NOVANEWS
However, I think we can also learn from the autonomist Marxists’ recognition that the current capitalist state is not monolithic or static. The state is the product of contradictory class forces, and since classes are constantly being composed and recomposed, the state can change and adapt, especially in response to pressures from below – from people like us.
Capitalism and the state are currently in a moment of crisis and transition. They are having trouble governing. This does not automatically mean that revolution is around the corner, and even if revolution happens this does not automatically mean the outcome will be anarchistic communization. But we need to recognize that the current state has its own set of problems, and that our enemies are not always united in some grand conspiracy.
Local and federal governments are allowing various corporations or ruling class factions to prioritize their own short term profits rather than investing in captalism’s longterm stability. We see this especially with the investments in trains carrying coal for export, instead of high speed passenger trains that could start to replace cars. We see it in the destablization of public education which allows various crackpot social entrepeneurs to market new products to “save” the system even while their products harm youth and make it more difficult to train the next generation of workers for the system.
We also see this tendency when companies replace workers with machines, even though this eventually causes their rates of profit to fall and creates a potentially rebellious population of unemployed people. We may see it in drastic form if the Trans Pacific Partnership is passed, reinforcing multinational corproations’ ability to sue local governments that try to regulate them. This could close off a whole range of reformist political strategies such as lobbying, petitioning, collective bargaining. Why lobby someone who doesn’t have the power to give you what you want?
All of this leaves the state and ruling class with less leeway to reproduce the illusion they represent some social contract or common good. That reality is both a cause, and an effect, of the creative rebellions that are happening here, and, more intensely, around the world.
“Grassroots” groups like unions, nonprofits, etc. that used to be locked into stable relationships with the state may increasingly find themselves having to freelance. This creates a new political terrain and we will need to learn to navigate it.
We will find ourselves betrayed, isolated, and crushed if we don’t remain independent of Sawant and the progressive union bureaucrats and social entrepreneurs who backed her election. But we will also find ourselves isolated and crushed if we abstain from future Occupy-like movements just because the last one produced a new socialist politician.
I’m noticing a number of my comrades are trying to maintain their anarchist credentials by flippantly dismissing Kshama as just another progressive Democrat. I think they’re bending facts to fit their dogmas. It is obvious that Sawant is sincere about fighting the corporate-controlled Democratic party machine; this is evident in her call to seize the Boeing factories and to put them under democratic workers’ control, and in her refusal to take corporate donations. But breaking from the Democrats alone is not enough to replace capitalism and the state with total freedom, and it creates new problems for us at the same time as it solves old ones. We can’t solve the new ones by claiming Sawant is just an old one.
We need to remember that the corporate status quo is not maintained solely by the two parties of the 1%. In fact, it isn’t maintained solely by the state bureaucracy. It is a product of social relationships that run throughout society – relationships that are continually reproduced and reinforced by hierarchal “grassroots” organizations like unions, nonprofits, religious groups, and activist groups. These shock-absorbers channel rebellious energy into safe cul-de-sacs where it won’t threaten the stability of the system.
The state doesn’t simply rule through brute force – if it tried to crush every oppositional movement, this would just piss people off even more and we’d rise up to overthrow it. I know the grand juries and all the killer cops can make it seem this way, but I doubt we are on the verge of martial law or general suppression of all radical activity. The state still rules through hegemony and counterinsurgency – through winning the hearts and minds of potential opponents, rendering them a loyal opposition. Some radicals call this tendency“social democracy”.
I’m not saying there is some grand conspiracy going on to brainwash us. Hegemony is always partial, tentative, contradictory, and dynamic. If the state aimed for total mind control it would become corny, obvious, and easier to mock. Usually it’s more subtle, and actually relies on everyday people creating new forms of incomplete rebellion ourselves, forms that can then set trends, allowing the system to market new, “edgy” commodities we can consume to blow off steam – everything from Kanye West’s appropriation of Black Block imagery to the corrosive proliferation of academic postmodernism through anarchist and activist subcultures.
Also, not all of these cooptation efforts are centrally coordinated and calibrated to effectively maintain the stability of capital as a whole. Again, some of them are simply efforts of various factions of capital to make a short term profit, and at times these short term motives will actually undermine overall capitalist stability by popularizing a culture of rebellion (e.g. movies like Elysium or the Hunger Games).
Other times, they undermine the overall hegemony by coopting a movement in a clunky way that is effective enough to avoid short term profit loss but not effective enough to prevent people from drawing radical conclusions over the long haul. Still other times, they attempt to directly make a profit off of people’s grievances, such as all the corporate education reform movements that promote Pearson, Inc.’s standardized testing products as a phony solution to the very real racialized inequality between Black students and white students in the public schools.
The most classic forms of hegemony are patriarchy and white supremacy – things like the sexual violence in the Occupy camp that fractured the movement, or the failure of majority white longshore workers in Seattle to support the majority African port truckers when they went on strike here in 2012. These are not just imposed from above; we re-generate them in how we relate to each other on a daily basis. The system convinces us to internalize the shock absorbers that allow capitalism to run right over our antagonistic gestures. When we see this happening, we shouldn’t fall into an abyss of guilt and conclude that we’ve failed and that no alternative is possible. All of this is part of living in a capitalist society, and we’re not exempt from it just because we’re radicals. But that’s also exactly why we want to destory capitalism. Race and gender oppression are social constructions, and like any construction site, they can be sabotaged.
For capitalism’s hegemony to work, the people who build the shock absorbers actually need a bit of leeway, breathing room to experiment at the grassroots level. Not every nonprofit worker or union organizer is a conscious social democratic hack. Some of them might be sincere revolutionaries, and others might just be good people trying to help out their neighbors. But at the macro level, these institutions operate by intertwining these good intentions with the constraints set by the system. In times of crisis, otherwise good people from these milieus are recruited into action to rapidly generate peace treaties that de-escalate struggles between the oppressed and the oppressors, the ruling class and the working class, the state and the ungovernable crowd. At that point, they become our opponents.
So, what all of this means is that if we want freedom beyond the two party system, we’ll need more than militant action in the streets. We’ll also need more than socialists in office. You can’t smash a social relationship like people smash windows. You also can’t vote it out of office.
We’ll need to break through these shock absorbers in a strategic and thorough way -and it will be a messy, impure process since the shock absorbers are intertwined with our daily lives and our very sense of who we are – so breaking through them is as much an act of social self-creation as it is an act of destructive transcendence. If we don’t do that, then any Leftward shift among elected politicians will remain largely symbolic and hollow, and militant actions in the streets will be easily isolated and contained.
In Seattle, the Democratic Party would have lost control back in the ‘60s or earlier if it hadn’t forged a mutual alliance with shock absorbing institutions like nonprofits, identity-based activist organizations, and unions. Sawant represents a break from the Democrats. But does she represent an erosion of these more diffuse forces of hegemony, or is she going to reinforce them in new ways?
