>
> But only about thirty people were from the Tea Party. Opponents of 1070 had
> them outnumbered six to one. Plus there were a hundred people watching a
> live feed of the event in the lobby. Plus there were dozens of people who
> would not go into city hall because they were undocumented and feared police
> harassment, but fed messages to Repeal Coalition members, who conveyed them
> to the city council. Plus there were two hundred people outside still
> protesting—oh, and a lone Tea Partier holding a sign. (Yes, one person.
> Remind me, why are liberals so afraid of this group?)
>
Oh no this guy just doesn't get it. They really should have been reaching out across the aisle to them, trying to bring them on board. You have to win over the TPers with rational arguments and a sympathetic leftist ear. Otherwise the only thing that standing up to them will produce is...
>
> The Tea Partiers began filing out in defeat midway through the meeting. As
> they did, Latinos who were waiting outside filled their seats. By the time
> the council actually voted on the injunction, there wasn’t a tea bag in
> sight. The symbolism of a grassroots movement devoted to oppression being
> replaced, one by one, by another grassroots movement devoted to freedom,
> smelled as sweet as creosote after a desert rain.
>
It's just inexplicable. I don't know how this happened without a kumbaya moment between the racist assholes and the people they are targeting. It's almost like you can beat them by just telling them to fuck off--and organizing the shit out of the opposition.
>
> Second, *the Tea Party and their ilk can only be defeated by out-organizing
> them*. Tea Partiers are wrong, but they’re not stupid. Their minds won’t be
> changed by showing them “the facts” about immigration, for ideology always
> trumps truth. Rather than dismissing them as ignorant, you have to beat them
> at the grassroots. In Flagstaff, a grassroots group led by working-class
> Latinos out-organized the mighty Tea Party. They left early, and at 10:00
> p.m. we celebrated a unanimous decision. Even Rush Limbaugh couldn’t save
> them.
I guess that is how you do it. go figure.
In all seriousness, this is really inspiring and I'm ashamed for not having been at the local protests against this--and for not being more directly involved in organizing protests to the funding cuts for schools in Illinois, against the banks up the road, and so on. I think the question of what the left needs to do and be is becoming increasingly banal. We need to organize against capitalism and for workers rights--and to make sure that fighting for workers rights means fighting for racial equality, gender equality, gay rights, immigrant rights, indigenous rights, prison rights, nuclear disarmament, and ecological rationality. Those obviously conflict in certain instances, and obviously there are instances where one of those objectives will seem more profoundly important to the struggle: but, seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's about getting asses in the seats at city council meetings.
That said, it is also a lot easier to generate energy to oppose something than to say what you're for. In a nutshell, that's why the TP group has been able to get any energy at all. As Richard Kim said in a recent Nation column, they are not at all about trying to actually implement a workable plan: <QUOTE> Fed a steady diet of paranoia and emotional appeals to vague concepts like freedom and liberty, they appear uninterested in the details of governing, to which even the Republican Party's elite pay lip service, and unable to espouse a vision, however cramped, of collective interest. Their logo and logic is simply Don't Tread on Me. That might work, for now, in securing enough "haves" to muck up GOP primaries. But it is hard to see how, in a nation still tilting toward the "have-not" column, the tea party approaches anything close to an enduring national political force. http://www.thenation.com/article/loose-tea
Having a plan that your advocating makes it much harder to generate support. On the other hand, the Physicians for a National Health Care Plan make some pretty compelling arguments: it's a wonky topic, but probably one of the most pressing. A strong argument could be made for health care being one of those things that compels the average middle class person to labor at a regular job more than any other--and which creates a large portion of the debt that keeps them working. I'm rambling now. THe point is that these folks in Flagstaff are awesome. And this should have been done at every one of those crazy town halls last summer so that any old codger with a batty idea about Obama bringing socialism with a public option could get handed his ass by someone forcefully arguing the other side (that side being that, we'd all be far better off if Obama would, in fact, bring some socialism)--preferably having these folks outnumbered 6-1.
It might not have made as much news, but then neither would these paranoid wingnuts--and I call them that will the full recognition that there is a lot to be afraid of right now, but with no interest in trying to convince them they are wrong. I've tried talking to my friends and relatives in Texas for hours upon hours about this stuff--and I'll probably keep on trying for the rest of my life--but I only do that because I already love them and think their misguided ideology is ultimately self-defeating. Besides I have to sit next to them at X-mas and eventually they'll probably watch my kid. Either way, the hours of argument with them has produced little real understanding and absolutely no action in the opposite direction. Doing that on a national scale is not just exhausting, it's impossible.
Hegemonic struggles aren't won by convincing the dead enders. They are won by winning over the undecided, turning the common sense in your direction. I'll concede that there might have been a vacuum--this crisis really was the opportune time to put serious reform on the agenda and to generate serious popular pressure to make it stick. However, I think I was complacent because that seemed to be so completely obvious at the time I couldn't imagine that the circumstances themselves would not generate the appropriate energy (it was a common materialist error). I didn't think all that much of Obama as a leftist, but he seemed to be a wonky guy who would do what needed doing in circumstances of this kind. And what needed doing was a fucking government takeover of the banking sector, a vigorous public option on health care (where most of the consumer debt was generated) and a serious effort to get jobs going. This was not radical at the time: it was conventional wisdom and I imagined--wrongly, of course--that there would be little argument (except from the wingnuts) that these things would need to come to pass to get us back on an even keel of merely draconian capitalist exploitation rather than thumbscrews and the rack of Mellon (and Scaife).
I think this was a common feeling and misguided as it might have been, I never seriously thought the TP group would catch on because it was so obviously misguided. It seemed like some sort of freakshow that would never catch on and at the time I couldn't imagine spending an afternoon defending Obama (Obama!) against someone daft loudmouth in a local townhall meeting. It just seemed ridiculous. In retrospect it was like watching some mildly entertaining political sideshow balloon into a sublime, horrific main event in the matter of weeks. The cynical appropriation of this energy by the GOP is yet to be vindicated as a strategy--and most places point to it being a clusterfuck for them as well--but I suppose we shouldn't be complacent any longer about this (though if Kim is right, the best thing for these troglodyte fanatics to get is a term in office when they actually have to figure out how to operate in an apparatus that is basically inimical to their retrograde libertarian bluster--then again, as Doug pointed out many times on his show in the Bush years, we waited for 8 years for the grown-ups to figure out these dumbasses were wrecking the ship and no one yanked the brakes. The lesson: don't play chicken with the chemically unbalanced.)
In any case, it is really disingenuous for Chomsky or anyone else to blame the left (in the sense of actively blaming rather than simply diagnosing) for not having some massive program in place to channel all this restless energy caused by the crisis. I mean the people predicting crisis on the left are like a stopped clock most of the time: they say it so much it HAD to be true eventually. But since it was more of an exercise in prognostication rather than actively planning for "what to do in case of crisis," I think the materialist in all of them was tuned to the same frequency as mine: when the crisis hits it will generate the kind of energy needed to push us in a leftist direction. Then all that will be needed is for Leo Panitch to write a piece for Foriegn Policy and for Marx to appear on the cover of major papers and people will suddenly remember that there is another way to do things and capitalism, when it comes down to it, is an unstable and basically inhumane machine to grind working class souls into the fine powder that keeps the hands of the wealthy dry while they pilot their yachts around their private islands.
But I was wrong (the wealthy almost always higher people to pilot their yachts). There needs to be passionate organizing with clearly leftist goals. And since I didn't get into that argument earlier, the only way to be called leftist in a clear and definitive way is to have a clearly anti-capitalist position on the ownership of property in the means of production. That sounds old school, but in case you haven't looked around, we may very well be heading for nineteenth century levels of austerity and reaction. As I said above, the more recent struggles for civil rights and equality in terms of recognition cannot be abandoned, but they have to be paired with a clear understanding of their structural articulation in the capitalist mode of production. Obviously they are autonomous issues in their own right: but if we're being honest, none of them will be resolved definitively without also resolving the problems of the relationship of property and the state (and, I suppose vice versa.)
I reserve the right to revise this definition in the clear morning light, but in the current case I think the main problem was not having an alternative discourse about property and the state to trot (small "t") out in response to these discourses from the rabid right. And I think that is because people on the left (at least in the academic left) have basically stopped thinking a whole lot about property--especially the cultural left--and economic power. Instead the problem was the evil political biopower of the state (a la Foucault) and the discursive creation of normalized identities enforced through various social institutions via that evil political power of the state apparatuses. The left, in other words, had largely left its left flank open and failed to ask why the state wanted to have all that biopower: what was it gonna do with it? Who wanted to have this control and why? And why was the only thing to talk about anymore in relation to the state it's role in the science of governming according to already predetermined goals and objectives (i.e. "governmentality")? It's interesting stuff and valuable work, but in the end it has almost nothing to say about the coercive use of state power to help assist powerful market actors in the coercion of people with their economic power over control of property. All of these are arguments that seem incredibly old fashioned and concepts like property (unless it has modifiers like "intellectual" or "cultural" in front of it) seem boring and wonky to scholars raised on rhizomes and multitudes. Obviously there were still people thinking about this stuff, but the mainstream of scholars in the academic left got way too philosophical at a time when there was some serious bread and butter stuff to worry about. Maybe that is always the case, that there needs to be this philisophical work to advance the movements outside: but I can't see the connection in the current context, except in the retrospective appropriation of the reactions to neoliberal capitalism as examples in support of a theory (which is cheating if the game is organizing).
I digress--boy did I digress--but in any case, that's my response to this tremendous rally. May we have one, ten, one hundred Flagstaffs!
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