>No, that's not what the historical record tells us. After the
>active minority succeeds, the rest of the population conform to the
>new social reality. The majority support is a result of the success
>of the political movement, not vice versa.
somebody wrote:
>A social revolution is an entirely different animal than a political
>revolt like the American Revolution. If you're aiming to found a new
>socio-economic order, you'll need more than just a politburo and
>hardened cadre of true believers
And round and round this goes. I think David Harvey can help here. This is the end of a more than very good talk that I think may be a version of what Chuck heard in Berkeley:
http://davidharvey.org/2010/08/the-enigma-of-capital-and-the-crisis-this-time/
A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut down the class power that propels it forwards, requires an appropriate theory of social change. Marx's account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism in fact embodies such a "co-revolutionary theory."16 Social change arises, he argues, through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the social body politic:
a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption b) relations to nature c) social relations between people d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements g) the conduct of daily life and the activities of social reproduction.
Each one of these moments is internally dynamic, marked by tensions and contradictions (just think of our diverse and contested mental conceptions of the world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other within a totality, understood as a Gramscian or Lefebvrian "ensemble" or Deleuzian "assemblage" of moments. The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting movement across all seven moments within the totality. New technologies could not be identified and applied without new mental conceptions of the world (including that of the relation to nature and of new labor processes and social relations).
Social theorists often take just one of these moments and view it as the "silver bullet" that causes all change. We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jared Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawken), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), class struggle determinists (most Marxist political parties), institutionalists, and so on and so forth.17 From Marx's perspective they are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across the moments that really counts, even as there is uneven development in that motion.
When capitalism itself undergoes one of its phases of renewal, it does so precisely by co-evolving all moments, obviously not without tensions, struggles, fights and contradictions. Consider how these seven moments were configured around 1970 before the neoliberal surge and consider how they look now; all have changed in relation to each other and thereby changed the workings of capitalism as a whole.
This theory tells us that an anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere (in labor processes, around mental conceptions, in the relation to nature, in class or other social relations, in the design of revolutionary technologies and organizational forms, out of daily life or through attempts to reform institutional and administrative structures including the reconfiguration of state powers). The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways.18 This was how capitalism arose out of feudalism and this is how a radically different alternative can arise out of capitalism. Previous attempts to create a communist or socialist alternative fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different moments in motion and failed to embrace the unpredictable and uncertain paths in the dialectical movement between them.
The problem for the anti-capitalist left is to build organizational forms and to unleash a co-revolutionary dynamic that can replace the present system of compounding accumulation of capital with some other forms of social coordination, exchange and control that can deliver an adequate style and standard of living for the 6.8 billion people living on planet earth. This is no easy task and I do not pretend to have any immediate answers (though I do have some ideas) as to how this might be done. But I do think it imperative that the organizational forms and political strategies match the diagnoses and descriptions of how contemporary capitalism is actually working. Unfortunately, the fierce attachment of many movements to what can best be termed a "fetishism of organizational form" gets in the way of any broad revolutionary movement that can address this problem. Anarchists, autonomists, environmentalists, solidarity economy groups, traditional left revolutionary parties, reformist NGO's and social democrats, trade unions, institutionalists, social movements of many different stripes, all have their favored and exclusionary rules of organization often derived from abstract principles and sometime exclusionary views as to who might be the principle agent sparking social revolution. There is some serious barrier to the creation of some overarching umbrella organization on the left that can internalize difference but take on the global problems that confront use. Some groups, for example, abjure any form of organization that smacks of hierarchy. But Elinor Ostrom's study of common property practices shows that the only form of democratic management that works when populations of more than a few hundred people are involved, is a nested hierarchy of decision making. Groups that rule out all forms of hierarchy thereby give up on any prospect whatsoever for democratic response not only to the problem of the global commons but also to the problem of continous capital accumulation.19 The strong connection between diagnosis and political action cannot be ignored.20 This is a good moment, therefore, for all movements to take a step back and examine how their preferred methods and organizational forms relate to the revolutionary tasks posed in the present conjuncture of capitalist development.