Curmudgeon: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, May 2024

I’m a curmudgeon.

I’m an ill-tempered old man who’s starting on my seventies and thoroughly pissed that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Capitalism still rules the planet, now more than ever given the collapse of “real existing socialism” and the inviability of most socialist struggles for national liberation. The radical utopias I’ve fought to realize for most of my life—left anarchism and left communism—have mostly failed to pan out. So I’ve got maybe ten years, twenty years tops if I’m “lucky,” as I watch the world go down the old porcelain highway before I die.

Things weren’t always so. Some fifty-five years ago I believed that some form of socialism was positive, necessary and all but inevitable. I honored the legacy and spirit of anarchism in its final stand during the Spanish Republic which went down to defeat at the hands of Fascism. For the next two decades, despite my growing mistrust and rejection of orthodox Leninist socialism as it expanded, I held onto the belief of the efficacy of socialism in the abstract. And by socialism I mean internationalism, workers’ power, democracy, and collective, cooperative economics. Two approaches influenced me during the Long Sixties; the progressive religious strain (social gospel Protestantism, liberal Catholicism, reform Judaism) that undergirded the New Deal, Civil Rights Movement and social justice movements, and the Marxist theory of history (historical materialism) which posited that “scientific laws” of historical development would bring about the secular utopia of socialism, a “workers’ paradise.”

I’m not religious and at the time I wasn’t a Marxist. Nevertheless I believed a better world was in the making. Certainly I thought that much of humanity was trending progressive. I was part of a variegated, rapidly expanding New Left in the capitalist West. There were halfway decent innovative social democratic countries and a promising non-aligned movement of nations. Then there was the growing “real existing socialism” of the Soviet bloc’s COMECON and Warsaw Pact, as well as several anti-revisionist regimes and successful national liberation movements that constituted a Marxist-Leninist “Second World.” By 1988 “real existing socialism” (RES) alone encompassed one-third of the world’s population (over a billion people), close to a fourth of world’s land surface, and 26 sovereign countries.

I’ve never been a fan of Marxism-Leninism nor do I consider that form of socialism—one based on one-party authoritarian regimes, centrally planned command economies, collectivized agriculture and industry, nationalized property and strictly controlled societies—to be truly socialist. Frankly I was appalled that the Leninist Left had managed to bamboozle a third of humanity and a fourth of the planet with the false promises of its brand of “socialism of scarcity,” let alone convince numerous Western liberals, progressives and radicals—useful idiots all—to support them. When the Anti-Vietnam War Movement was the largest, most inclusive form of political protest around and encompassed millions of people, all manner of Democrats, democratic socialists, Social Democrats, anarchists, independent socialists and communists, and Leninists participated. But Leninists ended up controlling many of the main anti-war organizations, not through numbers and majority democratic rule, but through political gerrymandering and minority machinations.

Once the Vietnam War ended the anti-war movement disintegrated and the New Left turned New Communist Movement was decimated. Reagan deliberately set out to bankrupt the Soviet bloc, leading to the collapse of the Leninist Second World from 1989-1991 until only five explicitly Marxist-Leninist countries remain standing today—China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. Colonialist and imperialist powers used everything from subterfuge to brute military force to defeat socialist struggles for national liberation or overthrow them once successful, strategies that eventually curtailed the nonaligned movement of nations. And neoliberalism’s austerity policies—the rollback of government regulations, the welfare state, the public realm, and union power—were coupled with issues of diminished national sovereignty and expanded undocumented migration to fuel the decline of Social Democracy and the rise of the Right.

There are only a handful of RES countries left in the world, with perhaps another handful of RES-adjacent nations claiming hard socialist regimes. Venezuela’s United Socialist Party and Syria’s Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party are among the few repressive one-party states claiming non-market socialist economies left. Not countries I would be caught dead in. A more authentic, liberatory socialism can be found in far fewer places. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) practices indigenismo, horizontal autonomy, mutual aid, women’s independence, and mandar obedeciendo in Chiapas, Mexico. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Peoples Defense Units (YPG/J) promote democratic confederalism, cantonal autonomy, women’s liberation, and confessional freedom in Rojava, Syria. While these are in many ways excellent examples of true socialism, their power to expand globally is not promising.

The Russian Revolution de facto divided the world into anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, socialist countries opposed to imperialist, colonialist and capitalist nations. But Stalinism formalized that division into socialist versus capitalist camps. With the collapse of RES, the Left can only muster an anti-imperialist versus imperialist campism that barely implies the latter is socialist. There is nothing socialist or anti-imperialist about an irredentist, oligarchic capitalist Russia attempting to crush Ukraine. An even vaguer partition happens around the concept of the Global South against the Global North, with India, Iran, Uganda, Argentina and many other reactionary countries in the Global South not even remotely approaching socialism let alone freedom or democracy.

All of this does not bode well for socialism as a project for human liberation. I’m experiencing a crisis in faith, an inability to summon optimism, and a profound unhappiness about the future. I no longer believe that socialism is likely. But I fear that capitalism will crash-and-burn, destroying the planet in civil war and ecological disaster in the process. I protest, I belong to a union, I write my columns, I have a life. So I don’t despair even though I do mourn what seems to be an epochal demise of socialism.

I thought revolution was just around the corner when I was young. Now that I’m old I fear, instead, that death and destruction are imminent. I know that the former was false and I only hope that the latter is as well.

National liberation: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2024

Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win!

The chant rang out from certain quarters of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement during marches and rallies. It was voiced by anti-imperialist components of the movement, a minority element comparable to the pacifist portion that believed in nonviolence and called themselves “the Peace Movement.” Most of the rest of us were neither anti-imperialists nor pacifists, and while some of us considered ourselves revolutionaries few of us were sycophantic cheerleaders for Third World national liberation movements.

Last column I discussed how the GI organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a stellar example of revolutionary defeatism during the Long 60s. The concept of revolutionary defeatism arose with the first World War, the near global conflict between the Allied and Central European powers and their colonial empires. European Social Democratic Parties—all avowedly Marxist and internationalist, some like the Social Democratic Party of Germany extremely popular, and none in power prior to 1914—split when the war began. The majority of these parties went pro-war, and defended their respective countries involvement in the war effort. Hence the term revolutionary defensism and the epithet social patriotism.

The social democratic minority—Luxemburg, Lenin, Liebknecht, Kautsky, Jaurès, et al—called themselves genuine internationalists, defended radical class struggle, and espoused revolutionary defeatism. The ruling classes of nations at war send their working classes to fight and die in battle against each other, so workers can never win when fighting capitalist wars. Workers need to turn these nationalistic conflicts into civil war and then international proletarian revolution to overthrow their national bourgeoisies. The imperialist ruling classes are the only true enemy and workers of the world need to turn their guns against them.

The VVAW attempted to do just that and caused the near collapse of the US Military in the process. But there are limitations to considering the GI revolt during the Vietnam War as unalloyed revolutionary defeatism. First, the concept had its ascendency during and soon after the first World War which experienced dozens of troop mutinies and a half dozen mostly-failed social revolutions. Revolutionary defeatism was a real option, as was the potential for international socialist revolution. In the Long 60s however, and despite our wishful thinking that revolution was imminent in America, the VVAW and the larger 60s social movements didn’t have any real opportunity for overthrowing the US government or Western imperialism.

Second, while the VVAW arguably practiced a form of revolutionary defeatism, the Vietnamese side of the war was not practicing revolutionary defeatism but rather revolutionary defensism. Right off, I’ll get blowback contending that the Vietnamese fight was not revolutionary defensism but a genuine “socialist struggle for national liberation.” To understand why the distinction is not so clear-cut, start with the preamble of Marxism’s retreat into nationalism.

When Social Democracy split into a “social patriotic” majority and a newly-minted Communist minority, the latter’s internationalism was short-lived. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were keen advocates of anti-imperialism and self-determination for all peoples, demanding freedom from colonial oppression for the Third World. Marxist-Leninists insisted they stood for international socialism, yet they also insisted that national liberation movements were not about chauvinism but about revolutionary democracy. Stalin took power in 1924 and declared his doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Mao then insisted that “Chinese Communists must therefore combine patriotism with internationalism.” These are the cornerstones of Third World national liberation struggles, including the Vietnamese one.

Imperialism and colonialism were also defining characteristics of Third World national liberation struggles, starting with the small elite of the colonized class that emerged during the colonial period known as the national bourgeoisie. This Third World national bourgeoisie was Western educated and organized with the consent of and by the imperial interests of the colonial powers. (Regarding Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh traveled extensively throughout the West, gaining his political education and commitment to socialism while living in France. Võ Nguyên Giáp studied at the French Indochinese University at Hanoi.) The native bourgeoisie in the Third World possessed limited capital and so cooperated in the exploitation of their nations with their colonial overlords. Their commitment to nationalism was an article of blind faith, and their national liberation struggles were an uncritical replica of European modernity, born of the successful bourgeois revolutions starting in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Their commitment to socialism was frequently born of Leninist vanguard party politics and Stalinist “socialism in one country” ideology. This national bourgeoisie, once in power, administered imperialism, decolonization, capital accumulation and the restoration of ruling class power. The national bourgeoisie claimed to be revolutionary and benefit “the people,” but in fact they underdeveloped certain sectors of their national economy while developing the whole economy to assist imperialist exploitation, and thus made the people dependent on global capitalism through hegemonic practices like national debt. (Vietnamese sweatshops mercilessly exploited native/child labor and indebted the country to the World Bank as Vietnam ostensibly became a mixed “socialist-oriented market economy.”) Ultimately, this native bourgeoisie prevented their people from achieving their full potential and maximizing their wealth by separating the working classes from direct ownership and control of the means of production, specifically the land. This is classic substitutionism; of the vanguard party substituting in power for the working classes, and of the central committee or the chairman substituting for the vanguard party. This national bourgeoisie was relentless against workers and people holding resources coveted by that bourgeoisie, insisting once in power that they were presiding over the end of colonialism, the birth of socialism, and the achievement of true national liberation. Rather than helping the people and the workers however, they only helped themselves and often the imperialists of a global capitalism.

National liberation struggles in the Third World attempted to mimic Europe in virtually every way, and not just its sometimes virulent nationalism. The contradictions between the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man” with its supposed humanism, freedom and autonomy and the increased exploitation, slavery and even mass murder of European history are paralleled in the Third World as it decolonized. (Vietnamese “re-education camps,” forced labor and economic relocations, brutal treatment of national minorities like the Hmong, Montagnards and Khmer Krom, expulsion of boat people, atrocities and massacres committed during Vietnam’s invasion and occupation of Cambodia, all while professing the ideals of “international socialism.”) Third World national liberation struggles attempted to “overcome” racism by instigating their own, often more relentless racism within the racist framework inherited from Europe. Much as European racism was initiated and fueled by Spanish, Portuguese, English and other colonialist powers through “primitive accumulation” against native peoples in the Americas and the rest of the world, Third World national liberation recapitulated both Europe’s “primitive accumulation” and racism. The national/racial/ethnic identities constructed by these struggles were in turn joined to the alienation, fragmentation, and consumerism fostered first by monopoly capitalism and then late-stage capitalism.

Third World national liberation movements, once in power, had numerous other problems beginning with failing to stem the flow of capital out of their country despite efforts at decolonization and anti-imperialism after political liberation. This is partly due to false decolonization and anti-imperialism. According to Franz Fanon, “if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new state, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.” But it’s also due to rampant corruption, and not just state capture where private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage. Widespread systemic political corruption, the corruption of politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants as well as the commodification of everything, including the integrity and conscience of the leadership, accounted for the flight of capital. (Vietnam’s rates of political/party corruption, bribery, etc stand second only to India, with foreign direct investment lagging at barely $28.5 billion, far below its ASEAN neighbors, due to mistrust.)

Third World national liberation struggles had hazy definitions of “democracy” that separated political from economic democracy, adulterated participatory democracy with Leninist faux democratic centralism, and postured that one-party dictatorships were actually European-style social democracies. Similarly, imprecise applications of “socialism” and “Marxism” were often insufficient, usually cultural formations disguised as economic, and denying the importance of economic democracy, workers’ self-management and community control against state ownership and bureaucratic control. The national bourgeoisie pretended to usher in democracy and socialism while actually incorporating itself within and entrenching the global capitalist system of imperialism. Thus national liberation movements seamlessly coalesced with new, anti-colonial forms of imperialism. Third World national liberation struggles, their politics and manifestations, became reified. György Lukács in History and Class Consciousness called reification “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Since all is capitalism these days—from the inner workings of individual consciousness to external corporatist economic structures, from “socialist” China and Vietnam to Campist so-called anti-imperialist regimes—we live in a totally reified world. The distinction between revolutionary defeatism versus revolutionary defensism I initially expressed by comparing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Vietnam’s national liberation struggle remains. Sanctifying national liberation is fraught at best, lethal at worst.

– – – – –

Half of this column was stolen from Idylls, Imitation, Ideology and Imperialism: A Fanonian Critique of National Liberation by Seshadari Jesse Moodley,  Picasso said mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. I’m not a great writer, but I do know when someone is. This University of Cape Town MA thesis is brilliant. (Download at https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/33870)

 

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anti-nationalist action: CRITIQUING CAMPISM | GA Matiasz (aka “Lefty” Hooligan)

CRITIQUING CAMPISM

I’m on the left of the Left. A libertarian socialist. I have been for fifty-five years now, ever since 1968 and the anti-Vietnam War movement. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2-24-2022 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza on 10-27-2023 I’ve been leery of mass anti-war protests organized by crude Leninists, terror apologists and left anti-semites like the Tweedledum-Tweedledee vanguardists of the PSL/WWP joined-at-the-hip by their faux ANSWER “Coalition.”

This hard Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left divides the world into imperialist nations versus anti-imperialist nations. It’s assumed that those countries in the imperialist “camp” are reactionary whereas those countries in the anti-imperialist “camp” are progressive. This basic campism insists that the US is the center of global imperialism and therefore the primary enemy, with Israel an imperialist appendage. The anti-imperialist forces arrayed against the US are considered “on the right side of history” and are, if not socialist, at least leaning Left. So campism implies that those who oppose imperialism, even reactionary Islamist Hamas, are progressive.

I’m pro-Jewish, anti-Israeli state, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Hamas armed party. But I’m convinced there can never be a simple, easy solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. The Israeli government has committed war crimes; the indiscriminate use of white phosphorous, collective punishment of Palestinians, massacres of unarmed Arab civilian protesters, the relentless assault on Arab hospitals and communities. Hamas has also committed war crimes; suicide bombings, indiscriminate rocket fire, using Palestinian civilians and hospitals as human shields, the massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7. And there’s been populist pogroms on both sides, grassroots war crimes like the murders of West Bank Palestinians by the Israeli Settler Movement and the looting of Israeli communities and bases by Gazans after October 7.

According to the anti-imperialist camp however Hamas can do no wrong and Israel can do no right. Hamas is engaged in a “decades long fight for national liberation,” a legitimate “struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” Israel is “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and “fascist-type oppression,” the “genocide being carried out by the Zionist terror state.” Resistance against “the Zionist entity-by any means necessary” is “a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation” by “Palestinian freedom fighters” who “are not terrorists!” Indeed. “when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance” (by massacring civilians) “must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”

The campist anti-imperialist “unwavering solidarity” and “unequivocally expressed support” for the Palestinian people and “their attack against Israel” becomes pure Manichaean “good vs evil.”[*] I prefer the straightforward approach of Gilles Dauvé who argued: “I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an ‘anti-imperialist,’ since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.” I too am against imperialism, but I’m not an anti-imperialist.

Much has been made of former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis’s refusal to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacres when he said: “Back in South Africa in the era of apartheid, what was the problem? Was it that some members of the Black resistance, including the ANC but not only the ANC, took up arms against the South African regime and sometimes killed innocent people? Was that the problem of apartheid? No. The problem was apartheid.” What this skirts is the history of the original apartheid system. That the ANC actually signed onto the Geneva Protocols in 1980, that the ANC was party to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that clearly found the ANC in violation of the Geneva Protocols, and that ultimately the ANC accepted those judgments. What we need is to hold Israel and Hamas, Britain, the US and Europe accountable for the 75+ years of heinous war crimes in Israel/Palestine, not make excuses for them.

Campist anti-imperialism discredits the Left as a whole. The machinations of the PSL, WWP and ANSWER “Coalition” are particularly destructive, with their retro-Marcyism, support for dictators like Putin and Assad, disdain for workers struggles, sabotage of other socialists, sectarianism against alternative movements, and strong-arm tactics to silence radicals of different views. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars they’ve sought to control the anti-war movement specifically and the Left generally as vanguardist fiefdoms. John Reimann (“Oakland Socialist”) insists the present anti-war movement should be democratically organized and all points of view be represented. Jason Schulman and Dan La Botz contend (“Socialist Forum”) there is only one camp, “our camp,” “our commitment to democracy, to the workers’ movement in all countries, and to the struggle for international socialism.” I heartily concur.
 
[*] Preceding pastiche of quotes from Democratic Socialists of America, National Lawyers Guild, Black Lives Matter, Party of Socialism and Liberation, Workers World Party.

by GA Matiasz (aka “Lefty” Hooligan)

The Long Sixties: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2023

The Sixties, henceforth designated the Long Sixties, are a touchstone for me. I make a lot of “coming late to the party” as I became aware of politics only in 1968 at age 16. And so I return to this period of my life obsessively in my writing. This piece treats the historical period as crucially intertwined with the history of the United States. To understand what I’m hoping to accomplish, consider that from one perspective the Vietnam War (1946-1975) was a war for national liberation—part of the decolonization wave of Africa, Asia and Latin America—that saw the defeat of first France and then the United States, and inspired similar armed struggles around the globe. But from another perspective America’s initial involvement in the Vietnam War—when the US first shipped military aid to the French colonial administration in 1950 and Eisenhower first sent military advisors to train the South Vietnamese Army in 1955—was crucial to the historical impact of the Long Sixties through the numerous movements I detail below. Because so much happened in these two decades, I’m necessarily selective about what I’m including in this synopsis. Instead of my regular column, I’m fashioning this as a type of “CliffsNotes,” a shorthand attempt to summarize the Long Sixties every time I drop the term. Expect this to be periodically updated in future installments as I expound and expand on it.

THE LONG SIXTIES: 1955-1975:
Contours Of U.S. History:

Colonial origins, continental expansion (Manifest Destiny) with displacement of the native population, and hemispheric hegemony (Monroe Doctrine). Capitalist individualism and entrepreneurialism alongside Black plantation slavery, Civil War, failed Reconstruction, codification of Jim Crow racial segregation reinforced by white supremacist terrorism. Beginnings of empire and imperialist interventionism, robber baron capitalism mythologizing laissez-faire while creating monopoly, US entry onto international stage with first World War. Assumption of two-camp capitalist/socialist global division around 1917 Russian Revolution, economic crisis in world capitalism, Great Depression, beginning of US welfare state with FDR/New Deal. Second World War between fascist Axis powers and US/USSR allies of convenience, US supersedes British imperial reach. Post-war consolidation of American corporate state and Pax Americana.

Elements Of The Long Sixties:

• American Way Of Life: American Liberalism’s welfare state, as constructed by Franklin D. Roosevelt (New Deal), Harry Truman (Square Deal), John F. Kennedy (New Frontier), and Lyndon Johnson (Great Society), integrated with the team cooperation, bureaucratic management, and multinational scope of Monopoly Capitalism. The individual subsumed to the organization. This required worker-management cooperation to guarantee labor peace through a liberal corporatist consensus. The American Way of Life defined a time of suburbanization, consumerism, material surplus and affluence; “the world’s highest standard of living.”

• The Cold War: The post-second World War division of the world into two contending power blocs, the US-dominated “Free World” and the USSR-dominated “Communist bloc.” Instead of direct military conflicts between the two superpowers, proxy or brush wars were fought indirectly between their spheres of influence, often in nations on the periphery (Korea, Vietnam). Anti-imperialist wars of national liberation often relied on asymmetrical guerrilla warfare to achieve decolonization, national self-determination and putative socialism. The rise of China (PRC) and the Third World further fractured and complicated the Cold War internationally. A bipartisan Cold War consensus about the means and ends of American foreign policy against the Soviet threat was considered to have prevailed domestically

• Rock Music/Youth Culture: The cross-pollination of rhythm-and-blues and gospel music from American Black culture with country/western music to create rock-and-roll, a cross fertilization of ethnic and regional styles that included the trend toward inter-racial bands. Rock Music/Youth Culture emphasized the importance of youth trends, tastes, and consumption and spread almost immediately to Britain, then to Western Europe, and finally to the rest of the world. A number of distinct rock-and-roll sub genres emerged by the late 1960s (blues rock, folk rock, country rock, psychedelic rock, jazz/rock fusion, progressive rock, heavy metal, etc). Dovetailing with the Beat Generation’s nihilism, youthful rebellion became social discontent that, when combined with quasi-sacramental drug use and liberated sexuality, formed the “turn on, tune in, drop out” freethinking communalist Hippie Counterculture/Youth Movement. Large, multi-day music festivals and intentional communities were hallmarks of the movement. The collective organizing, urban cooperatives and back-to-the-land rural communes of the San Francisco Diggers, Merry Pranksters, Good Earth, Hog Farm, White Panther Party, UATW-MF, etc. attempted to establish a practical alternative society on the ground and had decidedly anarchistic sensibilities.

• Civil Rights Movement: Starting with Brown vs Board of Education, the NAACP, and desegregation the rise of Black protest, nonviolent civil disobedience and various tactics (marches, boycotts, sit-ins, etc) through ML King, SCLC, SNCC and CORE. The move away from moderate incrementalism and nonviolent civil disobedience led to the Black Power Movement as enunciated by Stokely Carmichael and embodied by the Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self Defense. Both revolutionary Black nationalist and socialist, the BPP was influenced by one of the legacies of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction—Black Nationalism—specifically Marcus Garvey (Back to Africa) and the Nation of Islam (Black separatism) both of which emphasized cultural and economic autonomy. The BPP monitored the Oakland Police with armed patrols and ran a Free Breakfast for Children Program. In turn, Black Power led to Brown Power (Brown Berets, Young Lords Party), Yellow Power (Red Guard, I Wor Kuen), and Red Power (American Indian Movement). The Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College led a successful 3-month-long strike demanding ethnic studies in 1968, and AIM occupied the island of Alcatraz for nearly 19 months (1969-1971).

• New Left: Students for a Democratic Society, founded in 1962, and the sit-in occupation at UC Berkeley in 1964-65 known as the Free Speech Movement represented an ever-widening student rebellion that consciously set itself apart from the party-oriented/class-oriented Old Left of the Socialist Party (social democratic), Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), and Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist). The New Left’s sit-ins, teach-ins, occupations, demonstrations and strikes in colleges and universities across the country cross-pollinated with the Hippie Counterculture and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, sometimes producing hybrids like the Yippies. SDS continued with university and community/neighborhood organizing, shifting to anti-draft/anti-war work as the 60s went on. The attempt by the anti-revisionist Maoist Progressive Labor Party-Worker/Student Alliance to take over SDS led to sectarianism, factional infighting and splintering, and eventual dissolution. An ever-increasingly fractious landscape of multiplying groupuscules known as the New Communist Movement roughly polarized between a clandestine armed struggle tendency [Weatherman/Weather Underground Organization, May 19th Communist Organization, Black Liberation Army, Symbionese Liberation Army, et al] and a vanguard party-building tendency [October League/Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist), Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Organization for Revolutionary Unity, League of Revolutionary Struggle, Communist Workers Party, Sojourner Truth Organization, Venceremos Organization, ad nauseam] The NCM’s ideological hodgepodge of anti-revisionism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, support for Cuba, Vietnam, national liberation struggles generally and various Third World ideologies, Maoism, Stalinism, Hoxhaism, etc., never congealed into a single coherent organization. Its endless wrangling over the “correct line,” macho posturing, overt homophobia, and support for genocidal Third World movements (Khmer Rouge, Shining Path) were notable negatives. A notable positive was the turn to rank-and-file labor organizing (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Miners for Democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, etc) emphasized in the Long Seventies (1965-1981). Other tendencies survived the collapse of SDS with a revival of anarchism, a Gramscian/socialist-feminist New American Movement etc. And the NCM was paralleled by a bewildering proliferation of Trotskyist groupuscules (International Socialists, Revolutionary Socialist League, Freedom Socialist Party, etc,) [Precursor Revolutionary Labor Movements: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) with its emphasis on direct action and use of free speech fights. The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO, later Congress of Industrial Organizations) with its stress on collective bargaining and use of the sit-down tactic. Both deployed various labor actions (strikes, boycotts, slowdowns, sabotage, etc) culminating in the all-encompassing General Strike.]

• The Women’s Liberation Movement had its roots in Women’s Suffrage, with the goal of complete social equality for women, ending the patriarchy, and ultimately abolishing all sexual and social hierarchies in a realization of full human intersectionality. Feminist organizations included NOW (liberal), New American Movement (socialist), Bread and Roses (anarchist), and Redstockings (radical). Because homosexuality was illegal until recently, the Gay Liberation Movement relied on secret social clubs—Mattachine Society for gay men, Daughters of Bilitis for lesbian women—to organize. The San Francisco Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966 and the New York Stonewall Riot in 1969 propelled the Movement into the public eye.

• Ecology Movement: The first pictures of the whole earth from space inspired both Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and the environmental movement, which celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Environmental organizations range from liberal (Sierra Club) to radical (Earth First!). Without the planet there were no sixties, long or otherwise.

• GI/Veterans Movement: Whereas Black Americans constituted just 12% of the population, they occupied 31% of the ground combat positions in Vietnam and suffered 24% of the casualties. Martin Luther King called Vietnam a white man’s war but a Black man’s fight. It was also a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, in that high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam while the children of the educated got college deferments. After the Tet Offensive the US was losing the war although few citizens realized it and almost none admitted it. There were nearly a half million American troops in-country by 1967. Drug use among the troops—from marijuana to heroin—was rampant, as was racial unrest. What followed was the near-collapse of the US Military with murder, riot, beatings, arson and mass refusal to deploy or follow orders. Troop casualties rose annually, reaching nearly 17,000 in 1968, at which time Nixon’s combined strategy of Vietnamization and expanding the air war across Southeast Asia went into effect. A growing number of US military bases in this country and abroad were host to anti-war GI coffee houses off base where propaganda and organizing was available. And veterans were returning to the burgeoning mass Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the streets spearheading creative protests like Operation Dewey Canyon III in 1971 where Vietnam Veterans Against the War threw back their medals, awards, ribbons and commendations onto the US Capitol building. Early anti-conscription, civil disobedience and anti-war organizing came from traditional peace groups (Quakers, War Resisters League) and took hold among students facing the draft. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party formed the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (New Mobe) in 1966 and organized ever larger national marches and rallies, a mass demonstration strategy demanding “immediate withdrawal” as opposed to “negotiated peace.” Replaced by the SWP-dominated National Peace Action Coalition after acrimonious splits in 1970, other anti-war organizations and strategies arose (MayDay Tribe with mass civil disobedience, People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice with a “People’s Peace Treaty”). Divisiveness weakened the anti-war movement, causing a lull in protests and demonstrations. The largest protest against the Vietnam War occurred on April 24, 1971 in Washington, DC where upwards of half a million participated, with another 150,000 marching in San Francisco, CA. The National Chicano Moratorium Committee Against The Vietnam War reached its peak on August 29, 1970 with a march of 30,000 in East Los Angeles.

 

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Campism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2022

“This is utter nonsense.”

The gray-haired bespectacled man gestured angrily. It was July 21, 1989 and I was standing behind the Neither East Nor West literature table at the “Without Borders” anarchist conference/festival in San Francisco’s Mission High School. I was hanging out with the THRUSH girls and Bob McGlynn as the pissed-off individual continued to point at our table’s banner.

“Neither East Nor West, huh? That sounds an awful lot like the slogan of the Italian Fascist MSI. Neither Left nor Right.”

“We’re anarchists, not fascists,” Bob said.

“Anarchists, fascists, it’s all the same.” The man delivered his verbal coup. “If you’re not for the international socialist revolution you’re for reactionary capitalist imperialism.”

I’ve recently written a couple of columns exposing the idiocy that is Fascist Third Positionism.[1] Let’s now talk about campism and legitimate efforts to transcend it. In order to discuss international politics, let’s start with an analogy.

pt. 2: Third World Third Positionism: “What’s Left?” October 2019 (MRR #437)

I had a favorite t-shirt in the 1980s, one I owned several of and wore frequently. It was red with a stylized black silkscreened image of Alberto Korda’s famous photo of Ernesto “Che” Guevara printed above his popular quote: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.” Korda’s image of Che with military beret and solemn expression was taken during a Cuban state funeral; handsome, heroic, and seemingly immortal. I wore the t-shirt around the UC San Diego campus without incident or even much notice, but I liked pushing the envelope by wearing it all around the very conservative city of San Diego.

While wearing the shirt and eating my customary grease-, carb- and meat-heavy breakfast washed down with several bottles of Negra Modelo beer outside Harry’s Coffee Shop in La Jolla circa 1985, I noticed a young man glaring at me. Harry’s was a local favorite, so I assumed he was a surfer because of his shaggy haircut, Quiksilver Hawaiian shirt, colorful boardshorts, and leather huarache sandals. He frowned at me over a decimated plate of food next to which rested a russet guampa, a hollow calabash gourd lipped with silver from which a silver bombilla straw protruded. A waitress poured more hot water into his maté gourd before bussing his dishes and leaving the check.

A critique of Fourth Worldism

No more Negative Ned. Instead of critiquing Leftist practice and politics as I often do, I’m writing about something positive and hopeful this essay. To develop some PMA. I wrote a stupider version of this critique many years ago, from which I split off my July 17, 2017, piece called “San Cristobal and Zomia, an exercise in fantasy.” And like that essay, this commentary is not an official MRR column. It’s not Hooligan canon, but apocrypha.

***

Lenin formulated his theory of imperialism in 1900 which differentiates the world capitalist economy into the capitalist national centers of European empire and their exploited colonial periphery. In a Marxist anti-imperialist context, French social scientist Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World in 1952 as an analog to the Third Estate of the French Revolution. Also jumping off from Leninist anti-imperialism, Mao propounded his Three Worlds Theory by 1974 in which the First World is the developed capitalist nations, the Second World is the socialist nations posing as an international alternative, and the Third World is the orthodox category of undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing  nations. Starting in 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein charted the differentiation of the present world capitalist economy via the consolidation of nation-states and national economies into the fully developed core region, an undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing exploited periphery, and a semi-peripheral region in between. These tripartite schemas imply a fourth geographic tier, a Fourth World in Maoism and an outer periphery in the case of Wallerstein encompassing the marginal territories and peoples incapable of consolidating viable nation-states and national economies.

The Problem of Agency: “What’s Left?” February 2015, MRR #381

I’m sick of the blood and I’m sick of the bleeding,
The effort it takes just to keep on dreaming

Of better days, and better ways

Of living.

Michael Timmins, Cowboy Junkies
“Fairytale,” The Wilderness: The Nomad Series

“A new world is possible” was the slogan that emerged from the era of anti-globalization protests, which in turn evolved into an endless series of social forums that continue to this day. Airy and tentative compared to the insurrectionist communizing nihilism that followed, this sentiment is the lite version of a prefiguring politics that goes back at least as far as the 1905 Industrial Workers of the World constitution which called for “building a new world in the shell of the old.” Indeed, it can be argued that “[s]ocial revolutions are a compromise between utopia and historical reality. The tool of the revolution is utopia, and the material is the social reality on which one wants to impose a new form. And the tool must to some degree fit the substance if the results are not to become ludicrous.” So wrote the young, still Marxist Leszek Kolakowski in his essay “The Concept of the Left.” Thus, I intend to define who and what is trying to make a new world possible, and how successful such efforts have been to date.

I’ve always considered myself on the side of those who would create a new and better world. And I have more than a passing interest in the claimed existence of The Historical Agent (THA—also called the revolutionary agent/subject, or the social agent/subject), the radical social grouping with the human agency to affect revolutionary social change not just in the past but in our lifetime. Walter Benjamin proposed a similar messianic understanding of history, a sense of messianic time or a weak messianic power he associated with Marxist historical materialism and couched in cryptic, poetic terms in “The Concept of History” which ends with the statement that “[f]or every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.” Unfortunately the four broad terms usually synonymous or often conflated with THA—The Workers Movement, Socialism, The Left, and The Movement—each tries yet fails to be sufficiently all inclusive.*

The modern workers movement which congealed out of Medieval artisan and peasant strata can be said to have its origins in the practice of English Chartism at the beginning of the 19th century, and in Marx’s theoretical efforts to define such workers as a social class based on their relationship to the means of production. The economic labor unions and political workers parties of this emerging working class, not to mention the labor syndicates and workers councils that combined economic and political power, spread widely well into the 20th century, extending working class culture and consciousness internationally. Efforts to make The Workers Movement either less Marxist (by describing workers as simply “everyone who works for a living”) or more Marxist (through Leninist notions of the “industrial proletariat” or Maoist concepts of “proletarian consciousness”) must now give way to discussions of post industrial workers, marginal or precarious workers, or the abolition of the working class altogether.

Socialism refers to political theory and practice, as well as organizations, movements and regimes based upon social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of economy and society. Socialism as such goes back to the 18th, if not the 17th centuries, centered primarily in Europe. With roots in millenarian and utopian traditions, socialism diversified through the 19th and 20th centuries, though it can be generally categorized as either working class or non-working class based. In a 21st century rife with capitalist triumphalism, socialism has become a curse.

Born from an accident of seating arrangements in the National Constituent Assembly after the 1789 French Revolution, The Left means the politics and activity that arose from 1848 onward. Centered in Europe, it comprised Marxism (and eventually Leninism), anarchism, syndicalism, unaffiliated socialisms, even types of political democracy and liberalism. The Left’s configuration dramatically changed after 1945. First, there was massive proliferation as Leninism of Stalinism, Maoism and Third Worldism. Second, there was the consolidation and attenuation of Marxist social democracy. Third, there was the virtual extinction of anarchism/ultraleftism before its youthful resurgence. Fourth, there was the purposeful non-alignment of other forms of socialism. And fifth, there was the rise and fall of democratic liberalism. With the exception of anarchism/ultraleftism, these political forms experienced a contraction and retrenchment on or before the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Finally, The Movement covers Leftist politics and practice, as well as organizations and movements within the United States from the mid-1960s on. This was when the Marxist-Leninist old Left was superseded by a New Left rapidly differentiating into New Communist Movement and other kinds of Third World politics, an evanescent anarchism/ultraleftism also quickly diversifying, proliferating forms of non-affiliated socialism and liberalism, and a plethora of social movements such as Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation, Black (brown/red/yellow) Liberation, etc. In turn, the “crisis of socialism” that has riven The Movement since 1991 has produced a near universal turn toward identity politics and postmodern Leftism.

It’s not enough to consider whether THA is an adequate analytical category, a viable classification comprised of the intersection between The Workers Movement, Socialism, The Left, and The Movement. “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer,” Walter Benjamin said, “he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.” Four overlapping Venn Diagram shapes cannot magically yield a clearly defined collective human entity with historical agency within the convergence of these four nebulous social movements. There is still no precise historical delineation of who or what is responsible for the meager successes and overwhelming failures that I identify with as a socialist, a Leftist, a member of the working class, or a part of The Movement.

Until the 1917 Russian Revolution, history was one of three painful steps forward and two excruciating steps back. The period of world wide social upheaval bracketed by the first and second World Wars produced a sudden revolutionary surge from 1945 through 1985. “Real existing Socialism” (Soviet and Chinese style Communism, the so-called Second World) dominated a fifth of the earth’s land surface and a third of the world’s human population. Social democracy and social movements contested ground in the First World. And socialist struggles for national liberation and socialist national non-alignment proliferated in the Third World.

There were indications that all was not well however, especially in the West. I have argued for Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s somewhat pessimistic evaluation of the 1968 Generation’s impact (“It was fun, but 1968’s legacy was mixed,” Guardian Weekly, 9/5/08) in a previous column. In covering much the same ground (“Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!: Paris, May 1968,” The Independent, 9/23/08), John Lichfield reposted the overly simplistic formulation that 1968’s rebellious youth “had lost politically but they had won culturally and maybe even spiritually.” Timothy Brennan spends many an essay in his book Wars of Position contending that the poststructural, postmodern Left, especially in Western universities, had embarked by 1975 on a “war against left Hegelian thought” that successfully buried Marxism, its “dialectical thinking and the political energies—including the anti-colonial energies—that grew out of it” by the mid ‘80s.

These setbacks were minor however compared to the watershed collapse of “real existing Socialism” between 1989 and 1991. Kenan Malik summarized the consequences that followed this turning point in his 1998 essay “Race, Pluralism and the Meaning of Difference”:
The social changes that have swept the world over the past decade have intensified this sense of pessimism. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the left, the fragmentation of the postwar order, the defeat of most liberation movements in the third world and the demise of social movements in the West, have all transformed political consciousness. In particular, they have thrown into question the possibility of social transformation.
The Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union disintegrated, the power of the organized working class dramatically declined, all fronts from anti-colonial to social justice struggles experienced profound retreat, labor and social democratic parties and regimes were neoliberalized. Any one of these historical events is immensely complicated and deserving of deep historical analysis. Yet, collectively, they have been naively hailed by Establishment pundits as the results of the world wide triumph of capitalism, an end to the bipolar world order under neoliberalism’s Pax Americana, even “the end of history.”

I don’t have the space to disabuse my readers of this jejune myth of capitalism’s unequivocal victory and socialism’s undeniable defeat. But I do have the time to shatter the delusion, promulgated principally by anarchists, that with the near universal decline and defeat of the “authoritarian Left” their time has come, and that the future is anti-authoritarian. Clearly, forms of anarchism, neo-anarchism, libertarian Marxism and even leaderless Leninism are some of the fastest growing political tendencies on the Left over the last two or so decades. Yet those who wish to understand how things change, historically and socially, need to heed the conclusions arrived at by Max Boot in his comprehensive historical overview of guerrilla warfare entitled Invisible Armies:
Anarchists did not defeat anyone. By the late 1930s their movements had been all but extinguished. In the more democratic states, better policing allowed terrorists to be arrested while more liberal labor laws made it possible for workers to peacefully redress their grievances through unions. In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, anarchists were repressed with brute force. The biggest challenge was posed by Nestor Makhno’s fifteen thousand anarchist guerrillas in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, but they were finally “liquidated” by the Red Army in 1921. In Spain anarchists were targeted both by Franco’s Fascists and by their Marxists “comrades” during the 1936-39 civil war—as brilliantly and bitterly recounted by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Everywhere anarchists were pushed into irrelevance by Moscow’s successful drive to establish communism as the dominant doctrine of the left. […] Based on their record as of 2012, Islamist groups were considerably more successful in seizing power than the anarchists but considerably less successful than the liberal nationalists of the nineteenth century or the communists of the twentieth century. (“Bomb Throwers: Propaganda by the Deed” and “God’s Killers: Down and Out?”)

It should be obvious with the end of the Cold War that matters are far more complicated than a superficial battle between, and facile triumph of, good over evil. Equally obvious is that the concept of THA remains a slippery one, resonant with messianic intent, and hence one not easily pinned down by its successes or failures. Finally, I hope I’ve made it obvious that anarchism’s history is one of unmitigated defeat, and that anarchism by itself lacks the historical agency to do jack shit.

*[A discussion of agency is a consideration of human subjectivity. In contrast, emphasizing the objective to the point of denying the subject has a long tradition in Marxism, beginning with vulgar Marxism which contended that inevitable economic crises caused by predetermined historical circumstances would bring about the certain downfall of capitalism, whether or not humans had anything to do with it. Louis Althusser formulated a Marxist Structuralism in which ideological and material structures define the human subject out of existence. Thus, history becomes “a process without a subject” according to Althusser. Finally, the current Marxist school broadly subsumed under the rubric Krisis, or the Critique of Value, argues that capitalism is a single interconnected system of capital and labor components bound together by the valorization of capital, which transforms into the valorization of value and which will inevitably collapse due to crisis. Labor has no historical agency, but is merely an abstract historical category. History might harbor many revolutionary subjects, but the working class as a class cannot be one. Workers cannot constitute a revolutionary social class.]

Summing up: OWS in context: “What’s Left?” December 2013, MRR #367

Forgive me if I repeat myself.

I’ve had the above column header for a while now, a kind of homage to the anti-globalization movement. A response to the Thatcher/Reagan neoliberal agenda that included an aggressive economic and political globalism, the anti-globalization movement rapidly expanded through a series of international protests targeting the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and various annual global summits. These protests climaxed with the massive Battle of Seattle on November 30, 1999 that temporarily shut down that city and the World Trade Organization. A half dozen ever more violent mass confrontations followed, in Gothenburg, Sweden and Genoa, Italy in 2001 alone. But the worldwide clampdown that followed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, under the United States and its allies, forced the movement to evolve between 2001 and 2003, from roving international protests into international social forums. The affinity groups and non-governmental organizations of the “First World” based anti-globalization movement can be counterposed to much more significant “Third World” insurgencies. In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) instigated a guerrilla-lead communal uprising in January, 1994, that continues to this day. And the Argentinian economic debt crisis of December, 2001, resulted in political turmoil, financial collapse, street riots, and workers’ self-managed cooperatives taking over much of Argentina’s economy.

I am definitely inspired by the anti-globalization movement and, even more so, by the parallel Third World insurrections of the day. My first book, End Time, which was published in January of 1994, anticipated both. Now, let’s take stock of the last five years as far as international protest and insurgency goes. The landmark here is the 2008 worldwide economic meltdown initiated by the financial crack-up of Wall Street.

There was an uptick in labor unrest in this country, starting with the Republic Windows occupation in Chicago, Illinois, in late 2008 following the economic collapse and subsequent calls for economic austerity. When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker successfully divested public employee unions of their right to collectively bargain in early 2011, Madison became the center for demonstrations by unions and their supporters. These protests eventually culminated in the unsuccessful attempt to recall Walker and Wisconsin’s Republican Legislature. First World American labor unrest has grown diverse since then, from dock workers’ agitation on the west coast through attempts to unionize and pay fast food workers a minimum wage to a BART workers strike against management.

The worldwide 2008 economic meltdown buffeted the European Union with a severe recession and calls for austerity that hit the weakest economies of the Union hardest. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland became subject to more extreme neoliberal measures. Cutbacks in government spending and services, financial reorganization on the backs of working people and the poor, economic privatization, and the scaling back of an already anemic welfare sector followed. Comprised of generally prosperous First World western nations, the EU was politically committed to liberal democracy, economically hellbent on financializing to supersede their industrial sectors, and socially aging to where only 20% to 30% of the population is aged 24 or under. Yet when austerity was imposed on the feeblest members of the EU, political protest and social violence quickly broke out and rapidly spread. Initiated by the youth of Greece (2010-12), Italy (2011-12), Spain (2011-12), and Portugal (2011-12), these social insurgencies were true mass movements. They were largely leaderless due to their size, with mixed economic/political/social demands, a social composition crossing social classes, and activity not solely economically based. These mass movements allied with the working class of their respective countries, with trade unions calling limited, one-day general strikes in solidarity with popular anti-austerity actions.

The main aspects of this First World social opposition are magnified when we consider countries in the Third World, Brazil and Turkey being the most prominent. These nations are often only tentatively devoted to democracy, still heavily steeped in industrial economies, and defined by profoundly youthful societies with populations of 40% to 45% aged 24 or under. The world economic crisis hit most Third World nations hard, but Brazil and Turkey actually were less affected by the post-2008 financial collapse and effectively resisted the austerity efforts of the World Bank and IMF. Leaderless due to their magnitude, the youth-based, cross-class mass movements that exploded in these countries were intensified by conditions specific to the Third World. The mass movements were much larger, the political protests were more radical, and the social violence was more extreme. Finally, the allied working-class solidarity, the trade union general strikes were more potent. The Brazilians demanded an end to public transport fare increases, government corruption, the economic dislocations produced by the upcoming Olympics, and state repression of demonstrators. The Turks quickly moved from a sit-in against urban development plans for Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park to demands for freedom of press, expression, and assembly, further democratization of the Turkish state, and increased secularization of Turkish society. It was the EU protests, times ten.

The fraudulent 2009 presidential election of Ahmadinejad in Iran provoked a widespread uprising in the streets called the Green Movement, so massive that it threatened to topple the government. State repression quickly followed, forcing the movement underground. After protests over the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor at the end of 2010, a youthful insurgency rapidly spread to twenty-odd other countries across the Middle East, where 54% of population is under the age of 25. Accompanied by popular support and working class solidarity strikes, these actions—collectively called the Arab Spring—were leaderless because of the scope and breadth of the movement as a whole. The Arab Spring swept a region of the Third World where the countries were politically inimical to democracy, often economically dependent upon simple resource extraction, and geographically carved up by historical imperialism. Four governments were overthrown, as exemplified by the 2011 Egyptian Revolution focused on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The processes of the Arab Spring that some hoped would be ongoing in countries of the region, instead are experiencing dissolution altogether in multiple national civil wars, or in region-wide disintegration involving intercommunal and sectarian violence and warfare. The reverberations are intense and immense, ranging from Sunni/Shi’ite conflagration across the Middle East to the potential wholesale destruction of Egypt, one of the oldest national societies in the area.

In contrast to these world-spanning protests and violence, China experienced a less substantial economic slowdown after 2008 which produced an increase in industrial strike activity. While not as dramatic as those actions detailed above, this strike wave nevertheless amounted to significant opposition to Communist Party rule. Depending on the study cited, 345 industrial incidents occurred from 1990 to 2008 (18 years), 355 incidents from 1997 to 2007 (10 years), and 553 incidents from 200 to 2010 (10 years). By comparison, from 2008 to 2012, just 3.3 years, 435 industrial incidents occurred. Protests based on environmental issues alone increased by an average of 29% every year since 1996, while in 2011 the number of major environmental actions rose 120%. The number of protests, termed “mass incidents” in general, doubled between 2006 and 2010, rising to 180,000; uprisings that were responses to myriad issues, primarily official corruption, government land grabs, Tibetan autonomy, and environmental problems. And these are merely the tip of the iceberg, as it is notoriously difficult to ferret out information, facts and statistics from China’s state-controlled society. A putative socialist “Second World” country during the Cold War, China is a top tier Third World nation, comparable to Turkey or Brazil described above.

Then, there was Occupy Wall Street.

I tried to remain critical yet positive, analytical yet constructive, in particular with respect to Occupy Oakland. I attempted to use this column to detail the ups and downs of the OO encampment, the victories and defeats of OO’s black bloc anarchos, and the “close but no cigar” General Strike that wasn’t. Returning to the source—OWS—the contrasts with much of the post-2008 protest history described above cannot be more obvious, nor more troubling. OWS was self-conscious in so many ways, starting with being self-consciously NOT a cross-class mass movement. Rather, it was a movement of activists, and mostly of young activists at that. It self-consciously avoided “hitching its wagon to” (read “making alliances with”) any social sector or interest group, like organized labor or the Democratic Party or anti-capitalist movements or people of color, just as it self-consciously remained leaderless or self-consciously refused to formulate specific demands. Through this, OWS wanted to prevent being coopted and, as a movement, prevent being recuperated by state and capital. Only thing is, OWS was so busy paying inordinate attention to itself as a movement, it failed to take seriously the issue of power.

OWS garnered an extraordinary amount of national and international media attention, often excruciatingly self-aware, yet it accomplished almost nothing in the close to the year of its existence. It was a resounding failure, a flash in the pan, a nine days’ wonder. Much like those anarchists who proclaimed that the black bloc was not a group but a tactic, and became so preoccupied with their tactic that they failed to devise any more formidable strategy, those in OWS who proclaimed that their movement was leaderless, without demands, and not in need of a mass base, and became self-absorbed by their movement, had already relegated themselves to a minuscule historical footnote. Those leaderless, youth-inspired, cross-class mass movements of protest and violence in the EU, Brazil and Turkey, and the countries of the Arab Spring that have issued demands and contested power accomplished many significant things, despite being short-lived. By contrast, OWS in First World America was a sad little joke. The United States shared the political/economic/social configuration of much of the EU, yet with a much more youthful demographic due to ongoing immigration. OWS only gained the potential to become a mass movement when it relinquished its affected, self-conscious character, when it started to work with labor, both organized and unorganized, community occupations, squatting and anti-foreclosure efforts, anti-corporate/bank campaigns, efforts to help threatened schools and libraries, debt forgiveness, campaigns to monitor police abuse, even work in communities of color. By then, Occupy Wall Street was dead.

When Naomi Klein compared the Anti-Globalization Movement with Occupy Wall Street (NYT, 10-10-11), she realized that the former’s protest tourism targeting world summits was unsustainable in the wake of 9/11. Yet her praise for the latter was patently idiotic. Klein’s delight “that this movement doesn’t have a list of soundbite-ready demands and media-ready spokespeople” was extremely simple minded. And OWS’s choice of a “fixed target,” with “no end date on their presence” was a dead end. Occupy Wall Street has been relegated to the dustbin of history. I have no plans to change my column header to an Occupy theme anytime soon.