I'm now in Istanbul, without my luggage. A little tired, so I'm going to be lazy and post some pictures again.
A Metro station in Naples, which has the most elaborately aesthetic public transportation system I've ever seen.
Viala Antonio Gramsci.
Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the background.
Sunset in Naples.
Barricades on the Via Santa Brigata in Naples in 1848.
Via Santa Brigata.
The old church next to my hostel.
A peculiar architectural detail of same.
The baths in Pompeii.
So by the time I started writing my last two posts I was already in Rome, where I spent a day regrouping and a day touristing (I'm now in Naples). I just had a nice big glass of wine andI'm feeling lazy, so I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures.
This, in case you didn't guess, is a neofascist poster, of which there were quite a few in Rome. There have recently been several attacks by organized Fascist gangs on various events around there.
In the Piazza del Popolo.
Yes, that does say what you think it does. The present government in Italy is realigning into to parties, one of which is set to be called the Partito Democratica.
The Tiber.
The Roman Forum. 2,500 years of political history...
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.
I've had a very exciting week-and-a-bit, so I've fallen a bit behind on writing anything here. London dramatically exceeded my expectations, and my head is still spinning from some of the discussions I had and the things I've seen and heard, but I'm going to try to get a little of it written down.
As I've mentioned before the main reason I went to London was to attend the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)'s Marxism 2007. I had some idea what to expect from listening to recordings from years past and from associated literature from the SWP and the International Socialist Tendency (which have been a staple part of my political diet for many years), but I think I'd picked so much negativity from various sources that I didn't really expect the event to be quite as fantastic as it was.
What I did expect was a lot of talks which were quite interesting in their own right. In particular I was happy to see a number of very good talks on Africa (including one on imperialism in Africa by Charlie Kimber and one on Nkrumah's political legacy by Mani Tanoh of the Ghanaian International Socialists). It seems (and I think this is increasingly accepted) that Africa is likely to keep getting more important over the next few years both as a focus of inter-imperialist rivalries and as a source of resistance, and besides learning more it was particularly heartening to hear about some of the exciting developments in the workers' movements in various countries.
This is not to say that there weren't a few disappointments in the talks and discussions, though the SWP was mostly not at fault. I suspect that the talk by Slawoj Žižek was a bit similar from the comments I heard about it afterward, and also because he's always a bit like that.The worst talk I attended was by the USFI's Michael Löwy on Walter Benjamin. Besides his talk being rather dull, Löwy's main point seemed to be importance of revolutionaries encouraging a general sense of impending disaster, which seems to me to be exactly the wrong lesson from the time Benjamin was living in. Just like the main result of these politics in the '30s was the popular front, the main result today (at least in the US) seems to a desperate attachment to liberalism and reformism. The various SWP cadres in the audience were very complimentary, perhaps out of politeness, but who knows?
This is of course a problem I'm very familiar with, and another one was a hair-trigger response to anything smacking of islamophobia. I should say that I absolutely agree that this is one of the biggest problems facing antiwar movements and the left generally, and I'm very glad that the SWP is pushing hard on this front. However when admittedly reactionary ideas like these are so widespread even among people who are very actively involved in the movement, it's important to differentiate between people who are spreading and taking advantage of these ideas for nefarious ends and honest leftists who are simply being misled. As important as it is to denounce the former, it's even more important to give a positive lead to the latter. One of the speakers at this meeting was Ghassan Makarem, who has an excellent short piece on the same theme here.A good example was in a meeting (introduced by two excellent talks) on the LGBT movement in the middle east where a young Gay British activist from the Stop the War Coalition said, more or less, that no matter what he'd rather live in the UK where he 'has rights' than in the middle east where he 'wouldn't'. Of course that's based on an oversimplification of the situation in both Britain and the Middle East (as the speakers had done a good job explaining), but besides pointing this out politely the best thing to do is to explain that that attitude is a big problem for people who are trying to improve the situation in both regions. Unfortunately it seems to me that the comrades who tried to reply to him didn't do that very well, and it seems like part of the problem could have been an assumption that he was not just honestly confused/mistaken/misinformed. All else aside, I think a too-aggressive response to such a situation gives an impression of a lack of real confidence in the ideas being put out.
I should say, of course, that these problems are nowhere as severe as what I'm used to. I may even be exaggerating because of having been a bit oversensitized by me previous experience. I also hope I'm not giving anyone the impression that all of the discussions had one or another of these problems. It was refreshing, for example, to see Billy Hayes of the CWU (postal workers' union) speak in one session, and then hear John Rees in the next session call him out for opposing united strike action with other public sector unions.
Although I was generally very impressed with the insights the folks I was talking to had about the state of the US left, it did seem to me that except for possibly Molyneux all of the people I was talking to had a very distorted understanding of the ISO, Left Turn, and the processes that left the IST without an organized presence in the US.So far this is more or less what I expected. What really surprised me was getting an impression of the work the SWP in Britain and its sister groups in other countries (especially Germany) are doing, which along with some conversations I had with Chris Nineham (also more briefly with John Molyneux, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German, and John Rees) and with comrades from the Canadian IS really helped me figure out some of the things that have been bouncing around in my head about the American left. This is something I'll be coming back to very soon, along with the results of some conversations I had with some other americans who came to the conference.
I, probably like a lot of socialists in the US, had a totally distorted picture of what the SWP is doing, particularly in the RESPECT coalition. The impression you get by reading the reports easily available on the internet is basically of a shabby attention-grabbing front group, which only gets votes by pandering to muslim communalism. To be sure some of the things George Galloway has done have been pretty unhelpful and it does seem to be true that (to a small extent) Muslim RESPECT candidates get higher votes than non-Muslim ones when both run in the same areas (if you want to go through the raw numbers, you can find some here). It may be that there have been tensions within RESPECT between the SWP and some more conservative elements in the coalition, as some have claimed.
The overall impression I got, though, is very different. Firstly, even at an SWP event you can see that the SWP is more than just SWP + Muslims + George Galloway. I think that with the SWP taking the lead RESPECT has been shifting form a two-issue group (war and islamophobia) to a more general militant antineoliberal formation. They have made a very serious turn in the last year or two towards building a connection to trade union militants (through the Organizing for Fighting Unions initiative, which has already attracted an imitation by the English CWI section) and fights against privatization of housing and medical services. This is going to be a long struggle, but in last year's local elections RESPECT was able to begin to go beyond what the Socialist Alliance was able to achieve both in non-Muslim immigrant communities and also in almost all-white areas in the British equivalent of the Rust Belt.
It's important not to see this as a 180º turn. My impression of the typical RESPECT local councilor is a socialist, leftist, or community activist (very often a young woman, it should be noted) who is also either a practicing Muslim or from a Muslim background; a good example was a councilor from Tower Hamlets, an older Bangladeshi woman, who made a comment at a meeting on the shape of the working class to the effect of "Insh'Allah (God willing), the working class around the world will unite to fight for justice". Even if a lot of these people got involved around civil rights issues or the war, it's not a big stretch for them or the people who voted for them to talk about public housing, pay cuts, etc.
The point is that RESPECT is being built up as an organization which is really part of the movements against war and neoliberalism in Britain, and gives a place to develop an overall set of political ideas and strategies. In more elevated terms, RESPECT is taking a first step out of what Stanley Aronowitz (in an otherwise largely incomprehensible book) calls "the Postmodern Left": the combination of a collection of single-issue movements with political organizations which oscillate between being loose collections of activists or which work inside the movements without really being part of them. It seems like there is a strong chance that Die Linke in Germany is headed in this direction from a very different starting point, and from what I have heard the LCR in France has just recently decided to move in a similar direction, and there is also reason to be hopeful about P-SoL in Brazil, although I think they have more problems than many people realize.
A digression but hardly an unimportant one: I have been led to understand that Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The sizable Trotskyist minority, mainly organized in AMR-Progetto Comunista and Sinsitra Critica, will probably have entirely left the party very soon, and the leadership under Bertinotti is steering clear of mass mobilizations and the anti-war movement and planning on a merger with the other post-Stalinist parties in Italy.This is not the first time something like this has happened, even recently. Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and the PT in Brazil certainly looked like this at one point but were lured away by the supposed virtues of "respectability" and being thought worthy to govern or be part of a coalition government. The Scottish Socialist Party seemed also to have substantial prospects, but then fall apart because of (depending on who you listen to) either personality conflicts, a fear of being part of movements it didn't control, or being blindsided by left-leaning Scottish nationalism.
What seems to set the IST apart in all this is a broad and deep historical understanding, which manages to integrate most of the experience of the socialist movement in the 20th century, and at least makes it possible to understand the process that is going on in these "new left parties" and the pitfalls in them. This doesn't mean that the efforts they are involved in are fated to be successful, but it does give them a fighting chance of coming out having accomplished something, and ready to take on bigger challenges in the future.
As I've said I think there is a lot in all this to learn from in the US; but that's something I'll have to come back to later.
I started writing this on the Eurostar from Brussels, and I'm finishing it up the next afternoon at Marxism 2007 in London.
The US Social Forum was enormous, and as usual there is the feeling of about a dozen conferences going on in the same place and overlapping only slightly. I mostly went to talks on socialism and the labor movement. Probably the most interesting one (which I'm still chewing one a little) was the one I already mentioned about minority (or "pre-majority") unionism. This is basically a matter of figuring out what to do when there is an organization of workers which is not legally recognized as a union nor likely to be in the immediate future.
I am of course one of those who believe that the labor movement is what workers get together and do rather than the organizations the government chooses to recognize, and who think that the biggest problem with said movement is how few of the people in it realize that. I myself, although I'd been told it before, rally realized how true this was when I found myself a member of a union with a solid institutional position but huge gaping holes in its actual functioning, which is a bit depressing. It's very encouraging to see people come into it from the other side.
Although it was more diffuse, spread out over several other workshops, I was also very pleased to see that Solidarity and Labor Notes seem to take the matter similarly seriously. One or the other hosted a big proportion of the workshops I attended, and for the most part I liked what I heard a great deal. I was particularly glad to see that they at least seem to be thinking about some of the things that have been on my mind about how labor bureaucrats often use students and student groups.
I see that about half of the folks quoted in Socialist Worker's article on the forum were members of the ISO delegation, although of course none are named as such. But enough of that.I also had some less innocent fun contemplating the efforts of various groups which were present. I've already mentioned the ISO, whose tiny presence I found rather striking. The SWP (who thought Social Forums were a middle-class waste of time until there was one in Venezuela) had about half-a-dozen tables of the usual sort, and the RCP now seems to have enough Chairman Bob merchandise to leave everything else at home.
I had a related experience at a session on revolutionary organizing in the 21st century or something of that sort. This was an entirely stultifying experience for the 90 minutes or so I managed to get myself to stick around, which consisted of 40 minutes of corporate-training-style ersatz friendliness courtesy of Bring The Ruckus, an "anti-authoritarian cadre organization" descended from Love'n'Rage followed by a variety of Maoist soundbites from BTR, FRSO, and various study groups, with a few innocuous words from a Solidarity member. It was packed (at least at the beginning) and went on for another 3 hours so after my eyes glazed over.
Unfortunately I had to leave before the forum was over, so I missed a few interesting-looking workshops, particularly one to do with GI outreach which I'm hoping to hear about from a friend.
