``Why have so many state-centered alternative development regimes in the so-called Third World gone bad? Hardt & Negri have a theoretical answer: that national liberation struggles turn sour once they achieve state power, because the nation-state is a realm of hierarchy and exclusion. They also argue that the "nation" doesn't exist separately from a state - that it is, in fact, called into being by state formation - so that ethnicized exclusion is part of the pacakge. I'm not completely convinced, but it's a coherent theory.'' Doug
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Obviously I haven't read Hardt and Negri and don't know anything about national level movements, but I can tell you that you can see the process at work in the small scale of local community programs that begin from grassroots and community base action.
In one of your essays, you noted community organization co-option through grant guidelines and foundation funding manipulation (equivalent to IMF, WTO, WB development guidelines, etc, on larger scales). All of that (from what I've seen) is true enough.
But there are other modes of failure and manipulation through the internal dynamics that proceed from within the mind set and the organization of work itself: hierarchical ordering and bureaucratic procedural processes are pretty well known examples that are just as corrosive. This is usually seen as a `leadership' problem by the outside. But in fact, it is the loss of a communal base for decisions and the loss of a concrete cooperative work ethic--emphasis on co-op ethic. This assumes there was such a base and ethic to begin with.
Off the top of my head and with no other authority to cite, I would say that reason state-centered alternative development fails is because it is not built from the ground up---and I mean this literally.
I've seen completely ordinary, oppressed people turn themselves into all kinds of roles from intellectual to bureaucratic manager, to legal beagle expert and advocate, budget director, public relations spokes-person, Herr director tyrant of tyrants, computer systems analyst, etc. But in the process, the dirt work, whatever that is, becomes delegated to others, some homogeneous mass, and these others then move downward on the organization ladder while a leadership clique emerges. At a certain point a threshold is reached and the leadership becomes entrenched, protective of its privilege, unwilling to share decisions and work loads. The authority model takes over the cooperative model (the death of fraternity), and the hierarchy is frozen in place. The link is broken between the work that has to be done, and the organization of labor that is supposed to perform the work. The leadership sees that the collective work is the maintenance of the organization---since responsibility for the dirt work has already been relegated to the Others.
In other words, failure is constructed through the reproduction of an hierarchical division of labor itself. This proceeds, naively from the theoretically intuitive model of meritocracy as mode of organization as opposed to a perforce democracy of work. It is extremely important that the necessary roles of the organization of work be separated from the people who inhabit them, and that the people shift through the roles (the divisions of labor), performing and learning them all as best as they can---and that the Others emersed in their own struggles have the patience, tolerance, and trust that even if some people in some roles are utter failures, the work will be accomplished---and the collective They, will have their chance to take up another role in another round.
I put, theoretically institutive, in the above because there is nothing institutive about meritocracy that isn't always already constructed from a capitalist scheme of values. This scheme has predefined and predivided all forms of work to map its own needs.
We have so internalized this scheme that it is completely transparent to us---we literally don't see it. Instead, we see that there are some people who are naturally better at some kinds of work than others. In fact, that natural, is a social construction that has been learned. So, in order to eliminate the corrosive effects of this learned system on any organization of labor, it is essential to learn and unlearn the entire system, at the same time. It is a long, slow, painful process, and will always fail sometimes---but most of the time it will succeed and the work will get done.
That's what has to be done.
And, I have evolved a theory of revolution too--thanks for asking. It goes like this. The configuration of the revolt, its structure, its processes of formation, its organizational schemes, in short its history is recapitulated as its form of state, its governance. Thus highly centralized, militaristic and authoritarian revolutions form highly centralized, militaristic, hierarchical and authoritarian governments. A dictatorship of the proletariat, is exactly that, a dictatorship---long after the proles have gone home or back to work. So, you get a democratic and truly representative form of government from a democratic and truly representative revolutionary movement. And, in order to insure that movement is representative, you have to re-order its division of labor, along the lines outlined above.
So to return to the quote, ``...national liberation struggles turn sour once they achieve state power, because the nation-state is a realm of hierarchy...'' This may be true, but... only because the national liberation struggle was already ordered in a hierarchical and militaristic form in the first place. As a consequence, the state formed from such struggle reproduces the forms taken by the struggle.
A movement, an organization, whether large or small is already a society in miniature and its roles and divisions of labor are already the concrete manifestation of its social norms. That is precisely what has to be changed, in advance.
Yoshie writes, ``Morality, however, has never been the motor force of history. _Might makes right_ -- hence the necessity of state power, from which American socialists, alas, stand _very, very far_, objectively & subjectively.''
Thinking this way, automatically reproduces a hierarchical militaristic movement. You have to re-think what constitutes the movement of history and what constitutes power. These reside within the collective skills and capacities to perform the work of history, ie. the reproduction of society as a totality. So, power is created when more and more people can do more and more of the different kinds of work that are required to reproduce the society. A powerful collective is one in which you can hand anybody a shovel or anybody a pencil and get the best results no matter who has which tool. That is the whole point to separating roles and divisions of labor from the people who inhabit them, and then shift (or let) people shift through these roles or divisions of labor.
This goes back to why I was trying to get you guys (Yoshie and Doug) out of your Oscar Wilde smoking jackets and slippers mode and into some work clothes. Ladies, put down your cognac snifter and man your shovels, the work gulag is forming up. Time to live communism, instead of dream about it. We can all have cognac later, provided somebody has shown the rest of us how to make it.
I am telling you, this will work. I've seen it work (a long time ago and only for awhile, but still..). And even without any stinking organization I live and practice it every day anyway.
My work day.
Got there a half hour late as usual. First job, sweep the shop, put away tools. Fix the torch head. Nobody was waiting. Next job rebuild a couple of motors. Finally somebody showed up.
Fred D. He broke his frame. I brazed in an internal support tube to strengthen the front section of frame near the castor (enjoyed my new goggles, which I could see out of for a change. The flame made a perfect cone because the new mixing head was working right). Next job was talking to Fred D. He is black, was in the merchant marine during WWII and stayed on for the rest of his working life. He is seventy-eight. He has great stories about all the ports in the world. He's been around the world five times. I asked him his favorite country and he said Spain, Valencia in particular. He said, for a long time he liked Italy, Genoa, Naples, and Sicily, but he made that run too often and got tired of it. He said in the old days, Calcutta didn't have any heavy dock equipment so all freight was off loaded by hand, by `little bitty guys.' (Fred is a big man, over six feet, two-forty or so, even with one leg) We talked about the size of people and how much work they could do. His ride wasn't coming for several hours, so I put a plastic garbage bag over him and his parka as a make-shift poncho, and he went off shopping in the rain. Next job find, two off-sized tires for somebody. Next job, change another set of tires from air to foam filled, for no flats for a student at UCB. Next job, pull off a pair of anti-tip bars, straighten them out on the press and put them back on. Then back to rebuilding and testing motors.
Late in the day, the director of one of the local disability programs came in to get her chair gone over. She was headed to DC for a meeting. Bush had promised more money for assistive technology development for the disabled. She was originally one of Nader's Raiders and came to UC to go to law school back in the seventies. Her ex-husband runs an engineering and tech program at SFSU to train disabled students in the engineering program. They do internships in Novosibersk(?) in a former helicopter factory, part of which is now turned into a rehab hospital and wheelchair factory run by the local disability organization and movement. According to Marc K (another fix-it guy with two degrees: Russian History and Law) they have a lot of organization problems, ie. ego ridden top-down hierarchies out of control.
See? It's all there like a mist that can't quite congeal into form.
Chuck Grimes