dictatorship of proletariat.
3. If Marx said, emerging money from commodities results from instinctively Unconscious collective action of actors who are ruled by will of commodity , To abolish commodities and money is to stop this process. But this instinctive Unconscious collective action cannot abolish from Human wills, So We must start to make a detour which cann make unnecesarry to this Unconscious collective action . Thus to exploit capital, it could acheive by proletariat,their conscious will and political power,but these unconscious collecitve action would be unable by human will,other word, political will.If so,it become clear that NEP’s Inevitability and meaning of NEP under proletaliat as cultural revolution.NEP was to overcome economical deadrock which resulted from war communism and exploit farmers. Thus NEP was trying to save revolution by revival of commodity production.But in that time govermnet saw it tactics of retreat from revolution.So if economical revival was acieved,to abolish money is premise. Today, NEP was not proved retreat from revolution rather the tactics inevitable to lead social revolution avoiding to intervene farmers.Later Lenin knew it, but already he lost powers.
3.Marx; he proved in Capital money is the collective social product which is produced by unconsicious collecive action of commodity holder.But he continued to think to abolish money and commodity due to social
revolution.young Marx aruged that the more political society become ,the less peope only understand the social problem within the political term.To grasp social problem, one must understand the social relations.This differenciation berween political spirit and social sprit needs characteristic analysis. and Marx said that political revolution with social spirit is needed, and political spirit with potical spirit is to be failed.
4.Let start with social understanding.When we want to resolve the problem of social relation, human political spirit cannot go,in other word,by human will may not go. Young Marx considered social revolution is needed by ploretaliat dictator.ButÅ@its programe was different from later Marx.To abolish commodiry and money is impossible by political will,But to abolish capital is possible for human’s will. For example, in Revolution 1917,leftist could abolish capital but could not abolish commodities and money. So, we must start with this stance.Usual alienation revolution theory seeks weakness of capitalist society is alienated labor ,so they aim to liberliation from alienated laborÅBThis idea is latter method bcause of aim at worker’s suject constraction.But this process is limited within immediate production process, and led to trade uninionism. Now,we mind reificatio theory(Versachlung)as a forom of self-alienation,we could not challenge the refication due to alienated state.Refication means that things (Sach)rule peoaple’ mind (reverse is usual)and the thigs that are produced by people unconsciously,so toÅ@resist these things,human’s will can’t go.
The latter line, ie.Å@to refuse work under capitalist may imagine strike or sabotage but its line must continue. Rather,we could difine it as Alternative lives.If workers refuse work under capitalist, and try to live, It is for the time being defined as Workers collecitve. If this area will spread,and invade into capital’s area, capitalists will become unnecessary.Historically, the reverse occured.But it will look away.The cause of failure Usual worker’s collectine,or self-management is its limited aim for example,work for survival and not open to global society,If we can these experience to means of social revolution,Its meaning will change.
5.If we will inherit proletariat dictatorship,Å@Firstly,we overcome democacy,and make clear the perspective. This relate the high political lebel of the people’smovements already overcoming maximum of programe by each leftsist parties. First,to make clear the perspective social revolution,and practrically by people’s movements to answer to abolish commedity and money. Thidly,to form the cultral Fotheory is needes.To form cultural theory,Å@new forms of cultural konoledge. Usual parties oranizaiton of people’s firstly by subject to party’s program,then organize workers by paphret,publishing, and so on .This type of oragization is Stalin’s type,which proved differnt from Lenin’s. Today,such organinization can’t go.
6.permanent revolutuion; It lost meaningless as tactics of revolution,but with historical perspective,term of contiuative revolution becomes
meaning.Revolution began with Ruussia,after it, many revolutions occured and sevral result were produced. In this sense,we live in a global transitional period.And correspondent political counsciousness is produced. From our perspective,difined current society
as global transitional with Russia revolitionary ,then, in many academic,there meny Marxists argued thead two ecnomics of contra dictal systems between caipitalst abd socalism and socialism finatry.a This view is capital collapsed and finary socislidm will ein.This line many comunist was peace movement including to use of congless, whicih Japan commnist party adopt.and this line also collpsed.Comparef witht Our world revolution ,international dictator of prolatarit lead to armed struggle.and it ended by arresting leaders.
If our tactics of labor to refuse is adopted, Politics must be chnaged.New area within capitalist, The differencin Strategy and tactics are resolves.Mass movemet result from the movement that organize in the level maximam demand.
Reply this comment