Showdown

On one side we have governments and corporate elites. Their shared agenda is what it has always been. They universally seek to protect and enlarge their advantages over the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. Their shared means are two-fold. First, they want to rewrite the rules of international exchange to tilt even more toward their own aggrandizement. This is called corporate globalization. Second, they want to steadily erode popular protections and rights won in long-standing struggle around the globe. They want to assault affirmative action, immigrant rights, welfare programs, and broader social spending. They want to entrench new methods of repression. They call  all this patriotism. Beyond this broad consensus, however, elites are split.

Since 9/11 the most central and powerful elite sector has felt that it could dramatically enlarge its control by concocting a war on terrorism. This overwhelmingly U.S.-based contingent of the world's elites is seeking to scare and cajole publics all over the planet, hoping to propel all kinds of otherwise impossible redistribution and repression. Bush Blair and Co. now seem to think that turning the clock back a hundred years to reinstate brute force in international relations promises them even more control and power. Bombing Iraq to bones and then colonially occupying it is not the climax of their intentions but instead only a stepping stone to more war and colonization to come. Next stop Iran, Syria, Korea, Venezuela – especially Venezuela -- Colombia, and perhaps even China. They intend perpetual war in pursuit of perpetual power. They seek a spiral of violence whose very logic will propel those who control most of the world’s weapons into ruling most of the world. Bush becomes Caesar.

Others at the top of the pile of detritus that rules the planet are perfectly content with business as it had been the past couple of decades. They want some tweaks here and there, but they think that seeking overt empire risks too great a dissident reaction and/or they fear that too much of the benefit may accrue to a too narrow a sector at the top. They worry Washington will benefit, but not Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Thus French, German, and Russian elites  rail against war in Iraq – but Chirac is not simultaneously rushing to reverse his racist assaults on immigrants, Schroeder is not calling off his incursions against German social supports for the poor, and Putin is not denouncing his war in Chechnya--much less will any of them sincerely advocate justice plus equitable redistribution at home, now or anytime soon.

Against the haves who want more wealth and power but who aren’t quite sure of the best path to pursue it, stands our growing world-spanning movement of movements. The shared agenda of our movements is no war in Iraq, reverse corporate globalization, and more justice for all. Our shared means are to utilize a wide range of disobedience extending from day to day organizing to teach-ins and rallies, to disseminating information by drama and media, to marching, to civil disobedience, and beyond. But our side of the great struggle also has divisions. Among us there are different ways of understanding what we are doing, as well as differences in approach.

Regarding understanding, the big variation is that some of us think we are only trying to win various proximate gains such as preventing war in Iraq or blocking some new trade agreement. Others of us think instead that we are doing that, of course, but that we are also trying to ensure that these victories persist and grow by challenging and ultimately replacing the underlying institutions that create the injustices we oppose. At the level of understanding, therefore, the division in our ranks is ultimately one between reform and revolution.

At the level of methods and tactics, there is also a major divide. Are we mostly trying to make a statement and manifest the feelings that we ourselves have percolating through our nervous systems at any given moment – or are we trying to build a movement aimed at winning massive change over the longer haul?

In the first case, as situations unfold we make decisions about what to do by consulting primarily our own feelings: how angry are we, how much do we wish to do this or that action based on our mood and desires and in light of what is called for from us and how we will look and feel in the aftermath?

In the second case, we make decisions instead by primarily consulting our best judgment as to what will enlarge our movements and best increase our insight and commitment. The second approach also has to pay attention to how we feel and what we are capable of, to be sure, but it prioritizes what is needed to win and not just to feel fine. It may sound harsh, but I do think this is a real and serious difference, even if it appears here in words a bit more stark than it often appears in practice.

In short, are we building an activist community that preserves itself against incursions from without, creating an identity for ourselves as dissidents which we protect from dissolving, sometimes even becoming more concerned about persisting unchanged in all our formulations and processes than we are concerned about growing and diversifying? Or are we developing a movement whose intention is to constantly grow and alter, and in which we must constantly adapt our personal proclivities as we attract new constituencies and incorporate new agendas? Are we eager to empower others thereby reducing our own level of power and our own impact on how things proceed, though seeing the overall power of the movement enlarge?

What next?

(1)    Success is not a single “all or nothing” affair. Of course we want to prevent war in Iraq. And of course doing so would be a world transforming, historic achievement. But, should war proceed, it would not mean that we are failing, but only that we have a little less power than we hoped to have at this point yet far more than most people were willing to even dream about just a year ago. Whether this war occurs or not, our on-going task is unchanged. We must grow larger, more conscious, more militant, more organized – to try to prevent this war and the next one, to reverse globalization, and to continually challenge and eventually replace basic defining institutions. None of this will happen overnight. But we are on a path toward all of it, and we need to realize that’s our trajectory, to take it seriously, and to work tirelessly toward it.

(2)    The anti-war demonstrations this past weekend were perhaps the largest such outpouring in modern history. Were there two million or one and half million in London? Were there two or three million in Rome? Two or three million in cities across Spain? Five hundred or seven hundred and fifty thousand in NYC? The point is, there was an incredible mobilization and, far more important, our opposition is growing very rapidly. Indeed, it is the growth rate of dissent that is utterly extraordinary and that communicates the true threat our movements represent. And this has occurred without an international organization overseeing it. And it has occurred without single organizations inside each country overseeing it. There should be no rush to impose on our emerging massively entwined but hugely diverse international movement of movements any kind of central authority or identity. Things are going well. In fact, things are going stupendously. We need more of what we have been doing, not a dramatic change in what we have been doing – except that we need to reach out even more aggressively to new and wider constituencies, and except that we need to work patiently, respecting differences, to ensure a widening comprehension and commitment.

(3)    We must not in the flush of growth set our short-term goals so high that they are unattainable, making ourselves depressed about our efforts when we inevitably don’t attain them. We must instead see what we are doing as a process. We should exult in the growth of this process and see that growth as a tremendous achievement – but as an achievement that paves the way for more to come. The growth of our opposition brings a responsibility: more growth. We should not become enchanted with our current size and breadth whether it is on a single campus, or in a town, or a city, or a country, or internationally. The trick is not to celebrate ourselves but to celebrate our potential. The task is to reach out, reach out, reach out – precisely to constituencies we think we cannot reach out to – because we can. On a campus we need to do it in the dorms and the fraternities, seeking not only the dissidents but also the footballers – yes, the athletes, by all means! Put a leaflet under every door. And then do it again. And then knock on the doors and talk. And then do that again. In our neighborhoods and workplaces, give materials to and then talk with our fellow citizens over and over. Reach out to mail deliverers, public school teachers, short order cooks, flight attendants, assemblers, truck drivers, hospital orderlies, coal miners, and even the military and police, yes even and arguably most importantly the military and the police.

On one side there is Bush, Blair, and other political masters and mullahs, plus owners and CEOs galore. On the other side we have a movement of movements – and a massive worldwide constituency that we need to reach.

If movements for social change unswervingly seek diversity, solidarity, equity, and self-management – peace and justice – and if they do it in a manner and with a tone and with tactics all of which seek to empower the weak and to meet the needs of the poor, they/we can win this struggle – and the struggle I have in mind to win, the one I think we are all in, is not just over a reform here or there – and it is not just over peace now and then -- it is a struggle over who will decide the future and who the future will serve. Showdown indeed.

We have reason to celebrate. But we must have courage. And we must have stamina. Our struggle will require much time and tremendous perseverance. But the day for the ship of equity, for the ship of self-management, for the ship of solidarity, for the ship of diversity, and for the ship of justice and peace to dock is coming. Row!

History is not over. It is, instead, ours to take.