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/ ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? 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