Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> I'd have to agree with Irene Tung quoted in the article below about
> the style of organizing that has become fashionable among young
> activists through Seattle, A16, etc.: "There was definitely an
> insider's culture at A16, especially at the convergence spaces. There
> was a vocabulary and behavior, an assumed cultural commonality, that
> was somewhat eerie. It seems that the ideals of absence of leadership
> and `facilitated chaos'--as they say--function best in a homogenous
> group." Yoshie
>
> ***** By Colin Rajah , director of programs at JustAct.
> [SNIP]
> According to Sanchez, DAN-LA is the only regional DAN group that has
> a significant number of organizers of color. DAN-LA will be the
> principal coordinator of the actions at the Democratic National
> Convention (also called DNC or D2K) in August. Sanchez sees this as
> an opportunity to finally have leaders of color in the center of the
> mobilization. "There is definitely a call out there," says Jasmin de
> la Rosa, coordinator of the Third Eye Movement, which is organizing
> hip-hop activists and other high-school youth to participate in L.A.
Several points.
ONE. Most progressive/communist thinkers agree that the movement against capitalism must be democratic. The difficulty is double: (a) every thinker carries in her mind a particular model of what democracy is, a model derived by abstraction from some existing or prior attempt in practice to achieve democratic decision making, but (b) *all* such models (past practices) have been failures, and everyone is therefore defending a conception of democracy which has only failures in its past history. The available models seem to be (1) participatory democracy (2) representative (electoral) democracy (3) democratic centralism and (4) caudillismo (or populism cum democratic centralism).
The first is merely a projection into serious politics of the clique rule
in high school social life and is clearly unacceptable. The last, though it has had some very real success in Cuba, in sections of the black liberation movement in the United States, and at the local level in China for a brief period of time is clearly not a system which can be aimed at and cannot survive indefinitely. (When Castro retires or dies we will if it can outlast the Caudillo or will lapse into bureaucratic centralism or capitalist restoration.)
I have a premise which I won't attempt to defend but merely assert. The "new" is never achieved directly but only indirectly as it bursts through an old shell. So either representative (electoral/constitutional)
democracy or democratic centralism must be the *route* to a new type of movement democracy but neither will be the new form -- that new form not being even imaginable let alone implementable at the present time. Caudillismo has worked when the presence of an outside enemy (U.S. in the case of Cuba, in China the power of the gentry and the rich peasantry, which remained extremely strong even after military victory) makes a mass line of some sort not only advisable but necessary for survival. In the case of pure democratic centralism, however, an outside enemy seems to reinforce its tendencies to bureaucratic centralism rather than the development of a mass line. And if the "outside" enemy is in fact less strong than is assumed, the result is the panic leading to ultra-leftism and collapse as in China and the Cultural Revolution.
I tend to think that new (and we hope workable) forms of democracy will be achieved through the wrenching into new channels of democratic centralism, but that will be determined by theorizing within the practice of the future, not by theorizing now.
TWO. In the United States any movement or organization which in its initial form is predominantly white will eventually fail. The core of any
successful overcoming of the prime enemy of the working class in the United States, its own racism (conscious and spontaneous, subjective and structural) can only be broken if leadership is visibly black -- which means to begin with not only a predominantly black formal leadership but black dominance in terms of number of activists. This is not to deny the immense promise of the Seattle movment, but it is to claim that survival of that movement depends on its subordination to a black led black liberation movement.
Carrol