A good-ish article on the right-wing response to and attempts at gaining influence over the Occupy movement: OWS: Yes, we are anti-capitalist!. In my view it suffers from the misplaced certainty that its ideas are somehow the true heart of Occupy, rather than a minority position that needs to be defended, explained, and promoted. Not to mention the optimistic idea that the right-wingers are somehow interlopers or manipulators; I would rather emphasize Occupy! and TeaParty, etc, as linked aspects of the same phenomenon. That is, I think that the links between “right” and “left” are something other than what the relatively mild term “crossover” (not used in this article) might suggest.

And then on 11/9, we remember what happens when right-wing populist anti-capitalism, scapegoating, and antisemitism get in power and out of control: Persecution, prelude to murder.

(thanks to Contested Terrain)

There was a Russian Revolution in February; there was no Revolution in October, only the coup d’état of a party, already germinally totalitarian in its structure and in its spirit, that seized power, set everything in motion in order to dominate and to domesticate the popular movement, and quickly succeeded in doing so (the final act taking place at Kronstadt in 1921). (Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Revolution before the Theologians,” in World in Fragments, p. 79)

Voline: The Unknown Revolution

My socialism is simply a matter of loving your neighbor, of humanity. I don’t want there to be poverty, I want everyone to live decently, in and by his own labor, and to have enough elbowroom, as the Americans say. Loving your neighbor is not old-style philanthropy; philanthropy only helps here and there. A real love of humanity seeks to amend conditions by law and deed. If that is socialism, I am for it.
I do not believe in equality, absolute equality, that is. There is no equality in the stars or in man. There always have been and always will be individuals who by their own gifts and a combination of circumstances not of their own making can and do achieve more than others; there will always be a hierarchy among people. But hierarchy means order, organization, discipline, knowledge, and obedience, not the exploitation of man by man. That is why I do not accept Communism. No sooner did Lenin take power than he called for leaders. The longer I live, the more I realize the role played by the individual in the evolution of humanity, but I repeat: more talent and more of what is known as luck do not justify the exploitation of the less gifted and less fortunate. I do not believe that all private ownership can be done away with. The personal relationship — the pretium affectionis — that binds an owner to his property is good in that it promotes economic progress. Communism is possible, but only among brothers, that is, in the family or in a religious community or close circle of friends; it can be maintained only by true love. I do not accept the principle of class war. There are social estates and social classes, there are degrees of difference among people. But that does not mean war; it means the organization of natural inequality and of inequality resulting from historical circumstance, it means leveling, growth, and development. I am not so blind and simple-minded as to fail to see injustice and oppression, and I know that individuals, estates, and classes must protect their own interests, but it does not follow that homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man, as was said long ago.
As for Marxism, it is an economic theory and philosophy, a philosophy of history in particular. Economic theory, like every science, is a matter for investigation, revision, and improvement, and Marxism, like any philosophy, must be open to criticism and free deliberation. That is why revisionism arose and will continue to do so. Every revision of a creed or program is painful, but without the pain there can be no progress. I have no ready-made social doctrine in my pocket. As I’ve said elsewhere, I am always for the workman and working people in general, often for socialism, and rarely for Marxism. My views of socialism derive from my concept of democracy. A revolution or a dictatorship can occasionally abolish bad things, but it never creates anything good and lasting. Impatience is fatal in politics. When I consider that all recorded human history goes back only some ten thousand years and that we are still on the threshold of civilization, how can I believe that a fanatic, despot, or revolutionary will complete our development at one stroke? Serfdom and slavery were done away with less than two hundred years ago, forced labor even more recently, and it is only for the past hundred, no, even fifty years that we have worked consciously and systematically on the social problems of working people and the lower classes in general. We have hundreds of thousands, millions of years ahead of us. Must we really do everything at once? In any case, you can’t feed the hungry on the future. Faith in development and progress does not free us from tending to the needs of today. (T. G. Masaryk, in Karel Čapek, Talks with T. G. Masaryk. Catbird Press, 1995. Pp 161-164)

My view from here: throughout the Arab world, the total collapse of the Left and the implosion of “secular” nationalist tyrannies means a vacuum that the Islamists and their social networks will fill. I take it that this is an old story. I suspect some segment of Western opinion will peddle the fantasy (related to the fantasy that Dickensian hyper-capitalism will somehow “democratize” the Stalinist tyranny in China) that the Islamists, free from repression, will become domesticated, shed their extremist fringe, etc. In my view, this is placing the emphasis on entirely the wrong side. The Islamist parties aren’t “moderating” themselves: rather, just as here, politics and public discourse has shifted so far to the right that fundamentalist fascism will increasingly be seen as normal, legitimate, acceptable. Reality is accommodating to the fantasies of would-be religious tyrants and fundamentalist bigots, not the other way around.
Naturally, a lot of noise will be made about pluralism, respect for universal rights, respecting independent civil society, etc.; this will be contrasted with rhetoric from past decades. The Islamists have “matured,” they’ve “become realists,” we’ll be told. And as the transition takes place, they will continue to participate (in bad faith) in the institutions of the societies falling under their control, and clothe their activities in the yesterday costumes. The new “normal” will enthrone itself, and when the danger of any serious opposition has passed—and anyone in the West who might care is too busy battling this own process in our societies—the blood will start flowing. Worse: the parenthesis of Enlightenment will, in these countries at least, have closed, if not on the level of explicit political rhetoric then certainly on the level of hearts and minds.
But from what I can see, there are still other forces at work, and they need our support, and we, I should add, need theirs. The fundamentalist takeovers will not happen overnight, and so long as the Islamists are pretending, out of whatever motives, to respect pluralism and civil society, then there will be room for our comrades to move and breathe.
The problem then, is how to help our friends take advantage of this window and defend their newly liberated countries from the religious plague. (One thing that will not help: denouncing those who share our values as stooges of NATO, pawns of imperialism, etc.)
But the deeper issue remains: where do the Islamists get the grist for their mills? How can the oppression and indignities that have created the fertile soil for religious mania be undone? How can the ideological background that produces this mania be dismantled and dissolved?

“No,” answered Pilate. “I believe, I believe most passionately that truth exists and that man recognizes it. It would be madness to think that truth is only there for man not to know it. He knows it, yes; but who? I or you, or everyone perhaps? I believe that each of us has a share of it; the man who says yes and the man who says no. If these two united and understood each other, that would give the whole of truth. Of course, yes and no cannot unite, but people always can; there is more truth in people than in words. I have more understanding of people than of their truths; but there is faith even in that, Joseph of Arimathea, and it is possible to keep it alive with enthusiasm and rapture. I believe. I believe absolutely and without doubt. But what is truth?” (Karel Čapek, “Pilate’s Creed”)

The Grant Park protest:
The protest was crowded into a small section of the park, a few blocks south of their target, and was surrounded by police (more than usual, according to my friends). What I saw was a kind of preliminary whipping-up of the group before the march began. The whole area was NOISY. As we entered the the park, we were immediately accosted by a series of 4 or 5 middle-aged, mostly non-white activists in red shirts pushing a newspaper in our face: Challenge, the rag of the “Progressive Labor Party,” a Stalinist/post-Maoist sect famous for its role in infiltrating and destroying SDS in the late 60s
After the Stalinists, there was a single Truther (youngish, white, alone: maybe the other Truthers had stepped out?) distributing their conspiracy theories; after them, a group of youngish people, mostly Mid-Eastern or South Asian, women in Muslim dress, holding a giant Palestinian flag parallel over the ground.
Over all of this, at a tremendous volume, was the quacking, sputtering voice of some apparently well-known local activist, spouting venom at Obama, US policy in the Middle-East, colonialism, oppression, war, etc. His voice—well, “boomed” is wrong, because it was a shrill, nasal whine, over-loud, a quick and rhythmic rant that made it hard to distinguish any particular words or phrases. To any ordinary person, I guess he would have sounded literally hysterical—I mean, in a state of hysteria (phrases like “spittle-flecked fury” keep coming to mind). So: a tableau of Communists, 9-11 conspiracy theorists, radical Palestinian nationalists, dancing to the tune of a raving maniac’s incoherent denunciations.
Occupy Chicago:
I encountered the Occupy Chicago group twice, on the march along an apparently regular route. The crowd, compared to the other group, was (a) smaller, (b) younger, and (c) whiter. The first time, the group (I guess no more than 200 people but I’m very bad at estimating crowds) was chanting the old saw “This is what democracy looks like!”; they called out “join us!” to me and my friends (at the moment, young, dirty, on bicycles). The second time, as they headed back toward the Board of Trade, the chant was “We are the 99%! And so are you!” this last followed by meaningful pointing in the direction of passersby. One very young woman (ostensibly white and counter-cultural) delivered the “AND SO ARE YOU” response toward me with exaggerated pointing and a big smile. There was definitely a “come join us this is fun!” vibe—a major contrast with the “drink the koolaid” atmosphere at Grant Park.
Like with the speaker at the other protest, there was a note of hysteria in the voice of the Occupy Chicago people. Something like the mix of machismo, fear, and embarrassment, counteracted by getting louder and more daring, that one associates with a kid breaking curfew or getting drunk for the first time. I don’t like yelling and would probably do the same damn thing. What I wonder is, why do they sound this way: as if they have no confidence…?

Brief impressions. But one thing is clear: the energy and excitement of the Occupy people was worlds away from the sinister, hectoring, hypocritical frenzy on display at Grant Park. Whatever else comes out of “Occupy ___!” I hope that it means the eclipse of the “antiwar” movement as we’ve known it here for the last 10 years and longer.

Real self-management presupposes the existence of a reasonable number of rational, socialised, and human persons who understand the major aim of the social process, persons who are themselves alive to the relative interlinking of personal, group and general interests and who base their activities on ideals of general human significance. (Marković, Mihailo. “Socialism and Self-Management.” Praxis 2, no. 3 (1965). [here])

Marković goes on to suggest that, if it lacks these kinds of people, socialism needs (or more charitably, has needed) a bureaucratic elite which will create them. Leaving this aside (and leaving aside what in the world the “major aim of the social process” means), isn’t there something very true here? And more: isn’t this often what is meant by the notion of the “citizen”?
Anarchists have often suggested that self-management is something that comes naturally. In some sense, this must also be true: we know that relatively egalitarian human communities have existed. This all raises the question of what exactly we mean by self-management? Is it to be taken broadly, so that any case of human beings more or less spontaneously or “organically” arranging their affairs qualifies? Or do we mean something more robust? Marković offers this:

Self-management means that the functions of directing social processes are no longer performed by forces outside the mass of society, opposed to it, but [are] in the hands of the very same people who produce, who create social life in all its forms.

But is this enough? Can’t we imagine the primitive “organic” community of the anarchist anthropological fantasy fulfilling this criterion, but without requiring the “presuppositions” that Marković lists?
More, why should we care? If “self-management” is the end we desire, and this can be fulfilled by, say, the obeying of egalitarian tradition by a tribal community, then we do we need these presuppositions at all? Why need there be self-managing citizens of the kind Marković describes?
I would suggest, that, granting these definitions, it can only be the case that Marković’s citizens are not presuppositions but part of the definition of self-management. That is, what we mean by self-management must integrally include “rational, socialised, and human persons who understand the major aim of the social process, persons who are themselves alive to the relative interlinking of personal, group and general interests and who base their activities on ideals of general human significance.” We declare this to be valuable in itself: we wish to be this, and we wish to continue creating human beings who are this. And this, then is a clue to “the general aim of the social process”: freedom, which we will just as an aim that we project, not as a interior telos of history that we discover.
So, I will suggest that something like “self-management” might be possible without the democratic citizen. But, for us, the democratic citizen is (1) a presupposition of the technical side of self-management (there must be people who can will living like this, and then do it well), (2) part of the definition of self-management (who is doing this managing, now?), and (3) the end of self-management, to reproduce and expand a free society, that is, a society of individuals like this.
So, the questions for us now aren’t abstract ones (person A belongs to system B etc.) but something like this: is not this kind of human being the outcome of the history of the democratic movements for the last several centuries? and is not this kind of human being gravely endangered today? and if so, how can we preserve and protect this heritage, and advance the project (socialism) that “presupposes” and aims at it?
(I have wondered, while reading Capital, if one of the worst affects of Marxism hasn’t been that by attempting to fit this history into a “scientific” schema in which the workers movement was treated as a given fact and “explained” abstractly through economic categories, it allowed socialists to think their project outside of its concrete history, and instead of seeing these sorts of human personalities as the precious fruit of centuries of struggle, simply treat them as a given natural factor–and ignore the reasons they exist, and what might cause them to disappear.)

The Marxist outlook was emphatically monistic. In it science, philosophy, sociology, politics, and tactics were closely knit into a single system of ideas. Yet the interest of practioners of Stalin’s type in matters of philosophy and theory was strictly limited. They accepted certain basic formulas of Marxist philosophy, handed down to them by the popularizers of the doctrine, as a matter of intellectual and political convenience. These formulas seemed to offer wonderful clues to the most complex problems—and nothing can be as reassuring to the half-educated as the possession of such clues. The semi-intelligentsia from whom socialism recruited some of its middle cadres enjoyed Marxism as a mental labour-saving device, easy to handle and fabulously effective. It was enough to press a knob here to make short work of one idea, and a knob there to dispose of another[...]

(Isaac Deutscher. Stalin: a Political Biography. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)

Kenneth Rexroth, in his Autobiographical Novel (3) 3 takes a different but complementary tack. Rexroth describes a 1920 meeting of Chicago radicals orienting to the Third International with the infamous Joseph Pepper, the mysterious Hungarian figure who played an (apparently) self-appointed role as Comintern representative in the early American Communist movement of the 1920’s, wreaking havoc throughout. When a veteran Wisconsin radical asked Pepper how he thought the American revolution would happen, Pepper chilled the room by saying that revolution would come to America not by the actions of American workers but on the bayonets of the Soviet Red Army. Certainly no representative of the Second International had ever shown such contempt for American revolutionaries; indeed, as one counter-example, it is little remembered that the Dutch “ultra-left” (Pannekoek, Gorter, Roland-Holst) after 1908 had a significant following in the left wing of the American SP, especially in immigrant groups such as the Latvians, a following that had to be eradicated in bitter factional struggle in the early years of the CP (4) 4 Rexroth shows that damage inflicted by the Comintern on the American radical tradition, which we normally associate mostly with the 1930’s, was present from the outset. While Rexroth was first of all an artist, he also joined the IWW in 1917, and gravitated to the founding efforts of the Communist Party, and broke with the groups that became the CP by…1920, under the influence of encounters of the kind described above and of the selfsame German-Dutch ultra left. Rexroth not only depicts radical Chicago in its heyday, but gives a portrait of the world of American radicalism in the small town in Indiana where he grew up, where people (I paraphrase) had a sense of having won two revolutions (the American Revolution and the Northern victory in the Civil War) and damn well intended to win a third. (5) 5 (“Max Eastman : One American Radical’s View of the “Bolshevization” of the American Revolutionary Movement and a Forgotten, and Unforgettable, Portrait of Trotsky”)

I’m afraid I may be guilty of a desire “to justify and rehabilitate the most abject Social Democracy” (as Goldner says elswhere in the essay). In any case, I was reminded of what I just read in Michael Kazin’s new book, currently being mentioned in the New York Times and elsewhere. Kazin says:

During just one period of about four decades—from the late 1870s to the end of World War I—could radicals authentically claim to represent more than a tiny number of Americans who belonged to what was, and remains, the majority of the population: white Christians from the working and lower-middle classes. (American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, XV)

I will have to read the rest of Kazin’s book to see how he treats “the end of World War I,” but for now I will ask: did the influence of Bolshevism alone make the American Left marginal (that is, if we’re not content to just blame government repression, propaganda campaigns, etc.)? When it was more representative, did it have to ignore the plight of those on the margins? And to become important again, would it have to do the same today? What is AK Press, for example, after when they say that anarchists are just consistent Glenn-Beckians?