[lbo-talk] Passive Revolution (was new spirit of capitalism)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/30/07, wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:
> My suspicion is that we will need to rethink positing the war of
> movement as the key term of active struggle.  This is already being
> thought about in diverse texts such as John Halloway's work and of
> course the earlier work of Laclau and Mouffe. (Also, it should be
> noted that Luxemburg has already started this discussions with her
> work on the mass strike and her responses to Kautsky.)

I differ from Laclau and Mouffe and John Halloway.

At the level of analyzing the mode of production and secular trends of
capitalism, class contradiction takes analytical precedence over other
-- intra-class and trans-class -- contradictions.  The problem is that
too many leftists apply what makes sense at _that_ analytical level to
the empirical level of short-term struggles where intra-class and
trans-class struggles matter as much as, sometime more than,
inter-class struggles.

Struggles like the EZLN's could develop further if they, together with
other working people, could create a "national-popular," achieve
political supremacy to win state power, recognizing the limits of what
a state can do under capitalism, and continue to constitute themselves
as a base of dual power.

EZLN, with several other orgs, was doing "the Other Campaign"* during
the run-up to the Mexican elections last year.  Did that campaign make
sense?  I wonder if things might not have turned out better if there
had been more cooperation rather than competition between AMLO + PRD
on one hand and "the Other Campaign" and other forces on the other
hand.

*  <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/mt220406.html>
Resistance on the Mexican "Riviera": The Zapatistas Visit Manzanillo, Colima
by Jess MacKenzie and Ernest Tate

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We also wanted to hear what Marcos would say about the current Mexican
presidential campaign, in this "season of protest," and to see on the
ground, so to speak, how it related to the EZLN's strategy for
building "an alliance with the non-electoral left in Mexico who want
to build from below." The EZLN's "Sixth Declaration" (known in Mexico
as the "Sexta"), which forms the basis of "La Otra Campaña" and was
adopted last year by a broad coalition of left and activists groups
(and open to "non-registered political parties"), denounced all three
major capitalist parties for being in the service of neo-liberalism,
and attacked the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) very
sharply for its betrayal of the San Andreas Accords (negotiated with
the President Vicente Fox to give some autonomy to indigenous
communities).  The Zapatistas have also declared their solidarity with
Cuba and Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution.

In his debate with some on the left who have urged him to support the
PRD's candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Marcos has said that
López Obrador speaks with two tongues -- one for the popular
movements, seemingly to agree with many of their demands, and one for
the ruling elites, to whom he promises to continue Fox's neo-liberal
agenda.  "The PRD has been hijacked by scoundrels," the Zapatista
leader says, and he points to the repressive actions of some
PRD-controlled municipal governments in Chiapas: violence against
Zapatista activists and cutting off water to some Zapatista-influenced
indigenous communities.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The EZLN seems to be going through a process of change from being
essentially an armed-struggle movement, an "army," to becoming a
political organization of some kind, and Holloway may be
over-generalizing from what is but a moment in the history of its
evolution.

However, if it's a political party which comes out of all this, it
will probably be quite different from anything we've seen before,
obviously shaped by the experience in Chiapas.  But there's no doubt
the EZLN's present "non-political" line will give them some
difficulties in the current conjuncture because many activists will be
swept up into electoral politics behind López Obrador.  The old notion
that politics abhors a vacuum applies here.  Already a key veteran of
the C.P., Armando Martinez Verdugo, has broken ranks.  But the
evidence suggests the EZLN is not thinking in the short-term but maybe
of the next "Sixeno."  We prefer to see it as being in the process of
consolidating its forces and supporters outside its base in Chiapas.
They are a mass phenomenon.  Their powerful hard-won position as the
voice of Mexico's most oppressed, the 10,000,000 indigenous and the
poor, combined with their strong opposition to environmental
degradation as seen in Campos, has placed them in a key strategic
position to lead in a genuine recomposition of the Mexican left.
Marcos seems to hope they will eventually win over those social
activists who are now supporting López Obrador but who will eventually
be disappointed by him, to help in the building of an effective mass
political force capable of fundamentally changing Mexico.

> Obviously, it
> would be interesting to see how each would respond to the Venezuelan
> situation. As to Venezuela, my inclination is to argue that this
> points to the precariousness and the incompleteness of the process,
> rather than its embrace of 'restoration.'

If the process is precarious, it's in large part because the
bourgeoisie remain in Venezuela -- it's just that they are
subordinated to the state; because the state's continuing dependence
on oil revenues makes it vulnerable to fluctuations in the volatile
oil market; and Venezuela's economy is deeply tied to America's, which
is heading to the South now.

> I'm a little more
> tentative on that, though.  Ultimately, I still think that there
> needs to be more work done on the Chavista movement as a social
> movement.   Robert Wood

Community organizations are more the motor of the Chavista movement
than traditional workers' organizations like trade unions.  It's in
the nature of political economy where informal sector workers
outnumber formal sector workers.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>