The Socialist Response

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Nov 23, 2016 11:27 am

Yeah very true. I'm not trying to speak on behalf of all socialists, just what I see as both one of the larger current thrusts and my personal belief about the best way forward.

What's your analysis of Left Statists these days (since Trump was selected)? I can't wrap my mind around what progressive way forward through that lens that might be.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 23, 2016 12:06 pm

Luther Blissett » Wed Nov 23, 2016 10:27 am wrote:What's your analysis of Left Statists these days (since Trump was selected)? I can't wrap my mind around what progressive way forward through that lens that might be.



What little I know of such groups is based in the U.S. scene- and it seems that very few organizations would call themselves Stalinist these days. I would say that the RCP (Maoist/Avakianite), the PSL/Workers' World Party (Trotskyist/Marcyite/Stalinoid), the Sparticist League ("Trotskyist") and the CPUSA are somewhere in such a Sectarian/Zombie/Statist mode, to a significant degree.

My best guess is that these groups are doing what they've always done: issuing polemics that mean almost nothing, selling newspapers, fighting their ideological bedfellows, practicing entryism upon hapless progressives, cultivating their contacts in labor unions, and other things of that nature.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby brekin » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:12 pm

I think it can be agreed that socialist reforms/endeavors/platforms without the State backing are about as toothy as food coops.
People may want to convert or replace the existing State with a socialist platform, but there is no getting around the need for big centralized governmental bodies managing and running socialist programs. (Possibly technology could minimize this to some degree but technology also kills job and you want as many people employed in a governmental body so they have some allegiance to it.)

I get the young and grizzled ideologues don't want that or like it, but its just a fact. Everybody has their own version of boutique Socialism that would do this, and look like this, but all the isms are things that have designs of their own.

And Trump could end up turning labor unions against the rest of the working class to. By appeasing the auto, construction and shipping unions with bringing some manufacturing jobs back and opening some ports they would be tickled. But then he could leave it to states regarding minimum wage jobs.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:24 pm

I don't think you need to frame things in such stark terms. Class struggle is an integral part of our world- we can not avoid it. This includes organizing at the grassroots for affordale rents, enough food, decent working conditions, basic control over our own lives, a sustainable planet, an end to imperial wars, etc. etc.

Very few of us wants to live under an authoritarian regime.






.
Last edited by American Dream on Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Nov 23, 2016 1:39 pm

Current technologies, like blockchain, are but one tool that are floated as possible social efficiencies, but people power does not hinge on any one technology, tactic, or idea. I wholeheartedly disagree that a class-based uprising needs any state backing. It needs the state to back down. Automation is killing jobs regardless, which is why universal basic income was such a pet interest of so many, at least up until Election Day.

What if the governmental body was "the people" after the revolution? Wouldn't the people have allegiance to themselves?

Let's take a socialist program, like free breakfasts for children. What is that if not just an extension of a food co-operative? I think there's a lot of potential strength in the cooperative. Panthers were murdered by the state for the gall of providing free breakfast to children.

All this is why the multi-tendency, non-sectarian approach mentioned in the first post is the favorable one for now and the one being floated and pushed widely, negating "boutique socialism".
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby brekin » Wed Nov 23, 2016 2:01 pm

American Dream wrote:I don't think you need to frame things in such stark terms. Class struggle is an integral part of our world- we can not avoid it. This includes organizing at the grassroots for sffordale rents, enough food, decent working conditions, basic control over our own lives, a sustainable planet, an end to imperial wars, etc. etc.
Very few of us wants to live under an authoritarian regime.


Not sure if you are referencing my posts or others, but I think the last election showed that many people do want to live under an authoritarian regime.
You could even say between the two people running that those who showed up to vote were voting for some variant of that.
And even those who didn't vote, many want some version of an authoritarian regime, whether that be green, radical, conservative, alt-right, nationalist, Eco-political, anti-privilege, etc.
Many people are so disenchanted and/or ignorant of the system that they would trade it for a "strong person" to push through their pet ideologies into everyday reality.

Consider, if there was a caesar who could deliver affordale rents, enough food, decent working conditions, basic control over our own lives, a sustainable planet, an end to imperial wars, would you choose them over the democratic process?

Luther Blissett wrote:Current technologies, like blockchain, are but one tool that are floated as possible social efficiencies, but people power does not hinge on any one technology, tactic, or idea. I wholeheartedly disagree that a class-based uprising needs any state backing. It needs the state to back down. Automation is killing jobs regardless, which is why universal basic income was such a pet interest of so many, at least up until Election Day.
What if the governmental body was "the people" after the revolution? Wouldn't the people have allegiance to themselves?
Let's take a socialist program, like free breakfasts for children. What is that if not just an extension of a food co-operative? I think there's a lot of potential strength in the cooperative. Panthers were murdered by the state for the gall of providing free breakfast to children.
All this is why the multi-tendency, non-sectarian approach mentioned in the first post is the favorable one for now and the one being floated and pushed widely, negating "boutique socialism".


Who pays for the free breakfast program? And not just in a few places in Philly but the whole nation? Who manages that, and collects and distributes the funds and money for the program? Who makes sure that so and so's dodgy brother isn't sneaking out the back with the orange juice and reselling it? etc. All that stuff takes large centralized management, The State. "The people" is an abstraction. The "State" isn't. And the governmental body is made up of "the people" right now. After "the revolution" (and one has to ask what happens to all the people who are loyal and aligned with the current governmental system) why try and recreate the infrastructure that already exists, but in a hit or miss, ragtag way? For example, I don't want a hippy-anarcho-people-power mail system that is different in every neighborhood and city, I just want the US Mail system. I'm down with making the US Mail System more humane, efficient, better paying, equitable, etc, but why reinvent the wheel?
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
User avatar
brekin
 
Posts: 3229
Joined: Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:21 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 23, 2016 2:16 pm

I think some Trump voters are ok with oppressing "The Other" but would not want themselves and their loved ones to be put in internment camps. The false equivalence of Socialism=Totalitarianism should be questioned though. I like Cornelius Castoriadis:


The idea that socialism is synonymous with the nationalization of the means of production plus planning - and that its essential aim is merely an increase of production and consumption - must be pitilessly denounced. The identity of these views with the fundamental objectives of capitalism itself must constantly be shown.

Socialism means workers’ management of production and of society. It means popular self- administration through workers’ councils.


— Paul Cardan (Cornelius Castoriadis), Modern capitalism and revolution
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby dada » Thu Nov 24, 2016 1:22 pm

Some good food for thought on the subject of this thread. Chomsky on Anarchism. If you're in the US, you can nibble on it before and after your thanksgiving feast.

https://libcom.org/files/1345266991261.pdf

No answers in here, but it's better that way. Discussion on authoritarian tendencies, the use of the state, left socialism, language, the role of the intellectual, etc. Lots of references to early libertarian and anarchist theorists, names to look up with ideas worth pursuing. Helpful for those interested in clarifying motivations.

Chapter six, the essay titled "Containing the Threat of Democracy" I still think is one of his best. Guaranteed to piss off everyone, authoritarian and anti-authoritarian alike. Give it a try.

I was going to post a few selections to whet your appetite, but I changed my mind. If it hits you right at the moment, you'll check it out.

But here's one:

Q: Emma Goldman. as she grew older and feared the fact that there might not be an immediate revolution, became very influenced by Gustav Landauer who said the state isn't just out there. It's inside us and that we have to become ourselves-as free as we can be in capitalism, In fact
she was always worried that there may be a chance that people won't be ready for revolution and that there is a way of developing the politics of the personal so maybe more people could be ready to experience that life that is possible.

A: I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England. where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups-the business world, state managers and so on-recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously,
from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
User avatar
dada
 
Posts: 2600
Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2007 12:08 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 24, 2016 3:18 pm

Yeah, I very much agree. In Conspiracylandia there is a huge amount of bullshit piled on around themes of Social Engineering but there is something very, very important in there. Foucault- while not perfectly my cup of tea- wrote a lot about such themes under the category of "Biopower".

I'm particularly interested in the post-War discipline of Cybernetics and how it related to the early history of LSD, the development of the Internet, and related issues.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:18 pm

Ringing out the neo, Ringing in the neo

1. It has been going on a long time, hasn't it? The bourgeoisie have been on an offensive; the offensive was triggered by a decline in the rate of profitability; the offensive has not been able to systematically overcome the decline in the rate of profit; the offensive was kick-started with the overthrow of Allende in Chile, and the OPEC price spike of 1973. Both represent the attack on labor, on the class of laborers; on the living and the living standards of the workers; one using the hammer of military force, the other using the anvil of market force. Behind every free market, there stands a death squad. Said that 43 years ago; said it yesterday. Will say it tomorrow. Maybe from a secure, undisclosed location.


Continues at: http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.com/20 ... n-neo.html
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 22, 2016 9:27 am

Alienation As Poverty (Or, The Impoverisment of Poverty and How the Soft Left Makes Our Task More Difficult)

Thursday December 22, 2016, 10:57 am

Image

Martin Bradbury, Plan C Birmingham

The key issue at stake in our movements is the issue of how we respond to the increase in poverty under neoliberalism. Austerity represents a systematic attack on the working class and as such the dominant approach of our movements since 2010 has been to counter this with an anti-austerity agenda that rejects both cuts to particular services and the dismantling of the welfare state more generally. This has locked us into a path that has required us to form broader coalitions with groups and individuals that do not share our view of a world beyond capitalism. Practically speaking this has meant that we have had to moderate our positions in order to maintain these alliances, an approach that we have justified with recourse to notions such as the need to be realistic and pragmatic given current conditions. As such we have largely refrained from openly uttering the dreaded C word (Communism) for fear of scaring off the kind of wishy washy, Guardian reading soft left who profess to care about working people whilst simultaneously declaring their true contempt for those very same people. How exactly do they declare their contempt? They declare it by arguing that in fighting for a world beyond capitalism we are being utopian, that in reality There Is No Alternative and that as such we should scale back our dreams. For those of us in the student movement this has manifested itself in demands for free printer credits and cheaper coffee on our campuses.

The Importance of Being Earnest, The Practicality of Being Impractical

Why do they think this of us? If you get to speak to them they will give various reasons but ultimately they all come back to one simple fact : they are unable to broaden their political horizons and believe that working people are able to direct their own lives. They cling tenaciously to the reactionary belief that the slave requires a master, that the slave will always require a master, and as such the most we should demand is that the master only whip us 15 times instead of 16 because it is unrealistic to demand a state of affairs in which there is no master and there is no whip. The soft leftist rejection of the communist project as a living project amounts to an insidious form of self-hatred, itself stemming from an equally toxic socio-political inferiority complex regarding their own inability to live in a world in which they are not constantly told what to do by others. If they were to only apply this to themselves they would be merely irritating. However they project their feelings of inferiority onto others and brand as a heretic anyone who dares to shoot for the stars beyond an unbearable reality. This willingness to generalise from their own experience of inferiority is what makes them dangerous rather than merely irritating. For those us who dare to think beyond their narrow horizon we must remember that we did not arrive at our positions by magic. We read. We wrote. We had conversations with each other. We protested together. We occupied together. We came into conflict with the state together and some of us got smashed and saw our friends and comrades get smashed. Then while we were busy picking up the pieces and trying to put ourselves, our friends, and our comrades back together again we saw ourselves being lied about, defamed, slandered, and vilified; sometimes our antagonists were those that we thought may be on our side and sometimes they were those that we knew for certain were our enemies. If their evaluation of us as extremists is correct then we must tell them that getting to be this militant was not easy, it required a lot of hard work, and that by asking us to moderate our views it is they and not we that demand too much.


Continues at: http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/alienati ... difficult/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Jan 03, 2017 5:52 pm

An incredibly important point of discussion:

A Constitutional Revolution
The Constitution has strangled American democracy for long enough. We need a constituent assembly.

by Daniel Lazare

Is it time to call for a constituent assembly in the US?

2016 will go down in history as the year the United States entered into a period of prolonged minority rule. Not only did Donald Trump win the White House despite trailing by more than 2.8 million popular votes, but Republicans held onto a fifty-two-seat majority in the Senate despite losing by even more — some 10.5 million votes overall.

GOP candidates did better in the House, outpolling Democrats by a total of 1.1 percent. But through the miracle of gerrymandering, they managed to translate that slim lead into nearly fifty extra seats — 241 versus the Democrats’ 194.

In other words, of America’s four top governing institutions, a minority party was able to take control of one, maintain its grip on a second, grab more than its fair share of a third, and set about seizing a fourth — the Supreme Court — by filling the vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s mysterious death last February. Americans voted for a centrist party by a significant number, yet are winding up with ultra-right government across the board.

What’s going on? The answer is that, after more than two centuries, America’s pre-democratic constitutional machinery is spitting out increasingly undemocratic results with catastrophic consequences. Instead of government of, by, and for the people, it’s giving the people government they don’t want but can do nothing about.

The immediate cause of the breakdown is a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coasts. But the more fundamental reason is an ancient constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern society.

In the founders’ day, the ratio between the most and least populous state was twelve to one. Today it’s sixty-seven to one; by 2030, it’s expected to reach eighty-nine to one. As that gap widens, political equality will continue to wither. Because the Electoral College gives states an extra vote for each senator they send to Washington, a state like Wyoming enjoys triple the clout in presidential elections today and, according to census projections, will enjoy quadruple by 2030.

Whereas in 1990 it was possible to assemble an Electoral College majority out of states representing 46.15 percent of the total population, today it’s possible to do so out of states representing 45.82. By 2030, the magic number will drop to 44.75.

A shift of one or two points may not seem like much over four decades. But as with global warming, minor changes can have major consequences. With an electorate of nearly 140 million people, a candidate could conceivably wrack up a lead three or four times Clinton’s and still not make it into the White House. As politics grow more and more polarized and margins of victory shrink, the chances of yet more Electoral College upsets will skyrocket.

Rather than a one-off affair, Trump’s victory is thus a sign of things to come.

Politics have collapsed. Congress is gridlocked, the election process is a shambles, and corruption, already out of control thanks to lobbying and campaign contributions, is about to go shooting through the roof as the president-elect merges his political, real-estate, and entertainment empires. The new cabinet is a right-wing horror show of billionaire asset-strippers, mortgage raiders, religious fanatics, and more military brass than in “Seven Days in May.” Authoritarianism is growing more and more overt amid surging racism, anti-semitism, and xenophobia.

The entire post-1945 international structure, everything from NATO to the European Union, plus the individual nation-states, is predicated on the vitality of the US constitutional order — a constitutional order now utterly ossified and decrepit.

Is a historic upheaval just around the corner?

The Iron Cage

The Constitution is disfigured by innumerable cankers and sores — mechanisms that don’t work, institutions that are out of date, clauses that no one can decipher. But the biggest fault of all is that such problems are unfixable thanks to an amending clause that is even more dysfunctional than the document as a whole.

As every civics student knows, Article V says that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must concur before any constitutional change can take effect, no matter how minor. In 1790, the three-fourths rule meant that four states representing as little as 10 percent of the population could just say no to any change sought by the remainder. Today it gives thirteen states representing just 4.4 percent of the country the power to do so. As that number falls — it is projected to reach 4.0 over the next dozen years or so — the door to change will shut ever more tightly.

The result is a structure whose response to changing circumstances is to grow ever more rigid and unyielding. It is a recipe for a disaster of the sort that is now unfolding before our eyes.

Take the Electoral College. Because it triples the clout of the eight smallest states and doubles that of the next six, no one will have any trouble coming up with a list of thirteen states guaranteed to just say no to any deviation from the status quo. Efforts to end-run the problem by urging states to appoint electors who pledge to abide by the popular vote are futile since Republican and swing states can both be counted on to oppose it, the first because it would clearly boost Democratic fortunes and the second because it would mean presidential candidates would lavish less attention on them at election time.

The Senate is even more intractable. In 1788, Alexander Hamilton complained that equal state representation “contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.” Today the problem is five or six times worse. A system that gives the two percent of Americans who live in the nine smallest states the same power as the 51 percent who reside in the nine largest doesn’t just undermine the principle of majority rule. It repudiates it ever more decisively.

In 1810, thanks to the bedrock principle of equal state representation, it was possible to cobble together a Senate majority out of states representing just 33 percent of the total population. Today candidates can achieve the same thing with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the population. By 2030 that figure will drop to 16.7. The proportion needed to mount a successful filibuster — i.e. forty-one senators from twenty-one states — will drop to just 11 percent over the same period, meaning that just one person in nine will be in a position to bring government to a halt.

Yet nothing can be done thanks to an obscure clause in Article V stipulating that “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” Wyoming (population 586,107) shall therefore enjoy parity with California (population 39.1 million) for as long as it wishes, which, considering the enormous benefits it derives from the current arrangement, is presumably forever.

The picture is different in the House since congressional districts are supposed to be demographically equal (although they can in fact vary by as much as 80 percent). Yet the courts have been reluctant to confront gerrymandering since Article I, section four, apparently gives states broad latitude when it comes to “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives.”

The more America turns into a right-wing hothouse, the more brazen gerrymandering and anti-democratic machinations will become. North Carolina, to cite the most extreme example, hardly qualifies as a democracy anymore. Yet that problem is unfixable as well.

The same goes for a host of other constitutional conundrums. Gridlock, for instance. A number of ideas have been advanced about how to put an end to the logjam on Capitol Hill. But none has the slightest chance of running the Article V gauntlet.

If America’s constitutional crisis is hard to understand, it’s because no one can quite grasp how an ostensibly sovereign people could paint themselves into a corner in such a manner. Traditionally, Americans have responded by blaming everyone and everything except the document itself. If government is a mess, politicians are corrupt, the prisons are bulging, cops are running riot, and people are being shot down in the street — then it’s because politicians aren’t following the Constitution, they’re misinterpreting it, or else they’re insufficiently patriotic and bipartisan and are looking after their own interests. If Americans would just read it and follow its instructions to the letter, all problems would magically disappear.

That was before Trump. Thanks to the Electoral College debacle, some have realized that the country’s age-old plan of government may not be so flawless after all. But since it is apparently unfixable, the reaction is one of depression and paralysis. The people are helpless because while sovereignty supposedly rests with them, it really rests with a yellowing piece of parchment in the National Archives.

A Solution?

The idea that Americans have no choice but to stand by as democracy goes down the drain is absurd. Democracy is not some meek and mild creed, but a fierce and jealous god that recognizes no higher authority other than its historical obligation to defend, extend, and deepen its rule. People not only have a right to resist, but a moral duty.

But how? By blockading Pennsylvania Avenue, storming Capitol Hill, or kidnapping members of the House Freedom Caucus?

Actually, the most revolutionary response is the most peaceful. The people should demand a vote, not on some specific constitutional feature, but on the document as a whole. Before it does any more damage, they should demand a say as to whether it should be allowed to continue strangling democracy.

But through what mechanism? This is where the constituent assembly comes in. A constituent assembly has been high on the agenda of the international left ever since May 1789, when Louis XVI convened a body known as the Estates-General in a last-ditch effort to put the monarchy’s finances in order.

The Estates was not a constituent assembly. It was an old-fashioned gathering of France’s three traditional orders, which had not met in more than a century and a half and whose members sat separately, voted separately, and even wore separate colors — gold for the nobility, red or violet for the upper clergy, and black for the commoners.

But it turned into something very different when the third estate called on the other two to relinquish their privileges and join together to form a single constituent assembly. The proposal contradicted all existing law and procedure, and, once the other two estates acceded, threw France into a constitutional limbo. The revolution was underway.

A constituent assembly is thus an extraordinary national gathering called for the purpose not of passing ordinary legislation but of redesigning the state. It is not a US-style constitutional convention, which, according to Article V, can only be held if two-thirds of the states request one and whose recommendations are then subject to the same debilitating three-fourths rule. This leaves room for little but a state-centered affair in which the people are hardly more than bystanders.

A constituent assembly, in contrast, arises not out of the states but out of the people. Since it would represent the nation writ large, its members would vote as a whole rather than as part of individual state delegations. Taken to its logical conclusion, the concept implies that the people should vote as a whole as well, not for candidates in separate state or congressional-district contests, but from a single ballot in a single national election, with seats allocated according to each party or slate’s share of the total.

Once seated, the members’ remit would be unbounded. They could tinker with a few clauses here or there or throw the entire Constitution out and start from scratch. They could submit their recommendations to a referendum or decide that they had sufficient authority to institute them on their own. Instead of deriving their authority from Article V, they would impose it — on the amending process, on the Constitution, on society.

The American republic founded in 1787–88 was unique in that it was established on the basis of a single self-contained document, one that laid down its own reasons for existing — “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility” — and then set forth permanent rules governing how it might be changed. Although the Preamble says that “we the people” ordained and established the new constitution, the reality was the opposite: the Constitution established the people as a single entity, gave them the name “Americans,” and then bequeathed them the only politico-legal framework they would ever know.

This was the document’s strength and weakness. It has lasted far longer than anyone expected. But now that the minimalist change it permits is proving inadequate, the ties holding it in place are beginning to fray. When they snap, the Constitution won’t sag or collapse in part. The whole thing will go down. Indeed, the very calling of an extra-constitutional body like a constituent assembly would signal that the ancien régime was at an end and that the time had come to construct a new type of government to take its place.

Significantly, voting on the Constitution is something Americans have never been allowed to do. While an estimated 160,000 people cast ballots for delegates to state ratifying conventions, that amounted to just one in twenty-five people and mainly consisted of property-owning white males. Since then, Americans have only had the opportunity to vote, in a fragmented and indirect manner, for or against individual amendments under the auspices of Article V.

This is the single most undemocratic aspect of American society — its founding flaw so to speak. It’s the equivalent of allowing prison inmates to vote on what to have for dinner rather than whether they should be kept under lock and key. It is why the US is arguably not a democracy at all, but instead an eighteenth-century republic that has taken on certain democratic characteristics while remaining pre-democratic at the core.

The goal of a constituent assembly would therefore be to establish the first democratic republic in American history.

Socialism and Democracy

After the French Revolution, the demand for a constituent assembly figured heavily in the European-wide Revolution of 1848, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the German revolution of 1918–19. Trotsky revived the slogan during the Chinese and Spanish revolutions, and since 2001 it has emerged as a cause célèbre in Latin America.

Nonetheless, the concept is controversial among Marxists. One reason is that such bodies have been used against the working class — most notably in France, where a newly formed constituent assembly crushed a workers’ uprising in June 1848 and paved the way for the dictatorship of Napoleon III.

Another reason is that the rise of workers’ councils, or soviets, led Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and others to conclude that a new system of direct class rule had been born, one more militantly democratic than anything preceding it.

In the name of soviet democracy, the Bolsheviks dispersed a Russian constituent assembly when it met briefly in January 1918, and later that year, revolutionary socialists in Germany assailed right-wing Social Democrats for organizing a constituent assembly to counter the soviet movement springing up across the country.

“If we now convene the Constituent Assembly, that would be the death sentence for the workers’ and soldiers’ councils,” Richard Müller, leader of the revolutionary shop stewards’ movement, declared. “The road to the victory of the proletariat can pass only over the corpse of the National [Constituent] Assembly,” the socialist leader Paul Levi told the founding conference of the German Communist Party in December 1919.

Luxemburg wrote in Die Rote Fahne (“The Red Flag”), the newspaper of the Spartacus League:

What is gained, then, with this cowardly detour called the National [Constituent] Assembly? The bourgeoisie’s position is strengthened; the proletariat is weakened and confused by empty illusions; time and energy are dissipated and lost in ‘discussions’ between the wolf and the lamb; in a word, one plays into the hands of all those elements whose intent is to defraud the proletarian revolution of its socialist goals and to emasculate it into a bourgeois democratic revolution.


When the choice was no longer democracy per se, but “bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy,” as Luxemburg described it, a constituent assembly was more than a distraction. Instead of urging a halt to class struggle, it was time to see the war through to completion.

At the same time, despite their extreme reservations, Levi and Luxemburg supported participation in the constituent assembly as a way of reaching the broad mass of people. As Levi put it:

[T]he National Assembly is going to meet. It will meet and you cannot stop it. For months, it will dominate all political life in Germany. You will not be able to prevent all eyes from being fixed on it, you will not be able to prevent even the best of your supporters from being interested in it, seeking information, forecasting and wanting to know what will happen in the National Assembly. It will be in the consciousness of the German workers, and confronted with this fact, do you want to stay outside and work from outside?


As for Lenin, he called for a constituent assembly in 1905 and again in 1917 even while proclaiming “all power to the soviets.” Bolsheviks candidates campaigned for the Constituent Assembly after the October Revolution, and Lenin took it as a point of pride that such a body could convene only once the soviets had ascended to power.

Trotsky, for his part, not only revived the slogan with respect to Spain and China, but suggested the possibility of a constituent assembly in the event of a mass uprising in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. Following fascist rioting in France in February 1934, he called for a constituent assembly in everything but name there as well. Urging French workers to “draw inspiration from the ideas and methods . . . of the Convention of 1793,” he called for the overthrow of the presidency and senate, “which is elected by limited suffrage and which renders the power of universal suffrage a mere illusion,” and proposed instead rule by “a single assembly . . . combin[ing] the legislative and executive powers.”

If Trotsky could insist on abolishing the senate in France, why can’t socialists do the same in the US?

How Advanced Is the US?

Still, the idea of a constituent assembly in the US will cause certain socialists to choke on their morning coffee. After all, the United States is not just an advanced capitalist country, but the advanced capitalist country. Wouldn’t convoking a constituent assembly be akin to casting back centuries when we should be moving resolutely forward, toward socialist democracy?

The problem is, history does not travel in a straight line. What could be the next revolutionary wave may resemble 1917 in certain respects, but it may also incorporate elements of 1789, 1848, and 1905. As in the past, it will be free to draw from the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole, to mix and match in novel ways, and to add whatever new elements it comes up with. If a constituent assembly becomes part of the revolutionary chemistry, then who are socialists to say no?

And besides, how advanced is America really? The agrarian question may be forgotten and slavery may have disappeared. But their imprint lingers in the form of an Electoral College that was expressly designed to boost the power of the slave states and a Senate that was part of a grand bargain giving slaveholders as much as twenty-five extra congressional seats by virtue of the three-fifths clause.

The Constitution was an ambiguous achievement even by the standards of the 1700s. The abolition of aristocratic orders, for instance — set forth in Article I, section nine — represented a clear step forward. But whereas Britain was well on its way to concentrating full power in the House of Commons, America’s founders were anti-parliamentarians who sought to rein in a plebeian House of Representatives by offsetting it with a quasi-aristocratic Senate, a semi-monarchical presidency, and a lifetime judiciary.

The late conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that checks and balances and separation of powers were an attempt to recapture the decentralized “Tudor Constitution” that the Puritans remembered from the days of Good Queen Bess, defender of the Protestant cause, before a new dynasty, the Stuarts, began centralizing English government in 1603.

Robert R. Palmer, the great historian of the French Revolution, noted that American ideas about checks and balances and separation of powers were closer to those of the liberal aristocrats leading the charge against Louis XVI prior to 1789 rather than the ardent statists and centralizers who took charge after. That makes the founders the last blast of the old order instead of harbingers of the new.

Their creation was a strange agglomeration of the modern and pre-modern, a society that seems zippy and high-tech in certain respects but antique in others. Capitalism is hyper-advanced while labor is locked in a state of Third World underdevelopment. Futurist ideas advance arm-in-arm with the ultra-reactionary. Americans might have tried to sort out the contradictions by subjecting their society to a top-to-bottom democratic overhaul at various points, perhaps during Reconstruction or the 1930s. But such was the Constitution’s mystique that the effort never got off the ground.

Besides, a thoroughgoing overhaul requires a sovereign power to see it through. And since the Constitution created US society instead of the other way around, no such independent power exists — only an array of subordinate powers in a state of delicate equipoise.

A socialist-minded working class could provide the necessary outside force. By challenging the Constitution head on, it could exert control not only over the political structure but over US society more generally: its class structure, its economy, its external relations, and the runaway oligarchical tendencies that have given rise to a monster like Trump.

Finding a Way Out

We are faced, then, with a supreme paradox: a hyper-advanced economy coupled with a pre-modern political structure. Every economic gain validates a worldview in which democracy is narrowed to the vanishing point, politics are stigmatized as innately selfish and corrupt, private enterprise is celebrated as the ultimate good, and America’s right to rule the world is presented as a self-evident truth.

The fragmented political system ensures that political disputes will fester for generations, enabling presidents to channel years of accumulated bitterness and strife into expansion abroad. If politics stops at the water’s edge, then foreign adventures can be a means of escaping insoluble political disputes at home. The result is the perfect imperialist state, one that is as aggressive as it is populist. But now that the empire is over-extended and in disarray, Trump seems poised to withdraw America’s forces so he can use them against his enemies at home.

Two things seem clear about the coming period. One is that everything is coming under attack: public education, health care, drug decriminalization, the right to vote, the right to strike, and much, much more. The other is that the people most directly in the line of fire are wage earners and the poor.

American socialists have been weaned on stirring tales of the great strikes of the 1930s in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco. For various reasons, those struggles never advanced beyond the trade-union economic stage. In the age of Trump, however, mass strikes will take on a political character from the start. And with the incoming Trump administration shaping up to be the most reactionary in modern American history, then the response will have to be just as radical.

Perhaps today’s staid AFL-CIO bureaucrats will find themselves forced to call a general strike, raising the question of dual power for the first time in US history. If so, calling for abolition of the Electoral College or the Senate would raise the ante even more, while a demand for a constituent assembly would pose the question of the takeover of the state.

Rhetoric like this may seem over the top. But the US power structure is far more brittle than generally supposed, and events are moving much more rapidly than anyone would have predicted just a few months ago. As Brexit, the refugee crisis, and spiraling US-China tensions show, the global power structure is also weak.

It’s important to keep in mind what’s at stake here. The United States is not a semi-peripheral country like Russia in 1917, but the ruler of history’s first global empire. Since World War II, it has been busily remaking the world in its image as it carefully nurtured neo-federal institutions like NATO, the EU, and the European Court of Justice. While the US empire is first and foremost a military and economic alliance, it’s also a legal construct based on the concept of an untouchable constitution, a reduction of democracy to a few liberal formulas, and judicial review.

It is a structure that neatly suits the needs of capital. Neoliberalism and US-style constitutionalism “go hand in hand,” the University of Toronto legal theorist Ran Hirschl contends, because “they share a common adherence to a ‘small government’ worldview, a commitment to an expansive conceptualization of the private sphere, and an uneasy attitude, even hostility, toward the less than predictable political sphere.”

The goal is to place “private ownership and other economic freedoms beyond the reach of majoritarian politics and state regulation,” thereby promoting a “Schumpeterian (or minimalist) conception of democracy . . . in which the essence of democracy is relegated to the existence of some sort of electoral routine, controlled to a large extent by those who have greater access to and influence on the public agenda.”

March the people to the polls, in other words, so they can vote for one of two corporate-controlled candidates, and then march them back home again. Teach them that a two-century-old constitution represents the absolute summit of political thought so they will never be tempted to tamper with the political structure on their own. Tie the people down, Gulliver-style, with innumerable laws and treaties so that capital can be set free.

It’s a formula that has only worked as long as the economy continued to grow, wages remained strong, and imperial power was expanding. Now that that is no longer the case, many are beginning to recognize they’ve been residing in a giant prison and must somehow find a way out.

The Shape of Politics to Come

Context is all, as Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and other classic Marxist thinkers observed. Conceivably, some bourgeois visionary might push for a constituent assembly in order to stave off socialism much as centrist-leaning Social Democrats did in Germany in 1918.

But a replay of German events seems far-fetched. For more than two centuries, the Constitution has provided US capitalism with the rock-solid legal foundation it’s needed to grow into a world-transforming power. States’ rights, limited government, separation of powers — these are in US capitalism’s bones the same way that Westminster-style parliamentarism was in British capitalism’s bones in the nineteenth century. The ruling class will defend them tooth and nail against the Left even while cheering on Trump as he tramples them on the right.

Like it or not — and regardless of the Left’s relative strength — this is the great issue that will dominate US politics in the coming period: capitalism versus socialism, and a degraded bourgeois constitutional tradition versus working-class democracy. It’s not so different from the lineup Luxemburg described in 1918­­–19.

Old habits die hard, and leftists still find it easier to protest police brutality in the streets than to organize against the institutional miasma of the US Senate or the Electoral College. But these are the fault lines along which the US power structure is coming undone, and the basis for a potential democratic reconstruction. The Left won’t have a choice but to respond accordingly.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby norton ash » Tue Jan 03, 2017 7:29 pm

:clapping:

Agreed, this needs to be the course to avoid disaster.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Jan 12, 2017 11:24 am

This is really good.

Insights From Mississippi on Organizing in a Right-Wing Context: A Conversation With Kali Akuno

Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. In this series, we'll be talking with organizers, troublemakers and thinkers who are working to challenge both the Trump administration and the circumstances that created it. It can be easy to despair, to feel like trends toward inequality are impossible to stop, to give in to fear over increased racist, sexist and xenophobic violence. But around the country, people are doing the hard work of fighting back and coming together to plan for what comes next. This series will introduce you to some of them.

For this first interview, we spoke with Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative economic project in Jackson, Mississippi. "The overall aim and intent is to create a vibrant social solidarity economy in Jackson and, more thoroughly, to use that to transform the local political economy of Jackson and the State of Mississippi," Akuno said. In the interview that follows, Akuno shares more about Cooperation Jackson's efforts to take over Mississippi's political economy and move it in a more radical direction.

Sarah Jaffe: You are part of a new project called Ungovernable2017. Can you tell us about that?

Kali Akuno: The Ungovernable project started election night. There was a video chat that Cooperation Jackson [and I] hosted as part of an ongoing project that we have called An American Nightmare, which is focused on the question of disposability: labor disposability, particularly the disposability of the Black working class. It is kind of a canary in the coal mine. We wanted to have a conversation that night to really try to sharpen in on what forces throughout the United States could and should be doing in the next period, regardless of the outcome.

Now, truthfully, [many of us] thought that Trump was going to win very early on, but were really just trying to prepare ourselves and prepare others to start having an open and honest dialogue about the next four years, assuming that the democratic order will stay in place. Once it was clear that he had won the Electoral College, he was going to be the next president of the United States, a point that I raised was "Now we need to prepare to be ungovernable." That lingered in my head.

It is a phrase that I remember picking up from my younger days, from the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s as part of their noncompliance strategy. So, drawing on that historical memory is where that phrase came from. The general idea of the project is to start propagating ideas on how to build and resist this incoming regime. There is a focus on Trump, which is necessary, but I think we miss the boat if we don't really look at the Republican-controlled Congress, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court, which is now an inevitability, and the fact that Republicans control two-thirds of all of the state governments. We are looking at a major right-wing shift, I think, the likes of [which] this country has never seen before.

It is a minority movement and it is a minority government in every instance. I think we really need to be mindful of that. We are going to have to really dig deep and figure out how to develop a comprehensive program that enables us to survive this austerity onslaught that they are going to come hard with. How do we use it not only to pivot to resistance, but to actually create the new future that we need, and to see this as much as an opportunity to do many things that were off the table three or four years ago?

The Ungovernable project, first and foremost, [is] trying to galvanize and mobilize forces throughout the country and throughout the world to take actions on January 20. But beyond that, we really want to engage in creating a larger conversation on how to build a serious resistance program.

You said that you did think that Trump was going to win. Can you talk a little bit about the analysis you had that led you to be prepared for this?

I have the benefit of living in Mississippi, as odd as that may seem. I saw the enthusiasm for Trump. I listened to a lot of right-wing and reactionary radio, in part because of political reality and the context in which I am in, but also to study what these forces are doing, how they are doing it, who they are reaching, what is their impact? I started looking in September at the Electoral College map, and the map lined up pretty favorably for Trump. I never thought that he would win the popular vote, but you don't need to win the popular vote in the United States to win the presidency. It was very clear to me that if he could win a few key states -- North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Michigan -- he had a shot.

There was clearly no enthusiasm in the Black community for Hillary Clinton. I happened to be on the road when she was having events in different cities throughout the country. Even though she spent eight years really building up the infrastructure to prepare for this presidential run, she just couldn't overcome the historic deficit in the Black community. People really just did not believe in her, nor [could they] forget what she and her husband did during their eight years in the White House. The 1990s [saw] the largest number of people in history being incarcerated under their watch. People didn't forget her super-predator comments. Even though she did a lot to support, financially, institutions like the Congressional Black Caucus and the Black Democratic Party machine, she couldn't turn that into votes. She couldn't turn that into mobilization. Obama got out there and was imploring everybody to go out and vote … he was talking about the Black community and if they didn't vote for Hillary, he would take it as a personal affront.

Despite all of that, I think they knew that they were in trouble. One of the things that clearly let me know that she was vulnerable was, by all accounts Bernie should not have stood a chance in hell at actually challenging her given how much money she had in her war chest. How she had been basically buying allegiances for over almost a decade, had the money to back it, had the finance capital and virtually almost all of Wall Street on her side, and they were struggling.

I think Trump is a very astute politician. I don't think any of his antics are random. He comes off that way to disarm people, but he is very calculated. There were some folks who were trying to get Hillary to address issues of concern about the Clinton Foundation and its actions in Haiti -- how they helped to install a very oppressive and reactionary regime and basically ignored the Haitian community. Trump very skilfully went to Florida on two occasions that I am aware of and talked to a lot of the Haitian leadership, much of which is actually left-wing. He played up on the dislike that many have for the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons and what they have been doing in Haiti. For him to go and try to get, at best, 10 to 20 thousand votes from the Haitian community means that he was doing some serious math and he realized, "Hey, this could add up. If I can just break what is typically considered the Black vote, it will help me and my chances in Florida and some other key states to turn the tide."

He was looking at those moves, looking at that electoral map, really looking at the economic anxiety in the Black community, but also in the white community, which is very real in Mississippi, very real in the South, very real in the Midwest. I don't think that was being heard. It wasn't really being paid attention to. I think he picked up on it. He did everything he could on several occasions, as you remember, to very visibly and very publicly appeal to Bernie voters and say, "Hey, I am on your side. We are talking the same economic measures and concerns," which is not true, but it was great rhetoric.

Then, I think also the reality, a deeper piece, is that there was economic populism, economic nationalism that he presented in a very crafty way; and very skilfully also [played] the racism card. I think he was a very astute follower of history. I think his analysis was very reminiscent of what Reagan did when he came down here to Mississippi and went to the site near where civil rights workers were murdered. He came out with some great slogans -- Reagan did and so did Trump. "Make America Great Again": many on the left laughed at it, but I think anybody who watches Westerns knew exactly what he was doing. I think he picked the perfect target and spoke to both concerns about racism and economics with targeting the wall and targeting Mexico. He knocked out several things all at once.

Then, the rise of Occupy and the Movement for Black Lives also presented a certain amount of angst amongst large sectors of particularly rural white America -- about being excluded, overrun, isolated, marginalized, forgotten. He played all of that up. I think people need to recognize that in terms of his strategy and the lack of strategy on the other side.

You mentioned, of course, that this was still a minority movement, that a small percentage of people voted for Trump. He won the Electoral College, not the popular vote. Why is it important to remember that when thinking about resisting Trump?

I always bring it up because people feel isolated. Neoliberalism needs to be understood as a political movement. First and foremost, what it was trying to accomplish is breaking our social solidarity. It has done a good job over 40 years, clearly. With what we are calling the Neo-Confederate States and the Trump regime, many thought there was not much more to squeeze after 2008. They have, clearly, been proven false and they are going to try to squeeze the people more, very hard and fast beginning in the next couple of weeks. We already see it with the repeal of Obamacare on the Senate floor yesterday. And Trump is not even the president officially yet.

We need to recognize that in a number of different instances, folks who actually want to see something different constitute the majority. There were the majority of people who voted against Trump if you just look there. On a deeper level, this is something that I think we need to look at more profoundly and try to address: the 50 percent of voting-age adults in this country who typically don't vote. I don't think that is apathy; or not all of it. I think there is a growing dissatisfaction with the façade of democracy. People feel that "Whoever I vote for, nothing fundamentally is going to change. Their economic policy is going to be what it is. A lot of the fundamental questions around society are not on the ballot. We are restricted from being included in any serious discussion of democracy and what we can vote on, so why should I vote?" I think that is begging for some more fundamental, deeper and systemic change that I don't think the electoral strategy and the electoral focus that we -- in this case being the left -- have been so oriented toward touches upon.

Time and time again, particularly over the last 20 years, where we have demonstrated our greatest strength is actually in the social movement side, the resistance side. We have to find ways to build the type of organizations and institutions that can create a radical hegemonic project that is beyond episodic, beyond just Occupy or the Movement for Black Lives, but is really geared toward meeting direct needs, in the process creating new types of social relationships and the society that we want, envision and need. We have to figure out "How do we rebuild the social bonds? How do we rebuild the social solidarity that we need?"

I don't think any of us have, by far, all of the answers, but some things are staring us in the face. I have been constantly pointing out that those of us who want and chose a different path in the means that were available were in the majority and not in the minority. We need to look toward each other, first and foremost, for the solutions that we need.

What you were just saying leads us pretty perfectly to talking about what you are building in Jackson. Tell us a little bit about Chokwe Lumumba's election and what is still going on with Cooperation Jackson.

I will give the shortest version I can of the overall project and strategy. I am a long-time member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. After September 11, one of the key things that we have been working on [is] securing the freedom of our political prisoners, prisoners of war and political exiles. We recognized after September 11 that this was going to become a major challenge, if not impossible, given how the United States government was going to redefine the political terrain. We recognized that we were going to have to do some major shifts in our own orientation and strategy. One of the main things that we recognized was that the repressive nature of the United States government was going to reach new levels. The COINTELPRO program, which was devastating to Black liberation and socialist organizations, was founded as a secret program under the United States government. [It was] largely illegal by their own law and standards. We knew that after September 11 they were going to create something that would be COINTELPRO-like.

We created a strategy group and started to rethink what we were doing with the limited resources and human forces that we have. "How could we be more effective?" It took us a couple of years to narrow some stuff down. Then, after Katrina, it got sharpened and focused. We started to take climate change more seriously, particularly once we looked at the maps of the United States and recognized where major sea-level rise would impact -- most of it being in low-lying communities in the South where Black people are highly concentrated. We said, "OK, where are we strongest? Where could a small radical organization really bore itself in and have the greatest amount of impact?" For a lot of different reasons we looked at Mississippi and Jackson in particular -- partly because we already had a strong chapter there that had some major victories in the '80s and '90s -- and said, "What can we do that would lend us towards being in a position to shape the outcome of society on a municipal scale?" That led us to the creation of the Jackson-Kush Plan.

Out of that plan, there were some things that we were already working on, like people's assemblies. We reshaped and refocused and repurposed it in a lot of ways to try to be an instrument of dual power. Something that can both press government, but also work outside of it to transform society, to really push for a new politics. The third part, which is where Cooperation Jackson comes in, is transforming the economy, creating a democratic economy leading toward the creation and construction of a socialist economy, but through a democratic bottom-up process.

The first major piece that we put forward to try to actualize that strategy was the election of Chokwe Lumumba. We first ran Chokwe for City Council in 2009 and he won that election. We wanted to do that, first and foremost, to gain some experience in the art of governing and learn municipal law; to figure out what could be done on a municipal level to support a radical program of social transformation. Despite many of our years, if not decades, of studying radical theory and process, we didn't encounter many who had any serious analysis on how to actually govern. Those first four years, we learned a little bit. We felt confident enough that we wanted to try and move it to the next level and ran Chokwe for mayor in 2012 and 2013. He won and took over the mayorship in July 2013 and held that position until his untimely death in February 2014.

Something like Cooperation Jackson had been thought of for over 10 years prior to Chokwe becoming mayor. We knew we wanted to build something like it and our initial thinking was that we wanted to change some of the municipal law to support local hiring, local buying, local procurement and to change some of the rules of the game in a way that would support not just minority contractors and builders, but people who were doing collective and cooperative work. We also wanted to create a capital stream for these emerging vehicles. We were putting some of those things in place when he died.

The idea was there, but the next administration didn't take it up and had no regard for it. On our part, we said, "Hey, it was an untimely and unfortunate loss, but we need to keep the process moving forward," and try to move on to the next and third phase, which we always thought was the most critical: "How do you organize a community to both own and seize the means of production within its environment?" That's where Cooperation Jackson was born. That is still a process that we are working on and trying to cultivate.

We are experimenting left and right. Many things are working, many things are not, but it is all part of this process of trying to build a democratic culture and to do that on the level of production. It is more of a challenge than it sounds like because we don't really live in a democratic society. The more you really try to get into work like this, the more you realize how undemocratic the overall society that we live in really is. Particularly when it comes to the economic realm. All that is geared toward private accumulation. It is a boss who tells you -- not without struggle by workers for better wages and better working conditions -- but for the most part, most of [the working conditions] are really dictated by employers and by capital. Which is not democratic in any form or fashion.

We definitely see it as a long-term struggle -- one that has become harder with Trump's election and the potential consolidation of the political forces he represents with these Tea Party neo-confederates and their control over state governments. I do think in a moment like this, living in Mississippi is an advantage. Mississippi has been dominated by the Tea Party, even before the party had its name. Our governor, Phil Bryant, is a Tea Party member. We have a Republican supermajority and it has been that way for most of the last six years and they can pass almost anything they want. We have been able to sharpen some ideas about how to resist, how to organize in such a repressive and restrictive context, before the nation got hit and exposed to this with the Trump presidency. I think we had a little bit of a head start, which kept our core from being as depressed by what just transpired.

We were like, "Welcome to Mississippi!" to the rest of the United States. We don't wish this on our worst enemies, but this is where we find ourselves. Crying about it or wishing it was different is not going to change the situation. We are going to have to get down, get dirty and struggle and work our way out of this. Our orientation is that we have to be fighting both defensively and offensively as much as we can at the same time. That is very challenging to do, but I think it is an orientation that we have to really pivot towards. I think it is a time -- going back on some old clichés, but I do think they are true -- for us to really dream big, to vision big, much bigger and bolder than I think we have thought in most of the last 30 years as we have learned to acquiesce and accept TINA: There Is No Alternative. Actually there is, there has to be, because if the forces at the helm now continue to have their way, humanity won't survive much longer.

It is imperative that we not only remove them from power, but we totally re-orient the economy and society to [be] in balance and harmony with nature. We need a good grip on de-carbonizing the economy and putting forth a just transition. These are necessities and we have to build it from the ground up. That is what we are trying to do at Cooperation Jackson here in Mississippi.

One thing that is coming up, Lumumba's son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, is running for mayor in May. Right now, by far and away, he is the leading candidate. We fully expect to be back in office come July, but under some new terms that we are really going to have to figure out because the city is under major debt now. We are being threatened with the loss of our school district. The state is likely going to take that over because of some arbitrary grading system that they created several years ago, primarily focusing on Black school districts. Jackson is also faced with the threat of losing control over the city's water system, in part, because of a consent decree that the city was forced to sign with the federal government in 2012. The water situation has been bad going on into the 1970s. They just kind of kicked the can down the road until it became inevitable. Jackson has a water problem similar to Flint, but not as bad. For us, it is a key issue because the sale of water to both the residents of the city and the greater metro region constitutes 44 percent of the city's annual revenue. So, if we lose control of the water, we are not going to have a municipality to speak of.

We are trying to avoid what I call a Syriza trap, which is having a left-wing government come in to administer the worst forms of austerity. It is a similar situation that we are staring down. We are trying to meet that as best we can, with the most radical democratic ideas to counter it. The road ahead of us is very clear. We are taking a major risk and -- to steal a phrase -- "inventing the future" to deal with some of the issues that I spoke to earlier about Black disposability in the economic reality of this globalized world. It is increasingly becoming more and more computerized and more and more automated, which is going to have some major consequences for labor displacement. Ultimately, what we think is disposability on a grand and global scale [is coming] and we need to get prepared for it now. We do so, in our view, by fighting and creating a program which is about democratizing technology and putting it in the direct hands of the community so that we control the process, so that automation is going to serve humanity and not just the 1 percent elite.

We dream big here. We believe visioning small and trying to act in a very small and isolated way actually doesn't help us, or the broader left's project, in any form or fashion. We don't believe single-issue work is the way forward. We have to push beyond our capacity as we presently understand it. We think it helps people come out of their isolation to have some hope, and to start envisioning a future where they can be active participants in its construction.

Lastly, can you tell people where they can find Ungovernable and Cooperation Jackson, how they can find out more information?

You can reach Cooperation Jackson at our website. If you want to get more up to date on what we are thinking, what we are doing, our Facebook page is the best place to go. Our Twitter handle is @CooperationJXN. For the Ungovernable initiative the website is ungovernable2017.com. Also, look for the new Ungovernable Facebook page that we are also using to do regular updates and analysis. Right now, we are trying to get everybody to take the Ungovernable Pledge to join in actions in your city, in your state, or if you can make it, in D.C. for January 20 and 21. Stay tuned for the broader more long-term initiatives, because one day is not going to stop this regime from moving by any stretch of the imagination. We have got to start organizing and building for not just immediate survival and (hopefully) overturning of the Trump regime, but transforming society. We hope everybody will join us.

Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast. Truthout has lightly edited this article for ease of reading.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Socialist Response

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Jan 12, 2017 1:36 pm

Bumping to make up for my sins.

Some good articles.

I have to question that Scalia's death was mysterious!
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 42 guests