NOVANEWS
The years since the financial crisis have not been boring, especially here on the West Coast. Through strikes, occupations, demonstrations, and blockades, tens of thousands of us have created social possibilities with few precedents in recent history. However, all of these developments are fragile; we will forget what we’ve learned unless we keep putting it into practice. We need to stay dynamic, dodging the new obstacles that the system will encourage us to put in our own way.
An increasingly hollowed out state apparatus is having a harder time coopting street-level turbulence using the old carrots and sticks. The capitalist ruling class is finding itself unable to forge a consensus among its own members about how to stablize the system. This is both a cause, and an effect, of the actions we have engaged in here, and the rebellions that are breaking out around the world.
This shifting political terrain has made it possible for Kshama Sawant to win her recent election to Seattle city council.
But what does all of this mean for those of us who want to end capitalism altogether? What does it mean for those of us who want to nurture the fragile blooming of autonomy, communistic creativity, and direct democracy that has begun to emerge over the past few years?
Sawant’s election was only possible because the old systemic shock absorbers have worn thin and the ruling class has not yet reached consensus about how to build new ones. However, they are hard at work on this project, and we need to strike strategically against their prototypes as they try to build them.
If we want to do this, we will need to go much farther and deeper than Kshama’s campaign has gone (footnote 1). To facilitate that, I suggest we revisit some of the moments in the Decolonize/ Occupy movement that gave birth to her campaign in the first place (footnote 2). These moments are some of the horizons the next movement will need to exceed if it wants to remain un-cooptable.
This kind of analysis is not a matter of abstract political commentary. My goal is to make sense of the day-to-day political climate here in Seattle, a climate that may be emerging in other cities as well.
The day before Kshama’s opponent conceded the election, I was food shopping, and as I was checking out I chatted with the teller. Recently, he’s been talking about blue collar rebellion and was pissed that his union leadership just botched a potential strike. He knows I’m a member of Seattle Solidarity Network, which he respects because we fight bosses who don’t pay their workers, and we don’t ask any lawyers or union officials for permission. The minute I walked into the store, he shouted “Did you hear about Sawant? Looks like the king is dead”. He explained how he sees Sawant and Seasol as alternatives to the failed strategies his union has been pursuing.
This is the political climate in Seattle right now – people casually debate the merits of socialist and anarchist strategies in our daily lives. As a teacher, I walk into class some mornings and my students are discussing demonstrations they saw on the news the night before, demonstrations I couldn’t make it out to because I was busy organizing other demonstrations for the following week.
In a situation like this, where do we focus our limited energies? Here in the emerald city, there are a lot of glimmering political possibilities, but many of them could turn out to be empty spectacles. We need to choose carefully. But those careful choices we make may (at first) seem dangerously reckless – even to our friends, coworkers and neighbors who are beginning to consider themselves anti-capitalists.
