-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: The Globalization Movement: Points of Clarification By DavidGraeber Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 13:59:20 -0500 From: David Graeber <drg9 at drg9.mail.yale.edu> To: Chuck Munson <chuck at tao.ca> References: <3BECA920.FD3B2A6D at tao.ca><010d01c16a89$b6d59900$71a022c4 at net.mega>
Thanks for forwarding this, Chuck. If people on whatever list this is would be interested in a reply to some of brother Bond's points - I hope they're not too harsh - here they are:
>Patrick Bond wrote:
>>
>> >From Jo'burg, comrade Chuck, this is what I'd say is fatally flawed about
>> this rap:
>>
>> a) failure to recognise the durability of the nation-state form (and its
>> potential merits for poor and working people who make concrete demands for
>> social change, and for their protection from the ravages of int'l capital);
>
>I think we understand that. The anarchists in the anti-globalization
>have been speaking up about the need to add the state to the equation in
>our fight against globalization and neoliberalism. Those of us in the
>States have seen how quickly the majority of people can rally behind the
>state in times if crisis, but there is plenty of evidence that this
>support is quite shallow.
I don't think any of us would _object_ if, say, the state decided to take action to alleviate suffering: social welfare policies, reducing the working week, etc etc. The question is, rather, the strategic question of whether we see seizing state power as an effective or desirable way to achieve revolutionary transformation (we do not) and the tactical question of whether we are willing to accept the compromises that would be required to organize our activism around pressuring and influencing the state rather than creating autonomous spaces outside it. The moment you start intervening in political campaigns, lobbying, all that sort of thing, you have to completely change your own internal structure in a way which guarantees you can no longer hold out your own forms of organization as a radical alternative to what you are fighting. Thus, what's basically happened in the US and increasingly in Western Europe is a two-tiered structure where you have direct action people directly confronting offending institutions and trying to present the vision of an alternative and more NGOish/lobbying groups trying to influence political power; it's actually quite symbiotic even though the two sides don't like each other very much.
>
>> b) underestimating the revolution in power relations at the international
>> scale that would be required to allow the Hardt/Negri dream of a global
>> social wage in our lifetimes (hence the need for a) above);
>
>When I find a job, I'll have to go pick up a Hardt/Negri book so I can
>figure this point.
What is this bizarre need to find heroic academic figures to attribute ideas to? I stated in that very article that Hardt and Negri did not invent this idea but stole it from a social movement and still this guy has to treat it as if they owned it somehow. Sorry but this is a pet peeve of mine. The idea of guaranteed income was first developed by radical French economists associated with the MAUSS group (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales; http://www.revuedumauss.com/ , big fans of anthropologist and theorist of the gift Marcel Mauss) and then adopted by Ya Basta!, developed by people like Beppe Cacca. Okay? You are unlikely to find anything useful in the two or three jargon-ridden pages in which Hardt and Negri appropriate it without attribution, along with the other planks of the Ya Basta! platform. I would go for the Ya Basta! web pages themselves. Anyway, the dilemma as Beppe notes is that if you have global citizenship and a guranteed income even as an interim platform, you'd have to have a global tax, and that would present some notable problems - a Tobin- style arrangement could hardly scratch the surface here.
>
>> c) propagating the view that the Zapatista-era Peoples Global Action was the
>> basis for the contemporary struggle against neoliberalism (hence ignoring
>> the previous 15 years of heightening class struggle across the South--and
>> not merely the nod to the tactics as below, but more importantly, ignoring
>> the *programmatic content* of those engaged in mass proto-socialist
>> struggles in Korea, South Africa, Brazil and lots of places inbetween from
>> the 1980s onwards); and
>
>I'm well aware that there has been a heightened wave of class struggle
>across the Global South for several decades. This fact is lost on some
>in the anti-globalization movement who think that everything started
>with Seattle. But the Zapatista-era PGA network was very important in
>North America and Europe in providing some coherence to several
>anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal tendencies that were growing. Of
>course the use of the Internet in a Net War context also helped this
>convergence of stuggles in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Class struggle is always going on. I was talking about the origins of a particular movement that is based on certain visions and organizational structures that are relatively new. Is PB suggesting this is a story that is not worth telling? Perhaps so, if he already has a different, unfinished story in his mind where those participating in struggles in other parts of the world will end up gradually coming around to sharing his opinions about what needs to be done (I assume that's what "proto-socialist" must mean) - but as I note, what I find new about this movement is (a) the organizational principles _are_ to a large extent the "programatic content", and (b) we Westerners are no longer expecting people in the South to come around to accepting our vision of organizational forms and ideological analysis but are actually learning from them, for a change, and adopting principles of organization which are not at base Western at all but which were invented by those practicing resistance in the global South. Me, I think that's a much more interesting story.
>
>> d) the mistaken view that apparently post-fordist organisational models of
>> organising (nearly entirely tactical in character) are any kind of
>> replacement for what is ultimately needed, namely a left political party to
>> take state power.
>
>I think many of the activists in the movement reject the idea of a left
>political party taking power. Certainly, there are some Greens and
>socialists who have that goal. But there is a large fraction of the
>anti-capitalist movement in the First World that are anti-authoritarian
>and who seek change through direct action and grassroots democracy.
>Don't underestimate the political knowledge of those in the movement. We
>see all the time what happens to elements in the movement who try to
>play with the system. The current situation with the Green Party in
>Germany also serves as a harsh waring to those who hope that left
>political parties can provide an effective vehicle for progressive
>social change.
This is the second time I've seen someone suggest that the organizational forms I describe are really just an appropriation of new "post-Fordist", "silicon valley" capitalist ones (the other fellow was much more aggressive about this.) Personally, I think this is a lot of nonsense. The only similarity I can find is that they are both decentralized. Otherwise, zip. Since when have affinity groups and spokescouncils been typical of capitalism? One comes from '30s Spain and the other was largely developed in the Clamshell Alliance in the '70s, with parallels in events like the '72 revolution in Madagascar. Consensus process, or some variety of it, is the way that collective decisions are made in every known example of a stateless society or self- organized community outside of the Western tradition, but not to my knowledge any capitalist corporation. I guess I hadn't realized the degree to which people working in the Marxist tradition are so obsessed with capitalism that they really can't imagine anything could really emerge from outside it. But the result does seem from the receiving end extraordinarily patronizing and hardly different from the kind of dismissals you'd expect from hardcore Neoliberals.
Anyway, I agree with Chuck: part of the inspiration of the current movement is the knowledge that with the mechanisms of capitalist control shifting away from individual nation states anyway, even if one did by some miracle take political power there's not a whole lot one could actually accomplish - at least if one is talking about fundamental revolutionary change. However the concommitant decline of the nation state as a mechanism of uniform control over territories also has meant there are all sorts of new possibilities of creating living alternatives immediately in the cracks and fissures. It's a terrible dilemma still because those areas which have effectively established their autonomy (and these exist in lots of places, really, many we don't even know about) then end up having resources withdrawn and becoming even more horribly impoverished - like Zapatista-controlled areas of Chiapas - but it is a necessary and crucial part of any larger revolutionary strategy to start creating such free zones and showing what a radically different social order might really be like.
>
>> But I hope you bring all your comrades down here next September, to convince
>> us we're wrong, while joining in protest at the World Summit on Sustainable
>> Development. There's a tiny black bloc emerging (the
>> http://southafrica.indymedia.org site is probably where it'll raise its
>> head). And there are some formal anarchist groups that put out
>> Africa-oriented material (I'm sure you're in touch with them already).
>
>Yes, I'm in touch with them. I'm not the world traveller type, but as an
>activist who used to do anti-apartheid activism, South Africa would be
>an interesting place to visit.
Gee, that would be fun.
David