What I learned in London

I talked at great length in my last post about what I found so impressive about Marxism, and I had occasion a few `times to mention that I thought it helped to clarify what I had been thinking about the situation in the United States. I want to try to clarify that a bit now.

I came into politics starting with the sense that it was necessary to fundamentally transform the existing social order, and so I looked for a group that embodied some kind of overarching worldview and political project, and I found the ISO. I only got involved in "movement" activity afterwards. A lot of the people who make up the organized left in the US have a similar story, perhaps with a detour or two along the way.

There are only ever going to be so many people like that (and we tend to be a peculiar sort in some ways). One of the most exciting developments of the last few years is that there is a wave of people (most visible in the antiwar movement but also popping up elsewhere) who seem to be headed towards the same place from the opposite direction. If my own experiences and those of the people I know are anything to go by, there are thousands of people out there who have seen some of the crying injustices in the world around them and are trying to do something about them; who then see that what they are fighting against is one of a multitude of problems and that there are many unexpected pitfalls in overcoming it; and who are trying to come up with a way of understanding all this and a strategy to overcome it.

The role that radical (anarchist, socialist, communist, or what have you) political organizations generally aspire to is to give these people what they want, to give them a political home. Unfortunately none seem to be able to. Why is that?

As someone said, all happy families are alike in their happiness, but all unhappy families are unique in their misery. The american left has a myriad of shortcomings: some strands (most anarchists, or Democratic Party fringe groups like DSA, PDA, and Democracy for America) simply have little to offer in the way of ideas; others (most Maoists, Workers' World, PSL, the Communist Party, the SWP, and at least a dozen Trotskyist grouplets) have only ideas which are so detached from reality as to be worse than useless. Solidarity and the Socialist, Labor, and Green parties (together with their various factions) are so ideologically scattered and organizationally weak that in spite of the determination and acumen of many of the people who owe allegiance to one or another their organizational existence is almost irrelevant. The ISO, for me the most complicated case, is at the end of the day so organizationally and intellectually rigid that in spite of itself it is frequently reduced to the status of an alien body which has thrust itself into the various movements in which it projects itself. This has been the state of the American left for longer than I've been alive, and there are many who see it as an inevitable, natural part of the post-modern, post-industrial, post-whatever condition.

I don't think so, and this last week has given me a whole lot more confidence about that. The first point that was really driven home to me is that although things may be particularly bad in this respect in the US, the socialist movements in much if not most of the world (almost the entire developed world and a sizable portion of the rest) have been facing similar problems, but over the last 10 years or so have started to overcome them. This is actually the first key to overcoming the deadlock we face in the US -- if it can be done elsewhere, than that should give people a lot more hope that it can be done here.

The second thing we can get is an understanding of what it actually means to get beyond the current state of affairs. That means building structures that share a broad common understanding of the problems we face (war, neoliberalism, etc, to use the common shorthand) and a set of tactics to begin to fight against them. The latter vary from place to place; in Western Europe, the organizations in question are mostly new political parties of the radical left, which is to say that although their most important role is in social movements, trade unions, community organizations, and so on they often cohere around electoral activities of a kind which might be impractical in the US for some time to come.

This brings me to a rough point: even in, say, England there is a political culture so dramatically different from the US that it would be silly to try and directly copy the experience of RESPECT or some other group even if their success did come from some sort of written recipe and not a series of developments in reaction to a succession of complicated situations. I do think, however, that when a group of people comes together and makes a commitment to applying this project to the reality we find ourselves in we can draw any number of lessons from the details as well as the big picture of what our comrades in other countries are doing.

Photos from West Virginia

I just got back from Coal River Road in West Virginia. I was taking pictures for my friend Anand Gopal of Leftwords, who's doing a story for Wiretap Magazine on the mining communities out there. It was a fascinating trip and I want to write a bit more about it, but I'm moving house today so I'll content myself with putting up a couple of pictures.



This is Marsh Fork Elementary School, with a coal silo towering over it in the background. We got started because Anand heard from some folks in Philly about this spot. A lot of kids here have been getting sick, either from the coal dust or from the chemicals the company uses to treat the coal. Out of view in the background is 2.8 billion gallons of water full of mine waste, held back by a leaky dam.



This is Anand with Larry Gibson, a local activist, in Kayford, WV. Larry is pointing out a fissure opened up by explosives used in mountaintop removal mining. The mountain we're standing on top of is honeycombed with old mineshafts which are also full of wastewater; a fissure in the right place could flood the valleys and displace thousands of people.



This is what mountaintop removal looks like: the Samples mine in Kayford. The peak of this mountain used to be 700 feet above where we are standing. Towards the right you can see some of the attempts at restoration - native species don't grow back well on the fill from MTR, so they use imported grasses as a covering. You don't get a good sense of the scale from this picture, but if you look at it at full resolution you can just barely see the dumptrucks they use to pour the rock over the side of the mountain; they have tires the size of an SUV. It's also pretty impressive in Google Maps. Google Earth has a recent picture superimposed on out-of-date topographic information, which helps give a sense of how much the area has changed.



This is the memorial to 12 miners who died after being trapped by an explosion in Sago last year. The company had been cutting corners on safety, and locals say they held back a team that was ready to go in and cut these guys out. Mine safety has deteriorated tremendously with the expansion of aggressively nonunion companies like Massey Coal, who also push mountaintop removal.

Hangovers from 2000

I'm only even writing this post because Kim Stanley Robinson has written the best political scifi out there. His best known works are Red Mars and its sequels, which played a big role in my getting political. Plenty of his other works are, if anything, even better. The Three Californias Trilogy (reprinted not long ago) and Years of Rice and Salt are absolutely astonishing, as are some of his less remembered works, like Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness. He's written a lot of clangers, though.
I've just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below (the middle of a trilogy on climate change) again after a break. It has some good parts, but on the whole it's probably his worst book so far. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I'm particularly struck by the asinine politics.

A good deal of it centers around a miracle democratic presidential candidate, Phil Chase, who likes to talk about getting along with the rest of the world, pays attention to what scientists say about global warming and so on; in spite of that, he feels so threatened by a hypothetical independent 'scientific' candidate "polling about five percent in the blue states" in spite of not being on the ballot or even actually existing that the protagonists feel obliged to have it 'withdraw' from the race.

It's one of the best examples of the really bizarre reactions a lot of folks on the left are still having to the 2000 election. Robinson, who is pretty sharp politically, seems to have been so traumatized that he thinks that even an imaginary third party candidate - that is, even the idea that we might be able to do better than what's on the official menu - needs a sort of ritual exorcism.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that real democratic nominees are nowhere near as attractive as Phil Chase, but that every four years millions of people try to convince themselves that they are. Before Al Gore reinvented himself last year as a born-again environmentalist, he had worked hard to kneecap the Kyoto protocol - something that I think a lot of Nader voters knew or suspected in 2000.

This is part of the reason that, in spite of some reservations, I'm still glad I campaigned for Nader in 2000 and voted for him in 2004. There is a big problem with the political culture in the US, and one small but important part of it is that so many of the people who should be trying to do something about it are too pessimistic to even think seriously about it.

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Incidentally, there was an excellent piece by Garret Keizer in this month's Harper's to do with Al Gore and the politics of global warming. Among the many interesting points, he suggested that global warming could be a good counterpart to the "war on terror" in keeping people from thinking about everything else that's going on. That's an interesting way of looking at what's happened to Robinson.