by Sergio HkBk, Carla Morato, and Miguel Brea (anarcho-syndicalists and platformists)
translated by CES and comrades
Organized and non-institutional political spaces are at a historical impasse. They’re quickly approaching a theoretical ‘boiling point’. Between this political cycle finally drawing to a close and the new one just starting to emerge, lots of different projects with emancipatory perspectives are going through a process of restructuring. This makes sense because, if we want to overcome the limitations of the past, a period of strategic reconfiguration is definitely required. We have to move beyond the old ways of thinking that have failed us time and time again, beyond an idealistic, naïve understanding of progressive and mass politics. No more contradictions and political agents trying to co-opt the political process; what we need instead is full awareness and a strategy that arises spontaneously and in a natural way.
So, in this article, when we refer to a political cycle, we don’t mean it in the same way as those who talk about social dynamics from the past as if they were meteorological phenomena. The previous political cycle showed us that mixed in with the accumulated social force, and tied up with all the antagonistic capital that was awakened by social movement, there were a lot of different actors trying to funnel, deactivate, or directly capitalize on all of this energy for their own interests.
If we want to change everything, we need to prepare for the political events that are yet to come but are already in the works. This means learning from the mistakes of the past and articulating a vision for a new alternative actually capable of turning the tables of power. We are fully committed to participating in strategic debate and appreciate others doing the same. That’s why we wanted to go into depth and more thoroughly analyze some of the different ideas related to Popular Power and the Federation of various struggles.
We’ll focus on these specific organizational proposals for several reasons: to us, they seem like the most coherent ideas for accumulating social force and for guaranteeing the autonomy of an organized working class. But at the same time, they do still have a lot of the same problems that, in our opinion, facilitated the co-opting and misleading of struggles into the hands of neo-reformists. It should go without saying that we don’t agree with any proposals for increasing the influence and ranks of any single, hierarchical party.
An interesting but incomplete starting point
The compañeras from the housing movement, who wrote the article “Popular Power and Confederation of Struggles”, offer up some valid analysis with the goal of getting over the shortcomings of the previous political cycle. We think they’re spot on when they say the weakness of “movementism” is its “strategic approach”. They define movementism as “the sum of different collective actions based on mobilizing a single sector” adding that these “lax and unstable forms of organization” would eventually have shown themselves to be “unable to accumulate strength in the long term”. According to them, by not solidifying into popular structures and institutions capable of continuing the struggles, the mobilizations lost momentum, “opening the way for the rebuilding of the political system”. They do also say that “the different versions of electoralism were another major weakness”.
But just highlighting the obvious problems of sectoralizing and atomizing struggles doesn’t go deep enough into the issue. It still ignores how both of these “hypotheses” have the same sociological framework based on a de-classed political subject. Basically, they use a multi-class perspective. They accept the same framework as the ideologues of “the end of history” who think the working class, as a political subject, is already a thing of the past. Without explaining how the “movementist” and neo-reformist conceptions were based on a classless subject, it’s impossible to understand why so much of the discontent and outrage of the last political cycle was expressed in the civic sphere, where the situation couldn’t be sufficiently politicized and was easily co-opted by populist forces. This co-optation led to the formation of a de-classed political subject that was accepted uncritically in an effort to build an alternative, any alternative. But importantly, this political subject wasn’t already inherently de-classed; this was the result of a well-designed political intervention.
It makes sense that a political project without an in-depth, structural analysis of how capitalism and the State function would end up making detours and arriving at a dead end. You can’t see the common thread tying things together with an incomplete and stagnant view of how struggles work. Superficial analysis like that inevitably limits the scope of social struggles to small, incremental demands. The inherent fragility of this kind of thinking is even more obvious when dealing with unexpected challenges and reactionary forces.
To put it as plainly as possible, by focusing on citizens and accepting populist, cross-class theories coming from bourgeois ideology, we were never able to construct a strategy that could actually overcome the unbearable reality of capitalism. The analytical limitations of uncritically accepting a multiple-subject framework never helped us group together large sections of the population under a revolutionary program. Instead, it predictably led us to increasingly worse positions when things started to go bad. This was especially common at the local council level, where the protagonists of the social movements thought they had no other choice but to support a “municipalist gamble” that seemed like the only way out when the social force they had accumulated was rapidly disappearing before their eyes.
Daniel Bensaïd pointed out this same issue years ago, calling it the historical fruit of a “utopian moment”. In the 1990’s, after the defeat of the revolutions of the 20th century (with their authoritarian bent) and given the apparent imperviousness of capitalism, new discourses were born. While expressing a genuine desire for radical change, they ended up failing to ever articulate a concrete project for emancipation. The constant reference to “the other” (“alter-globalization”, “another possible world”, “the other campaign”) clearly expressed a strategic limitation that couldn’t be kept up after the last cycle of mobilizations, when things went from bad to worse.
Tripping on the same spot twice
From our perspective, the ideas in the article are a good representation of the general mood in protest movements today, with all the exact same drawbacks as before. The way they describe it, the “hypothesis of popular power” aims to build “a counter-hegemonic social block, rooted in struggles and cemented through a union base”, “articulated through the confederation of the different struggles that arise as a response to the multidimensional crisis of capitalism”. This is without ever indicating what the alternatives to capitalism actually are or on what social basis to build these struggles.
It’s easy to misunderstand the term ‘Popular Power’, which was an attempt, in Latin America, to expand the concept of “working class” to include those who’ve previously been excluded like peasants and indigenous people. It’s impossible to fully translate this idea to our “middle-class” society because it demands a socialist outlook, not just an ambiguous anti-capitalist one. Without socialism, Popular Power will inevitably be co-opted by populist projects, leading struggles to dead ends or to be hegemonized by the most privileged classes.
By refusing to name socialism as the only alternative capable of solving the wide-reaching problem of social injustice and the ecocide leading us relentlessly toward climate collapse, we’re just going to trip on the same spot again. Without speaking of the working class as the subject capable of bringing about this process of real and total transformation, we’re going to fall right back into the political ambiguity of “multiple-subjects”.
We already know that cross-class groupings aren’t capable of producing or sustaining the transformation that our planet and our class need. With a multiple-subject framework, it’s impossible to “avoid a new cycle of crisis-discontent-mobilization-frustration-demobilization”. To stop this vicious cycle, we need a radical break from the capitalist system; we need to develop a socialist system on a global scale. This won’t be possible if the subject capable of carrying out this task is never fully formed, and instead, it’s left up to a monster with a thousand heads pointing in different directions.
A Popular Power strategy: class-based, socialist, and revolutionary
As a concept, Popular Power marks a move away from outdated, workerist ideas that don’t accurately represent the diversity, feminization, and racialization of our class. This is potentially problematic since people could easily come up with less combative interpretations of what Popular Power means. By trying to attract the most people possible and not scare anyone away, we could end up with the opposite outcome, where we don’t help anyone in particular, or worse, help to progress the interests of other political forces.
A Popular Power strategy that doesn’t speak in terms of class, that doesn’t center the methods of working-class struggle and that doesn’t understand the potential that comes from its strategic position in the capitalist system, can only formulate strategies for gaining strength from within the system itself. This doesn’t mean we should give up on mobilizing large sectors of the population that have a variety of different characteristics and particular demands. However, it does mean that mobilizing has to target the inherent contradictions of capitalism. In short, you need a class-based perspective and a socialist horizon to actually transform society.
Going forward, it’d be interesting to discuss some related topics, such as the confusion between autonomy and sectoralisation, the purpose of bringing together a combative social force, the promotion of very specific models of anarcho-syndicalism, or the role of bureaucracies in unions and social movements. We’re excited to see that concepts like Popular Power, Confederation, and Revolutionary Syndicalism are being put on the table and applied to the political challenges of today. This is exactly why we wanted to point out the dangers of creating an ‘empty shell’. It’s up to us to continue filling it with content, together with compañeras committed to a revolutionary, federalist, and autonomous alternative.
Original article available here:
https://www.elsaltodiario.com/opinion/no-es-poder-popular-todo-lo-reluce
CES 