On January 28, 2012, people from Oakland and beyond bravely attempted to take an abandoned building to build a community center for living space, organizing infrastructure, medical facilities, and so on. It is absurd that huge buildings lay empty while families live in the streets and are denied basic access to shelter, food, and the necessities of human life. But such is the logic of capitalism.

Police in Oakland, acting in the interests of the owners of society, guarded this empty building by beating people, throwing flash grenades, tear-gassing, kidnapping, caging people—showing everyone that private property and the starvation and homelessness that it guarantees can only be maintained through violence. And part of changing these kinds of social relations means taking those things that have been denied to us through this violence.

More than statements, solidarity is also action. We’ll meet you in the streets with hopes of spreading rebellion into our workplaces, our communities, and our homes! Mad respect to everyone languishing in cages as a result of their bravery, standing up to police bullies and, by extension, a system that is decaying and dying in front of our eyes.

With a new world in our hearts,

Workers Solidarity Alliance

By Nathan Jun, Midwestern State University, WSA/TX

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos’ Christian Anarchism is a meticulously researched but readily accessible survey of an often overlooked and frequently misunderstood anarchist tradition. As he explains in the introduction, “Anarchism is not all there is to Christianity. The point which some describe as the overlap of the two separate traditions, however, seems to be precisely where others argue that Christianity logically leads to some form of anarchism… The aim of this book is to focus on this overlap, and therefore solely on the anarchist political implications of Christianity. That is, this book focuses solely on the view that Christianity implies a (peculiarly Christian) type of anarchism” (7). There is no question that Christian Anarchism meets its stated aim, and this in two ways: first, by offering a richly detailed overview of Christian anarchist theory vis-à-vis its key thinkers and schools of thought; and second, by vividly demonstrating how Christian anarchists have attempted, and continue to attempt, to live their ideas in practice.

At the level of content, my only criticism concerns the puzzling inclusion “anarcho-capitalists” [sic] alongside genuine anarchists such as Leo Tolstoi and Dorothy Day. While I am not in a position to judge the Christian bona fides of any of the figures discussed in this book, I do feel confident in asserting that capitalists—by definition—cannot be anarchists, and vice versa. (As an anarchist as well as a scholar of anarchism, Professor Christoyannopoulos surely knows this, which is why I say—quite charitably, I might add—that I am “puzzled.”) At the same time, so little space is devoted to “anarcho-capitalists” [sic] that it’s fair to describe the entire discussion as an aberration in an otherwise fine book.

By its own admission, Christian Anarchism is not a critical work; it is a descriptive work intended to introduce the reader to the Christian anarchist tradition, and on this score it is a great achievement. My hope is that Christoyannopoulos will follow up at some point with a more critical treatment of Christian anarchism—one that, for example, will address some of the common arguments which non-Christian anarchists level against the very idea of Christian anarchism. I say this as someone who has serious moral and philosophical objections to organized religion in general and Christianity in particular but is also willing to countenance religiosity when it is marshaled in the service of liberation. And although Christian Anarchism goes a long way toward allaying my concerns, many remain unaddressed. For example, isn’t Jesus Christ himself the ultimate ground of political and moral obligation for Christians? If so, doesn’t this imply that any Christian action—no matter how much it happens to outwardly overlap with the means and ends of anarchism—is ultimately carried out for the sake of Christ? And wouldn’t this suggest that Christian anarchists’ reasons for acting differ in a non-trivial way from those of non-Christian anarchists (viz., because they are acting ultimately for the sake of Christ rather than for the sake of humanity)?

The overarching problem I keep returning to is this: Christian anarchism has an archē—an ultimate authority, a first principle—that structures, organizes, and licenses it, and this seems self-contradictory to me as it did to Bakunin and others before me. I do not doubt this problem is a non-problem, that I am somehow missing the point in fretting over it, but this is where Christoyannopoulos needs to set my mind at ease. By raising these sorts of questions, Christian Anarchism has definitely whetted my appetite and I have no doubt that it will be followed up by deeply satisfying critical work.

Imprint Academic, Exeter, 2011, ISBN 978-1-845-402471; $34.90/£17.95

On the weekend 19-20th a new wave of mass protest all over Egypt broke out because of the systematic violence of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) against the Egyptian masses. People are tired of its dictatorial behaviour, the use of extreme force against protesters, the military trials that in 10 months have ended up with 12,000 comrades rotting in jail, their censorship, the torture, kidnappings and selective murder of activists. People are tired of the military council hijacking the banners of our revolution to continue the same old dictatorship through other means. People are tired of the sectarianism they promote to divert us from our real fight for justice, equality and freedom.Imperialism has dictated an “orderly transition” to democracy in Egypt. The military have shown themselves obedient in implementing this design. The people in Egypt demand an end to dictatorship and the uprooting of all the remnants of the hated Mubarak regime. People in Egypt want to feel, at last, that they have a country run by themselves for themselves.

The anarchists in Egypt, and the international solidarity movement with the libertarian revolutionaries, wholeheartedly support the just struggle of the Egyptian people to continue their revolution and deplore the massacre of protesters that shows that the SCAF is no different to Mubarak.

Unlike other sectors that hold illusions about bourgeois democracy, we believe that democracy and the State are irreconcilable. Real democracy was put into practice by the Egyptian people when they formed their popular committees and ran their own communities, their own towns, their own affairs from the bottom up. We call to strengthen these popular committees, we call to decentralise the country, to make every single political position recallable by the committees if they fail the popular mandate.

We also believe that the yearning for democracy is incompatible with the capitalist system, based on the elite control of the economy and the means of life, which condemn 25,000 human beings each day in the world to die of hunger. Real democracy is only possible when all of society democratically runs the economy and the industry of a nation. This requires collective ownership of land and companies and self-management by the workers and peasants themselves. If the few control the wealth of the world, the few will keep having power over the majority. The free market is a more subtle form of dictatorship.

Therefore, we call for the trade unions and the workers to take a leading role in the current struggle, to occupy their workplaces, to turn them into workers’ cooperatives and to prepare for the full self-management of the Egyptian economy.

The crisis of Egypt will not be solved with half-hearted solutions. We need the commitment of the youth, of the women, of the working class in order to uproot the sources of tyranny and violence in our country – the capitalist system and the State. Let us all unite under the banner of the struggle against military rule, but let us defend a revolutionary, libertarian option for the Egyptian masses.

25 November 2011

Libertarian Socialist Movement (Egypt)
Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (Italy)
Organisation Socialiste Libertaire (Switzerland)
Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)
Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (South Africa)
Workers Solidarity Alliance (USA)
Confederación Sindical Solidaridad Obrera (Spain)
Grupo Libertario Vía Libre (Colombia)
Centro de Investigación Libertaria y Educación Popular (Colombia)
Instituto de Ciencias Económicas y de la Autogestión (Spain)
Federación Comunista Libertaria (Chile)
Revista Política y Sociedad (Chile)
Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (Australia
Common Struggle – Libertarian Communist Federation (USA)
Unión Socialista Libertaria (Peru)
Common Cause (Canada)
Confederación General del Trabajo (Spain)

Coordination des Groupe Anarchistes (France)
Libertære Socialister (Denmark)
Motmakt (Norway)
Miami Autonomy & Solidarity (USA)
Union Communiste Libertaire (Canada)
Alternative Libertaire (France)

With several months of preparation and one month of action, Occupy Wall Street has accomplished what years of conventional activism has failed to do–spark a populist political awakening against the ruling class. The 99ers have captured the imagination of regular Americans from every background and point of view, unified by a general disgust with the upper 1% who have run our economic, political and social areas of life into the ground. The defiant occupation of public space in the heart of the capitalist system has not only inspired us, but challenged our sense of complacency in the age of crisis.

Some of us will remember a similar awakening in August 2005 when Cindy Sheehan and a handful of visionaries formed Camp Casey, another occupation outside the Texas ranch of George W. Bush, named for her son killed in combat during his tour of duty in Iraq. The story was picked-up by the alternative press with little mention in the mainstream, until it could ignore it no longer, due to the widespread support Sheehan and the occupants received. Solidarity demonstrations and encampments were organized internationally, and the previously dead antiwar movement found new life at the height of the dark Bush years.

But we should also remember the way that our antiwar energy was channeled by groups like MoveOn into lobbying and legislative action for the same Democrats who generally supported or tolerated America’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama was one of the many politicians who rode the wave of antiwar discontent into congress, and later, the White House. But what has our Democratic government gotten us? Instead of a necessary radical reform of the economy, the same inequalities were reinforced with bailouts of the country’s richest corporations and banks. American combat and occupation overseas has shifted, but continued. The 99% have suffered dearly, now more than in all the years that Bush ruled, all in the name of preserving an economic and social order–capitalism!–that the 1% is dead set on continuing … unless we make life more difficult for them.

Sites of occupation should be defended from the police with the smartest tactics we can think of, which are generally nonviolent, but occupation is not an end unto itself. The police get their marching orders from the political machines of our city governments, which are owned by the 1%. If we want to fight to  win, we need to use the spaces we’ve occupied to organize a real movement of the 99%, with a strategy that puts our most powerful weapon to use: our ability to stop working and cooperating until we get what we need. Only when we hurt the bottom-line of the 1% will we win. The General Strike is what our sisters and brothers around the world are using today to fend off the very same offensive that the 1% is waging on us. Why should we aim for anything less?

A lack of membership in an organized labor union is no reason to stay unorganized. The spaces of participatory discussion we’ve created through occupation can and should continue in our places of work and in our neighborhoods, especially as the weather worsens. Occupiers can give our movement new energy by calling for the 99% to prepare for a General Strike against social inequality. Preparation will require months of agitation and logistical discussions, which can happen in both occupied spaces as well as the more familiar ones.

When we make the call, thousands will flock to our occupations with excitement as word of a new and inspiring form of participatory action spreads. There, we can move forward to bring the movement to every workplace and neighborhood in the country. Even if a date is never set, simply putting the General Strike on the table will move us forward and “strike” fear into the heart of the 1%. At this moment in history, only demanding the impossible is a reasonable course of action. Indeed, “be reasonable!” is usually the demand put forward by people who want to keep things the way they are.

The Arab Spring and European Summer have now inspired a wave of demonstrations in the U.S. as well. It may well prove to be the most significant wave of protests the nation has seen in many years.

The occupation of Wall Street began on September 17^th and quickly mushroomed into dozens of occupations around the country – and all of this before the long planned major occupation in D.C. that began on October 6^th.

The timing is propitious. Forty-nine percent of likely voters “think neither party in Congress represents the people,” according to the conservative polling agency Rasmussen.

The Washington Post reports that “Americans have reached a new level of disgust toward Congress that has left nearly all voters angry at their leaders and doubtful that they can fix the problems facing the country. Whether Republican, Democrat or independent, more Americans disapprove of Congress than at any point in more than two decades of Washington Post-ABC News polling.”

There are some in the public who still support the record of the legislative branch: 14 percent.

The discontent reaches beyond displeasure with the particular representatives currently in power to encompass fundamental aspects of the nation’s governance.

Gallup finds “Americans Express[ing] Historic Negativity Toward U.S. Government,” with “A record-high 81% of Americans… dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed, adding to negativity that has been building over the past 10 years.”

Elites are admitting the structural causes leading to the popular anger. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that protesters are blaming “with some justification the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess. …. At some level, I can’t blame them.” The Wall Street Journal accurately characterizes this as a warning to legislators. Action must be taken to ensure the continued stability of the system.

In much the same way, a politburo official in the old USSR might have acknowledged that mistakes were made by the state leading to the unrest, and a course correction will be needed.

Those structural roots of the crisis include one third of Americans, including those earning higher incomes, living with so little savings that they would miss their next rent or mortgage payment if they lost their job.

As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein admits, “The top 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income and 40 percent of its wealth.”

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Procter & Gamble Co. is the latest corporation to adapt to what Citigroup has identified as the “Consumer Hourglass Theory.” P&G,

“which estimates it has at least one product in 98% of American households, [will] fundamentally change the way it develops and sells its goods. …. The world’s largest maker of consumer products is now betting that the squeeze on middle America will be long lasting. …. A wide swath of American companies is convinced that the consumer market is bifurcating into high and low ends and eroding in the middle. …. [Citigroup has] since 2009 has urged investors to focus on companies best positioned to cater to the highest-income and lowest-income consumers. It created an index of 25 companies, including Estée Lauder Cos. and Saks at the top of the hourglass and Family Dollar Stores Inc. and Kellogg Co. at the bottom.”

A society with a gouged out middle class – of designer clothing for a few, and meals of Frosted Flakes in water for the rest – is bound to be more prone to restiveness. As is the case globally, the youth are particularly burdened by diminishing opportunities.

In another sign of the times, Sesame Street is introducing a new Muppet that is bedeviled by food insecurity to “bring awareness to the ongoing hunger struggles that families face in the United States.” There are 17 million children in the country with “limited or uncertain access to food.”

These declining fortunes are reflected in Occupy Wall Street. Klein describes the message evident in the signs (notably at the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr) in Zuccotti Park:

“They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.

College debt shows up a lot in these stories, actually. It’s more insistently present than housing debt, or even unemployment. That might speak to the fact that the protests tilt towards the young. But it also speaks, I think, to the fact that college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that the way to get ahead in America was to get educated. You did it. And now you find yourself in the same place, but buried under debt. You were lied to.”

It is encouraging that the occupations have not only endured and garnered media attention, but that they have spread throughout the country.

Here in New Orleans an occupation began on Thursday. (It cannot have come soon enough. As I write this, out my window on the street below a thin middle-aged man is up early picking through the garbage bins of the apartment complex, eventually strolling away with his harvest of recyclables.)

The Occupied Wall Street Journal – an early print run ran to 50,000 copies on the strength of $10,000 quickly raised – featured a timeline of the global movement, beginning on December 17^th, 2010, when the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, seeing no economic prospects and nothing but harassment from the government, lit himself aflame in public. It was the beginning of a response to, as an article in Slate puts it, the “global class war.”

Elites have also connected the occupations to the global revolt. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg commented, “You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”

Origins

The genesis of Occupy Wall Street came from a call published by AdBusters. Weekly organizing meetings began in early July.

David Graeber, who was involved in the process, observed (in a Washington Post interview conducted by Ezra Klein, to their credit, though it was only published on the paper’s blog) that:

“One thing that helped a lot was a smattering of people from Spain and Greece and Tunisia who had been doing this sort of thing more recently. They explained that the model that seemed to work was to take something that seemed to be public space, reclaim it, and build up an organization headquarters around that from which you can begin doing other things.”

Much like other occupations of 2011, dozens of committees have been created to manage the day-to-day tasks of a 24/7 occupation. The Greek protestors in Syntagma Square have had over two dozen committees operating in their Square.

Graeber writes that there are “30 different working groups for everything from handling sanitation to discussing labor issues and tax policy. …. Of course, this is nothing compared to what happened in Tahrir Square, where they even had dry cleaners.”

Nathan Schneider characterized the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly as “a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.”

One can only hope that the use of consensus does not become a road block – consensus is a nice goal to aim for in any group decision-making, but it should rarely be a rigid requirement and can sometimes act as an impediment to timely or democratic results.

The extent to which these protests are dominated by people totally new to protesting is an immensely encouraging indication of the opportunities present for this movement to grow. There is a profound opportunity for humbly undertaken educational programs – listening as well as teaching. Ideologies are diverse and, among many, surely newly forming and fluid – this is precisely as it should be.

Food is ordered by people all over the world to feed the “American indignados.” Pizza has become the medium of global solidarity.

The scene, despite the many challenges occupiers face, has impressed many observers:

“The protestors have transformed the park into a village of sorts, complete with a community kitchen, a library, a concert stage, an arts and crafts center and a media hub.”

Labor

On October 5th, unions joined the Wall Street occupation.

The bureaucracies of the establishment unions recognize the occupation movement as important, but remain uncertain of how to capitalize upon it. The New York Times reports:

“Several union leaders complained that their own protests over the past two years had received little attention, though they had put far more people on the streets than Occupy Wall Street has. A labor rally in Washington last October drew more than 100,000 people, with little news media coverage.”

While the corporate media certainly do minimize events like last fall’s One Nation rally, it is hardly shocking that their tepid events fail to generate substantial popular interest. The politically cautious centrism and bland rhetoric of the establishment unions does not exactly inspire hope that they are building a meaningful movement.

Perhaps the current occupations will nudge them towards greater militancy. The Times reports that labor leaders were hearing from union members wondering why organized labor was missing in action.

Of course, the conservatism of the labor bureaucracy has not disappeared. “Behind the scenes,” the Times comments, “union leaders have debated how to respond to Occupy Wall Street. …. [Some] said they were wary of being embarrassed by the far-left activists in the group who have repeatedly denounced the United States government.” Heaven forbid.

Fortunately, thus far such sentiments appear to have been drowned out. Certainly, many in the rank-and-file appear eager to participate. A 32-year-old lawyer and union member told the Times, “We’re so fed up and getting nowhere through the old political structures that there needs to be old-fashioned rage in the streets.”

A spokesperson for the “historically militant” Transport Workers Union even said of the decision to endorse the Wall Street actions within his union: “A motion was brought up to endorse the protests’ goals; I don’t know why it took us so long to do it.”

The Democratic Party

The support of the unions may be vital and welcome, despite the risks created, but the interest of Democratic Party operatives is a dangerous hazard.

With the initial success of the Wall Street occupation, there is now this is the real threat of cooption and redirection into Democratic electoral politics. The Times reports that, “Democratic strategists… said they viewed it as a potential boon.”

Yves Smith quotes a Venezuelan aphorism: “A politician is someone who gets in front of a mob and tries to call it a parade.”

One of the most promising aspects of this wave of occupations is that they are happening under Obama’s watch. After the evaporation of the antiwar movement in the midst of presidential campaigns for John Kerry and Obama, the return of dissent is very welcome.

It is crucial for the occupations to retain complete independence from all politicians, in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the global occupations.

Already there are indications of Democratic representatives attempting to get in front of the developing movement. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, it is not at all clear the occupation movement will be easily coopted. When Representative Charles Rangel visited Zuccotti Park, he was apparently booed, though Joan Wile, writing on Michael Moore’s site, saw things differently.

From talking to the demonstrators in Syntagma Square over the summer it was abundantly evident that all the Greek politicians are discredited. That a similar attitude is prevailing in the U.S. occupations is a huge step forward.

Slate reports that,

“There was almost no talk about politicians. ‘The last six or seven presidents have been fakes,’ shrugged Teddy Curtis, who’d taken off work early from his job at a waste energy conversion company to hoist an ‘End the Fed’ sign. ‘I think they know who we’re going to get before we do. Nothing changes.’”

As Greenwald aptly notes:

“What will determine how long-lasting and significant is the impact of these protests is whether they allow themselves to be exploited into nothing more than vote-producing organs of the Democratic Party — the way the GOP so successfully converted the Tea Party into nothing more than a Party re-branding project.  There is no question that such efforts are underway, as organizations that serve as Party loyalists try to glom onto the protests and distort them into partisan tools.”

The dynamics can also operate in the other direction. These occupations have the potential to radicalize people.

Matt Stoller, despite a long background of working within the Democratic Party, spent time in several of the Occupy Wall Street general assemblies and praised the “communal sense of power” they created. Like Greenwald, he warns that:

“Many liberal groups want to “help” by offering a more mainstream version, by explaining it to the press, by cheering how great the occupation is while carefully ensuring that wiser and more experienced hands eventually take over. These impulses are guiding by the received assumptions about how power works in modern America. Power must flow through narrow media channels, it must be packaged and financed by corporations, unions, or foundations, it must be turned into revenue flows that can then be securitized. It must scale so leaders can channel it efficiently into the preset creek bed of modern capitalism. True public spaces like this one are complete mysteries to these people; left, right, center in America are used to shopping mall politics. ….

Interestingly, the first speech I heard at #OccupyWallStreet during soapbox time was a fairly explicit rejection of the notion of an American dream. Many people draw their inspiration from Tahrir Square, hardly a fount of Americana circa 1950. In other words, many of these people simply do not seem to be traditional liberals; they seem to see themselves as a transnational leftist class who believe gender, race, and economics are bound up into one struggle against oppression. .…

Power clashes in extremely odd ways. The Democratic establishment is finding itself tied in knots over how to react to the protests. Many want a left-wing version of the tea party, whereas others are deeply uncomfortable with democratic impulses like this one.”

Even a Washington Post blogger concludes that “an alliance between Democrats and the Occupy movement” is not possible, “at least not without Democrats renouncing the influence Wall Street holds on them.”

The blogger Kevin Gosztola comments, “The segment MSNBC host Ed Schultz did on October 5 indicates liberals, whom the Democratic Party counts on to deliver votes, will be working to contain this movement and make it seem these are really frustrated Obama supporters.”

For Schultz, the protesters are “not going to change the government of the United States but they can change who runs it.” Of course, the Democrats were in charge of both branches of Congress and the White House for two years and even now still retain control in two out of the three. Yet, still the problem is only one of restoring Democrats to the House.

Gostztola accurately sums up the prevailing elite mindset:

“The Obama administration sees itself as the adults. People who challenge the administration, who always oppose the administration on its every move aren’t acting grown-up. The occupiers are children. They can go out and protest but at some point they have to step aside and let the adults do the hard work necessary to eke out some sort of agreement or compromise. This is the culture Obama has promoted. It is why vision and policy ideas are secondary to how best to manage the country.”

The Obama Administration recalls the “new mandarins” that Noam Chomsky scorned over 40 years ago – technocrats that are spiritual descendants of Kennedy’s Camelot. Unfortunately for Obama, the country is far less deluded about the wholesome innocence of the American power elite than they were in the Kennedy era.

Fortunately the nascent occupation movement appears to understand that direct action, rather than electoral politics, is the most likely route to social change.

The Police

However, direct action is not cost free: it poses legal and physical risks.

Though bankers may have no reason to fear for their personal safety (media implications of looming violence to the contrary), protesters do. Videos and images of police abuse are legion (see, for instance, here and here), and the caught-on-camera unprovoked pepper spray attack on three nonresistant young women even garnered respectful and concerned corporate television attention – indeed such incidents helped to spark greater coverage of the occupations.

The corporate media coverage obscuring a dynamic of police violence and protestor nonviolence is such a commonplace it scarcely surprises, making objective segments like that of Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC (see the link above; O’Donnell’s language and assessment of the police abuse is remarkably uncompromising) notable.

The shifting Times coverage of the mass arrest (from their behavior it seems the police were seeking a pretext for making a mass arrest, having passively watched or actually encouraged the crowd movement onto the street, thus blocking traffic) of 700 people last weekend on the Brooklyn Bridge to deflect responsibility onto the protesters themselves was quickly detected and widely circulated online.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan has made a record-breaking $4.6 million donation to the New York City Police Foundation.

It is noteworthy that the Wall Street protesters currently perceive themselves unable to even erect tents in Zuccotti Park (which “police have indicated may violate sanitation rules”!). The extent of freedom permitted contrasts unfavorably with the situation at some of the occupations internationally. Extensive arrays of semi-permanent tent encampments have arisen in Syntagma Square and Tel Aviv, for instance.

The protesters have been unable to even use electronic sound amplification in the “very residential neighborhood of mixed income.”

An Israeli anarchist reflects that New York City police seem more fearsome than those in Tel Aviv. Perhaps this is unsurprising (they have become the domestic CIA after all).

The white shirts, as higher-ranking New York City cops are known, have been unusually prominent, “directing the rough arrests,” and perpetrating much of the gratuitous violence, while the lower-ranking blue shirts stand aside.

One possible reason for the dramatic leading role played of the white shirts not mentioned by the Times is suggested by the surprised reaction of a blue shirt in the video of the pepper spray assault upon young women (“I can’t believe he just fuckin’ maced her.”): fear of uncertain obedience from the blue shirts. The organizers also received unconfirmed reports that some one hundred police officers failed to report for work in a show of solidarity with the occupiers.

Disagreement on the proper relationship for protesters to adopt towards the police has sparked discussion on the left and among the occupiers, though there is no evident dilemma. At a general level, one can simply note that aimless hostility is unproductive, though it is important not to sow illusions among fellow demonstrators.

Take a scene related by the Times:

“Outside 1 Police Plaza on Friday evening, the seasoned agitator known as Reverend Billy tried to curry sympathy from the more than 60 officers standing across a police barricade. His sentiment was summed up in a protest sign that read, “The Working Class Must Unite (Hey, Cops, That Includes You).”

This need not reflect naiveté – merely a plausible strategy – so long as it is also made clear (in a movement in which many are protesting for the first time) that we must disabuse ourselves of expectations for decent treatment or sympathy from the police.

In an excellent new article, Kristian Williams, author of “Our Enemies in Blue,” surveys the prevailing historical patterns of police enforcement of class rule and the occasional exceptions, providing superb context for assessing how to approach the police presence.

Violence is not the only threat posed by the police. In the era of extrajudicial state murder of U.S. citizens, the surveillance state does intelligence reconnaissance (for instance, by photographing the crowds, as well as developing databases of dissenters from the mass arrests) on law abiding protesters.

The power elite need not rely solely upon state surveillance however. A Philadelphia Inquirer financial columnist blogged:

“Corporations who grab marketing data from Twitter, Facebook and other social media posts are curious about who’s behind the Occupy Wall Street protests and the mobilizers of spin-off demonstrations. Here’s how it looks to one veteran data miner: “‘We’ve been watching it for three weeks. Over the weekend, with the arrests in New York, it’s really taking off… The volumes have increased 20X, 30X. There are millions of communications.’ What’s the message? ‘Politics this year, it’s going to be the workers against the rich.’”

The police abuse has helped push the story onto the front pages. As Yves Smith wrote:

“Police efforts to contain OccupyWallStreet have had the opposite effect to what the officialdom no doubt assumed would happen: that the demonstrators would either become discouraged or become violent, which would make it easy to discredit them. Instead, the macing of a group of women last weekend, followed by the arrest of over 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge on Saturdy, has given the movement legitimacy and media attention. It was the lead item on the BBC website over the weekend.”

In general, international coverage of the occupations has been more generous.

Media Propaganda

As the Institute For Policy Studies’ invaluable Too Much online weekly observed, “the international press is so far covering [the occupation of Wall Street] much more seriously than media in the United States.”

Predictably, much of the corporate reportage has exhibited varying degrees of disdain and other forms of bias (Vijay Prashad finds examples in the Associated Press and Boston Globe here). Glenn Greenwald wrote “the now-familiar journalistic tone of a zoologist examining a bizarre new species of animal discovered in the wild.”

The lack of demands meme is transparently absurd – did anyone belittle the Egyptian protesters for not having a unified list of demands regarding the system (what they want) that was to replace Mubarak (what they’re against)? As it happens there were a wide range of views on what kind of governance should follow his overthrow. This was somehow not seen to be an indication of their lack of seriousness.

The notion that the protests have been lacking clear demands and should produce specific policy aims is a bizarre standard never applied to protests looked upon with favor (not to mention putting the cart before the horse – people are gathering precisely to permit democratic dialogue about aims, not to elaborate at the outset the need for, say, a particular tax rate on financial transactions).

It is easy enough to compile some short term demands – say, raise the capital gains tax to match paycheck taxes, a measure that would overwhelmingly target the top one percent (see the October 3^rd edition of Too Much “Inequality By The Numbers” graph) – if in fact, a ten point program is called for. But it is the long term demands, about which there can be no artificial consensus, which are the most important – and those can only come through a process of mutual education and discussion.

Public perceptions, informed by the corporate media, continue to lag behind reality in one realm – only “45% [of those polled] say American society is divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” while “52% say it is incorrect to think of the country this way” – that may limit broad participation until popular education improves. Yet this too has been slowly changing: “Over the longer term, however, the number seeing themselves in the have-nots has risen substantially. In 1988, half as many described themselves this way (17%) as is the case today (34%).”

The most dramatic cause in recent years for a renewed faith that we live in a united society was Obama’s election, the effects of which are now finally wearing off: “The percentage of Americans who see society as divided between haves and have-nots declined shortly after Barack Obama took office, but has rebounded since.”

Rasmussen Reports found, “Seventy-nine percent (79%) of Americans agree with the statement that the “The big banks got bailed but the middle class got left behind.” Just 10 percent disagreed. Or as the president of the conservative polling firm summarized it, “Americans continue to overwhelmingly believe that government and big business work together against the rest of us.” Despite these numbers, the corporate portrayals of the protests (backed up, no doubt, by a lifetime of socialization against displays of dissent) have had an impact:

“Americans are divided on the protestors themselves. Thirty-three percent (33%) have a favorable opinion, 27% hold an unfavorable view, and a plurality of 40% have no opinion one way or the other.  Fifty percent (50%) of Democrats have a favorable opinion while a plurality of Republicans (43%) say the opposite. Among those not affiliated with either major party, a solid plurality (45%) have no opinion. Most unaffiliateds are not following the story.”

With news coverage like that of Erin Burnett on CNN, not to speak of Fox News, it is little wonder a chunk of the population reflexively recoils. Still, the protests are more popular than not – and far more popular than Congress.

On Monday, October 3^rd, CNN debuted the new show Out Front, hosted by Erin Burnett. Her background includes stints working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. The segment can serve as a case study in propaganda as it trotted out all the media techniques to neuter the danger of the occupation movement. The laughable crudeness makes it particularly easy to identify the tropes.

Burnett visits Occupy Wall Street, where she finds a “tent city meets Woodstock kind of feel.” (Trivializing: subculture). “I asked several protesters what it was that they wanted. Now, they did not know. …they did know what they don’t want.” (Trivializing: ignorant). She then proceeds to venture her best guess: “So what do you want, protesters? It seems like people want a messiah leader just like they did when they anointed Barack Obama. But, if you don’t know what’s wrong, no one can fix it for you.” (Misinformation: red herring).

The notion that the protesters are looking for a leader from without to save them is about as contrary to the spirit of the protests as an idea could be, though Burnett appeared so disinterested in hearing the demonstrators that she may have even been sincere in her ignorance.

John Avlon, a CNN talking-head regular, is brought on to help Burnett ridicule the irrelevant new social movement:

Burnett: “I was in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution, and this lacked the intensity, to say the least.”

Avlon:

“It’s not remotely parallel. Look, drum circles don’t start problems. And it’s tough to get your demands taken seriously dressed when you’re dressed as a zombie. There’s no parallel to the grievances these folks have and some of them are legitimate. People should be angry at some of the economic environments — but to compare this and the United States of America to Tahrir Square and the Egyptian government or Syrian protesters is very self-congratulatory. But it has got nothing to do with reality.” (Trivializing: grievances; subculture.)

Burnett: “…there’s a little part of you that warms to such idealism.” (Condescension: damning with faint praise.)

Burnett: “…it’s peaceful and it’s fine now, but it could become something like we saw in London where disaffected youths become violent” (unfortunately, Avlon didn’t play along on that trope). (Potentially violent).

Avlon: “Having fun, this is not about protest and that’s a good thing.” (Trivializing.)

Avlon: “…conservative populism has always played a major role in American politics. Liberal populist marches like this tend to alienate more people than they attract at the end of the day. I don’t think you’re going to see a presidential campaign built around this for example.” (Trivializing.)

Burnett then seamlessly transitioned into the next segment, on a potential Chris Christie candidacy:

“But here’s the bottom line, can he even raise the money to win at this point? A lot of big money Dems tell me they’re going to give money. A major bank CEO, one of the biggest in the country, said last week to me I’m a lifelong Democrat, Erin; I’d vote for Christie and give him money. You’ve also got the new CEO of Clear Channel, Bob Pittman (ph), among the many that I saw at a mobile conference in Idaho this summer telling Chris Christie they wanted to give him money. …. Well, to compete in the primaries, Christie needs a whole lot of money. Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton both raised hundreds of millions, 223 million for Clinton, 105 million for Romney, and that wasn’t enough. They lost in 2008 — the ultimate winner, Barack, winning with a cool $745 million. Can Christie get that kind of cash?…”

And so forth. Somehow, viewers are expected not to see the connection between the protests and this political system. Only the most well trained minds will see no problems here.

Burnett then returned to the occupation: “And now for a story that made us say, ‘Seriously?!’ The occupied Wall Street protests entered its third week today.” (Trivializing.)

Burnett: “…their books, banjos, bongos, sports drinks, catered lunch. Yes, there was catered lunch, designer yoga clothing — that’s a little lemon logo — computers, lots of MacBooks, and phones …. and by the way, to Dan the very ardent software developer he had a lovely MacBook.” (Implications of hypocrisy.)

The transparently over-the-top extent of the bias may have made the show less than effective as propaganda, but CNN is trying to compete with Fox News in employing entertaining performance artists posing as hosts – most coverage is more subdued.

An inside peak at how newsroom editorial boards shape coverage can be seen in the portrait sketched by journalist Will Bunch:

“I’d successfully lobbied my editors at the Philadelphia Daily News to send me up here, but they loaded me down with questions. What do the protesters want, exactly? Why is this different from all the other left-wing protests? Why now? And be sure to write about all the fringe people — the Ron Paul fanatics and the bandana-wearing anarchists and what not.”

Interestingly, the business press has had some of the most sympathetic coverage.

David Weidner, a financial columnist for MarketWatch the Wall Street Journal website, wrote a remarkably positive assessment. Under the title “Occupy Wall Street is a tea party with brains,” Weidner opines:

“It’s been called the Woodstock of Wall Street, but that’s hardly an apt comparison. The gathering at Max Yasgur’s farm 42 years ago was built on a generation looking for peace, love, some drugs and acid rock. The kids today are looking for real, tangible change of the capitalist sort. They’re organized, lucid and motivated.
Actually, they have more in common with the tea-party movement than the hippie dream, with one key difference: They’re smart enough to recognize the nation’s problems aren’t simply about taxes and the deficit.
They want jobs. They want the generation in power to acknowledge them. They want political change. They want responsibility in a culture that abdicates it. They want a decent future of opportunity.
If that isn’t American, then what is?
Another key difference between today’s kids and their hippie forefathers: They’re willing to gut it out.
Not only is Occupy Wall Street showing no signs of dying out, but it’s getting stronger. On Sunday, a night of rain dampened the crowd at Zuccotti Park, but then the sun broke through, and they were back at it: challenging police, marching and drawing attention to their cause.
This isn’t just some anarchist or lefty agitating. Many of the protesters are furious with the Obama administration’s kow-towing to Big Finance. They’re critical of Federal Reserve policies. Refund California is aligned with 1,000 faith-based groups. ….
The press seems confused. There were signs about Afghanistan, taxes, Wall Street greed, corporate responsibility and just about every pet cause out there. But what some decry as a lack of focus is really about them not getting it: This movement is about money. It’s about wasting money. It’s about greed for money guiding those in power. It’s about the inequitable distribution of money.
Most of all, it’s about process. In a ‘general assembly’ meeting Saturday, Occupy Wall Street came up with its first official document. It is a powerful summation of grievances, not just of the young, but of many Americans: home foreclosures, workers rights, Internet privacy, health care and bailouts. Read the declaration of Occupy Wall Street.
‘No true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power,’ the declaration states. ‘We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.’
The protesters urge others to join them in public spaces everywhere. ….
But for a generation accused of being lazy, unwilling to work and living under their parents’ roofs for far too long, these kids have shown a hell of a lot of mettle so far. The odds are still long, but they’ve succeeded in the first step.
They’ve gotten our attention.”

Even the Economist, in its blog, was prompted to cheer, “woo!”

Mark Provost, an economic journalist, visited the Boston occupation and shared the following anecdote:

“I asked a well-dressed young man exiting work for directions to the park. He didn’t know the location, and I didn’t tell him why I was going (fearing he may intentionally misdirect me). Unfortunately, my cover was blown when ‘Brian’ asked a coworker for the whereabouts. Brian pointed me in the direction of South Station and offered his opinion, “I work for an investment bank. I am a capitalist…but I don’t agree with American-style capitalism.” Without pause, he refined his thoughts, “I am a socialist.” I was running late, so I simply nodded. He repeated this heresy, and wished me luck.”

The financial press is much less obliged to serve a propaganda function – and when the system appears broken even to some of its beneficiaries, it is free to express it.

Conclusion

Capitalism is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. As David Graeber wrote in the Guardian, since the 2008 economic collapse it has been evident that:

“Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like ‘Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?’”

In Egypt and Tunisia, the task was to bring down Western-backed dictatorships. In the U.S., the challenge is to topple the dictatorship of Wall Street.

How long these occupations will last in anybody’s guess. As with most uprisings, the most likely outcome is a fizzling out. Occasionally they explode.

As Bunch found in talking to the occupiers, one protester said: “since Obama was elected I’ve pretty much lost all hope in the two-party system. …. I’ve been waiting for this day for years” (a “frame of mind mirrored most of the folks that I talked to in Zuccotti Park” Bunch notes).

Another protester, a 47-year-old who came to occupy Wall Street all the way from San Francisco said, “I’m here for as long as it takes for this revolution to take off.”

The one percent on Wall Street are concerned about the protests – “the chief executive of a major bank” in Manhattan was worried enough to call a stooge reporter at the Times to investigate how fearful they should be; and when Anonymous endorsed Occupy Wall Street, the Department of Homeland Security issued an unusual warning to the nation’s bankers.

The Financial Times referenced the Diggers as a historical antecedent, while assuring its readers that “the average US voter may be irate at the financial system but is a long way from turning into an anarcho-syndicalist.” True, but perhaps less robustly so than Wall Street imagines.

In a survey of the occupiers, a retired teacher and grandmother from Middletown, Conn. told MSNBC, “If it has to be a revolution, it may be just that time – and I’m willing to work for that.”

Later in the day, 1000 more workers shut down the ports of Seattle and
Tacoma when they refused to work. ILWU leaders have declared the
action “a wildcat strike”, and have claimed no knowledge of the
actions in Longview.

According to the police chief of Longview:  “The terminal’s security
guards were outnumbered by people with baseball bats. People were
busting windows out of the guard shack. They took a security guard out
of his rig and drove it into a ditch.”

Tons of grain were dumped from railroad cars and the cars brake lines
were cut. In the end 19 arrests were made .

This is a message to the bosses: you will all get the same treatment
soon, and the sooner the better.

Resistance, it’s never futile!

By Tom Wetzel

In her essay Latin America & Twenty-First Century Socialism (published as  an issue of Monthly Review last year), Marta Har­necker presents a description of “some features” of a decentralized, self-managed socialism based on direct democracy in workplaces and neighborhoods — a picture congenial to libertarian socialists. She also pro­vides an interpretation of the Bolivarian Movement — the movement led by Hugo Chavez — that suggests it is embarked on a transition to this kind of socialism in Venezuela.

Rafael Uzcategui’s book marshals a lot of evidence to challenge that interpretation. Uzcategui argues that a continuation of capitalism is a more likely outcome of the Chavez government than a transition to socialism. Uzcategui also rejects the right-wing fantasy of “Castro-style Communism” being set up in Venezuela.

Uzcategui cites with approval the view offered by the radical Uruguayan journalist Raul Zibechi (author of Dispersing Power). Zibechi believes that leftist governments in Latin America (including Venezuela) tend to draw off the organic militants and organizers of popular movements into the leftist electoral and party projects…leaving a diminished capacity for independence and combativity among social movements. Given the poverty and discontent in Latin America, Zibechi argues that this is the only way for capitalism to survive in that region. This is also how the book under review sees the movement led by Hugo Chavez. To provide a critique of the Chavez government from the Left, he interviews and quotes a vari­ety of people in labor, environmental, indigenous and other social movements.

Rafael Uzcategui is the primary researcher for the non-profit Venezuelan Program of Education and Action on Human Rights (PROVEA) and a member of the collective that produces the anarchist newspaper El Libertario. His book uses interviews, statistics and reports to provide a picture of the real sit­uation on the ground in Venezuela. The English edition adds material for a North American audience that wasn’t in the previous Spanish and French editions. In this review I’m only going to touch on some of the topics that are covered in this very detailed study.

The Caracazo and a Crisis of Legitimacy

To explain the emergence of the Chavez movement, Uzcategui looks at the new social movements that came forth in the ’90s and the growing discredit of the political parties that had governed Venezuela since the beginning of “representative democracy” in that country in 1958.

During the first half of the 20th century Venezuela had been governed by a succession of dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. When “representative democracy” finally came to Venezuela, it was still a fragile growth. The parties that alternated in power from the ’60s through the ’80s — Acción Democratica (AD) and the Social Christian Party (COPEI) —  wanted to ensure that popular discontent didn’t lead to the overthrow of this new arrangement through another military coup or popular insurrection. Thus successive governments used the country’s oil income to build a welfare state. To ensure a solid hold on the income from hydrocarbon extraction, an AD government nationalized the country’s oil industry in 1976. The welfare state constructed in that era included:

• a Social Security system that provided unemployment benefits, pensions and disability payments
• a free public health care system
• subsidies for the construction of public housing
• subsidies of public utilities, gasoline, and food prices
• free public education at all levels

The Chavez government’s various initiatives (called “Missions”)  to provide social benefits in areas such as health care, literacy, subsidized food provision and housing follows in the footsteps of the earlier populist initiatives of Acción Democratica governments.

In the late ’80s Venezuela began its slide towards neoliberalism with the imposition of an International Monetary Fund Structural Adjustment Program. The AD president in power at the time then imposed drastic increases in transportation prices. This provoked a popular rebellion on February 27, 1989 — known as the Caracazo (“Caracas blow-up”) . This took the form of riots and looting of warehouses. The army committed various massacres in suppressing this rebellion. Hundreds of people were killed. Thus neoliberalism and repression were the starting points for a crisis of legitimacy for the old parties. Independent social movements grew in the ’90s and these became the major source of protests and demonstrations. Meanwhile, participation in voting plummeted from over 90 percent in the ’60s and ’70s to 56 percent in 2000.

The author describes a variety of social movements that were present in Venezuela in the years before Chavez came to power — from women’s groups and the Union of Revolutionary Youth, to indigenous and environmental groups, and union struggles — such as a fight in defense of social services in 1996 that brought together more than a hundred unions. Poorer neighborhoods were often participants in protests such as street blockades or riots or local “civic strikes” that resulted in shutdowns of shops and transport. A particularly significant movement in the early ’90s was the Assembly of Barrios in Caracas in which more than 200 neighborhoods were represented. That Assembly was a space for discussions and debates about the various struggles of particular neighborhoods.

Says Uzcategui: “In the 1990s, the visions of a different world were fragmented and isolated, without pretensions of totality. Mobilizations were, mostly, defensive reactions against government policies….The internal dynamics of social struggles in Venezuela involved the development of relationships among the oppressed, which among other things allowed them to ensure their survival.”

Chavez’s first political vehicle was the Bolivarian  Revolutionary Movement (MBR-200) which grew out of his participation in a failed military coup in 1992. MBR-200 was a conspiratorial vanguard dedicated to taking power via insurrection and advocated abstention in electoral politics. In 1997 Chavez switched gears and decided to run for president. The wide array of social movements, broad social discontent, and support from sections of the Left then “translated into votes for Chavez” when he was elected in 1998. The Chavez victory did reflect the loss of legitimacy of the old parties and the level of discontent, but the Chavez government was not a product of an existing, organized social base. Two attempts of the Chavez forces to build a social base from above were in the labor movement and in the creation of the community councils.

Community Councils

Marta Harnecker writes:

“Since, in Venezuela, the inherited state didn’t make enough room for popular protagonism, Chavez had the idea of encouraging new forms of popular organization and began to transfer power to them….One of the most original creations of the Bolivarian revolutionary process was the communal councils, which gave decision-making on a range of matters to the inhabitants of small territorial spaces.”

“The Law of Community Councils was approved without any input from the grassroots,” Uzcategui points out.

Creating the Community Councils (consejos comunales) from above was a responsibility given over to army general Jorge Luis Garcia Carneiro, who announced a fund of $982 million for community council projects. Community councils are rather small in scope, grouping a maximum of 200 families in urban areas, 50 families in rural areas, and as few as 10 families in indigenous areas.

The Community Councils were not the first foray of the Chavez government into local governance. The first initiative was the creation of Local Planning Councils. Because these were given certain powers over local budgeting they were perceived as a direct threat by mayors and city councils. The mayors began to undermine these councils in various ways including appointment rather than election of the erstwhile community representatives.

Chavez got around the local elected government leaders by setting up the Community Councils with no relation to the local government. The community councils receive funds through a chain of regional and national committees that get their orders and funding ultimately from the office of the presidency. The community councils lack a horizontal form of association among them and are fragmented through their linkage directly to the state.

Uzcategui acknowledges that this program has resulted in many small-scale good works throughout the country, such as sports fields. But his argument here is that the Community Councils are a means to build a subordinate local movement, incorporated into the state.

Uzcategui cites the study of the Community Councils conducted by researcher and environmental activist Maria Pilar Garcia-Guadilla:

“The objectives and rhetoric from most of the political, social, and governmental actors about Community Councils do not correspond to practice,” Garcia-Guadilla writes. “While the president’s objectives and rhetoric concern empowerment, transformation, and democratization, the observed practices point to dependent clients, cooptation, centralization, and exclusion for political reasons.”

In her report (1), Garcia-Guadilla says that the dependence of the Community Councils on the executive of the central state mean that those whose projects fit in with “the president and his project receive promised resources while those who oppose him must pass through innumerable bureaucratic procedures that disguise the reason for the refusal to receive their final application” (my translation).

She cites a number of cases where Community Councils have become defunct because of lack of continued participation. In the town of Sucre, where there had been 150 community councils in mid-2007, a later report indicated that “40 percent were disabled…by defection of their members.”

As a member of a human rights organization that is concerned with problems of police and military involvement in extra-judicial killings, Uzcategui is particularly concerned with the policing and military functions assigned to the community councils. He points to a major meeting of community council representatives in Caracas that was sponsored by DISIP (the political police) and the concerns of the police and government authorities to make the community councils their “eyes and ears” in the local communities. Community Councils have also been pressured to integrate themselves with the initiatives emanating from the Chavista party, PSUV.

Uzcategui cites one of Garcia-Guadilla’s conclusions:

“The Community Councils…lack the capacity to enrich social and cultural identities, and to contribute to the pluralism of urban ways of life because they do not impel movement towards an autonomous, alternative, and pluralistic society, one separate from the state that” implements top-down control in the sphere of “social transformation.”

The study by Garcia-Guadilla is a good start to a critique of the Community Councils but I think Uzcategui would have made a stronger case if he’d provided more concrete case studies.

Unionism Top-down

Another top-down base-building strategy pursued by the Chavez government is the creation of labor organizations “from above and by decree.” This is another case where Chavez follows in the footsteps of the earlier top-down populism of the Acción Democratica. The Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) had originally been created in 1947 in a top-down fashion. AD instigated a union congress that created a CTV executive committee made up solely of AD party militants. “When Hugo Chavez assumed office,” writes Uzcategui, “his intent to control the labor movement was evident from day one.” In Venezuela a government body controls union elections. Elections for leadership of CTV were delayed for two years while Chavez’s forces built the Bolivarian Workers Front as an internal electoral caucus in the CTV. Huge state resources were deployed in the campaign to gain control of CTV. A mass meeting was held in the Caracas Polyhedron — a large venue — and “participants were transported from all over Venezuela in thousands of buses.” Despite these efforts, the Accion Democratica slate won the elections.

After that defeat, the Chavez forces then moved to create a new union federation, Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT — National Union of Workers). When UNT was created, all of its directors had been appointed from above. According to leftist union current Opción Obrera (Labor Option), “there were few authentic directors from a labor background.” A congress was not called for three years. In 2008 Opción Obrera wrote,

“The internal crisis of UNT persists and worsens to this day….The pro-government CTV practices that were criticized are now being repeated by the leaders of UNT who deliver themselves unconditionally to the government.”

The incorporation of labor organizations into the Chavista party, PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), has been another tactic for control of the labor movement. In March 2007 Chavez said in a speech:

“The unions should not be autonomous…It’s necessary to do away with this.”

Orlando Chirino is a revolutionary socialist and former unionist in the textile industry who was the first National Coordinator of UNT and a leader of one of the leftist tendencies in it: Corriente Clasista, Unitaria, Revolucionaria y Autonoma (Class-conscious, Unitary, Revolutionary and Autonomous Current). Chirino had been active in the fight against the right-wing coup against Chavez in 2002 — in which CTV supported the right-wing opposition — and thus had gotten involved in the effort to form a new national labor organization. But he very quickly developed conflicts with the appointed directors and eventually broke with the Chavez movement. Chirino is particularly critical of the Chavez government’s dictatorial stance towards workers in the public sector, expressed in the unwillingness to negotiate with the worker organizations:

“I want to indicate the most important collective accords that have been violated. We’ll start with the public workers, approximately two and a half million workers. It’s been five years, from December 2004, since their contract standards have been discussed, and this is very grave. This has resulted in 70 percent of public workers being minimum-wage workers, which is to say that we’re a country of minimum-wage workers. It’s been three years since the educators’ collective bargaining agreement expired; the electrical workers, approximately 36,000 of them, had their contract expire last year; and the petroleum workers over the last ten years have lost important gains.”

Wages at the state oil company (PDVSA) were frozen from 2007 to 2009 while inflation was 66.5 percent. Uzcategui quotes an oil worker (from the leftist website laclase.info) on the result: “Many workers hold second jobs such as taxi driver or cleaning product salesman.” This oil worker mentions other problems at PDVSA:

• Failure to supply safety equipment
• Elimination of overtime pay
• Inequities and discrimination in payment of wages
• Criminalization of labor demands by the workers

The government has also refused to allow new elections for union representatives at PDVSA. About a year ago I interviewed another member of the El Libertario collective, Rodolfo Montes de Oca. He is a young lawyer who was working at that time with the radical oppositionists in the oil workers union (anarchists, Trotskyists, and so on). He says they had  petitioned five times for new union elections and each time they were denied. He said the head of the union was not regarded as very effective by the radical workers. He believed that the government wouldn’t allow a new election because the union head was a Chavista.

The Caracas Metro provides another example of Chavez labor policy. The workers there had held negotiations with the government representative for a year and a half and reached an agreement. But Chavez and his new director of the Metro refused to accept the new agreement. If they were to strike, Chavez said he would militarize the Metro and fire the workers. The Chavez government had two police agencies, DISIP (the political police) and DIM (military intelligence) participate in these threats. Community councils were mobilized against the Metro workers as well. Chirino describes what happened then:

“And so, without consulting with the workers,…the directors of the union who were members of the PSUV [Chavez's party] went along with the government demands and rolled back most of the previous gains won.”

In his interview with the author, Orlando Chirino says that in his 34 years in the labor movement, he’s “never seen the extreme to which we’re arrived today with the criminalization of protests….For example, when you’re…handing out flyers at a factory gate,  speaking through a megaphone, participating in an assembly, they use the repressive bodies of the state to detain the leaders, take them to jail, and while in jail they accuse them. This ends up with union militants being prohibited from going near the businesses where they do their political work, under the legitimate rights of free expression and organization.”

Partial De-nationalization of Energy Resources

Uzcategui points to the partial de-nationalization of Venezuela’s energy industry under Chavez as an example of Chavez’s accommodation to capitalism. An oil industry expert who Uzcategui quotes at length is Pablo Hernandez Parra. Hernandez Parra had been jailed back in the ’60s for his participation in leftist armed struggle groups. He was a founder of the Marxist-Leninist group Bandera Roja (Red Flag). He became part of a group set up in 2002 to defend the state petroleum industry at the time of the employer and CTV strike against Chavez. At that time the bloated managerial bureaucracy at PDVSA — Hernandez Parra calls them the “meritocracy” — were participating in the strike. According to Hernandez Parra, the introduction of “mixed enterprises” in the oil and gas sector since then is a change that is taking place “behind the backs” of the workers at PDVSA.

Since the nationalization of the oil industry in 1976, and until the Chavez government, PDVSA’s relationship to the big private oil companies had taken the form of simple service contracts: The government paid for services while continuing as the absolute owner of all oil and gas produced.

The introduction of “mixed enterprises” is an innovation of the Chavez government. These are companies that typically have 51 to 60 percent ownership by the state and the major energy firms own the rest. During the ’90s, politicians in Venezuela had said it was necessary to involve the multi-nationals to increase oil revenues, but it wasn’t til the election of Chavez that “mixed enterprises” were created. This arrangement allows ownership and profits to private energy firms. For example, Chevron boasts that it is the largest private producer of oil in Venezuela. In Zulia state it has partial ownership in the mixed enterprises Petroboscan and Petroindependiente. In Anzoategui state Chevron is the private partner in another mixed enterprise, Petropiar, which produces heavy crude and refines it into synthetic petroleum. Chervon also has various offshore operations, and the government has also invited Chevron to participate in a rail line to carry liquified natural gas.

For the old guerrilla, Hernandez Parra, the Chavez government’s mixed enterprises implement “the empire’s petroleum policy.” He described the concessions granted for mixed enterprises as “the greatest delivery in the country’s history of petroleum, gas and coal concessions” to the trans-national companies.

“Socialist” Maquiladora

In May 2009 Chavez announced that the government would set up a factory to produce cell phones with many features and sold at the low price of $15. “This telephone will not only be the best seller in Venezuela, but in the world.” Cell phones are very popular in Venezuela and are, says Uzcategui, a status symbol in third world countries. The cell phones would be produced by a Vetelca. Vetelca is another “mixed enterprise.”

According to the Minister of Science and Technology, Jesse Chacón, the Vetelca plant “is a model of socialist production with ‘integral’ workers who perform different jobs on a daily basis, in order that each will know the steps of the production process and the complete function of the plant. In addition, they participate in the planning of the production process, which clearly shows the difference between this and the capitalist model.”

To reduce labor costs to the minimum, Vetelca followed the path of so many high-tech companies to China. The parts are produced in China and assembled in Venezuela. This talk of “integral labor” is merely a cover for the multi-tasking that is a common feature of the Toyota or “lean production” model of capitalist production. This was merely an assembly operation, using parts made in China. The labor itself did not require lengthy training. As Uzcategui put it, the plant “is a simple maquiladora that serves the needs of the state cell-phone company.”

Workers were asked to do long overtime because Chavez wanted 10,000 phones ready for Mother’s Day. According  to one of the workers at the plant, Levy Revilla Toyo, “It was necessary to labor far into the night; this labor was done without logistical preparation, which caused dismay among some comrades because of lack of nourishment and trouble with transport.”

The law on working conditions approved by the government in 2005 allowed for the election of safety delegates and three were elected at the Vetelca factory. On July 7, 2009, however, Vetelca fired eight workers, including the three safety delegates who had been elected at a worker assembly.  Later, Vetelca management asked the National Guard to protect the plant from the workers. The company fired 56 workers who were forced to sign resignation letters to obtain their final pay.

In fact  these workers were fired for trying to form a union at the plant. The manager of Vetelca said this to the press: “These fifty-six persons had the intention of creating a union…and with an aggressive, instigating attitude.” The manager also stated that the company was going for form a “security” group “because in a socialist enterprise there’s no room for the word ‘union’.”

A Fragmented Health Care System

Uzcategui describes the Chavez initiatives in health care as the most important of the “Missions” established by the government. The idea is to have medical personnel living in the communities they serve (hence the name “Barrio Within”), create a network of people’s clinics, and provide high-quality diagnostic centers. Uzcategui cites a report by a non-profit that notes an inequity in the distribution of resources between different parts of the country with a very high concentration of doctors and resources in the capital district (where Caracas is located).

According to a report by Marino Alvarado, the coordinator of the human rights organization PROVEA:

“Since the government proposed Barrio Within, PROVEA has supported it; but it doesn’t appear to be an adequate program….The nationality of the doctors doesn’t matter to us but rather that they be where the poor people reside. However, Barrio Within has been manipulated to not only engage in health care but also in political proselytization. The government promised to construct thousands of health modules in the country, but has constructed only half of them….But it’s necessary to emphasize the positive in the government’s policy of providing free health care….For us, the problem is the limited coverage.”

However, the Barrio Within program is separate from the traditional system of public hospitals. This has created a fragmented system of health care with resources stacked in favor of the programs initiated by the Chavez government. People can go to a local clinic if they have a broken bone, or fever but they have to go to the underfunded, understaffed public hospitals for more complex procedures.

A hospital worker interviewed by Uzcategui is Johan Rivas, who works at Dr. Jose Ignacio Baldo Hospital. Rivas is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Collective. Rivas points out that the health care Missions “have the same bureaucratic structure as the traditional system, a system constructed from the top down where there’s no true participation of those below….The communities only advise and the workers have no say.”

Rivas believes that the funding and emphasis has shifted to creation of a parallel system because the old health care system “is a refuge for the political opposition — most of its managers are tied to the opposition parties.”

A large number of the workers at the hospitals are hired on precarious individual contracts. Says Rivas:

“I can cite cases of women who were discriminated against because they became pregnant, and so had to abandon their contracts. Infirmary workers who’ve worked three or four months receive their wages a month or two late….People wait up to two years for a contract and permanent and receive pressure…not to participate in such-and-such a political organization…..There are presently more than 25,000 workers in the health sector in Caracas and more than half of them are” temps.

Meanwhile, the government refuses to negotiate with health care worker unions. Says Rivas: “Health care workers, in the case of common laborers, have worked for 15 years without a collective bargaining agreement. The other workers have worked for five years without an agreement The government  has not had a policy to improve the quality of life for health care workers.”

As result of their criticisms of the Chavez government, Johan Rivas and the Revolutionary Socialist Collective have been labeled “counter-revolutionaries” by the Chavistas. This behavior is part of the polarized “us versus them” dynamic in Venezuelan politics. Uzcategui calls this tendency a “false dichotomy” because it crowds out and suppresses other viewpoints. But the ability of ordinary people and participants in social movements to debate freely and develop their own path, from the bottom up, is necessary for the autonomy of social movements.

Social Movements as Revolutionary Subject

Top-down state initiatives, a movement headed by a charismatic caudillo (top-down leader), benefits provided to dependent clients, attempts to control and coopt unions and other social movements, hundreds of military officers holding posts throughout the government, repression towards those who stray outside the permitted path — these elements suggest that the Bolivarian Movement is following in the tradition of Latin American populism. For example, the “revolutionary nationalism” of General Lazaro Cardenas, president of Mexico in the ’30s, also included “socialist” and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric and an occasionally pugnacious stance towards the USA — for example, violation of the Neutrality Act in giving support to the Spanish Republic or nationalization of the oil companies. But the “revolutionary nationalism” of Cardenas was no threat to Mexican capitalism. On the contrary, the Mexican “revolutionary nationalist” leaders crushed the independent, revolutionary labor movement of the syndicalist CGT — a significant service to capitalist interests.

Uzcategui suggests that a rising level of protests and demonstrations in the last couple years shows that the social movements in Venezuela are beginning to recover their autonomy. Populism is a danger to the autonomy of social movements as it works to incorporate and control such movements through the party and state structures and clientelist relationships. For Uzcategui, autonomy is essential for social movements if they are to be the basis for a liberatory transformation of society. We can think of autonomy as both independence from parties, the state and top-down forms of control, and also the ability to plan out and decide on their own course of action through the self-management of movements by their participants. Uzcategui sees autonomy as necessary if movements are to develop the “combativity” to challenge the existing order and press for changes.

However, he rejects a class struggle perspective as somehow no longer valid for the anti-capitalist struggle and substitutes the vague idea of the “multitude” — drawn from Hardt and Negri’s Empire — as his conception of the revolutionary subject. If we acknowledge the diversity of the various social movements and forms of oppression, there is then the question of how these can come together and form a unified force to challenge the powers-that-be. A weakness of Uzcategui’s perspective is that he never addresses this. Uzcategui doesn’t consider the idea of the various oppressions and movements as still within the ambit of the working class, and thus capable of forming a working class alliance.

The Dual Character of Self-management

In her interpretation of the Bolivarian “revolutionary process,” Marta Harnecker presents a concept of transition to self-managed socialism in which the bureaucratic, “inherited state” co-exists for a long time with what she describes as a “new state.” “New state” is her term for the emergence of the new system of neighborhood councils and worker councils that would be the basis of control by the masses over the work, their communities and the society. She writes:

“The fact that the state institutions are run by revolutionary cadres, that are aware they should aim to work with organized sectors of the people to control what the institutions do and to press for transformation of the state apparatus, can make it possible…for these institutions to work for the revolutionary project.”

This is in reality the old idea that somehow the liberation of the oppressed and exploited can be brought about from above by enlightened leaders controlling the state. What we see in the case of the Bolivarian Movement, on the other hand, is how these “revolutionary cadres” in control of the state work to coopt and control social movements.

A self-managed socialist society is not likely if it isn’t a conquest won by self-managed mass organizations of the oppressed and exploited. Thus self-management has a dual character: self-management of struggles for change, and self-management of the gains won through struggle.

Through self-management of struggles within the capitalist society, against employers and in other areas of oppression, people change and gain various capacities….increased commitment and organizing skills, increased knowledge of the system and of other groups in struggle and their issues. Self-management of movements itself is developed through struggle because because people learn the importance of controlling their own movements. Self-managed, organized mass movements are needed if the oppressed and exploited are to develop vehicles through which they can control — self-manage — the process of change and the building of new institutions through which they can power. For example, actual worker control over the production process is not likely to come about except through a workers movement that has developed the aspiration for more power and the capacity to run its own movement.

Uzcategui quotes with approval the well-known passage from John Holloway:

“If we rebel against capitalism it’s not because we want a different system of power, rather it’s because we want  a society where power relations have vanished. You can’t construct a society without power relations through conquest of power. Once you adopt the logic of power, the struggle against power is already lost.”

But this is a very misguided way of looking at the process of social liberation. Liberation from capitalist domination and exploitation can’t happen if workers don’t gain the power to control the industries where they work. Liberation from the state and various forms of oppression also requires re-organizing decision-making power so that the oppressed gain the power to make the decisions that affect them. This is not elimination of “power relations” but a change in the way power is organized. Authentic popular power is itself a form of social power.

Throughout this history workers have wielded the weapons of Solidarity and Direct Action in order to protect and advance their own interests. With strikes, sabotage, and other actions workers’ have stood up for each other ever since the bosses started exploiting them in the first place. Often during these struggles, the workers would be abandoned and condemned by there own Union leaders and left demoralized and forced to either carry on the fight by themselves, or capitulate to the boss. Even today, with millions out of work and rapidly deteriorating workplace conditions, Union leaders often appear more interested in the next election cycle than they are with the real concerns of their shrinking membership base. Worse than that, they seem to have completely forgotten the millions of workers who are unorganized, and must face the boss totally alone. With bosses taking full advantage of “hard times” by putting our working conditions in a “race to the bottom”, and the old unions no-where to be found, perhaps its time to build a new labor movement.

This movement will have to be unafraid to flex the muscles of Solidarity and Direct Action to win demands and protect the interests of workers. It cannot allow itself to be divided by Craft and Trade like the old unions, and will have to banish from its midst racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination for these blights on humanity only serve to isolate workers from each other, a situation very favorable for the boss. Most importantly, it must aggressively seek to reach out, mobilize and organize the millions of “unorganized” workers. If the movement expects to see any success, it will have to throw out the old idea of the “unorganizable worker” found in minimum wage part-time service sector jobs, and working as “temps” on construction sites and offices.

This kind of movement cannot be instituted from the top-down, and cannot have bosses. The movement will only defend the interests of the rank and file workers for as long as the rank and file control it from the bottom-up, democratically. In order to grow strong roots it will need room to include not just current wage workers, but all those  that where, those that will be, and those that labor without pay. Simply put, all those folks who find themselves powerless in this chaotic society must work together to forge a new one. It must mirror in its’ structure the kind of society we wish to build, one empty of hierarchy and full of democracy.

Perhaps you’ve found the crumbs, however frequently dropped from marble tables, never seem to fill your empty stomach. Let it be known that others have tired of the crumbs as well, and wish to get the whole cake instead. Feel free to contact us to learn more about how to fight your boss at work, to find out more about and anarchism and working class struggle, or just to discuss the situation further.

Workers Solidarity Alliance
Labor Commission
wsany@hotmail.com

I have recently been reading Murray Bookchin.  AK Press put out a wonderful collection, titled Post-Scarcity Anarchism, of ten of his works, including essays and discussion pieces on them, and a collection of letters and observations.  Bookchin is a touchy topic with some, because as most are aware, he moved away from anarchism later in his life, supporting what he called “communalism.”  None-the-less, all of these texts are from no later than 1970, when he was in his prime as an anarchist and, I contend, a leading theorist of the time.  In the first three essays of the collection (“Post-Scarcity Anarchism”, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”, and “Towards a Liberatory Technology”), he would define the revolutionary need for an ecological perspective, and not without controversy.

One must not take Bookchin out of his historical context, and to do so makes his works an enigma.  Most of these essays were penned between 1965 and 1968.   This must be kept in mind when reading his works, which make references to “free love,” the hippies, and the lifestylism of the time.  He has many praises for these things, which many dismiss now, but in the sweeping social changes of the 1960s they could be seen as positive occurrences.  Following the repressive social relations of the 1950s, it truly must have felt like a breath of fresh air to those who lived through these times – an explosion of sexual freedom, feminist and queer theory, and the civil rights movement.  All these things, from experiments in communal living, consensus decision making, rioting and mass insurrection, contain lessons that we continue to pull from today.  Bookchin took them in a critical light, used the parts he respected and applied them to his ecological-anarchist perspective in a pragmatic way.

Bookchin’s position on ecology was ahead of its time.  He believes that much of the failure of earlier socialist movements was precisely because of their lack of this perspective.  The earlier Marxists and anarchists believe in a society that was based solely around industry, glorifying work and toil, but he tempers this critique by attributeing this attitude to the lack of development of productive forces at the time.  This deterministic attitude would have us believe that it was not possible for there to be a human community during the industrial revolution, because goods were not in abundance (or, unable to be in abundance).  He does not speak to whether he believes it was possible to achieve a communist society before hand, but he does praise the feudal era for its intimate attachment to the land.  Despite this, Bookchin’s central point is correct: communism requires new forms, new relationships with both land and industry.  Compared to many Marxists and anarcho-syndicalists, who see workers’ self-management as the end in itself, Bookchin sees this as the beginning of a new human community.  In this we can see the beginnings of a critique of self-management as a total end and Bookchin begs the question: what exactly will we self-manage?  A society solely based on the self-management of exploitation appears only liberatory on the surface, but because it is still a society of labour and toil (but “self-managed,” naturally), it does not abolish the alienation that these forms create.  In addition, it does not break down the division between humanity, nature, and work.

The essay “Towards a Liberatory Technology” describes the changes in technology that were occurring throughout the 1960s.  Namely he speaks to automation and computers.  An unfortunately large portion of the essay is devoted to technical information on technology, which I have no interest in and has little contemporary use.  While, as stated before, Bookchin unleashe a criticism of Marxism and anarchism focusing on and glorifying toil, this essay tends to be the weakest of his three in the collection on ecology.  I believe this is because, as having seen the deployment and use of the liberatory technology he describes, I can certainly say his predictions were wrong.  Rather unfortunately, we are able to see first hand that technology has been recuperated as another source to enhance the process of capitalist accumulation, which is reminiscent of Marx’s warning in capital of the immiseration of the proletariat.  Furthermore, this assertion that technology is in itself liberatory and necessary for a post-scarcity society are shaky.  A major gripe of mine with his work is that he provides no evidence that it is not possible to have a post-scarcity society, or even communism, without automation or computers.  Perhaps at the time it would not have been possible for him to predict the waste these technologies would create and the alienated forms of communication they would create, but regardless these things have become reality for modern capitalist society.

What he saw as liberatory, or having the potential for being so, has, in reality, been turned against the proletarians.  Recuperation is a concept put forward by the Situationists, who Bookchin did keep up with (since he references Guy Debord at least once), and is a concept that states the existing order will take radical ideas and turn them against the pro-revolutionaries.  Recuperation is what has been done to these technologies.  They could be used to reduce toil, but certainly not in the market economy.  Perhaps Bookchin did not mean it was, but he does not make this point clear, and uses the idea of liberatory technology to support his bizarre economic determinism, almost as a justification for the continued existence of capitalism.

I do not bring these issues up, though, to shoot down everything in Bookchin’s entire theory.  In his ideas on freedom, I find his analysis correct and moving.  He puts forward the belief that the ability to abolish scarcity is now a precondition to freedom… that while humans are incapable of getting all they need, and the required sacrifice through labour, they cannot truly be free.  In this, we can find echoes of the communist call for the abolition of value.  In addition to this, his visioni for an ecological anarchist society was, I believe, ahead of its time and has an important place in the way which “red anarchists” and communists consider the natural world and its place in a communist society, without delving deeply into the wasteland of primitivist thought.  A term brought up often in his writing throughout these essays is the need for a “well-rounded man” [sic] – which seems to reconcile the apparent contradictions of a deep relationship with nature, and the need for automation and technological advance.  It does this by suggesting that ones livelihood cannot be restricted to one avenue (ie, just agriculture or just industry).  This is, of course, tied into the idea of the abolition wasteful work that is created by a national division of labour.  In refreshingly novel terms, Bookchin has put forward some of the classic ideas of true communism – that of transforming our relationships with work, land, production, and play and not merely substituting one form of management for another.

Part 2 of 2 (Read Part 1 here)

By Nate Hawthorne

Preface

This paper is as finished as I have the ability to make it, which is to say, not very finished. I wrote the discussion paper largely to think through some issues that have been on my mind. I would very much love feedback on it or responses to it. Feedback about improving the writing would be nice but even better would be input about the ideas – or better yet, writing stuff on your own ideas on any of this. You can reach me by email at crashcourse666@gmail.com.

Before you read the paper please think about these questions. These may seem really obvious but I for one sometimes struggle to answer them. Why does fighting bosses matter? Why does it matter to have a commitment to not only fighting bosses now but also someday ending capitalism? We talk a lot about direct action and about being a democratic organization, but why should anyone care about either of things?

Shared Interests And Mass Organizations Make And Remake Each Other

I have talked a lot about unions here and sometimes said “unions and other organizations.” My preferred term for these is “mass organizations.” A mass organization is not the same as a massive organization. That is, “mass” is not a matter of numbers. I once helped organize a committee of tenants in a building in Chicago where the landlord was doing loud, unsafe, and unsanitary construction work in the hallways. He wanted to drive tenants out so he could convert the building to condominiums. He wanted to drive them out by illegally by starting the construction while people still lived in the building. The committee touched off a rent strike and began to reach out to tenants in other buildings owned by the same landlord. There were maybe 30 tenants in the building. The group had maybe 10 people, with a few active people doing most of the real work. This was a tiny, limited group, but it was a mass organization.

As I understand the term, a mass organization is a combative organization that comes together around shared interests and takes action. “Shared interests” must immediately be qualified, because there are easy mistakes to be made otherwise. Interests are simultaneously things that exist that people can be made aware of and things to be constructed and revised. To put this another way, we live in more than one world, or one world made out of many layers which can inform and foster different perspectives. From one perspective, all working class people have an interest in ending capitalism because capitalism is a system that is bad for all working class people (though of course not equally so). From another perspective, many working class people have an interest in capitalism continuing because they benefit from aspects of it, in limited and short term ways. At one level, there is what would be best for the working class. At another level, there is what the working class thinks is best. While it can be argued at length that one of these perspectives is true and the other is false, in a way they are both true. And both of these perspectives are, in a sense, moral perspectives. They are prescriptive perspectives that are just as much about how the world ought to be as they are about how the world really is. To draw a parallel, think of someone addicted to some substance like alcohol or cocaine. For some people this is an abstract example, for others, we have (or we are) real people in our lives who have wrestled or still wrestle with this difficulty. Anyone who has been or watched a loved one and perhaps tried to help a loved one in the struggle with addiction knows that the person is better off if they can stop using the substance, if they can get their drinking under control, and so on. This is in the person’s interest. At the same time, the person has an interest in continuing to use the substance: it feels good; it is likely bound up with their social life and their friendships, such that changing their use of the substance will have an impact on their relationships. For some, substance use is a way to cope with other problems that they will have to face directly if they change their substance use. The person has two interests which are in tension or contradiction with each other. We can, if we like, say that their true interest is in changing their substance use and that it’s not really in their interest to continue their current substance use, but this means very little. When we say “their true interest is to do XYZ …” what this primarily means is “we very much want them to do XYZ.” Expressions of interests are as much or more about the world as we want it to be as they are about the world as it is. Of course, we exist in the world as it is. The way we want the world to be shapes our view of what the world is, and what we think the world really is shapes our view of what the world ought to be.

Thus, to say that mass organizations gather around shared interests means that mass organizations gather around shared understandings of the world and shared understandings of what the world should be like. This is too general, of course. More particularly, mass organizations gather around an understanding of the world that has a wide level of agreement and doesn’t require a very complicated explicit articulation to exist. In reality, mass organizations do have very complicated understandings of the world, but this is rarely, if ever, conscious or explicit. As an analogy, think about catching a baseball. Catching a baseball involves a complicated set of processes – watch the ball, where it currently is; predict where the ball will be; be conscious of where one’s body is in space now; predict where one’s body needs to be in order to catch the ball… this involves data coming into the body and brain, data being sorted into relevant data (the speed of the ball, the direction of the wind) and irrelevant data (the color of the sky, the shouts of other people watching), being processed into information with decisions and estimates getting made, instructions going back to muscles. And in the meantime, one keeps breathing, one’s heart still beats… All of this happens, and little of it happens consciously as a result of direct decisions. Humans make history but not in an immediately conscious manner; this happens in much smaller scales than all of humanity, it includes individuals as well. The understandings of the current world and ideas about the future world and the decisions that people make as part of their participation in mass organizations are very complex, but few of them are conscious. To catch a baseball does not require knowledge of any of the above processes. Likewise to be part of a mass organization does not require explicit awareness of the value systems and complex mental work that goes on as part of being part of the mass organization.

The shared understanding that people have of the world as they group into mass organizations are often general in the sense of wanting things like fairness and justice and happiness, or having more control over life. These things are subject to a huge variety of interpretations, including contradictory interpretations. More than generality, some people in mass organizations tend to be involved around localized and specific concerns: “I want this particular problem in my particular workplace to be alleviated and being part of the organization is a way to help make this so.” Sometimes involvement is about anger more than a vision of alternative: “I am outraged at this problem, it is unacceptable, so I will be part of this organization who accepts my outrage and will act on this problem.” Other people are involved for more abstract, and, in my view, better reasons: “The problems I have will only be solved through collective means; I want all of us to have more power so that all of us can have better lives; I will not have the better life I want unless all of us have more power.” All of these sorts of reasons and others can co-exist and people often change their minds. People are complicated, contradictory, and dynamic.

Mass organizations do not just gather people around shared understandings as they currently exist. Mass organizations also shape the understandings of the people they involve. To put it another way: mass organizations are made of people. Mass organizations are people who come together around shared understandings of how the world is and ought to be. In mass organizations, people take action together on the world as it is, motivated by understandings of how the world ought to be. In their interactions with each other and through their experiences of collective action, people’s understandings of the world as it is and as it should be can develop and change. To make a long story short: shared interests are in part made through mass organizations. As such, we should orient toward both shared interests as they currently exist and toward shared interests as we want to make them become. This is a balancing act, but we need both. To orient only toward what we wish to see happen is to have no vision of transition from the unacceptable present to the needed future. To orient only toward current interests is to pander and, perhaps, reinforce, elements of the present which continue to delay or deflect progress toward our needed future.

Shared interests are in part made by mass organizations in their activity. People often do not maintain one perspective which stays the same before they join an organization, while they join an organization, and while they participate in the organization’s activities and struggles. People change across those moments. So if people currently do not have radical ideas it does not mean that they will not.

We need to have a rich and dynamic understanding of “interests.” People often think mass organizations gather together around “economic” interests, by which they mean “more money” and similar things. That’s not the case. People gather together in mass organizations because of their outlooks on the world. Above all, for people to engage in combative behavior in mass organizations, they do not simply want lower rent or more money. They want value-laden things, like more time with family, more respect, a sense of dignity. These often translate into economic costs for employers. But fundamentally, mass organizations of the working class, at least to the degree that they matter for radicals, are about the ways in which the capitalist economy forecloses human possibility. (Of course, mass organizations can sometimes be conservative in their outlook  and in their effects: seeking or achieving only a different allocation of the foreclosure of human possibility, or to expand one group’s possibilities at the expense of another group’s possibilities.) The marxist writer E.P. Thompson put the point well:“The injury which advanced industrial capitalism did, and which the market society did, was to define human relations as being primarily economic.” Above all “the injury [that capitalism inflicts] is in defining [humanity] as ‘economic’ at all.” Working class people in struggle and in mass organization “desire, fitfully, not only direct economic satisfactions, but also to throw off this grotesque ‘economic’ disguise which capitalism imposes upon them, and to resume a human shape.” The term “direct economic satisfactions” might be better put as “narrowly economic satisfactions.”

These two impulses, toward “direct economic satisfactions” and toward throwing off, or at least, resisting, the grotesque economic guise into which capitalism casts human life, both exist within mass organizations. Mass organizations take actions around both of these aspects of human life under capitalism – not in the same way or to the same degree, of course; this varies by circumstance and location. Furthermore, in some cases, mass organizations can play a role in furthering the reduction of human life to narrowly (capitalist) economic forms, reinforcing the grotesque economic guise or at least abandoning objections to it in favor of more money. For example, in contract negotiation, a union might be forced to or choose to abandon a demand for safer staffing levels and more control over hours in order to get higher rates of pay. Or, there is sometimes an “obey now, grieve later” mentality which argues against fighting major injustices on the job when they occur in order to obey the law and prevent consequences. Mass organizations face tremendous pressures to behave in this way. Those pressures can be contested, however, to at least some degree. But if our perspective on mass organizations concedes too much ground to a narrowly economistic perspective – if we allow the money economy to predominate too much over the moral economy – we will have less to contribute toward pushing mass organizations away from exchanging more “directly economic satisfactions” in return for less efforts at pushing back the grotesque economic guise capitalism pushes onto our lives.

Failure to recognize that both of these elements exist in mass organizations is a failure to recognize that, in the words of the marxist writer Raymond Williams, “Practical consciousness” which  is to say, the actual consciousness of the working class under capitalism, “is almost always different from official consciousness (…) practical consciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what is thought is being lived. Yet the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms,” that is, to the official version of working class conscious which tend to privilege directly economic satisfactions over opposition to the reduction of our lives to economic factors and capitalist ideology which encourages this reduction, “is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange. Its relations with the already articulate and defined are then exceptionally complex.” As noted above, mass organizations are people grouped together around complicated understandings that are often not *consciously* complicated. These understandings overlap with, reinforce, contradict, and escape official working class ideology and capitalist ideology. Above all, these differences co-exist dynamically in the working class and in mass organizations. Mass organizations are both a product of and a shaping factor in these understandings.

Where Do Radicals Come From?

It may seem strange or simply dishonest to say that mass organizations express an interest in ending the grotesque reduction of human lives to a narrow economic calculus. In fact, though, many of us who see ourselves as radical have experienced this interest in action. That is, we have been part of moments where people have opposed aspects of life under capitalism in ways which begin to open onto the reduction of our lives to simply salable labor power.

A friend of mine talks about how his union has won grievances that apply to large numbers of workers, and the union officials have totaled up the dollar value of this grievance per person and said “look at this massive sum of money we have won from the employer!” This is true in a sense but it’s misleading: a grievance spread across 3,000 workers may add up $150,000 but that is only fifty dollars per worker, which sounds very different. It’s understandable why organizations will want to talk in large numbers like that, it sounds more inspiring.

Ultimately, though, for many of us who are committed to struggle at some level, the main sources of inspiration are not dollar amounts. The things that have gotten us fired up and kept us going are harder to quantify, mostly respect and dignity issues and workplace control issues. Those indignities have been really intolerable so we feel strongly a gut-level need to fight on them, and the aftermath that we carry with us is more than the experiences of the fight and the relationships we built in the process—it is more than the contents of the win. And when we do get fired up about the contents of the win it’s usually mixed and it’s usually about management having to eat crow more than it’s like “work is fine now” because work *isn’t* fine. That is: we are motivated more by opposition to the grotesque reduction of our lives to a narrow form economy and by attempts to limit this reduction, as well as the experiences of the fight and the relationships we build during it, than we are motivated by a desire for more goods and greater amounts of narrowly economic satisfactions.

We don’t really want money in exchange for our time and for the horribleness of being at work and being bossed around. We sometimes settle for that, and are sometimes asked to and sometimes the other side will raise the amount of money to get the settlement but… The equivalency in that exchange is a false one, the quid pro quo (“this for that”) doesn’t make quid (“this”) and quo (“that”) identical. Even if they’re rendered monetarily equal they’re not *really* equal. The employer, and more broadly the employing class, can be made to want to give money instead of our other demands, and there’s a reason why they want that.

What we really want is not the equivalent of our demand in money because what we *really* want is not really representable in monetary terms. You can’t buy what we really want, even if we might be willing to agree to undergo this shit for a sum of money, but that doesn’t really mean that the undergoing and the money are truly equivalent. There’s an element of this sensibility in every movie and TV show whenever someone shouts all melodramatically “I don’t want your dirty money, I want XYZ that I want!” There’s a fiction in some of the laws that cover injuries and that cover work and workplaces, about this equivalency that isn’t really an equivalency, the idea of being ‘made whole’ via being given a certain amount of money. We reject that, we’re not going to be made whole by more money — we’ll take the money if that’s our only option, but that’s not really what we want. Those of us who reject this capitalist world, many of us come to this understanding through things we’ve read. Experiencing groups of workers in action who share this rejection – however momentarily and however unclear it is articulated – is incredibly powerful, even for people who already thought this. And many mass struggles and mass organizations have this at least temporary recognition that the equivalency at the heart of capitalism – money for labor time – is a false on and a rip-off. A mass organization inscribing on its banner “abolish the wage system” can and should be a commitment to this perspective, a commitment to proceeding in mass struggle in a way that spreads this recognition among workers and which aims eventually to end capitalism.

What is a Fair Day’s Wage, Anyway?

The line from the IWW Preamble that rejects “fair” wages in favor of abolishing the wage system is an almost exact quote from Marx’s Value, Price, and Profit. The passage from Value, Price, and Profit that the IWW Preamble quotes is worth looking at closely. Marx wrote that “struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities.” This means two important things. First of all, capitalism will always involve conflict between workers and employers. Secondly, these conflicts will usually revolve around fighting against continued lowering of wages, worsening of conditions, and layoffs. That makes attempts to achieve or maintain “fair wages” more likely.

Marx continues, saying that “[t]he working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market.” Marx adds later in this piece that “Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”

That is to say, fights about limiting the effects of capitalism are limited fights if they don’t become fights to end capitalism. Organizations that fight for “fair wages” are organizations that seek to limit what Marx calls “the encroachments of capital.” These organizations and these fights have important potentials but they are unavoidably limited unless they come to recognize the need to end capitalism and take steps to act on this need. This is why Marx argues that instead of being “exclusively absorbed in (…) unavoidable guerilla fights” with capitalists, workers need to consciously organize toward ending capitalism: “Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” Readers will no doubt see that that this is almost exactly the same line as the IWW Preamble, except the Preamble says “we” instead of Marx’s “they,” because the IWW was a working class organization as opposed to Marx’s position outside the working class.

This brings us to the issue of a fair wage. What is a “fair” wage? “A fair wage” is a contradiction in terms, like “deserved abuse” or “good injustice.” In capitalism, people can’t get many things we want and need unless we have money. There are really only two basic ways to get money: hire someone to produce something which you try to sell for a profit, or get hired by someone to produce something which they will try to sell for a profit. This is why no wages under capitalism can be truly fair (and we can ask, would there be wages under any other, better society?). This is because the basic arrangement, the starting point for it all, is already unfair. Under capitalism we are required to spend our time working for other people – if working class people don’t work for wages or find someone who works for wages who will share their wages with us – then we can’t get money and so we can’t get things we want and need.  Furthermore, the stuff the capitalists sell: workers made it. The capitalists’ profits generally come from the difference between the price they charge for the stuff we produce and what they paid us to produce the stuff.  That difference is inherently unfair.

Sometimes liberal or progressive capitalists and people who are in favor of capitalism will become concerned that wages are too low and conditions are too bad. This is because capitalists need workers. The capitalist class needs there to be workers tomorrow, and in ten and twenty years. Smarter capitalists and people who support capitalism sometimes realize that if wages get too low then workers may have a hard time coming back to work tomorrow.  You may know this from your own life, if you have ever dug through the couch cushions to find bus fare to get to work, or if you’ve had to work long enough hours or in bad enough conditions that your immune system crashes and you get sick and have to miss work. And if wages get too low then in the long term workers might not have enough money to provide their kids with the sorts of education and training that will make them be what employers will want in 10 or 20 years. That is, sometimes capitalists behave in ways that maximize profits in the short term but which have the potential to undermine the stability of the company or of capitalism as a whole in the long term. The recent global economic meltdown triggered by financial markets is another version of individual capitalists putting the short term goal of maximum profit ahead of the long term interests of the capitalist class as a whole.

Liberal or progressive capitalists and their supporters recognize that capitalists overall will be better off if there is a balance between the short term interests and profits of individual capitalists and the long term needs and interests of the capitalist class. This leads these progressives to call for fair wages. Capitalist “fair wages”– and really, would there be wages under any economic system other than capitalism? – means that individuals get paid enough so we can support ourselves in order to keep on working.  In the long term, “a fair day’s wage” means that the working class gets paid enough to keep having kids and raising them up so there continues to be a working class. From our perspective, as workers, of course we want more money for our work, not less. But we also need to recognize that higher wages and improving working conditions for some workers is often in the long-term interests of the capitalist class. This is why there are laws for minimum wage and health and safety. This also accounts for the motivation of some capitalists to support initiatives like universal health care– they want to ensure that there are healthy and productive workers available for the production of profit.

One of the most important dynamics in the capitalist system is that some sections of the capitalist class try to use the struggle of the working class to identify ways to reform the capitalist system in the long term interests of the capitalist class. That is, they use the working class’s struggle to identify places where capitalism needs a course correction, ideas for what this course correction would look like, and as a club to push stubborn capitalists into line with the over all interests of the capitalist class. Fights for fair wages, even fighting in a very militant way, often play this stabilizing role – they whack the capitalists upside the head with the need to preserve a basic level of well-being for workers, for instance. This is one reason why many countries give legal recognition to unions.

Historical Note

The part of the IWW Preamble I have been focusing on did not appear in the first version of the preamble adopted at the IWW’s founding convention in 1905. The line was adopted at the 4^th convention in 1908, the convention which resulted in the group around Daniel DeLeon leaving the organization. That convention added a whole new paragraph to the Preamble, as follows:

Instead of the conservative motto, ’A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,’ we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, ’Abolition of the wage system.’ It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

That convention also replaced the line “between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party” and with the line “between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system.”