RE: Re: No retreat in Doha

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian wrote:

> My 2 cents, adjusted for inflation [or is it deflation?]

I say it is deflation. Long live pessimism!

>> Its disregard for the state was such that it had no strategy for
achieving
>> the political power necessary to deliver its aims, and fell back on
subverting
>> the state by declaring it impotent.
=========
> Not the case. It's across the board disgust with political parties who
> have used the appurateses of State institutions to secure significant
> barriers to entry against competition. The state is not impotent
> against corporate power, it creates it via the ability to make law in
> favor of some interests [the few] against others; the tyranny of
> organized minorities.

I would have put it differently but I don't disagree with Ian. (Does this
mean I partially agree with him? Go figure!) Two institutions that have lost
their legitimacy the most in the eyes of the "people" over the course of the
20th century are the State and the Party and there is no doubt that the
so-called socialist parties and "workers' states" also played very important
roles in this loss of faith. I don't think it is a coincidence that almost
all of the newly radicalized youths call themselves anarchists in these
days. And unlike some of us may think, they don't call themselves anarchists
because they studied Bakunin or Proudhon or other anarchist theoreticians
and rigorously formulated what they mean by anarchy but because of their
disgust with the State and the Party from their life experiences. By the
way, I share their disgust from my life experiences too.

I tend to agree with Ergin Yildizoglu, who wrote in a few articles in the
Turkish Daily Cumhuriyet newspaper, that ideologically we are back in 1830s.
It is as if we, where with we I mean those who _still_ believe in the
possibility (not certainty) of a libertarian, egalitarian and fraternal
world, have not learned anything from our experiences over the past 170
years or as if we have not been in existence for that long or even much
longer. Now there is this talk that we now live in a totally different era
in which everything is new in almost every sense and that we need to start
from scratch and build a totally new left movement in our struggle for a
"better world". Sure there are so many new things: that we are fast
approaching an environmental catastrophe was not the case 170 years ago, for
example; or that we are now facing an additional problem that we may call
deprolaterianization, that is, the creation of an army of unemployables, as,
for example, it is happening in rural Turkey with the destruction of
agriculture, is new; so forth.

So it appears, we are back to our original questions, after all these years:

1) Who is the enemy?
2) Who are we?
3) What do we want?
4) How do we plan to get what we want?

First of all, these questions are not at all new and can be reformulated
using technical terms such as "agency", "aims", "institutions", "strategy",
"tactics" and the like but I don't see any point in doing that. Secondly, I
can hear Doug objecting to my use of the word "enemy" in posing the first
question, as I recall that he once sent a quotation from Foucault against
this concept, but I use the word nevertheless. We as a movement need some
common goals. Defining common goals should not mean building highly
centralized rigid hierarchies or, as Ian might have put it, allowing for the
tyranny of a minority. What should it mean is a question we need to answer
collectively. But a movement without some common goals cannot go anywhere.
And in my view, to answer these questions, assuming that these are the right
questions to be answered, we need to identify what is new and what has
remained fundamentally the same over the course of the past two centuries.
And in this, a hypercritical re-evaluation of the Party and State is an
important task we need to undertake, again, in my view, and we better keep
in mind that we are not the first ones who are doing this.

These are my main reasons for bringing this topic up.

One last thing:

Assuming that there are two parties, that is, "we" and "them", and a battle
between these, there is no doubt in my mind that the winner of this battle
will be the one among whose own troops there is less fight, ceteris paribus,
that is.

Sabri Oncu
soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx