On 1/6/12 4:49 PM, Keith Hart wrote:
[...], but the paper that launched
this thread reminded once more of my mentor, the West Indian revolutionary
CLR James. He often drew attention to the intellectuals' impotence in the
face of mass pressure for enhanced democracy. When the force of people on
the move fails to conform to their own ideas, they make abstract calls for
them to fall in line. Many of them end up serving established powers of the
right and left, not that there are many of the latter these days.
I am not sure whom you are referring to here, Keith. But there is
nothing abstract in the piece Jodi and I wrote. In fact, the three kinds
of objections to demands we discuss in the article have been raised in
several OWS meetings. The second part of the article argues that demands
can be tactical weapons once you try to rebuild society around communal
practices. Some of these practices already exist within OWS and tend to
build autonomous institutions (Negri would call them self-valorization).
Yet the notion that the General Assembly or the Spokes Council will
scale up and one day will replace the functions of a national government
is delusional. Increase the scale of democratic participation (something
every Occupier desires) entails a radical transformations of the
institutions that are supposed to articulate the decision-making process.
When I started attending GAs in August in Tompkins Square Park, we were
about 50-80 people attending these meetings and the discussion was
moderated but also quite informal. By October you had to compile a form
in order to submit a proposal to the GA. The Spokes Council, which was
created to overcome the paralysis of the GA is completely bureaucratized
and yet still paralized by the ideology of consensus and
participationism. De facto, anyone can create a working group and send a
delegate to the Spokes Council with the sole purpose of disrupting it
(something that is happening on a regular basis).
What we are saying in this article is that instead of pursuing consensus
at all costs we should begin by acknowledging existing divisions. From
there we can begin looking for commonalities. But if basically one or
two individuals are endowed with the power to block any proposal, you
end up with a dictatorship of the more vocal individuals--some of whom
are aptly infiltrated so as to make self-government anything but an
incredibly frustrating experience.
Finally, in the second part of the article we link the struggle for
democracy to the struggle for social justice and environmental justice.
We recognize that the commons is a training ground where democracy is
exerted in relation to material resources. And we ask how do we go from
local to large-scale commons when capital allows the commons to exist
only insofar as they do not threaten private accumulation? This is a
criticism of those who believe that you can simply expand alternative
economies through incremental change. On the contrary, we believe that
we need to mark a clear discontinuity with the current economic and
legal framework of contemporary capitalism as this system does not have
the resources within itself to overcome the crisis. We also think that
this discontinuity has to go hand-in-hand with developing alternative
economies from below.
Yet demands are critical for claiming back the space of thinking (and
acting) big. To begin with, we propose a national campaign to reclaim
the ground waters as commons. We also suggest that such campaign could
be extended to other resources and sectors of the economy. If we do
that, it is because we know that there are many activists that are
already thinking and acting along these lines. For instance, OWS is
working on an alternative bank called "The Commons." The direct action
of December 17 was titled "Take Back the Commons." There are several
working groups, forums, and other initiatives inspired to the notion of
the commons. And even those who do not use this term, often assert
communal practices around the production and reproduction of specific
resources.
From my point of view, this is exactly the opposite of "making abstract
calls." It is an attempt to say, we do have a lot of little pieces of a
giant puzzle, but we won't be able to see the larger picture if each of
us remains focused on his/her own detail and if we assume that these
pieces will recompose themselves as if by magic (i.e. by "consensus").
best, snafu
snafu
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