From: Petros Evdokas <petros at cyprus-org.net>
On 24-Mar-13 7:40 PM, Mitchel Cohen wrote:
> *Those Not Busy Born are Busy Dying
All in all it's a very good piece. Below I noted some themes that need exploring, rethinking, correcting.
Many of the other items and elements of the piece that I will not comment on here are very well said AND are very true and useful!
Here goes.
You wrote:
> A parallel way to look at the wages vs. debt organizing implications
> is to not see these as separate categories but as consequences of
> the intersection of the realm of production and that of consumption.
> Consumers (debtors) are simply workers (wages) when they get home
> from work. But capital expends enormous amounts of energy to keep
> the fight around consumer debt separate and distinct from the fight
> over wages and working conditions on the job.
Absolutely true. But it is significant in a different way than you point out.
Our role as consumers, which in some perverse way is the inverse of our class identity as producers, is the necessary existential answer that capitalism provides to its workers. Capital steals the products of our collective labour at the point of production. It transports them to points of distribution (markets) where WE HAVE TO PAY to get back what we created.
In the act of creation, especially through our collective labour, we as a class experience both the grandness and the terrible loss of what we create as core parameters of our being. "What we do" (our work) is a humongous part of our identity. It's not a coincidence that people ask "what do you do?" as a way to find out WHO you are. But this way of existential definition has a gaping hole in it: we are alienated from the product of our work, and the only way to feel whole again (to whatever pathetic degree the system will allow) is to engage in... shopping.
It's not a coincidence that the phrase "shopping therapy" is a way to satyrize our modern consumer culture.
The need to buy stuff goes MUCH BEYOND the need for survival necessities such as food, shelter, clothes, etc, all of which have use value for us. In fact, as soon as a person has even a few of those needs covered, they will immediately set upon "becoming actualized" by procuring fancy merchandise. The act of buying is hardly ever any more a way to fulfill one's survival needs, except in areas where only a very primitive form of capitalism dominates. Or to put it differently, the domination of the commodity culture over our hearts and minds has shifted our ability to rank our priorities: most people will strive to buy a fancy cellphone (now an i-phone) rather than buy healthy food. They'd rather eat shit that will kill them rather than remain ALIENATED, removed, from the wonderful fruits of our collective labour that confront us as entities separated from us at the display window of a store or featured in an advertisement.
People buy in order to try and heal the existentially traumatic effect of the robbery they experience at the point of production, where what we make - which determines to a great degree "who we are" - is stolen from us. People become consumers in order to try and become whole again. In vain, of course (not the artery, but the vein) because the merchandise (commodities) created and sold by capitalism are like heroin: you can never get a permanent satisfaction and must buy again soon. Socialism, and especially a regime of Direct Democracy over community-owned means of production, is a cure from all this.
> Our job is to show that [our roles as consumers (debtors) and
> workers (wages)] are really two artificially separated moments of the
> same historical force...
Why is this our job? Later on (below) you manifest the way of thinking that leads to the above statement, but still, there is no reason apparent to me why we must shoulder this mission to "show" this to anyone. When has showing this to people ever led to a radical epiphany or a revolutionary moment, or better forms of organizing?
Below you wrote: "It is that false separation of "workers" (producers of value) and "consumers" (users of value) that has locked us into an increasingly untenable situation, and renders us controllable and impotent."
I don't think that this is true. It's true that a false separation exists, but it is not what has locked us into an untenable situation. More on this below.
> Capital works hard at maintaining the illusory wall between
> "workers" and "consumers" -- a pitiful and disempowering way to
> describe workers when we're not at work. Most of us have internalized
> this split, to capital's advantage; it keeps the 99% from taking
> action where capital is most vulnerable....
I don't see any evidence that THIS is what keeps the working class (in the US, the people) from taking appropriate action. On the contrary, there are other factors that are proven to be a lot more potent obstacles to appropriate action: racism, sexism, homophobia, identification with illegitimate authority, to name a few. More about this below.
> Even the progressive campaigns of consumer advocate Ralph Nader for
> President presented the primary clash in our society as between
> "consumers" and "irresponsible corporations," therein upholding (at
> least in theory) "responsible" ones, and ignoring the exploitation
> and expropriation on which capitalism as a system is built.
There is no doubt that Nader's approach was a sickening glorification of modern capitalist ideology at its worst: the attempt to elevate consumer fetishism to a "political ideal". Like the cleaning product "Comet"; it makes me vomit.
> We need to create new organizational forms that go beyond the
> traditional trade union, consumer advocacy /and/ political party
> models...
That, we do need.
> ...all of which accept that duality to one degree or another.
But not because of this reason.
> The challenge for any radical organization of-a-new-type is not so
> much to proselytize around political questions arising out of one
> side or the other in the wage/debt debate or exhort the exhausted to
> hustle back to the barricaded Zuccotti Squares of our lives, but to
> enable us all -- particularly workers (who are, after all, /us/) --
> to dramatically expand our organizations' purview to include /what/
> is produced, /how/ it is produced, and how it the end-product is
> made available to all.
Yes, very good. Though we need to say more about the "radical organization of-a-new-type". The criterion you delineate above is not enough.
> One way to do that is by revealing the hidden environmental,
> political, racial, sexual, class and cultural dimensions within
> /every /seemingly economic issue. And, second, we must make it
> possible to organize and fight for so-called "consumer" demands on
> the job and not just in the community, by taking direct action on
> the job and forcing the company or government to comply with whatever
> we are demanding in our communities. In that way, we can begin the
> process of taking political, ecological and social responsibility
> for the world around us.
Yes, Direct Action conceived this way is the correct way to go, even if the way you articulate it comes out of positing a wrong theoretical problem. Your solution is the correct one, even if the identification of the problem is wrong.
> *All of these "What Ifs" embody a radical vision that is
> fundamentally democratic (with a small "d"); they are based upon
> direct community participation through which people take charge over
> the decisions that affect their lives on every level and minimize
> /relying upon/ those in power to make the changes they seek.
Yes, and in process of doing so, the mobilized community experiences a transcendence of the false duality between producer and consumer and becomes directly both.
> It is that false separation of "workers" (producers of value) and
> "consumers" (users of value) that has locked us into an increasingly
> untenable situation, and renders us controllable and impotent.
This is wrong. Partly because there's no credible evidence to back it up (if there is, what is it?), and partly because other, better theoretical formulations explain much better what has "locked us into an increasingly untenable situation, and renders us controllable and impotent."
In summary:
1. The advent of the Orgonomic (Reichian) branch of marxism (scientific socialism) has thoroughly explored and explained the role of AUTHORITARIANISM as a tremendous social, personal, biological and psychological political force that "renders us controllable and impotent.". It has shown the mechanisms through which the dual power of the State and Capital is embedded, imprinted and reproduced within the continuum of our psyche and our biology and acts as a TANGIBLE force, a force measurable with electrical devices and observable with simple psychological interviews, that acts to distort our political behaviour as individual and collective actors (or abstainers) from the historical process in ways that serve the ruling class.
2. The advent of the Situationist view on the evolution of the Society of the Spectacle explains almost fully how and why our modern consumerist society operates more like the Circus part of the "Bread and Circus" formula, and less like the Bread part. And it explains why there are tremendous numbers of people who instead of drinking water prefer to buy and drink ONLY Coca Cola.
One needs to combine the findings of Orgonomy with the findings of the Situationists to see the full picture: authoritarian capitalism has traumatized us in many ways, but one particular way in which it did so has resulted in a tremendous amount of sexual energy (vitality) that's accumulated and stagnated within the Ocular segment of the bodymind, that is the visual and mental areas and organs of "modern" humanity, rendering us into zombies addicted to merchandise porn. We are literally fixated by this trapped sexual energy to trying to live our lives in accordance with the images (the Spectacle) of merchandise and commodities that are embedded everywhere in the social-physical environment that surrounds us. "I will not rest until I can get a hold of that couch and SEE MYSELf just like in the picture of that ad." It rules our lives.
The Spectacle has become the pathway through which we attempt to regain what has been stolen from our identity as producers. Being "merely" consumers of items that have use value is not only inadequate; it is REJECTED by most working people! People want to "get themselves in the picture", and therefore will strive at any cost and sacrifice to get the merchandise that the Spectacle promises best to give them some relief from the existential trauma they experience from the robbery of our collectively produced goods at the point of production.
The two theoretical frameworks I delineated above explain a lot better why Direct Action and Direct Democracy - in the spirit you so brilliantly present here - are medicine for our problems.
Whereas your explanation phrased as: "It is that false separation of "workers" (producers of value) and "consumers" (users of value) that has locked us into an increasingly untenable situation, and renders us controllable and impotent", I think is inadequate.
> Breaking down the imposed dichotomy between wages and debts --
> between workers and consumers -- involves new organizational
> formations that take action to prevent the waves of cutbacks,
> privatization, layoffs, housing and farm foreclosures, bank bailouts
> and huge consumer and student debts, to say nothing of the massive
> destruction of the planet's biosphere and imperialist wars.
Well, here it is again, the "new organizational formations", or "radical organization of-a-new-type" you mentioned earlier.
> That doesn't mean we should never petition those in power; it means
> we don't rely on it. Instead, we focus on putting the world we want
> directly into effect, and create in the here-and-now some tiny
> sliver of a future society worth living in. These will hopefully
> inspire others, and become bases -- liberated zones -- from which to
> launch further sorties against the system. Direct
> Action/Participatory Democracy serves as both means and ends at the
> same time.
Yes, the above paragraph and the one below are excellent ways to articulate it.
> Clearly, direct action as conceived here is not simply a more
> militant form of protest, as some portray it, but a total
> reconceptualization of how societal transformation comes about and
> the role of conscious activists in organizing themselves to achieve
> it. That is, direct action is a /strategy/ for achieving a new
> society and not just a tactic used in attempts to attack the
> policies of the old one.
One element that is lacking from contemporary revolutionary theory and praxis is a set of guidelines that allow us to know when and where to "invest" heavily our organizational efforts in order for Direct Action and Direct Democracy to have the effects we want, especially in the sense of (as you wrote) becoming "bases -- liberated zones -- from which to launch further sorties against the system".
Up until the nineteen eighties there were three theories with guiding principles for how to devise revolutionary strategy in that respect.
I'll go into those three a few paragraphs below. But first I look at your guidelines for it, here:
> Direct action is, most of all, a /way/ -- a Tao. It is a strategy of
> dual power based on participatory grassroots democracy, of building
> up the embryo of liberated or autonomous zones (often quite
> temporary ones; sometimes they are not even geographical but based
> on affinities around subverted norms), which serve as communities of
> resistance and nurturance within the shell of the old. They create
> in effect a parallel socialist universe; but these differ from
> utopian communes in that they are continuously /engaged,/ they can't
> withdraw from the effects and pressures of the system even if they
> want to. The more successfully they see wage-workers and debtors as
> two sides to the same coin, the more powerful our chances of saving
> ourselves -- /all/ of us -- and the planet we live on.
Up until the last sentence, everything you wrote is perfect. Except at the last sentence where I'd say if you were in a good mood and if this were someone else's writing you would probably see that there's an inversion of Cause and Effect. The path of Direct Action / Direct Democracy, due to the nature of the degeneracy or deficiency built into capitalism and how those affect us in ways that, among other things, create the false dualism between producers and consumer, has an inherent healing power to render that false dualism null. Socialism, is after all a large aspirin (the size of the Sun) capable of healing all of that.
But it's one thing to experience the neutralization of the false dualism through the path of Zen Marxism (Direct Action / Direct Democracy) and a totally different thing to say that "The more successfully [the communities of resistance and nurturance] see wage-workers and debtors as two sides to the same coin, the more powerful our chances of saving ourselves". In fact the truth is the exact opposite. In your phrase there's an inversion of Cause and Effect.
Our communities of resistance and nurturance do not need to "see succefully" that "wage-workers and debtors as two sides to the same coin" in order to make "more powerful our chances of saving ourselves".
The exact opposite takes place. The experiences of Direct Democracy and Direct Action that are embedded within the revolutionary communities as applied to the specific conditions of the struggle (creation of free clinics; occupation of an empty shopping mall to create youth centers; squatting land or buildings and converting them to people's needs, whatever the projects might be), those experiences by themselves are inherently capable of restoring the false dualism back to a unity. Neither the individual nor the community need to "see successfully" the false dualism in order to transcend it through struggle. The experiences within the community of resistance and nurturance are enough for that to happen.
The way you phrase it - "puts Descartes before the horse", you might have said on another day - violates the principle of logic by inveting Cause and Effect: People (both collectively and individually) reap the healing benefits of Direct Action and Direct Democracy regardless of whether they could "see successfully" the false dichotomy ahead of time. Transcendence of the false dichotomy is an Effect of revolutionary processes, not a Cause.
But written up with a reversal of Cause and Effect, the concept misleads us into thinking that it might serve as a set of guidelines telling revolutionary strategists when and where to invest that type of revolutionary activity. Whereas the three theories I mentioned above that are specifically intended to help us make those choices, utilize a type of thought that is of an entirely different order. In summary, those three theories are:
1. Lenin's theory of the "weakest link"
Essentially it presents the Empire as a system of links in a chain. The metaphor is usually applied to thinking of countries as the links, but large areas that are not formally countries might qualify for it as well.
Due to the uneven development of global capitalism, some links in the chain are stronger than others, and the pressures and forces applied between the links are also uneven; some are strong, some are weak. When a sufficiently strong force runs through the chain (for example a world war, or a global crisis) some links break. The break in the link offers an opportunity (NOT a guarantee) that revolutionary conditions might break out. If a revolutionary organization is positioned well in time and place, and has the support of a large section of the people (or at least the people will not oppose it), then it can effect (catalyze) revolutionary change that involves a seizure of power BY the communities of resistance and nurturance.
2. Che Guevara and Fidel's theory of "foco"
Che and Fidel extended this form of thinking to examining the play of powers within a country. They also recognized the uneven development of capitalism and especially the fact that due to it, a tremendous difference arises between countryside and urban areas. The Capitalist State has near absolute control in the urban areas whereas the system's development "leaves behind" large areas of the countryside, especially mountainous or desert areas (eg. the Andes, or the Moroccan desert). The people there are nominally under the system but do not really participate in it. In those areas there is a vacuum of power, and a vacuum of political economy. In those areas, a revolutionary community or resistance and nurturance can take root, become embraced by the people, and if conditions are right, become a base from which to lure the entire country into a revolutionary change.
3. The theory that the Yippies named the "Soft Revolution" strategy from the late seventies (well articulated in their book titled "Secret History of the "70s") which also emerged independently in the nineteen eighties from the mostly anarchist squatter movement in the West (esp. in Western Europe and N. America).
According to this theory, after Che's "foco" theory and due to the accelerated development of the system in the "advanced" countries, both revolutionaries and reactionaries in the nineteen sixties realized that the the core of the urban areas in the West (the dilapidated urban centers and the ethnic/racial ghettos within the cities), were very good candidates for "foco" activities, resulting on the one hand in uprisings and revolutionary movements best exemplified by the Black Panthers, and on the other hand by a totalitarian military occupation of those urban regions and communities by soldiers of the system dressed up as Police, replete with tactical units, tanks, and heavy weapons making the revolutionary project impossible.
So the "Soft revolution" strategy was based upon the realization that urban centers contain vast areas and communities that are within a political vacuum (high unemployment, abandoned buildings, populations either ignored by the system or violently oppressed by it), fulfilling the conditions of a "foco", but where the conditions are not ripe for the revolution to go out into full scale conflict with the regime. Hence a strategy of occupations, takeovers, a steady instituting of communities of resistance and nurturance founded on Direct Action and Direct Democracy and "biding time" until this can be done in a larger scale.
As you can see, the type of thinking that went into the three theories above is of a different order than what you propose. In essence you propose that if revolutionary strategists can "see succefully" that "wage-workers and debtors as two sides to the same coin" then this will make "more powerful our chances of saving ourselves" through Direct Action and Direct Democracy. But it essentially leaves the question of when and where to apply such activity and organizational effort unanswered, and reduces it to an act of awareness by the strategists: when they "see successfully" that "wage-workers and debtors as two sides to the same coin" this will somehow lead to correct choices for our campaigns, and also will heal the false dualism (producer-consumer) that the system embeds in us.
There's a great value in what you wrote above, except, in that last sentence.
One last unfinished comment
In my commentary here I wrote that you correctly argued that we need "new organizational formations", or "radical organization of-a-new-type". I also wrote that the criterion you delineate for it is not enough. Your phrase for it was "to dramatically expand our organizations' purview to include /what/ is produced, /how/ it is produced, and how it the end-product is made available to all."
I think that it's certainly a useful attribute to have but that it not at all sufficient, nor is it explicitly a revolutionary quality. In other words an organization possessing that quality is not necessarily revolutionary.
"What is?" you might ask. I would save more comments on that for later, if there's interest in this dialogue.
Thanks, Petros _____________
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