[Marxism] Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange On The "Organizational Question"

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In early October, I traveled to Berkeley, California, for the Free 
Speech Movement @ 40 Anniversary. I stayed with several former comrades 
of the SWP, touched base with a few FSM stalwarts, and attended some 
seminars.

It was a wonderful break for me, mostly because I could talk openly 
with former comrades about our past political experiences and lives. 
The conversations were wonderful, due both to being out of the 
Procrustean bed of the SWP and because age had freed us from the 
conversational barriers of the young.

Politically, the FSM@40 was almost an entirely ABB crowd. One exception 
was former SWPer Syd Stapleton, who along with Mario Savio, Bettina 
Aptheker and Suzanne Goldberg was on the key committee elected to 
negotiate for the FSM. Although he was one of the most prominent FSM 
leaders, he was not asked to be one of the major speakers. He did speak 
on one of the panels and also spoke from the floor at another, clearly 
stating his complete opposition to both major capitalist parties and 
what was wrong with the ABB strategy.

Most of my free time I spent at the U.C. library collecting information 
on the 60s. I was in Berkeley for 10 years, 7 of them in the YSA/SWP. I 
hadn't realized how much of this activity had been recorded until I 
looked at back issues of the Daily Californian, which is a rich 
documentary resource of those times. Some of this I'll share with you 
in the future.

Wednesday, October 6, I went to a panel called: Effective Strategies of 
Change. The speakers included Michael Lerner [Tikkun], John Sellers 
[Ruckus Society], David Solnit [Art & Revolution], and Kevin Danaher 
[Global Exchange]. In my opinion, Lerner's talk was the best, probably 
because it was devoted to moral generalities.

After Lerner came Kevin Danaher.* It was an eye-opener. Fortunately, I 
captured it on tape and transcribed it for you. Look upon it as a 
present to the Marxmail list in the spirit of the season.

Brian Shannon
_________________

A Little Bit of Lenin, a Little Bit of Marx, a Lot of Tammany,
and Let's Buy a Building and Make a Profit

My name is Kevin Danaher. I’m with Global Exchange. We’re a human 
rights organization based in San Francisco. We try to unify a diversity 
of tactical approaches under a basically anti-imperialist strategy.

Up until recently, we didn’t use the word “imperialism,” because we 
were trying to reach mainstream people, and if you talk 
Marxist-Leninist jargon it turns off mainstream people. We have stores 
where we sell third-world crafts produced by grass-roots development 
organizations. We do Reality Tours. Last year we did 142 Reality Tours 
to other countries. We did 90 trips to Cuba alone. That’s being cut 
back this year because Bush saddled more restrictions on travel to Cuba 
because “Cuba is so dangerous! All those 11 million Cubans!

The danger is that people might see that people might see a health-care 
system that actually functions and say, “If they can’t do it, why can’t 
we do?”

We do a lot of anti-corporate campaigning. We’ve done a lot of work on 
the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO. That’s been my main area of work. 
I’ve got some of my books with me. And one of the things that I’ve 
learned in studying these global ruling institutions, like the World 
Bank and the World Trade Organization—what they’re about, particularly 
the WTO, is they are writing a constitution for the world. They’re 
writing a planetary constitution because they realized from things like 
the anti-apartheid movement that we the people can get legislation 
passed that will restrict the ability of trans-national corporations to 
extract wealth from humans and the environment. So they want to have 
something that can go above all the valid legislatures such as city, 
state, and national and that can trump any kind of law that we can pass 
that would restrict the profitability of corporate behavior.

So we are at a constitutional moment. And if you think that law is not 
important, get involved in a legal case sometime. We just won a case—it 
took three years—where we and a few other groups got together and sued 
25 companies like the Gap and Tommy Hilfiger and OshKosh B’gosh, all 
those clothing sellers over sweatshops they had in Saipan. And we won 
over 20 million dollars for workers in those factories who had been 
screwed out of their overtime pay. [applause]

So if you think that law isn’t important, go ask those workers in 
Saipan whether they appreciated the 20-some million dollars in back pay 
they got screwed out of. Etc., etc. I mean we know how important the 
law is even though its written in a way that most of us can’t 
understand it.

THE TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATION

What I’ve learned in studying and writing about those institutions is 
what’s behind those institutions is the transnational 
corporation—that’s the fundamentally problematic institution. The 
institutional form that capitalism takes is the transnational 
corporation.

It is problematic in my mind for three reasons. One is that it is not 
democratic. It is totally hierarchical—an autocracy. A very few people, 
who tend to be rich old white males sit at the top of that pyramid and 
they control the decision-making and it is very top-down and 
non-participatory. Second. They are not rooted in place. They have no 
patriotism to any particular geography. Well, I work in a neighborhood. 
 Human beings work and live in a neighborhood. All of us do.

However, not many of your neighbors do you actually know by 
name—something we are deficient at in this country. Still, we are all 
rooted in place, and that’s true of most things human. There is now a 
movement to get more in touch and be native to the place where we find 
ourselves.

Transnational corporations are not capable of being rooted in place 
because they’re economic power is based on their being rootless. They 
can close a factory here and move it there because there are more 
exploitable workers or more pollutable water or other purely financial 
advantages.

Third is that they are not green. And it is impossible for them to be 
green. Yes we can pressure the leaders to change their policies to do 
less harm to the environment, but it is impossible for a corporation to 
show future environmental damage on current corporate books. There is 
no way that that is physically possible.

So they are not democratic. They are not rooted in place. And they are 
not green.

LEARN FROM TAMMANY HALL AND THE DALEY MACHINE

So what is the opposite of that? We can’t just do the NO. We are all 
protestors. We’ve logged a lot of mileage. “Capitalism Sucks,” “Down 
With the World Bank,” “We Want to Abolish You, “ etc.

But we have to develop a YES message. The narrative can’t just be about 
them. The narrative also has to be about us. What are we going to 
replace it with? Imagine that the Titanic is sinking. And it is. The 
Empire is going down in case you haven’t been following what’s going on 
in Iraq and a lot of other places.

I would argue that Bush has recruited more people to the 
anti-imperialist movement than any leftist has every done. In a very 
strange way, we should look on him with a bit of affection. He has 
helped cleave the world population into 90% against the empire and the 
10% that is benefiting from it.

We are at a crucial turning point here. Instead of running around the 
decks of the Titanic saying “look at this, it sucks,” we need to build 
the alternative boat and pull up alongside the Titanic with a party 
going on deck and people will jump willingly from the Titanic to our 
boat. Because our boat is better, right.

If you look at the traditional approach of Marxist-Leninist parties and 
bourgeois political parties, they follow the same basic path. And that 
is: you develop the political apparatus that gets control of a state, 
and then the state will reform the economy from the top down.

And that failed in the Marxist-Leninist version and it is failing in 
the corporate version. It is not democratic; it is not rooted in the 
community.

So what’s the opposite of that? The opposite of that is: Get the 
economy at the grass roots and build up from that so that the political 
movement that eventually gets control of the state has already reformed 
the economy at the community level.

And for most people it’s about jobs. It’s about meaningful jobs. If you 
look at the history of the city machines—Boss Tweed, Tammany Hall, 
Daley’s machine in Chicago—what was there power base in the working 
class? It was the provision of jobs. “Heh, my cousin just came in from 
Poland; he needs a job.” “Will he work on a garbage truck?” “Yeah, 
he’ll work on a garbage truck.” “O.K. he’s got a job. But on election 
day, he’s got to walk the precinct and turn out the vote for the 
party.” “Yeah, sure.”
That was the deal.

I’m not proposing something so patronage laden as that. But if we in 
our movement start focusing on creating good jobs, of not waiting for 
corporations or the state, the capitalist state, to provide good jobs, 
but us doing it, that’s how we can build a base in the working 
class—right?

So the opposite of the transnational corporations is the locally 
controlled green democratic economy.

Which is why what I am now focused on in my work is creating platforms 
that bring together all the different components of our movement: civil 
rights, social justice, environmental groups, green enterprises, 
progressive, religious, etc., that believe that it is time for us to 
create that alternative boat to the Titanic.

And if you look at Porto Alegre, the world social forum, it’s a 
platform. And they say that anybody who is antiwar, and who’s against 
neo-capitalism, neo-conservative, neo-liberal corporate model for the 
economy—if you are against those two things, is welcome to come to the 
world social forum.

So at the Green Festival, we created a two-day platform with a kind of 
conference with a lot of speakers, a trade show with green economy 
companies, 350 of them, and a party: music, food, beer, wine. The Green 
Festival at Washington, D.C., at the convention center—a 125,000 sq. 
ft. room—was packed. Over 15,000 people turned out.

It was very positive, people were coming up to us and saying: “Thank 
you for organizing this. We needed something positive against all this 
negativity that the Bush administration is pushing out.”

There’s a fundamental perception out here that has been created by 
these clowns through all their violence. It is that “Oh, the world is 
going to hell. Oh the terrorism. September 11.”

We don’t even know what happened September 11. The official story is so 
full of holes. It’s like Swiss cheese. You’ve probably read some of 
this documentation. My 13-year-old daughter did her eighth-grade term 
paper on what really happened on September 11, 2001. And she had about 
50 or 60 different facts which don’t match the official 
story—photographs, etc. So there is this big bamboozling going on and 
even some of us on the Left are not immune to it even with our high 
guard against propaganda, we start getting all negative and cynical.

We are on the verge of the first global revolution in world history. It 
is a values revolution where we are making a paradigm shift from the 
old paradigm that has dominated for 500 years: money values, violence, 
god is on our side—go back to Columbus, Pizarro, Cortes, the 
conquistadores, the people that were slaughtering the natives in 
America—infidels they called them, like Osama Bin Laden refers to us, 
right? And they justified the violence and the violence was made 
possible because it was about money. Gold and silver—that’s what they 
were looking for. And they mounted cannons on sailing ships. That was 
the key technology.

And that comes all the way up to the U.S. shooting rockets into Samara 
yesterday. And killing innocent men, women, and children. It’s money 
values, violence, god is on our side.

PLANNING A BUILDING

The new paradigm is life values, nonviolence, god does not take sides 
in internecine conflicts. However you conceptualize the spirituality of 
your existence, if it’s just nature and a life force or some supreme 
being--the creator of all things visible and invisible—that supreme 
force is not going to decide in a fight between black ants and red ants 
or between fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians. These 
fundamentalists have taken the fun out of fundamentalism. We need to 
put the fun back.

So what we do at the Green Festival is try to create the alternative 
vision saying its great to protest, we’re all veteran protestors. Let’s 
create the alternative vision, create a positive energy and beat them 
at their own game. Let’s take their [not clear], their citizens, their 
voters, away from them. Not with a no anti-message—we’ll still do the 
protests, we’ll still blockade, chain ourselves to the doors, etc., 
etc.—but let’s create some positive alternatives so we are doing a No 
and a Yes.

The next thing that I am focusing on and I’ll end with this, coming out 
of the Green Festival is: We starting working on planning a building 
and calling it the Global Citizen’s Center where its offices will be 
nonprofit social, justice, and environmental groups, maybe some 
foundations, trade union offices—most of these organizations are 
currently renting from commercial landlords that they don’t 
like--commercial landlords don’t give a damn about our political 
issues.

So the idea is to bring together a whole bunch of groups in the same 
building with a ground-floor green mart—the opposite of Wal-Mart—where 
all the products are produced with protecting nature and protecting 
human rights as the core principle. And yet, of course, you have to 
make a profit, because if you don’t you go out of business. Duh.

A lot of my Marxist friends—I was trained as a Marxist at U.C. Santa 
Cruz. The best book I ever read was Volume I of Capital in terms of how 
it helped me understand day-to-day reality. But there are a lot of 
Marxists and Leftists running around: “build the revolution” “smash the 
state”.
And they couldn’t run a candy store.

Come on, let’s get real about this. It’s easy to be an armchair 
revolutionary. To create a revolution means building a mass movement. 
You don’t build a mass movement unless you can provide jobs. To provide 
jobs, you have to create an organizational structure. Lenin himself 
said that the key question is the organizational question. And that 
includes enterprise.

The enterprise that Michael [Lerner] alluded to is not being redefined 
through triple bottom line. Yes, you make a surplus over what it costs 
you to do it. The question is how do you decide where that surplus gets 
reinvested: in the community or in the pockets of a few?

And in environmental sustainability and social responsibility. That 
triple bottom-line—that will be the economic model of the future. 
Mother nature is going to enforce that. Do you see all those hurricanes 
that hit Florida? There’s proof there’s a God, right? Did 
fundamentalists ever stop to think about why Florida got slammed big? 
You don’t have to believe in global warming. A vengeful God, right? You 
stole the election. Now you will pay [laughter].

So, we’re in the planning stages of this building. If we can get this 
building up and get it going where it becomes a convergence center with 
events every night and all sorts of organizing going on and show that 
it can work … We can do one in Washington, D.C., we can do one in Des 
Moines, we can do one in Madison, in Paris and Johannesburg, in Buenos 
Aires.

Because the movement has to have physical place. It has to have 
property that we control. Control over the means of production, O.K. 
The production of the movement has to have control over its own means 
of production and own its own photocopy machines.

I know this sounds mundane, but as someone who is hassling to raise 
50,000 every two weeks to pay our staff of 49 people, it’s very real to 
me. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about this kind of 
stuff. It’s one thing to worry about your own salary. It’s something 
else to worry about other people’s salaries. We need to start feeling 
that responsibility it we are serious about creating a revolution. 
Otherwise it’s just talk.

Let me end with this. Dr. Martin Luther King said a lot of really great 
things, but my favorite saying of his was “What is going to win in the 
end is unarmed truth and unconditional love.” “Unarmed truth and 
unconditional love.”

And that’s the challenge in front of us. Can we fashion the weapons of 
unarmed truth … and unconditional love is tough. It’s tough to love 
Bush and Cheney and people like that. People attack you and the first 
place you want to go is down to the low energy level. We have to train 
ourselves to go up to that high energy level, the spiritual level that 
Michael was referring to. So let’s go out and let’s make unarmed truth 
and unconditional love the law of the land. Thank you very much.
______________

* Described by The New York Times as the "Paul Revere of 
globalization's woes," Dr. Kevin Danaher's analytical expertise, sense 
of humor and blunt eloquence make him an exceptionally dynamic speaker. 
As Global Exchange's co-founder, Dr. Danaher has spoken at universities 
and for community organizations throughout the U.S. He conducts 
workshops on issues ranging from the dynamics of the global economy to 
how we can replace the power of transnational corporations with local 
green economy networks. A longtime critic of the so-called "free trade" 
agenda, Dr. Danaher explains how we must work with other countries to 
reduce poverty and inequality if we want the cooperation of the world's 
people in ending terrorism. Dr. Danaher is the author and/or editor of 
11 books, including his latest, "Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to 
Corporate Power." His other titles include: Ten Reasons to Abolish the 
IMF and World Bank; Democratizing the Global Economy; Corporations are 
Gonna Get Your Mama: Globalization and the Downsizing of the American 
Dream; and Globalize This: The Battle Against the World Trade 
Organization and Corporate Rule. 
http://www.globalexchange.org/getInvolved/speakers/profiles.html#56



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