Everybody talks about the weather

By Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

“Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t.” This 1968 poster was a response by the German Socialist Student Union to an ad campaign for weatherproof trains. The students were suggesting that like the figures pictured above, they had more important concerns than everyday things like the weather. The next year, journalist and future Red Army Faction terrorist Ulrike Meinhof would use the slogan to argue that radicals should talk about everyday life, since “the personal is political.”

For us, it just means that we should talk about the weather. It’s going to start snowing on the occupations, and the authorities want to use the weather as a weapon. They’re hoping that winter will kill the movement off, and it’s hard to deny that camping out in the middle of January would be a poor tactic.

But the weather represents a much bigger question: what will it take to make this movement last? There is great potential in what has been achieved, but there are also significant obstacles, which present themselves both inside and outside the movement. With an eye towards advancing this struggle, let’s start by trying to understand what’s happening: who is protesting, and what does it mean?

In a reflection on the riots in London this past summer, “The Prince and the Pauper,” we argued that the composition of the rioters reflected the blurred boundaries between a precarious and hyperexploited “lumpenproletariat” and the mainstream working class. What was important above all was that the spontaneous violence of the riots took place at the same time as a strike by Verizon workers across the pond, within the very industry that provided the rioters with means of communication. And though struggles were communicating with each other across the world, these two political compositions – one reflecting a disorganized population usually subjected to the worst state repression, the other reflecting the classical mode of trade-union politics – did not encounter one another.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd seems to be an in-between element, both technically and politically. Much of the energy behind it comes from the activist milieu that characterized the Seattle “anti-globalization” protests, but it also clearly draws from a wide base of working people who are now seeing the disintegration of classical forms of work alongside the social fabric that once supported them. So the Occupy movement is simultaneously the space where encounters can take place, as well as a form of struggle with the implicit objective of creating conditions in which these encounters can take hold. But who exactly is in this space?

The best information we have now is about Occupy Wall Street; though other occupations may have unique elements, this serves as a useful starting point. The composition of Occupy Wall Street is unsurprisingly heterogeneous. Age, wealth, and experience vary widely; some participants are veterans from former struggles, others are joining in for the first time; there’s a large concentration of youth, but more than 28% are over 40. You’ll find the homeless, doctoral students, and professionals of various stripes all camping out together. Despite these sharp differences, however, some common characteristics stand out. First, the vast majority is highly educated: a study by CUNY sociologist Hector R. Cordéro-Guzmán observed that over 90% reported “some college, a college degree, or a graduate degree.” Second, the great majority does not support either of the political parties. Third, and perhaps most important, the movement as a whole is overwhelmingly composed of the unemployed, underemployed, or precariously employed.

In many important ways, it’s no coincidence that this particular technical composition would choose the Occupy movement as its form of struggle. By firing workers, putting them on furlough, demanding that they work part-time, or simply forcing them to accept an early retirement, the capitalists gave them all free time. Instead of sitting at home, these workers are using this imposed free time against those capitalists who forced it upon them in the first place. The Occupy movement demonstrates how workers can creatively turn their situation against their bosses, how they can transform an imposed form of production into a weapon. It’s not so much a kind of prolonged march as it is a transformed strike, work stoppage, or collective slowdown. It’s a form of struggle that has emerged directly from the particular economic situation that capital has led us into. But not only is it a form of struggle, it’s a bridge between a multiplicity of forms, where already existing movements can cross-pollinate and new ones can be tested for the first time.

This bridging is international in character. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the struggles in Greece, and the Spanish indignados, Occupy Wall Street first emerged as yet another moment in this broader cycle of struggle. It’s significant, however, that after becoming a real movement by spreading itself across America, this form of struggle then found its way back into the hands of those who had inspired it in the first place. There is no greater illustration of the circulation of struggles today: from Puerta del Sol square in May, to the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and back to Madrid in October. But it’s not as though the same coin has passed through thousands of new hands just to return to its owner unchanged. The circulation of this struggle has added something; it returns with more experiences, a sharper perspective, a more radical edge.

But we’re not dealing with the same struggle. There’s a plurality of almost bewilderingly diverse forms of contestation. Before Occupy Wall Street, there were literally thousands of distinct struggles from Greece to the Middle East to China. What the Occupy movement has done is strategically subsume many of these preexisting struggles into a shared discursive space – providing them with a common language. In China, demonstrators have held up banners reading: “Resolutely support the American people’s mighty Wall Street Revolution!”

On October 15, protests erupted in 900 cities across the globe. Though many had already witnessed their fair share of disturbances over the past few years, it was the bold synchronicity of it all that was so unprecedented. This could have only been accomplished through a recoding of each particular struggle into a more general vernacular. Of course, all of these struggles were already implicitly – and in some cases explicitly – in touch with one another. But now, they speak the same language. Slogans reappear, symbols are shared, and practices are recycled on different continents.  Struggles all over the world are beginning to recode themselves in this idiom.

The dilemma is that while unions have expressed their support, organizations like Occupy the Hood are attempting to prioritize the sectors of the working class that are racially marginalized, and international struggles are taking up occupations as their banners, no concrete and institutional connection has been made. It could very well be that the durability and radicalization of this movement will rely on its potential as a mediating element between the the various segments of the class, their particular interests, and their traditional forms of struggle. Achieving this means going beyond a spontaneous reflection of changes in our working lives. It has to start by understanding the system underlying them.

We Are the Wage Relation

We all know how the protest represents itself. “We are the 99%,” said Occupy Wall Street, and this single slogan has spread like a prairie fire.

Only a philistine would dismiss the movement based on objections to this slogan. A quick glance at the now-famous website wearethe99percent.tumblr.com shows what it has achieved. In a society that is supposed to be hopelessly atomized, made up of alienated zombies staring at individual TV screens, ordinary people are showing solidarity with each other. The problems people describe on this website might once have been thought of as personal issues, of no concern to anyone but your spouse and your landlord. Occupy Wall Street has given us the language to understand our personal problems as a collective political struggle against the 1% who got rich from our misfortune.

At the same time, the slogan advances no analysis about how things got this way. Social inequality is shameful, to be sure, and it’s been growing steadily. But does this happen because there are bad eggs at the top? Because the good guys in government aren’t strong enough? Or is it because there’s an underlying relationship in our society that produces this inequality and ensures that it constantly increases?

It would be no improvement to quibble about percentages. (“We are the 87.3%! Down with the 5.2% and their 7.5% running dogs!”) The figures which actually demonstrate the fundamental changes in our economy leading to today’s discontentment are shown in the following graph, covering the period from 1947 to 2010, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The top line represents worker productivity, measured by output per hour. The line lagging behind is their hourly compensation, which means wages plus benefits, adjusted for inflation. The growing “wage gap” between the two lines essentially measures the change in the rate of exploitation, and it shows that exploitation has been steadily increasing. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t exploitation before the 1970s, it just means that social inequality wasn’t growing; now bigger and bigger portions of wealth are being transferred from labor to capital.

In 1865, Karl Marx engaged in a debate in the First International Working Men’s Association against a utopian socialist named John Weston. Weston argued that the wave of strikes across Europe demanding higher wages was dangerous, since if wages were increased, capitalists would simply raise commodity prices to compensate and make life more expensive for workers. Marx argued in his speeches, later published as Value, Price and Profit, that this position was based on a totally incorrect understanding of the wage. Capitalists pay a wage that ensures the worker will show up to work the next day, equivalent to the socially average collection of necessities (food, housing, entertainment) required to reproduce labor-power, or the ability to work. They don’t pay for each individual commodity the worker produces, because the central fact of capitalism is that workers produce more than the value of their daily necessities. The difference between their wages and the value of the commodities they produce is the “surplus value” that belongs to the capitalist. No other input of the production process generates more value than it costs; the exploitation of labor is the source of profit.

What Marx pointed out is that if there is an increase in the productivity of labor, but wages stay the same, struggles for higher wages have to be understood as “reactions of labour against the previous action of capital.” If capital can’t pay workers less, or work them longer hours, it has to increase the productivity of labor by disciplining workers and introducing technological innovations. This has two dramatic effects. First of all, it reduces the demand for labor, which means unemployment. Second, it means capitalists are investing more in expensive machinery than in their source of profit.

If productivity has dramatically increased, and industries across the board produce many more commodities, they need people to buy them – but that’s difficult to pull off when wages have been so low for so long. The result of rising social inequality is that capitalists are sitting on vast amounts of money, or channeling it into a luxury economy, and banks are running out of profitable investment opportunities. Workers, on the other hand, need money just to live. The solution to these problems is well known. The widespread reliance on consumer credit – a risky investment for the banks and potentially lifelong debt for the consumer – increases purchasing power beyond the wage.

Alongside the use of home equity loans and credit cards to shore up consumption is the massive student loan industry, which lends future workers the resources to develop their productive powers. In theory, these debts would be paid off by future income, assuming some kind of imminent recovery. The problem is that people graduating with enormous and unreasonable loans are not getting jobs, and as we’ve already noted, capitalism is tending towards unemployment. With the classical system of exploitation by the wage undermining itself, capital is forced to find ways to use debts to extract wealth. Ever paid an overdraft fee?

There’s also a dramatic political effect of debt: it prevents people from deserting the sinking ship of the wage system. In spite of the fact that nobody expects a job to become a lifelong career anymore, which used to be work’s way of justifying itself, they’re still forced to accept precarious work – rushing between multiple part-time jobs unrelated to their education, if they have jobs at all, and cutting every possible expense to pay off their loans.

This is just an extension of the brutal strategy of expropriation already imposed on the poorest sectors of the working class, the predatory lending that specifically targeted black and Latino women. Just as student debt established a supplementary form of exploitation, by compelling people to pay for the rest of their lives to acquire a competence they may be unable to cash in on the job, subprime mortgages practiced exploitation at the site of reproduction. Low-income workers who needed an address, a place to maintain their abilities to work and to institutionalize their social existence, found themselves struggling to pay an unmanageable debt until the bank simply took the house back to sell it again, pocketing the already-extracted payments.

It should be clear that these very visible actions by finance can’t be reduced to the greed of individual criminals. They are the violent and reckless attempts by capitalists to defend and radicalize the exploitation that took place in the wage system, in spite of the growing contradictions of that system. So we have to decouple our rhetoric from notions of corporate power and lawless bankers. It’s a relationship we’re fighting, not a bunch of guys in expensive suits.

What the 99% slogan moves us towards is a concept of class. It’s the ladder that we’re using to climb up to a class analysis. But to really develop that analysis, we’ll have to leave the ladder behind. “We are the wage relation” is not a very good slogan. It’s a shift in perspective that indicates the need for new slogans.

The 99% is a coalition built upon many different tendencies, interests, and projects. While it helps us unify our separate struggles, discover the social in the personal, and forge our different demands into a common discourse, it ultimately conceals more than it reveals. The danger is most apparent when we consider that some of the tendencies within the Occupy Movement hope to use the momentum of the struggle to enter into a profitable alliance with finance. The “professional-managerial sector,” or what has been commonly though erroneously labeled “the middle class,” is certainly part of this 99%. But it’s a peculiar part of this percentage: although it is exploited by capital like everyone else, it nevertheless occasionally profits from its own exploitation. As that layer which embodies the interests of both labor and capital, the “middle class” stands as a variable and potentially dangerous element within the movement as a whole.

The “middle class” is, in its own way, tormented by wage labor – we think of what Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba describe as “the lack of social life, the endless cigarettes, the psychic disturbances and the hemorrhoids of our ultra-modern knowledge workers.” But this layer also has a tendency to look for a way out – not by abolishing exploitation in general, but by taking a cut of the exploitation of lower-income workers. The professional-managerial liberals want to make finance work for them; their gamble is to co-opt the more exploited sectors of the proletariat, to claim to speak for the whole working class, to use reform as a means of stabilizing the wage relation rather than putting it into question.

In many ways, it’s an old strategy that goes at least as far back as the French Revolution. The Third Estate united its heterogeneous components by reconstituting itself as the nation. Everyone else – the upper clergy and the nobility – was regarded as a mere parasite idly leeching off the labors of the overwhelming majority. The dominant figures of the Third Estate – the businessmen, lawyers, and aspiring politicians – at first hoped to use the strength of the movement to advance their own distinct interests rather than those of the masses. Even some aristocrats threw in their lot with the masses in the hopes that they too could domesticate it. This was all in 1789.

But now we’re in the twenty-first century – we don’t need another French Revolution. So we have to question the strange resurgence of the language of parasitism. It’s a convenient way to reduce the objectives of the movement to nothing other than casting off the parasites in order to preserve the body. And the rhetoric of the 99% helps dissemble the very real contradictions slowly tearing apart that purportedly coherent body. The danger is all the more severe when we remember that this body is not so much American as it is international.

Beyond the divisions within the American “99%” there are global divisions. Inequality of wealth extends to the inequality between nations and suggests that the situation of the working class varies with national boundaries. In many nations workers are caught between the increasing impoverishment of agriculture and an unstable slum life structured around contingent or informal work. Farmer suicides in India are echoed by iPhone factory worker suicides in China.

The American inflection of the slogans now circulating globally is significant. It signals the decisive reentry of the United States into this international cycle of struggle; the dominant pole of capitalist accumulation can no longer distance itself from the struggles rending the rest of the world. But there is a danger that the growing significance of the American struggle will begin to blind us to the distinct characterof other struggles and the specific historical form of the wage relation in which they have found themselves. The Israelis began with a housing crisis, the Chileans attacked education, the Greeks aimed at austerity, and the Filipinos united against American imperialism. Movements in the countries of the “Third World” will have to take on a distinct set of interests and strategies precisely because their composition is already so different. So while the Occupy movement has allowed these dialects to translate, it will have to avoid the risk of obliterating its particularities. The contradiction is not between a homogeneous international majority against an equally homogeneous international minority, but between the different poles of a global wage relation that necessarily assumes different forms in different places.

Enemy of the State?

The media like to suggest that the Occupy movement is the Tea Party of the left. And maybe there are some similarities: both are socially hetereogenous, both have brought together individuals from across the country, and both have several decentralized grievances, some of which may even be the same. Where they differ most strongly, however, is their relationship to the state. While the Tea Party has strategically insinuated itself with the Republican Party in the hopes of reorienting the state itself, the Occupy movement has consistently refused to do the same with the Democratic Party. The Democrats are too politically impotent to effectively co-opt the movement, and even the unofficial demands of the occupation are well beyond anything the Democrats will ever be willing to get behind. Most significantly, the movement rejects the entire party system. The Cordéro-Guzmán survey discovered that the vast majority of those involved in Occupy Wall Street – some 70% of the respondents – identify as politically independent.

This signals a major shift in the political culture. While just a few years ago the Democrats were able to rebrand themselves as a party of opposition, change, and new hopes, they’re now widely regarded as opportunists with nothing to offer. This legitimation crisis forced open a wide vacuum on the left of the political spectrum that has been filled by the Occupy movement. But while the movement has clearly abandoned the Democratic Party, it has not yet definitively abandoned the state.

There are two tendencies that fetishize the state. The first is the typical liberal call for financial regulation – if it was the unregulated avarice of the corporations that got us into this mess, then we can resolve it by pressuring the state into regulating them more tightly. The second, paradoxically, is the opposite end of the spectrum, the “End the Fed” Ron Paul fanatics who believe that fiat currency is the root of all evil. The shared ideological assumption of both these tendencies is that the state and the market are somehow totally distinct actors with contrary interests.

So the comparison with the Tea Party should lead us to an unexpectedly important question: why is the only anti-government rhetoric to be found on the right? The paranoid notion that “big government” seeks to take away the private property of individuals is a mystified understanding of the reality that wealth really has been transferred away from middle-income Americans, and it accurately intuits that this process has been overseen by the state. We don’t have to spend a lot of time emphasizing the fact that the state not only represents the interests of the wealthy, it’s actually composed of them. Everybody knows this.

Add to this that all these processes of financialization have been administrated by the state. The bail-out was no aberration; it just confirmed who the state is here to support. Consider the telling example of student loans. Since 1965 the government has underwritten private lenders who facilitate an increasingly expensive college education, as part of the Federal Family Education Loan Program. What this means is that the ability of universities, including for-profit colleges, to radically increase tuition, and of private lenders to prey on more students, has been enabled by the government. The policy was ended in 2010, but not before making it absolutely clear in 2005 that the government was not interested in extending any support to the borrowers: student loans have become nondischargeable, leaving a generation of unemployed graduates without the option of declaring bankruptcy. The only winners are the financial corporations, which have been packaging student loans into lucrative financial products called student loan asset-backed securities. Even the most recent measures announced by the White House only make it easier for people to get into debt; they do nothing to counteract the 8.3% increase in tuition at public colleges.

In spite of the government’s visible defense of the capitalist class, the tendency on the left is to imagine that we can somehow just negotiate with the state. It’s not the first time this has been attempted. A militant labor movement confronted capital on the shop-floor during the 1920s and 1930s. Capital and the state were forced to find a way to subsume and control this threat; that strategy was called the New Deal. Under the pressure of World War II, the Communist Party entered into an alliance with the Democrats and threw in its lot with the New Deal, suppressing rank-and-file activity in the name of the “no-strike pledge.” The situation established had serious consequences after the war. The labor bureaucracy set the stage for its coming decline; they strengthened capital and paved the way not only for the Smith and Taft-Hartley Acts, the legal foundations for the purging of communists from the unions, but also for the devastating separation of the working class from the labor movement.

Recognizing that the state is an adversary, however, doesn’t mean moralistically ignoring it. It won’t wither away if we just refuse to engage with it out of principle. The lesson from our labor history is not only that alliance with political parties is treacherous, but also that meaningful reforms were won by the labor movement as a result of militant and antagonistic strategies, extending from the 1919 Seattle general strike to the 1934 San Francisco general strike. It would be the worst sectarianism to reject reforms; they alleviate suffering and advance the position of the working class. But the question is whether meaningful reforms can be achieved within the political limits of capitalism. If the political apparatus is controlled by the capitalist class, this means that those limits are not external limits that can be overcome by a stronger program. Instead, they are internal to the strategy of reform. The only way to force the capitalist class to concede reforms is to confront it with an antagonistic agent, a unified working class. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking we can convince them with our better ideas.

Today the immediate tactical questions of the movement also pose the question of the state. In a telling international exchange between the various occupations across the world, a New Yorker questioned occupiers in Frankfurt about their decision to request a permit from the police. Noting that Liberty Plaza was occupied without a permit, she asked why the Germans had asked for one, wondering if such collaboration with class enemies could have been the result of a “cultural difference.” But why not be flexible, on the lookout for openings that can be strategically exploited? Some compromises may advance the class position, allowing a movement to confront the state on a different plane. If the state is willing to give us a permit, let them make that decision and live to regret it.

The question of police permits touches more generally on the police force itself. Are they, as some protesters have chanted, part of the 99%? From the start there has been a clear tension with the police. They have made arrests, have begun infiltrating the various occupations, and will certainly be called in, as they have been in Berlin and Oakland, to violently crush the movement.

But the challenge of the police is that they genuinely are workers, and their work is to repress proletarian antagonism. This paradox is not to be taken lightly. Neither blindly defending them as fellow workers nor blindly attacking them as hated pigs will help us now. Any failure to understand their specific function is either a reformist danger or an adventurist error.

The real problem was posed in 1968 by Pier Paolo Pasolini, after the Battle of Valle Giulia, in which police and student radicals clashed violently. Pasolini, the communist filmmaker, would later write a poem declaring solidarity with the police:

At Valle Giulia, yesterday, there was a fragment
of class struggle: you, my friends, (although
in the right) were the rich,
and the policemen (although in the wrong)
were the poor…

The important point in Pasolini’s poem is not his romanticization of the police’s purported proletarian identity, but instead the question of the composition of the revolutionaries. The problem this poses is that the repressive state apparatus has greater contact with many more layers of the proletariat than the political movement. In many spectacular street confrontations the police have seemed to be the only representatives of the “traditional” working class, including people of color, allowing the reactionary media to represent the protesters as entitled college students. And there can be no doubt that the police force recruits from the underclass; it offers one of the last careers available. Though in the abstract it is possible to bring the police over to our side – the protesters in Wisconsin successfully won the support of the police – this strategy can’t be assumed as some kind of utopian reflex. The Oakland Police Department gave us a crucial reminder of the instability of Pasolini’s perspective, when the vicious and obscene violence used for years against the black community was brought down upon Occupy Oakland. The real goal of the movement should be to move past the fetishization of the police, and to forge deeper connections with excluded segments of the proletariat, surrounding the police with their neighbors alongside college students.

Whatever the composition of the police, they remain an index of the state’s experience of protest. Remember the wise words of William S. Burroughs: “a functioning police state needs no police.” The Wall Street occupation was taken far more seriously when the pepper spray came out; even more when 700 were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. The acts of violence perpetrated by police have served as indication that the protest is a threat to the state’s functioning. Determining the next steps will require careful consideration, and leadership by people of color, who have the most experience dealing with police violence.

The Roof is on Fire

Some squeamish left-liberals complain that the Occupy movement lacks organization. This is obviously ridiculous. How can the simple occupation of a park spontaneously ignite similar occupations in well over 50 American cities, incite a global protest in nearly 900 cities across the globe, and successfully link together a series of heterogeneous struggles without any form of organization? The Occupy movement is perhaps one of the most organized movements in history.

An accompanying complaint is that the occupations have not put forth demands. But it’s not at all clear that demands are a sufficient condition for social transformation. To a certain extent, as we wrote about the London riots, the refusal to make demands is a protest against the idea that the existing order could make our lives better, a refusal to speak in capital’s language. At the same time, the absence of “official,” institutional demands coexists with an incredible multiplicity of demands made by individual protesters, as the list of grievances in the first official statement indicates.

The important question is whether this organization is durable, and whether the movement’s demands put the social structure into question. No spontaneous collectivity could come together without at least an abstract set of common demands, and it would be unable reproduce itself without some kind of organizational form. But can these forms radicalize the demands so that they are oriented towards the transformation of the social reality outside of them?

The meaning and political effect of demands will depend ultimately on the organizational structure that makes them. It’s possible, for example, that even a highly desirable demand, like free healthcare, could be posed by a faction of the protestors who will make it possible to dissolve the movement into the Democratic Party. But this dynamic could just as easily work in the other direction. Take, for example, this poster produced by the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power).

The text reads, “Reforms don’t protect wages from rising prices, from the robbery of deductions. Comrades, let’s take the offensive for our objectives. Transportation, rent, school, meals – free. No taxes.” The police figure wields the scale like a baton, showing how the deductions outweigh the wage. The base of the figure is labelled: “parties – bosses – unions.”

The analysis offered by these demands is clear. Like debt today, the prices of daily necessities is a deduction from the wage, a wage which already represents exploitation. But the American reader will find two things very strange about this poster. The first is the idea of communist parties and bosses in alliance with unions; while Italy in the 1960s and 1970s had large and powerful bureaucratic unions and a reformist communist party, we have no influential left parties and our unions have barely any social power. Where it says “parties – bosses – unions,” we should write “liberals.”

The other puzzle is the final demand: “no taxes.” Isn’t this the core platform of the right, of free-market extremists? It is, of course, but this demand is a platform of the right because it is embedded in class, in the organized structure of the ruling class. No taxes for whom? The capitalist class tries to escape from taxes, to continue to redistribute wealth towards the top, and to give the state an excuse to dismantle the social gains made by labor. But if the capitalist class was subjected to a tax that even began to approach the percentage it expropriates from workers, this would render taxes on workers obsolete.

Since the tax is experienced by workers as yet another deduction from the wage, while the public programs that benefit them are on the chopping block, it seems unnecessary to allow the right to monopolize the attack on taxes. If an anti-tax platform is put forward by workersas a class, it represents a program of eliminating one deduction from the wage while charging capitalists for the maintenance of the state. The demand to tax the rich is, of course, accepted by many left-liberals. While it’s definitely a good idea to charge the capitalists, taxing the rich as the maximum program sets us up for social development by the state. The occupation movement gives us the potential toindependently develop the class.

Other demands may be more appropriate for our situation. But they will have to be put forward by an organizational structure that represents a unitary class power. And the construction of such a form of organization will have to emerge from strategies of action that produce class solidarity.

A concrete example of this kind of strategy took place in La Puente, California. Rose Gudiel, who was about to be evicted from her foreclosed home, discussed her situation at Occupy LA. Her seemingly personal story turned out to be a social one; others there had suffered a similar fate. Many of the occupiers followed her back to her home in support. A few days later over two hundred joined her as she protested in front of the mansion of OneWest’s CEO; the next day they staged a sit-in at the Pasadena branch of Fannie Mae. Faced with such widespread opposition the bank gave in and decided to modify her loan.

This was a strategy, however spontaneous, that united participants in the movement who were hit by foreclosures. It provided a conceptual language in which individuals began to recognize that their own problems are closely related to other seemingly distinct problems. Not everyone who supported Gudiel was facing eviction; they joined her in part because they recognized that their own difficulties – unemployment, debt, rising cost of living – were connected to hers. The woman who loses her home is not so different from the neighbor that lost his job.  The power of this strategy emerged from a unique kind of solidarity. For the banks to fight Guidel, they had to fight the whole movement.

A foreclosed home is an interesting site for an occupation. Among the many differences between a house and Zuccotti Park is the fact that a house has a roof. And this brings us back to the weather. Everybody’s talking about it; everybody knows that winter will force the movement to rethink its tactics. This is the politics of weather: it’s not some neutral phenomenon, but a weapon like any other. We will have to use it to our advantage before capital enlists it to crush our movement.

This won’t be the first time weather has figured prominently in a struggle. A reform banquet was scheduled by the moderate opposition to take place in Paris on February 22, 1848. Fearing an escalation of the already existing conflict, hoping to break the solidarity of the opposition, and knowing full well that the district where the meeting was to be held was a real hotbed of revolutionary activity, the forces of order cancelled the banquet the night before, undoubtedly hoping that the week’s horrible weather would work to keep the demonstrators away.

But despite the heavy clouds, cold wind, and biting rain, the protesters took to the streets anyway, enraged by this provocation, and quickly set about building barricades, looting gun shops, and throwing stones at the National Guard. While order was restored in some of the more public places, the demonstrators strategically regrouped in their labyrinthine neighborhoods. Already a challenge for the army, the winding streets, tortuous alleyways, and bewildering terrain became even more dangerous to outsiders now that it was pouring rain. So the forces of order hoped to use the weather to dissuade protesters from coming out; the protesters ended up strategically using the weather to bolster their primary points of resistance and escalate the struggle. So began the revolution of 1848 in France.

We can also use the weather to our advantage. The forces of order are hoping that winter will kill off the movement by forcing us to retreat back to our homes. We should do just that. We should strategically regroup by reoccupying foreclosed homes, squatting abandoned apartments, occupying various other buildings, transforming each and every one of these into the cells of an escalating movement. From the occupation of a public park we can shift towards reoccupying those spaces from which we have been forcibly ejected by mounting debt, unemployment, austerity measures, and cuts to social services. We can take back the public libraries, schools, lost homes, community centers, and more. The point is to constantly think of creative ways to use the weapons of our enemies against them. Let’s start with the barometers.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz. Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at UPenn. They are the editors ofViewpoint.

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As it appears here, this essay combines two of what Nappalos describes as a series of four interconneted essays addressing questions of revolutionary organization and organizational theories in use today. Published so far have been Parts I, II, and III of Towards Theory of Political organization for Our Time. What appears below is an edited amalgamation of Parts I and III.

Towards a Theory of Political Organization for Our Time: trajectories of struggle, the nature of our period, and the intermediate level

Scott Nappalos

The Nature of Our Period: looking to an autonomous working class alternative

The end of the twentieth century was a time of transition. The regime of low-intensity warfare, the dismantling of the welfare state, and neo-liberal privatization schemes ultimately was running its course[1]. The final defeats were to be dolled out across the world in the eventual collapse of finance bubbles, widespread resistance to austerity, and the implosive of the economies of Latin America[2]. Before this was all but said and done, there was the gradual and later meteoric rise and fall of social movements against neo-liberal reforms and the militarism leading to the afghan and Iraq wars. Revolutionaries played an active and disproportionate role in mobilizing the social actors in what would become the largest mobilizations of their kind.

Time has passed, and the limitations and deflation of the early 2000s anti-globalization and anti-war movements are becoming clearer to many revolutionaries. Though massive mobilizations occurred, little lasting organization was built.

This means that the militancy we witnessed in the streets had a very short shelf life, and much of the work can reasonably be said to have disappeared. Millions of people engaged in various forms of resistance to the wars, globalization, and the new forms of capital and state; however the left was not able to produce a sustained alternative that was able to engage, nurture, and develop that activity into a lasting movement against capitalism and the state. While seemingly militant direct action was relatively common, this militancy rarely led to further radicalization or the popularization of struggle. Power was built, but dissipated. The left had not developed the ability or perhaps the orientation to build movements, either mass movements or revolutionary ones.

The decline of the era of activist mobilizations was an interlude to a series of economic failures coming to a close. Capital had been able to delay escalating crises in previous decades through expansion of markets into new proletarianized workforces, seizing new assets and bringing them into the market via privatization schemes, austerity programs, and financialization of markets with new financial “products” such as derivatives, currency trading, and the like. A series of bursting bubbles eventually brought us to the brink. Though people dispute the beginning or the trajectory, we can see a continuity of bubbles from the finance scandals of the 80s and 90s, the dot-com bubble, post-September 11 accounting scandals, and the real estate bubble. Resistance both by social movements in the developing and developed worlds forced the ruling class recompositions[3], and likewise bred new resistance. The ensuing crisis has brought a new era of austerity, following previous austerities, and a culmination of decades of ruling class assaults on the basic living conditions of workers and oppressed classes across the globe.

Presently in an environment of austerity, the most politically significant and powerful mass movements in the US are movements from the right, often with organized tendencies of conscious neo-fascist forces. In an era of ruling class assaults and austerity, it has been the right that has been most successful in responding to organizing the oppressed classes. While the left is quite conscious of this, the left’s isolated position makes a serious challenge more difficult and questionable.

At the same time no major progressive mass movements provide a counterweight to the ruling class assaults, restructuring, cuts, and collaborationist mass organizations. Unions are nearing a crisis with decades of attacks on the social compact which gave the unions a stable base in the American economy. As we reach new lows for unions in terms of position and power in major industries, many unions are choosing not to organize at all and others are attempting to launch of quixotic crusade for labor-management partnership while management prepares for total liquidation of the unions. Many environmental groups actively partner with major capitalist interests, and have become support bases for green consumerism.

The institutional left has largely sought to save capitalism as was done in the Great Depression, through a combination of state intervention and a social compact between capital and institutionalized forms of social organization (unions and NGOs). Our time is however different and capital itself has evolved beyond the prior compositions. The New Deal era social welfare programs were based on a time when capitalism required a highly productive and predictable workforce, which was guaranteed by unions as mediators on the shop floor and social welfare programs in the community. No analogy exists in our time of international capital, the dismantling of the welfare state, and increasingly fractured state rule. It is unlikely that even if capital had the will to find such a solution, it would be able to solve the fundamental causes of this crisis which is not merely a lack of jobs or capital, but in fact the global organization of production and the break down of the balance of forces, both proletarian and capitalist[4].

The existing organs of the institutional left (the unions, the NGOs, and the liberal and social democratic political machinery) have not built up mass movements, but rather organizations with a service orientation towards the working and oppressed classes. Our goal is not to judge these movements merely evaluatively. As revolutionaries, we should seek to understand what potential there is for building and supporting the mass popular movements for the revolutionary transformations that can abolish capital and replace it with a classless society administered and organized by all for all. Setting aside questions of how much these institutions actually do to protect and expand life under capitalism (for which they also fail significantly); as revolutionaries who seek not just to win day-to-day struggles but also to transform the systemic causes of exploitation, we need to evaluate our role in these institutions, their role in capitalism, and the potential for transformation in mass movements.

The issue then is this. Whatever level of practice there is amongst the mass organizations is social democratic practice. Revolutionaries, for the very few who do have a level of activity in mass organizations, tend to have social democratic practice in these organizations. In actuality, this social democratic practice is probably the most advanced and progressive even compared to the tiny fractions of revolutionaries trying to build a mass practice. Revolutionary practice, because of the low level of struggle and isolation of the left from direct rank-and-file struggle, is in its infancy. There is a large gap between ideas and action, and in our time it is worth questioning the extent to which ideology does work. If radical ideology yields social democratic practice, and at times social democrats outpace radicals we should question that relationship.

Questions for existing mass organizations

We can reasonably ask questions of the existing mass organizations (to the extent they actually function as mass organizations): (1) do they organize their members, engaging them in collective activity and struggle, and (2) if so, to what ends, and (3) to the extent this does happen, how much does it facilitating conditions for revolutionary transformation or create openings for developing militants of the left committed to social transformation? We might even add, to what extent does the left presence in the NGOs, unions, and liberal political machinery translate into an advance of revolutionary practice, theory, and organization?

The overwhelming majority would answer no to the first. Instead activity is professionalized service activity, and is integrated into existing channels of struggle within the capitalist and state infrastructure. Nor do most NGOs and unions engage in collective struggle, opting instead for lobbying, attempting to elect representatives, and legalistic maneuvering which can be called struggle only in the most vague and meaningless sense. While collective struggle leverages power based on the collective strength of social classes united in action, legalistic maneuvering relies upon the skills and activity of a narrow class of professionals and decision making that stands outside the grasp of collectivities. It is possible to engage in collective pressuring of institutions of power, but this is different from believing that lobbying, candidate work, and filing lawsuits is itself collective struggle.

Due to the pitched antagonism presently towards any autonomous working class movement, there are contradictions. Some unions for example must fight for their survival in a hostile environment (particularly service sector unions), and in some instances must fight hard against bosses. Even if we’re charitable in the content of these fights, any semblance of activity and organization gets dropped following a contract period. The unions actively promote working together with the bosses, and organize workplaces for labor peace in an era of ruling class cut backs and brutal assaults. The NGOs, often funded directly by major capitalists and the state, have taken up social service functions of the state and have centralized organizing activity into a professional bureaucracy without building up popular organs of collective activity and power. This is the case even when NGOs have nominal revolutionary administrators and explicitly talk about their work in terms of building movement, or worse revolution.

To what ends?

When collective organization and struggle does occur in these institutions, to what ends do they fight? Besides largely symbolic actions (perhaps resolutions passed against wars, symbolic strikes and marches), these institutions are firmly rooted within the bounds of the left-wing of the capitalist class. There are numerous examples that are worth spending a little time reflecting on.

The boring-from-within union reform movement has a section that comes out of revolutionary politics. Most prominently Solidarity (US) is active in union reform movements across the United States, and is one of the main driving forces behind Labor Notes, the labor reform publication with associated movements and conferences. Despite 80+ years of the failure of communist-led union reform movements to produce either reformed unions or communist practice, the basic tenets of reforming the unions through running slates, electioneering, and bureaucratic reform measures is unquestioned. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which had many Solidarity organizers within, won control of the Teamsters for a period in the early 90s. Many laudable reforms were introduced, and there were strides made to increase organizing and transparency in a notoriously corrupt union. Still, from a revolutionary perspective we should ask, what was built? Where is the mass movement of Teamsters organizing combatively, and where is the revolutionary practice to emerge from this? In fact what we have is a social democratic practice of business unionism and liberal politics, but under revolutionary pretenses.

The union reform movement’s emphasis on positions of leadership, staff organizer positions, and structural reform on the system and union’s own term kept these struggles contained by the existing bureaucracies. Just as Ron Carey’s presidency was recuperated and contained, we repeat the experiences of communist reformism in the unions from another era. Walter Reuther was elected by a communist opposition on a union reform basis. Reuther would eventually become the opponent of the same opposition that led him to power, just as the union reform movement itself is an opposition to a revolutionary practice in the unions in our time[5].

Perhaps another famous example is that of Van Jones. Van Jones was once an NGO staff-cum-Maoist in the Bay Area political grouping STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) made up largely of the administrative staff of leftist led NGOs. While it is worth questioning Jones’ radicalism (he seems more like a fellow traveler passing through, than a committed revolutionary), it is worth reflecting on the activist –> ngo staff –> white house trajectory. As some have noted[6], the institutions of power are filled with people who think or thought of themselves as radicals, but who function largely to serve and protect capitalism (or at least their progressive version of it). Van Jones’ Green Capitalism is one such project, and we can look to Carl Davidson promotion of Progressives for Obama and similar reformist capitalist visions[7] as yet another.

Whatever the revolutionary ideas or credentials of these particular people, there is a strong link between these ideas (which have strong currency on the left, in spite of their ties to the most major institutions of state power and capitalism) and the institutions (NGOs, progression electoral organizations, and unions). The politics may be on the surface revolutionary, but its role in functioning is not merely reformist but actually constitutive of capitalist power relationships. These radical leaders help reinforce and expand capitalism from inside the system even from a position of supposed opposition.

Communist electioneering

We see similar dynamics at a more local grass roots level as well. There is a long history of communist electioneering, but recently there has been an emergence of Maoist-inspired politics in NGO staff. Freedom Road Socialist Organization (not the Midwest pro-Stalin split organized around the paper Fight Back) is the most characteristic organization which has a high concentration of NGO and union staff. Freedom Road has a long history of electoralism dating back to Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign[8], which members of today’s Freedom Road supported and helped organize. Recently, Freedom Road members have been instrumental in election work within NGOs including voter-turn out campaigns, endorsing Democratic Party candidates, and promoting electioneering as a revolutionary strategy both primarily and through voter organizations aiming for “new majorities”[9]. This NGO-revolutionary unity has sought to organize and rally their organizations behind sections of capitalist power[10].

Organizing Upgrade (a new media site that features NGO staff, Freedom Road members, and Maoist-inspired writings) is worth looking at for detailed insight into this new reformism-as-revolution ideology. For an in depth look at the theoretical justification for these electoralist adventures by the staff doing the work, it is definitely worth reading Organizing Upgrade’s “Fast Forum: Electoral Organizing”[11]. What is most interesting is the total conflation of mass movements and attempting to leverage either positions of power or shifts in policy. We see revolutionaries engaged in activity which objectively strengthens the electoral process, takes up positions within the power structure, and actively attempts to bring masses into the system’s means of settling disputes on its own terms. Despite the Maoist origin of this current of NGO staff, the ideology is much more clearly coming from the historical reformist communist currents such as euro-communism. This is clear for example in an interview with two organizers in Virginians for a New Majority who draw from Poulantzas who, perhaps unintentionally, became the theoretician for euro-communism’s embrace of the capitalist social democratic state in Italy and Spain a generation ago[12].

We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital[13].

In so far as membership is engaged at all politically (beyond high sounding lectures), it is to mobilize with de facto support of capitalist social and political institutions even when under a red banner.

Playing cop within the movement

The most naked display of the embrace of playing the “cop within the movement” was shown in leaked emails from NGO staff in the Bay Area during the Oscar Grant trial. Advance the Struggle, a bay area revolutionary organization, published an expose of sorts clearly demonstrating the way in which local NGO bureaucracies embraced a role of trying to work with local city and police authorities in diverting organizing and anger surrounding the police brutality in favor of “voicing one’s opinion” and “making music”[14]. The Urban Peace Movement sent an email in which it revealed that they had

…been in preliminary conversation with some of our partners an allies up to this point including the Ella Baker Center, Youth UpRising, Oakland Rising, BWOPA, The Mayor’s Office and the City of Oakland regarding these suggestions.  Let’s continue to be in dialog and hold each other close in the challenging days ahead.[15]

Note that Oakland Rising is one of the groups represented in Organizing Upgrade’s Electoral Organizing article, and the NGO staff proclaims “We don’t believe in struggle, we believe in winning”. The Urban Peace Movement staffer lays out the method that this grouping of state and NGO officials will use to contain coming agitation surrounding the immanent letting loose of Oscar Grant’s murderer. Whatever critiques there are of symbolic protest violence, and I think there are, it is not random that the response of the NGO bureaucracy is to defend the state in this instance and to consciously “inoculate” and “create avenues of expression”.

The position of NGOs constitutively within capitalism reinforcing its social relationships, hierarchies, and distribution of power pushes radicals in these directions, often in contradiction to their self-conception and their language.

The issue is not whether these institutions do some good. Humanistically they do improve humanity and this should be supported. The problem is that these institutions consistently rally behind ruling class interests, often against the working class, and are organized against the building self-activity of the class. Noticeably off the table are fighting mass organizations whose basis and activity are founded on the collective interest and activity of a class working autonomously.  There is a glaring absence of organizations working to build up a class alternative of workers acting directly and collectively to build independent class power capable of breaking with capitalism.

Why?

Whatever struggles can emerge outside of these institutions find themselves facing significant repression, cooptation, and difficulty taking an organized and sustained path. The left is generally isolated both in practice and ideologically from the oppressed classes. Whatever exceptions there are remain localized, cordoned off, and contained at this time. This is not to dismiss out of hand the crucial work occurring in various NGOs, unions, academic circles, and revolutionary organizations. It is not difficult to see what would occur without a positive social force fighting back. Still it is important to ask harder questions about why the good work has systematically been retarded, and why the bureaucratized movements are so dominant.

This situation has meant that whatever solutions and responses the revolutionary left is developing at this time is largely internal to the left, and without sufficient practice to clarify our attempts. In the recent history of North America, this has generally been the case. This severing of theory from practice has contributed to our problems moving forward, building organized revolutionary forces capable of contributing to mass movements, and developing revolutionary consciousness, practice, and catalysts.

With the unions, the social democratic trends, and NGOs lining up behind an increasingly desperate attempt to save capitalism through populist-electoralism and state-interventionist measures, the necessity of an autonomous working class alternative is pressing. There is broadly speaking a crisis in the institutionalized left and its allied radical currents. The path to an autonomous working class alternative is not merely a matter of organizing, or being proficient. There are objective forces that necessitate a strategy, and one that meets the reality of our time. The method for this is intermediate organizing, which I explore below.

Trajectories of struggle, the intermediate level, and political rapprochement

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EL: But…there will have been opportunities for the left to step in and develop a different discourse and programme, potentially?

CL: I would put it differently. I would say that we should stop thinking about ‘the left’ stepping into anything. This is – unintentionally I know, on your part – a hangover from a conception of the left as some kind of knowledgeable minority that can help the benighted majority. I think change will spring out of a variety of mobilisations in different sectors, with a new project, and we need a new left project, that’s for sure. I can’t imagine what dimensions it might have….I think a different kind of politics is going to have to emerge.

EL: And one which may have to take on an international dimension, if these are international issues?

CL: It’s bound to.

Now this interview, and what Leys says overall, isn’t worth much, in my opinion (readers can look and judge for themselves), but this bit of it brings up a topic which could use some discussion.

Leys speaks against the “condescending savior” attitude, and that’s a good and valid point. But there’s something even more basic that we need to take up first, which is just the notion that there is an entity, “the left,” which can be called upon to take some sort of action or assume some sort of stance.

People often talk about “the left” in this sense and what it should do (more commonly, perhaps, in left-liberal circles, but among more radical folks too). But what is meant by the left? The presupposition seems to be that there is some entity which has coherence ideologically/politically, and identity as a social force. It seems to me that there is no such entity.

Of course there is a loose collection of groups ranging from organizations which operate within the ambit of the Democratic Party through left-liberal NGOs, etc. over to the small groups and grouplets of the “hard left,” and a loosely identifiable demographic which might be called liberal or progressive in orientation. But this collection of groups and this relatively broad swath of the population — all of this pretty obviously lacks any real coherence and integrity, either politically or organizational. It lacks consistency and even loosely common goals and analysis.

This is an historical result. It once did make sense, in the world and in this country, to speak of the left (despite its always-present divisions) as a broadly coherent social entity. This is no longer the case, and has not been for some time.

It’s time to take cognizance of this result, to recognize where we are, and proceed on that basis, rather than maintain a pretence that things are as they once may have been.

The problem of talking about “the left” in the way that Leys does (not to pick on Leys, he’s simply a handy example) is this way of speaking ignores this historical outcome and seemingly presumes something to be in existence, whose nonexistence as an actual coherent entity is a key problem of the present – recognition of whose nonexistence, in fact, is a prerequisite to solving the problems that we face.

Perhaps it’s hyperbolic to say that the left does not exist (or “the left is dead” a la Platypus), but it’s the hyperbolic expression of a truth whose recognition is a necessity for an emancipatory politics today.

By this I do not mean “All those people who call themselves leftists are bogus, not true leftists, because a true left must to conform to such-and-such a formula.” Readers of this site will be aware that anything like this is very far from my thinking.

My point is that there is no such thing as “the left” as a contemporary social agent. It is not an entity which can as such “do” anything; it lacks sufficient coherence or even definition to have agency or to act as an entity. It is vain and misleading to call upon “the left” to “do” anything at all, and the practice of doing so principally serves as a means of avoiding the thinking, the watchfulness and inventiveness that are needed if any emancipatory politics is to emerge today.

- John Steele

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Tunisia this year, and ramified in different forms across the Arab world? Is there a comparison to be drawn between these eruptions and the mass action we saw in the Wisconsin state capitol (which has also had its echos elsewhere? Too often the response to these upsurges has been a simple affirmative hailing or, further to the left,a critical reaction based on political templates and recipes already fully formed.

In the following essay — the first of a promised two parts — Don attempts to analyze while learning.

‘Madison’ — & More

Don Hamerquist

This effort has been put together over weeks of rapidly changing events and some observations are rather dated. It is also incomplete. A concluding section on the impact of transnational capitalism on the political contexts — in Madison and in North Africa — is not finished and will be a separate piece.

On Madison…the activity has subsided – or so it seems from the outside – but I’m sure there is a lot of internal discussion about continuing possibilities and problems, opportunities seized or missed, and lessons learned or not. Not being a party to much of this, what I say will risk irrelevance and redundancy in addition to error – not so unique a problem, I suppose.

Various reports from Wisconsin and from similar activities in Ohio and Michigan note the contrast between the actual and potential energy of these mass mobilizations and their continuing commitment to objectives and approaches that can’t maintain a minimal momentum, much less build on real possibilities that have emerged within the struggle. This can be demoralizing for radicals who, looking past their initial hopes, see narrow limits on the struggle that appear to be more restrictions on the movement’s imagination than consequences of the response of the state or of capital –either repressive or incorporative. (Of course, a good argument could be made to view the trade union/parliamentary response as an incorporative tactic of a segment of capital.)

This reaction is understandable, but the pessimism it supports is not really warranted, and should not be allowed to contribute to radical inertia – perhaps inertness is a better word. These moments of explosive insurgency will always resurrect obstacles to their development that will have to be countered. But this shouldn’t obscure the main point – that a mood of rebelliousness is emerging in new places, globally and in this country, and it is showing evidence of a greater staying power.

The conception of the radical role that most of us share stresses the need to ‘recognize and record’ the actual character of the struggle. But it is easy to overemphasize one or another element when the struggle is complex and contradictory. The new possibilities can support a poorly grounded, frantic and usually short-lived optimism. Persistent shortcomings, that show the old mole still has a ways to grub, reinforce tendencies towards passivity and cynicism. But even if ‘Madison’ falls short of Badiou’s ‘…event…the sudden creation…of a myriad of new possibilities’, the changes in political context that it announces will positively impact the potentials for radical work.  Tipping points in popular moods are hard to estimate, but it is still possible that we may discover proof from ‘Madison’ that what we thought was impossible yesterday is here today. (Apologies to Brecht and acknowledgement to Khukuri).

I think it is helpful to look at Madison in terms of the Gramscian notion of ‘contradictory consciousness’, recognizing that for Gramsci, as well as us, ‘consciousness’ in its usual meaning is too restrictive a framework for the actual topic.

[The] ‘active man [sic] in the mass’; including aspects “… implicit in his activity…which unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world”; and aspects “…which he has uncritically absorbed.” (Prison Notebooks, p. 333; apologies for my excisions and the gender bias)

The “uncritically absorbed” aspects in Madison include the legalistic reformism and parliamentary cretinism that binds current resistances within the same structures and processes that created the circumstances they are opposing.

Two things are important here in my opinion: First, the changed conditions mean there are greater possibilities of success for critical challenges to that which is “uncritically absorbed”, assuming the typical paternalistic left stupidities are avoided. Second, the possibilities for major innovative mass struggles to emerge quickly out of an apparently calm terrain have been demonstrated and a further possibility, one that is rarer but more important, should also be recognized. This is the possibility for mass protest movements to move from a focus on a little more and a little better – on concessions and adjustments to power that are ‘reasonable’ – to a stance of radical intransigence that might actually effect a “practical transformation of the real world” on a meaningful scale – an autotransformation. To illustrate this possibility, I’d cite the emergence of Black Power in the movement of the sixties. This transformed an important mass reform movement – one that was arguably on the cusp of a general reform victory – into a revolutionary challenge to existing power. Something similar, although perhaps not so basic, developed with the Seattle WTO action in 1999. (The contradictions and potentials for reversals in these challenges to power become evident soon enough, but that is for a different argument.)

I say autotransform here, although the computer tells me it is not a real word, since the essential impetus towards transformation will only be discovered/created within the struggle. Revolutionaries that hope to play some role in expediting a difficult and far from automatic process must be a part of that struggle – oriented more to learn than to teach.  This entails giving much more attention to making the ambiguous and amorphous“we” that is so often invoked in these discussions, a larger and more coherent and cohesive element in the actual struggles.

General strike

In this regard I’m becoming more convinced of the usefulness of the work focus on the possibility of a general strike and am questioning my previous skepticism. In this country, the idea of general strike points toward ‘illegal’ and ‘illegitimate’ mass struggle; unless we would choose the path of classical 2^nd International German social democracy and restrict our ‘general strikes’ to the weekend – preferably Sunday so as to interfere less with shopping.

There is certainly a need for a platform from which to challenge the mind-numbingly wasteful and demobilizing parliamentary reformist tactics that are the conventional wisdom in the emerging resistance to capitalist austerity – for a radical pole in the struggle that can be identified by what its advocates do and propose to do – and not so much what they suggest others should do. The notion of a general strike can begin to project a vision based on the autonomous organization of the working class and the economically marginalized in struggles to satisfy real popular needs; a needed alternative to narrow sectoral (and ultimately reactionary) interest group notions of ‘defense of the middle class’. This offers the potential for active and creative participation to newly political forces that typically are treated as quantitative means to various political dead ends in shop worn strategies not of their making and far from their influence.

To realize its potential it is important that the concept of the general strike not be fetishized into a tactical panacaea and tossed around like an advertising slogan. However, I’d be more worried about the opposite tendency which might take the form of a reliance on changing formal postures in union structures by collecting professions of support from some of the more beleagured – and thus opportunistic – sectors. I have many memories of such approaches: lobbying for 30 for 40; for Taft Hartley repeal; for nuclear disarmament; for 30 and out; in opposition to any number of wars; for a Farmer/Labor party, God help me. ‘Successes’ in this arena seldom amount to much when it comes time to take action. To the extent the promotion of the idea of the general strike is advanced in this form, it will quickly bounce up against the low ceiling of the formal and ritualized political “general strike” that is routine in France and Italy and elsewhere. They is no closer to what is needed than the ‘working class’ election campaigns and parliamentary maneuvers to which such exercises are always linked.

‘Egypt’

Here I’d like to bridge over in a super awkward way to the different struggles which are occuring more or less simultaneously and might be generically termed, ‘Egypt’. Obviously there are important differences between ‘Egypt’ and ‘Madison’ – differences evident in the character and objectives of the struggles and, more dramatically, in the stakes that are involved for the participants. However, they certainly share one common thread – they are both maximal innovative actions that seem destined to produce tired sick minimal outcomes – at least in the short run.

I have some things to say on both what is distinctive and what is shared between these struggles that I will approach in a round about way. On the last day of February, Khukuri ran a short piece by Badiou titled, ‘The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings’… John Steele made a comment that incorporated an extended passage from a more theoretical Badiou essay on Tunisia that had appeared on Kasama earlier that month. Nate added one of his useful and provocative comments. I would recommend that people read all of this.

There are elements of Badiou’s positions in these two essays that I’m not sure about; one example is his recurring image of ‘East’ over ‘West’. Then he writes on a philosophical level well above my pay grade so I have no grounds to assume that he would agree with my clunky political uses of his arguments and concepts. Finally, and more specifically, these particular essays contain passages where I think Badiou oversimplifies and idealizes the Tunisian and Egyptian insurgencies – although I confess to wanting him to be closer to the actual truth than he probably is. For an example of this last point, consider:

There [Tahrir Square – d.h.] we find all sort of people who make up a People, every word is heard, every suggestion examined, any difficulty treated for what it is.

Next, it [the uprising – d.h.] overcomes all the substantial contradictions that the State claims to be its exclusive province since it alone is able to manage without ever surpassing them: between intellectuals and manual workers, between men and women, between poor and rich, between Muslims and Copts, between peasants and Cairo residents. (Badiou)

Despite the reservations, I very much like the way these essays combine Badiou’s conception of the characteristic features of mass insurgency in this ‘intervallic period’ with his notion of the ‘communist idea’ – or to be more accurate, with the implications he draws from in its current weakness as an underlying assumption of the struggle.

I think that a passage John S. excerpted in the Khukuri comment mentioned above is a good beginning to the discussion. Badiou argues there that we are in an extended historical interval following the revolutionary sequence which was organized around the theme of the ‘party/state. The party/state theme in his view is exhausted and attempts to revive it tend to be reactionary, but no alternative has yet emerged in the form of a mass movement with a ‘shared idea’. Consequently, when and where the real and massive power of growing popular discontent emerges as in ‘Egypt’, it is essentially negative (negative in a Hegelian sense, I would say). Therefore, “…the form of mass collective action in an intervallic period is the riot”.

Badiou is not hostile to the notion of riot. He advocates ‘empathy’ with the riot and stresses the essential productivity of its“negative power” (more Hegel?). But he argues that without the “shared idea”, which “…explicitly presents itself as an alternative”, the mass collective action remains unable to fully reach its potential capacity, “…to solve insoluble problems without the assistance of the State.”

I agree here with the short point that Nate made in the Khukuri discussion. This might be interpreted as something of a statement of historical causality where the ‘shared idea’ is the cause and the successful revolutionary movement the effect. I share Nate’s doubt that this is Badiou’s intent, since any such interpretation would seem to support the approach to communist propaganda that is a central feature of the party/state model he believes to be exhausted. Certainly any such position would be at odds with the excellent statement below:

…we should be the students of these movements, and not their stupid professors. (Badiou, Khukuri, 2/28)

My initial reaction was that this Badiou perspective was something of a mess. How can notions of mass collective action and riot coexist in the same phrase? But on reflection, I think the combination is possible when it is understood within the Gramscian contradictions that I mentioned above.  Using such a framework, we might look for both the conservative elements that have been “uncritically absorbed” (more or less) in ‘Egypt’ and ‘Madison’; and the elements that point – even if just tentatively – towards “…a practical transformation of the real world.” In conditions in both places, however, where there is not a coherent counter-hegemonic social force that is currently capable of playing a determinative role.

Comparisons

I see significant differences between ‘Egypt’ and ‘Madison’ on each side of this contradiction, and think understanding these differences can help clarify unique problems and opportunities in each context. There is a good deal that can be said in this area but I want to focus on a couple of points regarding the “uncritically absorbed” obstacles to radical advance in the respective situations. In ‘Egypt’, the essential element is a bourgeois conception of ‘democracy’ encased in a refurbished populist nationalism. (Realize that this is not saying that such conceptions are uniformly accepted in a coherent form – just that they are firmly in place and their critique faces a hard road against significant opposition before it can hope to prevail.)

In ‘Madison’, there is something a bit different, although equally bourgeois. I’d characterize it as an assumption of the moral rightness of an unequal status quo organized and expressed in various forms and layers of relative privilege  The revolutionary alternative ‘idea’ for both ‘Egypt’ and ‘Madison’ must be radically egalitarian and internationalist, but the difference in context means it will emerge through distinctive processes and face different challenges.

But let’s begin with a very basic similarity. Short of actual revolution, the global economic and political circumstances in which both develop offer little political and, perhaps more important, economic space for any major popular gains. Genuine national independence and autonomous development in post colonial societies such as Egypt is not possible. The relative privileges of sectors of the metropolitan working classes will continue to erode, undermining the rotten political compacts in the imperial core despite any complaints of the benighted beneficiaries. So to the distinctions:

In ‘Egypt’, the ‘uncritically absorbed’ bourgeois liberty elements relate to ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ that have been denied for generations by corrupt, autocratic post-nationalist states. Their essential absence meant there were few initial shock absorbers to deflect and delay insurgencies. With few buffers preventing them from moving quickly to challenge existing power, the movement quickly emerged as ‘riot’, when and where it encountered significant resistance. However, the lack of a broad experience with the essentially fraudulent nature of bourgeois right also made the Egyptian movement susceptible to structural concessions and reformist tendencies that promise ‘democratic’ solutions to real problems. As these approaches are shown to be bogus, or even just ineffective – and the political and economic context means that this will not take that long – the element of ‘riot ’will rapidly regenerate.

It remains to be seen how much momentum a regenerated movement can gain… and how quickly. The diverging responses to ‘concessions’ from different class segments and the smarter ways that repressive tactics will be employed in the future in ‘Egypt’ will repeatedly ‘fork’ the movement, as John Robb puts it. And other centrifugal pressures, such as tendencies towards authoritarian warlordism, are likely to be exacerbated and to provide new range of challenges that complicate the fundamental oppositions around the class question.

However, this all will involve an increased polarization and a much more categorical opposition that will have little tolerance for attempts to impose ‘national unity’ by edict. Of course, attempts will still be made in this direction. Consider the following which I can’t resist including even though it relates to Libya and has a sketchy relationship to ‘Egypt’ and the main argument: (and thank you again, ‘Angry Arab’)

I just saw it on Al-Arabiyyah TV (the news station of King Fahd’s brother-in-law, run by his son, Prince `Azzuz who squandered millions of his people’s wealth on wooing Yasmeen Bleeth).  The US/Saudi-selected Libyan opposition leader, the lousy Mustafa `Abdul-Jalil has just said–KID YOU NOT–that “dismay with decisions made in the national interest is forbidden.”

In ‘Madison’ the ‘uncritically absorbed’ elements were pastel versions of the palingenetic mythology that posits an increasing erosion of a democratic and representative social order that allegedlywas a good place for the ‘middle class’ in the not so distant past. (I’m always amused at the aspects of those discussions which point to the ‘good’ factory jobs with ‘living family wages and some benefits’. I remember seeing those jobs in the context of William Blake’s “Satanic Mills”, as did many of those who lived hard and died early in their shadow. Perhaps we were just soft and privileged.)

In any case, rather than advancing new progressive goals to be attained, ‘Madison’ presents itself as a defensive struggle aimed at restoring an idealized past. This is heavily influenced by the widespread perception that, if the stakes of this struggle are raised significantly, a good deal more could be lost than what is already on the table. These features combine into a different, but equally significant, buffer against rapid radicalization of the movement. However, there is no easy way that its goals can be universalized in the ways that were (and still are) possible in Egypt. That would demand a more categorical break with sectoral interests, and it would require a posture that was not defensive.

Even when a general realization develops that no significant concessions are in the cards, in ‘Madison’ this overwhelming emphasis on social strata that still have quite a bit more to lose will delay a real challenge to power. But this delay will not be indefinite. So while the insurgency in ‘Madison’ might not have developed quite to Badiou’s point of ‘riot’- to the undisguised relief of official society including its component that is also out there ‘protesting’ – the potential was and is there, quite close to the surface.

Along with the potential is the obligation on us to understand that, absent the semi-progressive clothing of oppressed people’s anti-imperialist nationalism that exists in N. Africa and the Middle East, ‘riot’ in ‘Madison raises a potential for large sections of the populist anger to take a xenophobic and quasi-fascist direction. When that happens, ‘riot’ will certainly exhibit much more of a dual character, the ‘bad’ side of which will contribute to the elements of danger and fear of reaction and fascism that can be brokered into some degree of popular support for the global structures of repressive social democracy. Of course it could also kill us in the process.

Global capital

This brings me to the situation with global capital; with the political economic context in which these mass breaks are occurring, and its impacts on the range of possibilities we should anticipate. This is a big topic and I will get further into it is a separate piece starting from some points that Nick Paretsky has raised about my view of the defining features and the trajectory of transnational capital: In correspondence I had said that:

The emerging business model of transnational capital prioritizes the privatization and financialization of national wealth and revenue and its absorption into global capital and labor flows.

Nick responded:

Don says that financialization is the emerging business model for transnational capital; but I think that financialization was the emerging model during the seventies and that it may now be in its final stages, in a purer form (finance completely detached from the “real economy”).

A renewal and re-ascendance of industrial/productive capital might draw crucial support from a social-democratic working class movement as part of a Global Social Democracy mode of rule. The result would not be a “reformed” capitalism, a new “social equilibrium” (to use Don’s terminology), with mass incorporation of the working class into capitalism. Rather, secular crisis tendencies would persist, perhaps accelerate, with the fuller development of new science-based industries with production processes described by Marx in the famous Grundrisse passage.

I’m leaving Nick’s statement to indicate the topics so that anyone else who is interested can jump in without waiting for what I may write.

No related posts.

Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new

William K Carroll

Abstract

This article argues that humanity’s prospects in the 21st century hinge on the creation of a counter-hegemonic historical bloc within which practices and social visions capable of fashioning a post-capitalist economic democracy begin to flourish. The organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism creates openings for such a breakthrough; the deepening ecological crisis renders such a breakthrough an urgent necessity. The analytical challenge pursued here is to discern, in the contemporary conjuncture, elements of practice that might weld the present to an alternative future. How can new movement practices and sensibilities can be pulled into a historical bloc – an ensemble of social relations and human agency for democratic socialism; how might that bloc move on the terrain of civil society, and vis-à-vis states, opening spaces for practices that prefigure a post-capitalist world? These questions are too big for a single paper; the objective here is to show how a Gramscian problematic furnishes us with an analytical and strategic lens that can illuminate practical answers.

Introduction

Since the global financial meltdown of 2008 and the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change (COP15) to reach a meaningful accord, it has become increasingly clear that a profound economic and ecological crisis is facing humanity. Crisis, as the ancient Chinese proverb says, presents a combination of threat and opportunity. It is a time of danger yet also of new possibilities, as received wisdoms and unreflective practices become open to challenge. The question for activists is how to mitigate the danger while seizing upon the openings. This is a matter both of ends – of articulating an alternative in which human beings and ecosystems might thrive – and of identifying practical means to those ends. Amid the crisis, we hope to find, within the present, elements of a more hopeful future, and to forge alliances that can leverage neoliberal capitalism’s failure into a different kind of world.

This paper brings a Gramscian problematic to these efforts. It draws upon recent activist and academic insights regarding crisis, movements and counter-hegemony, in order to discern criteria for making choices in current struggles – choices capable of effectively challenging power relations and bringing about not simply a different, but a better future.

At the outset, a word of clarification is needed. I will be employing ‘counterhegemony’ in the neo-Gramscian sense, referring to broad transformative strategies and practices for replacing the rule of capital with a democratic socialist way of life. This project is distinct from two rival approaches on the left, namely social-democratic electoralism and anarchistic anti-hegemony. Viewed from a Gramscian vantage point, the former relies too heavily on the liberal democratic state as an instrument of change, and underplays the importance of struggles within civil society and vis-à-vis the means of production (Pontusson 1980). The  latter (as in Day 2006, 2007) retreats from creative engagement with state-centred politics altogether, substituting a lifestyle politics of ‘living differently’ (Carroll 2006; McKay 2009). The objective here is not to debate these different visions and strategies for the left, but to demonstrate the value of neo-Gramscian thinking for activists and movements in the early 21st century.

In search of the new

In the most general terms and at the highest level of abstraction, the question of counter-hegemony evokes the dialectic of bringing the new into existence, against the sedimented practices and relations that, as Marx (1852) wrote, weigh ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ Yet it is from existing practices and relations that the new is fabricated, which is to say that the future is already contained as potential within the present. ‘Fermenting in the process of the real itself’ is what Ernst Bloch called ‘the concrete forward dream: anticipating elements are a component of reality itself’ (1986:197).

Counter-hegemony, as distinct from defensive forms of subaltern resistance, strives to shape those ‘anticipating elements’, so that they may become lasting features of social life. For counter-hegemony, the challenge is to seek out in the present the preconditions for a post-capitalist future and to develop political strategy based on an analysis of those immanent possibilities (Ollman 2003). Gramsci captured this dialectic with the metaphor of welding the present to the future:

How can the present be welded to the future, so that while satisfying the urgent necessities of the one we may work effectively to create and
‘anticipate’ the other (1977: 65)?

The new is no mere ‘fashion’, the latter being a preferred trope of modernity (Blumer 1969), closely integrated with consumer-capitalist accumulation strategies, and thus with reproducing the status quo. Often the new reworks the old, with radical effects. Viewed dialectically, the new preserves yet transforms extant reality, as in the incorporation of indigenous ways as alternatives to neoliberal practices that have grown decidedly old (cf. Bahn 2009).

This dialectic between what already exists and what might be constructed out of that is integral to any project of purposeful socio-political change. Movements, as Melucci (1989) has emphasized, are laboratories for social invention. They are carriers of the ‘new means and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships’ that Williams (1977: 123) identified with cultural emergence; ‘emergent publics’ that create possibilities for a more democratic way of life (Angus 2001). Movements succeed in creating change when political and cultural opportunity structures open up (Tarrow 1998). But which movements, which practices and which alignments of movements and practices, in short which ‘new combinations’ (Dyer-Witheford 2001) might already carry the new – and under what contemporary conditions might they have efficacy? These are more concrete questions of counter-hegemony. Theorists of agency and structure note that,
although social structures are sustained solely through the practices that reproduce them, such practices, precisely because they are structurally reproductive, do not produce much that is new; only transformative practices have that capacity (Bhaskar 1989; Fraser 1995). Indeed, a well-established hegemonic structure naturalizes social cleavages and contradictions, securing the active, agentic consent of subalterns to their subordination (De Leon, Desai and Tugal 2009: 216; Joseph 2002).

Organic crisis

Gramsci, following Marx and anticipating Bourdieu, recognized crisis as a necessary condition for undoing the doxa that is perhaps the most salient feature of well-entrenched hegemony. In Gramsci’s formulation, organic crisis is a crucial element in creating the new. In this kind of crisis, the structures and practices that constitute and reproduce a hegemonic order fall into chronic and visible disrepair, creating a new terrain of political and cultural contention, and the possibility (but only the possibility) of social transformation. Such a situation entails a crisis of authority:

If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e., is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies…. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (1971: 275-6).

Gramsci asks whether the interregnum will ‘be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old’ (276), as in an elite-engineered passive revolution that reconstitutes social relations within new forms of a continuing capitalist order (Morton 2007: 150-1). For him, the key instance was the Risorgimento that brought to Italy a deeply problematic political unification, over the heads of the masses. In our time, neoliberalism played a similar role in the crisis of Fordism and the welfare state which by the late 1970s registered in falling rates of profit and rising state deficits. What was ‘new’ in neoliberalism – a vision reaching back to the late 18th century liberal utopia of perfect competition overseen by a night watchman state – was, historically speaking, archaic. The market-centred practices of neoliberalism did not create the rational, self-equilibrating social order celebrated by neoclassical economics. Capitalism’s tendencies toward uneven development – temporally, sectorally, spatially – and toward polarized incomes were exacerbated by deregulation. In the 1980s, neoliberal austerity succeeded in boosting rates of profit, but by the mid-1990s it was only through financialization and other forms of accumulation by dispossession that high profits demanded by shareholder capitalism could be sustained. Yet these very measures set the table for global crisis.

Parameters of hegemony

This article is mainly about movements from below and counter-hegemony, but these are internally related to movements from above, and hegemony. To view structure as the contingent sedimentation of past practice implies that movements move not in relation to some permanent fixture, as in a reified conception of the state, but in relation to each other (Magnusson 1997). ‘Social movements emanate from and are grounded in the collective skilled activity of both dominant and subaltern groups’ (Nilsen 2009: 115). A movement from above strives to maintain or modify a dominant structure in ways that reproduce and/or extend the power of dominant groups and their hegemonic position within the social formation (ibid 115), and in this sense, neoliberalism has been as much movement as policy paradigm. Across three and a half decades, the neoliberal movement has been expertly assembled and led by organic intellectuals that include in their ranks politicians, academics, journalists and business leaders, through densely networked movement organizations both global (e.g., the Mont Pelerin Society, the World Economic Forum) and local (e.g., the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies; cf Carroll and Shaw 2001; Carroll 2007; Carroll and Sapinski 2010). This is what Stephen Gill (1995) means when he refers to neoliberalism’s transnational historical bloc.

Elsewhere (Carroll 2006), I have specified some parameters of hegemony that are central to early 21st century capitalism. At a deep level of the social formation, and most saliently in the global North, these include

• postmodern fragmentation: the commodification of everyday life fragments collective identities and inculcates a de-politicizing fascination with style and spectacle;
• the neoliberalization of political-economic relations: deregulation of markets insulates a protected economic realm from popular will while
  accumulation by dispossession privatizes the public interest and promotes possessive individualism;
• capitalist globalization: the densification of transnational economic relations augments the structural power of capital (Gill and Law 1989) and promotes a project of global governance within a neoliberal framework.

John Agnew has identified a parameter of hegemony in this era that includes elements of the first and last of these, namely the globalization of Americanism as a way of life. In Agnew’s formulation (which is inspired by Gramsci’s essay on Americanism and Fordism), the hegemony of marketplace society, achieved within the United States in the first two thirds of the 20th century, has been projected into the world at large setting the political basis for a globalization that has had two salient aspects (2005: 100).

On the one hand, US-based institutions have had the power to enact globally a dominant vision of ‘the good society.’ On the other hand, this vision has been one of ever-increasing mass consumption. The hegemony of marketplace society is therefore what lies at the center of contemporary world society (2005: 8).

As a parameter of hegemony, globalization of Americanism is distinct from notions of American hegemony that centre upon the imperial American state. It is the American way of life, not the fading lustre of American state power, that gained global hegemony in the late 20th century.

The current crisis

Although these economic, political and cultural forms have provided a basis for an emergent, transnational hegemony in the post-Cold War era, the hegemony on offer has been a troubled one –fragile and tentative, thin on the ground as it were, in great part because the neoliberal historical bloc is far less inclusive than its Fordist-Keynesian predecessor (Cox 1987). We can understand the current organic crisis as a cumulative decline in the capacity of hegemonic forms to promote accumulation and secure popular consent. In the case of American hegemony, ever-increasing mass consumption on a global scale requires Americanism’s epicentre to borrow funds and import vast quantities of goods to fuel domestic spending, in a pattern of asymmetrical accumulation that is probably unsustainable (Agnew 2005: 192-218). In economic terms, as David McNally (2009) has shown, neoliberalism’s crisis was already evident in the Asian financial meltdown of 1997.

The ensuing decade inflated a bubble economy that burst in the autumn of 2008, putting deregulatory logic into question and also questioning basic premises of Americanism, as endlessly expanding, credit-driven consumption came unstuck in global capitalism’s heartland. But this organic crisis has involved more than economic failings and associated crisis management strategies such as the corporate bail-outs and stimulus spending packages of 2008-2010. Integral to it have been the challenges from below, from the Zapatistas’ declaration of war against neoliberalism in 1994 through the 1999 Battle of Seattle and the various incarnations of Social Forums to recent general strikes in southern Europe in resistance to the new wave of austerity – in each instance, a critical, collective response to the privations and indignities that are neoliberalism’s legacy. Such campaigns and ’wars of position’ challenge the hegemony of neoliberal globalization, but they also work against the ideological effects of the commodification of everyday life, gesturing however incompletely to another possible world.

Crucially, the economic crisis of neoliberal globalization has been accompanied and amplified by a deepening ecological crisis. In the 20th century, capitalism ‘scaled up’ from a network of local economies centred in a few regions of the global north (articulated via colonialism with precapitalist modes of production on the periphery) to a system of transnational production and consumption in which most of the world’s burgeoning population is ensnared. So did the ecological externalities of accumulation, so that by the late 20th century capitalism’s footprint, evident in species extinction, the thinning of the ozone layer, and global warming, was outgrowing the biosphere. What James O’Connor (1990) has called the second contradiction of capitalism sharpened, as capitalist appropriation of nature cumulatively eroded capital’s own conditions for expanded reproduction (cf Kovel 2006). The economic and ecological moments of crisis are interconnected, but they do not follow a unitary logic. As John Foster (2010) reminds us, in contrast to ecological crisis, economic crises are of their nature cyclical. Short of an exit from capitalism, economic crises eventually resolve themselves, on the backs of workers and other subordinates, as conditions for robust accumulation are re-established or invented; a case in point being neoliberalism’s own success in disassembling many of the impediments to accumulation that Fordist regulation and the Keynesian welfare state eventually presented. The deepening ecological crisis, on the other hand, has no bottom, in the sense of an anticipated ‘recovery’. Without timely and radical intervention, ecological overshoot portends only a downward spiral, giving new meaning to the choice Rosa Luxemburg posed between humanity’s exit from capitalism and its likely descent into barbarism (Angus 2010). The global character of ecological crisis, and the growing consciousness of that global character, add a new element to the organic crisis, and to the project of counter-hegemony.

Indeed, the organic crisis of our time needs to be understood as an assemblage of economic, ecological, and socio-political moments. It has both a political-economic face and a political-ecological one. But it is the ecological race against time that makes this crisis unprecedented in its challenges and in the morbidity of its symptoms.

Counter-hegemony in theory

Against this backdrop of organic crisis, I want to consider the political challenge for counter-hegemony, first in a rather formulaic manner, then more concretely.

Let us begin with Gramsci’s own formulation of how power works, which recognizes that within advanced capitalism the combination of force and
persuasion that comprises hegemonic rule entails a panoply of relations both within the state and throughout civil society that serve to organize subaltern
consent. Consent is never total or seamless. Subalternity typically involves episodic, fragmented resistance and a contradictory consciousness whose common sense includes elements of ’good sense’, and of the new. However, the lack of coherence among various oppressed and subordinated groups enables bourgeois ideology to dominate (Ives 2004: 24). From this general diagnosis of subalternity, which I believe is fully relevant today, Gramsci envisages the constitution of a collective will encompassing a wide range of identities and democratic aspirations, posing an alternative social vision, a socialist way of life – what we now call counterhegemony.

A cultural-material formation of this sort is comprised of several facets:

• The coming-into-being of a collective will requires a process of catharsis in which ‘structure ceases to be an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive; and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives’ (Gramsci 1971: 367). This remarkable passage describes the transition from an economic-corporate phase in which subordinates define their interests narrowly and in immediately instrumental terms, to an ethico-political project that can bring formerly disparate identities onto common ground. As Ives (2004: 107) and Sousa Santos (2006) have argued, this involves the work of translation across various cultural domains and contexts, involving organic intellectuals – activists, organizers, ‘permanent persuaders’ (Gramsci 1971: 10) whose practice is rooted in subordinate experiences and resistances.2
• Importantly, a counter-hegemonic formation includes both class forces directly articulated with the process of accumulation and popular democratic currents — movements and identities that arise through practices centred in civil society (Urry 1981).3 Without the former, and in particular, broad elements of the working class, a radical challenge to capitalism is strategically unsustainable; without the latter, the collective will fails to encompass the diversity of needs and aspirations that partially constitute Bloch’s ‘concrete forward dream’. The welding together of disparate class and popular-democratic interests is not a mechanical assemblage of convenience; rather, ‘the process of coming together to form a specifically hegemonic force involves each group being partly transformed’, as it takes on elements of the identity and agenda of other groups and comes to adopt the interest of others as its own (Purcell 2009: 296-7). The famous slogan from Seattle 1999, ‘Teamsters and turtles, united at last!’ exemplifies this reciprocal process in forming a counter-hegemonic collective will.
• war of position/war of manoeuvre: in capitalist societies, civil society comprises a strategically important ‘arena in which capitalist hegemony is secured but also where subaltern classes forge alliances and articulate alternative hegemonic projects’ (Munck 2006: 330). Through a war of position, which does not exclude struggles directed at the state (Simon 1982: 75), the balance of power in civil society can be shifted and space won for radical alternatives, unifying dissenting groups into a system of alliances capable of contesting bourgeois hegemony. This prepares subordinate groups for self-governance by creating post-capitalist sensibilities and values, practical democratic capacities, and a belief in the possibility of a radically transformed future (Carroll and Ratner 2010). As Staggenborg and Lecomte (2009) found recently, within particular social movements wars of position and of manoeuvre can be mutually reinforcing processes: in the Montreal women’s movement community, winning space for an alternative community has created capacity for successful collective campaigns, and vice versa.
• The national and the inter/transnational. For Gramsci (1971: 240), writing in the 1930s, ‘the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is “national”.’ Since mid-20th century, capitalist globalization has created more extensive bases for both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic movements to contend within a global civil society that is itself constantly constructed as contested terrain by diverse social groupings (Munck 2006: 330; Carroll 2007). Nevertheless, one should not impute a ‘singularly transnational logic’ to contemporary struggles for hegemony; national, regional and local dynamics continue to shape the conduct of these struggles (Morton 2007: 199).
• Welding the present to the future. Prefiguration was central to Gramsci’s conception of counter-hegemonic politics.4 For Gramsci, inspired by the factory councils’ movement to democratize workplaces, prefiguration ‘meant that politics would be integrated into the everyday social existence of people struggling to change the world, so that the elitism, authoritarianism, and impersonal style typical of bureaucracy could be more effectively combated’ (Boggs, 1976: 100). Indeed, a war of position includes a process of moral and intellectual reform that not only renovates common sense into good sense, but incrementally erodes the distinctions between leaders and led, creating the basis for participatory democracy in a widening sphere of activities (Simon 1982).
• Catharsis, prefiguration, and the articulation of class and populardemocratic forces, of the national and the international, and of wars of position and manoeuvre, add up to the construction of a historical bloc, around a counter-hegemonic project. Such a bloc combines leadership in civil society with ‘leadership in the sphere of production’ (Simon, 1982: 86).

Its development expresses movement from subalternity to a counter-hegemonic collective will.

This schematic account gives us a normative-strategic template for considering emergent themes and practices in movement politics and their implication for counter-hegemony today. How might contemporary developments in counter-hegemony yield insights on welding present to future in our times? In the space at hand, I will telegraph seven interrelated themes that stand out in recent work by movement theorists, intellectual historicans and social researchers. In reflecting on these themes we can gain perspective on how new sensibilities and practices – often reworked from old sensibilities and practices – provide resources of hope (Williams 1989) for counter-hegemonic politics, and 21st century socialism.

Counter-hegemony in practice: what’s new?

Increased transnationality

Just as hegemony has been increasingly organized on a transnational basis – through the globalization of Americanism, the construction of global governance institutions, the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and so on (Soederberg 2006; Carroll 2010) – counter-hegemony has also taken on transnational features that go beyond the classic organization of left parties into internationals. What Sousa Santos (2006) terms the rise of a global left is evident in specific movement-based campaigns, such as the successful international effort in 1998 to defeat the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); in initiatives such as the World Social Forum, to contest the terrain of global civil society; and in the growth of transnational movement organizations and of a ‘democratic globalization network’, counterpoised to neoliberalism’s transnational historical bloc, that address issues of North-South solidarity and coordination (Smith 2008:24).

As I have suggested elsewhere (Carroll 2007), an incipient war of position is at work here – a bloc of oppositional forces to neoliberal globalization encompassing a wide range of movements and identities and that is ‘global in nature, transcending traditional national boundaries’ (Butko 2006: 101). These moments of resistance and transborder activism do not yet combine to form a coherent historical bloc around a counter-hegemonic project. Rather, as Marie-Josée Massicotte suggests, ‘we are witnessing the emergence and re-making of political imaginaries…, which often lead to valuable localized actions as well as greater transborder solidarity’ (2009: 424). Indeed, Gramsci’s adage that while the line of development is international, the origin point is national, still has currency. Much of the energy of anti-capitalist politics is centred within what Raymond Williams (1989) called militant particularisms – localized struggles that, ‘left to themselves … are easily dominated by the power of capital to coordinate accumulation across universal but fragmented space’ (Harvey 1996: 32). Catharsis, in this context, takes on a spatial character. The scaling up of militant particularisms requires ‘alliances across interrelated scales to unite a diverse range of social groupings and thereby spatialize a Gramscian war of position to the global scale’ (Karriem 2009: 324).

Such alliances, however, must be grounded in local conditions and aspirations. Eli Friedman’s (2009) case study of two affiliated movement organizations in Hong Kong and mainland China, respectively, illustrates the limits of transnational activism that radiates from advanced capitalism to exert external pressure on behalf of subalterns in the global South. Friedman recounts how a campaign by the Hong Kong-based group of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior to empower Chinese mainland workers producing goods for Hong Kong Disneyland failed due to the lack of local mobilization by workers themselves. Yet the same group, through its support for its ally, the mainland-based migrant workers’ association, has helped facilitate self-organization on the shop floor. In the former case, well-intentioned practices of solidarity reproduced a paternalism that failed to inspire local collective action; in the latter, workers taking direct action on their own behalf, with external support, led to ‘psychological empowerment’ and movement mobilization (Friedman 2009: 212). As a rule, ‘the more such solidarity work involves grassroots initiatives and participation, the greater is the likelihood that workers from different countries will learn from each other’, enabling transnational counter-hegemony to gain a foothold (Rahmon and Langford 2010: 63).

The political ecology of counter-hegemony

In a context of biospheric crisis, the recent turn to Gramsci in political ecology has great pertinence to our analysis (Mann 2009; Kebede 2005). As a ‘new front’ in the analysis of hegemony and counter-hegemony, Gramscian political ecology understands the production of nature as a co-evolution of humans and their environments pointing to ‘the conditions of possibility for radical change that might emerge through interactions with nature’ (Ekers et al 2009: 288). From this perspective, bourgeois hegemony is achieved though the reification of particular spaces and natures (Wainwright 2005), as in the common sense of a consumerism founded upon industrialized agriculture, automobility and suburban sprawl, and north-south relations that displace ecological costs onto the periphery (Rice 2007).

The turn to Gramsci enables us to see the environment as ‘a socio-natural entity … a particular terrain over which hegemony is consolidated and contested’ (Ekers et al 2009: 289). In an era of deepening ecological crisis and of rising consciousness of that crisis, social groups aspiring to hegemony must demonstrate their ability ‘to pose solutions to a variety of issues related to nature and the environment’ (Ekers et al 2009: 289).

This insight reconfigures the meaning of counter-hegemony around a vision of ecosocialism. To forge an alternative hegemony, counter-hegemonic movements must go beyond resisting the capitalist growth machine, into prefiguration: ‘they have to develop alternative forms of production and reproduction or alternative conceptions of nature-society relations’ (Karriem 2009: 318). Abdurazack Karriem’s study of the Brazilian landless movement (MST) gives us a case in point.  The war of position that MST has waged through a combination of land occupations and popular education has not only moved from local sites to transnational arenas; it has had a strong prefigurative thrust. Besides the ethicopolitical claim that food and food sovereignty are human rights, the MST has promoted ecological alternatives to corporate agriculture, in alliance with the environmental and indigenous movements – all aspects of ‘a long, slow process of practical and ideological struggle for an alternative hegemony’ (2009: 324) that refuses the regime of ‘sustainable degradation’ on offer from transnational neoliberalism (Luke 2006).

Reclaiming the Commons

MST exemplifies a third theme in contemporary counter-hegemonic politics. In response to neoliberalism’s dynamic of accumulation by dispossession,
multifarious movements and campaigns have arisen to protect and reclaim the commons from privatization and commodification (Harvey 2005b 166-172).

Initially reactive and protective, harkening back to much earlier resistances to enclosure (Linebaugh 2008), indigenous struggles for land, agrarian struggles for seeds, crops and biodiversity, political campaigns against privatization and the like open a “political dynamic of social action across the whole spectrum of civil society” (Harvey, 2005b: 166, 168, 172) that often (as with MST) combines struggles for self-determination with ecological sustainability (Klein 2001: 88). In providing a communal way of regulating activity without the state or market, ‘the commons’ presents a rich counter-hegemonic template (Wall 2005), but raises challenges as to how it will articulate with ‘whatever states also claim authority over the resource or territory in question’ (McCarthy 2005: 24).

Notwithstanding such issues, the vision of a global commons ‘defended by a multiplicity of state and non-state actors in the name of human survival’ (Watts 2010:22 ) – visible beyond the cabal of hegemonic state, inter-state and NGO actors that dominated formal negotiations at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change (COP15) – offers a radical imaginary for emerging counter-hegemonic sensibilities worldwide. This strong image can be applied not only to political-economic matters, but to ideological struggles against enclosure of the moral field within economistic and legal-bureaucratic frameworks (Smith 1997).

On matters ranging from biopiracy and intellectual property rights to the idea of a global commons, ‘“the commons” can work as a unifying signifier – of resistance, community, collective action and common values’ (Holder and Flessas 2008:299). Indeed, as Bakker (2007) shows in her study of struggles against water privatization in the global south, whereas human rights discourse frames issues individualistically and in ways compatible with commodification, the ‘commons’, in championing a collective property right creates space for radical strategies of ecological democracy to decommodify public services, resource management, etc. A contemporary reworking of a very old theme, anti-enclosure offers, in response to the ‘dictatorship of no alternative’ (Unger 2009), the germ of a left response to neoliberalism beyond ‘narrow (and conservative) social democracy’ (Watts 2010:24). The key is to find, or create, the ‘organic link’ between reclaiming the commons and opposing capital’s domination of labour (Harvey 2005a:203), thereby connecting the struggle to decommodify land, intellectual property, public utilities and the like with the struggle to decommodify labour.

Mediatization and the struggle to democratize communication

Many of the issues at stake in the politics surrounding the form and content of communications media comprise a special instance of the struggle to reclaim the commons. The world of the early 21st century is densely networked by virtue of an unprecedented apparatus of communications, which has opened new possibilities both for bourgeois hegemony and for oppositional politics. Media now comprise a vast field of cultural struggle.

In a media-saturated world, capitalist organization of communication creates a multifaceted democratic deficit, evident for instance in the failure of mainstream media to create a democratic public sphere, the centralization of power in media corporations, inequality in media access, homogenization of media content, the undermining of communities through commodification, and the corporate enclosure of knowledge. ‘Media activism’ can be read as a critical response that takes different forms depending on location in the media field. Media democrats struggle to limit corporate power and commercial logic, to democratize media workplaces and labour processes, to develop alternative media, and to foster more literate and critical readers of media texts.

When we look at media activism ‘on the ground’ we find many of the rudiments of counter-hegemonic politics. Activists see the struggle to democratize communication as a multi-frontal war of position that needs to be waged in conjunction with other movements. Communicative democracy comprises a social vision in which the voices of citizens and communities carry into a vibrant and diverse public sphere. In pursuing this social vision on several fronts including those of state, corporate media and lifeworld, media democrats build a new nexus among movements, a place where strategies might converge across issue areas and movement identities (Hackett and Carroll, 2006; Downing 2001).

As a political emergent, media activism underlines the importance to counter-hegemony of reclaiming or creating the means and forms of communication necessary for subaltern groups to find their voices and to organize, both locally and translocally. The formation of organic intellectuals is substantially caught up in this struggle to break the dominant class’s monopoly within the intellectual field (Thomas 2009: 418-19).

Here, the new includes a mediatized politics of everyday life, as in proliferation of alternative media (often via the internet; Atton 2009) and the diffusion of culture jamming and other practices of media literacy, yet also a politics, focused upon state and capital, that presses for limits upon corporate power and for an opening of access to the means of communication (Hackett and Carroll 2006). The politics of media democratization is necessarily multi-frontal and intersectional. All progressive-democratic movements have an stake in these struggles; the extent to which movements take up democratic communication as a general interest is a measure their catharsis from fractured subalternities (with their characteristic foci upon single issues and narrow constituencies) to an ethicopolitical collective will.

The question of autonomy

Autonomy from old-left parties and unions, and from overweening regulatory states, was cited by NSM theorists of the 1970s and 1980s as a criterial attribute of the emergent movements of late modernity. In Jean Cohen’s (1985) classic, and rather Americanized treatment, these movements were viewed as practitioners  of a ‘self-limiting’ identity politics that rejected large-scale projects. This stylization was never unproblematic as an empirical account, and several decades later, in the wake of neoliberalism’s global triumph and in the midst of its global crisis, the appeal of self-limiting politics is embarrassingly limited. Yet autonomy remains a lasting legacy of the so-called NSMs.

Autonomy informs aspects of contemporary counter-hegemonic politics at the level of everyday life, as shown in Gwyn Williams’s (2008) ethnography of
alterglobalization activism in the Larzac plateau of southern France. Famous since their dismantling of a McDonald’s restaurant in 1999 and for the slogan, ‘the world is not a commodity,’ these activists resist the hegemony of global market society ‘by cultivating themselves as “autonomous” political subjects and organizing a movement considered to be an “autonomous” counter-power’ (G. William 2008: 63).

This has meant not only maintaining independence from political parties and functioning in a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘horizontal’ manner but cultivating in themselves and others an autonomy that partly frees them from neoliberal ideology and the power of consumer society. Here, prefiguration is grounded in a moral imperative to ‘become aware’ and to act ‘coherently’ (2008:72) by living the ideals to which one aspires.5

Becoming aware is both an ongoing aspect of autonomous self-development and a movement-building praxis instantiated in a range of pedagogical activities – forums, information evenings and media actions – designed to provoke public debate and to persuade people join the cause (G. Williams 2008:72-3). Although activists can never be fully autonomous from the forms of power to which they are subject, the struggle for autonomy is a crucial element in challenging hegemony and in bringing into existence what Gramsci (1971: 327) called a ‘new conception of the world … which manifests itself in action.’6

As a sensibility that holds both visionary and strategic implications, autonomy has roots not only in NSM theory, but in historical materialism. Harry Cleaver, who introduced the notion of autonomist Marxism into English-language academia in the 1970s (Cleaver 2001; Wright 2008:113), predicated it on an agency-centred analysis of the working class, defining autonomy as

the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them – to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self defined ‘leadership’ and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future (Cleaver 1993).

The key question is how autonomy and other emergent features of activism might figure in a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. Mark Purcell, drawing on Laclau and Mouffe (1985), suggests that relations between elements of such a formation be conceptualized in terms of equivalence, ‘a concept that evokes relations of simultaneous interdependence and autonomy, obligation and freedom, unity and multiplicity, sameness and difference’ (2009: 301). The movements and interests that comprise the bloc do not dissolve completely into it, but they move together and lean into one another.

Intersectionality

In sorting out the nuances of counter-hegemonic unity-in-diversity, what stands out as the complement to autonomy as a cultural emergent is the concern for intersectionality. Arriving in the 1990s as a way of rescuing feminism from the culde-sac of identity politics, intersectionality transformed feminist praxis itself.

Beginning with the critique in the 1980s, by lesbian feminists and women of colour, of the exclusionary practices in bourgeois, white, heteronormative feminism, intersectional praxis has unfolded, roughly speaking, in stages. First, a group-centred framework recognized that a more inclusive politics must give voice to the qualitatively distinct experiences of subalternity arising from intersections of class, gender, sexuality, race and other social positionings (Choo and Ferree 2010). A process-centred approach then moved from positional categories to ‘dynamic forces’ – racialization, economic exploitation, gendering – and highlighted the distinctive operations of power across institutional fields (Choo and Ferree 2010: 134), as ‘multiple relations and structures of power interact in context-specific ways’ (Eschle 2004: 119; Walby 2009). In this formulation, intersectionality becomes an operating principle for building a historical bloc and conducting a multi-frontal war of position, guided by an understanding of intersecting relations of domination and subalternity and of the need for dialogical efforts to mediate a multiplicity of identities, communities, and contexts (Rice 2010).

Spike Peterson has recently brought post-structural insights to an intersectional perspective that recognizes gender as a governing code which, as it privileges masculinity – not necessarily men – also naturalizes the power relations that constitute multiple forms of exploitation and subordination (Peterson 2009). As a hegemonic code, gender interlinks and reifies diverse hierarchies by feminizing those who are subordinated – devaluing ‘not only women but also sexually, racially, culturally, and economically marginalized men (e.g., “lazy migrants,” “primitive natives,” “effeminate gays”)’ (2009:35). The binary code is self-validating in practice, as ‘common sense becomes a two-sided justification of hierarchy: not only are the subordinated devalorized by feminization but the qualities they lack are typically just what the dominating (masculinized) group has to offer’ (ibid:36).

Peterson’s decisive break from identity politics, deepens our understanding of how hegemony works through a confluence of discourse and material relations. By implication, she clarifies an aspect of the cathartic passage from the economic-corporate to the ethico-political:

…we are not simply talking about male-female relations or promoting the status of ‘women.’ We are first addressing the exploitation of all whose identities, labor, and livelihoods are devalued by being feminized and, second, advancing the critical project of theorizing intersections of devalorization that link hierarchies of race/ethnicity, class, gender/sexuality, and nation (2009:38).

Intersectional analysis is a resource in the struggle for dignity that has been highlighted in Zapatismo and other autonomous struggles. Yet it presses toward a unity-in-diversity that challenges both postmodern fragmentation and the single-issue sectionalism prevalent in many social movements, including mainstream environmentalism. Recognizing the deep connections between environmental sustainability and social reproduction, intersectionality is a tool for political ecology. It asks how the ‘intersection of specific economic, social, and environmental conditions’ might disable an individual’s or community’s ability to survive (Di Chiro 2008:286) – a question that motivates the search for alternatives within which individuals, communities and ecosystems may thrive.

New organizational forms

A final theme in recent thinking calls attention to new organizational forms within which a historical bloc for a just and sustainable alternative to the current world order might take shape. Different projects ‘imply different forms of organisation, which thus require different types of organic intellectuals, whose role it is to elaborate such organisation in both ideological and practical terms’ (Thomas 2009: 416). The activists of the Larzac, struggling for autonomy both in everyday life and in publicly oriented actions, exemplify this relation between activism and organization. The same might be said of the Zapatistas, whose campaigns in Mexico and in cyberspace activated national and global civil society while constructing new forms of local autonomous governance that validate indigenous tradition and identity within a contemporary context (Morton 2007: 191; Bahn 2009: 551).

Yet such autonomism, if pursued singularly, undercuts the possibilities for creating a counter-hegemonic unity in diversity. The Zapatista slogan ‘one no, many yeses’ creates a unity around a shared rejection of transnational neoliberal capitalism that resists

any fixed meaning of the collective subject that undertakes activism. The central dilemma for activist life becomes whether the “many yeses” arising in its wake can exert counter-hegemonic power in a long-term war of position (Gibson 2008: 256).

Beyond autonomy, beyond pluralism, but not in opposition to them, is the cathartic transition from the many, the sectional, to a ‘political unity across cultural differences’ (Sanbonmatsu, 2004:130). The question is how to construct ‘forms of political agency that allow for the necessary diversity of a global counter-hegemony while allowing for the necessary commonality of a global counter-hegemony’ (Stephen 2009: 494).

Gramsci characterized the historical bloc that might issue from such formative efforts in terms of the ‘modern prince’ – ‘the fusion of a new type of political party and oppositional culture that would gather together intellectuals (organisers) and the masses in a new political and intellectual practice, “organising the organisers”’ (Thomas 2009: 437). In considering prospects for what Gill (2000) and Sanbonmatsu (2004) have termed a ‘postmodern prince’, adequate to the political task of exiting from today’s globalized and crisis-ridden capitalism, the World Social Forum has been said to represent ‘in organizational terms, the most consistent manifestation of counter-hegemonic globalization’ (Sousa Santos 2008:249). The WSF contests the claim that capitalism is here to stay while it provincializes conventional, northern-based left thinking through practices of intercultural dialogue. Convened first in 2001 and proliferating subsequently into
regional and national social forums, the Forum has created an ‘open space’ for discussion and a transnational site for organizing concrete collective practices.

In its scale and breadth, the WSF is, indeed, new. Moreover, it has spurred a process of intellectual and moral reform that begins to provide a cultural
infrastructure for global counter-hegemony. Within WSF discussions it has become clear that ‘the global left is intercultural’ (Sousa Santos 2008: 261); hence the importance of mutual translation, an emergent practice that preserves autonomy while creating common ground. A related contribution that the WSF has made to the global left is its horizontal, network politics, which enables the work of translation and is further elaborated through that work (ibid).

Yet the shape of the network is worth pondering, and on this question of form, the WSF’s counter-hegemonic capacities to wage a war of position are doubtful (Gibson 2008; Stephen 2009; Worth and Buckley 2009).7 Gramsci’s modern prince anticipated a relatively centralized network encompassing a dialectical relation between masses and leaders – rather distinct from the rhizomic networks, celebrated by the postmodern left (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Hardt and Negri 2004), which lack any central basis for coordination. Organizationally, a certain degree of centrality is needed to ensure that ‘the movement will be able to move when the time is right’ (Purcell 2009: 304). Alternatively, it is difficult to know how a rhizomic movement ‘will be able to move at all, much less take coordinated and strategic action that shifting political opportunities demand’ (ibid 305). On this point, Peter Evans is correct to claim that ‘the eventual construction of counter- hegemonic globalization will almost certainly combine ‘rhizomic’ networks with traditional ‘trees’” (2008: 291), the latter branching out authoritatively from well defined centres of decision-making.

Although the WSF’s rhizomic structure has limited its capacity to serve as much more than an open space for building cultural infrastructure and launching episodic campaigns, an even more formidable constraint resides in the neoliberal organization of global governance, in which a Westphalian state system coexists with international apparatuses like the World Trade Organization (WTO), in a context of globalizing capitalism. The debacle that was COP15 (December 2009) illustrates the toxicity of this combination, wherein the old system of state sovereignty is dying but a new global political order cannot yet be born. The Westphalian ‘partitioning of political space along territorial lines insulates extra-and non-territorial powers from the reach of justice,’ (Fraser 2005:81) offering increased scope to transnational capital.8

Progressive politics framed at the ‘global’ level are circumscribed by the lack of a global state that might be democratically transformed; hence they take the form of a cultural war of position within global civil society (eg, the WSF) punctuated by occasional defensive wars of maneuver against such threats as the MAI (defeated 1998), WTO (stalled in 1999) and Free Trade Area of the Americas (defeated in 2005). Instructively, defensive campaigns of this sort are successful only to the extent that the collective action of movements meshes with actions taken by progressive state actors. The WSF’s open space and the defensive campaigns that have significantly sapped neoliberalism’s momentum cannot in themselves create a global post-capitalist formation; they only gesture in that direction. Resplendent in its slogan that another world is possible, the WSF instantiates the not-yet, the concrete forward dream of a global left – a counter-hegemonic collective will – not yet the reality. For now, it is at the national level that system change is feasible (though inherently dependent on transnational alignments of movements and progressive state actors) –confirming the continuing validity of Gramsci’s adage that the ‘point of departure’ for radical, transformative politics is national.

The hotbed of such politics is contemporary Latin America, where Jerry Harris (2007: 1) has discerned a developing ‘democratic dialectic’ of state and civil society. Flowing strongly but not exclusively from the labouring classes, the new movements of the 21st century seek ‘a novel relation to the formal political realm by fundamentally reworking relations of power’ (Stahler-Sholk et al 2007: 6). Across much of Latin America, the project is ‘to reappropriate democracy from a restricted and statist form by means of an expanded and participatory model’ (Harris 2007: 14). Many of these movements maintain autonomy from parties and governments, acting as a counterbalance that pressures the state to withstand the demands of global capitalism (ibid 15). Where the left has formed the government, particularly in Venezuela and Bolivia, radical forces within the state have united with social movements, giving the state-civil society dialectic ‘a revolutionary character and expanded potential that is lacking in countries where autonomist power remains isolated from the government’ (Harris 2007: 19).

This dialectic animates Marta Harnecker’s (2010) recent analysis of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Noting the transition within the left from workerism to an understanding that ‘the new political instrument must respect the plurality of the new subject and take on the defense of all discriminated social sectors’ (2010:5), she emphasizes that at the heart of the revolution, inscribed in Venezuela’s constitution, is a conception of protagonist democracy – a commitment to popular participation in public affairs that brings with it individual and collective development (2010:37). Conjoined to protagonism in this counter-hegemonic project is a ‘socialist conception of decentralization’ that reworks Marx’s (1871) comments on the Paris Commune – a decentralization ‘imbued with a spirit of solidarity’, which strengthens communities, deepens democracy, and collaborates with the central state as it coordinates society-wide plans (2010:51).

These elements of autonomism and of the commons take concrete shape in Venezuela’s co-operatives, now a key economic form for state decentralization and mass participation, and in Community Councils that enact democratic planning for human needs at the local level (Magdoff and Foster 2010; Spronk and Webber 2010). Here we find the ‘organic link’ mentioned earlier, between the emancipation of labour and reclaiming the commons: between building worker control in production and building communal control within places. In the historical bloc prefigured by these forms, activists become producers rather than protesters demanding more services, and their alternative economic activity produces new social relations that concretize a social vision of sustainable human development (Harris 2007: 22). Under these nationally-specific conditions, facilitated greatly by emergent intergovernmental alliances such as ALBA (Kellogg 2007), the prospects for 21st century socialism – though circumscribed by legacies of political cronyism and corruption, of charismatic populism as a form of leadership that may reinforce subalternity, and of ecologically problematic ‘extractivism’ as a means of generating wealth (Gudynas 2010) – are real.

The exemplars, however, are not restricted to Latin America. In her ethnographic account of building participatory democracy in Kerala, India, Michelle Williams observes many strikingly similar socio-political inventions. There, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) has developed a ‘counter-hegemonic generative politics that attempts to establish new institutions and practices that extend the role of civil society over the state and the economy’ (2008:9). Operating both arborescently and rhizomically, partly through a succession of coalition governments but especially through organic ties to Kerala’s vibrant popular sector, the CPI(M) has coordinated innovative initiatives in participatory democracy and decentralized, self-reliant development. The provisional result of this decades-long war of position is an empowered civil society that enjoys one of the highest levels of human development and quality of life in the majority world. As in Latin America, participatory democracy in Kerala confirms the viability of counter-hegemonic generative politics, but it also suggests that such politics requires ‘a new type of political party, one that is not afraid to empower civil society’ (M. Williams 2008:156).

It is these fragile prospects that have propelled the recent effort to create a ‘Fifth Socialist International’ – a space where ‘socialist-oriented parties, movements and trends of thought’ will be able to propose a common strategy for the struggle against imperialism, for transitioning from capitalism to socialism and for international economic integration within a framework of solidarity.9 Proposed in November 2009 by Hugo Chavez at a meeting of more than 50 parties and movement organizations from 31 countries, the Fifth International may yet grow to complement the World Social Forum, but as a tree-like, arborescent formation, whose project is more action-oriented and whose roots in organized parties and left governments enable coordinated action in a global field, something the WSF seems incapable of delivering. Significantly, and in contrast to the template for party-based internationals, Chavez’s proposal emphasized the inclusion of both movement organizations and parties, and noted that a new international would have to function “without impositions” and would have to respect diversity (Janicke 2009). Subsequent elaboration of the idea (Albert 2010) and debate about its assumptions and entailments (Waterman 2010) help clarify the possibilities for such a new left formation, based in autonomist and intersectional practice and a thoroughgoing provincialization of Europe. Whether these possibilities will be actualized is at the time of writing entirely undecided.

Conclusions

Our point of departure was a meditation on the new, and the problem of welding present to future. Counter-hegemony, however, requires more than a cataloguing of what is new; welding the present to the future has an indelibly programmatic aspect, registered in such notions as war of position and historical bloc. As an instrument of transformative politics, the ‘programmatic imagination’ marks a direction and defines the next steps in taking up that trajectory (Unger 2009:xxi). Marking a direction sketches the contours of a counter-hegemonic project – a possible alternative – but it is the choice of next steps that enables motion. In this respect, ‘the possible that counts is not the fanciful horizon of possibilities but the adjacent possible: what is accessible with the materials at hand, deployed in the pursuit of movement in the desired direction’ (Unger 2009:xxi; emphasis added).

The emergent themes and practices discussed above help mark a direction: toward a post-capitalist way of life that is broadly eco-socialist, that subordinates the state to an empowered civil society structured around practices of participatory democracy, dialogical communicative relations, and autonomous governance of the commons, both physical and informational; that combines, within an ethicopolitical framework, the autonomy of individuals with an abiding appreciation of the intersecting relations that implicate us in each other’s lives. This direction implies a process of democratic globalization that reaches beyond the Westphalian division of humanity into (potentially) warring factions – and well beyond the current state of the world.

The elements of the new I have sketched also illuminate the next steps, toward the adjacent possible. Transnational networks and campaigns, new media and new communicative struggles, initiatives to reclaim the commons, and quotidian practices of becoming aware and acting coherently all mark a cathartic shift from protest to generative politics, to production of sustainable agriculture, of communications and culture, of collective property, of new social relations and subjectivities. For such generative politics to take root ‘a synergistic relation between political parties and civil society must be forged in order to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and the capacity for civil society participation is developed’ (M. Williams 2008:156).

As for the national and transnational, what seems adjacently possible is an ‘institutionalization of multilevel contestation’, combining rhizomic networks and ‘traditional’ trees, reaching from the local to the global, and including as allies progressive state actors, in ‘virtuous circles’ that strengthen both movements and initiatives by state leaders at the global level (Evans 2008). These politics must be substantially rooted in local and national contexts: local self-empowerment is a requirement of  democratic mobilization, and winning state power is indispensable to transformation at a global level. Counter-hegemonic globalization is sustained by the transnational cultural infrastructures and activist networks that shape global civil society, but also by arborescent formations such as new democratic left parties in Europe (Rao 2009 Solty 2008), the intergovernmental organizations developing within the Bolivarian process and what may be an emerging Fifth International inclusive of parties and movements. The movement of movements will walk on both legs, creating new relations, practices and subjectivities both on the cultural terrain of civil society and within/against the state, globally and in national and local contexts – or else it will stumble.

These developments portend a global left, a counter-hegemonic historical bloc organized around a project of sustainable human development and participatory democracy, whose constituents recognize in the intersections of power and oppression an emancipatory collective interest. This project faces great challenges, when placed in the context of the ecological race against time and the continuing hegemony of consumer capitalism. Indeed, in North America, where the marketplace society and postmodern fragmentation discussed earlier are most entrenched – where the left’s marginality contributes to a doxic condition of ‘dreamlessness’, as Bloch put it10 – it is unlikely that transformative politics will gain traction until consumerism as a way of life that contains its own self-reproducing end values is rejected by (or becomes unviable for) great numbers of people. In practising sustainable consumption in the North, the autonomist politics of the Larzac plateau is exemplary. 11 To break from the hegemony of marketplace society is to endeavour ‘in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth’ (Magdoff and Foster 2010).

Globally, pressure for change may arise most urgently from a growing “environmental proletariat” (Foster 2010: 15) in areas of failing habitability, and leadership in counter-hegemonic globalization can be expected to emanate from the South. Yet achieving the global contraction in greenhouse gas emissions and convergence in emissions per capita necessary to avert the worst ecological scenarios will require a strong ethico-political solidarity of North with South –
quite the reverse of what was on display at COP15 in Copenhagen in December 2009, and presently a distant possibility.

It is, nevertheless, steps taken in that direction that, cumulatively, might open an exit hatch from capitalism. Such a global transition would require that ecological and social revolutions in the South ‘be accompanied by, or inspire, universal revolts against imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation’ (Foster 2010: 15). What is particularly new in this organic crisis is the entwinement of human survival with democratic socialist construction, the twin exigencies of our time.

Notes

1 This article has benefited enormously from critical comments by Laurence Cox and Peter Waterman, who bear no responsibility for any remaining weaknesses.

2 To construct a general will, to raise consciousness and transform ideas into a material force, ‘movements must continuously form new organic intellectuals’ (Karriem 2009: 318); hence the process of translation is not top-down but an active and reciprocal ‘educative relationship’ (Gramsci 1971: 350).

3 Here I am using ‘civil society’ in the contemporary sense of that which is neither state nor economy. Gramsci’s use of the term is complex, in some contexts contrasting state with a civil society that includes economic relations; in other contexts contrasting capitalist economic relations with an ‘integral state’ (‘State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion’ (Gramsci 1971: 263)). See Anderson’s (1976) classic discussion, for a critical take.

4 Basing himself on Marx’s 6th Thesis on Feuerbach, that human ‘essence’ is the ensemble of human relations, he identified political activity with the dialectical production of new relations and new subjects: ‘to transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and to develop oneself’ (1971: 360).

5 Since domination dwells within one’s own person, since each person’s actions reproduce forms of domination, changing the world implies an ongoing process of ‘work on oneself’ that cultivates autonomy (G. Williams 2008:75). That activists are thoroughly embedded in the extended relations of global capitalism problematizes the achievement of coherence, yet by living relatively simply, in full respect of the environment and their fellow human beings, the activists of the Larzac ‘distance themselves from the power of capitalism, consumer society and neoliberalism, they banish it from their lives and thereby partially fulfil their vocation as activists. To banish power is to create an autonomous space in which to live your life, itself an act of resistance. This is something that requires effort, and ongoing attention to the way you act in the world that is a part of the developmental process of becoming aware’ (G. Williams 2008: 77).

6 Gramsci’s own commitment to autonomous human development was deeply seated in his conception of counter-hegemony. ‘Is it better to take part in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment; i.e. by one of the many social groups in which one is automatically involved from the moment of his entry into the conscious world…? Or, on the other hand, is it better to work out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in the creation of the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely from outside the moulding of one’s personality?’ (1971:323-4).

7 On this issue, Worth and Buckley are especially caustic. The WSF ‘has suffered from being a directionless series of events, whereby the working formula of “open space” has led to the creation of nothing more than a “talking shop”, rather than any valid construction of counter-hegemony’ (2009: 650).

8 This problem is exacerbated by the highly uneven distribution of powers among intergovernmental institutions. Although the international agencies like the WTO that enforce the rule of global capital are invested with some degree of state power, other international bodies and sites – such as the Copenhagen conference, the ILO, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples lack state authority and exist only by the good graces of the states that selectively participate. See Clarkson (2010).

9 ‘Commitment of Caracas’. http://www.psuv.org.ve/files/tcdocumentos/commitment.caracas.pdf, accessed 7 March 2010. See also ‘The Venezuelan Call for A New International Organization of the Left,’ The Bullet, No. 312, Feb 15, 2010, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/312.php.

10 In contrast to the concrete forward dream that informs prefigurative practice, dreamlessness ‘which is associated with standing still or with a realism which only appears to be such, even in a state of resignation, is actually the ruling state of mind of many thinking though unperceptive people in a society without perspectives (and with an abundance of inaccuracy)’ (Bloch 1971: 31).

11 As Magdoff and Foster (2010) point out, a post-capitalist future generalizable to humanity in its entirety implies a radical shift from the unsustainable consumerism that middle-income North Americans take for granted. ‘An economic system that is democratic, reasonably egalitarian, and able to set limits on consumption will undoubtedly mean that people will live at a significantly lower level of consumption than what is sometimes referred to in the wealthy countries as a “middle class” lifestyle (which has never been universalized even in these societies). A simpler way of life, though “poorer” in gadgets and ultra-large luxury homes, can be richer culturally and in reconnecting with other people and nature, with people working the shorter hours needed to provide life’s essentials.’ and social revolutions in the South ‘be accompanied by, or inspire, universal revolts against imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation’ (Foster 2010: 15). What is particularly new in this organic crisis is the entwinement of human survival with democratic socialist construction, the twin exigencies of our time.

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About the author

Bill Carroll became concerned about issues of global justice in the 1970s, and was active in the Marxist Institute, a Toronto-based left-wing educational collective from 1977 to 1981, when he moved to Victoria, British Columbia. In the 1980s he was involved in the Solidarity Coalition, a movements-unions alliance, and in the Committee on Alternatives for British Columbia, a group of academics that published two books critiquing neo-liberal policy and advocating democratic alternatives. More recently, he has been active in VIDEA (http://www.videa.ca) and has created a series of political music-videos, at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=wcarroll52#p/u/0/4li0MzzRXMU.

Bill teaches Sociology and is founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria. His research interests are in the areas of social movements and social justice, the political economy of corporate capitalism, and critical social theory and method. Among his books are Organizing Dissent: Contemporary Social Movements in Theory and Practice, Remaking Media:The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication, Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neo-Liberal Times, Critical Strategies for Social Research, and The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class. He has won the Canadian Sociological Association’s John Porter Prize twice, for his books on the structure of corporate power in Canada. He has held visiting fellowships and appointments at the University of Amsterdam, Griffith University, Kanazawa State University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. He is Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, associate editor of the journal Socialist Studies, and a member of Sociologists Without Borders.

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