Parts 1 to 3 of this series were published on rabble
here and
here. These were not jointly written, though this part is. Part five, the final part, will follow.
I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I
the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember
feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question
is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle! -Alice in Wonderland
In the immediate aftermath of the failure of the Wisconsin Gubernatorial Recall Campaign, the
Globe and Mail
noted the results of a poll from the Pew's 2012 American Values
Survey. Specifically that there "are no indications of increasing
hostility toward the rich and successful... and there are no signs that
lower-income people have become more cynical about an individual's
power to control their destiny or the value of hard work." Further, the
Globe notes that, when offered the chance to opt out of
having their Union dues deducted, over half of the 63,000 members of
the Wisconsin wing of the American Federation of Teachers chose to do
so.
The outcome in Wisconsin should serve as a cautionary tale to those
involved in the student movement in Quebec, as well as other social
movements across Canada and around the world. It was an example both of
the defeat of a social movement, as well as an unsuccessful attempt by
an electoral force to co-opt that movement in order to achieve an
electoral victory. The end result will likely be a continuation of
policies designed to weaken organized labour within the public sector,
which, in North America, is one of its last bastions. In Quebec a
similar situation seems to be unfolding. Only 13% of Quebecers polled
support a tuition freeze. Support for Solidaire Quebec, the left-wing
political party, remains in single digits.
In analyzing not just the Wisconsin defeat, but the broader shifts to
the political right that have been effected in public policy over the
last several decades, there is one simple reason why this has
happened: the forces of the right have been winning battles in public
opinion, and have translated those into victories in the electoral
process. Nobody forced over half the Wisconsin teachers to opt out of
their Union. The cuts to welfare rates in Ontario were not done
through trickery or deceit. Anyone who studied the Reform Party in its
infancy could hardly have been surprised by the EI changes now being
proposed by the Canadian federal government. The cries about the 1%
that supposedly control our society ignores the obvious fact that, in
the democratic world, the weakening of the welfare state was chosen by
a majority of its citizens. That this choice turned out to produce
results which were the opposite of what was claimed should not make us
overlook the fact that people were acting on what they perceived to be
their self-interest. These changes were not imposed upon us from
above. We did this to ourselves.
How does one undo the damage of the previous several decades? How
do we intend to attain and maintain power? How do we foresee the
transition from the economics of today to the economics of a more just
or equitable society? How do we ensure that the power relations and
patterns of the past do not reassert themselves? How do we overcome the
reality that most Canadians are not ready for a genuinely
revolutionary transformation of social relations?
If we do not answer these questions then there is, in reality, no movement.
Notions that "we are changing the world" through mass expressions of
"love" or "solidarity" (with what, exactly?), while making
participants feel a part of something "bigger", don't actually mean
very much. Car commercials say they are going to change the world.
Presently, there are two key problems facing left-wing political
movements, both of which are related. The first relates to our own
understanding of current political-economy. Within the modern left,
and in particular in the Canadian context, there has not been a serious
attempt to provide a concrete analysis of Canadian political economy.
A fundamental error that underlies much of the thinking on the left,
is the notion that we live in a free-market capitalist society,
dominated by neo-liberal economic thinking not only in theory, but in
practice. We do not. The notion of a free-market system, unencumbered
by the hand of government is no more real than a unicorn. All
societies display characteristics that are both socialistic and
capitalistic and the failure to provide an analysis that describes the
day to day experiences of the working population, is a weakness for the
left.
Second, for much of the left, there is a confusion between tactics
and objectives. The purpose of a tactic in politics, is to alter the
power relationship between competing interests in society such that a
group can implement a particular political objective. The tactic is
only useful to the extent that it is able to accomplish this goal.
Voting, striking, engaging in boycotts, engaging in civil disobedience
are all tactics, not ends in and of themselves.
Because of these two critical failings, modern left-wing movements
and parties lack the ability to do much of anything, other than
protest and rage against changes that they are powerless to prevent in
any meaningful sense. They are, quite literally, standing athwart
history yelling "stop!", but to no avail. In practical terms, it means
that left-wing movements have abandoned the goal of implementing a
substantive political agenda, in favour of political theatre that is
presented as short-term tactical victories in the rare cases that they
do succeed.
Electorally, in Canada, we are assured that only a vote for the NDP, a
party that has all but abandoned any pretense to economic democracy,
can defend the interest of working people (which in Ontario, according
to the ONDP, counts as those earning less than $500,000/year). With
respect to social movements, since they have no ability to change the
law in the absence of an organized political wing, their battles
become, in effect public relations campaigns fought through the mass
media, a media that is usually owned by individuals hostile to their
interests.
Given that these movements are a reaction to laws or developments
that the participants oppose, entirely justifiably, they are by
definition limited in aims and reactive in intentions. Constructive
movements do not only know what they are against, they know what they
want to do about it and how they intend to replace it.
Wanting to do something is no substitute for actually attempting the
difficult and arduous task of developing political tactics and ideas
that will, in fact, "do something". Just because someone is resisting
"the system", for lack of a better descriptor, does not mean that their
actions are productive, meaningful or correct. Most criminal
behaviour, for example, is a function of social conditions that have
created individuals that can only resort to crime in order to survive.
That does not mean all criminal behaviour is, by definition, resistance
against austerity.
Further, by refusing to move beyond the "politics of the street",
these movements, by default, hand leadership and political power to
"left" mainstream parliamentary parties or "revolutionary parties",
(based, as we will see, around vanguardist ideas), that do, actually,
have an agenda and set of ideas as to what they intend to accomplish;
ideas which are principally centred around asserting and maintaining
their own power.
Within the electoral system, at least at the federal level in
Canada, all of the political parties accept the neo-liberal economic
framework, with minor modifications. For example, in the 2011
election, the federal NDP campaigned on a proposal to keep Canadian
corporate taxes lower than in the US, a position entirely consistent
with the previous 100 years of Continentalist economic strategy that
has dominated Canadian economics.
The empty sloganeering of the political parties, like throwing
stones at riot police or smashing corporate offices are not expressions
of power, but of powerlessness. They are not the actions of an
organized, popular movement on the verge of power, but rather their
last stand on the verge of being pushed off of the precipice. The
circumstances that have pushed individuals to this point are real, and
the reactions are understandable. However, slogans and rhetorical
sophistry are not a substitute for reasoned analysis and understanding.
How one thinks about the world is more important than what one thinks.
A person who faces the complexities of the current economic situation
with quotes from dead-philosophers, whether Marx or Hayek, is
contributing no more help to our current situation than a person who
spends their evenings watching professional sports. Marx once wrote
that 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways: the point, however, is to change it.' It follows that one cannot
change the world if one does not understand it. A political movement
that is attempting to effect change without an understanding of the
social, political and economic circumstances in which they exist, and
without a specific sense as to how it intends to change them will, at
some point, fail. It is only the circumstances of their defeat that are
uncertain.
The financial crisis that has began in 2007 with the collapse of the
US housing market was not the first financial crisis. There had been
stock market crashes in 1987, followed by a 4 year long recession
starting in 1989. The Asian market crisis in the late 1990s. There were
numerous crisis in Latin America throughout the 1990s. And of course,
there was the dot com bubble burst that occurred in early 2000. All of
these have been happening in the context of, in the west, state
retrenchment from certain types of economic activity, particular
through privatization of state corporations and reductions in spending
for social services. Because these policies are consistent with what is
proposed by neo-liberal economists, it has been assumed that what has
been happening is, in part, the result of a move towards a neo-liberal
society and that this has been happening the same way around the world.
This belief is not entirely correct.
There is no such thing as "laissez-faire" capitalism
A major source of confusion within left-wing movements comes from
the notion that the economy that exists in Canada, and elsewhere, is
actually laissez-faire Capitalist. Capitalism only exists as an idea.
There is no society in the modern world that operates in a
laissez-faire economic system, nor will there be for the foreseeable
future. The basic theory behind capitalism is that there is something
called the free-market which functions as a kind of feedback control
system for the people who are affected by it. The information that it
feeds back are prices. By communicating prices to people, they are able
to make rational decisions about economic activity, whether it is what
groceries to buy, stocks to purchase on market exchanges or what kind
of new products to develop. All of this ensures that money circulates
in such a way that encourages economic growth for everyone, if not
entirely in an equal way.
One can debate the relative merits of organizing a society along
such lines. However, there is one fundamental problem with this model:
it does not exist in the real world. One of the results of the
industrial revolution was the need to expend large amounts of money on
machinery in order to mass produce goods and services. In modern times,
that money is also spent on computer hardware, software and other
electronics. Because of the large amounts of capital involved, the
ability to plan long term, several years in advance, becomes important.
Furthermore, as the cost of producing goods and services becomes more
expensive (save for computer software, which can now be transmitted
through wireless internet connections), the ability for large
industrial conglomerates to be challenged by start ups in their own
country is very difficult. The probability of a someone creating a new
automobile from scratch in their backyard, and commercializing it, is
so low as to be negligible.
With large conglomerates, their primary concern is to optimize
short term value for shareholders. As such, the easiest way to ensure
profitability, is to keep operational costs low, and profits high.
Because the concern is often for short term profit, this makes it
difficult for corporations to engage in pure research in science and
technology. This is often done at public expense, either through
universities, tax-credits for businesses engaging in R&D or,
particularly in the US, through military spending. Packet-switching,
which is one of the technological foundations for the internet was
developed by Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The early touch-screen
technology, now popularly used in Smart Phones, was first developed at
the University of Illinois in the 1970s.
All of this is to say that the type of economy that we live in
displays characteristics that are just as socialistic as they are
capitalistic, and it is a serious analytical error to describe it
simply as a capitalist economy.
In a sense, the difference between a hypothetical socialist economy,
and what we have presently, is not so much in the question of whether
or not the economy will be planned since all economies are, to some
extent planned, but rather, who will be doing the planning.
That the modern economy contains a mix of planning, as well as
free-markets, is a source of confusion within left-wing movements,
particularly those whose intellectual origins are in, or influenced by,
Marxism. The reason for this confusion is that modern economies have
not evolved in the way that Marx predicted. The capitalism that Marx
analyzed has disappeared but it's disappearance did not lead to
Socialism - at least not in a way recognizable to any Socialist prior
to, say, the 1930s. As such, movements that have attempted to use
Marxism as a framework for analyzing modern political economy, run into
the obvious problem that Marx's predictions simply do not correspond
to reality.
All modern economies exist due to the relationship between business
and their respective governments. In the Canadian context we have had
two policies, the original National Policy of the MacDonald
Conservatives which sought to use tariffs to help develop industrial
Canada. Subsequently, Continentalism has been the policy since the
early 20th century which sought more direct economic ties with the US.
None of these strategies were entirely laissez-faire, although the
Canadian experience of industrialization is quite different from the
United States in a way that is not well understood by many Canadians.
Nor is globalization of the Capitalist economy a meaningful shift
towards the mythological capitalism of the free market. Instead, the
tendencies of global finance and industry trend towards greater
centralization and monopoly. The end of what might be seen as the
neo-mercantalist phase of protectionist capitalism has meant fewer
serious global players, not more.
The widespread popular and leftist misunderstanding of the nature of
the global state capitalist corporate beast could form the basis of an
entire separate essay. But, to some degree, what does it matter how
society functions if there is no coherent platform or transformative
agenda to alter it? If social movements have no political wing they
inevitably and always capitulate power to existing political parties.
And, if in part these "popular movements" and mass outbursts are a
reaction against traditional politics, how do we develop the ideas that
will prevent an almost immediate Thermidorian Reaction and a
re-implementation of the social disparities and injustices that we
sought to overthrow? How do we, as
The Who would have it, "not get fooled again".
The trouble with "leaders"
While noting the distinction between tactics and goals, one must
note that there is a relationship between tactics and ideas. The
tactics chosen by movements and, more broadly, how they govern
themselves internally matter because they indicate how a movement will
conduct itself once it has achieved power.
In the history of humanity there have been few concepts that have
been more devastating than the idea that, as human beings, we need to
be led.
This idea, the foundation of elitism, has transcended nation,
historical epoch, ideology and even specific forms of oppression. At
its heart, in whatever form it may take, it is always elitist, in that
its essence is the principal that human beings, as a species, and as
individuals, are incapable of civilized or meaningful collective
behaviour without some form of ruling class, whether it be kings or
queens, presidents or prime ministers, or revolutionary, intellectual
or social democratic vanguards.
The very idea of the need for a leader presupposes that most of
humanity is, in some way, incapable of collective self-governance.
Those who have sought to lead have always found some form of
justification for this. The supposed failings of "human nature" being
the foremost. (Though one must always note that if by "nature" as
humans we are likely to become corrupted as a collective, are we not
even more likely to become corrupted as individuals?) But, what we are
interested in in this short essay is not the totality of elitist
thinking, but rather of the impact, through both practice and ideology,
of elitist thinking on leftist movements in both their revolutionary
and reformist forms.
We can begin with the rather obvious observation that genuine human,
political, social and economic equality is not possible, in ways that
are easily demonstrable historically, within the bourgeois and
pre-bourgeois conceptualization of leadership.
Any movement seeking to change society needs to ask itself, how should society be led? And by whom should it be led?
Traditional leftist parties have answered this question in ways
entirely consistent with the society from which they emerged. Given
that, at heart, the idea is to overturn the social relations of this
society, there is an irony to this.
In addition, if, as the vanguardists have always stated, power must
always be the agent that allows for the overturning of the "old order"
and the introduction of a new society, why has this never occurred in a
way that bears any resemblance to what the "left" supposedly sought?
Why have all left governments become fixated on power as a goal in and
of itself?
Revolutionary vanguardism, the ultimate detour
"Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our
midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a
Secretary-General. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way
of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his
stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having
only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal,
more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious,
etc."
While belatedly, in the quote above, Lenin in his final days
understood the danger that Stalin presented, he never really understood
why he presented this danger, in that Lenin himself was the primary
force behind the creation of the vanguardist idea in pseudo-Marxist
thinking.
Stalin presented this danger for the precise reason that vanguardist
ideas allowed for the creation of an ideological and social context in
which Stalinism was not only possible but, actually, could be made to
appear to be historically, ideologically and even morally justified.
Stalinism may not have been an inevitable outcome of Leninism (from
which it only differed in degree, as other Leninist experiments have
proven) but it was a very likely one. We know this, among other things,
due to the fact that it was what ultimately transpired.
Within revolutionary vanguardism lie some of the most dangerous and
elitist principles that have ever flowed from what was meant to be an
alternative to bourgeois class oppression and social constructs.
Principles like historical inevitability; the inane and tremendously
dangerous idea that, somehow, what you are proposing is "scientifically"
guaranteed to occur at some point; and that, therefore, those who are
obstacles to this "inevitable" outcome, as with those who will be
denied rapture, are meant to be historically swept aside.
Beyond this, the notion that history has an inevitable outcome, when
conjoined with the Leninist idea that the broad section of the masses
are incapable of anything beyond what he called trade union
consciousness, and that, therefore, some elite and "enlightened"
vanguard was required to lead them out of the morass of their own
shortsightedness, has proven to be a devastatingly violent principle.
The Leninist and Vanguardist idea of social change and consciousness
is contemptuous of the ability of the "people" (or, more specifically,
the "workers") to develop ideas of self-governance. Hence, as early
as in
What is to be Done? Lenin states "the spontaneous
development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to
bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is
trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of
the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of
Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class
movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under
the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of
revolutionary Social Democracy."
In this same tract, the clearest outline of his astonishingly
elitist thinking, we find his infamous quip that, left to the people
themselves, their intellectual development to the point of being able
to achieve socialism would take 500 years.
These principles form the basis of an ideology that suggests that
people are little more than agents of history. The future is foretold,
the only question becomes how to get there. The Leninists purport to
understand that the collapse of capitalism is an inevitability that the
the workers themselves are not "aware" enough to fully foresee and
thus cannot politically embody due to their own narrow sense of
self-interest. Only the vanguard represents the political and human
class that has transcended trade union consciousness, thus quickly
becoming framed as the historical agent of the creation of a better
future.
Once you are an historical agent, you no longer need answer to the
day-to-day mundane concepts of human rights or individual and personal
dignity. You, as a member of the vanguard, are an historical catalyst
that seeks to create a society that the bulk of your fellow citizens, by
your own ideological admission, are incapable of realizing. You, and
your comrades, have become their leaders not in the traditional sense
that you may have been elected by them, or that you may have been born
into some idiotic statehood as a king or aristocracy of some kind, but
rather because you embody an historical fact that you have learned and
understood and thus you are its expression on the grand stage of the
human drama.
The trouble with such a view, and why it has always proven to be a
horror rather than an utopia, is that it regulates the individual and
civil society into an historically subservient role and creates instead
the entirely awful and false notion that individuals are either the
agents of the transformation in question or obstacles to it. And if
they are obstacles to history, if they doubt or attempt to speak out
differently than the vanguard that embodies the outcome that
"scientific socialism" has ordained, then what should become of them?
In addition, maintaining power for the presumably 500 years that it will
take to enlighten the "masses" becomes the fixation of the government.
Further, it takes the mass nature of revolution, by definition a
wildly democratic and chaotic event, and attempts to impose "order" on
it by claiming that this democratic expression of revolt can only lead
to one conclusion; a conclusion, conveniently, that the revolutionary
class has per-determined will be led by them.
We could now go into detail about what the crimes of the
revolutionary vanguardists have been, We could point out the almost
unbelievable horrors of the Stalinist era. We could seek to find the
individual cruelties of the many millions that disappeared into the
maelstrom that was Maoist China and the "Cultural Revolution". We could
seek to put names to the faces that litter the Killing Fields of
Cambodia.
Or as so many revolutionary leftists do, we could simply do what the
Right does when it is uncomfortable with reality and we can claim,
despite all the evidence, that there was and is something worthwhile in
the denial of basic freedoms and liberties that occurred and continue
to occur in Communist countries. After all, as leftists in Canada we
know what is best for these people, and we can still vacation in Cuban
resorts, thumbing our noses at the Yankees every time we do, while yet
another multinational sets up an hotel there open to everyone other
than Americans and the Cuban people themselves.
But, even beyond these facts, once you have embraced the idea of a
vanguard, a single-leader cum father figure is always the result. The
vanguard becomes embodied in one person, be it a Mao, a Castro or a
Stalin, and that person becomes the ultimate arbiter of what
constitutes the revolution.
There is nothing more patriarchal and centralizing than this, and,
one might point out, there is not a single case in revolutionary
vanguardist history where it has not occurred. Not one. In the case of
the Chinese Communists, for example, they have taken the vanguardist
pyramid scheme to its logical conclusion and have a created a society
that is, in fact, run by far less than 1% of the population, both in
terms of wealth and in terms of political power. The historical irony
of this should be more telling than it broadly seems to be.
In the end, once you accept that some people are above others, it
always turns out that one person or a very small group is above others
most of all. And basic moral and political corruption is never far from
there.
Social democratic vanguardism
Vanguardism certainly has not infected revolutionary thinking alone.
In fact, in every meaningful sense, all mainstream socialist and
social democratic parties have embraced vanguardist thinking as well,
in that they have eschewed the concept of mass movements as a motive
force for social change and they have, at the same time, embraced all
of the elitist and bourgeois nonsense and structuralism that
constitutes parliamentarianism.
They all accept the basic principle that defines bourgeois society;
the principle that people need to be led and that they are often
unaware of their own alleged best interests.
They have also embraced all of the possessive and patriarchal ideas
that directly flow from this thinking, in that these parties invariably
abandon their membership and ideals and replace them with electoral
machines run by a professional political class that seeks to express
itself in the figure of the leader that they have chosen to rise above
the others.
We could talk here about such parties in a global context, but we
must restrict ourselves to Canada, though the same comments could be
made of virtually every formally mass socialist and social democratic
party in the western world.
While the CCF and the NDP have always had leaders, and while the
party has always accepted the basic organizational structures that
flowed out of the Liberal revolutions of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century, the sense that the party was a movement that sought to change
Canada fundamentally and irrevocably was very pronounced in the
approach that the party took to politics.
This, very clearly, is no longer the case. There is no New Jerusalem
on the horizon. There isn't even a new Weyburn to be found.
In the last federal election the NDP became Jack Layton's NDP. The
possessive and personalizing aspect of this transformation was rather
startling, especially given that some on the neo-anarchist left had
chosen to disband the New Politics Initiative due to the allegedly
consensus driven leadership that Layton would supposedly embody.
But he embodied the exact opposite as it turns out. His leadership
represented the culmination of a trend within Canadian Social Democracy
that began with the expulsion of the Waffle and ended with lawn signs
that emphasized one person over an entire party and over what had been,
once, a truly inspiring set of ideas.
One could point out that the platform of Jack Layton's NDP was a sad
shadow of social democracy. It was very short on substantive ideas,
had no platform planks of any transformative value, and was to the
right of the Liberal platform in certain critical areas. While people
read into it what they wanted to, the reality of its capitulation to
neo-liberal "moderation" is demonstrably obvious by simply reading it.
More importantly, in some ways, was the fact that this platform was
developed by a minuscule group of paid party strategists in a central
office after listening to focus groups and sycophants. It had nothing
whatever to do with any policies the membership may have passed, and,
especially with its profoundly patriarchal and possessive emphasis on
embodying the party in the persona of one individual, it was actually a
repudiation of the very idea of a mass party.
A party, if it is the embodiment of an ideal and a movement cannot belong to anyone. Nor should it be identified with anyone.
But parliamentary Social Democracy is fixated on winning as an end
in itself on the, not entirely unfounded, principle that by winning
they will be "better" than what would have otherwise occurred. And, in
the case of the NDP, a deep envy of the position that the centrist
Liberal Party has held, as well the desire to supplant them and to
shine in the spotlight that they have held, has driven much of their
political "thinking".
Yet they often fail to grasp that this is a defensive and
reactionary principle. To be a better alternative is simply a rearguard
action against what is politically "worse". It is not a way to prevent
it or to change the social or political dynamics so that neo-liberal
ideas are actually put to the test or disputed in a political forum.
In fact, by making the compromises that the NDP has made to be
opposition in Ottawa or government elsewhere, the have shown the
vanguardist principle in action. They have discarded their popular and
mass origins in favour of tightly scripted election campaigns that,
once they have won them, actually change nothing in any meaningful
systemic sense.
Having adopted all of the hierarchies and structures that every
other party has adopted, having embraced the very idea of the leader,
they have transformed from a cry for a new social order into a very
narrow attempt to incorporate themselves into this order.
Without, as we will discuss in the final part, attempting to turn
ourselves as leftists away from the power structures that originated
with the society that we claim to want to supplant, there is little
hope that we can ever overthrow them.
Andrew Klochek is a former NDP riding association president and
activist from Toronto and is a founding member of the Socialist Party of
Ontario
Michael Laxer lives in Toronto where he runs a bookstore with his
partner Natalie. He is a political activist, a two-time former
candidate and former election organizer for the NDP, was a socialist
candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 and is on the executive of
the newly formed Socialist Party of Ontario.
This past Wednesday, July 18, Fatah shared the stage at an event "The Return of Omar Khadr: the Unholy Alliance of Islamism and the Left" that was held at and under the auspices of the Canada Christian College and that featured, among others, Meir Weinstein, the Director of the Jewish Defense League- Canada as a keynote speaker. Fatah appeared on the bill as a spokesperson for the MCC.This is a fascinating context for him, given his supposed beliefs, to appear in at all.
