Re: AUT: My anti-inauguration flyer

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From that critique of Empire you sent out, i think I understand better where
you are at least partially coming from, so please take this response as
merely part one and the response to that critique as a second, connected
part, of our discussion.

Indeed, I gave rather short-shrift to Nader and the Greens.  I work with
some Greens around Mumia Abu Jamal and they seem decent enough politically
in many ways.

However, I am against electoral politics.  Its not that I do not think it
changes anything or that it has to do with wanting the revolution right
away.  It has to do with the fact that our power does not lie in votes for
politicians, whether they represent our interests.  You have to show me how
placing our confidence in this state helps do anything but sow illusions.
Of course, I know many people who will lambast me for refusing to vote
against Bush, esp. since he just cut all federal funding for organizations
which support and promote abortion internationally.  Clearly, that hurts.
Clearly, Gore or Nader would not have done it.  But Bush won't have
Left-cover to
pull off his other dirt, like Clinton and Gore and every other Democrat.

I am not interested in orienting to a politics of a 'kinder, gentler
capitalism'.  That's liberalism.  And to believe that Nader could win and
produce the platform he ran on seems ridiculous to me.  It is a fine fantasy
for those who believe in the state as neutral or neutralizable with the
right people.  In situations like this, I think the long view of history is
very important, as is a marxist view of the state.  i would like to know
what government, on whatever platform, pushed through the kinds of things
Nader wants out of the goodness of its heart or because it got votes?  Not a
single one.  Mass struggle, an old term I suppose, makes a difference, the
only difference.  Nothing progressive, especially in this country, has ever
been won by the vote.  So why spend our energy on trying to improve the
voting system or other aspects of the state?  We should fight for what we
want in the streets, the workplaces, the neighborhoods, etc.

Anyway, let me address the specifics.

> Hello Chris,
> I think that reducing the possibility of having
> someone decent to vote for such as Nader; to "changing
> nothing" is a big mistake. If you look at the green
> party platform, although negating capital or creating
> worker's councils may not be on their list, and they
> can at best be seen as the left of the reformist
> movement in this country; you are not looking at the
> more radical policies they are advocating such as
> shortening the work week, making it easier to form a
> union in this country (when was the last time a
> pro-business democratic president proposed this?), and
> advocating organic farming and sustainable agriculture
> over biotechnology. These are three of the green
> parties positions that I most strongly support.
I support these things, but how do we get them?  It won't be by voting.  And
the Greens seem to see voting as the only way to really get what they want.
I do know Green supporters who are activists, but I have yet to see proof of
the Green Party as an activist vs and electoral party.  Also, and this is
strictly my opinion, Nader role as spoiler has killed the Greens and
third-party electoralism in the United States for a while.

The difference is one of promoting self-organization along struggles that
challenge capital, not accepting its state as a valid arena of struggle.
That promotes illusions in what can be won through the state.  Our struggles
will result in gains that certainly get enshrined by the state as laws or
social programs, but their formalization in that way also signals a
limitation.  You can't take the notion of the state as a capitalist state
seriously and believe that voting has any use except propaganda.  I am not
interested in socialist or communist or Green ministers of state.  All of
them have become our enemies, if they were not before they started.  The
Greens in Germany supported the Gulf War and they have built and
increasingly liberal, not even radical-reformist, agenda.

As such, I do not claim they have no differences with the Republicrats on
making capitalism friendlier.  I just think that serves as a diversion and
building a Green Party just makes another roadblock to overthrowing capital.

I happen to think that raising the question of capital, exploitation,
oppression, etc. is important, not just bad corporations who have 'taken
away our power'.  They can't take away what we did not have to begin with.
There is no rosy past of popular democracy, and yet Nader invokes exactly
that.  I feel no need to support sowing those kinds of illusions.

Also
> publicly financed elections is an important position
> of the greens which would allow a better selection of
> candidates, and some honest candidates. I don't think
> validating the electoral process necessarily will
> stave off revolution, and I don't think green party
> positions can be reduced to "60's liberalism" or even
> populism;
I happen to think that bourgeois democracy will be the greatest enemy of the
revolution.  It is not the weakest form of the capitalist state, but the
strongest, exactly because it gets people to believe that they have built in
means to change things that don;t require getting rid of the system.  And I
don't know what an honest politician is, btw.  That is a liberal approach
that removes class, race, sexism, etc...  And even if there were such a
beast, then they would be forced to walk out of Congress the first time the
U.S. bombed someone, if they had any principles besides 'honesty'.  Also,
what would 'honesty' mean?  That they admit we bombed Iraq for imperialism
or Empire or whatever?  That capital rules everything and has to be
overthrown?  That would be 'honest', but I don;t see the Greens saying it.
Honesty, divested of politics, is meaningless.

the green party is proposing some serious
> systemic and philosophical changes to government.
> There are some serious structural problems with the
> U.S. economy itself, and with the world capitalist
> system which will be difficult for any candidate of
> any political persuasion to fend off. These problems
> may bring about revolution whether we have a welfare
> state or not; decent environmental regulations or not;
> and a sound and sustainable versus a profit based
> agricultural system or not.
Really?  Serious systemic and philosophic changes?  What does that mean?
They mean to change some of the harshness of capital, but they don't propose
to get rid of it.  They propose a different ideology, but not the
elimination of capital.  They propose, and you seem to agree with, a little
fixing of "the U.S. economy".  However, the 'economy' is not broken or in
need of fixing.  It is capitalist and in need of destruction.  As such, I
see the Greens and Nader as trying to salvage capital through a kind of
'Swedish model' or a kind state capitalism.  Why should I support that?

> A lot of your flyer seems like old left rhetoric that
> I think is best left in the 1930's.
Some of it might even seem to be from the 1800's.  But I like my Marxism
old-school, not New Left or Not-Left.  I actually feel that I successfully
avoided too
much rhetoric.  I think I simply called upon people to choose their own
self-organization and direct action against taking ritalin.  The Zapatistas,
if it helps make me seem like less of a dinosaur, take a similar view of
voting and direct action.  Hence the Ya Basta I ripped off from my comrades
in the IWW.  But also, I derive a lot of my ideas from the Situationists,
Socialisme ou Barbarie, Italian Autonomism, Open Marxism, etc.  But this is
really about something else, which will come in the second critique: it's
about Deleuze, Guattari, Negri, Foucault, et al, isn't it?

 Sure the green
> party or any social democratic or reformist movement
> does not have the goal of a proletarian state;
Actually, the social democrats did have a goal of a proletarian state, which
is where Leninism came from.  The Greens have a notion of 'good' bourgeois
democracy, but no notion of workers' self-determination and self-liberation.
I happen to think that is limiting not just during "the revolution", but in
how far they will push against capital today.  What laws will they be
willing to break to win at all costs?  More than a few struggles of the last
few years would have possibly won if they had had less respect, not more,
for the laws of a so-called democracy.

I don't have the goal of any kind of state, 'workers' or otherwise.  I am
not a statist.  To the extent that I conceive of any form of
post-revolutionary state, it is only in a purely negative sense of those few
things we need to organize to protect ourselves militarily from a hostile
capitalist world while the revolution spreads.  I do not conceive of a
crystallized apparatus that runs things, but simply provides for efficient
defense against counter-revolution.  Even then, such a 'state' can be no
more than an extension of the workers' self-organization and purely
transitory.  Even that may be too much.  History can only take us so far,
however, and I am leery of projecting very much.

 but
> does that mean I should just sit by and let people
> like George Bush get elected? Why should low income
> people and those disenchanted with this system wait
> for a proletarian revolution?
Who said sit by?  Half of my flier addressed exactly some very basic ideas
of what we can do to begin organizing in a different way.  It appeared
prescriptive, I suppose, but I merely meant to toss out a few examples.  If
you have some ideas on how I could have done it better, please share with
me.  But if that means saying "Vote Gore" or "Vote Nader" or "Rock the
Vote", thanks, but no thanks.

It seems that your
> argument could to easily be applied to the old left
> mantra of equality for women, people of color, etc;
> after the revolution. I personally think that these
> struggles and many non-class based struggles might not
> be able to be fulfilled and come to fruition until we
> can achieve libertarian communism and radical
> democracy, but that doesn't mean these struggles
> should not be waged at all.
I don't see where you get this at all, and I certainly have to laugh that
you ascribe an antipathy to anti-white supremacist/anti-patriarchy, etc to
me.  I have fought the whole of my life for Marxists to take those struggles
seriously as part and parcel of the class struggle.  You imply that these
are bourgeois democratic struggles, btw, which I totally disagree with.  I
think you have let your response to my critique of Nader and voting get in
the way of reading what i wrote (or rather, you introduced
Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari again without saying so.)  I support every
struggle against fetishized human relations, against oppression in whatever
form, and I support waging them here and now in the most thorough-going way.
I don't see how electoralism as part of that fight, except in certan cases I
can think of where fighting for the right to vote exists as a central moment
of a broader struggle (such as in the Civil Rights Movement, where it was
nonetheless eclipsed and merely one moment.)  Your point may apply to
someone sitting and waiting for the revolution, but I believe fully that we
have to be active now and propose and defend our ideas NOW.  I do not
propose, however, defending and supporting reformism because
the revolution is not here.  That very notion of revolution as something out
there in the future fails to understand Marx's idea that communism is the
real, existing movement of the working class.  Participating in limited
struggles is not the same thing as curtailing one's politics to those
limits, which you appear to suggest we do.  That, in my mind, is a slippery
slope.

Why should the
> multiplicity of struggles wait for a revolution and
> not vote when there is a candidate running who
> actually supports their positions; even if not in a
> completely perfect way? You have to live in this
> world.
Indeed, I will support and work with people who actually organize people to
take control of their lives through struggle, but electoralism does not do
that.  To believe that electoral politics is a sham is much further from not
living in this world than believing that voting will make a difference.

 And voting does not mean that all you are doing
> is voting; many activists choose to vote, many of them
> who are marxist or sympathetic to marxism.
Well, bully for them, I suppose.  I can think of several groups of statist
Marxists who whored themselves out ot the Greens here like they do to Labour
in England (The ISO, the Militant Tendency/CWI types, etc.)  I also don't
think voting indicates political bankruptcy, so much as desperation in the
abscence of a real movement or movements.  I thinking organizing electoral
politics indicates something though.  I think the instrumentalist view of
the state and the notion of 'taking power' shared by many of these groups
opens them up to supporting so-called 'Left' alternative candidates.  I want
to challenge that view.

> I was just reading that House and Senate Republicans
> are currently pushing for the elimination of overtime
> for work over 40 hrs a week (a stipulation many
> companies already get past by making a worker
> "salaried"), and making it easier for corporations to
> classify a worker as contingent.
Yes, indeed.  Carter and Clinton also passed many a reactionary bill.  Bubba
ran one of the most reactionary 'right to work' states, Arkansas.  And I
have not seen any progressive legislation coming from these people.  Gore is
to the right of FDR, in fact, maybe to the right of Woodrow Wilson.  We live
in bad times which will not be fixed by voting for the lesser of two evils,
but by participating in, and trying to spread and clarify, struggles where
people live and work.  FDR did not give out social programs, he had them
choked from him by an increasingly militant and active workers' movement.
The racism of that movement and the weakness of Black struggles at that
moment, however, allowed him to always protect lynch law.  The state gives
nothing.  The best we can say is that Bush will try to take more, but he may
also fail.  Clinton took this country further to the right that Bush, Sr. at
every level.  Apparently you believe what I do not: that politicians make a
qualitative difference in capital's perpetual war to extract value from
labor, to exploit, oppress, etc.

 I almost always vote
> green, but I will vote for democrats to stave off this
> kind of nonsense.
Well, voting for Bill Clinton didn't help.  The one positive thing Bill did
just got
revoked by Bush, and the rest puts him to the right of Bush Sr.  And while
berating me for not voting or criticising
voting, I find it interesting you never discuss Gore's white supremacist
refusal to take up the racist filth in Florida in his own attempt to
dislodge that victory.

I take part in the voting system
> because of the positions that republicans represent
> and support. Sure, many democrats are identical on
> many of these positions, and even some greens
> (especially an issue such as nationalism) but that
> does not invalidate the progressive or even sometimes
> radical positions that these candidates may hold.
I do or do not vote based on my politics, not someone else's.  I also have
not seen anything terribly radical from any candidate, though Nader at least
said more than anyone has said in a long time.  And even if
they are not identical (which you say they are in many cases), they all
agree that working people, regardless of race or gender or national status,
should bow before the state and do everything through the state.  This is
exactly what I disagree with.  I am for breaking the law.  I am for
destroying this insane society.  I am for
following every struggle through to the length of its limits.  I am not for
respecting bourgeois rights or laws or cops or courts.  Everything that
makes me a revolutionary is exactly what makes them pro-capital, liberal or
not.  On that alone, none of these parties agree with us.  But that is my
old-Left understanding of
what struggle and principle mean.

> The democratic party no longer has any kind of leftist
> politics; but marginally there are still a few
> progressive democrats around. And as a whole they are
> definetly not as reactionary as most republicans. In
> an era of globalization I doubt any progressive dems
> will run for president (although I would consider
> voting for Bill Bradley were he to run); but most
> likely I will continue to vote green for the vast
> majority of candidates.
I don't think i need to respond to this at this point.

> Lastly, I think saying Nader ignored racism, is
> inaccurate, he should have focused on it more; but
> Cornell West and Randall Robinson were two of Nader's
> biggest supporters.
Yeah, but that was about it.  And until Nader came under serious fire from
those few Black supporters he had (most of whom are not well known outside
of intellectual circles), he said nothing.  He even actively
courted law and order forces early on and through the middle part of his
campaign.  I happen to think it is more important that almost no Black
people showed up to any Nader event or voted for Nader.  The phrase
lily-white comes to mind.  That thay went totally to the Democrats indicates
more about how afraid people were of Bush, and maybe also demoralized in
their own ability to fight back on other terms.  But I am not for supporting
the second-in-command to the man who helped drive 'America' further right
than anyone in 50 years, while trucking the Black
population along with him thanks in part to a scurrulous Black middle class.
 Nader criticized racial profiling,
> the criminal injustice system, and the prison
> industrial complex. He did not speak about his
> positions on these issues enough, and he did not
> articulate his stances on women's rights and gay and
> lesbian rights well or enough either, I think. But he
> wasn't really given a great deal of media coverage,
> and time to articulate these positions.
Too little, too late.  He did it under pressure, as he has refused to take
or state positions on things like abortion rights or gay rights in the past
because he felt they were divisive!.  Anyway, the point is that he clearly
had no resonance in the Black community because he took exactly the approach
you criticize me for earlier: reducing the struggle to an economistic notion
of class that avoids the multiplicity of oppressions.  Funny that you should
defend the person who did that, but pin it on the person who criticizes him
for it.

Fundamentally, we disagree on what to do and what organizing to fight back
means.  Just because we cannot create struggles, as the Leninists would like
to believe they can do, we do not have to sit back and defend reformist
politics.  To give up making a different kind of revolutionary critique
cedes the radical ground to the Leninists, something I think would be bad.

So you vote for these people.  Do you restrain your critique of their
limitations?  Do you put it on paper?  You really did not mention it here.
Or do you point our that whatever
happens, they are nothing but the lesser of evils?  Politically dubious, but
'honest', I suppose.  Do you propose a different way of mobilizing our
power?
Or do you see electoralism as a sufficient means?  If we give up our
critique
as communists (libertarian or anarcho-), then why bother being communists?
Your approach smacks of Realpolitik, but that is the politics of power, of
domination.  As such, we do not simply have a difference over the value of
voting, but a wholly different political perspective on the world.  But I
think that will come out in the second part.

Cheers,
Chris




     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---