----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Munson" <chuck at tao.ca> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2001 9:41 PM
> A reply from David Graeber...
>
> -------- 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>
>
> 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.
Doesn't have to be that way... radical advocacy ("lobbying") is what the Zaps do, isn't it? For the right to autonomous municipalities, safety for those who've done land invasions, the right to steal back the electricity being exported from Chiapas, etc.
> >> 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.
A job? Whatever happened to Steal-this-Bookism? Actually, don't bother figuring that last chapter of strategy-less jargon, Chuck, it's most useful as a brick for chucking through Niketown windows...
> 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.
That's the damn thing. Who would be the globo-finance minister administering the tax, and the whole resource control system? Under current power relations, none other than Larry Summers or somone of his ilk, eh?
> >> 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.
No knocking PGA on this, be sure. Three of our most militant grassroots activists spent late September in Cochabamba with them, and their orientation to getting organic radicals from the South to that meeting, as well as the Caravan a couple of years ago, was exemplary. The question is whether, beyond networking, there are emerging political formulae for linking mass democratic organising in the South with the hits on the big meetings in the North (amongst other great things you comrades are doing). I think there are, mainly in the communities of struggle associated with 50 Years is Enough (which sponsors a lot of these types of visits); one is the unifying call for a World Bank Bonds Boycott, and I think another that will take off more is the campaign against Citigroup... and maybe the best example was the multiple hits done -- at the request of SA's Treatment Action Campaign -- on Big Pharma the first week of March, when they were sueing the SA government on the issue of patent protection. And then the question becomes establishing common platforms and universal rights-based discourses so that in contrast to the coherence of the neoliberal attack on the environment, women, poor, workers, aged, youth, disabled etc, we've got something concrete to unite behind. Maybe Porto Alegre will tighten up and get processes for programmes going; I kind of doubt it given what I understand are the dynamics there, and instead probably we'd find more by going into each of the struggle-sectors to identify what anti-neolib programmes are emerging, and what debates are underway.
> 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.
It's just not satisfying, to the masses who are involved in life/death struggles, to claim that the organisational principles are the programmatic content. That's not a luxury our comrades can afford, I'd say. They have to put concrete demands out and build their movements upon winning gains each day... or they recede. The mass democratic organisational styles that exist, say, in the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee have involved, over the past six or twelve months, meetings of several hundred at a time, hammering out strategies, tactics, and formal demands. And their victory last month - the electricity company agreeing to stop the cutoffs of tens of thousands of households - only came through mass-democratic decisions to back up the groups of comrades who go to ANC councilors' houses and chop off their electricity and water supplies directly. Several hundred presented themselves for arrest a couple of weeks ago, and it was this kind of mass democratic process that intimidated the ruling party and the neolib managers of the soon-to-be-privatised electricity firm. I'm not sure, in this kind of struggle, how micro-networked affinity groups (even linked through spokescouncils) would have substituted for the lengthy, hardwon process of education, mobilisation and establishment of a general will in which the demands arrived at are defended through what is literally a life/death struggle (several comrades have been killed in battle with the electricity company's goons).
But I'm an academic observer/supporter of such struggles, not a Soweto resident, so I'll plead ignorance!
> >> 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?
Green areas in Toyota, quality circles, flat management hierarchies. This is all the blahblah I get from colleagues in the business school next door to our public policy school. But your point's taken; yours is genuine decentralisation of power; their version is a cover for speed-up.
> 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
This is an area to be careful about. The control by nation-states of physical space, through the monopoly on violence, hasn't really ebbed at all (even if comrades in Chiapas can carve out some very very tenuous terrain). The issue isn't actually about physical power, it's about legitimacy. And there's nothing new here. In 1980s, South Africa, the rhetoric associated with Zap-style autonomous municipalities involved "dual power," "township soviets," "organs of mass people's power," "ungovernability" and the like. (There's a nice book describing this process -- Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa -- that my pal Mzwanele Mayekiso did in 1996 for Monthly Review Press.) But let's be clear that this contestation of territory and ideology always occurs in a bid to delegitimise the ruling party, the state apparatus, and its ideological and material orientation (today, "neoliberalism" in most of the world). We would still need to establish massively redistributive processes, such as in the free-electricity-for-Soweto campaign, to achieve decades-old demands by these mass democratic organisations, and to do that, we'd still need a national state apparatus. After winning a few of these over with PT-type of organisations over the next decades, then maybe we'd be in a position to link radical regions and talk about global citizenship and social wages. Until then, I believe it's naive to do so in anything but rhetoric. And serious politics has to be about much more than that.
> 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.
I've been there and appreciate what you're saying. But given the poverty of Chiapas, and the human needs for the material goods that Mexico as a whole could provide that region were there to be powerfully redistributive "development" politics, I doubt that decentralisation-without-resources has much of a future. I may be wrong. But I gather that Marcos and his comrades are in regular touch with Keynesian-oriented comrades (Gustavo Castro, Carlos Salas, Alejandro Bedal, David Barkin, etc) to make exactly these points to the broader society.
Gotta run, but stay in touch!
By the way, aside from being in the streets of Ottawa next weekend, are N.American anarchos doing good groundwork on issues such as shutting the Bretton Woodsi institutions, via protesting university/municipality/pension/church investments in the World Bank? Join us! http://www.worldbankboycott.org