social movements

These cracks can be spatial (places where other social relations are generated), temporal (“Here, in this event, for the time that we are together, we are going to do things differently. We are going to open windows onto another world.”), or related to particular activities or resources (for example, cooperatives or activities that pursue a non-market logic with regard to water, software, education, etc.). The world, and each one of us, is full of these cracks.

At a certain point, bottom-up movements stall, they enter a crisis or an impasse, or they vanish. Would you say that the politics of cracks has intrinsic limits in terms of enduring and expanding?

The movements you mention are enormously important beacons of hope, but capital continues to exist and it’s getting worse and worse; it progressively entails more misery and destruction. We cannot confine ourselves to singing the praises of movements. That’s not enough.

Any government of this kind entails channeling aspirations and struggles into institutional conduits that, by necessity, force one to seek a conciliation between the anger that these movements express and the reproduction of capital. Because the existence of any government involves promoting the reproduction of capital (by attracting foreign investment, or through some other means), there is no way around it. This inevitably means taking part in the aggression that is capital. It’s what has already happened in Bolivia and Venezuela, and it will also be the problem in Greece or Spain.

The search for legitimacy was largely provoked by accusations against the opposition of disloyalty and a lack of patriotism and it led to a concerted effort to reinforce the links between patriotism and dissent.

Yet the real similarity, he argued, was in the need for a 'conscious minority' (i.e. Herzen's 'educated minority') to act as mediators when the interests of the state and the people are out of sync.

Despite the Russian love of martyrs and a number of prominent cases, the idea of political martyrdom has become devalued as an effective form of resistance when cynicism prevails.  Consider the response to attempts at making Sergey Magnitsky into a figure of resistance against the apparent moral and economic corruption deep inside the Russian state: allegations of corruption against high-ranking bureaucrats were quickly transformed back into accusations against Magnitsky himself. In this instance, the 'blame game' rhetoric regarding Western-backed privatisation and economic collapse of the 1990s can quickly be adapted against many figures of the opposition. 

The engagement with, and simultaneous formation of, a dissident past indicates the opposition's need for symbols and authority. Against the current background of systemic corruption, it also suggests a desire for sincerity associated with the Soviet underground. Yet in the return to dissent we can see signs of that 'mindset of martyrdom' mentioned by Budraitskis. The demonisation of the Putin regime as the rebirth of Soviet totalitarianism may have aesthetic and moral appeal, but it does not necessarily provide much in the way of political potential apart from the 'boomerang' effect via Western pressure.

However, during the oil price slump of 2008, Chávez drew criticism at home for not concentrating on internal Venezuelan affairs rather than drawing the wrath of imperialist states during long international speeches. He heeded this warning and cut back on international engagements and visits. However, maintained an important role in Latin American relations. His leadership of a significant power in the region created a domino effect and enabled the surfacing and victory of progressive parties from Ecuador to Argentina ending the decades of isolation of Cuba.

Yet the key to the importance of President Chávez’s re-election for Africa lies strangely beyond Venezuela’s foreign policy and more so at the epicentre of its national struggle.

The election in Venezuela stood in stark contrast to the campaigning in the U.S. The ideological differences between incumbent President Chávez and the opposition candidate Radonski is far from a nuance and instead represents clear ideological paths, values, interests, alliances and priorities.

Yet Chávez progressive discourse presents an alternative to both. Rabidly anti-imperialist but equally anti-conservative, Chávez offers, particularly to the peoples’ movements of Africa, a discourse that resounds on the streets of Guinea, the farms of Madagascar and the squares of Egypt.

Chávez has been reluctant to criticise Global South leaders for any of their failings in leadership, understandably seeking allies amongst the few willing to openly oppose or resist the multiple layers of northern imperialism. However, with another six years to deepen the progressive agenda of not only Latin America and the Caribbean, but potentially the world, it will be critical that President Chávez and his administration consider supporting deepened solidarity between the peoples’ movements of Africa and the Americas to break the bipolarity of an increasingly belligerent world.

The strategically disabling condition of middle-class people is the belief that they are in it by themselves, subject not only to individual isolation but also to the failure to look around for allies.

Now we understand why college faculty members are so often passive when student movements emerge on campus and why public school unions often fail to make common cause with parents and other unions.

The cultural attributes that go with being working class can also hurt strategy. A Canadian example is a militant union that for decades has extended its resources and energy to assist anti-poverty groups, aborigines and many other causes that are marginalized in that country. Recently that union was thrown on the defensive and forced into a strike. Remarkably, the union failed to create a movement by gathering around itself the forces that it has helped.

A vital theme of owning-class culture is the “big picture.” The right wing easily puts us on the defensive because they know what they want. The counter-offensive that gives parents, school unions and others their only chance awaits the creation of vision. It’s vision that inspires people to go to the level of sacrifice that is necessary to win.

The radical revolution of values that King hoped would transform the country was repackaged by the early 1970s into an individualist, pro-capitalist, debt-constructed consumer diversion.

the West has demonstrated that it will use all of its military means to maintain its hegemony. Yet, to realize that shift, the “people” are going to have to “see” through the ideological mystifications that still values Eurocentric assumptions as representing settled, objective realities on issues like democracy, freedom, human rights, economic development and cultural integrity in order to confront the new coalitions of privilege.  Dr. King and the black anti-racist, anti-colonialist movements for social justice brought clarity to these moral issues by its example of movement building that sparked struggles for social justice in every sector of U.S. society. That is why sidelining black radical organizations and the black social justice movement has been one of the most effective consequences of the Obama phenomenon.

Today the necessity to stand with the oppressed and oppose war and violence of all kinds has never been more urgent. But that stand cannot be just as individuals. Individual commitment is important, but what Dr. King’s life reaffirmed was the power of movement — of organized and determined people moving in a common direction. That is why the government so desperately attempts to disconnect Dr. King from the people and the movement that produced him and to silence any opposition to its colonialist violence. The example of movement building and struggle is an example that has to be brutally suppressed, as witnessed by how the Obama Administration moved on the Occupy Wallstreet Movement once it became clear that they could not co-opt and control it.