LENIN'S TOMB

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Would European capital sacrifice Greece to protect profits? posted by lenin

Answer: what do you think they've been doing? On Monday, the Greek Prime Minister announced that his government would hold a referendum on the latest Euro austerity package. And look at the reaction to this ostensible democratic naivete. Stock markets slide everywhere. The BBC expresses its disbelief: "For whatever reasons, George Papandreou was standing up for democracy." German and French politicians throw tantrums, demanding accountability. Papandreou has been summoned to Cannes to explain himself and get chewed out. PASOK MPs have defected, and the Blairites are calling for Papandreou to resign. The cabinet has backed the PM, but a no confidence motion is being raised in parliament, and the government could easily collapse by the end of the week. Yesterday, Greece's military top brass was sacked and replaced by the PASOK defence minister. The ides of march forestalled? I'll come back to that.

The decision to hold a referendum is a tremendous risk for the government. As Costas Douzinas puts it: "Assuming it is not withdrawn amid all the political turmoil afflicting the ruling party, the vote is planned for January, and the issue will presumably be the latest bailout. But the real question will be: "Euro or drachma?"" As Papandreou has put it, the referendum would be on "our European course and participation in the euro". PASOK are talking as if they can win a referendum. Maybe they really believe this, because as yet most Greeks don't see the need to leave the Euro. Polls show that 70% favour staying in. But if the choice is between the Euro and a reasonable standard of living, it's very possible that people will choose their living standards. And even if a referendum happens now, it won't be over the present deal, which isn't going to be on the table. In the most polyannaish situation imaginable, Merkel et al would concede that things have reached a critical impasse, offer a much better deal, and allow Papandreou to put this to the electorate. But that looks very unlikely at the moment. Almost all the 'haircuts' applied to Greece's debts so far have been to the disadvantage of Greek banks, not French and German banks. Substantial further reductions would harm politically dominant class interests which makes it highly unlikely to happen.

One can imagine the fears that pro-Euro politicians would work with: banks collapsing, international capital flight, currency instability, rapid inflation or deflation, house prices slumping, years of painful re-financing, and Greek isolation within Europe. And that's not just scaremongering. Default would pose a set of challenges that can by no means be wished away. But it would allow Greece to stop the massive annual interest payments to bondholders, which Greece's productive base simply can't sustain, and prevent the need for further austerity. A people's default is conceivable. A people's austerity is not. Yet, if the scare tactics were going to work, one would have expected the middle classes to cave already, and that has not happened. The PASOK government has created a situation now where there's a realistic possibility of Greece simply pulling the plug on the Euro.

The consequences for the Euro as a viable currency would be dire. Douzinas is probably right that the managers of the ECB and the EU never intended to push Greece to the point that it may end up withdrawing from the euro. Yes, they're turning Greece into a basket case. Yes, they are literally asset-stripping the entire economy, presumably because they don't expect it to be a viable export market any time soon. Yes, it's a death spiral. But, they apparently imagined, that's no reason for anyone to go off in a huff. But French and German banks are probably unwilling to sacrifice a single cent of the debt interest they believe they have coming to them. After all, there isn't much money to be found elsewhere. As Michael Burke points out, the recovery in profit rates facilitated by the attack on labour over the last few years has been accompanied by a slump in corporate investment. There's little for the banks to invest their money in but speculation and debt. The EU leaders have said clearly that the main elements of the current deal are not up for renegotiation.

So, we're back to the ides of march. The replacement of the top generals, despite bland official assurances that it's all regular, suggests that PASOK smelled a coup in the works. There have also been hints that Papandreou may be unwise in going to Cannes, as a lot can happen while he's out of the country. The opposition are feigning outrage, hinting that PASOK themselves are the agents of a coup, but that seems unlikely. Now, the EU may not prefer a military coup, if it was possible to orchestrate the political collapse of the government through a no confidence vote, and facilitate a new right-wing New Democracy-led government. But the structures of the European Union have always been profoundly anti-democratic, and the politics of austerity, pushed most aggressively by the EU, are pushing the institutions of capitalist democracy to their limit.

Consider what Greece is up against. Guglielmo Carchedi, in a superior class analysis of the European Union, argues that the project of economic and monetary union is driven by European capitalist oligarchies, led by German oligarchies, with the aim of creating a new superpower. This would, of course, be an imperialist power, re-asserting European influence after decolonisation. It would allow Europe under united Franco-German leadership, to compete with the US by overcoming the limited scale of national markets and production. As importantly, it is a reaction by capital against the post-war influence of communist and socialist parties in Europe, and an attempt to create a political framework that would systematically reduce the power of labour. The project of European unification has, on these grounds, been successful.

But, a consequence of Carchedi's analysis is that, far from reflecting a community of interests, the EU is necessarily characterised both by class antagonisms (the working class has always made its presence felt, even while it has been excluded from the construction of the EU) and by national or inter-imperialist conflicts (Franco-German competition, and the predatory relationship between core and peripheral economies). The antagonisms at the heart of the EU could blow the whole project apart. The neutral (but intensely ideological) language of the mass media and the political classes treats the suppression and management of those antagonisms (in the interests of the dominant capitalist oligarchies) as a merely technical problem, albeit one complicated by various pressures. This is why they don't understand when politicians invoke 'democracy'. What has democracy got to do with it, they think, when Everyone Knows What Needs To Be Done? We're all in it together, after all. (This ideology was expressed concisely in a tweet I saw this morning, complaining that Greece was 'letting the team down': the hashtag said, '#globalvillage'.) In this view, the exclusion and suppression of working class insurgencies is a duty of 'responsible' politicians serving the general interest.

Greece's PASOK government has tried its best to fulfil its brief as a responsible government. But the severity of the crisis is overwhelming its ability to cope, and its referendum gamble has offended its masters in Europe. There is a continent of surplus value at stake. There is an imperialist super power at stake. There is decades of institutional construction and refinement at stake. There is a whole austerity formula at stake. For that reason, I suspect there'd be corks popping in Cannes if the government fell by one means or another.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, coup, dictatorship, eu, eurozone, greece, recession, socialism, working class

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Angela Davis at Occupy Philly posted by lenin

"We talked about the importance of building a movement that is inclusive, but recognising that the unity of the 99% must be a complex unity. Movements in the past have primarily appealed to specific communities. Whether workers, students, black communities, Latino communities, women, LGBT communities, indigenous people, or these movements have been organised around specific issues. Like the environment, food, water, war, the prison-industrial complex. Speaking of the prison-industrial complex. This is the movement I have been personally associated with. We have tried to call attention to the inoperable damage prison and the prison-industrial system has inflicted on our community. So we have called for a reduction of the prison population. Decarceration - decarcerate Pennsylvania. And we have called for the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. But we have also called for the revitalisation of all our communities. We have called for education, health care, housing, jobs, hope, justice, creativity, equality, freedom! We move from the particular to the general. We have come together as the 99%. There are major responsibilities linked to your decision to assemble here in communities. How can you be together? I evoke once more Audre Lorde. Differences must not be merely tolerated but seen as a fund of polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Finally, let me say a few words about my home town, Oakland, California. You have heard about the police assault. Scott Olsen remains in the hospital. Oakland General Assembly met in the renamed park Oscar Grant Park and responded by calling for a general strike on November 2nd. Many unions have already supported the call. I end by sharing the language of the poster: decolonise Oakland. We are the 99%. We stand united. November 2nd, 2011, general strike, no work, no school, occupy everywhere. Occupy everywhere."

Labels: anti-capitalism, capitalism, class struggle, left, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy philly, occupy wall street, protest, socialism, strikes

Friday, October 28, 2011

OWS vs. the Octopus: On Making a Demand posted by lenin

Guest post by Ruth Jennison and Jordana Rosenberg

The biggest and broadest social movement we have seen in this country since the anti-Vietnam war protests has begun. The anti-capitalist revolts in Seattle, the movements to establish and defend the rights of the undocumented in Arizona, the defense of organizing rights in Wisconsin, the robust and indignant response to the murder of unarmed black men by the Oakland Police Department have prepared the way, nationally, for this moment. Internationally, the revolutions in the Middle East have raised the flag of full transformation. These are our waypoints, our history, our archive of how we got here.

The question we have asked ourselves, for so long now, has been: how far can they push us before something breaks?

Something has broken. And re-formed. And billowed – radiant and heterogeneous – into existence.

In the face of barrages of moralizing media campaigns that told us that overspending on our credit cards and living “outside our means” was the reason for the recession, we now have the blossoming of an entirely more accurate alternative narrative. Since at least the 1970s, the financialization of our economy has coincided with an unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the 1%. There has been a near absolute reversal of the gains won by working class militancy in the 1930s, as well as a gutting of the gains won for people of color in the long civil rights era. Such reversals at the level of finance and policy have been put in place through a steroidal injection of resources into the prison system, the police forces and wars: the repressive apparati of finance capital.

Even as veterans of the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements, nothing could have prepared us for the scope of what we have seen and participated in on the streets of New York. Everything you have read about the tremendous energy generated by Zuccotti Park is true. We have seen and love: transit workers shoulder to shoulder with tweens coming to social consciousness; street corner debates at the edges of Zuccotti that last so long the children fall asleep at the feet of their parents; when the food committee crosses the city to bring pizza to your working group, and your voice remembers it has a body that needs to eat; when the National Nurses United sets up voluntary shift rotations that make it feel just a little bit easier for the differently-abled to stick around, march, and wheel; when the human mic shouts “Free Mumia,” and it rings, in waves several times over, through One Police Plaza.

Zuccotti has given us a taste of what we want. Even the briefest breath of the air outside of full alienation feels like enough to strengthen us for the fight ahead. No-one wants this moment – so hard won – to end. But there is a temptation to say that the occupation itself is the revolutionary movement. Such a perspective partakes of some mixture of the long tradition of utopian communitarian social movements, a defanged lifestyle politics – whose injunction to “be” the change you want to see in the world has at times substituted for collective action – and the simple fact that the de-alienating atmosphere of this moment just feels really good.

And this same utopian whiff of de-alienation produces the sheer optimism that re-opens a historically healthy and crucial question for any social movement: the question of what we want. We have seen that there are diverse elements, in many working groups, that want to demand something in excess of the occupation itself.[1] These elements have not congealed, in any way, around a single set of demands. They are passionately interested in discussing the concerns of other groups, and constituencies, and communities. In the remainder of this piece, we argue not for a specific set of demands, but wish to address concerns about the raising of demands in general.

Those elements beginning discussions about demands do face some some steep questions from the rest of the movement. For the sake of clarity we have broken these questions down roughly into 3.

1) What is the Occupy movement?

Is it a clearinghouse – a hub? the center of a constellation? a member of the constellation? – by which other groups are inspired and to which other groups might bring their demands for solidarity? We have seen this structure functioning quite well in rallies with Verizon workers, the anti-police brutality and anti-Stop-and-Frisk demonstrations, the foreclosure auctions, and so on. There has been nothing – not even Zuccotti itself – that has been more inspiring than these actions.[2] But, after the raid on Occupy Oakland last night, the terms of both solidarity and of demands have intensified. Almost immediately, there was a call for the removal of mayor Quan from office. This demand resonated nationwide not as a divisive or premature silencing of debate, but as a cohering of the movement around necessary next steps. Today, the Oakland GA voted to call a General Strike for November 2^nd. What solidarity actions should we take in New York? Nationwide? How does Oakland’s sharpening of demands affect the Occupy movements around the country? It seems that, to even survive as a hub (much less to morph into an anti-capitalist movement that is able to truly challenge the State’s violent protection of the interests of the 1%) we may need to make some demands.

2) To whom do we make these demands?

Wall Street, or. . .the State? We cannot make demands of Wall Street. Wall Street, while it has taken on properly golemish proportions in the OWS movement, is not a coherent entity. It is tentacular. A blind and deaf octopus. Here, we might draw on the wisdom of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Panthers, the sit-down strikes and the unemployed workers’ movements of the 1930s. All of these movements had a double vision, an ability to produce syncretic understandings of the way that the State and capital work together to ensure the status quo. The Panthers provide us with a particularly strong model: holding community-building in a tense and mutually constitutive dialectic with demands for the full restoration of what has been stolen, denied, or hidden from view. The vitality of such a perspective finds an echo in the strength, within OWS, of the solidarity actions against police brutality. It is not coincidental or simply reactive that we have mobilized so strongly against police brutality. It is not only because we have been pepper sprayed, tear gassed, and targeted with rubber bullets, that our largest, loudest, and most passionate marches have cried out against the violence of the State. It is because we realize, in these moments of extreme violence, that when we speak out against capital, it is the State that answers. It is the State that protects the interests of the 1% – the State that arms itself and brings itself down upon us, in the form of arrests, pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

3)Another question that has been percolating in the movement is: what happens if you hazard a demand and lose it?

This is an understandable concern. For those of us too young to have participated in the fire last time, we have needed to read about vibrant cultures of resistance and victories in peoples’ history books, and in our archives. If many people are being radicalized now, or given a sense of political community and possibility for the first time, there is a hesitation to hazard a demand and lose it. Moreover, OWS is a loose constituency of many groups with many differing demands. Within it, there may be concerns about marginization by the movement itself. Many of our comrades of color might look with suspicion at a historical record scarred by the watering down and sidelining of crucial demands by white progressives and liberals. But, if we want to evolve from a sheerly populist movement to an anti-capitalist movement with teeth, we need to have these debates. We need to synthesize and motivate around the needs and wants of our constituents. In the understandably protective feelings that people have about the occupation, some are expressing fears that demands will divide us. But, if “divide” means that we lose the democratic opportunists and the Ron Paul supporters, maybe we should see it as less of a division, and more of a clarification of ourselves as principled anti-capitalists. Furthermore, demands have an inimitable power to further conversation and debate that ripples far beyond us. It is the fabric through which people discuss their relationship to OWS, and through which people who can’t occupy that particular space – for reasons of geography, health status, job, and so on – can take the debates to their communities.

And, if we don’t win a demand? Demands function in many ways. They exfoliate discussion, they clarify our objectives, they extend the optimism and vision of the occupation to real-life contexts. The forging of the demand is itself a laboratory for the revolutionary process. It necessarily entails and encourages a living dynamic between ourselves as the movement and those not yet in the movement.[3]

What, after all, is a demand? That we liberate New York, or Oakland, or Cleveland from the grips of financiers? That we must have returned what was stolen from us and given to the banks and to the 1%? That we deserve to live a life free of police repression and violence? That we want an end to imperialist projects and wars, and the restoration of social services and education? If any of our hesitation to demand comes from a fear of losing, let’s look around us and see how strong we are. For the first time in a lifetime.

[1] In terms of this question, we speak of our experience of New York alone.
[2] Erika Marquez, "The Zucotti/Liberty Park occupation seems to be, indeed, a symbolic (and, sure, material) interpellation to the monopolistic, speculative real state/space control in the city. Yet, this temporary space seizure must give place, as it is occurring right now, to decentralizing the occupation. To barrio GAs, to school occupations, to one-night occupations, to occupying airwaves." Notes from an Occupied New York City, After October 14," in Lana Turner Journal http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/general/occupywallstreetkaplanwinslowmarquez.html

[3] Vijay Prashad’s conception of a succession of demands/victories as a way to nourish the “radical imagination,” is particularly germane here. http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/06/zombie-capitalism-and-the-post-obama-left/

Labels: anticapitalism, antiwar movement, civil rights, class struggle, democracy, left, occupation, occupy wall street, socialism, us politics, working class

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Police terror in Oakland posted by lenin

The question was always going to be posed. How do you stop the police from physically dismantling your protest by sheer overwhelming force of arms? How can you uphold your right to protest when that right is gainsayed by tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds? When armed paramilitary police are running around like storm troopers - the cliche is appropriate - assaulting unarmed and non-violent protesters? When, having literally broken bones and smashed skulls, the chief of the police department can tell the press, "I think we allowed people to exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly"? And when the mayor - who was herself a target of Occupy Oakland's criticisms - can commend the police on a "a generally peaceful resolution to a situation that deteriorated"?

The debates on LBO Talk suggest two reasons not to be surprised by the police action. The first is that local Democratic Party machines are just as apt to resort to repression as the Republicans; and the second is the proliferation of Joint Terrorism Task Force franchises throughout the police during the Bush era - as is typical, a 'counter-terrorist' weapon has been largely refined and used in combat with workers and the Left. So what can one do? If you resort to tooling up and having running battles with the police, like the Black Bloc do, the police always win. At any rate, the problem isn't ultimately kinetic force, it's political force. Even at the moment when the police bring out their weapons, the chances of their being successfully faced down depend on political organisation not weapons. It is at the level of politics that the problem has to be countered. Yet, if you try to work around it by negotiating with local authorities, the mayor's office etc, you may end up having making your protest inoffensive and ineffective, at which point you may as well pack up and go home. The bourgeoisie fears "mob rule" more than anything at this point - by which they mean, they fear a surfeit of democracy. If you're doing anything remotely effective, the ruling class should be put out.

As far as I can see, the only possible solution is the one opted for by Occupy Wall Street - broaden the movement within the working class. The tactical alliance with unions was probably decisive in stopping NYPD's attempt to 'clean up' Liberty Plaza. Even that isn't necessarily sufficient. The Oakland occupation was, until last night, one of the largest in the US. It had already made links with major unions, as well as with several other occupations across the country. Labour organizers had come along to help out. They were doing everything they could do, and making a success of it. But this didn't stop the police waiting until the early hours of morning, and going on the rampage against children, women in wheelchairs, whoever - the cops weren't there to discriminate, they were there to break limbs. Even so, if Occupy Oakland has a chance of reviving and facing down this terror, it is because of the organisational alliances they formed, the political support they assembled, and the coalition of forces willing to continue to support them.

Labels: capitalist state, class struggle, democratic party, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy wall street, police, police brutality, ruling class, us politics

Monday, October 24, 2011

On Utoya posted by lenin

I've written a contribution to a new ebook, 'On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism & Europe', which is now available for purchase:

‘The teenagers who gathered at Utøya that day could not imagine that they would be enrolled in the ranks of those murdered by the Right’

In a challenging new book, a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the left, and its impending destruction through immigration.
Breivik’s beliefs – expressed at length in a manifesto, ‘2083’ – were part of a huge volume of right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman – so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the far Right racist and Islamophobic social and political conditions in which it emerged.
Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is – a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far Right organising.
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze, with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O'Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow and the editors.

You can read editor Tad Tietze's article on right-wing attempts to depoliticise Utoya here.

Labels: breivik, edl, europe, fascism, islamophobia, norway, racism, utoya

Saturday, October 22, 2011

On demands posted by lenin

Our own bat020 on this presently fraught subject six years ago:

...if we admit the possibility of a non-hysterical demand by the popular masses – a slogan, let us say – what would it look like? Here I'd suggest that the answer lies in the direct converse to the famous (and eminently hysterical) situationist graffito "Be realistic, demand the impossible!". Rather than formulate realistic but impossible demands, our "demands" must be unrealistic but nevertheless possible. And moreover they should be addressed diagonally, ie to both the ruling elite and the popular movement simultaneously, or more precisely, they should formally pose a demand addressed to the elite, but actually raise a slogan that engages and resonates with the movement – mobilising it and thereby subjectivating it from within.

A neat example of this was provided by an Independent front page last week. It was dominated by a table whose columns listed four "options" for the future of British troops in Iraq: what the option was, its pros and cons, who was calling for it and what its likelihood was. The leftmost column was "troops out now", called for by the Stop the War Coalition – and likelihood of this happening was, in the Independent's eyes – nil.

But while calling for troops out now is certainly "unrealistic" within the framework of bourgeois politics, it is nevertheless clearly possible – nothing in principle prevents it from happening. And it is the very raising of this demand from the radical left that has exacerbated divisions in the elite about what to do re Iraq. The demand forces its own possibility and reconfigures the frame of what is considered "realistic". One only need recall that prior to Stop the War demanding troops out now, the question of withdrawal from Iraq was never openly discussed in the bourgeois media – why, to even entertain the possibility would be Giving In To Terrorism... now we are treated to the bizarre spectacle of Simon Jenkins calling for rapid withdrawal, with a string of MI6 "experts" in tow!

But more important than this slogan's effects on the ruling elite, its exacerbation of a "crack in the big Other", is the mass political subjectivity that emerges through this crack. "Troops out now!" acts as a rallying point for anyone repulsed by the lies and prevarication that have characterised Blair's imperialist theatrics. But it simultaneously consolidates the anti-war movement, forcing all those involved to discern where our power lies, what our strengths are, and how we can rely on those strengths and powers instead of those of any putative Master figure.

One final example, this one taken from Bolshevik lore. It was June 1917 and Kerensky had formed a provisional government that included the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries – but also representatives of the capitalist parties such as the Cadets. The Bolsheviks refused to join such a government. But what was their demand/slogan to be? Their choice was "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" – and Trotsky later explained the rationale behind this choice:

The enormous role of the Bolshevik slogan "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" is well known, in 1917, at the time of the coalition between the conciliators and the bourgeois liberals. The masses still trusted the socialist conciliators but the most trustful masses always have an instinctive distrust for the bourgeoisie, for the exploiters and for the capitalists. On this was built the Bolshevik tactic during that specific period. We didn't say "Down with the socialist ministers!", we didn't even advance the slogan "Down with the provisional government!" as a fighting slogan of the moment, but instead we hammered on one and the same point: "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" This slogan played an enormous role, because it gave the masses the opportunity to learn from their own experience that the capitalist ministers were closer and dearer to the conciliators than the working masses.

The precision of this slogan is astonishing. It cuts like a chisel at a fracture that only an understanding of class struggle allows one to discern. It acts simultaneously as a populist demand and a mobilising slogan. It separates those who are willing to fight from those who are not, to use one of Trotsky's characterisations of the united front. And it is a model for what our response should be to the obscure face-off between popular movements and liberal political elites that increasingly characterises this conjuncture.

Labels: demands, ideology, movements, populism, protest, slogans, socialism, socialist strategy

On consensus posted by lenin

How, then, would society make dynamic collective decisions about public affairs, aside from mere individual contracts? The only collective alternative to majority voting as a means of decision-making that is commonly presented is the practice of consensus. Indeed, consensus has even been mystified by avowed "anarcho-primitivists," who consider Ice Age and contemporary "primitive" or "primal" peoples to constitute the apogee of human social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that consensus may be an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups of people who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that when larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted -- precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations -- even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.

To take a very striking case in point: the largest consensus-based movement (involving thousands of participants) in recent memory in the United States was the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to oppose the Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New Hampshire. In her recent study of the movement, Barbara Epstein has called the Clamshell the "first effort in American history to base a mass movement on nonviolent direct action" other than the 1960s civil rights movement. As a result of its apparent organizational success, many other regional alliances against nuclear reactors were formed throughout the United States.

I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a dubiously "anarchic" commune that was located in Montague, Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by its own hidden agendas, was able to manipulate many Clamshell members into subordinating their goodwill and idealistic commitments to those opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell overrode the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who entered it and undermined their morale and will.

In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called "standing aside" in American consensus processes, all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings -- so that a "decision" could be made. More than one "decision" in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence and, through a chain of such intimidations, "consensus" was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as participants in the process.

On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues -- and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated -- they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical "one" of the "consensus" group.

The creative role of dissent, valuable as an ongoing democratic phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even Marshall's "minority of one" to block decision-making by the majority of a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide confederations, would essentially mutate into a Rousseauean "general will" with a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic conformity. In more gripping times, it could easily "force people to be free," as Rousseau put it -- and as the Jacobins practiced it in 1793-94.

The de facto leaders of the Clamshell were able to get away with their behavior precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently organized and democratically structured, such that it could countervail the manipulation of a well-organized few. The de facto leaders were subject to few structures of accountability for their actions. The ease with which they cannily used consensus decision-making for their own ends has been only partly told,6 but consensus practices finally shipwrecked this large and exciting organization with its Rousseauean "republic of virtue." It was also ruined, I may add, by an organizational laxity that permitted mere passersby to participate in decision-making, thereby destructuring the organization to the point of invertebracy. - Murray Bookchin, 'What is Communalism?: The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism'.

Labels: anticapitalism, autonomism, autonomy, consensus, democracy, dissensus, dissent, individualism, socialism

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Discovering the capitalist network posted by lenin

Obviously, the New Scientist is disingenuous to pretend that no studies have hitherto confirmed global structures of ownership in this pattern, or that it has thus far been the preserve of - what else? - 'conspiracy theory'. There has been tonnes of sociological work on the workings of capitalist class power, the role of corporations and finance, etc. Nonetheless, this looks serious:

From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

The research was apparently aimed at finding means of stabilising capitalism - an impossible dream. The significance of these findings lie elsewhere. It isn't about networks of 'conspiracy' either. Capital is value in motion. The class power of the capitalist class derives from its accumulation of surplus value by putting money into circulation as capital. These figures illustrate the concrete effects of the neoliberal phase of capital accumulation, in which the combined structures of imperialism and financialised capitalism have concentrated the control of surplus value, and thus of investment and all the prerogatives and benefits that come from that, in the hands of a very small number of people disproportionately based in Manhattan: that's the Dollar-Wall Street regime. It is on the basis of that general understanding that one can then drill down into the subject of networking and class cohesion, which is what is meant by 'conspiracy'. One of the points made in Michael Useem's study, The Inner Circle, is that class-wide perspectives and solidarity among the corporate ruling class is underpinned not just by social cohesion, philanthropy, lobbies and political action committees, but by practises such as the sharing of managers between multiple firms, dispatching promising managers to be non-executive directors on other company boards, etc. Such practises allow capitalist directors to gain a 'business scan', and collectively form part of what Useem calls the 'interlocking directorate'. Financial corporations play a particular role as the nerve centres of production, and the centralisation and concentration of capital has been most advanced in this sector. This means that the 'interlocking directorate' is much more condensed within finance. So, these findings can be used to expand on previous work to illustrate something about the current distribution of capitalist class power. It's the 1%, stupid.

Labels: capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, finance capital, imperialism, neoliberalism, ruling class

Revolutionary crisis posted by lenin

"And Professor Pouthas added that when the 1848 revolutions broke out, "its leaders and instigators were intellectuals devoid of political experience, not men of action". This amateur aspect of the protesters of 1848 is repeated today. A description wouldn't be very different from Professor Pouthas'. In 2011 one would say the "leaders and instigators" of the protests are women's rights organisers, self-employed IT consultants, middle-class, jobless squatters, unemployed music teachers, freelance artists, charity volunteers, social workers and media studies students, all of whom, like their predecessors in 1848, are "devoid of political experience, not men and women of action". Surely, one might reflect, there is nothing to fear from such a group.

"On Sunday, some 500 of them held an assembly and agreed on nine points. The process is likely to have been laborious. For participants were reminded that deliberation takes time, that eloquent and confident speakers are not necessarily right and that conditions will not favour the merely quick-witted. ...

"Nonetheless, what the men devoid of political experience did in 1848, and the inexperienced protesters in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt did, is simply to endure, to keep the spark burning. There are two characteristics of a pre-revolutionary situation – a valuable insight widely shared and the endurance of those who hold it. We have the first, but it is not yet clear whether we have the second." (Andreas Whittam Smith, 'Western nations are now ripe for revolution', The Independent, 20th October 2011)

Labels: capitalist crisis, class struggle, media, recession, revolution