Thursday, February 02, 2006
(9:39 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Multitude, Recruit
What do Autonomia, Hamas, and the Zapitistas have in common? Lots, of course. But read on!I had already started drafting this post earlier this week when the voting discussion broke out anew and also before this from the new pontiff's first encyclical:
The modern age, particularly from the nineteenth century on, has been dominated
by various versions of a philosophy of progress whose most radical form is
Marxism. Part of Marxist strategy is the theory of impoverishment: in a
situation of unjust power, it is claimed, anyone who engages in charitable
initiatives is actually serving that unjust system, making it appear at least to
some extent tolerable. This in turn slows down a potential revolution and thus
blocks the struggle for a better world. Seen in this way, charity is rejected
and attacked as a means of preserving the status quo. What we have here, though,
is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the
moloch of the future—a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful.
One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and
now. (para 31b.)
So let's be honest about a few things. With the exception of Paul, who came quite late to the discussion, and perhaps also Luke, everyone in the discussion agreed that voting was not really the primary locus of political action. We're just disagreeing over the wisdom of voting Democrat in addition to whatever esle we should be doing.
And Paul writes: 'I don't know what the alternatives are. Vote Green or Socialist or Libertarian? Do nothing? Organize small local quasi-anarcho-syndicalist collectives?'
Well, yeah Paul, many of us here are precisely those types. Option c) of course. Collectives it is. Though some of us roll our eyes at the notion of anarchy, and staying small is definitely not necessary, even if required at first.
As I see it there are really only a handful of options out there:
-Conservative-like hankering for the halcyon years of the Welfare State (vote democrat, hope)
-Zizek-Badiou (to paraphrase Jared, Waiting for the Event!)
-Negri- Hardt
-A variety of lesser known or unclear options (Agamben?)
-Poltically radical Islam (perhaps the globalization of the Iranian situation)
Still, none of these options seem to give real hope for an imminent overthrow (Islam excepted, but much work would be have to be done on how sympathetic westerners could constructively be involved). My particular standpoint, for those who follow, falls under the lesser known or unclear category.
Again, excepting Islam, all of these options have a glaring, fundamental problem at the moment. One of the supertheses in my original post here at the weblog suggested that recruitment was one of the four pillars of any truly radical political movement of the future. Serious, serious work needs to be done with respect to Recruitment, and that both in terms of theorizing recruitment and actually doing it.
Let's say we wanted to have a serious revolution going down by 2017 (to pick a number totally at random). Compared to the situation of radical movements in 1906, we’re way behind, and this is nowhere more apparent than in strategies for recruitment and for linking together various grassroots organization. Cell recruitment was powerful and something we have largely lost on the Left. Individuals tend to take their own routes to the Left. The only serious mode of recruitment is universities, and they have their shortcomings, and often fail to link recruits up to more contiguous movements. What's worse, no matter what is being actually taught or believed in the humanities, every single student winds up producing for global capital as soon as she leaves campus.
I'll hope to say more in this regard over the coming weeks, but to return to the initial question and the quote from Benedict ...
I was happy to see the concern at least raised in the encyclical, even if it was dealt with in a completely trite fashion. As someone who works for the Mennonite Central Committee with homeless folks, it is something I worry about often (only with homelessness it's somewhat different, street folks are a prophetic embarassment to the system, and so, more often than not, organizations like ours are accused of enabling people to stay on the street).
The Bishop of Rome's answer is good and well so far as it goes, but insufficient. The fact is, charitable work is only fully laudable to the extent that it functions to draw people into new ways of being in the world. For Hamas, Autonomia, and the Zapitistas, building schools, running hospitals, denouncing political corruption while strategically refusing to vote unless or until they could be a part of the political process without compromising, actually dwelling with and working along side those they advocate on behalf of ... All of these things were critical for a particular reason other radical movements must now learn from: Recruitment.
