Zizek against protest mode (Posted by Keith) by Keith

Here is Zizek critiquing protest mode. He doesn't use the term protest mode. The interview is a few years old but he makes the point well. Of course he doesn't put forth a strategy or any tactics for a struggle for power either. 

"Obama and the Left" - what "progressives" are saying... (Brian) by Winston

I still subscribe to The Progressive. It has some good nuggets once in awhile (good toilet reading), and I appreciate its century-old roots...

This month, Ruth Coniff and John Nichols each have an interesting piece on how to "push" Obama "from the left." While they represent largely the advocacy model, it is worth a look, as these are the types of analyses many Obama supporters are using when determining how to engage his administration (in an environment in which these "progressives" are ostensibly "in power" and no longer working with "strategies of the opposition").

A nugget from the Coniff piece:

"We're not so much in protest mode and more in expectations and if-we-build-it-it-will-happen mode," she [Medea Benjamin] says. "Who knows how long we can stay in this mode?"

and from Nichols:

"Obama was nominated and elected in 2008 by progressives, both younger tech-savvy activists who made his candidacy an early favorite of the blogosphere and old-school liberal precinct walkers who saw in his candidacy an extension of the frustrating work of opposing all that was Bush and Cheney. The Senator won the Democratic nomination because he was the only first-tier contender who could say that he had opposed authorizing Bush to take the country to war with Iraq....

These activists formed a base within the campaign and the Democratic Party, centered on but not limited to the Obama team's quasi-open website and blog, www.MyBarackObama.com, which did not always cheerlead for the candidate. In June, when Obama broke with Feingold and other Senate progressives to support Bush's rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senator felt enough heat from his own and independent netroots sites that he was compelled to explain himself, making what Obama described as a "firm pledge" that he would revisit the issue as President to shore up privacy protections....

activists cannot wait for Obama to define the playing field. They must assume that he knows what they know. And this requires a radically different approach than the left took to Southern centrist Democratic Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. The way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak not so much to him as to America. Get out ahead of the new President, and of his spin-drive communications team.... Don't expect Obama or his aides to do the left thing. Indeed, take a lesson from rightwing pressure groups...."

"Franklin Roosevelt's example is useful here. After his election in 1932, FDR met with Sidney Hillman and other labor leaders, many of them active Socialists with whom he had worked over the past decade or more. Hillman and his allies arrived with plans they wanted the new President to implement. Roosevelt told them: 'I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.'

It is reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees with them on many fundamental issues. He has said as much.

It is equally reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for progressives to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do it."

So...how do these ideas compare or contrast with recent discussions (on this blog and elsewhere) using a revolutionary democratic lens to examine the question, "What now?" What can we take, and what can we leave on the table? What are the real life implications, now that Obama is in office, of finding allies among these circles with whom we can build dual power? And what are some of the possible unfortuante exigencies or possible obsatcles?

"This is what democracy looks like!" (X.) by X.

The slogan “This is what democracy looks like!” hit the big time in 1999 during the street protests opposing the World Trade Organization at their meeting in Seattle. It became the title of a seminal underground documentary that narrated and helped define the events for progressives all over the country. The slogan was obviously a direct response to the highly undemocratic character of the WTO and to the authoritarian and repressive counter-protest tactics of the Seattle police department. But the ease with which those few words spread throughout the broader movement (and especially the younger generation) hints at something deeper: In many ways, the Seattle protests represented a reaction to the waning power of the traditional US Left. They were a reaction to the complacent 80’s and 90’s during which the advocacy faction took over the leadership of the movement and led it into steep decline, displacing the protest faction that dominated the 60’s and 70’s. In this sense, the crowds of activists in the streets of Seattle also chanted: “This is what the movement looks like!”

A large and relatively diverse array of groups had gathered in Seattle for the largest protest in years, in direct opposition to the powers-that-be. The WTO protesters delivered a broad critique of the system on the system’s own turf. But not only did they challenge capitalism’s “new world order”, they challenged the prevailing “common wisdom” of the advocacy partisans in positions of leadership throughout the US Left that for years have channeled the movement into reformist, single-issue activism by proxy (from union contracts to affirmative action to abortion rights to saving endangered species). The demonstrators -made up largely of dissidents young and old within the US Left- organized a mass (if short-lived) challenge to big capital. And it blew their minds that by working together they successfully prevented business as usual for the rulers of the planet. For a little while, they “shut down” the WTO…

The success of the protesters in achieving their goal unfortunately overshadowed the most important aspect of the Seattle experience. While the mainstream media focused mainly on isolated incidents of vandalism, the movement narrative (as told in the “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!” documentary, for example) focused much attention on the confrontation pitting the mass of protesters against the police and WTO bureaucrats.

The most revolutionary democratic activities did not take place during those street battles, however. Quite to the contrary, democracy was mainly built before and after each protest. The key factor that set the WTO protests aside from most prior protests is that they lasted for several days during which a vast but fragmented network of progressive activists had to contend with tremendous logistical challenges in close proximity to one another. The planning of daily marching routes, resistance to police repression, first aid assistance, room and board, jail solidarity, teach-ins, liberation of resources, etc required a multitude of activists of every shade of the Left political spectrum to cooperate in some way. Numerous decentralized, grassroots initiatives brought together groups that previously had never worked together, building coalitional trust and fostering unity of action to overcome ideological differences. In other words, the movement had to try and practice democracy in order to exist.

The most striking examples of budding revolutionary democracy in action can be found in interviews of the diverse activists that participated in the three days of WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 (these interviews are available at the online WTO History Project hosted by the University of Washington). In the weeks that led up to the protests, a multitude of labor unions, issue groups, student groups, revolutionary groups, etc. cooperated in one form or another to plan for the demonstrations (amidst a host of disagreements over the purpose and the tactics of the protest). A careful reading of the activists’ interviews shows how rapidly the movement coalesced at the grassroots level in the last few days and especially during the “downtime” in between protests once the WTO ministerial conference had begun.

This so-called “downtime” was in fact the “organizing time” during which thousands of activists of every shade of the Left political spectrum resided in close proximity to one another in de facto “liberated zones” in and around Seattle. The geographic closeness and the magnitude of the logistical challenges led these activists to exchange ideas, share resources and make plans together. They became movement organizers as they began to work and decide together, as they began to practice democracy like they never had before. This process of budding revolutionary democracy is credited in many interviews for the decision by a number of “older” protesters to break away from the relatively non-confrontational, pre-approved march routes to join “younger” activists in direct actions in the “no protest” zone declared by the city police.

Richard Feldman, Director, Worker Center, King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO:

… And then there was other coalition activity, as it got closer, there was a regular meeting, kind of a coordinating meeting that I attended, that was hosted by the Citizen's Trade Campaign folks that brought together some of the prime organizers and organizations, including DAN [Direct Action Network] and a very diverse kind of group of organizations that met and just kind of more or less kept each other somewhat up to date on what people were planning.

(…)

Well, it was a coalition in terms of everyone coming together dealing with the events of the week, for example from the students' perspective, obviously having been hit the hardest, and the students that had been doing civil disobedience and not doing civil disobedience, just been sitting around and getting whacked by the cops, they brought anger and disbelief. Then us just seeing what had happened and the wrongness of how protests had been met. And it was because we were in coalition and had the energy and ability that enabled us to quickly put together a march with 5,000 people. We wanted to go into the no-protest zone on Friday to show we could have protests and that we could have our voices heard. So things happened pretty quickly.

(…)

Things came together incredibly quickly. A wide variety of things happened very quickly, just remarkable how quickly. I guess in terms of true coalition activities, people took ownership, came together and achieved, in a very short time, something that normally takes months to plan and figure out. And that was because everyone had been working together. And this was also something that was also more locally driven. It wasn't people from D.C.

Han Shan, Ruckus Society:

“That’s actually a bigger conversation and a really important thing. That’s something that’s new and something that we saw develop in Seattle to a large degree. There are a lot of groups working in very different ways with different constituencies, and maybe different ultimate goals who nonetheless are recognizing that as the right has come together with various goals, but recognizing they have similar adversaries, at least, we’ve recognized that we need to come together. In Seattle, there were a lot of folks who maybe didn’t work super closely with each other in their discrete strategies, in their tactics that they took to the streets, but tried to at least talk and keep the lines of communication open. I talked to a lot of Labor. I talked to folks who were visibly nervous about who Ruckus was and what we might have planned, who nonetheless showed goodwill and recognized that we were allies in this battle. I think that kind of coming together is a rare thing and it was certainly gratifying.”

Robin Denburg, Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange:

“The coalition, I think, while there were ups and downs, it was very effective in allowing a level of coordination so that the environmental community knew what the labor community was doing and then the labor community would then go back and work out the details, but at least there was some level of coordination and that was exhibited during the week of the WTO when you had one day which was focused on labor, one day which was focused on the environment, one day which was focused on agriculture. If you hadn’t had that, the dialogue and the trust established beforehand, you could have had a hodgepodge of seminars and teach-ins and rallies going on at the same time. So I think it was really effective in that respect. I think it was also effective in terms of creating good relationships between communities that hadn’t normally worked together. In particular for me, working with the faith-based and labor communities was, especially the faith-based community, was a new thing for me, so I think that was effective as well.”

Advocacy & Lobbying (Erik) by X.

Advocacy consists of convincing people in positions of power to change laws and rules. Advocacy is usually associated with elected officials, but can apply just as easily to working at reforming any undemocratic system by essentially trying to convince the people who control power that they should use that power to do what you want. Conscious consuming is just another form of advocacy. Lobbying is the most advanced form of advocacy and involves actually paying people to advocate on a full-time basis.

The radical Left mostly rejects advocacy because they perceive it as ineffective. They see advocacy as dominated by professional lobbyists who represent giant corporate interests, and who can use the allure of highly undemocratic campaign contributions, and the permanence of (often times multiple) full time lobbyists to monopolize control over politicians who depend on their money to stay in office.

For the mainstream Left however advocacy is the only ways to enter the political system. Many advocates may object that grassroots mobilization is a big part of much advocacy work, they get petitions signed, hold educational events, invite politicians to campus, etc. But they only work directly with people to get money or to substitute public support for money when they advocate. They still see the people as only a means to influence power (leaders) not as having power themselves.

Advocacy offers an opportunity to make small improvements in people’s real lives that are beyond what the movement could accomplish without political support. In order to use advocacy correctly the movement must ALWAYS remember that power flows directly from the people, and that the politicians are just avenues through which to exercise that power for the growth of the alternative independent movement. By eschewing traditional lobbyists the movement can culture jam advocacy campaigns by making them about mobilization. Legislative victory becomes (a welcome) consequence of growing the movement, not the purpose of growing the movement. Legislative goals should serve to advance the ability of the movement to grow either directly or indirectly by improving the lives of the people you hope to organize. No legislative goals are as important as building independent institutions and mass revolutionary democratic activity.

Protest Mode, Advocacy Mode & the Loyal Opposition (X.) by X.

Most of the traditional US Left still functions either on the Protest Mode or on the Advocacy Mode (or a bit of both). That is, leftist activists take the tactic of protesting or advocating and repeat it over and over for its own sake, almost by reflex, as if it was the only possible means of struggle. In other words, they turn a useful tactic into useless strategy.

Despite their differences, both protest and advocacy modes of political work are fundamentally undemocratic in that they rarely provide many people with genuine opportunities to work together and decide together how to change society. Both claim to represent people’s aspirations, but neither is rooted in the practice of democracy and neither aim to build democratic alternatives to the current power structure. Consequently, they play the role of “loyal opposition,” either begging (advocacy) or demanding (protest) that the powers-that-be change their policies on this or that issue on account of their lobbying or protesting. The partisans of the “protest” and “advocacy” trends often criticize one another bitterly, and yet they fail to recognize that their political approaches –although different in form– are quite similar:

• Both “protest” and “advocacy” partisans are fragmented into a myriad narrow, issue-based groups and/or isolated sectarian organizations. Neither camp offers concrete or convincing proposals to build a broad-based, nationwide progressive movement that could radically change the system. Both thereby acknowledge an unwillingness and/or inability to organize the great majority of people. In fact, the very nature of their main activities is exclusive of the majority since few people can participate frequently in a meaningful way in protests or advocacy campaigns. These groups then end up simply asking people to donate money.

• Both “protest” and “advocacy” partisans elevate their tactics to the level of a strategy. Their chosen activities become the only means to be considered by the movement to effect change; they are presented as the essence of progressive action under the present system, because they are more “militant” or more “realistic”.

• Whatever their intent is, both “protest” and “advocacy” partisans implicitly or explicitly recognize and legitimize the system’s authority. Whether they are advocating for the powers-that-be to listen to their recommendations or protesting their decisions, it is clear that all decision-making power rests in the hands of the powers-that-be.

Just as "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" in England, the loyal opposition that dominates the US Left does not fundamentally challenge the system (i.e. capitalism): The advocacy mode because it merely reforms the system, the protest mode because -no matter how militantly- it merely criticizes the system. What differentiates Revolutionary Democracy from the Loyal Opposition is that it not only challenges the legitimacy of the system, but that it makes use of a multiplicity of tactics to organize people to practice democracy and directly challenge the ability of the powers-that-be to enforce their illegitimate control of society.

"From Protest to Resistance!" A Bad Slogan... (Keith) by X.

One of the ironies of the mobilizations to stop the war in Vietnam was that as the majority of people in the country came to oppose the war they simultaneously increased their opposition to the formal anti-war movement. There are parallels with the present moment as the majority of the country now opposes the war, at least according to major news outlet opinion polls. The movement in the 60’s became increasingly alienated from the general population and as the movement came to understand the limitations of protesting (protest mode), they drew certain conclusions that had devastating consequences in the long run. The conclusion that was widely drawn from the critique of protest mode in the late 60’s was that protesting was not enough—“resistance” was necessary. The war would be stopped through sabotage, disruptions, blowing up ROTC buildings and so forth. The movement stopped organizing people and attempted to become a social force itself—a force that would make it impossible for the U.S. to continue the war.

The U.S. war against Vietnam ended for many reasons: the people of Vietnam’s commitment to independence and their military struggle, the resistance of U.S. soldiers who became increasingly mutinous, and the anti-war movement in the US are a few of the main reasons. So it isn’t that moving from protests to resistance failed to end the war, it played a significant role in ending the war, but it also played a
significant role in ending the movement itself. The corporations and capitalists seized upon the opportunity. With the election of Reagan in the 1980 capitalists began a major offensive against working people and small business so that real wages in the United States have continued to decline since the late 1970’s for the first time in the history of the country. The gains of the New Deal, the social safety net, welfare provisions as well as the gains of the civil rights movement have been continually eroded. A massive transfer of wealth has occurred over the last thirty years from lower to upper classes. To put it bluntly we have been getting our asses kicked in for the last thirty years. It is for this reason that the slogan “from prost to resistance” was a failure. That is to say, while it may have worked to help end the war it failed as a long term strategy to build a movement.

Unfortunately, the movement, such as it is, as a whole has yet to get beyond it. We have talked on the blog before about some of the differences between the advocacy or lobby left and the protest left. The “resistance left” is another version of the protest left, however they style themselves in even more militant postures, but they don’t consider how to actually organize a revolutionary movement, only how they can momentarily disrupt order. The resistance left is working under the same logic that led some in the late 60’s to embrace terrorism as a tactic. Terrorism is actually the hysterical response of intellectuals, often students or recent graduates, to their own inability to organize working people. They get increasingly desperate and begin to despair, and either act in the name of people, act to stir up people (propaganda of the deed), or begin to perceive the “backward masses” as the enemy. We must get beyond “resistance” to revolution. But revolution is not about militant postures it is about the long and often slow process of organizing people along revolutionary democratic lines to take control over the production and reproduction of their lives.

“THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” – Part II (X.) by X.

The most striking examples of budding revolutionary democracy in action can be found in interviews of the diverse activists that participated in the three days of WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 (these interviews are available at the online WTO History Project hosted by the University of Washington). In the weeks that led up to the protests, a multitude of labor unions, issue groups, student groups, revolutionary groups, etc. cooperated in one form or another to plan for the demonstrations (amidst a host of disagreements over the purpose and the tactics of the protest). A careful reading of the activists’ interviews shows how rapidly the movement coalesced at the grassroots level in the last few days and especially during the “downtime” in between protests once the WTO ministerial conference had begun.

This so-called “downtime” was in fact the “organizing time” during which thousands of activists of every shade of the Left political spectrum resided in close proximity to one another in de facto “liberated zones” in and around Seattle. The geographic closeness and the magnitude of the logistical challenges led these activists to exchange ideas, share resources and make plans together. They became movement organizers as they began to work and decide together, as they began to practice democracy like they never had before. This process of budding revolutionary democracy is credited in many interviews for the decision by a number of “older” protesters to break away from the relatively non-confrontational, pre-approved march routes to join “younger” activists in direct actions in the “no protest” zone declared by the city police.

Richard Feldman, Director, Worker Center, King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO:

… And then there was other coalition activity, as it got closer, there was a regular meeting, kind of a coordinating meeting that I attended, that was hosted by the Citizen's Trade Campaign folks that brought together some of the prime organizers and organizations, including DAN [Direct Action Network] and a very diverse kind of group of organizations that met and just kind of more or less kept each other somewhat up to date on what people were planning.

(…)

Well, it was a coalition in terms of everyone coming together dealing with the events of the week, for example from the students' perspective, obviously having been hit the hardest, and the students that had been doing civil disobedience and not doing civil disobedience, just been sitting around and getting whacked by the cops, they brought anger and disbelief. Then us just seeing what had happened and the wrongness of how protests had been met. And it was because we were in coalition and had the energy and ability that enabled us to quickly put together a march with 5,000 people. We wanted to go into the no-protest zone on Friday to show we could have protests and that we could have our voices heard. So things happened pretty quickly.

(…)

Things came together incredibly quickly. A wide variety of things happened very quickly, just remarkable how quickly. I guess in terms of true coalition activities, people took ownership, came together and achieved, in a very short time, something that normally takes months to plan and figure out. And that was because everyone had been working together. And this was also something that was also more locally driven. It wasn't people from D.C.

Han Shan, Ruckus Society:

“That’s actually a bigger conversation and a really important thing. That’s something that’s new and something that we saw develop in Seattle to a large degree. There are a lot of groups working in very different ways with different constituencies, and maybe different ultimate goals who nonetheless are recognizing that as the right has come together with various goals, but recognizing they have similar adversaries, at least, we’ve recognized that we need to come together. In Seattle, there were a lot of folks who maybe didn’t work super closely with each other in their discrete strategies, in their tactics that they took to the streets, but tried to at least talk and keep the lines of communication open. I talked to a lot of Labor. I talked to folks who were visibly nervous about who Ruckus was and what we might have planned, who nonetheless showed goodwill and recognized that we were allies in this battle. I think that kind of coming together is a rare thing and it was certainly gratifying.”

Robin Denburg, Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange:

“The coalition, I think, while there were ups and downs, it was very effective in allowing a level of coordination so that the environmental community knew what the labor community was doing and then the labor community would then go back and work out the details, but at least there was some level of coordination and that was exhibited during the week of the WTO when you had one day which was focused on labor, one day which was focused on the environment, one day which was focused on agriculture. If you hadn’t had that, the dialogue and the trust established beforehand, you could have had a hodgepodge of seminars and teach-ins and rallies going on at the same time. So I think it was really effective in that respect. I think it was also effective in terms of creating good relationships between communities that hadn’t normally worked together. In particular for me, working with the faith-based and labor communities was, especially the faith-based community, was a new thing for me, so I think that was effective as well.”

To be continued...

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION (X.) by X.

Today’s progressive US Left is mostly known for two types of activities. On the one hand is advocacy for reform with lobbying of the two-party system, the occasional local referenda and long-shot electoral candidacies. On the other hand are the protests such as rare strikes and even rarer large demonstrations, smaller rallies and direct actions at the local level, and isolated acts of vandalism. The partisans of the “protest” and “advocacy” trends often criticize one another bitterly, and yet they fail to recognize that their political approaches –although different in form– are quite similar:

1) Both “protest” and “advocacy” partisans are fragmented into a myriad narrow, issue-based groups and/or isolated sectarian organizations. Neither camp offers concrete or convincing proposals to build a broad-based, nationwide progressive movement that could radically change the system. Both thereby acknowledge an unwillingness and/or inability to organize the great majority of people. In fact, the very nature of their main activities is exclusive of the majority since few people can frequently participate in a meaningful way in protests or advocacy campaigns.

2) Both “protest” and “advocacy” partisans elevate their tactics to the level of a strategy. Their chosen activities become the only means to be considered by the movement to effect change; they are presented as the essence of progressive action under the present system, because they are more “militant” or more “realistic”.

3) Whatever their intent is, both “protest” and “advocacy” partisans implicitly or explicitly recognize and legitimize the system’s authority. Whether they are advocating for the powers-that-be to listen to their recommendations or protesting the decisions of the powers-that-be, it is clear that all decision-making power rests in the hands of the powers-that-be.

The partisans of the advocacy mode and the partisans of the protest mode represent two wings of what Amiri Baraka (riffing off of Lenin) called the Loyal Opposition in discussions with revolutionary democratic organizers going back to the mid-90's. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, both trends end up legitimizing the powers-that-be by recognizing their right and ability to rule. Just as "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" in England, the loyal opposition that dominates the US Left does not fundamentally challenge the system (i.e. capitalism): The advocacy mode because it merely reforms the system, the protest mode because -no matter how militantly- it merely criticizes the system. What must differentiate the new revolutionary democratic movement from the Loyal Opposition is that it will not only challenge the legitimacy of the system, but that it will engage people all over the country to practice democracy as a direct challenge to the ability of the powers-that-be to enforce their illegitimate control of society.