On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 7:00 PM Molly Hankwitz <
mollyhankwitz@gmail.com> wrote:
"I only hope that our police and our National Guard don't turn their guns onto a democratic system which has begun to change by virtue of the vote....as leadership like Ocasio-Cortez and Stacy Abrams have shown."
Change by the vote is the point right now. Big gains from our side have provoked a reaction from the right. The gains are not just this law or that politician: they spring from a growing social capacity to listen to others, just as you pointed out with your totally dialogical reply to me, Molly. That kind of listening, when it begins to occur between the classes and the races, becomes a threatening force challenging hierarchical norms.
Memories are short, but just a few months ago we had the George Floyd protests that drew half the country into a movement against police violence, and before that, we had the democratic socialist movement around Bernie Sanders that has brought precarious labor and healthcare issues to the center of the Biden administration. Now the desperate drama from the superpatriot crowd is forcing something even more impressive: an anti-racist shift at the heart of the American state, with all that entails, opening up avenues for every imaginable type of work towards social and environmental justice over the next few years. In my view this moment of US society is a new avatar of the Left, but one that drinks straight from the source: because the central technique being employed - transforming social relations for political ends - was first conceived by Antonio Gramsci in the 20s and 30s, and then brought into the contemporary world of cross-racial politics by Stuart Hall. That type of barrier-crossing practice began in American educational institutions in the 1970s, with the ambition to give disenfranchised people the chance to create their own cultural canons; but it has never ceased raising questions, and making people rethink their privileges, to the point where other categories of traditionally entitled citizens started to feel very uneasy. Like industrial workers and military men threatened in their masculinity, or middle-class Whites threatened in their property values, or high-end entrepreneurs threatened in their capacity to profit. It came to the point where laws and mores started putting the squeeze on the capacity of these dudes to put on the squeeze, if you see what I mean. And so force came into the picture.
Now we don't know exactly what to do, or how to understand what we are collectively doing, which is why I started talking about strategy. We are told that an armed revolution of gun-toting QAnon-hyped violent militiamen and random nationalist evangelical crazies might break out this weekend; and we find ourselves desiring and fearing the protection of the National Guard. You know, during the George Floyd protests I was angry to see National Guard troops in Chicago, and I bet you were too Molly, but now I'm getting the point. The point is hold up something better against a bunch of White supremacists who want to start a fascist regime. The fascinating thing is that we, the Left, who always worked toward revolution, increasingly find our power in the institutional system - precisely because we have transformed it so deeply over the generations. This process of social metamorphosis has nothing to do with the old battles between capitalist or imperialist countries, nor really with battle at all, because it's basically against violence, enslavement, rape and expropriation. But control is still an issue, because to be autonomous, as a collectivity, you have to control your own destiny at least to some degree. If you are trying to bend the course of an entire modern country to the left - which is what the Progressive bloc is trying to do right now - then you have to take on that country's operations, you have to keep the peace, you have to put out the forest fires and stop the pandemic. Right now I find that great to aspire to. Like a lot of people I want to work with these new possibilities: this moment is a great teacher.
On the one hand I'm seeing all this through the spectacles of Gramsci, whose strategy was the war of position, paradoxically inside the enemy where you have to make the terrain, rather than taking it in a raid from outside. Making the terrain is that social creativity I was talking about: it's all those molecular shifts of people becoming simultaneously more respectful and more outraged, and building organizations to put their politics into effect on the ground. That's a vast generational thing in the US, youth have really changed. All of that is our way of queer warfare and its doing pretty damn good among lots of other things. But on the other hand if you think about the global history of the Left, it's an incredible irony for sure, because the ragtag wannabe army of this weekend somehow represents the old industrial working class: damaged in the heart by extraction and religion and war, and even more, by their nationalist bosses who showed up in DC with the same red hats on. The aim, now, has to be quelling this conflict by opening up some ethically different kinds of energy industries, while cutting out the influence of the fascist entrepreneurs. That left strategy is called Green New Deal.
The upshot is, here in America we the Left are the people who are trying to hold the state against the insurgency of the new partisans. It's unbelievable. But I think it's totally serious to see it in this way, at antipodes from Left thinking in the 20th century. If the American Left moves through this faceoff with the fascists, I think there could be waves of social invention cutting across a lot of former divides. Maybe for the first time in my life I understand what it means, to change hegemony.
all the best,
from the Dreaded Rustbelt Midwest -
Brian
