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Notes From
the Editors
New Crusade: The
U.S. War on Terrorism
by Rahul Mahajan
Japan’s
Stagnationist Crises
by Joseph Halevi and Bill
Lucarelli
Antiwar
Movements, Then and Now
by Benjamin
Shepard
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From Resistance to Alternative Policies/Structures to Alternative
Politics
Naomi Klein, reporting on the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, wrote that
“If Seattle was…the coming-out party of a resistance movement, then
[according to Soren Ambrose] ‘Porto Alegre is the coming-out party for the
existence of serious thinking about alternatives.’”6 If, however, that movement
is to move on, that “serious thinking about alternatives” cannot be
limited to what an alternative world would look like; it must also address
getting there. What remains conspicuously absent from the remarkable
movements that have emerged is an alternative politics. This is, above
all, a matter of the movements taking seriously their own descriptions of the
scale of what we are up against and discovering—or at least entering into
a process to discover—what developing a capacity to match that power might
mean.
This requires greater attention to national politics. The movement has thus
far been internationally oriented and while this has been a strength, no
internationally-focused movement can sustain itself—let alone
fundamentally challenge capitalism—without also sinking the deepest
domestic roots. Any politics that is anti-capitalist must carry the
fight into the national states which remain the ultimate bases of
capitalism’s power, and any anti-capitalist politics with staying power
can only evolve out of the collective experiences and struggles in workplaces,
neighborhoods, universities, and within historic communities such as nations.
This emphasis on the domestic base of an anti-capitalist movement
reorients debates around strategy and tactics, the demands to be highlighted,
the language used and arguments articulated, the links between particular
interests and broader concerns, the nature of the alliances to be developed,
and how to wed the international and the domestic.
So, for example, in discussing tactics around the WTO, calling for its
abolition is clearly to be supported, but, even if accomplished, this would
only get us back to the hardly inspiring world of the mid-nineties. Trying to
include progressive side-agreements, on the other hand, is naive and
dangerously co-optive. Gerard Greenfield has consequently argued that we should
generalize the debate to demand the exclusion of certain social needs
from commercialization, whether this be inside or outside the WTO.7 This simple but powerful
proposal links immediate concerns to a critique of capitalism’s drive to
commodification and reminds us that privatization and deregulation have local
bases of class support and are not just external impositions. It thereby also
establishes the ideological groundwork and precedents for later expanding the
range of what might be excluded from private control.
Similarly, in debating IMF structural adjustment programs, the
unconditional cancellation of third world debt should, as others have
argued, be at the top of the agenda. This does not deny the likelihood of
corrupt regimes pocketing the savings for themselves, and it certainly
won’t in itself solve third world poverty. But modestly curbing our
complicity in their poverty represents a gesture of human solidarity and
does remove an oppressive constraint on third world development, posing
the more fundamental economic/political changes they must address and what kind
of world order might support their development.
As for the free trade debate, we must go beyond blocking changes which,
again, only get us back to a discredited recent past. It is crucial
aggressively to place capital controls on the agenda, and any such restrictions
on the flow of capital across borders must also address democratic control over
what is done with that capital inside our borders. As long as capital retains
the threat of disciplining us with the capital collectively produced but
privately appropriated, our ability to sustain any gains and therefore expand
confidence in future change is frustratingly limited. Such controls, and all
the questions they raise, are absolutely fundamental to any serious project of
social justice and social change.
Through all of this, the labor movement, with all its flaws and complex
diversity, remains absolutely fundamental because of its central location
within capitalism. Without labor’s material resources (which Andre Gorz
has described as a “safety net” for other social movements that have
not developed their own independent funding8), without labor’s organizational capacity and
unique ability to affect the economy (while others protest, labor can shut down
capital’s lifelines in production and services), without the
radicalization of working people and without a working class with a universal
sense of social justice—without all of this no movement can sustain hopes
of transforming the world.
All of the above—the challenges to commodification, to capitalist
priorities and discipline, to contrasting notions of freedom and
security—is “anti-capitalist” in that it involves a direct
challenge to capitalist property rights. Thomas More, in his literary Utopia
of some five hundred years ago, noted that reforms that redressed the worst
implications of private property, “…would certainly relieve the
symptoms, just as a chronic invalid gets some benefit from constant medical
attention.” But More, unlike our latter-day social democrats, quickly
reminded the reader that “...there’s no hope for a cure as long as
private property continues.” That view became a fundamental principle of
much utopian thought over the ensuing centuries. Long before a full capitalist
economy was ever conceived, the contradiction between a just society and the
exclusivity of private property was presciently understood by More. His
protagonist declares: “I’m quite convinced that you’ll never get
a fair distribution of goods or a satisfactory organizing of human life, until
you abolish private property altogether.”9
The Full and Mutual Development of Capacities
Behind this political project lies a particular vision of humanity, a
conception of our potential that motivates and guides, a terrain that links
means and ends. What makes the human species special, what gives each
individual worth and dignity, is not that we are maximizers of easy
satisfactions, but that we are all potential doers, creators of our social
life. We have the ability to imagine what does not exist, and set in motion
the energies and capacities to manifest those imaginings. Through that process
of affecting the natural and social environment around us, our capacities are
further developed and possibilities expanded; we thereby express the dynamic
capacity to change ourselves. Antonio Gramsci, put it most succinctly:
“The question ‘What is man?’ is really ‘What can man
become?’”10
This inspires a definition of a socially-just society as one that
fosters and encourages the full and mutual development of all the
capacities of all members of society. The terrain of social justice is
consequently shifted to that of capacities, development, and potentials. It is
not that the equality of distribution, opportunity, or freedom emphasized by
social democrats or liberal reformers are irrelevant, but that their relevance
is to be judged by their contribution to developing “what we can
become,” rather than to any fairer access to what we can have to
compensate us for what we are not.
That “becoming” cannot be separated from the evolution of society
itself. The above definition speaks of “mutual development” because
individual worth is necessarily expressed and realized through society. Our
capacities are given life, developed, and magnified through our participation
in a collectivity that extends across generations, and involves cooperation and
material links with people we have never met or heard of. As Richard Lewontin
explains:
No individual human being can fly by flapping his or her arms and
legs.…Nor could humans fly if a very large number of them assembled in one
place and all flapped their arms and legs simultaneously. Yet I did fly to
Toronto last year, and the ability to fly was a consequence of social action.
Airplanes and airports are products of educational institutions, scientific
discoveries, the organization of money, the production of petroleum and its
refining metallurgy, the training of pilots, the actions of governments in
creating traffic control systems, all of which are social products…note
that although flight is a social product, it is not society that
flies.…Individuals fly. But they fly as a consequence of social
organization.11
Early liberalism did of course address capacities. The uniqueness of
capitalism as a social system lay, as Karl Marx was himself so ready to
concede, in its dazzling development of productive capacities. Liberalism also
recognized that such productive forces were a social capacity—Adam
Smith’s early example of pin making was, after all, meant to show the
remarkable benefits of the social division of labor. But those original
insights and directions were predictably narrowed and corrupted by their
context. Where the social is rooted in class inequality, private appropriation,
individual incentives and pay, impersonal market relations, and divisive
competition, why would we be surprised at the cultural outcome? The social
retreats into the private and personal; those around us are not recognized as
an organic and necessary part of our own success and development, but instead
identified as, at best, tolerable others and at worst, as barriers and even
threats to our ambitions.
All of this also affects our perspective on democracy. As David Harvey
insists, social justice must also be “justly arrived at.”12 This is more than a
matter of being consistent. The capacity of collectives to work and act
democratically is fundamental to both imagining an alternative society and to
developing the movements capable of getting us there. Democracy as
“people’s power” must be rooted in a sense of people’s
contribution to the social exercise of their own powers and the need to develop
their potentials so they can fully participate in, contribute to, and learn
from society. A “democratic practice” must literally involve
“practicing democracy” so we can learn to maximize our capicities for
effective participation.
One dimension of this is our approach to knowledge. Effecting change—as
both a goal in itself and an essential tool—demands a generalized capacity
to understand the world, why it works the way it does, the openings for
responding, and the likely consequences of any serious challenge to the status
quo. Knowledge is an inherently social undertaking since it necessarily extends
beyond any individual. But even so its pursuit is confined to a relative few. A
few—partly because of the uneven distribution of skills and time under
capitalism, and partly because of different interests—have come to
specialize in the theoretical and intellectual. But if the point is to use
knowledge to change the world, then knowledge and the social capacity to
understand must go beyond the majority of people only receiving
knowledge. It must reach for a universal participation in the development of
understanding—a radical democtratization of knowledge.
This is of course a two-way street. It requires building an interest and
confidence among ordinary people in their potential to grasp the world
intellectually, an appreciation of the point of conceptual abstraction and
complexity, a readiness to overcome, in Gramsci’s words, “the
tendency to render easy that which cannot become easy without
distortion.”13
And it requires that the specialists are integrated into popular struggles in a
way that informs and shapes the content and style of their theory. What
specialists must learn, for example, is how to communicate technical
information for popular use—what de Sousa Santos, commenting on the
alternative budget exercise in Porto Alegre, characterized as the need to move
“from technobureaucracy to technodemocracy.”14 He might have added
the importance of academics developing into “academocrats.” More of
us should, as Galileo suggests in Brecht’s play, “…write for
many in the language of the people, instead of in Latin for the few.”15
…It Depends
There is, though, an uncomfortable contradiction in the link between
capacities and a just society, and it is based in the very critique of
capitalism we have been putting forth. Social justice involves the historically
unique project of a subordinate class moving beyond protests to create a new
world. The crime of capitalism is that it is based on a systematic frustration
and underdevelopment of those same popular capacities needed to transform
society. Where then will the necessary capacities come from? If suddenly handed
the world, would we know what to do with it? Could we avoid chaos, never mind
the more ambitious goal of inventing the capacities to do what has never been
done before: collectively and democratically administering a complex society?
Could we expect workers tied to concentrating on the minutest details of work
and limited by their localism to even imagine that they might replace
corporate owners and institutions that have been coordinating the overall
productive system, mobilizing finance, analyzing the penetration of global
markets, organizing global sources of supply, and investigating how to apply
the latest technology or breakthrough in science?
Such questions can’t be avoided. Without some concrete signal in the
here and now that such capacities are possible, the movement to build a society
supportive of developing capacities will never emerge; the confidence in, and
commitment to, creating a new society will simply not manifest itself. The
point is that to articulate a faith in capacities is not to assert that their
realization is guaranteed; only that because of such potentials, the
future is not closed—it “depends.”
The future is open because for all its coherence, capitalism is itself not a
closed system. It allows for private and public spaces that can nurture
resistance (and are the results of prior resistance). It includes its own
ideological and material contradictions that can be, and have been, used to
create further openings. Struggles, as heightened moments with openings to new
experiences and awareness, are themselves ways of standing outside of the
system, even if only partially and temporarily, to create a measure of
liberated space. And political organization, more or less conscious of the
ultimate goal, can serve to shape resistance so that in the course of struggle,
people learn, change, develop a culture of solidarity and mutual empathy, and
institutionalize the cumulative building of capacities.
Neoliberalism’s greatest victory has been the lowering of expectations
and the belittling of what we are capable of. But neoliberalism is also proving
vulnerable to the flowering of a new sense of entitlements, solidarities, and
possibilities. The old is morally exhausted, though it would be foolish to
underestimate its continuing power and economic dynamism. The new is fragmented
and sporadic, but as Daniel Singer always reminded us, it would be a betrayal
to underestimate its potential.16 In this contest between the power of the old and
the potential of the new, we have a chance to be not just witnesses, but
participants.
Notes
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. 1
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 222.
- John Stuart Mill, quoted in Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to
Political Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University Press), 196.
- Friedrich Hayek, Economic Freedom and Representative Government
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
- Quoted in G. C. Morris, “Montesquieu and the Varieties of Political
Experience” in David Thompson (ed.), Political Ideas (London:
Penguin, 1990), 91.
- President Nixon captured a particular dimension of the period’s
limits. At that very moment in 1971 when the U.S. ended the dollar’s
convertability and signalled the end of the alleged golden age, Nixon began his
address by noting that “in the past forty years we have only had two years
of prosperity without war and without inflation.” (Transcript, Address to
Congress, in New York Times, September 10, 1971.)
- Naomi Klein, The Nation, March 19, 2001.
- Gerard Greenfield, “The Success of Being
Dangerous,” Studies in Political Economy, Spring 2001 (See also
“A Different Kind of Devastating: From Anti-corporate Populism to
Anti-capitalist Alternatives,” unpublished, available from author at
gerardg@caw.ca).
- Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason
(London: Verso, 1989), 232-3
- Thomas More, Utopia (London: Penguin, 1965),
66-7.
- Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other
Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1970),76.
- Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology
(Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1995), 95.
- David Harvey, Justice and the City (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1977),97.
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York:
International Publishers, 1997), 43.
- Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Participatory
Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Towards a Redistributive Democracy,”
Politics and Society, Dec. 1998, 461-510.
- Bertholt Brecht, Life of Galileo (New York:
Arcade, 1994),79.
- Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours?
(New York :Monthly Review, 1999).
w
If we want to recover the dialectical link between the movement and its
objective, we must draw clear distinctions between actuality, necessity, and
inevitability. Socialism may be a historical possibility, or even necessary to
eliminate the evils of capitalism, but this does not mean that it will
inevitably take its place. The departure from the fatalistic conception is, in
a sense, a return to the distant past, when socialism was not considered as
bound to happen, since there was always the possibility, to quote the terms of
Rosa Luxemburg, that barbarism would win out. Above all, uncertainty as to the
ultimate result should not imply passivity, obedience, or resignation. On the
contrary, it dictates greater participation, more activity, and more militancy
since, within the limits of objective conditions, the future will be what we
make it.
—Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (Monthly
Review Press, 1999), 272-73.
RAHUL MAHAJAN is a graduate
student in physics at the University of Texas at Austin and an antiwar
activist, serving on the national boards of Peace Action and the Education for
Peace in Iraq Center. His writings on foreign policy and globalization have
been published in newspapers like the Baltimore Sun and Houston
Chronicle, and alternative publications like Extra! and the Texas
Observer. He is a member of the Nowar Collective
www.nowarcollective.com.
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