Subject: Re: AUT: RE: Research towards an anti-militarist project
From: chris wright <cwright.21stcentury-AT-rcn.com>
Date: 13 Feb 2003 10:42:55 -0600


Hi Laura,

My hesitation in calling the current situation a movement, at least in
the US, is that it so far has not seeped into the daily life practice of
many people, including those involved in the demonstrations directly. 
The layer of people in the US involved, even in terms of the misnamed
anti-globalization movement, did not have deep social roots and
connections.  In Chicago, my experience is that in some ways the
anti-war mobilizations are much deeper than the anti-glob mobilizations
were, though obviously to me the anti-glob stuff in a way made this kind
of ealy massive protest possible and cannot be neatly cut off.

On the term 'coalition', that is the common word used here in the US by
the anti-war groupings.  It is their word, not mine.  And joining with a
broader grouping usually means joining a coalition, which tend to be the
broadest organizational forms in the 'movement.'  But anti-war
'movement' politics in the US are very organizational in this period
exactly because its not much of a movement yet that is self-sustaining
and imprinted in people's daily lives.  No one uses the term 'coalition'
to describe a movement, just a particular form of politcal
organization.  Right now, the coalitions dominate in the abscence of a
real movement.

As for what social forces will play a role, I certainly do not expect a
repeat of the 1960's.  However, the participation of the African
American community is a very important indication of the depth of a
movement in this country.  I do not think that has changed.  What has
changed is the class composition of race in the US.  The blue collar
population that was essential to the formation of a radical politics in
the North in the US has been decimated, and that decimation is far
deeper in the African American population than elsewhere.  It is easier
to be African American and male and spend time in jail than it is to
find a steady industrial or technical job.  And white supremacy, though
of a different sort than civil rights-era activists are used to thinking
about, is still a key problem to the recomposition of the class here.

I have a lot of thoughts on the problem of the decomposition of the
African American working class and the transformation to a surveillance
state away from the welfare state, and maybe I should write something
coherent, but I will say something small here.

On the decomposition of the class, IMO a large portion of the African
American population should now be considered migrant labor.  People are
forced to move frequently, to constantly find new jobs, to engage in the
underground economy to make ends meet, etc.  This has created a crisis
situation in terms of a deep atomization that has left people often
feeling disconnected and isolated on one level.  One common touchstone
is the resistance to the state via the police and that has been an
important part of African American politics.  But it is not
uncomplicated.

The atomization of people and the decimation of access to steady waged
labor has a gendered component.  Patriarchal violence has increased. 
Many women I know live with the very real threat of being killed by the
men in their lives (and have women in their families who have been
killed by the men), a situation far more prevelant for the African
American women I know than the white ones (including one woman recently
divorced from a white man who understands his social privileges all too
well.)  The incarceration of African American men is not looked at as
purely negative by many of the women.  Sometimes it is the only way to
get rid of a violent man who is also a severe financial drain and a
threat to the children.  At the same time, Black women in particular
will not turn over Black men to the police in matters of domestic
violence.  This is too general, but I am merely trying to complicate
matters a bit.  With varying nuances and expectations, this also largely
is true in the working class Puerto Rican and Chicano (not recent
immigrant) communities too.  NOTE: In all cases, this is about life in
working class communities.  The middle class, professional, etc. Black
and Latino populations act pretty much just like the white ones.  The
situation of white workers, however, is much less desperate and much
less a focus of the state apparatus, and so the situation is one which
is very much racialized in how it plays out concretely.  Class does not
appear in a unitary fashion, but like everything else, in a fragmented
manner.

The prominence of gangs is not disconnected from this atomization but
deeply connected with it, both as a form of social organization and as a
means of getting income.  The gangs reinforce the patriarchal aspects
and the credibility of the violent organizing of hierarchical social
relations.  Not surpisingly, the police are heavily implicated in the
gangs and not a few cops are gang members.  Gangs often also tend to
make arrangements with the cops and even with some local politicians. 
There is nothing good about the gangs, but I am concerned with what they
signify.  And I don;t think they signify anything good, not in the
racist, terrorzing media way, but as an indication of the deep
atomization in the African American community. At the same time, no
other groups are as likely to engage in massive social outbursts aka
rebellions/riots.  When that happened in Cleveland a few years ago, the
anti-glob folks had no connection to the Black population and even less
of interest to say.  They literally could not communicate meaningfully. 
Why not?  It is not the incommunicability of struggles, IMO, but a
genuine lack of political and human contact that involves white, US
anti-glob activists being more comfortable talking to people in Papua
New Guinea or Ecuador than to African Americans because the relationship
is abstract and not a part of daily life.  It is safe and not so messy
and doesn't challenge the white supremacist organization of social life
here that gets at people's daily practices.

In that sense, working with the Pakistani and Arab communities is easier
too and not terribly indicative of anything yet.  Maybe if it was a
massive support for Mexican migrants it would impact differently.  Not
to be unkind, but it is an easier first step.  A good one though, and I
don't want to underplay its importance, but to pay attention to its
specific weight.  If the support is to become more than simple 'defense
of victims', it will require a lot of effort and learning.

Now can any radical politics make headway without some transformation of
the current class composition?  I think so, though I am more sure of
what politics will not be effective, rather than what will be.  

The situation is reminiscent of a generalization of the type of people
the old Nation of Islam used to recruit.  Malcolm X, not accidentally,
had been a petty criminal and pimp.  The NOI took the patriarchal,
hierarchical, domineering aspects of the atomized, lumpen life and
turned it into nationalism (not surprisingly.)  What politics will take
up that challenge in a situation where the lumpenization of a large
section of Black workers is more and more the case?  The civil rights
politics never did and never will appeal to that situation, but neither
will a League of Revolutionary Black Workers.  I don;t have an answer,
but this is partially what I see as capital attempts to impose its
recomposition here in the US.

I will just say briefly that with the collapse of the welfare state, the
police are a more and more prominent part of social control, and not
really through direct violence, but through the expansion of
surveillance powers.

Let me give an example.  If you are pulled over by a cop, you are
generally checked for what is called a 'rap sheet' (if you are Black of
Latino, you are definitely checked), a list of times you have been
stopped and brought down to the station.  No charges need to be filed to
acquire a mark in the record and every cop in a squad car can get your
rap sheet in a minute or two.  So let's say you have no marks, but you
run into a cop who just wants to be a bastard (quite frequent).  Boom,
you suddenly have a mark.  Once you have a mark, you will get more and
more because a cop is more likely to bring you in to harass you the more
marks you have.  Now this is done and is expected to be done in African
American, Puerto Rican and Mexican neighborhoods quite a lot, so that
people who are frequently out on the streets, including very young
people, frequently have a rap sheet but no actual criminal record.  This
is a kind of constant surveillance.

There was a recent instance here where a drug raid led to the cops
finding a 3 year old chained to the radiator of the apartment.  The 3
year old was under foster care (which is a pretty horrible system) and
the foster parents were arrested and the kid shipped somewhere else. 
But it caused an uproar because in past times, it would have been the
task of DCFS (Department of Child and Family Services) to find stuff
like this, but the cuts to social welfare programs have cut the
monitoring capacities as well, which shift more and more to the police.

This situation has also involved an increase in police brutality, and
that was a very important issue here in Chicago, as it is in many
places.  But it also involves a need to make the police look clean and
technical.  There is an increasing pressure on police to file constant
reports, to follow detailed technical procedures and keep extensive and
detailed records.  Police who fail to do this are being weeded out
slowly and it involves a genuine transformation of that aspect of the
state machinery.  The old beat cop is being replaced with a more
surveillance-oriented, technocratically managed cop.  This cop obviously
makes all the same old discriminations (yuppies don't get thrown in jail
for public drinking, while workers are far more likely to be harassed,
on a sliding racial scale.)  But he/she also has to transmit the
information gathered to the state in a constant stream of database-
building material on each and every person targeted as 'criminal
element.'

The mostly white anti-glob movement has little or no connection to these
struggles (in part because many of them wouldn't be treated by the cops
as 'marks' on site unless they are at a demonstration; in other words,
unless they make a target of themselves) and so have stayed outside the
mainstream of social struggle in the African American and Puerto Rican
communities.  (Even though the African American population is only about
14% of the US population, adjusted for the massive miscounting recently
reported in studies of the 2000 Census, the weight of the African
American working class in most of the cities of the US is far larger.)

At the same time, the anti-glob stuff has not found much of a hearing
outside of white student non-waged labor and a handful of organizations
in the immigrant communities.  So I am arguing here about a certain
depth, a resonance, that a movement has which I don't think we can talk
about yet.

However, if there was ever an opportunity to take the anti-capitalist
message of the anti-glob struggles to people, to link up with a
potentially deep and aggressive mobilization, a war with Iraq might be
it.  Not that other events might not lead to a social movement, but this
seems rather immanent and it engages with a very broad cross-section of
the population.  However, rhetoric-laden texts won't work (most African
American youth are more familiar with the Bible and their parents likely
relatively fundamentalist beliefs than with Malcolm X.)

Sorry, no answers and this kind of rambles, but for the people where I
live and who I associate with (which is not the increasingly white world
of university students), the anti-glob stuff never even made it onto
their radar, but the state and its increasing power and omnipresence in
their daily life certainly has.

Cheers,
Chris

On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 03:52, Laura Fiocco wrote:
> Chris et al, 
> you may be right that in the US "we still do not have anything on the level
> of a sustained social movement(s)", but I whouldn't be so sure. A movement
> is a process feeding itself by the inclusion of different contents of
> different persons and groups, which feel they have some values, desire,
> present and future expectations in common.
> Vietnam's war became a catalizzatore ??? of the world movement in the 60's
> because it became (product of the movement itself -hegemony) the
> rappresentation of death against life, hate against love, authoritarism
> against freedom, power (capital) against selfvalorisation.
> Each person deals with those oppositions from the stand point of his own
> life and position in the social context. This can be true also now, but the
> social context has changed, so that we cannot expect that the movement will
> be made by the same social forces that were present in the past. I think
> that to find the new social forces we have to look at the "no global"
> movement, including the new forces created by this specific war coalition,
> such as the Arab American and Pakistani groups you refare to.
> 
> By the way, what doesn't help the movement(s) is to label the anti-war
> movement as a "anti-war coalition". It is not a coalition (where does this
> name come from?). My fiends and I are not a component of a coalition, we
> are in the anti-war movement, Berlusconi governement is in a war coalition.
> And it is not a simple problem of names. Giving names to things is part of
> the strugle, it is a product of a process of hegemony making (common
> sense-sense of life).
> ciao laura
> 



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