Idealists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the last shred of respect

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Re: Idealists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the last shred of respect

Post by blindpig » Wed May 13, 2020 4:09 pm

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Reviewed by Lewis Hodder

Image
Photograph of a Cuban cow, provided by Alberto Bayo

Waking up under mosquito nets each morning, we would use plastic jugs to fill the cisterns of the toilets and hose ourselves down with cold water in the showers. For breakfast there’d be bread and eggs again, so I’d just grab a banana and bag of peanuts before I got on with hand-washing my clothes to get rid of the red dirt that stuck to our trousers while we worked. But looking out over the Cuban landscape as I brushed my teeth each morning, watching the cattle in the next field as the sun rose, any notions of luxury were entirely forgotten. Outside Caimito, on a small camp, we worked with farmers who used old tools that were fixed with rusted nails and sheer force – bent back into shape again and again until they were broken beyond repair. Had I got my hands on Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism sooner, I’d have quoted to the farmers, ‘Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism’, and we all would have laughed.

Now, sat in England, turning to my tattered review copy, it’s difficult to muster the same sense of humour. It’s hard to not see this book as a vanity project. Not in the sense of social media personality writes a book, but in how Bastani places himself in relation to Marx and his audience. ‘The reason you’ve likely never heard of either before’, he writes, either being the Grundrisse itself and the small section ‘Fragment on Machines’, ‘is that the Grundrisse never extended beyond a series of incomplete manuscripts remaining unpublished in Germany until 1939.’ And although we should be thankful that Bastani has uncovered the Penguin Classics edition of the Grundrisse, it is here that Bastani’s use of Marx both abruptly begins and ends.

The book itself is a slog to get through, and it feels like you’re reading pages among pages of PR directly from Silicon Valley. After a certain point Horkheimer’s throwaway line in Towards a New Manifesto, ‘I couldn’t care less about sending spacecraft to the moon’, begins to resonate on a personal level. FALC works as a catchphrase that attempts to fulfil the negative function of criticism; it contradicts the caricatures of communism as a mass of faceless workers bound to the fate of being able to buy one type of cola. Yet at the same time FALC takes these caricatures at face value and readily agrees with them. In an attempt to distance himself from these caricatures of communism he even goes so far as to say that, under FALC, ‘when you’re relaxing, it will look like a music video.’ Showing someone photographs of East Berlin fashion would more constructively fulfil this function of criticism, or even recalling Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment which reminds us that ‘the actual working conditions in society compel conformism’ – that the material conditions of capitalism can only offer the bright individuality central to its promise to one class.

Continuing along this line, Bastani entirely ignores the actual gains of communism while attempting to do-battle with capitalism over consumer culture; rather than looking to the countless people raised out of poverty, instead Bastani looks to Silicon Valley, space, and music videos. These concessions bring to mind an instance from Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, if only to demonstrate the contrast between the conception of communism in imperialist countries against the conception of communism in communist countries. When Snow asked a Chinese peasant whether they liked the Red Army, he ‘looked at me in genuinely amazement.’ The peasant replied, ‘The Red Army has taught me to read and write… Here I have learned to operate a radio, and how to aim a rifle straight. The Red Army helps the poor.’ Another peasant joined in, adding, ‘Here everybody is the same. It is not like the White districts, where poor people are slaves of the landlords and the Kuomintang. Here everybody fights to help the poor, and to save China. The Red Army fights the landlords and the White bandits and the Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should anyone not like such an army as this?’

It is getting increasingly tiresome that leftists in the imperialist core turn their nose up at communist countries because they have had to develop and struggle against attacks from those same imperialist countries. As the memory of Soviet Russia and communism is increasingly weaponised by NATO and the US to bolster their crumbling corpses, FALC cedes this ground entirely as an extension of the ultra-leftism that says, ‘communism has never existed’, that the USSR, People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Cuba were never really communist, they’re all bastardised attempts. This is a position that’s infinitely played out, but it appears again here – almost word-for-word: ‘While it is true that a number of political projects labelled themselves as communist over the last century…’ After reading that I seriously considered putting the book down for good. While I would agree with Bastani that that there are technically no communist countries, only socialist countries working towards communism, the purpose of this technicality isn’t in staying true to Marx’s definition but only in ignoring those countries who are closest to achieving that goal. This is clear when he writes, ‘There was never a workers’ revolution that overthrew the system – at least not on a global scale.’ At least is doing a lot of work here.

Reading the book, it soon becomes necessary to seriously reconsider the purpose of communism. Is it a political theory that we must use to liberate the working class and the Global South? To lift people out of poverty? Raise literacy? Decrease infant mortality? To save the planet? Or is it a rhetorical device to do-battle over consumer culture? It is incredible to see just how far leftist thought has been taken in by the machinations of imperialism that someone who endorses Marx shies away from the gains of his philosophy, and instead writes that ‘Marx considered the working class to be the key to a future society, but only because its revolution was uniquely able to eliminate work’, or that FALC is not ‘substituting one class for another’ as other communist projects hope to – reducing Marx to an infantile anarchism, ignoring the essential role of resolving class struggle. Bastani goes on to emphasise that FALC will not ‘be delivered by storming the Winter Palace’, and even that communism was impossible until the beginning of the ‘Third Disruption’ – since the advent of information technologies. But, after all of this, how does Bastani hope to achieve this communist vision? He takes Labour’s electoral strategy as its blueprint:

In isolation electoral politics will not give us the world we want, but allied with a constant movement to make the potential of the Third Disruption clear to everyone – along with the necessity for a collective political response – it shapes the parameters of what is possible.

I almost did a double take when I read this. This is exactly Corbyn’s and Momentum’s strategy. ‘After all,’ Bastani concludes in his own way, ‘it is often only around elections when large sections of society – particularly the most exploited – are open to new possibilities in how society works and able to perceive how previously distinct issues share both common cause and prospective solutions.’ And once a Corbyn government is in power? Government spending, co-ops, and free buses.

We can be confident that FALC isn’t an attempt to raise people out of poverty, or to resolve the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, yet it can’t even be said that it’s an attempt to pry hegemony away from the bourgeoisie; it’s a catchphrase raised into a principle, that someone has then had to laboriously work backwards into a contrived set of political positions. Bastani criticises ‘capitalist realism’ for the poverty of its imagination, yet FALC demonstrates the worst in the imagination and scope of leftist thought. It takes every piece of PR and propaganda at face-value, parades around empty phrases like populism and globalism, and can’t even conceive of imperialism on a basic level; instead it talks about the ‘outsourcing economy’, or the ‘spacial fix’ which ‘underpins contemporary globalisation’, even British manufacturing ‘going elsewhere.’ And when discussing the Global South’s capacity for solar energy as a natural resource, Bastani writes – without a hint of irony – that ‘nature’s gift becomes an economic blessing.’

I miss Cuba, and brushing my teeth in the morning sun. I’m starting to think that the real luxury is being thousands of miles away from these people. But, if I have to, the most positive thing I can say about the book is that I don’t doubt that it will be Elon Musk’s favourite book of 2019 – and he’ll tweet about it as he prevents his workers from unionising. No one else – whether those farmers in Cuba, the literal hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty in China, or even communists organising in the imperialist core – will pay attention.

Lewis Hodder is an editor of Ebb Magazine and writes on the Frankfurt School, philosophy, and Marxism.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/reviews/fu ... -communism
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Re: Idealists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the last shred of respect

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 09, 2020 10:33 pm

MARXISM WITHOUT SOCIALISM, SOCIALISM WITHOUT MARXISM
Posted by MLToday | Jul 9, 2020 | Featured Stories | 0

Marxism Without Socialism, Socialism Without Marxism
By Greg Godels
July 3, 2020
With an unparalleled, multi-faceted crisis only beginning in the US, one would expect that our deeper thinkers would rise to the occasion and offer bold, creative answers. With a popular revulsion against racism; a raging, death-wielding virus; a two-party electoral catastrophe; and only the first wave of a likely unprecedented economic disaster, one would hope that radical solutions would come forward to meet equally radical challenges.


Instead, many of the US Left’s most influential thinkers are offering weak tea– a tepid, shopworn, unimaginative crazy quilt of answers. Since the stultifying anti-Communist purges of the 1950s in the US, labor, peace, racial and women’s equality, and economic justice movements have been shackled to anarchist, liberal and social democratic ideas. As a result, anti-Communist Western “Marxism” only enters the conversation shorn of a commitment to socialism. And socialism is only discussed apart from the basic ideas of Marx and Lenin.


Perhaps the most popular “Marxist” in the US is Professor Richard D. Wolff. Throughout his career, he has done much to popularize Marx and Marxism. He is the go-to individual whenever the media needs a facile and well-spoken “Marxist.” Unfortunately, popularity and facility are not always a guarantee of clarity or audacity of vision.


Professor Wolff correctly sees this moment, this bizarre combination of biological, economic, social, and political catastrophe, as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change. In a recent article (How Workers Can Win the Class War Waged Against Them, Counterpunch, 6-19-2020), Wolff gives a brief, but competent recounting of the key events leading to this moment and the importance of the working class in advancing beyond it.


He answers the crisis with three points: “What then is to be done? First, we need to recognize the class war that is underway and commit to fighting it. On that basis, we must organize a mass base to put real political force behind social democratic policies, parties, and politicians. We need something like the New Deal coalition.”


A revitalized New Deal coalition? While hardly a new idea, that would require a sea-change in the Democratic Party, a party that demonstrated emphatically in the 2016 and 2020 primary elections that it would thwart social democratic ideas encroaching on its thoroughly corporate capitalist turf. Moreover, the Roosevelt coalition brought together Northern progressives and Southern racists in a last-ditch effort to save capitalism. After capitalism regained strength through the war economy, the corporate, reactionary wings of the coalition slammed the brakes on progressive politics with the Red Inquisition. Wolff knows this. He acknowledges this in his second point:


“Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies… Those positions gave capitalists the financial resources and power—politically, economically, and culturally—repeatedly to outmaneuver and repress labor and the left.” True enough.


“Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element…The new element is thus the demand to change enterprises producing goods and services. From hierarchical, capitalist organizations (where owners, boards of directors, etc., occupy the employer position) we need to transition to the altogether different democratic, worker co-op organizations.”


And there you have Wolff’s answer. With a rebuilt New Deal coalition that should magically spring up because the professor wills it, a “demand” for worker cooperatives should be advanced (against whom?) and a transition engineered (how?) to a New Jerusalem. Of course this is a modern iteration of the Fourier, Owen, Cabet utopianism that Marx sarcastically described in the Communist Manifesto:


Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful ends, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for a new social gospel…They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias…–pocket editions of the New Jerusalem– and to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.


Marx understood that, as an anti-capitalist tactic in his time, cooperative experiments ultimately would have to be financed by capitalists in order to compete against giant enterprises. Imagine how they would need to be capitalized to compete against monopoly transnational corporations in our time! Perhaps Goldman Sachs would fund them?


Lenin believed that cooperatives could help the working class struggle, but not replace socialism as the goal. As his party affirmed in 1910:


[T]he improvements that can be achieved with the help of the consumers’ societies [cooperatives] can only be very inconsiderable as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the class without whose expropriation socialism cannot be attained… consumers’ societies are not organisations for direct struggle against capital and exist alongside similar bodies organised by other classes, which could give rise to the illusion that these organisations are a means by which the social question may be solved without class struggle and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.
Clearly Lenin (and Marx and Engels) did not see cooperatives as anything but an illusive challenge to capitalism. They saw the cooperative movement as, at best, a helpful companion to the fight for socialism, at worst, a distraction.


In a curious turn, Wolff argues that “[w]e could describe the transition from capitalist to worker co-op enterprise organizations as a revolution. That would resolve the old debate of reform versus revolution.” So by verbal legislation, the cooperatives become revolutionary and not reformist. And the fight for socialism (unmentioned by Wolff) is removed from the historical stage. Wolff serves “Marxism” without socialism at a time when there is an unprecedented interest in socialism and an unprecedented need for a replacement for capitalism.


David Harvey is another celebrity “Marxist.” In truth, he has written several insightful, thought-provoking books in the Western Marxist tradition (an academic tradition bereft of praxis). Like Wolff, he is an able expositor, bringing a nourishing taste of Marx (especially political economy) to hungry readers. But like Wolff, his disconnect from popular movements, his self-imposed distance from 20th century Marxism (Communism), cripples his answers to the pending 21st century catastrophe.


In a recent video (Global Unrest, December 19, 2019) in his Anti-Capitalist Chronicles series, Harvey makes a startling claim: “Capitalism, right now, is too big to fail.” We must manage it, nourish its accumulation process, while tempering the inequality that it generates. In a bizarre, Malthus-like argument, he asserts that, unlike in Marx’s time, “70 or, maybe 80%” of the world would not survive if capitalism were brought down. His comments are worth quoting at length:


We cannot afford any sustained attack upon capital accumulation. So the kind of fantasy that you might have had– socialist or communist, and so on, or might have had in 1850, which is that well, okay, we can destroy this capitalist system and we can build something entirely different– that is an impossibility right now. We have to keep the circulation of capital in motion, we have to keep things moving, because if we don’t do that, we are actually stuck with a situation in which, as I’ve said, almost all of us will starve.


And this means, in general, that capital is too big to fail… We have to actually spend some time propping it up, trying to reorganize it, and maybe shift it around very slowly and over time to a different configuration. But a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not something that is conceivable at the present time. It will not happen, it cannot happen, and we must make sure that it does not happen…


“We must make sure that it does not happen…” In fairness, Professor Harvey may feel differently today, six months later, as capitalism is imploding under its own weight. I had to listen to the video three times before I could grasp that a student of Marx could cast such a dire shadow over the prospect of socialism.


Another paragon of the US left, Noam Chomsky, while professing a personal kind of libertarian-socialism, never embraced Marx. He, along with Edward S. Herman, exposed the deeply undemocratic role of the capitalist media and its commitment to “manufacturing consent,” that is, serving the ruling class by constructing a corporate-friendly shared narrative. In addition, his activism, his self-effacing solidarity has been an example for academic political authenticity, especially his willingness to criticize Israel. But the twists and turns of the late US empire have challenged his critical understanding.


In late October, Chomsky called for US troops to remain in Syria, a strange deviation from his long-standing opposition to US intervention in the affairs of foreign countries.


More recently, on June 25, Chomsky announced that Donald Trump “is the worst criminal in history, undeniably.” In an interview with Jacobin magazine, he elaborates: “There has never been a figure in political history who was so passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organized human life on earth in the near future…That is not an exaggeration.”


But, of course, it is an exaggeration. It is one that diminishes the criminality of a Hitler or a Tojo. It trivializes the mindless slaughter and bombing of millions of Vietnamese under Johnson and Nixon, a crime that Chomsky himself opposed vigorously.


It stains the anti-Trump movement with an in-itself immature, gross magnification of the damage that Trump –this childish, swollen ego, prevaricator– has perpetrated. It serves no purpose to overplay the real, existing case against Donald Trump. Most importantly, it muddies the important insight that Trump is the product of a long trajectory of rot in US politics.


Chomsky is adding little clarity to the task facing a left caught off guard by the severity and depth of the 2020 crisis. Instead, he leads people back to the two-party travesty.


It would be mean-spirited to not acknowledge that there are thousands of people motivated by and introduced to left activism by Wolff, Harvey, Chomsky, and a handful of other celebrated left pundits. Undoubtedly, they share a genuine interest in promoting change in the US. But their popular status depends upon their not exceeding the bounds established decades ago by the vile Red-hunters, the thought-police who protect the US people from a robust idea of socialism. There is no need to judge their anti-Communist sincerity. It doesn’t matter whether they believe the Cold War mythology that is foundational to the capitalist world view. The simple fact is that Wolff, Harvey, Chomsky, and others would not enjoy the notoriety they command if they deviated too far from those myths.


Because they are unable to break from these limitations, they are ill-suited to lead in the battle of ideas at this critical time. They cannot imagine a world without capitalism; they cannot envision politics outside of the dreary prospect of two-parties or two-and-a-half parties divided by contrived optics; they find no ideas worth considering in a hundred years of real existing socialism.


At a time when literally millions of young people are searching for a meaningful alternative to capitalism, when they accept that socialism may be the answer to poverty, inequality, and war, it is tragic that those enjoying their trust cannot give life to that vision.


Success in the coming period will depend on whether the labor movement, the broadly progressive movement, and young activists can remove the blinders forced on them by the ideological ‘iron curtain’ that denies them an understanding of the organizational and programmatic pre-conditions of capturing the capitalist state and replacing it with a peoples’ state. The Cold War fetters must be cast aside to allow the fight for a new world without commodities, market competition, and exploitation.


For most of the last century and a half, the fertile ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin have served as a guiding light for that program. Working people, certainly since the last years of the 19th century, found no better beacon. Nor were they afraid to pronounce socialism as the goal of their struggles.
Isn’t it time to recognize and return to that path?

https://mltoday.com/marxism-without-soc ... t-marxism/

I do believe that 'ZZ" is back.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Idealists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the last shred of respect

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 27, 2020 11:37 am

NOAM CHOMSKY: "I’ve often myself just not bothered to vote when it didn’t matter or voted for a third party if it didn’t matter. This time is unusual. It matters. A lot. In fact, more than anything ever, literally. So, I therefore think it shouldn’t take five seconds for people to recognize we have to vote against Trump. There’s only one way to vote against Trump in our two-party system. That’s to push the lever for the Democrats. That’s voting against Trump. If you decide not to vote against Trump, you’re helping him, you’re helping him win. We can debate lots of things, but not arithmetic. If you withdraw a vote from Biden, that puts Trump one vote ahead. So, you have essentially two choices on November 3rd. Am I going to vote against Trump or am I going to help him win? I can’t imagine how there can be a discussion about that among rational people."

Posted by: pat | Oct 26 2020 18:20 utc

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/10/e ... .html#more

Thank you Mr Millionaire Anarchist. Bakunin would slit your throat and fuck you in it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Idealists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the last shred of respect

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 25, 2021 1:12 pm

GUTTING ANTI-IMPERIALISM
Posted by Greg Godels | Aug 15, 2021 | Featured Stories | 0

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Gutting Anti-Imperialism
BY GREG GODELS
August 5, 2021



Before Hobson (1902) and Lenin (1917) elaborated theories of imperialism, there was an American Anti-Imperialist League (1898). The League’s members constituted a diverse group ranging from left to right, radical to conservative, social worker to politician, writer to lawyer, trade union leader to monopoly capitalist. Notables included Jane Addams, Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, John Dewey, Samuel Gompers, Henry and William James, Edgar Lee Masters, and Mark Twain.

While they may have had differing views of the actualities of imperialism or colonialism, the Anti-Imperialists shared a sense that a tide of imperial or colonial predation was cresting at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, they feared that the US was energetically joining the mainly European powers in carving up the world.

This opposition was built upon two principles that were thought by many to be foundational US ideals: the idea of consent by the governed and non-intervention (like so many contradictory ideals in US history, the nineteenth-century US anti-imperialists seemed little bothered by intervention and lack of consent with the frontier expanding across the American continent at the expense of others).

To those constituting the American Anti-Imperialist League (AAIL), imposing the will of imperial masters upon other peoples violated the most basic axioms of democracy. To the anti-imperialists of the AAIL, it mattered not whether those to be governed by others governed themselves well or not. The partisans of the AAIL were unmoved by the pro-imperialist arguments that people’s souls needed Christian salvation, that subjected peoples would be better off surrendering their sovereignty, or that those to be ruled were savages and incapable of ruling themselves.

In US history, the mass predisposition towards non-intervention was only interrupted when ruling elites were able, through fear or fable, to animate involvement in outside adventures; non-engagement in foreign affairs was deeply embedded in popular thinking as well as in the early expressed values of the colonial regime.

Mark Twain, one of North America’s greatest writers, perhaps best expressed the anti-imperialist sentiment of the time with his satirical King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905) (During the Cold War, this powerful anti-imperialist critique was only available in book form from a GDR publishing house). Twain scalded Leopold, the King of Belgium, and his brutal colonial reign over the Congo. Through the fiction of an explanation by the King, Twain mocks the King’s justification for his mistreatment of his subjects, citing his missionaries bringing civilization to the natives and his thwarting of the evil slave trade.

Thus, Twain, like most of the nineteenth-century anti-imperialists, thought that there was no good reason for great powers, or any powers for that matter, to intervene in the affairs of another land, regardless of the good they might bring or the evil they might thwart. Put simply, intervention violated the consent of the people.

In the twentieth century, this understanding of anti-imperialism was sharpened by Lenin’s right of a clearly defined nation to self-determination. This idea of self-determination served as the grounds for national liberation and the almost total elimination of colonialism, a process largely, but not completely finished in the decades after World War Two. As in Leopold’s time, the imperialists maintained that the native peoples were not ready for self-rule.

While colonialism receded, imperialism remained, with US imperialism and its global domination of the capitalist world taking center stage. The foe for the US and its European allies in this era was world Communism. Communism, whether viewed favorably or not, was undeniably the bulwark against imperialist domination.

Cold War imperialism justified intervention in the affairs of other nations as part of an unrelenting war against Communism. Intervention was a prophylactic or remedy for an evil portrayed as godless, materialistic, murderous, anti-democratic, ruthless, and predatory. Like Leopold and his counterparts, twentieth-century capitalism and its apologists defended economic aggression as a civilizing mission, as a way to bring a superior way of life to those captured or courted by an evil ideology. USAID, the CIA, money-soaked foundations, cultural warriors, the Peace Corps, etc., replaced the nineteenth-century missionaries. When these modern missionaries became ineffective, the US military stepped in.

In our time, many self-styled anti-imperialists have lost the meaning of anti-imperialism that was so firmly grasped by our nineteenth-century forbearers. Under the sway of the Cold War corruption and weaponization of human rights advocacy, liberals and a segment of the left now qualify their condemnation of US and EU domination of less powerful countries with real or imagined concerns with human rights violations or the perceived breaching of democratic standards. They have become the modern missionaries, purveyors of supposedly superior Western values to the ignorant and backward of the world. Like the missionaries of old, they spend little time in self-examination; they simply take for granted that their way of life is superior in all ways.

With that presumption, it is a small step to finding merit in intervention, in bringing enlightenment, even liberation! And, of course, the messenger or the deliverer of enlightenment may well be US bombs, special forces, or mercenaries. Whether it is Haiti, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, or many that I may have left out, all interventions were justified as humanitarian missions delivering a better way of life. Those who succumbed to this bogus liberation are all now broken or failed states.

Where human rights doctrines served a liberating purpose, unleashing human potential and providing protection against feudal caprice and privilege during the rise of capitalism, they now are more often instruments of manipulation and oppression in the era of moribund, decadent capitalism.

Western NGOs underscore this point. In the Cold War heyday of Amnesty International, one could not help but note that the organization’s focus was largely on the socialist countries and their friends. This was explained by the peculiar rule that it was inappropriate for Amnesty chapters to focus on their home country. So, of course, since the membership was largely in advanced capitalist states, the spotlight was upon non- and anti-capitalist states! A mere formality that put the organization, more often than not, in lockstep with the US State Department and NATO.

Another prominent NGO– Human Rights Watch– came into being as an anti-Soviet watchdog. Its funding– largely from the US and Europe– cannot but taint the targeting of its attention.

It is equally clear that the “human rights” NGOs show much less zeal in exposing the “friends” of the US, EU, and NATO who had appalling human rights records. They were late or tepid in deploring the ugly apartheid regime in South Africa, the brutal treatment of Palestinians, and the Saudi aggression against Yemen.

The gaggle of NGO directors that police the human rights terrain form a comfortable team with academics, think tanks, and the professional crusaders of Western political officialdom. They attend the same seminars, consult one another, and often exchange jobs, guaranteeing a high degree of conformity and insularity, and generating a human rights industry.

There is a comfortable circularity to Western human rights doctrine. Of the expansive range of human rights– positive, negative, personal, social, individual, collective, cultural, commercial, etc.– it is exactly those rights that are the most cherished by the self-satisfied capitalist burgher that NGOs rush to protect! And they are protected with missionary zeal.

It is this industrial-strength human rights doctrine that mixed with US foreign policy goals to create the twisted notion of “humanitarian interventionism,” a concept most successfully peddled by and identified with former political operative, diplomat, and now head of the CIA-front USAID, Samantha Power.

Thus, the twisted trajectory of human rights advocacy has led us to an equally twisted concept of benign intervention, an idea that would have outraged earlier advocates of anti-imperialism like Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers, and even Andrew Carnegie!

As if critics of US foreign policy did not have a great enough burden, large sections of the US left– especially those addicted to the New York Times and National Public Radio— have gone over to the other side, drinking the seductive elixir of humanitarian interventionism. The NYT/NPR “progressives” and their European counterparts qualify their anti-imperialism by insisting that those countries under the heel of imperialism must pass a purity test: they must be committed to “democratic” and “human rights” values that are consistent with those of their oppressors and privileged Western “progressives,” Otherwise, they will not win the support of their “friends” in the Western capitalist countries.

We have seen this time and time again in the refusal to or hesitation in denouncing imperial aggression in Yugoslavia, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Libya, and even Cuba.

This arrogant, selective “anti-imperialism” would nauseate the nineteenth-century anti-imperialists of the AAIL.

The gutted anti-imperialism of humanitarian interventionism recently found its theoretician in Professor Gilbert Achcar. Achcar wrote a piece happily embraced by the old Cold War campaigner, New Politics magazine, and the increasingly irrelevant, The Nation. A consistent anti-imperialist comrade, Roger D. Harris, thoroughly dismantled Achcar’s apologetics for US, EU, and NATO imperialism in his response.

Harris correctly argues that Achcar and the other “sophisticated” anti-imperialists “(1) serve to legitimize reaction and (2) obscure the singular role of US imperialism, while (3) attacking progressive voices. Such anti-anti-imperialism provides left cover for the foreign policy of the US as well as the UK, where Achcar is based.”

In plain words, the bogus anti-imperialism of humanitarian interventionism turns a blind eye to the global bully because the victim is not always “worthy” of defense. This response is especially indefensible when the global bully attacks in our name.

Regardless of how The New York Times, NPR or the other media pals of the bully portray the victim, a bully is still a bully. Our nineteenth-century forbearers understood this simple truth.

https://mltoday.com/gutting-anti-imperialism/
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Re: Idealists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the last shred of respect

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 18, 2021 2:05 pm

OCCUPY IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR
Posted by Greg Godels | Oct 17, 2021 | Featured Stories | 1

Occupy in the Rearview Mirror
BY GREG GODELS
September 28, 2021

Image

Ten years ago, September 17, 2011, protesters settled in Zuccotti Park in the New York City financial district, a privately held park owned by Brookfield Office Properties and named after its former chairman. This action acquired the simple, straightforward, but somewhat misleading moniker, “Occupy Wall Street.”

While the specific motivations of the congregation are debated, there is a general agreement that the 2007-2009 economic crisis, and especially the failure to punish its perpetrators, was an instigation. Occupy became a phenomenon, even a brand in the era of memes, social media, and ultra-consumerism. Occupy-like copycats sprang up around the country and in different forms of activism.

In its initial form, Occupy was an open invitation to gather in a public or semi-public space and hold it. The participants resisted a program, organizational structure, or leadership. Like previous efforts at anarchist levelling– so-called “radical” or “participatory democracy” — everyone was nominally of equal voice and stature. And like its anti-structure antecedents in the New Left, the Zapatistas, the anti-Globalization movement, the Indignados, etc., one can only wonder how its spokespeople, organizers, “facilitators,” or anti-leaders, are democratically selected in the absence of some structure.

The common thread that runs through all of the celebrated anti-hierarchical organizations is a semi-religious confidence in spontaneity. All worship at the altar of this elusive idea, despite the fact that there is no successful historical precedent to support faith in its success.

Though the Occupy movement succumbed after two months to a brutal assault by the coercive forces of the US ruling class, it left a popular slogan that continues to be embraced by a large sector of the US left: “We are the 99 percent!”

The Ten-Year Retrospective

Not surprisingly, various estimations of the value of Occupy are springing up on the 10th anniversary of the initial occupation. They range from the romantically naive, crediting Occupy with spurring every struggle since 2011, including the minimum wage fight and the teacher strike wave of 2018, to the coldly skeptical viewing of Occupy as an opportunity lost to “performative acts” or merely an historical “blip.”

Michael Levitin, writing in The Atlantic contends that Occupy “made protesting cool again… it brought the action back into activism…” In fact, protesting has never been “cool;” it requires a sacrifice on the part of participants. More importantly, it should conjure a commitment beyond an event, a performance, a statement. Protesting requires the uncool tedium of building a movement that can grow sufficiently to tackle the unequal power of the rulers, a goal difficult to achieve without leadership, organization, and structure. The “1%” is more than the economically privileged; the “1%” has also accumulated massive power largely immune to the incantations of a general assembly.

Micah L Sifrey, writing in The New Republic, references a somewhat chastened Occupy Wall Street organizer, Jonathan Smucker from his book:

Occupy wasn’t just a success in putting class back on the American agenda.

It was also “a high-momentum mess that ultimately proved incapable of mobilizing beyond a low plateau of usual suspects.” As he wrote in his book Hegemony How-To, “We were not merely lacking in our ability to lead the promising social justice alignment that our audacious occupation kicked off; many of the loudest voices were openly hostile toward the very existence of leadership, along with organization, resources, engagement with the mainstream media, forging broad alliances, and many other necessary operations that reek of the scent of political power.” Because Occupy’s general assemblies were so time-consuming and so easily hijacked, much of the real work and decision-making went elsewhere, “into underground centers of informal power,” he writes.

It’s possible to look at Occupy as an experiment for its time– 2011 was the year of the rise of Spain’s anti-austerity movement, the Indignados. Occupy came shortly after the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution which sparked the Arab Spring. All shared the elements of non-violence (by protesters), spontaneous or near-spontaneous risings, absence of a clear program, an allergy to hierarchies, and cross-class engagement. None were led by traditional leftist parties or ideologies (apart from a nebulous connection with anarchism). And– a conclusion that none of the commentators want to accede– all faded away, leaving the balance of power essentially unchanged.

Occupy did demonstrate the power of social media and internet communication. Old-timers were in awe at the ease and speed that people could be rallied around actions and events. Time proved that the new technologies came with a downside: action came almost too easily and with minimal commitment or understanding. Activism often sprang from the same emotional immediacy as going to a concert or movie. One commentator called Occupy “exhilarating” — a kind of political Woodstock?

Arun Gupta, writing in In These Times, casually notes: “Every movement reaches the end of the road, and a decade later Occupy-style protest has smacked into a dead end.”

Yes, Occupy-style protest is exhausted today, but Gupta’s dismissing that demise with a shrug reflects a measure of political immaturity. Any movement bent upon challenging inequality, injustice, capital, or, most importantly, capitalism, cannot accept a dead end as an inevitability. Quite the opposite, any movement promising success must stay the course if it holds out any hope of winning against an unprecedented accumulation of power in so few hands and a long history of falling short. Occupy lacked that vision.

Gupta writes of the “authenticity” of Occupy and the satisfaction drawn by its participants. Insofar as it served as a “pre-school” for a generation of young people deeply scarred by student loans, poor job prospects or unemployment, and deeply disappointed with the political establishment, Occupy was a worthy introduction. Insofar as political elders, movement veterans, and theorists accept Occupy as the road forward and offer no alternate routes, they bear much of the responsibility for the collapse of the movement.

The Lessons

Clearly, many feel strongly that the legacy of Occupy is worth fighting over. Witness the statement by the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, claiming Occupy as its own. Or the debate in The Nation: “Was Occupy Wall Street More Anarchist or Socialist?”

Undoubtedly, Occupy served to introduce thousands of young people to collective action, to resistance to the rich and powerful. With “the 99 percent” slogan, many saw social life in the US through a rudimentary lens of class division for the first time, a reality denied us by our education system, our media, and our leaders.

But “the ninety-nine percent versus the one percent” construction was far too simplistic and far too crude to capture the differences or reflect the structure of twenty-first century capitalism. It failed to explain the divisions that kept the ninety-nine percent or its various strata and classes from uniting against the one percent. It failed to fit this simplification into the dynamics of the two-party system– a system of control fundamentally owned by the one-percent and its allied strata– while denying effective power to everyone else. It failed to offer a road map either inside or outside of that decadent structure.

In short, “the ninety-nine percent” was analytically far too blunt of an instrument to advance Occupy beyond well-intended street theater.

What was needed was a deeper class analysis that more accurately distinguished between the exploited and the exploiters. If they would have bothered to look, Occupiers might have found that more profound analysis in Marxism-Leninism.

Occupy follows a long trajectory of “new” radicalism in the US shaped by subtle, but long-festering anti-Communism. Since the purging of Communists and their allies from US social and political life in the post-war era, every version of revitalized resistance pays subtle, but uncompromising homage to the religion of anti-Communism– a silent loyalty oath. From the student-based New Left to Occupy, it was understood that the limits of tolerance ended at the door to authentic Marxism-Leninism.

Instead, every emerging movement ostentatiously showcased its commitment to “democracy” in stark contrast to the caricature of Communism and its alleged soulless hostility to the individual. The cult of the individual and a utopian “participatory” democracy is meant to demonstrate a breed of radicalism distinctly different from the Cold War image of Communism. Thus was born a kind of individualistic, petty-bourgeois anarchism characteristic of US activists from early SDS to Chomsky and to Occupy.

Where anathema to the lessons of over a hundred and fifty years of Communist and socialist (and anarchist, as well) practice were not purposely obscured, different outcomes ensued. The Chilean student movement, though concurrent with the Occupy phenomenon, is a case in point. Though virtually ignored by the media and the US left, Chilean high school and university students demonstrated from 2011 until 2013 for educational reform.

Unlike Occupy, the protests were highly organized, welcomed democratically chosen leadership, and constructed a coherent set of demands. In addition, the students engaged and were joined by the Chilean labor movement. The left political parties collaborated and enjoyed growth from their engagement, particularly the Chilean Communist Party. The successful socialist candidate for president in 2013, Michelle Bachelet placed educational reform at the top of her agenda.

Students again sparked the August 2019 protests that continued through the next two years, with over a million Chileans in the streets on October 25, 2019 in Santiago alone.

Unlike Occupy, the Chilean student protests of 2011 led directly to the empowerment of the left, electoral gains, and a referendum opening the way to a new constitution.

The political maturity of the Chilean movement and its successes serve as a stark counterpoint to the shortcomings of the Occupy model of resistance.

To its credit, Occupy broke the pattern of movement quiescence during a Democratic Party administration. For decades, anti-war and reformist protests only took on a mass character when the Republicans were in power. The anti-war demonstrations of the Bush administration were never duplicated, not even when Obama engineered the troop surge in Afghanistan. The dominant liberal and social democratic wings of the left fear antagonizing the Democratic Party torchbearers, unleashing street heat only when Republicans are in power. Allergic to electoral politics, the anarchists at the core of Occupy fearlessly and determinedly pressed forward during the Obama years.

Nonetheless, after two months of intense media attention, exhilarating public theater, and sincerely felt protest, the Occupy movement was swept away by military-like operations of the police. With no deep moorings, no road map, and no lieutenants or captains, the movement was shattered into many pieces. Some, in frustration, sought to change the Democratic Party; some sold their souls to the social-change-industry of NGOs, foundation grants, and non-profit social engineering; some returned to academia; and some, out of cynicism, simply dropped away.

An unlikely chronicler, loyal Democrat Robert Reich, noted perceptively that a contemporary right-wing populist movement, the Tea Party, expressing outrage against the powers-that-be from a different perspective, found much more success in shaping the political terrain. With its focus on performance over program, form over content, spontaneity over organization, Reich could understandably not see any hope that Occupy would change the course of history.

Well before Reich’s skepticism, V.I. Lenin railed against spontaneity in his classic polemic against the enemies of organized leadership, in What Is to Be Done? Lenin mocked actions that came to be called “participatory democracy” as examples of “toy” or “primitive” democracy. While they appear to be ultra-democratic, they actually inhibit serving the cause of the people with their endless obsession over procedure.

Occupy ran aground on the shoals of procedural sectarianism, organizational chaos, and the lack of a programmatic compass. Will the lessons be heeded or will the US left continue to flirt with “toy” democracy over substance, cultural expression over political engagement?

https://mltoday.com/occupy-in-the-rearview-mirror/

In a word, Occupy lacked an unifying ideology.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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