``...When action is abstracted from political analysis, isolated from other issues, and turned into a good government prescription, that's one thing. But what is most needed is the broadest view of analyzing the situation we face, explaining the weaknesses of opponents that can be exploited, and reviewing the battlefield and likely responses to action. That involves often quite abstract and even European styles at times, but the question is whether there is a payoff for action at the end.
The classic Marx statement on it all was, The point is not to understand he world but to change it.'' -- Nathan Newman
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I am of the opinion that what's needed is at least an institutionally supported edge or wedge of some kind. A city, county, state, or fed program loosely attached to some larger and more established entity in order to get off the ground.
It was this apparently minor wedge that became so powerful however briefly, under Johnson's War on Poverty. I know I can hear the howls from here. Never mind. Listen. Even temporarily funded public programs are that kind of edge---as a potential. Whatever their implementing regulations, goals, etc, they provided the critical boundary between government and people, and it is that boundary that as to be opened.
I'll give you a very minor example. With the collapse of the Berkeley disabled movements (early 80s) and the fed, state and local institutional funding that supported them, most of the leadership devolved into small rickety projects running on foundation money---which was entirely geared to research and policy and no services. Yet it was the publically funded services that were the means of radicalization. The disappearance or transformation and privitization of services was the very means to destroy these movements.
Among those services was transportation on demand.
Now twenty years later the need to be picked up with a wheel chair accessible van if you are broken down in a power chair still exists. So a small group of disabled politicos who were many steps below the old leadership, got together and worked with the city manager's office to put together an emergency van transportation proposal, which they then got put on the city ballot (measure E). It was passed, but took another couple of years or so to get implemented in working order. The delays came because of course the minute there was money around, a host of organization types rushed in with proposals, one was funded and didn't work. It had to be scrapped through yet more political action, via an oversight board, which was re-taken over by of some of the original group.
Now this is still not worked out, it is still too top heavy and procedure oriented from my point of view, but it does work. People in wheelchairs in Berkeley can get an emergency pick-up on call, day or night, or weekends.
Generally this city funded service is pretty much the kind of thing that I put together and roughly administered through UCB disabled students program twenty-five years ago as a mere component of a larger project. However, since I was within a large institution that already had plenty of resources, I had one very nice addition. If you were a disabled student, you could check-out a lift equiped university owned van for the day or night or weekend. You and or your driver came in, went through a short driving test, filled out a card, and I gave you the keys! I told people, straight up. Do not wreck this van, do not trash it, do not abuse it. If you do, you will kill this service for everybody else and they will come after you. Well, it lasted about two years before there was an accident. It was a minor one, but it was caused by negligence. Eventually, after I left, this service was `brought under control' by the new bureaucratically responsible and ended of course.
But in the meanwhile, this little transportation system had a tremendously radicalizing effect because it was the very first means to concrete freedom many of the students ever had. Most just used the van for typical things like moving, going to concerts or into SF for entertainment. But some used it as I was hoping they would, to organize their own political things: mostly going to Sacramento, or Save the Stanislas, Disabled Prisoners project, etc. (All failures, but still action, nonetheless)
There are some theory laden ingredients in this tiny model. Work on gaining access, however limited into government. This is supposed to be a damned democracy. It is your right to do so. That doesn't mean you abandon anything. Make concrete proposal that provide concrete service were it is needed. Every public service that still exists doesn't work. Figure out a way to make them work in some minor way.
In my mind this is first a reconstruction project from within existing communities and institutions. I used disability and transportation as an example but there are dozens of others. Day care, pre-school education, youth after-school and summers, pre-natal and family health, legal assistance, probation support services, the list is endless. All of these have been completely co-opted and institutionalized into non-functionality. They need to be reconstructed from the ground up within existing communities, using the very people served, as the project and program personnel.
It is exactly this move---using the people served---that is the concrete means to radicalization, because that is how you build a polity from within---shared work, shared struggle, shared failures, and shared achievements. This is exactly contrary to the existing systems that use so-called professionals, so-called experts, so-called career tract bureaucrats. They don't do anything. They manage, boss, police, order, plan, propose, analyze, justify, direct, etc---exactly on the model of capital under hierarchical elite managers (where's the fucking beef?).
It's the work itself, not the project or program that is the priority, and it will already have its own inherent ordering---which the people who do the work will have to figure out and have to manage for themselves. It is this point, the destruction of hierarchies that is critical, otherwise no matter what else, the same professionalized and therefore non-functional class system will emerge. So work has to be collectivized from the start, specifically to de-nature the emergence of a top down order and class division. So whatever wages and duties have to be kept in a very narrow spectrum. The very thing that must be fought against is to duplicate the class system within---which was the core failure of every project I ever worked for.
This is a very simple formula, but it needs that first edge, that first little entry of access to get off the ground. And that has to be done with people who already understand the intimate link between work and organizing. Not organizing work, but work and organizing for work. It is also forever threatened by experts, professionals, in short the bourgeois, so it is a forever war. It is also threatened from below, the criminal, the scam artist, the lazy, the self-serving petty tyrants and entrepreneurs that fill the streets. So what? Some are actually activists in the rough, but that takes a certain patience and time to figure out---and it also takes resolve to exile them if needed.
Now to re-emerge into the intellectual realm. Almost every academic field has some bearing on social reconstruction. It is just a matter of going back to the intellectual roots of the field to see the connection. Philosophy for example is ultimately talk---enlightening and persuading talk, that is political talk, that is exploring the world through talk. But talk is also the origin of action---you can talk yourself and others into action, into work. And of course everybody talks about their work, that is analyzes it---usually complaining, but that is critique.
Ultimately all the relevant issues are right in front of us. That is immediately before us, literally there, a few feet from our noses. In fact, we are configured by them. So the key intellectual work is to recognize those configurations and their processes, so that they can be changed.
Dennis Redmond mentioned short-term, medium term, long term. What I've been trying to explain above is concrete and short-term.
The medium term has to involve confronting and re-constructing the old liberal or social democratic agendas and their partnerships with capital. These agendas devolved into the neoliberal fundamentalism of the 80s-90s that privatized and therefore destroyed by subsuming the welfare state--that is transforming it into the service economy as HMOs, private education, utility scams, etc. The goal of a re-construction is not to reproduce the old welfare state, since that was created mostly as strain relief for the failures of capital---which fifty years later were turned back to capital as the New Economy.
The point this time around is to re-configure social institutions As the people and By the people, but not For the people. It is that little phrase with For that has most of the nasty part. After all Capital is For the people, since that's how it sells itself as the neo-liberal public good, aka technology, progress, consumerism, etc.
Chuck Grimes