Category: Protest tactics

Utopian Passion

The heartfelt disgust at neoliberalism’s cruelty that animates Hardt and Negri’s work is, quite simply, admirable. And the equally passionate desire for the “commons” and for “cooperation”—along with the desire to imagine a politics, along with forms of political action, that body forth such cooperation in a shared space—is also praiseworthy. Just because their sharp analysis of neoliberalism is not matched with a correspondingly acute description of what to do next is no reason to disparage the work.

Here’s the fullest statement of the longed-for utopia in the book.

“The history of general strikes is animated by an insurrectional and constituent passion: not passion in the sense of a charismatic or thaumaturgic event, but passion that lives in the highest moments of political ethics, in the intersection of resistance and solidarity, when spontaneity and organization, insurrection and constituent power are most closely tied together. It is an act, to use the language of ethical philosophy, when rationality and love triumph together. In the ‘strike’ passion, reason creates a dynamic of common freedom and love generates an expansive action of equality. Calls for coalition, tous ensemble, speak the language of reason and freedom; expressions of camaraderie, companer@s, sisters and brothers, are the language of love and equality. The general strike thus gives flesh to the bare bones of the language of human rights” (Assembly, 241).

“O, then was it bliss to be alive. The resemblance to Arendt’s celebration of “the lost treasure of revolution” impresses me. The importance of ends, of purposes, of outcomes shrinks; it is the political action itself that looms large, the ecstatic moment of union with others in the fierce present of “resistance,” of love. Success is almost beside the point. The strike is not a moment of building or of becoming. It is a moment of pure being, of being-with, of the ecstatic loss of self in something larger than the self.

(To be fair, Hardt and Negri’s term “constituent power” is meant to signal that the power immanent to the general strike is constructive, it constitutes things. They certainly don’t want to say that the strike, like Auden’s poetry, “makes nothing happen.” But “constituent power” is another instance of their sloganeering. How this power constitutes anything and what it constitutes are never addressed.)

The longing for a worthy collective, a larger cause to which I can willingly, happily, in a full unshadowed endorsement, immerse myself must beckon to us all at some point or another. Even the staunchest individual imagines a soul mate, an absorbing and fulfilling love. A perfect union.

Love, admittedly, is difficult. I am often astonished at both how mundane love is—and how improbable at exactly the same time. We are all such prickly beasts, full of selfish desires and self-regarding hurts and shames and needs. The slightest things rub us the wrong way, make us wrinkle our noses in disgust. “I don’t want to be associated with that.” Such sensitivities afflict our personal loves and consistently poison less personal associations. So when it actually works, when our incorporation (a potent word when its bodily root is taken seriously) is complete—and satisfying–it seems nothing short of a miracle.

And here’s the rub. Few experiences appear to scratch the itch for belonging so intensely as war. Nostalgia for war is rampant among those who have participated in one. And Hardt and Negri’s romance of the general strike sounds remarkably similar to soldier’s memories of being in the army. The logic of William James’s famous essay, “A Moral Equivalent of War,” weighs upon me. James was eloquent, in Varieties of Religious Experience, about the desire to merge the self into some cause, some entity, larger than self. In many respects, that longing is religion for James. War can look like religion’s equivalent—the stakes are appropriately high, the denial of the self’s petty needs fully imperative.

“War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne. Presumably, war thus should be the exact opposite of everything that Hardt and Negri desire from politics. They want ecstasy without destruction, with everything on the line even though violence is absent. I sympathize. I, too, want that. At least some of the time. I am, I suspect, more attached to individuality than they are. I want to reserve my right to have reservations, to maintain an ironic distance from collective enterprises, to be allowed to judge them as well as participate in them. No unreflective belonging.

One final thought. Bourne’s famous statement can be taken in another way. Reading the book about the American war in the Pacific, it is impossible not to be impressed by the feats of organization and coordination the state managed during World War II. The moving parts were almost infinite; the details that needed to be anticipated and then taken care of simply mind-boggling. As an intellectual challenge, a challenge then joined to the material and psychological challenges, the war—and how America responded to it—is awe-inspiring. If anything ever proved that communism could work, it was what America did in the five years from 1940 to 1945, when a centrally planned economy that appropriated every single member of society and assigned them their place in the war-making machine performed its task extremely well.

Hornfischer (the author of the book on the Pacific War) is a fairly typical right-leaning military historian. He is fully taken with the romance of American power and deeply proud of American know-how and courage. He never cottons on the extent that the America of the war years was a communist society if ever there was one. But he also pays just about no attention to the sand in the machine. For him, the war operations were just about frictionless, with only a few minor, if unfortunate, mishaps (he really can’t even bring himself to call them screw-ups). Most telling, perhaps, is the fact that he deems artillery and air bombardment (long-distance killing) as almost always effective, whereas most analysts have concluded that the military has always over-estimated their efficacy.

It wasn’t just for humor’s sake, with no connection to reality, that the common sailor resorted to the ever-present euphemism, SNAFU. Situation Normal All Fucked Up. The best laid plans and all that. The romance of war, like all romances, tends to eliminate the warts. Many a soldier was not a happy camper, and even the happy ones usually had scant respect for the abilities of the higher-ups, with their fancy uniforms and even fancier plans.

Assembly is driven by a desire for a moment (at least a moment, even though it seems to suggest we could have an era) when all are in lockstep. Be careful what you wish for. War, based on nationalist solidarity, is the closest we’ve come to such ecstatic unity. Maybe the revolutionary moment, the longed for assembly of the multitude out in the public square protesting the evils of neoliberalism, compares. But I’ll put in my two cheers for liberal pluralism all the same. Lockstep just doesn’t appeal to me all that much.

Combating the Ills of Neoliberalism

I finished, over the holiday break, four rather different books: Hardt and Negri’s Assembly (Oxford UP, 2017); Donatella deela Porta’s Social Movements in Times of Austerity (Polity, 2015); Mark Kurlansky’s history, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (Random House, 2005); and a book by a military historian about the war in Pacific in 1944-45, with primary emphasis on the battles in the Marianas, the taking of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. [James Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-45 (Bantam, 2017).] My father was part of the Marine contingent on both Saipan and Tinian, which was part of my reason for reading the book.

It would be east enough to make fun of the Hardt and Negri. They keep insisting that a successful social movement must have “lasting institutions” and a strategy that will enable it to survive over the long haul. But everything they value is evanescent, a fact mostly attributable to their anarchistic horror of leaders, intellectuals, bureaucracy, organization, hierarchy, representation (as opposed to direct democracy), etc. etc. The della Porta book only confirms that the most recent anti-neoliberalism protestors share all of Hardt and Negri’s suspicions of hierarchy and organization. In fact, Kurlansky’s makes it clear that SDS, especially in its Columbia moment in 1968, shared the same antipathy to leadership.

I can’t help but believe that the hyper organized world of the right, with its top-down command structure and its deployment of money to hire the cadres required to lobby the state, and find the loopholes in existing regulations/tax laws, and fight its battles in courts, will continue to eat the left’s lunch so long as the left insists on fighting shy of organization and an articulated strategy complete with plans for its being carried out.

At one level it is just a boring question of scale. Boring because this issue has troubled theorists of democracy since before the flood. Direct democracy in any populace larger than two or three thousand just seems impossible. It is even bloody inefficient and frustrating when the numbers are relatively small.

But, even more significant (or so it seems to me), is the breezy way that Hardt and Negri write off the state. They see no path back to a revitalized social democracy because they believe the state is a dead letter. Della Porta correctly sees that many of the anti-austerity protests are “restorative” in focus. That is, they want the state to restore lost benefits, protections, security etc. But she also correctly notes that the fundamental crisis is that the state has become unresponsive. The desires and complaints of citizens go unheard. Oligarchy or plutocracy means the state does not attend to the needs of its citizens.

So, yes, there is a crisis of the state. But to simply let the state be captured by the 1% out of either a fatalistic sense that it can never be otherwise or because relying on an analytic that claims the state is powerless in the world of global capital seems incredibly foolhardy. It’s not an either/or when it comes to power. Of course, the state is not omnipotent; it never was, and it is probably true that it is less powerful now (in Europe and North America; all bets are off in the rest of the world) than it was in 1950 (at least in the US and UK and USSR; Spain and France would be interesting cases to consider in that year, whereas Germany hardly had a state at the time.) Certainly the state is stronger now in Singapore or South Korea than it was in 1950. What about China? That’s a fascinating question, probably best answered by saying more powerful in some respects, less powerful in others—which just indicates exactly how silly it is to say the state is no longer a significant actor, or that the state’s power can be determined along some one-dimensional axis.

The logic of direct democracy leads to smaller and smaller political units precisely at the time when globalization means that economic units are getting larger and larger. It’s enough to make the cigar chomping capitalist salivate. No possible countervailing power to capital on the horizon. How could anyone possibly think that some kind of political control over the economic could be achieved by getting smaller? Yes, the state has drifted far from democratic accountability. And, yes, such accountability was never all that great in the past (although definitely better in the case of the US than it currently is). But to simply decide we need to find/locate democracy elsewhere seems to me a suicidal path to follow, a ceding of the field of power to the people we most want to divest of power.

Hardt and Negri are clear that a transfer of power is what they seek. They are dodgy on the issue of violence in relation to such a transfer. They insist violence under current conditions is bound to be counter-productive, but their historical examples (the historical figures they admire) all used violence for political ends. Similarly, they are dodgy about power. Like a number of other recent figures (including Judith Butler who follows Arendt’s lead in her meditations on this issue), Hardt and Negri want power without sovereignty. I am very sympathetic to this desire, but I can’t work my way to a clear understanding of what it means. I get the slogan but, as often in Hardt and Negri (for example, the call for “lasting institutions” or their desire to have the multitude determine strategy and the leaders only tactics), there is not enough meat behind the slogan to actually understand what it could possibly mean—either in theory or in practice.

But I said I didn’t want to just carp about their work. I am in quest of something very specific: some strategy/tactic (I don’t think the distinction means much in the context of my quest) that the left could effectively employ at this dark moment. Della Porta tells us that social movement studies teaches us that “innovations” in strategy/tactics are few and far between, usually only slight deviations from previous forms. In addition, she places, I think, her finger on another dilemma (besides the one about the limits on human ingenuity): the anti-austerity movements combine a deep skepticism about the ability of existing political institutions to respond adequately to citizens’ needs with a failure to create “new organizational forms” that would substitute for the existing political infrastructure. The result is a not very satisfying mixture of “prefigurative” politics with rather pathetic appeals to the powers that be. The prefigurative part is the attempted creation of the democratic spaces the movement wants to make more general. The appeals part (the passivity) is looking to the state for redress of grievances. To quote her:

[E]ven if movements have stressed prefiguration, citizens need a (paradigmatic) change of public policy decisions. What they claim is a return of the public, which also means states and other public institutions taking back competences they had released during neoliberalism. Even if the appeal is to reconstruct (decentralized) commons, robust interventions of legal and institutional character are required. This is difficult to implement until the movements are able to influence institutional decision-making” (221).

What I fail to see is even a half-hearted attempt to imagine concretely what shape the “robust interventions of legal and institutional character” should be. Forgive all debt is not an actionable plan. Restructuring the legal terms of debt is—and requires specific proposals. And then there has to be a way to exert real pressure on the mandarins who are currently immune to it.

I said I wouldn’t carp—and here it has been all carping. I am going to reserve my positive point for tomorrow, one that actually comes back to the World War II narrative in an odd way.

But, before that, a last summary statement: the evils—and the means for achieving those evils—of neoliberalism are, by now, clearly understood by the commentators on the left. The analysis of neoliberalism in both Hardt/Negri and della Porta are completely convincing. Privatization emerges as equally important as, and perhaps much more nefarious than, globalization. Thus, what the left now desires is also quite clear: a reclaiming of the commons, the construction (or reconstruction) of a public domain immune from rents, and a robust democracy that occupies (that salient term) that common space and allows for collective control of the polity. I have no argument with either the analysis or the desires. I am only searching about for some means that seem plausible—plausible in the sense of having some chance of leading to a successful consummation of these desires.

Protest in an Unjust Society

Not just Micah White’s The End of Protest, but also the essays of Martin Luther King, to which I have been sent by a wonderful essay by Alex Livingston, a political theorist at Cornell, and Livingston’s own book on William James [Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (Oxford UP, 2016)], have pushed me to this question: if the mechanisms of democratic accountability are broken, then what forms should protest take?

Let’s frame this question in Martin Luther King’s terms. “The American racial revolution has been a revolution to ‘get in’ rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down the factory. . . . The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced” (“Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom [1966].)

But what is the appeal to “the forces of good will” does not work? Even King realizes that things seldom happen because that is the right, the moral, the non-evil, thing to do. He is quite realistic that other pressures—especially economic pressures through boycotts and political pressure through disruptive non-cooperation—must also be applied. The bigger point, it would seem, is that these other pressures cannot be effective if the moral high ground is lost. The social movement must be on the side of justice, must be seen as appealing to the community’s best self, in order for its other tactics to bear fruit.

Success in the rhetorical battle over right and wrong is, thus, necessary for success, but not sufficient. At issue right now is what other ingredients are needed to complete the circle, to give us the magical combination that is gives us the necessary and the sufficient.

A big obstacle here is a fundamental asymmetry. Protestors almost always lose the high ground if they resort to violence. The use of violence is also tantamount (it would seem; I am on shaky ground here) to seeing overthrow of the existing power and social relations as the movement’s goal. If you want in (as King puts it), if the goal is fuller inclusion—and inclusion along more egalitarian lines–, then it seems as if violence is ruled out.

Yet—and here is the asymmetry—the forces opposing change get to use violence without undermining their cause. This is not a blanket statement. There are many ways the state—and other established power centers—can lose legitimacy and popular support by resorting to violence. But there are also many cases where state violence is not condemned, or is even applauded. Thus, incarceration of those deemed criminals rarely generates any dissent. Similarly, police actions against “rioters” are most often applauded and almost universally tolerated. The present of gun-toting policeman on the streets of our cities and villages is taken for granted.

Similarly, various forms of surveillance of employees is mostly accepted and the summary firing of employees deemed trouble-makers is also immune from protest or legal redress.

In short, we have a double standard. Violence—both direct and indirect—establishes inequality and differential treatment of citizens—and is used to uphold that unequal state of affairs. Such violence is often unremarked, and is seldom condemned, and even more seldom openly contested. But if those who would contest this “maintenance violence” (to coin a phrase) resort to violence, they jeopardize their whole cause. But in a battle so unequally joined, how can the contenders, the protestors, ever hope to win.

There are, by now, both historical examples and theoretical accounts, of non-violence winning this apparently hopeless contest between established violence/inequality and those who would hope to transform prevailing conditions. SO: never say never.

One way the civil rights movement did win some successes was by pitting some laws against other laws. The legal system—especially on the federal level—did provide some protection against, and even the ability to annul or override, injustices legally established at the state level. Even if democratically elected politicians were unresponsive to the protest movements, the courts were another site of possible progress. And, of course, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the1965 Voting Rights Act, even the politicians were responsive.

The contrast to the anti-Vietnam war movement is instructive here. There was never any avenue of legal redress to pursue. Swaying politicians was the only way to get the government to change course. And that never happened. The New Left could not win enough elections to advance its cause; it couldn’t even scare enough politicians in the ways that the conservative movement since 1980 has been able to do. (The “no new taxes” pledge is one example of frightening politicians into compliance; enforced attitudes toward legal abortion and gun control are another example.) The only thing the anti-war movement accomplished was the end of the draft. The politicians decided they could wage war so long as they didn’t force any citizen to actually fight in those wars.

As matters currently stand, conservatives—through wealthy donors and strong single issue groups—can influence politicians to a degree that the left cannot. Although, it must be said, the conservative control only works for negative action: no gun control, no new taxes, no expansion of legal abortion rights. Conservatives are not able to accomplish anything positive. And now—with the failure to repeal ObamaCare and the probable failure to pass new tax cuts—their ability to do anything at all in Congress is in serious doubt. The Trump administration, of course, can do considerable damage on its own, starting with the sabotage of ObamaCare and moving on to destructive dismantling of environmental and financial industry regulations.

More troubling is that we have now have minority government—and that minority is doing everything it can to retain its hold on power. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and allowing big money to dominate politics are all designed to keep a Republican Party that gets a minority of votes in power. The dysfunctional rules of the electoral game in America are being exploited in a straight-forwardly undemocratic fashion.

Most troubling is that this Republican gaming of the system has extended to a quite deliberate—and frighteningly successful—take-over of the judiciary at every level. The cherished path of using legal recourse to undermine the system’s inequities and injustices is being taken off the table. In other words, where violence was, legality is about to rein. The Republicans have done nothing illegal—as they love to keep shouting from the mountaintops, even as they gerrymander, and refuse to ratify court appointments that are put forward by Democrats. They are, they insist, playing by the rules—even as, naturally, they use the rules to further their own interests. That’s what winning is. You play the game to win. Both sides do. And you don’t cheat.

The upshot is that an undemocratic political system and an increasingly unequal economic system is now being fully legalized. Recourse within the system is now deeply endangered because even winning a majority of votes in an election does not give you any leverage over government, while the legal system is packed with judges who will not countenance any challenges to the electoral system or to the rights of corporations.

So: what is a protest movement to do? I am fully willing to believe (even though I think leftists are often deluded on this score) that a majority of our fellow citizens in these united states of America do not want what our current government is delivering. But—and this seems to me the crux—I also believe that a vast majority of those citizens are not willing to step outside the bounds of legality to challenge what is going down. Either things have just not gotten bad enough—or do not touch them personally enough—or there is a deep in-grown habit of legality. Whatever the explanation, this is where asymmetry hurts. A social movement that acts outside the bounds of legality will lose any chance of mass support. Yet the structures of legality are tightening to the point where action within their limits has less and less chance of being effective.

Massive civil disobedience is one possibility. The classic tactic of non-cooperation. But no suitable target immediately offers itself. The rush to airports after the first Muslim ban was the most hopeful—and useful—response to the Trump administration to date. The problem here is the site of noncooperation. Civil rights activists had two obvious sites: segregated public places and voting registration offices. In each place, they could dramatically stage their attempts to overcome unjust laws.

No such obvious sites are on offer right now. Occupy went to Wall Street, which makes sense. But they didn’t actually confront the financiers who were responsible for the mortgage crisis. And they didn’t have any rhetorically effective way to force such a confrontation.

I am going to stop here. But the search for answers will continue—not that I have any on the tip of my tongue. Subsequent posts will keep worrying this topic. I don’t promise any solutions.

Micah White’s The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution

Micah White was one of the people who inspired (?)/initiated(?) Occupy Wall Street. He certainly can’t be said to have organized it since he did nothing beyond publicizing the idea and setting a date for its occurrence. He never visited the site and made no effort to direct how it unfolded or what it demanded. He thinks the Occupy movement was a “constructive failure.”

I was drawn to his book The End of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2016) because White is adamant that “change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests [especially marches and other mass demonstrations] have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens” (27). That last statement is a little odd, but is explained (somewhat) a bit further on.

“We have been acting as if people have sovereignty over their governments when they act collectively. Now it is clear that the people’s sovereignty has been lost. We were wrong to believe that bigger and bigger street protests could force prime ministers and presidents to heed the wishes of the people. . . . [T]ese ritualized spectacles of tens of thousands in the streets are only effective when applied against autocratic regimes that are vulnerable to international pressure. It seems that popular protest functions only when it is aligned with the pre-existing Western geopolitical agenda” (36). We must recognize that we live a “precarious historical moment of broken democracy and the rule of the wealthy” (43) Having lost “faith in the legitimacy of representative democracy” (38), an entirely new set of tactics must be developed to ferment change in our plutocratic and oligarchic condition.

There is a lot here to unpack—and I will be doing that work over the next few posts. But, today, I just want to hone in on White’s commitment to revolution. “[R]evolution’s chief characteristic,” he tells us, is “the transfer of sovereignty and the establishment of a new legal regime” (60). But those two things are not the same at all. “Revolutionary activism,” he asserts, “is any attempt to make the illegal legal or the legal illegal” (60). I like that claim a lot. I have nothing at stake as to whether one instance of political activism is deemed revolutionary while another is not. Worrying about whether something is reformist or revolutionary does not interest me.

But I do think it very useful to focus in on this question of legality. Segregation was legal, was the law, in the Jim Crow South. The civil rights movement worked to change that. Domestic abuse was not specifically illegal, and was almost entirely deemed outside the law’s purview, until feminism changed laws and attitudes toward violence in the home. We know, of course, that reforming the law is only half the battle; cultural change—a change in attitudes—is also required to have fully successful social transformation. But pinpointing the legal change that is desired gives social movements a focused goal, a clear message, and a benchmark for progress, even for success.

Hypothesis #1: Where social movements do not have an unjust law to focus upon, they have much more trouble gaining traction.

The second point for today is to think about transfer of sovereignty. Only very fringe social movements in today’s US imagine overthrowing the government. So it is not clear to me what a “transfer of sovereignty” means in our context right now. It is absolutely true that power has been concentrated in the hands of the few—and that it strains credulity to call the US a functioning democracy at the present moment. But the concentration of power is very different than the legal apparatus of sovereignty. It does not appear that anyone is interested in undoing that legal apparatus. Instead, as White himself says, “activists may use one law to overturn another” (61). The prevailing strategy is to work through the legal means afforded by the system to alter, rewrite, or abolish the laws and practices that undermine our democracy, that keep it from truly representing the will of the people. (Let me get away with that solecism for the moment. White has a very bad tendency to believe in Rousseau’s “general will.” Let’s just note for the moment that, when it comes to gun control and the tax code, the legal and governmental status quo is demonstrably not in aligned with the view of the majority.)

But, and this is where I will end today and resume tomorrow, what if we no longer have any faith that the current legal and institutional system afford any possibility of reforming it back into the direction of making government responsive to the people? In other words, if we accept that we no live in an oligarchy, what alternatives do we have for fighting that reality. I fully agree with White that marches and petitions are not going to get the job done. They are ignored with impunity. So what should we be doing?