----- Original Message ----- From: "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 10:01 AM Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] DC: Costs of big marches
>> So how do you explain the civil rights movement and those marches? These
>> were an organized set of people that supposedly had very little effect on
>> the capitalist class--and didn't have voting rights either. Maybe I'm
> just
>> romanticizing, but it seems that a march can have some effect even if it
>> isn't along class lines, though I don't really know how. It seems there
> is
>> a space where ideology and ruling class interests don't necessarily
>> correspond.
>
> That is an easy one. Civil rights movement by itself would go nowhere,
> had
> it not been for the support of the fed, esp. the Eisenhower and the
> Kennedy
> administration. The US ruling class fell the heat of the Soviet
> competition
> - the Sputnik went up, the colonies were falling down (thanks to the
> Soviet
> support) so it was increasingly difficult for the US to cast itself as the
> leader of the free world and, at the same time, have the old slavocracy
> and
> lynching mobs practically running half of the country. The Southern
> racism,
> bigotry and anti-intellectualism became a serious liability to the
> imperial
> project and had to go, or rather be swept under the rug until they were
> resurrected by the Repugs after the Soviet "threat" subsided.
that's what I thought you'd say. But here it seems like you didn't really answer my question which has to do with the primacy of class--in terms of its relation to production--as you framed it earlier. You said that a protest couldn't work if it wasn't some sort of working class coalition which could withhold labor and "kick the capitalist class in the balls." I asked what about the civil rights movement and you said it was an exception to the rule because of what might be called the "overdetermination" of the situation. But this means that your original claim, that a protest movement couldn't succeed unless it is aligned with a class movement is disproven. It seems that it could succeed if the situation was right.
> Do not get me wrong, I am not trying to discredit the sacrifices of
> thousands of courageous men and women who faced, often alone, the Southern
> rednecks and his elected officials. I think it was an act of
> extraordinary
> courage that I am not sure if I were able to muster. But the courage and
> sacrifice alone are not enough - they are important but they are not the
> sufficient and not even the necessary condition for a social change. The
> other crucial ingredient is a "window of opportunity" - i.e. the
> willingness
> of the ruling elite (or its part) to work with social movements. Absent
> that willingness (which itself may be cause by a crisis, a foreign threat,
> or internal competition with other power brokers), a social movement alone
> will almost certainly get nowhere.
So is the argument that a working class movement capable of putting on a strike has the power to open the window itself whereas other movements have to wait for the right moment? As I understand it, even in the civil rights movement, the leaders understood the way they could manipulate geopolitics and open that window wider. They understood what was at stake in the de-colonization of Africa at the height of the Cold War. And they were aware of the way to put what you call the "elite class" on the defensive in this situation. I think you sell their efficacy short on this count in an attempt to give primacy to labor.
> Nor should it be construed that social movements do not matter - e.g.
> without the civil rights movement the changes proposed by the Eisenhower
> or
> Kennedy administrations would have probably been much more timid. I think
> the role of social movements can be compared to that of a fuse - they need
> a
> charge to cause an explosion, but without that charge they are just duds,
> fireworks, inconsequential bangs, sparks and smoke without fire.
>
> However, that is often lost from the activists' perspective. Social
> movement participation has a profound effect on transforming one's
> cognitive
> frame - often leading to redefining the whole life of the activist and the
> whole world indeed in terms of goals and tactics of the movement. That
> often leads to loosing sight of a bigger picture. For one armed only with
> a
> hammer every problem looks like nail. These activists, or 'activistists"
> as
> our fearless moderator Doug dubbed them, become like little energizer
> bunnies, going and going and going and hoping in vain that playing their
> little drums will spark an avalanche - until they are run over by the
> wheels
> of history or their batteries run out of juice..
>
> Wojtek
But this losing sight of the big picture as you state it seems to be exactly the opposite of what ANSWER does--and one of the biggest critiques I've heard on the list of them. On one hand, the critique is that ANSWER is basically an empty, parasitic organization, that they don't really plan or strategize, they just hold a march and hope that the current events will make it a bigger event and put it on the national radar screen. (You said that the only reason either were happening was because the elite were giving up on Iraq and decided to change the tide of public opinion, but I'll just add that to this column as the top down equivalent.) On the other hand, the problem is that, although ANSWER has a big picture, it isn't really willing to articulate it because it would be a fairly distasteful one (support for Kim Jong Il, etc.)
So it gets a march together under the general heading of being anti-war, but doesn't really say much else about its general principles. This attempts to overshoot sectarian concerns (at least for the unaware) and means that any number of individuals can go to the march--either to voice their their pet complaint or to simply "be together." What Doug, et. al. pointed to in their article on "activistists" was something that others have talked about in terms of the ontological claims made by Hardt and Negri in Empire, something that you hint to when you say, "Social movement participation has a profound effect on transforming one's cognitive frame." This is true, but it problem here it that it is a transformation without content. Thus, when you say, "For one armed only with a hammer every problem looks like nail," in reference to the activists themselves, it doesn't really make sense as a critique.
In fact the problem seems to be that there isn't a common hammer anymore, which is really what you mean when you say that "working class" movements are the only ones which succeed--and likely the reason that the Civil Rights movement had its successes. In this case, it is only partially about the way that windows of opportunity open for (or are opened by) social movements in their relations with the "elite class" and it isn't completely contingent on the ability to withhold labor or power from the capitalist class. It is also about articulating a coherent set of principles relevant to the audience that can be used as a hammer--and getting enough people to use it to build something with whatever nails they find. Better yet it is about having a blueprint and making people aware of it enough to inspire them to pick up the hammer and pound some nails.
Am I right in understanding that it is mostly on the last count that people feel animosity to ANSWER? -s