Sunday, June 3, 2012

We need some bolsheviks up in this motherfucker: some reflections on anti-austerity movements

I will confine myself to a couple of short theses:
1.) A few victories notwithstandind (hooray for the comrades in Quebec) we are losing the war. We are losing the war because we are weak.
2.) Our weakness has multiple aspects. The first is spineless oportunism of "left" parties and unions, fighting on a political terrain that has over recent decades become ever more favourable to the right. The second is the radical and politically naive anti-authoritarianism of social movements. The third, perhaps most important, is the seemingly unbridgeable divide that has sprung up between these two: organizations that have absolutely no clue about the true desires of the masses on the one side, and spontaneous outbursts that reflect these desires in an authentic, but completely ephemeral, politically ineffective way on the other. Neither side is either willing or able to communicate.
3.)  With political weakness comes intellectual weakness. Even the brightest minds, having a thorough theoretical understanding of capitalism, therefore knowing full well that its crises can not be reduced to hyperproduction (or the opposite side of the coin: underconsumption), that its paradoxes do not originate and can not be resolved in the realm of consumption, fall prey to a spontaneous social-democratism after being forced by objective circumstances to try and defend what is left of the welfare state. Necessity is turned into virtue and thus delusions about the emancipatory potential of social-democratic opportunism proliferate, despite all historical proof to the contrary.
4.) The most pertinent symptom of intellectual weakness is the inability to propose a positive program, even more, the unwillingness to attempt such a task. The plain fact of the matter is that as long as we do not even have ambition to take power and a plan to overcome capitalims when we do, the bourgeoise has absolutely no incentive to give in to critique or pressure. Reformist critique addressed at the bourgeoisie only strengthens their confidence that there is no real power able to challenge their position as the ruling class. They might back off for a moment where opposition is fierce, but only because they are confident in final victory.
5.) This intellectual weakness works to further erode what little political power we have. Lacking a positive program, we are unable to organise and build political power around it. Critiques of the madness of austerity do not serve to strengthen our position, because we do not have a position. They either promote a futile hope of an enlightened bourgeoisie or cynicism and withdrawal.

5 comments:

shakub said...

I have been thinking this for a while. One of the effects of atomising society over the past few years and placing massive burdens of private debt/anxiety on individuals means that many have not the time/hope/persistence to have a broad wide range of people involved in drawing up the details of a programme of alternative society. But for sure, this is what we need. Yet it is very, very difficult. What is the first step to bringing the two najor groups you identified together in the first place? Even this apparently trivial thing seems insurmountably difficult, forget about the imaginative and critical alternative...

Sašo said...

I don't know, I've just finished reading Serge's Memoirs of a revolutionary and these problems seem to go a long way back, at least to Kronstadt (or the underlying tensions that found their first major outbreak in Kronstadt). Then we have the failure of 68, when so-called left parties showed their true conservative colors and left Thatcher and co. free reign to insert themselves into the political space opened up by social movements. And I think social democracy was the most important factor of atomising society, with the "nanny state", as republicans are fond of calling it, substituting and destroying class solidarity. Marx might have been right in his critique of the Gotha programme since putting all faith in the bourgois state is revealing itself to have been a rather risky if not outright ludicrous course of action. Meanwhile social democrats haven't learned a single thing, after flirting with neoliberalism they are reverting to the old failed policies the failure of which had pushed them towards neoliberalism in the first place. I guess things are bound to get a lot worse before they have any chance of getting better.

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Lịch sử gia ách: Di lan truyền đóng đơn vai trò trong suốt việc trừng phạt mụn. phải trưởng hai ba má lắm mụn trứng cuộc, bạn còn giàu khả hay là tốt phát triển nó.

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