General Strike

[Elvis]

And the wars we are going to have, they will be amazing. America has the best wars. And our wars are going to be incredibly great. We have the most amazing army. And America is going to be so safe. We are going to have the most amazingly safe country. You have my word.

[8bitagent]

I hate to be that guy, but wasn't the current Muslim refugee crisis caused by say, ALL THE PEOPLE BUSH AND OBAMA bombed and the countries they went in and destabilized?
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, et al.

I always support peaceful protests, and have been wanting the left to grow a pair post Bush era, but I just can't help but wonder...where were these protests when Obama deported two million Latinos
and continued the neocon Bush era policy of endless bombing of Muslims, and destabilizing regions by propping up Saudi funded jihadist rebels?

[8bitagent]

"Demand 1. An Election do-over. "?

Why, because Hillary Clinton didn't get a fair shake? Did the "evil Russians and Comey" ruin her chances? Every time people say the Russians "hacked the election", the 2016 election was "unfair",
or "Hillary was the real winner"...I just have to point out the obvious: What about Bernie Sanders do-over from being cheated by the DNC? Noone felt inspired by Clinton as they did Bernie.
And I still feel Hillary deserved to lose for pulling the levers of the "impartial" DNC to destroy Bernie the way she did.

A general strike is a great idea but these sorts of proposals are casually floated from time to time, with very little follow through. Also needed is a solid social base, massive amounts of organizing, good praxis, a solid strategy and many other such things.

Which, given the inertia of the general population, means that things will really have to turn to shit before any actual, large-scale movement comes to be. First thing that would need to happen is for everyone's TVs to go dark. That might spur people to at least wonder, "Hey! Wha hoppen?".

TVs? You mean iphones/androids/tablets and wi fi enabled Apple laptops right? :p

[8bitagent]

I work at a university, the PC culture, even at a progressive and science-focused place, doesn't exist. It's just a phantom made up by reactionaries and it feels good to talk about and find examples of - the types of examples that have always existed.

Wellllll....one of my closest best friends is a firebrand progressive like me, works teaching communication at a college in Southern California and we joke about how pedantic goofy *some* of the modern
campus culture can be. He told me the day after the election staff and students were notified that emotional support animals, grief counselors and literal 'safe spaces' would be provided on November 9th.
Yeah, I know Rush and Fox News salivates over this notion of "SJW campus crybabies" but least here in California some of that stuff is cartoonishly true. I've long felt college kids should get out of their damn 'safe spaces',
get off the iphones and instagram and get back to grassroots 1960's activism which looks like is finally happening. I'm just not into the more riot causing beat down insanity as we saw at the University of Berkeley tonight

^^Yeah, nothing to do with social democracy actually working, as opposed to the dominionist fascism you voted for.

I have to ask: Are you happy with how things are going so far under Trump? Was it everything you dreamed of?

I'm not happy with immigrants being threatened to be kicked out for using government assistance, saber rattling with Iran, or any of the other
expected social fabric rattling insanity we're seeing with President Donnie Hategun. But my belief that the millennials needed to grow a pair
and get active in grassroots awareness is taking shape quite nicely...an activist mindset completely missing during 8 years of Obummer

[DrEvil]

your Trump-addled brain

I almost engaged until I saw the ad-hominem. U mad bro?

Damn straight I'm mad, mostly at your condescending suggestion that people go to university as some sort of safe space from the "real" world. God forbid they should get an education, no one would vote for Trump anymore.

That said, I apologize for the insult. Any chance you could respond to the rest of my previous post now? I'm genuinely curious what you think of Trump's track record so far.

[Luther Blissett]

Millennials are the country's largest generation and have the most access to human knowledge in history. This is why they and the upper reaches of Generation Z prefer socialism.

I doubt that millennials "prefer socialism", but I'll grant it for the sake of argument. If they do, it's because the economy tanked at the worst time for them, leaving them with massive student loans they now had little hope of repaying. They're scared. Understandably so. Lots of people took refuge at Universities during the recession, because the real world suddenly held nothing for them. (Is that why you sheltered yourself at University too? The scary real world?) So of course socialism, A.K.A. other people's money, suddenly looked like the answer. This is all just my opinion, but it's as valid as your quote above which is just your opinion. So I guess we'll agree to disagree.

My time here predated the housing crisis. Not really a lot of money in it and my main job is at a cash-strapped university.

Separate Pew and Yougov polling data suggest that both millennials and generation z prefer socialism. Only one single faulty poll that queried the heartland instead of population centers found fault with that. Speaking of - we organize with about a half-dozen rural leftist / socialist groups, who have been seeing exploding numbers since the election and have come to us for advice on how to handle the new volume.

The money is just yours that was stolen from you starting in the late 70s. Take it back with us:

[Luther Blissett]

I work at a university, the PC culture, even at a progressive and science-focused place, doesn't exist. It's just a phantom made up by reactionaries and it feels good to talk about and find examples of - the types of examples that have always existed.

Wellllll....one of my closest best friends is a firebrand progressive like me, works teaching communication at a college in Southern California and we joke about how pedantic goofy *some* of the modern
campus culture can be. He told me the day after the election staff and students were notified that emotional support animals, grief counselors and literal 'safe spaces' would be provided on November 9th.
Yeah, I know Rush and Fox News salivates over this notion of "SJW campus crybabies" but least here in California some of that stuff is cartoonishly true. I've long felt college kids should get out of their damn 'safe spaces',
get off the iphones and instagram and get back to grassroots 1960's activism which looks like is finally happening. I'm just not into the more riot causing beat down insanity as we saw at the University of Berkeley tonight

Maybe it's an east coast / west coast thing. The last "safe space" I experienced last week was in order to make sure black voices critical of the pigs were heard (directly to the chief of police's face with a megaphone, as he stood there shaking his head and eventually turned tail) so that the talks wouldn't be disrupted by capitulating, deradicalizing, or deferential voices. Not really soft at all…I mean I don't have the balls to scream at a police chief, quoting him about how he doesn't believe in white supremacy and that I have the receipts to prove it.

I'm starting to understand that the whole notion was invented to stymie deradicalization from the people who would have us not punch nazis.

I had some friends at the Berkeley protest who sent messages overnight that it was the "solidest thing ever." Maybe more Germans should have been rioting in 1933.

[redsock]

I hate to be that guy, but wasn't the current Muslim refugee crisis caused by say, ALL THE PEOPLE BUSH AND OBAMA bombed and the countries they went in and destabilized?
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, et al.

I always support peaceful protests, and have been wanting the left to grow a pair post Bush era, but I just can't help but wonder...where were these protests when Obama deported two million Latinos
and continued the neocon Bush era policy of endless bombing of Muslims, and destabilizing regions by propping up Saudi funded jihadist rebels?

As long as there is a "D" after someone's name, he or she can commit all kinds of war crimes - and Democrats and people who consider themselves liberal will not make a peep. They ranted and raved during the two Bush terms, then went quiet for eight years (as things actually got much worse), and have now begun to start complaining again.

I find it maddening and hypocritical - blind loyalty to a party is never a good thing - and it is one big reason why I don't go onto FB much anymore, and am thinking of stopping altogether. Pretty much all of my extended family think of themselves as progressive, but they also happily and proudly voted for Clinton (after many were in the Sanders camp and truly thought he had a chance). Their complaints about Trump are valid, but after not saying boo about Obama's long list of crimes - indeed, posting memes about how cool and classy he is and wishing he could have a third term - I find it disgusting.

[Luther Blissett]

I hate to be that guy, but wasn't the current Muslim refugee crisis caused by say, ALL THE PEOPLE BUSH AND OBAMA bombed and the countries they went in and destabilized?
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, et al.

I always support peaceful protests, and have been wanting the left to grow a pair post Bush era, but I just can't help but wonder...where were these protests when Obama deported two million Latinos
and continued the neocon Bush era policy of endless bombing of Muslims, and destabilizing regions by propping up Saudi funded jihadist rebels?

As long as there is a "D" after someone's name, he or she can commit all kinds of war crimes - and Democrats and people who consider themselves liberal will not make a peep. They ranted and raved during the two Bush terms, then went quiet for eight years (as things actually got much worse), and have now begun to start complaining again.

I find it maddening and hypocritical - blind loyalty to a party is never a good thing - and it is one big reason why I don't go onto FB much anymore, and am thinking of stopping altogether. Pretty much all of my extended family think of themselves as progressive, but they also happily and proudly voted for Clinton (after many were in the Sanders camp and truly thought he had a chance). Their complaints about Trump are valid, but after not saying boo about Obama's long list of crimes - indeed, posting memes about how cool and classy he is and wishing he could have a third term - I find it disgusting.

Mostly agree except on one point: that there was much mobilization on the left at all during the Bush years. I remember seething punk and learning about anarchism during the anti-globalization days of the Clinton years, which was school for me. This culminated in the RNC 2000 protests and police riots, a radicalizing moment to be sure. Then 9/11 happened and dissent was silenced, and aside from a few anti-war protests I don't think I went to one demonstration for about six years.

During the Obama presidency, leftist dissent exploded, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to anti-fracking marches to Idle No More to No DAPL.

[American Dream]

Plan C is good:

On Social Strikes and Directional Demands




Beyond the electoral turn: The Social Strike

I’ve already suggested that we see the electoral turn as, in part, a response to the impasse that horizontalist movements found themselves. But this impasse might look a little different once the Plan B+ electoral projects have collided with neoliberal governance and run into an impasse of their own. I think the focus will then swing back to extra-parliamentary action around the problem of leverage.[4] I’m suggesting we use the social strike as the way to frame this problem. Translating and adapting the idea of a social strike into the contemporary UK environment and working out what it would actually look like in practice is going to take lots of collective thinking and practical experimentation. As a stand in for that I’ve pulled together some ideas to suggest why it might be an appropriate angle. In particular the social strike brings out three functions that will be required from any set of practices able to play a role equivalent to the twentieth century strike. These are making the new conditions visible, disrupting the circulation of capital and directly socialising, collectivising and communising our social relations, reproduction and struggles.

At it’s most crude the social strike seems like an attempt to answer the question of how we can strike effectively under present conditions or perhaps more broadly, how can we exercise leverage? Behind this is an understanding that the strike, the withdrawal of labour, has been the principal form of material leverage for the working class since the late-nineteenth century. It was this ability to exercise force that has underlain most expressions of working class power in the twentieth century.[5]

But strikes have stopped working so well, at least in the developed world.[6] The number of days lost to strikes in the UK is at a historic low and much contemporary industrial action is more gestural than forceful. The Plan B response to this is to demand the reversal of anti-trade union laws, to which the orthodox Left would add electing a more combative union leadership. Those would both be good things but as with other Plan B strategies they are totally insufficient. Strikes, as traditionally conceived, have been primarily inhibited by changes in class composition, in particular changes in the experience of work and changes in the organisation of production.[7]

The idea of a social strike, as it was originally developed, obviously relates to the concept of the social factory, the idea that the sphere of production has escaped the factory and seeped into the rest of society. The era of the strike is associated with the era of the Mass Worker, with very large workplaces, clear lines of antagonism between workers and managers, and with collective break times and visible factory gates giving opportunities for communication and agitation. Now those kinds of mass workplaces have been broken up through outsourcing, work has become more precarious, the kinds of work we tend to do has changed, etc. These all make it much harder to establish the common interests that an effective strike requires.

Making Visible

Some social strikes have tried to address this problem by finding ways to express the new common conditions politically. A pioneer of this approach can be found in the EuroMayday movement that started in Milan using festival type marches, along with the icon San Precario, the patron Saint of Precarious workers, to make the common condition of precarity both visible and a political problem that demands to be addressed.[8] This ‘making visible’ function of the social strike can also be the point where it moves beyond Plan B politics. Look at the example of the recent ‘Vaga de Totes’ women’s strike in Barcelona, which aimed to reveal the usually invisible, devalued and feminised work of social reproduction. This work only becomes visible when it stops happening, when the dishes remain dirty. Of course the neglect of women’s experiences in Left strategies was the spur to the feminist discourse on social reproduction and demands such as “Wages for Housework” in the 1970s. This ‘making visible’ function can also be seen in the movements of 2011, e.g. 15M and Occupy. The demand for ‘Real Democracy Now!” can be seen as an attempt to bring neoliberalism’s anti-democratic mechanisms of governance into focus. These mechanisms have also played a key role in class composition by training people to adopt a more neoliberal outlook and making collective political change appear impossible.[9]

Disrupting Circulation

Perhaps the changes that have done most to undermine the traditional strike have been transformations in the organisation of production and, in particular, production’s underlying infrastructure. Once again this can be understood through the problem of leverage. Traditionally the most powerful unions were located amongst the workers who occupied key sectors in the infrastructure of the time; Dockers and rail workers occupied key pinch points in transport infrastructure while miners did the same in the energy infrastructure. Their ability to stop that infrastructure functioning could choke off production as a whole.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a ‘logistics revolution’ aiming to route around those points of working class leverage. The introduction of shipping containers and the 1990s road-building program (partly defeated in the UK by the anti-roads movement) aimed to break the dock and railway unions[10]. While a new gas-based energy infrastructure finished off the National Union of Mineworkers. New world wide supply chains coordinated ‘just in time’ by bar codes and networked computers also allowed the break up of mass workplaces in developed countries and the relocation of production to the global South. Yet while old forms of working class power were destroyed, the process of automation and geographical relocation produced new weak points.[11] ‘Just in Time’ or LEAN production, relies on keeping very low stock levels in shops and factories with bar codes allowing new stock to be ordered just-in-time for it to arrive where its needed. The Fuel blockades by farmers and truckers in 2000 showed just how vulnerable modern capitalism is to disruption of transport infrastructure. A weakness amplified by the strong tendencies towards monopolies and oligopolies in the modern economy. As a result there are small numbers of very large logistics centers in the UK that have vital infrastructural roles.

Workers at those sites would seem to occupy key points of material leverage however they tend to be un-unionised and employed under precarious conditions. Yet others too have twigged the potential here, just look at Occupy Oakland’s port shutdown. Working un-officially with the unionised dockworkers they have led the way in the move from symbolic occupations of city parks to tactics that disrupted the circulation of capital. It’s a lesson that seems to have somewhat generalised in the USA with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations also beginning to occupy highways, etc. Of course there are other examples of those without a shared workplace gaining leverage by blocking circulation. The Argentinean unemployed workers movement, the Piqueteros, are a case in point.

It’s not hard to imagine how effective a logistics strike could be if supplemented by social movements deploying tactics such as ‘Reclaim the Streets’ style street occupations in the most disruptive areas. In this vein the Italians have started to think the Social Strike alongside a Metropolitan Strike, with the idea that as production takes place throughout the whole of metropolis then we should bring the whole city to a halt.

Socialise, Collectivise, Communise

Before we get too excited there are several problems with this strategy of disruption. The most obvious is that for highly disruptive strikes to work and not be isolated and crushed through militarised policing it would need high levels of legitimacy in wider society. Such support is of course possible. A 2013 poll by Spanish newspaper El País showed 89% support for the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages campaign of direct action, eviction-blocking and escraches (protests outside politicians’ houses). Amazingly even among voters of the governing rightwing Partido Popular the approval figure remained at 87%.

The second problem with a strategy of disruption returns us to the problem of visibility. Simply put those sectors with the most leverage, the ability to cause the most disruption, tend to become the most visible and so those whose needs are most attended to. This obviously risks reinstating the invisibilities of the 1970s. The increasing amount of caring work in the economy and the waged labour market makes such an outcome even more likely. As social reproduction has a dual character, reproducing us as both workers for capital but also as human beings, then a strategy of disruption becomes problematic. How can care workers, for example, go on strike without causing suffering to those they care for and about?

To address these problems we need to develop the third character of the social strike, which sees it try and directly socialize (or communize) relations. Most obviously this involves striking (or otherwise acting) in ways that maximise feelings of collectivity and enhance general levels of sociability.

To understand this we can go back to the very birth of the social strike idea. In 1995 there was a transport strike in Paris. Toni Negri and the other Italian Autonomists who were living there in exile at the time got very excited about it. This was in part because the disruption of transport revealed a key point of leverage but also because the strike seemed to have made Paris more sociable in some ways. In order to deal with the strike people had to cooperate more, perhaps by car pooling or walking together and therefore getting a different perspective on the city. It was this increased sociability that provoked the title ‘social’ strike but this dimension seems to have been lost a bit in recent discussions.

For a more recent example of a tactic that tried to socialise a strike we could look at Bradford IWW’s organisation of a collective crèche during the recent teachers strikes (perhaps the crèche Plan C organised during the TUC march is another example). More generally though this approach to the social strike might provide a way to link up the two extra-parliamentary forms of exercising power: the power of disruption (strikes, blockades, occupations, etc.) and the power of self-reproduction (solidarity networks, socialist clothing banks, Pay as You Feel cafes, etc).

Perhaps we can see the latter, projects and campaigns to directly address the crisis of social reproduction, as a means of socialising society and therefore moving things in the direction we want it to go. But we can also see them as reclaiming some of the resources needed to make more directly antagonistic tactics, tactics of disruption, more winnable. After all, the response to any unlimited strike is to starve out the strikers and their families. When we go on all out strike we are trying to cause a crisis in the reproduction of capital while the bosses try to provoked a crisis of social reproduction amongst the workers. The winner is the side that holds out longest. The reason the UK Miners could strike for so long in 1984-5 was because they had strong communities (as well as networks of political support) that could help them address the problem of social reproduction. It was the communities that organised the collective kitchens, and the political supporters who organised collections. These sorts of homogenous communities with a strong history of struggle have largely been destroyed but perhaps projects of self-reproduction can establish new networks of support. We might call this either building counter-power or seizing the means of social reproduction.

These ongoing projects also help to establish legitimacy for more disruptive tactics, especially when they are tied to politicising a specific problem and exposing the inability of ‘established channels’ to address them. Perhaps the natural accompaniment to this tactic is a reinvention of the ‘good work strike’. Traditionally this targets the needs of bosses in the work process rather than the needs of other workers. The classic example is the refusal of transport workers to stamp tickets. But a side effect of this tactic is to reveal how the demands of capital and management gets in the way of actually addressing people’s needs. The modern version might well take aim at the bureaucracy of neoliberal managerialism, refusing to participate in, or acting to otherwise reveal, the endless audits and performance management that does so much to prevent people doing the actually useful part of their jobs.

More at: http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/on-socia ... l-demands/

[Freitag]

Damn straight I'm mad, mostly at your condescending suggestion that people go to university as some sort of safe space from the "real" world.

Not all, but some. And especially during the recession.

God forbid they should get an education, no one would vote for Trump anymore.

I know lots of educated people who voted for Trump, myself included. (To be fair I know what you meant, you meant indoctrinated.)

That said, I apologize for the insult. Any chance you could respond to the rest of my previous post now? I'm genuinely curious what you think of Trump's track record so far.

I'm extremely happy with Trump so far. I don't think I've ever seen a politician so committed to doing what they said they would do. And so quickly! He's already killed the TPP. We know he's going to protect American workers from the shameful H1b visa scam where Americans have to train their foreign replacements before they're fired (these are white-collar jobs, by the way, American STEM students should be ecstatic). Many companies have already committed to bringing manufacturing/jobs back to America since he took office. He has a plan to repatriate their foreign cash holdings and close the corporate tax loopholes. I'm greatly anticipating his simplification of the tax code. As I've said before, I disagree with some things he proposes, such as bringing large-scale private investment into our national infrastructure. But by and large I couldn't be happier.

[American Dream]

I'm extremely happy with Trump so far.

I'm guessing you're straight, white, male, native born, etc.? And that you had sympathies for the Right long before Trump really got started?

[Blue]

the Fiends! forcing people into getting education merely to improve their job prospects! It's like some kinda god damn nightmare. Now evrybudiel ave a good jawd buidin trumps perimid. with out takin owt lowns, just than maxing they credit cawrds for per scipshun paintkillerz.

Good one, Drew!

[American Dream]

“Eros and Revolution”

Paper Prepared for the Critical Refusals Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society

Philadelphia, October 28, 2011

by George Katsiaficas, Wentworth Institute of Technology


In his last three books, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Essay on Liberation, and The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse concerned himself as never before with questions raised by contemporaneous social movements. His work on Nature in these three books was central to his notion that there may be a “biological foundation for socialism,” that Nature—not only external Nature but our own inner human nature—is an “ally” in the revolutionary process. As Marcuse so clearly formulated it, humans have an instinctual need for freedom—something that we grasp intuitively.[1] Unlike Habermas, who considered the unconscious “inner foreign territory” as part of his overly rationalistic model of humans, Marcuse’s understanding embraced the erotic and unconscious dimensions of human nature as central to the project of liberation.

Following Marcuse’s formulation of political eros, I developed the concept of the eros effect in my book on the global imagination of 1968 to explain the rapid spread of revolutionary aspirations and actions. [2] The eros effect is crystalized in the sudden and synchronous international emergence of hundreds of thousands of people who occupy public space and call for a completely different political reality. Other dimensions of this phenomenon include: the simultaneous appearance of revolts in many places, the intuitive identification of hundreds of thousands of people with each other across national and ethnic dividing lines, their common belief in new values, and suspension of normal daily routines like competitive business practices, criminal behavior, and acquisitiveness. In my view, it is the instinctual need for freedom that is sublimated into a collective phenomenon during moments of the eros effect.[3]After 1968, other such moments are evident in the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests that spread to more than 1,000 cities globally as well as in the less well-known wave of Asian uprisings in the 1980s and 1990s.

The eros effect first appeared to me as I completed a decade of research on social movements in 1968. As I sat over looking the Pacific in Ocean Beach, California, I had a Eureka moment as I uncovered the specific synchronic relations to each other of spontaneous uprisings, strikes, and massive occupations of public space. During this world-historical period, millions of ordinary people suddenly entered into history in solidarity with each other. Their activation was based more upon feeling connected with others and love for freedom than with specific national economic or political conditions. No central organization called for these actions. People intuitively believed that they could change the direction of the world from war to peace, from racism to solidarity, from external domination to self-determination, and from patriotism to humanism. Universal interests became generalized at the same time as dominant values of society (national chauvinism, hierarchy, and domination) were negated.

When the eros effect is activated, humans’ love for and solidarity with each other suddenly replace previously dominant values and norms. Competition gives way to cooperation, hierarchy to equality, power to truth. During the Vietnam War, for example, many Americans’ patriotism was superseded by solidarity with the people of Vietnam, and in place of racism, many white Americans insisted a Vietnamese life was worth the same as an American life (defying the continual media barrage to the contrary). According to many opinion polls at that time, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was more popular on American college campuses than US President Nixon. Moments of the eros effect reveal movements’ aspirations and visions as embodied in actions of millions of people, a far more significant dimension than statements of leaders, organizations, or parties.

European philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries sought to understand the structure of individual thought and to classify it according to its various dimensions and historical unfolding. Using a similar analytical method, we can today comprehend social movements as the logical progress in history which unfolds within the praxis of thousands—and sometimes millions—of people as they rise up to change their lives. The inner logic in seemingly spontaneous actions during moments of crisis—particularly in events like general strikes, uprisings, insurrections, and revolutions—constitutes the concrete realization of liberty in history. People’s collective actions define the specific character of freedom at any given moment. By reconstructing the actions of hundreds of thousands of people in insurgencies and uncovering concrete dynamics of the unconscious, we can contribute to a philosophical history not simply from my own mind but from the actions of thousands of people. As Susan Buck-Morss put it, what is needed is to “construct not a philosophy of history, but a philosophy out of history, or (this amounts to the same thing) to reconstruct historical material as philosophy.”[4]

One after another, insurgencies at the end of the 20th century illustrate that ordinary people’s collective wisdom is far greater than that of entrenched elites, whether democratically elected or self-appointed. Whether we look at France in May 1968, the Prague Spring, or Occupy Wall Street, people’s common sense is greater than the “rational” knowledge of elites. Throughout the world, throngs of ordinary citizens who go into the streets and face violence and arrest, endangering their own lives and their families’ futures, have visions of freedom writ large. Empirical analysis of the actions of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people—millions if we sum the total number of participants—reveals that ordinary people want peace, greater democratic rights, equality and simple forms of progress, while elites are more concerned with cutting taxes on the rich, extending national sovereignty, and protecting corporate profits. In the transformed reality constructed by people power, mobilized throngs have newfound capacities to enact change. Inspired by previous movements of common people to overturn elites at the apex of power, popular movements continue to enlarge the scope of human liberty. Without highly paid trainers, insurgent activists adapt new technologies (such as the fax machine in China in 1989, the cell phone video in Burma, and social media in Egypt) and bring them into use far faster than the corporate or political elite.

Forms of direct democracy and collective action developed by the New Left continue to define movement aspirations and structures. This is precisely why the New Left was a world-historical movement. In Gwangju, South Korea in 1980, people refused to accept a new military dictator and stayed in the streets for democracy. When the army brutally attacked the city, outraged citizens beat back a vicious military assault and held their liberated city for a week, using general assemblies and direct democracy to run their commune. Abetted by the US, the South Korean military crushed the commune with tanks and helicopters, killing hundreds of people (at the time, Human Rights Watch estimated the carnage in the thousands). Within the Zapatistas, in the protests in Seattle in 1999, and in the more recent wave from Tahrir Square to Wall Street, general assemblies and direct democracy remain movements’ modus operandi.

Alongside participatory currents, the history of social movements is also the history of popular insurgencies being placated, accommodated and sold out by reform-minded parties and organizations of all kinds—whether French and Italian Communists, Czech or Bangladeshi democrats, and Korean or U.S. trade unions. Ritualized protests organized by top-down groups with “progressive” leaders no longer suffice to bring the “masses” into the streets. Apparently, after 1968, centrally controlled elites, like Leninist-style parties, are no longer needed to transcend the reformism of spontaneously formed movements since these movements are themselves capable of developing a universal critique and autonomous capacities for self-government. Since World War 2, humanity’s increasingly awareness of our own power and strategic capacities has continually manifested itself in sudden and simultaneous contestation of power by hundreds of thousands of people.

A significant new tactic in the arsenal of popular movements, the eros effect is not simply an act of mind, nor can it simply be willed by a “conscious element” (or revolutionary party). Rather it involves popular movements emerging as forces on their own as ordinary people take history into their own hands. The concept of the eros effect is a means of rescuing the revolutionary value of spontaneity, a way to stimulate a reevaluation of the unconscious and strengthen the will of popular movements to remain steadfast in their revulsion with war, inequality, and domination. Rather than portraying emotions as linked to reaction, the notion of the eros effect seeks to bring them into the realm of positive revolutionary resources whose mobilization can result in significant social transformation.

Limits of the Eros Effect

Uprisings may be powerful vehicles for overthrowing entrenched dictatorships, but they are also useful to global elites whose interests transcend nations. Massive occupation of public space was clearly effective in overthrowing existing regimes (such as Marcos in 1986, Korea’s military dictatorship in 1987, and Mubarak in 2011), but the system has become adept at riding the wave of uprisings to stabilize its operations. The wave of Asian people power uprisings from 1980 to 1992 helped to incorporate more of the world into the orbit of Japanese and US banks.[5] The South Korean working class’s heroic struggles for union rights became useful to neoliberal economic penetration of the country.[6] In democratic South Korea and Taiwan, as in the Philippines after Marcos (and elsewhere), newly-elected administrations accelerated neoliberal programs that permitted foreign investors to penetrate previously closed markets and to discipline workforces of millions of people in order to extract greater profits.

Although Egypt’s future has yet to be written, the military’s control after Mubarak’s imprisonment is another example of how dictatorships in danger of being toppled—and possibly taken out of the orbit of the US—can be salvaged by deposing a few men at the top while retaining the core of the system. Egypt’s military leaders enforce Mubarakism without Mubarak, a more stable system ruled by an elite friendly to the US. As we saw in the Philippines without Marcos, Korea without the military dictatorship, and Taiwan without the White Terror, unstable countries were turned into fertile grounds for US and Japanese banks and corporations. An end to “crony” capitalism meant the expansion of transnational corporate markets and profits.

Humanity’s unending need for freedom constitutes the planet’s most powerful natural resource. In the struggle to create free human beings, political movements play paramount roles. Uprisings accelerate social transformation, change governments, and revolutionize individual consciousness and social relationships. Most popular insurgencies result in expanded liberties for millions of people; when they are brutally repressed, the regime’s days are numbered. Uprisings’ enormous energies transform people’s everyday existence and continue to energize long past their decline. Uprisings activate civil society and mobilize subaltern groups, such as the working class, students, minorities, and women. After uprisings, autonomous media and grassroots organizations mushroom, feminism strengthens, and workers strike. Even among non-participants, bonds are created through powerful erotic energies unleashed in these exhilarating moments. These instances of what Marcuse called “political eros” are profoundly important in rekindling imaginations and nurturing hope.

Revisiting the Eros Effect

Although contemporary rational choice theorists (who emphasize individual gain as the key motivation for people’s actions) cannot comprehend instinctual motivations, even George Kennan, who famously started the Cold War with an essay written under the pseudonym Mr. X, found the anti-nuclear wave of protests in the early 1980s to be “expression of a deep instinctual insistence, if you don’t mind, on sheer survival…This movement is too powerful, too elementary, too deeply embedded in the natural human instinct for self-preservation to be brushed aside.”[7]

A similar basis for action was also gleaned by social scientist Choi Jungwoon in reference to the Gwangju Uprising. As an established scholar unfamiliar with what had transpired in 1980, Choi was subsequently approached by his professional academic association to investigate the uprising. After extensive research, he concluded that Gwangju citizens had crystallized an “absolute community” in which all were equal and united by love.[8]

So impressed was Choi with the solidarity he uncovered in Gwangju, he believed, “The most basic human values travel beyond history and culture; they began with the birth of humankind and will continue into the unknown future…The term to refer to this primeval instinct has not been found in South Korea’s narrow arena for political discourse and ideology.” The empirical history of crowd behavior in the late 20th century—most clearly in Gwangju—demands a reevaluation of the frozen categories of crowds, through which they are viewed as emotionally degraded, when Gwangju’s people were passionately intelligent and loving.[9]

For Choi,

“…it was not ‘mobs’ of cowardly people hoping to rely on the power of numbers. The absolute community provided encounters among dignified warriors. The absolute community was formed only from love…In Western Philosophy, reason is derived from solitary individuals. However the Gwangju uprising demonstrates that human beings who were conscious of being members of a community achieved reason. Reason was the capability of the community, not that of individuals….”[10]

The connective threads running through grassroots movements around the world are often intuitively woven together in innumerable strands of what might seem like very different struggles. In the 1970s, Italy’s Metropolitan Indians, the most spectacular of dozens of autonomous groups that constituted Italian Autonomia, adopted very similar notions to the US Yippies and Black Panthers, Dutch Provos, and Christiania’s communards.[11] No organizational means of communication tied together these communities of struggle; rather, intuition and common sense made the same conclusions flow naturally from people’s hearts.[12]

Diffusion­—what Samuel Huntington called “snowballing”—can help us to trace how one movement causes another.[13] Snowballing is a postmodern version of “Domino Theory” that guided American anti-communism in the 1950s. Based upon the assumption that there is a single point of origin for insurgencies, this concept expresses the paranoid fears of a center for social control that perceives itself to be surrounded by enemies, not the wondrous joy at the simultaneous emergence of freedom struggles. Tied as Huntington was to Washington policymakers, his ideological presuppositions blinded him to the emergence of polycentric grassroots movements. The distance between his theory and law enforcement officials is not great. As the US civil rights movement accelerated in the 1960s, sheriffs and police continually blamed Martin Luther King or Malcolm X for their own city’s problems, and campus administrators often insisted that “outside agitators” caused university protests.

What Huntington called snowballing has been described by others—even by progressive academics in what Barbara Epstein dubbed the “social movement industry”—through terms like demonstration effect, diffusion, emulation, domino effect, and contagion. The sheer number of labels is one indication of this phenomenon’s recent emergence as a significant variable. The concept of diffusion and Marxist notion of the circulation of struggle are valuable because they show that struggles impact each other. Leaving aside the difference in values embedded in disease-laden labels like “contagion” and less pejorative terms like “diffusion” and “demonstration effect,” they all assume a single, external point of origin. None of these concepts comprehends the simultaneous appearance of insurgencies among different peoples, even across cultures. It’s not simply a chain reaction, not just that A causes B which causes C. Events erupt simultaneously at multiple points and mutually amplify each other. They produce feedback loops with multiple iterations. To put it in terms of a mathematical analysis, we could say that diffusion and the circulation of struggles describe the process of movement development geometrically, while the eros effect describes these same developments in terms of calculus.

While the influence of one event upon another is no doubt substantial, to comprehend movements as externally induced—much as a collision of bowling balls—is to miss something essential about their inner logic and meaning. Simultaneous emergence and mutual amplification of insurgencies are alternative understandings, ones embedded in the notion of the “eros effect.” Rather than a simple monocausal process of protest, the eros effect provides a way to comprehend the polycentric—indeed decentered—source of movements’ energies. For Huntington, simultaneity was “impossible,” and he excluded it in advance.[14]

Out of a series of struggles in France, activists developed a very similar notion to the eros effect: “Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance…An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire—a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.”[15] In many places, grassroots activism made possible “discoveries” of this same phenomenon with a simultaneity and autonomy that defied “scientific” understanding.

Long before the social media, simultaneous tactical innovations occurred in different places. To name just one example, in May of 1970, after the US invaded Cambodia and killed college students on its own campuses, activists from all across the country simultaneously blocked highways. There was no central organization directing people to do so. People didn’t obstruct highways simply because they heard that people elsewhere in the country were doing it but because people thought they should do something effective to stop a society destroying hundreds of lives every day in Vietnam. Without direct lines of communication, activists on the West Coast clogged Route 5 while, at the same time, activists in other parts of the country stopped traffic on nearby roads. Tactics may move in a line from point A to point B through a process of diffusion, but we can’t ignore how tactical innovations can also happen simultaneously.

Continues at: http://www.eroseffect.com/articles/Eros ... lution.htm

[stefano]

Strikers make demands. What would this strike be demanding, exactly?

Steve Bannon's removal from the National Security Council is a good one, think it's got legs.