Subject: Re: AUT: Tariq Ali: change the world by taking power
From: chris wright <cwright-AT-megapathdsl.net>
Date: 09 Dec 2004 01:34:34 -0500


The problem with this discussion is that it skirts a variety of issues:

First, what kind of power do we want?  Power over others or power over
our own lives?  These are not quite the same.  The rejection of state
power is not the rejection of collective working class power, of the use
of organized violence or social organization against capital in the
event of struggles against it.  But we do have to ask ourselves: What is
the state?  John starts from, as do I, the idea that the state is a
social formation which stands in place of collective self-organization,
which is in fact a moment of a particular kind of class relations. In
abstentia from the analysis of the state, Ali can only in fact promote
Lenin's concept of the state as an object with a content determined by
who runs it.  But is this realistic?  Can we just take over the state? 
Can we even smash the state and then reinstitute a "workers' state"? 
Ali does not even have this in mind.  If anything, he starts from the
current miserable situation and universalizes it, rather than
approaching the problem of what to do today from the concrete.  His
approach is abstract.

Second, where is power located?  From the point of view of communism,
the state is an obstacle, one which we may certainly be forced to reckon
with, but not one which we want to replicate.  If revolution does not
immediately involve breaking down the separation of life into a
multitude of discreet spheres (economic, political, ideological,
ethical, legal, etc.), then it cannot hope to engage all of our powers. 
When Marx describes communism as the return of humanity to itself, he
does not mean a return to some previous communism, but a reclaiming of
everything which human beings have produced in the past and the present
as ours, as the product of our activity and as subordinate to ourselves
as our own end.  To reinscribe the separation of the economic and the
political is to reinscribe the capital-labor relation.

Third, none of this prevents us from approaching each and every struggle
concretely, but are we left then with only thinking as far as ths or
that struggle?  It is a recipe for single issue politics or politics
which seeks to 'link' issues because it sees life as a series of
independent problems.  It forgoes exactly what makes Marx's work
valuable, IMO.  It is a position suitable for making capitalism less
nasty, but I do not see any vision from there beyond capital.

Fourth, to flesh out this problem of power a bit more, how could one
imagine any form of self-organization which did not defend itself and
seek to surpass the form of social organization associated with state
power?  The Zapatistas suffer from isolation, which may be partially a
product of their politics, but also a product of the relative weakness
of resistance elsewhere.  I doubt that the people of Chiapas would
consider the last 10 years a waste for their own lives compared to the
old days.  In fact, when have the people of Chiapas ever had as much
direct control over their lives as this last 10 years?  On the other
hand, where is this sense in Bolivia under the little general?  Do
people have more control over their lives or simply less repression (a
good thing in itself, to be sure)?

Power of the sort that interests us then is a power of self-activity,
self-organization.  It is not therefore unarmed or passive, but requires
activity, audacity and struggle.

Fifth, it is often hard to see where such power can come from in the
current world situation.  In different places, different problems
present themselves, but nowhere is it obvious what revolution means. 
Certainly, it does not mean Chavez since Chavez is first and foremost no
threat to capital, although maybe to certain capitalists.  But to
confuse the current impasse with the need to return to the failed
politics of state power (and really the last 87 years are a testament to
its failure as well as ours), is to simply admit to prefering what
exists (even if it is a failure) to what does not-yet-but-may-exist, to
the possible.

I do not mean to hop on a bandwagon which refuses to engage in struggles
unless they meet my criterion, but Ali's article rather does do that. 
"I won't support the Zapatistas because they have not done things my
way, through the state."  Then again, the Zapatistas have not turned
into the kind of monsters that the very state-power oriented groups like
Sendero Luminoso or the FARC become, who murder opponents from the Left,
who police any popular struggles that threaten to escape their embrace. 
This alone is valuable and to be respected.  I do not want to go back to
the guerrilla armies who are very much a new state in waiting.  I do not
want to go back to workplace organizations which seek incorporation into
the state, nor the state formation of 'workers organizations' as in
Yugoslavia or China or the USSR.

Forward has to be some other way than through the state, but not without
power, just without 'taking power' or as John calls it 'power over'.

Just because these are despairing times does not give us the right to
succumb to a politics of despair.

Cheers,
Chris



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