Rotting Empire: Failure of Mass Parties

The Electoral College Motto: "No Good Can Come of This"

When I was involved with the American arm of the CWI, every other newspaper article that was published would end with some variation of "... and this is why we need to build a mass party in the interests of the working class."

It was the kind of thing people made jokes about, sounding like a goddamn broken record every issue. It was also the sort of thing that caused me endless writerly exasperation. I'm sure it eventually bored the few readers who were not already members.

But hey, on its own, a "mass party" sounds well and good, right? After all, as the activist group (rightly) points out: Wall Street has two parties of its own - Democrats and Republicans. Two variations of the same general practices. A center-right party and a conservative party. They keep America good and profitable. It sure would be nice if there was a great big party for working folks to defend their own interests, wouldn't it? Fight fire with fire?

No. Wrong.

Hence:

RULES FOR RESISTANCE, #1: NO ONE WHO USES THE WORD "MASS" OR "MASSES" IN A POSITIVE WAY IS YOUR ALLY.

People who don't use those words aren't necessarily your allies, either. But folks who use this kind of terminology tend, in my experience, to either be psychopathic schemers or the boot-licking lackeys for psychopathic schemers. They will also, at some point, refer to you as "unwashed."

"The masses." If people referred to me by my density, I wouldn't wash, either.

Let's face it: when you join a "mass party," ie, a party made up of lots of people united for a common interest, you're compromising your individual positions for a party platform. That has its uses, sure. Legalizing gay marriage. Legalizing hemp. Banning the death penalty. We live in a pretty big country and pretty big decisions "have" to get made.

But your voice gets drowned out. There's lots of people shrieking for the ears of just a few representatives. Having a new political party doesn't change that. And it's always the political people shrieking the loudest, the ones who think they know best for everybody else.

We don't need another party that whitewashes personal and regional differences.

Also big parties are targets for big interests. The Democrats are constantly co-opted by business, and they're constantly co-opting social movements in turn. Big institutions, whether it be corrupt labor bureaucracies or planet-poisoning industries or corrupt financial powerhouses, use big political parties to cover their asses. That's how the Republican party can house both working-class conservatives ("I don't want my money going to anyone else!") and rich conservatives ("I don't want my money going to anyone else!").

We can't get what we want out of national parties. We can't build a "mass party" that we won't eventually lose to other "mass" institutions. Look at the Labour Party in Britain!

It'd be much wiser to form smaller parties that we can hold on a short leash. Keep em accountable. Keep em close to the people they represent. It'd do us far more good in the long run to start paying more attention to our local political scene, instead of fixating on a cabal of a few hundred limp-dicked old fossils in Washington whose geriatric minds we will never change.

Political parties love their Dicks (this one is Cheney).

Mass parties emerged from mass communications: the telegraph, the radio, telephones and television. Look at where our technology is heading, what it's doing to our lives and our society, and ask yourself what it will and could do to the political parties of the future. And to you socialist activists, nostalgic for the myths of the mighty Bolsheviks, you need to get yourselves in shape. This is far, far away from the Russia of the first World War. This ... is reality. And the old models cannot engage it.

Our One Demand: *Everything*

Revolution is ballet on the back of a bull.

It's been far too long, and it is far too late past our naivete to presume we can make some totalitarian summary of what has occurred since the Arab Spring.

With no more or less than that hesitation, the pause of someone who has not commented on the game despite watching closely for a summer - and most of an autumn - I turn my analysis towards Occupy Wall Street, the populist movement that has grown from a dozen protesters in Zuccotti Park to a swarm of tens of thousands in New York and thousands more in over 70 cities in the nation and the world.

It is, of course, a direct employment of the same tactics used to bring down Ben Ali and Mubarak, the same tactics leveled in the tilt against (a medievally entrenched) Gadhaffi, against the tyrants of Bahrain and Syria and Yemen and Iran. For different reasons, not all of them have "succeeded," at least as far as having their demands met.

And a lot of U.S. critics are especially derisive of #OWS because their demands seem nebulous, without realizing that this is a manifested symptom of how terribly fucked up this country has become. There are at least a dozen strong demands among the protesters, and countless other intelligent, thoughtful, and creative ideas coursing through its collective veins. A lot of people come out waving a sign about their "pet issue," but see others with different issues and think to themselves, or say aloud, "Right on!"

It is a conglomeration of decades of unmet demands.

And as such, it neither can nor needs to articulate "clear" demands. We the occupation as a whole have little faith that such demands would even be met, and even if they were the Democratic spirit of "bipartisanship" and the Republican ideal of "obstructionism" would only leave us further dissatisfied.

This is the next stage of the global populist uprising, what protesters and commentators are very rightly calling the "American Fall." Government as it has existed in this country for the last sixty years, ruled by oligarchical cash, cannot continue. Nor can it facilitate its own further evolution. The very social forces that gave rise to the state have changed into the anathema of the state. Its products have made it obsolete. The institutions of tradition are bankrupt, having spent the last 150 years careening through a menagerie of manifestations: monarchy, bourgeois republic, state socialism, Stalinism, fascism, authoritarianism. With the internet and all of human history now at our fingertips, we see through every cynical maneuver the ruling elite take to re-establish their rule of profit.

I'm faintly amused whenever I hear one side or another take up a debate about whether or not #OWS "wants" the "end of capitalism." Is it "anticapitalist"? Certainly one key demand is "the end of corporate personhood," a cornerstone of capitalist structure. But you can no more call for the "end" of capitalism than you can call for the end of the west wind.

Social forces are material forces, governed by social and material causes. No matter to what degree the protesters are aware of the fact, capitalism has run into one of its greatest impasses in unprecedented ways. Socially, ideologically, even physically - even the Earth itself has slid past the brink of ruin without any clear way back. The protesters from #OWS are only evidence that more folks feel the crush and the worry and the lack of alternatives than ever before.

The bottom is falling out. Some are losing their fear. Others will follow.

How many Parliamentarians does it take to screw together an industrial restoration?

Out of the "amorphous," "uncertain" Libyan rebellion rises a road-map towards parliamentary government. More opportunity to elucidate my own apocalyptic Marxist heresy.

Note how in the early days of the rebellion, the media was unable to articulate the "character" or "direction" of Gaddhafi's antagonists. It defied their paradigms. Some on "the left," including conventional Marxists, made a big deal of the early use of the pre-Gaddhafi monarchist flag (which has pretty much been adopted, it seems, now that the rebellion's leadership is developing into a "legitimate" institution). There are complaints that the leaders of the rebellion are too pro-Western, in bed with the imperialists, making deals with the devils, etc. etc. And clearly this is true. And clearly there are times when people's movements are all-to-eager to compromise, even when they have the upper hand (*cough*Wisconsin*cough*).

Other times, there just isn't the higher-level thinking prevalent enough to make and stick to reasoned, virtuous choices. (Funny, how in that photo, I can't make out a single black person, despite gathering outside a black President's home in a city that roughly half black.) You can argue all you want with people about the things they ought to know better about. It isn't that people are immutably evil. It's simply that sometimes they are just too engaged in the habit of ego to be good. Their capacity isn't any generally less.

Anyway, I digress; points about individual egoism is only circumstantial to Libyan "leaders" and their promise to make a conventional parliamentary government. In my experiences with "politicized" folks (approximately meaning in this context "folks who have become passionate about the socialization of enmity enough to 'do something' about it") most people gravitate towards (or rattle around between) one of three positions when it comes to leadership (perhaps more acutely "management" - so-called "leaders" whose function is to mystify through a process called "government"):

1. High respect, and/or apologism for perceived bad policy. This is how liberals in the U.S. usually treat Democrats and how conservatives in the US treat Republicans.
2. Moderate respect, and/or criticism or even hostility towards perceived bad policy. This is how liberals and conservatives in the U.S. generally feel towards their opposing parties; how conventional Marxists think of parliamentary politicians on the whole. This latter point is because, in my experience, conventional Marxists can't imagine an imminent reality that isn't governed by parliamentary procedure but they do want the formation of their own Party (a "working class" party) to take the helm of it (functionally restoring the industrialist paradigm).
3. Nil respect and/or apathy and/or hostility towards leadership's existence and whatever institutions support them/enact their policies. Superficially, the whole gamut of anarchism fits in here - but I think there is room for something else, a creative anti-Parliamentarianism, an antagonistic philosophy that combs the social ruins of bureaucracy in decline and recombines the fluid constitution of what we once conceived of as concrete institutions.

The rebellion against Ghaddafi's eccentric, chaos-chronistic tyranny (unpacking it: this green-flagged government ostensibly linked "outdated" [the scare quotes of bourgeois perspective] tribal government with "advanced" [and the scare quotes of Vanguardist perspective! Look Ma, no hands!] people's council governments - by arbitrating past and future modes via cult of personality a la Stalinism or "third-world socialism") ... the rebellion against Ghaddafi's eccentric, chaos-chronistic tyranny ought to reveal to us the interstices between "forms" of "government."

The question that comes to mind: if a people can voluntarily enter into a war against a hated tyrant, "how much" government do they need? What is the purpose of "government" as we know it - "rule of law," as many Western politicians claim, or the negotiated slavery of populations, organized into classes, to an industrial mode of production? A mode of production whose harried, unresting, replicative logic extends beyond the control of any singular class or class alliance. A mode of production which blindly and mindlessly pillages the living and the dead and all the "useful" things of nature and leaves swaths of ruins and polluted wastelands in its wake?

an interim government would immediately take over to provide day-to-day governance and keep order, the Associated Press news agency reports.

It would comprise members from the NTC, technocrats from the Gaddafi regime, senior military and intelligence officers and a supreme court judge, he said.

A constitution would be drawn up and put to a referendum, followed a few months later by parliamentary and presidential elections.

What we see in Libya is a habitual surrender of the vital forces of rebellion to the industrial mode of government, which domesticates the human animal in order to turn the gears of the earth's mal-apportionment. Their instinct is to destroy that which oppresses them, but in doing so their only choices has been an alliance with the devil they don't know (yet).

But, precisely because of the unusual historic balance of powers that I described in my last post, more of that interstitial space has been revealed than might normally appear in "simple" (perhaps better explained as "previous") civil war scenarios. To glance a moment at our own Civil War (because I assume our readers are most familiar with that), the South adopted the old Articles of Confederation without batting an eye. Hell, it was a handful of property owners who went to the state governments to instigate secession - it wasn't a people's movement at all until the ruling powers capitalized on regional patriotism. It simply went from being states in the United States to being a Confederacy without a struggle for form in between. Those rulers had cohesion as an organized class.

These people, in a Libyan refugee camp across the border in Tunisia, are not represented by any "real" (parliamentary) government and might never be.

The Libyan rebels have slipped, however temporarily, through the cracks of the industrial mode, and these cracks are widening. There is very much a chance the "22-nation contact group" working with the transitional government can foster a parliamentary government and bring the rebellion under control, declare a revolution "complete," and integrate them all some way into the current world order. But as resources become scarce, as labor becomes redundant and what industrialization has deemed "work" becomes "scarce" and commodities, environments, modes of living become antagonistic to the survival of our species, more of these interstitial gaps will yawn open with less opportunity for "appropriate" re-incorporation.

Who will build the new infrastructure for millennial capitalism's catastrophic zones? Where will they get the resources? Who will pay for it? And who will benefit? Worse yet - how, in light of peak oil and capitalism's sociopathic waste of resources - how can it possibly be sustainable?

What we're reading

File Under "Know Thy Enemy": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt

Schmitt changed universities in 1926, when he became professor for law at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, and again in 1932, when he accepted a position in Cologne. It was in Cologne, too, that he wrote his most famous paper, "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political"), in which he developed his theory of "the political". Distinct from party politics, "the political" is the essence of politics. While churches are predominant in religion or society is predominant in economics, the state is predominant in politics. Yet for Schmitt the political was not an autonomous domain equivalent to the other domains, but rather the existential basis that would determine any other domain should it reach the point of politics (e.g. religion ceases to be merely theological when it clear distinction between the "friend" and the "enemy"). The political is not equal to any other domain, such as the economic, but instead is the most essential to identity.

Schmitt, in perhaps his best-known formulation, bases his conceptual realm of state sovereignty and autonomy upon the distinction between friendand enemy. This distinction is to be determined "existentially," which is to say that the enemy is whoever is "in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible." (Schmitt, 1996, p. 27) Such an enemy need not even be based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything.

Although there have been divergent interpretations concerning this work, there is broad agreement that "The Concept of the Political" is an attempt to achieve state unity by defining the content of politics as opposition to the "other" (that is to say, an enemy, a stranger. This applies to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one's own interests.) In addition, the prominence of the state stands as a neutral force over potentially fractious civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to reach the level of the political, lest civil war result.

How the Union Resurgence Got Quashed by the Union Leadership in Wisconsin: http://gmfbrown.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-still-exist.html

After that, the movement completely died down at the precise moment when it should have been at its peak. Suddenly everything became about recall campaigns and legal challenges. The legal challenges to the bill were based, not on the content of the bill, but on a technicality about how it was voted on. As such, they can just vote on it again if it gets thrown out. And by the time any recall campaign can take effect, the bill, having passed will effectively destroy the public sector unions. And then, at best, we'll replace the party funded by the anti-union Koch brothers with the party funded by the anti-union Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And yet, this strategy was deemed to be "reasonable" because apparently "reasonable" and "passive" are the same thing.

I'm More and More Convinced It's the End of the World (As We Know It): http://www.amazon.com/Combined-Uneven-Apocalypse-Luciferian-Marxism/dp/1846944686/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303488895&sr=1-1

The world is already apocalyptic, and .... there is no event to wait for, just the zones in which these revelations are forestalled and the sites where we can take a stand ... to refuse either a sense of reconciliation with this world order or an illusion of the ease of bringing it down.

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Those of us who still find dignity in the idea of the human spirit - who even now consider ourselves as part of "the Left" - ought to discard these reactionary tendencies to hold onto the crumbling past and prepare for the ruins of the future.