File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0109, message 255


Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 17:36:23 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: Autonomist Marxist analyses of the crisis?



I've been looking in vain for some autonomist Marxist
analyses of the current crisis.

It's possible that some have passed me by, in the e
mail deluge that followed S 11, but all I've seen are
forwarded statements by ultra-left and Leninist
groups.
I'm forwarding something Iwrote, as part of a local
debate, in the hope that it'll be bad enough to stir a
few others into posting...

The antiwar movement here actually seems to have quite
a bit of potential: already we've had a march of 900
people. You can get some details at the trial local
indymedia site: http://www.indymedia.org.nz/


SH


Fydd has raised important questions about the current
political climate in New Zealand.
Here's my contribution to analysisng the conditions an
anti-war movement will have to operate in, here and in
other Western states...


Any analysis of the conditions we work with today has
to begin in the 80s, when, worldwide, Capital used
neoliberalism successfully to smash the left and
recompose the working class into a form that prevented
it from advancing or holding the gains it had made in
the 60s and 70s.

The forms that leftist activity has taken in the past
few years can only be understood in terms of the
defeats of the 80s and early 90s. The anticapitalist
movement was based in the streets and not the worksite
because workplace organisation was shot. The affinity
group model for organisation gained popularity because
the old, mass hierachical models pushed by reformist
unions, mass social democratic parties and mass
Stalinised Communist Parties had been smashed. Direct
action gained popularity because the politics of
mediation - of national awards, pay rounds,
parliamentary representation for mass social
democratic and Stalinised Communist parties, and the
rest of the heritage of the Keynesian 'social
contract' society that was institutionalised in the
30s and smashed in the 80s and early 90s - seemed
unable to deliver rewards. Students, certain strata of
the white collar working class and declassed youth
took the lead because the industrial working class had
had its guts kicked out. 

With its tactics and organisational forms, then, the
anticapitalist movement turned the disadvantages the
defeats of the 80s and early 90s had forced on the
left into strengths. Despite the successes of Seattle
and Genoa, though, the left and the working class have
remained very weak in most parts of the First World.
In Aotearoa/NZ, this weakness has been reflected in
chronically low strike levels, small turnouts for left
political protests, and a decline in membership
suffered by all  political parties, from the Labour
Party to Leninist grouplets, which appeal to leftist
and working class sentiment. At the same time, the old
and new right is experiencing, in this country amongst
others, an ideological exhaustion which is reflected
here in phenomena as different as the disastrously low
polls attracted by ACT and the Christian Heritage
Party, the increasing irrelevance of the National
Party, the desperate mysticism of the 'Knowledge Wave'
cult, and depressed business' abandonment of old
neoliberal ideas in favour of a 'socially responsible'
neo-Keynesian Third Way.

The ideological and economic impoverishment of NZ over
the past two decades, and the defeats of the left and
the working clas in the same period, have created a
situation very different to the one that sponsored the
60s and 70s 'upsurge' in struggle that lead to the
ruling class' neoliberal response. I'm thinking, here,
of struggles like the strike waves of the late 70s and
early 80s, the revival of militant Maori nationalist
protest beginning in the mid 70s with the Land March
and continuing to the march on Waitangi in 1984, and
the Springbok protests in 81.

Taking 81 as an archetype for the protests of the
'upsurge', we can clearly perceive the difference I've
asserted above. The Springbok protests were intensely
internationalist - after all, they concerned
themselves, principally if not exclusively, with
events halfway across the world - and thus testified
to a population with a fairly high level of political
consciousness, a population capable of linking issues
and arguments. Despite the best efforts of some union
leaders and soon-to-be-Rogernome liberals, and the
perhaps-inevitable appeal of rugby-uber-alles in some
of the provinces, the Springbok protests were also
characterised by a significant degree of class unity:
that is, they had a significant working class base.
Additionally, the 81 protests featured a significant
amount of cross-racial participation, with Maori,
Pakeha, and PI marching together. 

All of the above-mentioned features reflect the
cohesion of the working class and the clear outlines
and class demarcations society as a whole had in 1981.
This was a society of national wage awards, carefully
prescheduled national wage rounds, a stable,
well-established ruling class, a fairly homogenous,
populist culture, and a fairly clear sense of where it
belonged, give or take a nuclear ship visit, in a cosy
Cold War world. In short, it was a classic late social
contract society. It was also, of course, threatening
to come apart at the seams, as the demands of workers
and newly-militant 'minority' groups combined with
economic troubles born overseas to stretch the
boundaries of the class compromise which was the
social contract welfare state.

Twenty years later, in 2001, we live in a very
different place, where an atomised, disunited
population lacks a clear framework or ideology into
which to fit its experience of steady economic and
social decline. The disappearance of old ideological
orthodoxies and the absence of credible forms for
political protest leads to the channeling of
dissidence and disatisfaction away from their sources,
and into fads and  free-floating 'moral panics'. 

Ours is the era of New Age superstition, body image
anxiety, Satanic ritual 'abuse', hysteria over rap
lyrics, and so on, apparently ad infinitum. The
intolerant behaviour and reactionary, hysterical
slogans of some of the anti-GE brigade, and the middle
class orientation of the protests they have organised
-protests which some optimistically count as possible
signs of an 'upsurge' - reflect the weakness of the
left and of the working class. The difference between
the anti-GE protests of 2001 and the Springbok
protests of 1981 is the difference between chalk and
cheese.

Where does all of this leave the nascent anti-war
movement, and the libertarian leftists who will take
part in it? I believe that we have to see the impact
of the S 11 atrocities on popular consciousness
in its complex reality, and not impressionistically in
the images of jingoism and war fever dominating the
media and - let's face it - large parts of mainstream
society. 

Considered against the backdrop of the weakness of the
left, the ideological exhaustion of left and right,
and the fragility of popular consciousness, the S 11
attacks can be seen as opening up contradictory
possibilities. 

On the one hand, the lack of strong left institutions
and mechanisms of protest and the disunited nature of
the working class offer opportunities for those
leaders who seek to win assent for imperialist wars
and repressive domestic legislation. 

On the other hand, opportunities for the left exist.
The magnitude of the S 11 and the response they are
eliciting cannot be answered with the minimalist,
post-Cold War politcal vocabulary of the 90s. They
raise, in the most dramatic manner imaginable, massive
questions about the nature of advanced Western
capitalist societies and the wider world those
societies exist in. Not for nothing have the likes of
Bush and Blair been forced to draw on the language and
concepts of the Bible in their pro-war addresses to
the world.

The tragedies in New York City have also unleashed a
wave of genuine emotion and empathy, which the
dessicated, shrunken realm of official public
political discourse is incapable of containing. Bush
and the other warmongers  ride this wave of emotion,
but simultaneously seek to limit the territory it
crosses. If empathy for slain New Yorkers becomes
empathy for slain Iraqis, Palestinians and Afghans,
then their best-laid plans may go awry. The
atomisation and depoliticisation of the working class,
a task accomplished by long years of neoliberalism,
has also been undone, in however partial and
contradictory a fashion, by the aftermath of the S 11
attacks. (The ruling class still needs the working
class to wage war, after all.) Calls for collective
action  and mass public political expression of
opinion in response to the attacks fly in the face of
previous determined attempts to depoliticise and
atomise the Western working class, and have the
potential to turn against the forces which are
currently benefitting from them.

The anti-war movement has to engage with the
contradictions of the impact of S 11 on popular
consciousnes in the West. It has to turn popular
empathy for a few indirect victims of imperialism into
popular empathy for the many  direct victims of
imperialism; to turn collective insecurity into
collective understanding, by adding its analysis to a
popular sense of unease; and to turn collective action
in support of imperialism into collective action in
opposition to imperialism, by demonstrating the
spurious nature of the security that imperialism
promises to a hitherto atomised, frightened
population, and by counterposing real internationalism
to the fake harmony of imperialist globalisation.

In summary, the imperialist war drive will, by its own
logic, reverse some of the atomisation and
depoliticisation that has hamstrung the left for a
decade or more; the task of anti-war protesters is to
*politicise* that reversal. 

The litmus test for the success of repoliticisation,
in the left as in the rest of society, will be the
adoption of a truly internationalist stance, a stance
which acknowledges the right of Third World peoples
oppressed by imperialism to self-defence, even when
the said peoples use states or  organisations with
reactionary ideologies as their vehicles for
self-defence. Very few of the 1981 protesters had
difficulty in accepting the legitimacy of a South
African people's national liberation struggle aimed at
the establishment of a state; today, of course, the
calls for critical support of states threatened by
imperialism are confined to a small number of even an
embryonic anti-war movement. At the anti-war meeting
held yesterday in Auckland, speakers argued against
slogans which recognised Afghans' right to
self-defence by claiming that such slogans would
alienate many Kiwis who might not object to blanket
'No to war' 
statements. Such an argument shows up a failure to
achieve an internationalist perspective because, for
no reason other than national bias, it subordinates
the perspective and demands of those taking part in
the massive, crucial anti-imperialist struggles in
frontline states like Pakistan to the mood of public
opinion in faraway, privileged, relatively unimportant
New Zealand.

Anarchists, who were at the heart of the very populous
left wing of the anticapitalist movement, will need to
adapt if they want to survive on the left of the new,
anti-imperialist movement. At the moment, most of them
seem to stand alongside pacifists, desperately
moderate authoritarian socialists, Greens and social
democrats in holding a 'neither of two evils'
position.

While an anti-war movement has to be very broad,
incorporating everyone from the centre to the extreme
left, it is important that it have a cutting edge. The
left of the antiwar movement needs the
antiauthoritarianism, commitment to democracy and
energy of anarchists. It should not be abandoned to
the dwindling numbers of orthodox Trotsyists and
Maoists. Anarchists need to update the politics that
served them well in the days of the anticapitalist
movement, so that they can play an important role in
the new, anti-imperialist era. 

Cheers
Scott   



====For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea":
THR-AT-LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/thrall/
THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_third_eye_website/
and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production, http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7Ejho32/

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