Chuck wrote:
> Some are waiting for the "right conditions." I'm one
of > those who isn't religious about the "right
conditions" > and instead operate with the idea that
people have free > will and agency and thus can change
things
"Men make history, but not under conditions of their own choice."
An understanding of the relative favourable or unfavourable conditions for revolutionary politics has nothing to do with being "religious" about objective conditions. Social structures are emergent properties of individual human agency, but the analysis of modern society as being mediated by a fetish-relationship is based upon the fact that people within a determinate social structure take the conditions of social life for a fact of nature.
The potential of emancipatory social movements consists in being able to see through these fetishized social structures, but the potential for de-fetishizing social structures is always contingent upon circumstances.
A call for a council democracy in a situation of dual-power is an immediate call for the revolutionary re-constitution of society; a call for council democracy right now in Western Europe or North America is simply a source of amusement completely divorced from reality.
Chuck wrote:
> my argument is that you can't achieve real
> differences unless you are going with your more
> radical game plan.
It is useful, I think, to maintain a distinction between propaganda and agitation. Of course, under all conditions, favourable or unfavourable, we must maintain a constant propaganda for a communist society: no state, no social classes, no regulation of human productive activity by the law of value. One must also not conceal such aims or act in a conspiratorial manner. We must openly proclaim our intent. However, the realization of such goals is dependent upon exploiting cracks and fissures in the existing system. One must therefore support social movements which are engaged in real struggles. This is not to say that communists are obligated to support anything that calls itself a "movement". But it does mean that certain movements contain within themselves a potential to crack the system wide open.
I think the notion of "transitional demands" is very useful here. The one social movement to which I would accord an instrinsic revolutionary potential, in both Europe and the United States, is that of uninhibited freedom of mobility for immigrants and open borders. This is a demand which cannot be satisfied within the confines of the nation-state. At the same time, the real struggle for immigrants' rights is an actual struggle in the present moment.
Support for open borders is a minimum consensus position for anyone who purports to be a revolutionary, it is not a negotiable position which can be discarded in the interests of a broader "Left" unity. Anyone who does not accept this position, i.e. Oskar Lafontaine and the leadership of the Linkspartei, are fake leftists unworthy of support.
The big debate within the extra-parliamentary left here concerning the "unconditional basic income" is a source of controversy, because it is not yet clear whether this demand has such a transitional potential.
Post-autonomist groups such as felS <http://fels.nadir.org> argue that it does; some critics of the position maintain that such a demand is easily recuperable, if implemented as a basic income at the absolute poverty level which is restricted to citizens. Indeed, some sectors of the CDU have already voiced support for this idea, renaming it "Bürgergeld" (citizen's income). But the recuperation of once negative potentials within the framework of capital is a risk of every social movement. The history of the trade union movement is testament to this.
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