The role of the movement is not merely to compete with the system in the area of “politics” but to build an alternative infrastructure for the production and reproduction of all aspects of cultural and social life. This infrastructure must provide means and opportunities for musicians’ unions, artists’ collectives, writers’ circles, theater troupes, film-making coops, dance groups, fire spinning crews, etc. as well as sports clubs, yoga classes, health and nutrition coops, online support networks, community-based counseling, etc. that provide people with the means of expression needed to live a fulfilling creative life and the social and cultural foundation required to participate actively and meaningfully in the movement for the long term.
For the system to function, people must not only be capable of working under undemocratic and exploitative conditions when they arrive at work or at school, they must also be willing. The powers-that-be cannot rule by force alone; they must rely on a whole system of cultural production (universities, publishing houses, movie studios, churches, TV networks, art foundations, etc.) to make their rule appear good, just or at least inevitable. For the movement to develop we must have alternative institutions which can promote an alternative vision, alternative ideas, and a place to critique and deprogram ourselves from the system.
Too often, the traditional US Left relegates art and culture to the role of temporary interlude in the all important business of politics. Revolutionary Democracy does not draw such a line between culture and politics. Both are essential to the transformation of society. Culture is key to revolution and democracy. When practiced effectively, it encourages the unleashing of individual and collective potential that are suppressed or under-developed in the anti-democratic atmosphere of most of society’s existing institutions and organizations. The revolutionary democratic movement must organize progressive artists, cultural workers and people everywhere to build democratically-run institutions and organizations dedicated to the creative production of art and culture rooted in the experience of the movement, of people’s lives and of the transformative experience that comes with changing the world. The movement must build its own cultural events, theaters, studios, underground clubs, websites, etc. to challenge the backward culture spoon-fed to everyone by the corporate media but more importantly, to spur on, inspire and enlighten all people as they struggle with the concrete challenge of waging revolution in a new way.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
A revolutionary party (X, Keith) by X.
In 1997, the city of New Brunswick passed a repressive ordinance that required all parties to be approved and registered by the police in advance (at $20 per permit) if any gifts or money was to be exchanged. This law was obviously targeting the very successful fundraising events of local grassroots groups that the city machine didn’t like (especially the New Brunswick Coalition Against Police Brutality).
Local progressives and revolutionaries decided on a creative revolutionary democratic approach to overturn the law: On one hand, sympathetic attorneys filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the law unconstitutionally violating freedom of speech and assembly. On the other, they immediately organized a "Party Without A Permit." The best local bands were recruited to play (they opposed the law because it threatened their ability to throw their own parties) for a 12 hour festival at Brower Commons - a traditional rallying space at Rutgers University. At the party, organizers symbolically collected pennies to break the law. This event put the music in the forefront and kept political speeches only in between acts and sets (which is unusual for the Left). The crowd was not bored by the speeches (also unusual!) because they took the form of TV commercials in between the main events. The city police did not fine anyone nor try to stop the huge party that drew over a thousand and shut down Main Street.
The movement lawyers were then able to argue that the police were selectively enforcing the law since they took no action at the "Party without a Permit." The city was forced to come up with the silly excuse that the ordinance did not apply on university grounds. Following the same approach, the organizers then planned a "Picnic Without A Permit" in a local park in the heart of the city, inviting families to bring their children to play games and BBQ. Pennies were collected again to break the law, while children played and parents engaged in discussions about police brutality. Once again the police found themselves unable to enforce the law.
The movement lawyers took this back to the court and the city was again forced to make the absurd argument that the law didn’t apply to the parks. As the organizers now prepared to challenge the law at a private party, the exasperated judge in the case overturned the law on constitutional grounds. And the city had to pay for the legal fees!
US Leftists often talk about organizing legal challenges on two fronts, in the courts and in the streets. However, this usually means asking people (in the street) to come to court or hold a protest in front of it. Instead, we organized a mass cultural event that made it possible to gather enough revolutionary democratic social power to challenge the illegitimate law openly. With hundreds of participants at the permit-less events, the police could not enforce the law. If we understand that most laws are designed to protect the system and that the strength of the movement lies in finding ways to organize masses of people to resist the system in creative ways, we can restrict the state’s ability to enforce these laws and even make these laws depend on our strength or weakness. Our lawyers couldn't have won the case before we had proved in the street that the law was unenforceable.
The Party Without A Permit victory also highlighted the lack of public space for free expression in New Brunswick and inspired further efforts to not only challenge oppressive laws but to create performance spaces. The struggle against the permit law provided organizers with experience that they later used to create "Art House" –a monthly cultural event that featured, poetry, hip-hop, bands, and art exhibits. This tradition lives at Tent State University with open, free nightly music events.
Local progressives and revolutionaries decided on a creative revolutionary democratic approach to overturn the law: On one hand, sympathetic attorneys filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the law unconstitutionally violating freedom of speech and assembly. On the other, they immediately organized a "Party Without A Permit." The best local bands were recruited to play (they opposed the law because it threatened their ability to throw their own parties) for a 12 hour festival at Brower Commons - a traditional rallying space at Rutgers University. At the party, organizers symbolically collected pennies to break the law. This event put the music in the forefront and kept political speeches only in between acts and sets (which is unusual for the Left). The crowd was not bored by the speeches (also unusual!) because they took the form of TV commercials in between the main events. The city police did not fine anyone nor try to stop the huge party that drew over a thousand and shut down Main Street.
The movement lawyers were then able to argue that the police were selectively enforcing the law since they took no action at the "Party without a Permit." The city was forced to come up with the silly excuse that the ordinance did not apply on university grounds. Following the same approach, the organizers then planned a "Picnic Without A Permit" in a local park in the heart of the city, inviting families to bring their children to play games and BBQ. Pennies were collected again to break the law, while children played and parents engaged in discussions about police brutality. Once again the police found themselves unable to enforce the law.
The movement lawyers took this back to the court and the city was again forced to make the absurd argument that the law didn’t apply to the parks. As the organizers now prepared to challenge the law at a private party, the exasperated judge in the case overturned the law on constitutional grounds. And the city had to pay for the legal fees!
US Leftists often talk about organizing legal challenges on two fronts, in the courts and in the streets. However, this usually means asking people (in the street) to come to court or hold a protest in front of it. Instead, we organized a mass cultural event that made it possible to gather enough revolutionary democratic social power to challenge the illegitimate law openly. With hundreds of participants at the permit-less events, the police could not enforce the law. If we understand that most laws are designed to protect the system and that the strength of the movement lies in finding ways to organize masses of people to resist the system in creative ways, we can restrict the state’s ability to enforce these laws and even make these laws depend on our strength or weakness. Our lawyers couldn't have won the case before we had proved in the street that the law was unenforceable.
The Party Without A Permit victory also highlighted the lack of public space for free expression in New Brunswick and inspired further efforts to not only challenge oppressive laws but to create performance spaces. The struggle against the permit law provided organizers with experience that they later used to create "Art House" –a monthly cultural event that featured, poetry, hip-hop, bands, and art exhibits. This tradition lives at Tent State University with open, free nightly music events.
Revolution is a process, not an event! (Keith, X., Tommy D) by X.
Instead of “waiting” for the revolution to solve social problems, Revolutionary Democracy holds that revolution involves the process of solving these real problems. The traditional US Left views "the revolution" as an event, to be waited for patiently or to be hastened through frenzied protest or "resistance" activity. Instead, revolutionary democracy puts forward that people will not transform the system after the revolution, they will make the revolution by transforming the system in every aspect: work, school, culture, politics, etc.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The People's Campaign (Keith) by X.
The People’s Campaign organized an electoral challenge for three city council seats in 2000 in New Brunswick NJ, after years of organizing on the Rutgers campus and five solid years of organizing with the New Brunswick community around education, housing, and police brutality. Our work prior to the electoral campaign gave us a number of contacts within the community as well as some recognition and respect as dedicated organizers. We began by conducting surveys of the various communities as the basis for a platform. (1) The surveys also gave us the opportunity to discuss the campaign and its next step: an open convention where the candidates, platform, campaign manager, and steering committee would be voted on. The convention was one of the campaign’s great successes: Hundred of people attended and the students were represented in numbers closer to the portion of the population that they actually make up in the city (unlike in previous events). About nine people vied to be chosen by the convention as candidates. Some had the backing of an organization while other ran as individuals.
The three candidates chosen at the convention were an Afro-American bus driver, a Latino van driver (who only spoke Spanish) and a white revolutionary who had graduated from Rutgers. In addition to electing candidates, the People’s Campaign featured –a first in the United States– an elected campaign manager and a steering committee that most people at the convention felt should be broad and representative of different communities and social classes opposed to the existing political machine. So the revolutionaries had to not only deal with small business people and petty landlords among others but also to negotiate to keep them supportive of a radical program—these were real lessons in coalition building and “politics” which much of the Left, because they refuse to engage in grassroots electoral work, has never even experienced.
The program was extensive and radically redistributive. New Brunswick had been re-nicknamed by city officials the “Healthcare City” because of the number of hospitals and medical research facilities in town. The People’s Campaign platform called for free healthcare for all residents, admittance to Rutgers University for all New Brunswick high school graduates, rent control, an elected civilian police control board, affordable housing, a public swimming pool and so forth. The candidates and all positions of responsibility were subject to recall at any time up until two weeks from Election Day. (The group decided to place this limitation on recall so that everyone could focus on the election in the final weeks.)
Our opponents were long time incumbents of the Democratic Party, one of the most powerful political machines in the State of New Jersey. The previous mayor, John Lynch, is not only mobbed up (now under indictment), he is also the king maker of the statewide democratic party. The machine is backed by Johnson & Johnson (J&J), a global corporation whose world headquarters are located in the center of downtown New Brunswick. The local Democratic Party does J&J’s bidding and J&J rules the city with a mix of coercion and consent. They set up NGOs that attempt to determine the cultural and social life of the city, making sure it is corporate friendly while striving for pseudo- hipness.
The local Democrats dominate local small business through intimidation. For example, they have fire and health inspectors that can shut a business down. Small businesses are expected to make substantial financial contributions to the machine as part of the cost of business, and display Democratic Party propaganda. The machine also awards contracts and can make sweetheart deals for things like property purchases and liquor licenses. In order to work for the city as a firefighter, cop, in sanitation, or in the parks department you must regularly attend fundraising dinners and make campaign contributions. These workers are also the machine’s ground troops, they tear down opposition posters, hand out and post machine literature and work the polls on Election Day. We learned this during the course of the People’s Campaign became a crash course in politics—politics 101. Despite five years of organizing before the electoral campaign we had little sense of how the city was actually run until we faced off against the machine for political control of the city at the ballot box.
We organized to win, not to protest. We handed out over a quarter million pieces of literature (no shit!) and recruited hundreds of new people to the movement. Clausewitz famously commented that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Well elections are the closest thing to war without bloodshed. We battled their hired campaign goons on the streets: When they ripped down one of our posters, we ripped down ten of theirs. We ran from the police, got caught by the police, and finally negotiated with the police with the help of supportive attorneys that since the machine was tearing down our literature (and the police weren’t stopping them) they would no longer stop us either. While we negotiated this agreement, we had won it first on the street: The police couldn’t stop us since our numbers were too large. They agreed to stop bothering us so that they would no longer look like incompetents.
Election Day was the major battle. We recruited progressive lawyers to volunteer to monitor for fraud on Election Day (the machine is notorious for cheating through fake residences for supporters, vote suppression, etc.) We had some two hundred and fifty volunteers at the polling stations and getting out the vote (GOTV). This required high levels of organization and planning. Much of it is very basic: All campaign workers must be fed (that has to be organized and planned) and we need people at every polling station handing out literature and talking to people, winning votes and reminding supporters. Inside the polling place, we need challengers and lawyers who monitor the process and determine which supporters have voted and which voters still need to brought to the polls and so forth—it is a tremendous effort.
Nonetheless, electoral politics, at least for the foreseeable future, is one of the best ways to engage with the day-to-day struggles of the majority of people, they provide a vehicle for revolutionary democratic forms of organizing and they allow for the actual seizure of power by the people. Winning control of a city council or winning a mayoral election means the control of jobs, resources, and the ability to pass laws: The war on drugs could be over in your town, the domination of landlords could be ended, minimum wage laws can be passed, etc. Running and winning local election is a school of revolutionary democracy and a way to build the movement. Not the only way, but an important and necessary way.
In Alejandro Jodorowsky's surrealist western El Topo, the gunfighter protagonist (for whom the movie is named: El Topo or the Mole) confronts four master gunfighters. The philosophy of one of the gunfighters should be adopted when engaging in electoral politics. The gunfighter tells El Topo that he no longer tries to win gunfights, he only tries to attain perfection in each fight; and thus bullets have no effect on him and he never loses.
The major error we made in the People’s Campaign was long term planning. We failed to consider seriously what we would do if we won, if we lost, and most importantly how to maintain, consolidate, and grow the movement that we had built during the course of the campaign. Indeed, winning or losing is a secondary concern that we confront at the level of tactical consideration: The strategic question is beyond winning or losing, the strategic question is how to grow a revolutionary democratic movement where people work and decide together. If we do that, we can then do certain things if we win the city council seats and other things if we don’t, but the main thing is that the movement grows with people taking control over their lives, working and deciding. We develop the revolutionary process whether we win or lose.
On Election Day our candidates received over two thousand votes each (28% of the total) and our first meeting following the electoral loss was still attended by over 80 people. The possibilities were enormous. We had accomplished more than any other grouping that challenged the local political machine in decades. But our accomplishment was not the number of votes we got (although that reflects what was happening), our accomplishment was bringing people together to work and decide, to build an electoral movement based in democratic participation. Unfortunately, most of the people who attended the post election day meeting didn’t return for another. They never returned because our conception of revolutionary democracy only really emerged after the campaign was long over. We focused, unlike the master gunfighter, on winning and losing, rather than on building revolutionary democracy. The initial meeting deteriorated in petty bickering and half-baked proposals. We had failed to consider what to do if we lost (not to mention what to do if we won). We could have immediately planned, discussed and debated the next election, what had gone wrong during the last campaign, what went right, etc. etc. We could have consolidated a movement of very committed people.
By trying for perfection the gunfighter wins without trying to win. The same is true in electoral politics. It is not that winning is unimportant. We are not advocating running electoral campaigns as protest campaigns, or agitation campaigns, or to get a certain small percentage of the vote and then get matching funds. We run electoral campaigns to build the movement and do our utmost to win the election, to organize people to seize power little by little, bit by bit. Elections are a tactic. If we build the movement along revolutionary democratic lines, if we strive for perfection, if we keep our strategic goals in the forefront, if we grow a movement of fully engaged people, working and deciding together, we will win at the ballot box and everywhere else we take on the system.
________________________________________________
(1) Surveys are a great way to learn about issues people face day to day. The mistake with our survey was that we generated the questions for people to answer and rank amongst our core organizers and then went to people to discuss them. A better way would be to add an additional step and let people develop the survey itself.
The three candidates chosen at the convention were an Afro-American bus driver, a Latino van driver (who only spoke Spanish) and a white revolutionary who had graduated from Rutgers. In addition to electing candidates, the People’s Campaign featured –a first in the United States– an elected campaign manager and a steering committee that most people at the convention felt should be broad and representative of different communities and social classes opposed to the existing political machine. So the revolutionaries had to not only deal with small business people and petty landlords among others but also to negotiate to keep them supportive of a radical program—these were real lessons in coalition building and “politics” which much of the Left, because they refuse to engage in grassroots electoral work, has never even experienced.
The program was extensive and radically redistributive. New Brunswick had been re-nicknamed by city officials the “Healthcare City” because of the number of hospitals and medical research facilities in town. The People’s Campaign platform called for free healthcare for all residents, admittance to Rutgers University for all New Brunswick high school graduates, rent control, an elected civilian police control board, affordable housing, a public swimming pool and so forth. The candidates and all positions of responsibility were subject to recall at any time up until two weeks from Election Day. (The group decided to place this limitation on recall so that everyone could focus on the election in the final weeks.)
Our opponents were long time incumbents of the Democratic Party, one of the most powerful political machines in the State of New Jersey. The previous mayor, John Lynch, is not only mobbed up (now under indictment), he is also the king maker of the statewide democratic party. The machine is backed by Johnson & Johnson (J&J), a global corporation whose world headquarters are located in the center of downtown New Brunswick. The local Democratic Party does J&J’s bidding and J&J rules the city with a mix of coercion and consent. They set up NGOs that attempt to determine the cultural and social life of the city, making sure it is corporate friendly while striving for pseudo- hipness.
The local Democrats dominate local small business through intimidation. For example, they have fire and health inspectors that can shut a business down. Small businesses are expected to make substantial financial contributions to the machine as part of the cost of business, and display Democratic Party propaganda. The machine also awards contracts and can make sweetheart deals for things like property purchases and liquor licenses. In order to work for the city as a firefighter, cop, in sanitation, or in the parks department you must regularly attend fundraising dinners and make campaign contributions. These workers are also the machine’s ground troops, they tear down opposition posters, hand out and post machine literature and work the polls on Election Day. We learned this during the course of the People’s Campaign became a crash course in politics—politics 101. Despite five years of organizing before the electoral campaign we had little sense of how the city was actually run until we faced off against the machine for political control of the city at the ballot box.
We organized to win, not to protest. We handed out over a quarter million pieces of literature (no shit!) and recruited hundreds of new people to the movement. Clausewitz famously commented that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Well elections are the closest thing to war without bloodshed. We battled their hired campaign goons on the streets: When they ripped down one of our posters, we ripped down ten of theirs. We ran from the police, got caught by the police, and finally negotiated with the police with the help of supportive attorneys that since the machine was tearing down our literature (and the police weren’t stopping them) they would no longer stop us either. While we negotiated this agreement, we had won it first on the street: The police couldn’t stop us since our numbers were too large. They agreed to stop bothering us so that they would no longer look like incompetents.
Election Day was the major battle. We recruited progressive lawyers to volunteer to monitor for fraud on Election Day (the machine is notorious for cheating through fake residences for supporters, vote suppression, etc.) We had some two hundred and fifty volunteers at the polling stations and getting out the vote (GOTV). This required high levels of organization and planning. Much of it is very basic: All campaign workers must be fed (that has to be organized and planned) and we need people at every polling station handing out literature and talking to people, winning votes and reminding supporters. Inside the polling place, we need challengers and lawyers who monitor the process and determine which supporters have voted and which voters still need to brought to the polls and so forth—it is a tremendous effort.
Nonetheless, electoral politics, at least for the foreseeable future, is one of the best ways to engage with the day-to-day struggles of the majority of people, they provide a vehicle for revolutionary democratic forms of organizing and they allow for the actual seizure of power by the people. Winning control of a city council or winning a mayoral election means the control of jobs, resources, and the ability to pass laws: The war on drugs could be over in your town, the domination of landlords could be ended, minimum wage laws can be passed, etc. Running and winning local election is a school of revolutionary democracy and a way to build the movement. Not the only way, but an important and necessary way.
Zen and the Art of Electoral Politics:
The Conclusion of the People’s Campaign
The Conclusion of the People’s Campaign
In Alejandro Jodorowsky's surrealist western El Topo, the gunfighter protagonist (for whom the movie is named: El Topo or the Mole) confronts four master gunfighters. The philosophy of one of the gunfighters should be adopted when engaging in electoral politics. The gunfighter tells El Topo that he no longer tries to win gunfights, he only tries to attain perfection in each fight; and thus bullets have no effect on him and he never loses.
The major error we made in the People’s Campaign was long term planning. We failed to consider seriously what we would do if we won, if we lost, and most importantly how to maintain, consolidate, and grow the movement that we had built during the course of the campaign. Indeed, winning or losing is a secondary concern that we confront at the level of tactical consideration: The strategic question is beyond winning or losing, the strategic question is how to grow a revolutionary democratic movement where people work and decide together. If we do that, we can then do certain things if we win the city council seats and other things if we don’t, but the main thing is that the movement grows with people taking control over their lives, working and deciding. We develop the revolutionary process whether we win or lose.
On Election Day our candidates received over two thousand votes each (28% of the total) and our first meeting following the electoral loss was still attended by over 80 people. The possibilities were enormous. We had accomplished more than any other grouping that challenged the local political machine in decades. But our accomplishment was not the number of votes we got (although that reflects what was happening), our accomplishment was bringing people together to work and decide, to build an electoral movement based in democratic participation. Unfortunately, most of the people who attended the post election day meeting didn’t return for another. They never returned because our conception of revolutionary democracy only really emerged after the campaign was long over. We focused, unlike the master gunfighter, on winning and losing, rather than on building revolutionary democracy. The initial meeting deteriorated in petty bickering and half-baked proposals. We had failed to consider what to do if we lost (not to mention what to do if we won). We could have immediately planned, discussed and debated the next election, what had gone wrong during the last campaign, what went right, etc. etc. We could have consolidated a movement of very committed people.
By trying for perfection the gunfighter wins without trying to win. The same is true in electoral politics. It is not that winning is unimportant. We are not advocating running electoral campaigns as protest campaigns, or agitation campaigns, or to get a certain small percentage of the vote and then get matching funds. We run electoral campaigns to build the movement and do our utmost to win the election, to organize people to seize power little by little, bit by bit. Elections are a tactic. If we build the movement along revolutionary democratic lines, if we strive for perfection, if we keep our strategic goals in the forefront, if we grow a movement of fully engaged people, working and deciding together, we will win at the ballot box and everywhere else we take on the system.
________________________________________________
(1) Surveys are a great way to learn about issues people face day to day. The mistake with our survey was that we generated the questions for people to answer and rank amongst our core organizers and then went to people to discuss them. A better way would be to add an additional step and let people develop the survey itself.
Speak Truth to Power? No Thanks! Let’s Take Power! Electoral Politics: Build Dual Power, Dismantle the State (Keith) by X.
Participation in electoral politics is one of the more controversial issues among significant portions of the Left. Many revolutionaries don’t vote and don’t participate in local elections. Two misconceptions blind revolutionaries to the possibilities of electoral politics. First they see revolution as an insurrectionary event in the distant future to prepare for, and the primary means of preparing is protesting and perhaps publishing a newspaper. Revolutionaries opposed to electoral politics have many other objections but let’s not rehearse them all here; they are as familiar as they are tired. Electoral politics is one of the best tactics available to revolutionaries who want people to seize power immediately to dismantle the state piece by piece and replace it with the revolutionary democratic power of organized self-determining people. Elections and the system’s (false) claim to democracy are the Achilles’ heel of the system which is only protected by our own inactivity.
“Protest Mode” is the way that Amiri Baraka described a form of organizing that made demands on the “powers that be” but failed to actually take on the task of organizing to take power. As Baraka put it, “we need to organize to take power where we can literally put our hands on it.” What does he mean? In the 1994 speech, he joked that would-be revolutionaries announce “death to the bourgeoisie, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that to the bourgeoisie” but these revolutionaries can’t get a school board member elected in a local election, “they can’t even elect a dog catcher.”
Participating in electoral politics is full of risks, but the risks are our opportunities as well. The system tries to constrain electoral campaigns to promote the individual candidate and limit mass democratic participation. This undemocratic structure is even more developed and dangerous once a candidate wins. Once the newly-elected official enters the halls of government, the people are kept out! This way the system can work over politicians like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We cannot surrender to this imposed anti-democratic structure. But the best way to destroy it is to organize electoral struggles along revolutionary democratic lines and to build a revolutionary democratic movement that retains precedence over individual candidates. We not only need to beat the system in the elections, we must continue to beat the system after the elections. A real “people’s campaign” must maintain its independent momentum and organization (dual power) to support its candidates after they have won but also, if needed, to remove them by recall if they decide to sell out. This is one of the best ways to build dual power because it strengthens the movement while at the same time it weakens the power of the system by undermining it. One of the main tasks of an elected revolutionary democratic candidate is to start dismantling the antidemocratic structure of the system from within.
“Protest Mode” is the way that Amiri Baraka described a form of organizing that made demands on the “powers that be” but failed to actually take on the task of organizing to take power. As Baraka put it, “we need to organize to take power where we can literally put our hands on it.” What does he mean? In the 1994 speech, he joked that would-be revolutionaries announce “death to the bourgeoisie, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that to the bourgeoisie” but these revolutionaries can’t get a school board member elected in a local election, “they can’t even elect a dog catcher.”
Participating in electoral politics is full of risks, but the risks are our opportunities as well. The system tries to constrain electoral campaigns to promote the individual candidate and limit mass democratic participation. This undemocratic structure is even more developed and dangerous once a candidate wins. Once the newly-elected official enters the halls of government, the people are kept out! This way the system can work over politicians like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We cannot surrender to this imposed anti-democratic structure. But the best way to destroy it is to organize electoral struggles along revolutionary democratic lines and to build a revolutionary democratic movement that retains precedence over individual candidates. We not only need to beat the system in the elections, we must continue to beat the system after the elections. A real “people’s campaign” must maintain its independent momentum and organization (dual power) to support its candidates after they have won but also, if needed, to remove them by recall if they decide to sell out. This is one of the best ways to build dual power because it strengthens the movement while at the same time it weakens the power of the system by undermining it. One of the main tasks of an elected revolutionary democratic candidate is to start dismantling the antidemocratic structure of the system from within.
Strategy & Tactics (Keith) by X.
Revolutionary Democracy is a strategy as well as a broad set of tactics and organizational forms or structures. Revolutionary Democracy provides an organizational form because it poses that the people who do the work should make the decisions, and that this is the most effective, efficient and powerful form of organization. The strategy is about the long term and the goal of the movement. The strategy of revolutionary democracy is then to build a movement, an alternate society, a dual power, where the people who do the work make the decisions. From this strategic idea almost any tactic is possible. Tactics would be things like protesting, lobbying, electoral politics and so forth. The strategy informs the tactics because the point of any tactic is to advance democratic participation. Organizing, for instance, a protest against the war is a tactic. But what is the point? That is the strategic question. Usually there is no point, unless we are utterly naïve and believe that Bush or the Democratic Party will make decisions based on our protests. Millions protested the war against Iraq before the first bombs were dropped. In many countries the majority of people opposed the war and made their views known through protest yet their governments went ahead and supported the war. Protesting, however, is not futile if the point is to organize people—not into little sectarian grouplets—but in a revolutionary democratic fashion so that they begin to participate, do work and make decisions about that work collectively. Most existing left-wing groups are either secretive about their strategy or are only interested in getting people to join or follow their little thing. Instead revolutionary democracy empowers people to participate fully in the transformation of society, wherever they are. That is the strategy for which the tactics are means. Ani DiFranco says “every tool is a weapon if you hold it right” and we say that any tactic can be revolutionary democratic if it organizes people to work and decide together.
Advocacy at Tent State (Erik) by X.
Tent State University is a mass revolutionary democratic event where students take over public (university) space to radically redefine education and demonstrate a student run alternative to the undemocratic university structure. Students camp out, run classes, workshops, play music, and engage in planning and coalition building. Tent State also includes an advocacy campaign where passers-by are encouraged to call their state legislator and call on him to support higher education. Advocacy serves a number of purposes. It allows us to work in coalition with, and receive funding from, more centrist minded organizations like the student governments. It allows us to reclaim university space with the tacit approval of our administration, because they share our goals of increased funding for the university, and see student advocacy as a great avenue to get it. It creates sympathy among moderate students for the hard work we do “defending” Higher education. It allows us to have access and credibility with politicians who can potentially spark movement building reforms. The legislative presence also aids us in attracting media who might react to a bigwig political name over a radical activity. TSU makes use of the traditional advocacy process to engage in highly revolutionary activity, and to engage and gain the sympathy of the more moderate students.
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.
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.
The "Great Rutgers Walk Out" of 2007 (X., Tim) by X.
In a short few weeks leading up to fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq a small coalition organized an antiwar walkout at Rutgers University. (1) On March 20, 2007, between 400 and 500 students walked out of class and joined an antiwar rally. Some 300 then marched to a local recruitment station and temporarily took over a major highway. The Rutgers antiwar organizers pulled off this protest –one of the largest on any US campus this year- without any support from any national organization and with very limited resources. Their revolutionary democratic approach to the protest tactic dramatically improved the turnout, diversity, boldness and outcome of the event.
Going to the Students & Addressing Everyone
The walk out organizers engaged a large section of the university community through active outreach (handbilling, dormstorming) rather than passive outreach (tabling, flyering). They distributed thousands of handbills directly to the students announcing the upcoming walkout. They crafted different messages to address the various concerns of different segments of the university, alternately focusing on the need to bring the troops home, on the cost of the war, on the massive killings of Iraqi civilians, on the illegality of the war, on the impact of budget shortfalls on higher education, etc. A special appeal was made to all students to consider their responsibility to get their peers out of Iraq (many of whom had to join the army to get ahead in life). The entire focus of the mobilization effort was to assume mass support and to call on the overwhelming majority of the university community join the walkout on their own terms, not just to reach out to the usual suspects in the “activist” community.
Assuming Support
With the protest still a month away, a handful of organizers decided to start creating antiwar armbands for distribution on the day of the event. The purpose? Many expected that their peers would not walk out of class. Therefore they could “participate” by wearing an antiwar armband! Several assumptions were made here, but the most important being the assumption that on the date of the walkout, students would not walk out of class. As the date approached however, organizers realized that instead of assuming hostility of the student body, they should assume support.
On the day of the rally, the crowd was told to contact people wearing red armbands if they encountered any problems. Since the armbands had already been haphazardly distributed, there was no way to know who all had received one. By putting armband-wearers in positions of responsibility (even if they had no formal link to the organizers of the rally), these supporters were invited to take a more proactive role in the success of the rally, and to make it theirs in a much more real sense. Thus the tactic of creating armbands was thus shifted from “resistance mode” to a revolutionary democratic organizing tool.
Diverse Coalition & Unity of Action
The walkout coalition was small but diverse: It included student groups from a variety of communities (Middle-Eastern, Latino, African-American, “white” Left, hippies, pirates, etc.) A number of these groups had previously worked together (on such issues as immigrant rights, university democracy, etc.) and had held joint cultural events, building an important foundation of trust. Additionally, off-campus alumni and antiwar community activists participated (mostly in an advisory and support capacity) and added to the experience of the group.
The coalition was new and its goal ambitious. The organizers had to quickly establish a rudimentary communications and decision-making process in order to maintain unity despite real differences of opinions. Despite the inevitable flaws in this ad hoc process, a firm commitment to the success of the action, to open discussion and to respect for democratic decisions kept the group together at critical times.
Building up Momentum & Claiming Space
As the date of the walkout approached, the organizers stepped up their activity: They spread word of the walkout door-to-door throughout the dorms and made announcements in dozens of classrooms (before class or during class if they had the support of the professor). Individual initiatives were welcomed: When a new organizer proposed to hang a pro-walkout banner from her dorm room window, the group quickly adopted the idea and produced dozens of antiwar banners to hang from the windows of friends and sympathizers and even on the trees leading up to the classroom buildings.
The organizers chose a key location for the walkout rally (the largest concentration of class buildings at the university) and began to claim it as an antiwar space way ahead of the day of the walkout. For weeks, thousands of students going to class got used to a constant presence of antiwar organizers handing out handbills, unfurling large banners and wallpapering buildings with flers.
The university grounds were claimed visually and physically but also educationally and culturally: When isolated reactionaries criticized the walkout in the student newspaper as being counterproductive to learning, the antiwar organizers responded that the walkout was a revolutionary and democratic form of education sorely missing from the standard curriculum. Creative cultural approaches played an important role in winning hearts and minds among students and professors: One organizer announced the walkout in a Shakespeare class by reciting one of the legendary bard’s classic antiwar sonnets to great applause. (2)
Numerous letters to the editor and a full-page ad in the student newspaper put a final touch on the peaking momentum in the days leading up to the walkout. A collective sense of anticipation could be felt throughout the campus. Unlike many isolated antiwar actions that had been ignored or dismissed by the majority of students in the previous couple of years, the walkout became a fact to be acknowledged before it even happened. Posters all over campus counted down the days until the action and students everywhere began to talk with their friends about what they planned to do on March 20.
Asserting Dual Power & Democratizing Protest
The three dozen or so active organizers in the antiwar coalition managed to temporarily change the character of the university by creating a dual power situation through their revolutionary democratic mobilization efforts. Day by day, they gathered the support, sympathy and/or friendly neutrality of the vast majority of the faculty, staff and students. They built a loose yet enormous antiwar social network that forced the administration and local police to think twice about trying to stop or curtail the walkout. In fact, a number of sympathizers within those system forces ended up giving their tacit support to the action (the dual power situation emboldened them to oppose the system even in small ways). Because the coalition succeeded in drawing on the social power of masses of people (as opposed to the minor social power of a few activists), the authorities were unable to pick out specific targets for arrest or suspension.
The palpable sense of rising momentum in turn emboldened the organizers to plan, prepare and run the walkout boldly and powerfully. During the final couple weeks of organizing, they discussed previous walkout experiences at Rutgers and elsewhere (including watching the movie Walkout about the 1968 Latino high school walkouts in Los Angeles). The antiwar coalition debated, defined and visualized what the walkout event should accomplish - agreeing when they could, and otherwise agreeing to disagree.
On the day of the walkout, the organizers refused to be intimidated or distracted by a small group of reactionary provocateurs, wagering that encouraging their fellow students to ignore counter-protestors isolate these elements more effectively than arguing with them or exchanging insults. Organizers went into classes to help their fellow students gather their resolve to join them (starting with friendly classes with supportive students and/or professors). The rally kept speakers rolling (without interminable lectures), emphasizing students and peers as speakers (no “talking heads”), and offered a wide range of informative and engaging perspectives that kept the crowd involved with innovative call-and-response techniques.
The organizers further infused democratic content into the protest format by asking the crowd to decide where to march next and whether or not to take the highway, making sure to keep the best communications possible between key organizers from all the groups in the coalition. The assumption of mass support proved to be a successful gambit, and a learning experience, as many “activists” were surprised to see construction workers on the highway flashing peace signs and pumping their fists in support.
Following Through & Building the Movement
The walkout, rally and march turned out great; marchers returned to their starting point having closed down a major highway and (thanks to the mass number of participants) suffered no arrests. The students felt a real sense of accomplishment and empowerment, having pulled off the largest walkout at Rutgers in at least 20 years.
Organizers wanted to ensure that the enthusiasm of the crowd was not wasted when everyone went home and that participants would be given the opportunity to begin deciding the next step of the movement immediately; when the march ended, dozens of students signed up with the coalition. Coalition events had been scheduled in advance so that students signing up were all reached with one mass email announcing all the different groups, projects, etc. which they could join (not just being told to come to the next protest!). As a result, all groups in the coalition got to grow. The revolutionary democratic approach of the organizers helped the movement move away from the individualistic militancy typical of activism, and towards building the mass militancy of an organized movement.
Of course, the student organizers identified a number of shortcomings: There should have been more preparation of students in the classes ahead of the walkout, media coverage should have been better organized, the process of coalition democracy needed improvement, etc. But the overall success of the event left the entire antiwar coalition eager to plan for a bigger and better walkout next year.
The Rutgers walkout turned out to be a skillful use of the protest as a tactic within a movement-building strategy. Such success could not happen if you protested every week as a ritual– the point is to use the tactic at the right time, at the right place and to do it strategically: Organize large numbers of people, engage them in the building of (temporary) dual power, and use the action not merely as an end in itself, but as an opportunity to grow the movement. (3)
______________________________________________
(1) The original call for the Walk Out at Rutgers was issued by the student group Rutgers Against the War (RAW). RAW was soon joined by Students for Belief, Awareness, Knowledge, and Activism (BAKA), Tent State University, the Student and Education Workers Union, the Latino Student Council, the United Black Council and others.
(2) “But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a
heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads,
chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day
and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying
for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some
upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I
am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how
can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black
matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were
against all proportion of subjection.” (Shakespeare, Henri V)
(3) One of the definitions of a successful action is that it leaves the movement stronger than it was before the action.
Going to the Students & Addressing Everyone
The walk out organizers engaged a large section of the university community through active outreach (handbilling, dormstorming) rather than passive outreach (tabling, flyering). They distributed thousands of handbills directly to the students announcing the upcoming walkout. They crafted different messages to address the various concerns of different segments of the university, alternately focusing on the need to bring the troops home, on the cost of the war, on the massive killings of Iraqi civilians, on the illegality of the war, on the impact of budget shortfalls on higher education, etc. A special appeal was made to all students to consider their responsibility to get their peers out of Iraq (many of whom had to join the army to get ahead in life). The entire focus of the mobilization effort was to assume mass support and to call on the overwhelming majority of the university community join the walkout on their own terms, not just to reach out to the usual suspects in the “activist” community.
Assuming Support
With the protest still a month away, a handful of organizers decided to start creating antiwar armbands for distribution on the day of the event. The purpose? Many expected that their peers would not walk out of class. Therefore they could “participate” by wearing an antiwar armband! Several assumptions were made here, but the most important being the assumption that on the date of the walkout, students would not walk out of class. As the date approached however, organizers realized that instead of assuming hostility of the student body, they should assume support.
On the day of the rally, the crowd was told to contact people wearing red armbands if they encountered any problems. Since the armbands had already been haphazardly distributed, there was no way to know who all had received one. By putting armband-wearers in positions of responsibility (even if they had no formal link to the organizers of the rally), these supporters were invited to take a more proactive role in the success of the rally, and to make it theirs in a much more real sense. Thus the tactic of creating armbands was thus shifted from “resistance mode” to a revolutionary democratic organizing tool.
Diverse Coalition & Unity of Action
The walkout coalition was small but diverse: It included student groups from a variety of communities (Middle-Eastern, Latino, African-American, “white” Left, hippies, pirates, etc.) A number of these groups had previously worked together (on such issues as immigrant rights, university democracy, etc.) and had held joint cultural events, building an important foundation of trust. Additionally, off-campus alumni and antiwar community activists participated (mostly in an advisory and support capacity) and added to the experience of the group.
The coalition was new and its goal ambitious. The organizers had to quickly establish a rudimentary communications and decision-making process in order to maintain unity despite real differences of opinions. Despite the inevitable flaws in this ad hoc process, a firm commitment to the success of the action, to open discussion and to respect for democratic decisions kept the group together at critical times.
Building up Momentum & Claiming Space
As the date of the walkout approached, the organizers stepped up their activity: They spread word of the walkout door-to-door throughout the dorms and made announcements in dozens of classrooms (before class or during class if they had the support of the professor). Individual initiatives were welcomed: When a new organizer proposed to hang a pro-walkout banner from her dorm room window, the group quickly adopted the idea and produced dozens of antiwar banners to hang from the windows of friends and sympathizers and even on the trees leading up to the classroom buildings.
The organizers chose a key location for the walkout rally (the largest concentration of class buildings at the university) and began to claim it as an antiwar space way ahead of the day of the walkout. For weeks, thousands of students going to class got used to a constant presence of antiwar organizers handing out handbills, unfurling large banners and wallpapering buildings with flers.
The university grounds were claimed visually and physically but also educationally and culturally: When isolated reactionaries criticized the walkout in the student newspaper as being counterproductive to learning, the antiwar organizers responded that the walkout was a revolutionary and democratic form of education sorely missing from the standard curriculum. Creative cultural approaches played an important role in winning hearts and minds among students and professors: One organizer announced the walkout in a Shakespeare class by reciting one of the legendary bard’s classic antiwar sonnets to great applause. (2)
Numerous letters to the editor and a full-page ad in the student newspaper put a final touch on the peaking momentum in the days leading up to the walkout. A collective sense of anticipation could be felt throughout the campus. Unlike many isolated antiwar actions that had been ignored or dismissed by the majority of students in the previous couple of years, the walkout became a fact to be acknowledged before it even happened. Posters all over campus counted down the days until the action and students everywhere began to talk with their friends about what they planned to do on March 20.
Asserting Dual Power & Democratizing Protest
The three dozen or so active organizers in the antiwar coalition managed to temporarily change the character of the university by creating a dual power situation through their revolutionary democratic mobilization efforts. Day by day, they gathered the support, sympathy and/or friendly neutrality of the vast majority of the faculty, staff and students. They built a loose yet enormous antiwar social network that forced the administration and local police to think twice about trying to stop or curtail the walkout. In fact, a number of sympathizers within those system forces ended up giving their tacit support to the action (the dual power situation emboldened them to oppose the system even in small ways). Because the coalition succeeded in drawing on the social power of masses of people (as opposed to the minor social power of a few activists), the authorities were unable to pick out specific targets for arrest or suspension.
The palpable sense of rising momentum in turn emboldened the organizers to plan, prepare and run the walkout boldly and powerfully. During the final couple weeks of organizing, they discussed previous walkout experiences at Rutgers and elsewhere (including watching the movie Walkout about the 1968 Latino high school walkouts in Los Angeles). The antiwar coalition debated, defined and visualized what the walkout event should accomplish - agreeing when they could, and otherwise agreeing to disagree.
On the day of the walkout, the organizers refused to be intimidated or distracted by a small group of reactionary provocateurs, wagering that encouraging their fellow students to ignore counter-protestors isolate these elements more effectively than arguing with them or exchanging insults. Organizers went into classes to help their fellow students gather their resolve to join them (starting with friendly classes with supportive students and/or professors). The rally kept speakers rolling (without interminable lectures), emphasizing students and peers as speakers (no “talking heads”), and offered a wide range of informative and engaging perspectives that kept the crowd involved with innovative call-and-response techniques.
The organizers further infused democratic content into the protest format by asking the crowd to decide where to march next and whether or not to take the highway, making sure to keep the best communications possible between key organizers from all the groups in the coalition. The assumption of mass support proved to be a successful gambit, and a learning experience, as many “activists” were surprised to see construction workers on the highway flashing peace signs and pumping their fists in support.
Following Through & Building the Movement
The walkout, rally and march turned out great; marchers returned to their starting point having closed down a major highway and (thanks to the mass number of participants) suffered no arrests. The students felt a real sense of accomplishment and empowerment, having pulled off the largest walkout at Rutgers in at least 20 years.
Organizers wanted to ensure that the enthusiasm of the crowd was not wasted when everyone went home and that participants would be given the opportunity to begin deciding the next step of the movement immediately; when the march ended, dozens of students signed up with the coalition. Coalition events had been scheduled in advance so that students signing up were all reached with one mass email announcing all the different groups, projects, etc. which they could join (not just being told to come to the next protest!). As a result, all groups in the coalition got to grow. The revolutionary democratic approach of the organizers helped the movement move away from the individualistic militancy typical of activism, and towards building the mass militancy of an organized movement.
Of course, the student organizers identified a number of shortcomings: There should have been more preparation of students in the classes ahead of the walkout, media coverage should have been better organized, the process of coalition democracy needed improvement, etc. But the overall success of the event left the entire antiwar coalition eager to plan for a bigger and better walkout next year.
The Rutgers walkout turned out to be a skillful use of the protest as a tactic within a movement-building strategy. Such success could not happen if you protested every week as a ritual– the point is to use the tactic at the right time, at the right place and to do it strategically: Organize large numbers of people, engage them in the building of (temporary) dual power, and use the action not merely as an end in itself, but as an opportunity to grow the movement. (3)
______________________________________________
(1) The original call for the Walk Out at Rutgers was issued by the student group Rutgers Against the War (RAW). RAW was soon joined by Students for Belief, Awareness, Knowledge, and Activism (BAKA), Tent State University, the Student and Education Workers Union, the Latino Student Council, the United Black Council and others.
(2) “But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a
heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads,
chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day
and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying
for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some
upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I
am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how
can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black
matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were
against all proportion of subjection.” (Shakespeare, Henri V)
(3) One of the definitions of a successful action is that it leaves the movement stronger than it was before the action.
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:
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.
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.
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