Social Movements Will Not Free Us (part three)

The fear of demons from the past weighs heavily on the imagination and thinking and action of the living left. Most of today’s activists are too young to have directly experienced this past. More proximate factors no doubt explain much of what appears to be a fear of repeating past atrocities or errors or defeats. This is not to say that today’s left has not made considerable progress in reinventing ways to do left politics that address some of the most egregious flaws in past lefts. They have. My critique is directed at those that I consider to be the most inventive and committed parts of today’s movements, what I label variously the left of the left, or the radical flank, or just the left.

This is part three of a three-part article. See Social Movements Will Not Free Us (part one) and then Social Movements Will Not Free Us (part two) to read them first, or to skim through them if you read one or both a while ago.

We Will Not Get What We Want and Need Unless We Actually Ask For Exactly That. And Nothing Less.

My argument in this post is as follows: We will not get what we want and need until and unless we actually ask for what we want, and make that ‘unrealistic’ Left Alternative Society Framing very visible to the general population and to all those who are active in social movements and struggles. I call this giving priority to the tactic of waging a Gramscian counter-hegemony struggle within the broad left itself, as well as within all institutions of society. The goal is to reorient the overall society-wide Movement of movements (or at least the left-wing of it, but to the extent possible the majority wing of it) so that it is also a Political Movement, a Movement that deliberately and persistently seeks to win power, to achieve system-level changes in basic social structures and dominant cultures.

This does not mean building a single vanguard. Nor does it mean seeking a revolution that ends capitalism and imperialism and systemic racism and patriarchy in one glorious uprising, or even just two or three or ten spread out over many decades. Even if we win power in some country, it will take a very long time to transform the society bit by bit. Before we win any real power anywhere, we will always have to spend most of our time on playing defence, on fighting back. But we will win precious few battles, and have no hope of ever winning the war for a new social system based on genuine full-scale liberty, equality and democracy, until we commit to playing offence, to waging campaigns and struggles around our values and ideas translated into a coherent agenda of ideas for alternatives/solutions long-term, medium-term and short-term.

Here is What We Can Agree That We Want and Need. Let’s Start a Campaign to Win People to the Idea That They Can Get It.

Here is the outline of what follows. First, a recap of what the Build a Gramscian Political Movement tactic entails. Second, a brief statement of the ten point programme of key organizing principles for a new social system. I proposed this earlier as a sample of what we could unite around as an initial statement of our ‘core ideology’, of a provisional specification of our long-term social change goals (see XXX). Third, how building a Gramscian Political Movement based on deliberately agitating, educating, training and organizing around a highly visible set of core principles for an Alternative Society is different from what we are doing now (or rather would reshape what we are already doing to improve it), and is also better.

WHAT A ‘BUILD A GRAMSCIAN POLITICAL MOVEMENT’ TACTIC ENTAILS

The proposal to build a Gramscian Political Movement is as follows:

-- We will only win the ‘transformative’ (or systematic, or new system or revolutionary in scope) changes that we need if our movements and struggles are consciously trying to (a) win transformative changes long-term; and (b) win the power necessary to implement those changes (against the organized resistance of those with entrenched interests in the status quo and their supporters). To do those two things is what it means to say that a movement is being Political.

-- The left flank of left-leaning movements today (the left of the left, or simply the left) can and should agree on an explicit statement of the long-run changes sought that is sufficient to guide the carrying out of a sustained Gramscian counter-hegemony campaign. See below for a brief statement of my 10-point programme proposal for this basis of unity and statement of political goals.

-- An organization that seeks to provide political leadership to movements and struggles needs to achieve whatever internal agreement that it can on four things: (1) an analysis of the problems in society and their (tentatively understood to be) causes; (2) a set of proposed solutions to those problems that addresses both their effects and their causes – stated differently, a programme of long-term, medium-term and short-term solutions; (3) a strategy (in practice, multiple strategies at various levels and at various times and places) for winning the power to enact the social changes sought; (4) tactical means that are ‘appropriate’ to the strategy, i.e. tactics that contribute to winning the goals of the strategy. I will refer to these four as Problems, Solutions, Strategy and Tactics.

The Left of the Left Disagrees About Strategy. But We Can Agree on the Basic Problems That Need Fixing and on the Guiding Principles for the Solutions.

-- The ‘left of the left’ that I propose should be brought together to initiate a Gramscian campaign is not a political leadership organization in the sense just defined. Why? Because we may be able to achieve considerable agreement on Problems and Solutions, but we will disagree on Strategy and Tactics (and that results in a lot of other disagreements). In other words, we can agree on at least the key organizing principles that define the kind of alternative society we want to end up with (a vision), but we disagree quite a bit on the means for getting there (where ‘means for getting there’ also includes more explicitly defined short-term, medium-term and long-term changes sought). I am claiming that there are three basic strategies for power on the left – revolution (seeking power/control in the State and Economy), electing left-wing governments, and autonomism (seeking self-rule everywhere, but not seeking power/control in the State or Economy, except as an effect of ever expanding decentralized self-rule). I am proposing that left people who disagree on strategy-tactics should define their unity around goals at the level they are able to, in order to work together as broad a left coalition as possible to carry out a Gramscian campaign that would help everyone.

-- The left of the left that comes together is like the Billy Graham coalition of theologians and preachers from different (Christian) denominations and churches that came together to (a) get agreement on a core theology; (b) work together to conduct ongoing national and international crusades to win converts to that basic ‘Jesus saves’ theology from the mass public. This is explicitly not a proposal for a single vanguard party. Nor is it a proposal to do political activity that would lead to the formation of a single vanguard party. It is a proposal for raising the political consciousness of the general population to be supportive of transformative social and political changes, through a sustained Gramscian campaign of agitation, education and organization (AEO work). It is a proposal to do the same within the overall Movement of progressive movements. It is a proposal that takes as a foundational principle that both the Movement and any future Society is pluralistic with regard to (political) values and ideas. There is no ‘correct line’ that everyone must agree with, and there never should be.

Taking Power in Economy and State, Electing a Left Government, Seeking Local Self-Rule. We Can Try All Three of These Strategies and Support One Another In Doing So.

-- Note that this proposal is strictly speaking agnostic on all matters of strategy and tactics. I think that a healthy left political movement can be pluralist long-term on strategy (let the best strategy win and let each strategy win some things). I think that we can support one another’s different efforts to win change by viewing them as different wings of a single Movement seeking the same goals, but most people do not think so. Having said that, there will often be differences short-term, ones that will tend to sharpen when repression intensifies and/or when the left starts to succeed, where the difference between victory and defeat gets more and more dependent on making the right decisions, where the level of costs and benefits gets much higher. And this does not mean that ‘anything goes’. Some actions by self-defined leftists or progressives will be so negative in their effects that we should strongly oppose those actions, but we should be able to do this as an overall left Movement across strategy-tactics divides.

-- The main reason that I currently think that an overall left Movement can be united in action where it counts (working together often, supporting one another’s efforts when we work separately and differently) and be pluralist in a lot of our thinking is because I now believe in a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ theory of evolutionary/revolutionary change. I think that history alternates between relatively long periods of ‘evolution’, where the left can win changes (even fairly transformative ones) here and there but does not have the power to implement across the board systemic change, and ‘moments of rupture’ where history can speed up, power over State and Economy can be won, and revolutionary in scope changes can be implemented.

Punctuated Equilibrium is the Theory that It Will Take a Series of Evolutionary and Revolutionary Periods to Phase Out Systems of Oppression.

Even more important for what I am arguing here, I also think that even when the left has major power in some time and place, it will take a very long time to ‘phase out’ systemic racism, patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, homophobia etc. Change will take place in a series of changes, some of them quite radical in the short term and others not so much. Those changes will be in institutions and in policies. They will be applied and tested out to find out what works, and what still does not work and therefore requires a new set of changes. Pluralism in thinking will not only be possible but highly desirable so that we try out different ideas and see what works best. The left can be pluralist because the time frame for achieving the kinds of changes we seek is much longer than most people on the radical left used to think (it will likely take many generations).

(The approach of most revolutionaries that actually made a revolution in the past 100 years or so was Marxist-Leninist. That approach posited that a fully egalitarian society would take a fair while to achieve once power was won over the State and Economy, but that the biggest steps could be made relatively quickly by establishing public ownership of the economy and seeking to build up workers control ‘from below’ in combination with leadership of the vanguard party. That idea was much too optimistic about how quickly changes could be achieved. In my view, that idea (of achieving a fully prosperous socialist economy, if not yet a classless and bottom-up controlled communist one, in a single generation) was crucial in motivating and justifying the often brutally repressive policy of endless purification purges and strictly imposed ideological orthodoxy.)

Here is the Game Plan for Getting a Left Coalition to Organize a Campaign of Agitation, Education and Organization (AEO Work).

-- All of the above leads to this specific proposal for waging a sustained Gramscian campaign:

** The left coalition should first agree to a basis of unity that consists of a statement of the long-term social change goals.

** Then it should educate individual activists to understand this set of ideas about Problems (and their systemic causes) and Solutions (and their systemic change scope).

** It should also train these activists in the skills of agitation (persuasive speaking and writing), education (explaining left ideas about problems and solutions) and organizing (working with people to get them organized to take collective action that can win changes and win more power).

** And then those educated and trained activists should go out to all the progressive movements and organizations and win them to the idea that they should build in Gramscian AEO work as a priority feature in their own organizing, based on their own interpretation and application of the general set of long-term goals. We would of course offer to educate and train some of their activists, or rather we would provide ideas and various types of resources and support for them to educate and train some of their people themselves.

Two Tasks: (1) Educating and Training Organizers to Do AEO Work; (2) Creating an Infrastructure of Schools, Thinktanks, Festivals, Media etc to Make the Left Alternative Visible to the General Public.

** Educating and training individual activists will not be enough. We also need to encourage the building of an entire system or network of institutions where AEO activity can take place. We need to directly create, and mostly encourage other left movements to create, schools, summer camps, broadcast and publishing media of various kinds, think tanks, conferences, nightly or weekend training workshops that busy/working people can attend, festivals, competitions in sports and the arts and science and social science, and much much more. It is crucial to remember that the goal of Gramscian counter hegemony work is to challenge the dominant ideologies that justify the unequal and unjust status quo, in order to progressively win the battle of ideas amidst the general population. AEO work certainly aims to achieve transformative changes in the consciousness and organizing skills of activists, but our primary goal is to go out to the people wherever they are and do the same with them.

** A Gramscian campaign aims to do one big thing, and then several things that are required to do that thing. It aims to change the social and political consciousness of the mass public, so that they see the problems and their causes, and not just the need for system-level changes, but the fact that there is nothing stopping us from making those changes except a minority of entrenched interests that are preventing it.

The AEO Work of Changing Popular Consciousness About What Is Possible Will Be Done Differently by Different Movement Organizations.

In order to accomplish that change in mass public consciousness, we need to get activists in progressive movements of all kinds to agree to the idea of educating and training people to wage their mass struggles in the perspective of winning transformative or systemic changes. Why? Because doing so raises the expectations of people about what they need to win, are entitled to win and have the power over time to actually win. When people understand the facts about what the causes of the problems they face are, and are constantly presented with the transformative agenda as the measuring stick of how much we are progressing in any given struggle, it will make it more possible to organize them and to unite them.

This does not mean that we are saying that people should only make maximalist demands. We will operate on two levels at the same time, and make explicit connections between the two levels. We will take up whatever demands for change are necessary to ask for, and possible to win, in any given campaign or struggle. At the same time, we will stress explaining the roots of the problems and explaining what a systemic change that gets to the roots of the problem, and we will always connect the demands and ideas of the immediate struggle to the measuring stick of the principles of a new society.

Remember that this agitation, education and organizing work is to be done by the different movements and organizations based on their own interpretation and application of the broad set of systematic change goals of the overall Movement. There will be very different specific framings and proposals, but there will be agreement on the level of core principles as the measuring stick. The public will get a consistent message about the need for systemic change in accordance with a short list of key values and ideas. They will understand what a left framing of the issues looks like and what kinds of proposals left groups are suggesting as solutions to those problems. The specifics matter, but not that much because the specifics will be varied and they will change. What matters is the core principles and the broad thrust of the analysis of the problems and their causes (which of course will also be varied and will also change in their specifics).

Revolutions Happen When ‘There is No Other Way Out’. Right Now Let’s Agree to Seek Systemic Changes by Whatever Means Are Both Necessary and Possible.

(One thing we should probably change is to drop the use of the word ‘revolutionary’ to refer to the new system changes. Both activists and regular people use revolutionary to refer to the process of change, not the scope of the changes that a process aims to achieve. Very few people want a revolution most of the time, because they think of the bloodshed and disruption of civil war. Then all of a sudden there is a moment of rupture, perhaps because of the collapse of the economy, or the collapse of the natural environment, or a horrible war fought for ignoble ends. Then all of a sudden the idea of a popular uprising seems like a good idea to a lot of people. There is no need to spend a lot of time arguing for a process that we radicals only actually try to organize when ‘there is no other way out’ (Bayat, quoting Trotsky). What revolutionaries should do, to make it more possible to win a revolution when it is imposed on us, is to get the Movement as a whole to prepare to deal with the surveillance and repression that is already here, and the much greater amounts of it that will come whenever those who control and benefit from the system of systematic oppressions feel that their system is even a teeny bit vulnerable.)

A TEN POINT PROGRAMME TO UNITE US

The goal is to get leading groups on the left of today’s movements to do two things: (1) agree to a clear statement of the basic transformative changes we need to make steady progress toward achieving, both globally and locally; (2) set up the structures, and educate and train the organizers, to seed a sustained Gramscian campaign.

Such a campaign would engage as many movement organizations as possible in educating and training some of their own activists to do AEO (Agitate, Educate, Organize) work, based on their own interpretation and application of the general Statement of the Left Alternative. It would also provide leadership and seek to raise resources, to establish a vast infrastructure of left institutions that do AEO work oriented to raising the consciousness of the general population. That everexpanding network would have one overriding mission – to do everything possible to make the Left Alternative framing of problems and proposals for solutions highly visible, and to work tirelessly to develop new analyses of problems, and new and better proposals for solutions, in line with the principles of an Alternate Society.

The Left Can Agree on the Principles for an Alternative Society, a Ten Point Programme.

I have already written an article that presents a Ten Point Programme. For a somewhat better explanation of each point see A Ten Point Program To Unite the Global Left . Here is a more concise version.

(1) LIBERTY: Freedom of all individuals from unwarranted coercive or manipulative control. Individual freedom of conscience, speech and association.

(2) EQUALITY: Equality of results. Guaranteed basic standard of living. Redistribution to achieve this. An end to patriarchy (male domination), homophobia and systemic oppression of ethnically distinct (often racialized) groups. Human rights, not property rights, as the basis of equal status and equal rights.

(3) DEMOCRACY: Final decision-making about important economic, cultural and political issues by the people most impacted by the decisions. A mix of expert, representative and participatory forms. Goal of maximizing both dialogue and debate to clarify and/or reconcile views.

(4) POST-CAPITALISM: Dismantling capitalism step by step over an extended period of time. Some changes will need to be made quickly, to make later changes that take more time (and need to be trial and error tested) possible. The starting point will be the positive vision of building a truly democratic socialism, that recognizes various types of property and ownership and control arrangements.

We Can Agree to Reverse Neocolonialism by Carrying Out a Worldwide Redistribution of Wealth and Decision-Making Power.

(5) DECOLONIZATION: Reversal of the (neo)colonization of peoples, countries and cultures. Global redistribution of wealth and decision-making power to achieve this. Step by step radical reduction of the means of war. The balancing of levels of means of war between a global center and countries, and between countries.

(6) ECOLOGY: Change the definition of economic growth to subtract the negative consequences for Nature, and for the quality of human lives, from the measure of supposed improvement. Change everything in our ways of producing, distributing and consuming that contributes to destroying Nature and people in ways that are unrecoverable.

(7) NON-VIOLENCE: Our goal is a society where peaceful resolution of conflicts is maximized, and people are protected from violence, coercion and manipulation. We will always seek to minimize the amount of violence against people and Nature that takes place in struggles to win a better world.

(8) TRUTH-SEEKING: Universal access to the education, training, tools, resources and media for individuals to develop and propagate their artistic or scientific or secular moral or spiritual/religious capacities and truths, so long as this does not contribute to hurting Nature or people to an unacceptable degree.

We Can Agree to the Step By Step But Deliberate Dismantling of Capitalism Over an Extended Period of Time and the Building Out of a Truly Democratic Socialism.

(9) WELL-BEING: Quality of life, including institutions and policies to maximize health and truth-seeking, is the top goal. Opportunities for people to play, pursue their desires and express themselves in all types of creative and leisure activities.

(10) JUSTICE: Reinvention of our systems of law and order, with new institutions and laws and equal enforcement of all crimes. Reliance on police as only one type of agency to protect everyone from crime. Rehabilitation and healing/redress as the goal of punishments.

I think that something like this statement of the guiding principles for a new society is Goldilocks. It is sufficiently close to what many people will already be open enough to at least considering. It is sufficiently clear about what would be different about a Left Alternative Society to serve its Gramscian campaign purpose, of uniting as much of the Movement as possible around transformative (hence political, by my definition of political) social change goals. I welcome your suggestions for improvements.

HOW A GRAMSCIAN CAMPAIGN IS INDISPENSABLE TO ANY STRATEGY TO WIN

How would the overall left-led Movement of movements be different and better if we got together to conduct a sustained Gramscian campaign to enable AEO work by as many left-leaning organizations as possible?

(1) A Gramscian campaign would progressively unite the Movement around (a) analyses of problems and their systemic causes; and (b) proposals for systemic solutions.

Today’s overall Movement is not united around either. We are not capable, most of the time, of doing anything beyond ‘fighting back’. We do not share a vision of the future, or even an analysis of the present. Consequently, even in the struggles that reach the highest level of popular mobilization, our level of unity cannot go any higher than that of a pragmatic coalition for short-term (mostly defensive) ends. We practice some kind of left populism, where people with different interests and views and priorities agree to support a particular limited cause, because we are all part of The People. Counterintuitively, but entirely predictably, this is combined with a very strong sense of being a counterculture (of people apart from the mainstream), that shares a strongly felt sense of values that should guide individual behaviour (or else you are not part of the people).

A Gramscian Campaign Would Promote the Creation of an Infrastructure of Think Tanks, Media, Schools, Festivals etc To Make the Left Alternative Visible to the Public.

(2) A Gramscian campaign would create the infrastructure, and educate and train the people, to do AEO work: (a) Agitate (do persuasive writing and speech); (b) Educate (explain problems and their causes and what kinds of systemic solutions are needed); and (c) Organize (to provide strategic and tactical leadership to mass struggles; to educate and train individuals to have the consciousness and skills to be organizers, to provide that kind of leadership).

Very little AEO work is being done in today’s movements. We are mostly all for horizontalism, and against the very idea of leadership. This stance is antithetical to doing AEO work, which has educating and training (mass struggle level) leaders as one of its main goals. We expect whatever leadership emerges to be spontaneous (self-selected). We end up with charismatic leaders who are followed because they seem to incarnate the popular will as we interpret it (see Syriza, Podemos, Five Star Movement, the early civil rights movement). Failing that, or accompanying that, we have the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’, a self-declared set of leaders operating behind the scenes that is not subject to criticism or held to account because, after all, they are not leaders, and anyway they are doing all the work.

(3) A Gramscian campaign would persuade people in as many different movements and organizations as possible to take two things seriously, Developing Theory and Doing Politics. By Developing Theory, I mean analyses that lead to theories of problems and their causes, as well as analyses that ground proposals for solutions. By Doing Politics, I mean (a) recognizing that we can only get what we want by figuring out the Problems (and their causes) and Solutions, and by consciously orienting our struggles to winning systemic solutions; and (b) acting with the understanding that winning the battle of public opinion will not be enough to produce the changes we seek, unless we win enough power to enact them.

We Need a Very Detailed and Accurate Set of Analyses of Societal Problems and Their Causes In Order to Come Up With Credible and Workable Solutions. This is the Work of Theory.

By ‘take seriously’, I mean that we recognize that our level of Developing Theory and Doing Politics are not a ‘one and done’ accomplishment. Developing Theory: We have to keep doing more and more concrete analyses so that we are constantly getting better at offering solutions that work, and that masses of people can come to see that they work. Doing Politics: It is something that changes every day. New circumstances, new actions by opponents and others, new analyses and awareness let us, and require us, to keep revising our strategies and our tactics. Every day in politics, in any kind of conflict situation that is centrally about who has the power to do what, we get a little bit stronger or we get a little bit weaker, as the outcome of our tactical battles.

Today’s movements do very little work to upgrade our level of Theory. Activists are well aware about all the points I just made above about the cut and thrust of politics. But we are not working to build up our capacity for Doing Politics (for uniting to seek systemic change goals; for doing strategy-tactics to win greater leverage/power) in our overall Movement, or even in many of our autonomous movements. If we don’t work consciously and tirelessly to get better in these two areas, we will not get any better. We are afraid to even try. Or else we don’t think we really need to Develop Theory or Do Politics to win. All we need is (spontaneous and decentralized) Social Movements Only that Strengthen Civil Society.

An Infrastructure of Liberal Thinktanks, Media, Websites etc Already Exists that Allows Some Left Intellectuals and Artists to Reach a Mass Audience. This Makes Some of Us Complacent.

(4) If we actually managed to build the infrastructure of media, schools, think tanks etc then we would be better able to do make a Left Position about problems and their causes and solutions Highly Visible to the general public.

It is true that we will not raise the level of consciousness of the public evenly, or all at once. Most people are only likely to make significant changes in the way they think when they get interested in, or even directly involved in, one or many practical struggles around issues that they come to care about. That is probably how it happened to most of us who are now conscious activists. In the first instance, practical conflicts about perceived problems/issues will have more impact for most people than our communicating of our ideas. But they will only be really ready to listen to our ideas and to consider following our leadership/advice in struggles, because we will have put out Visible Messaging to the public over a long period before that moment. People need to be made aware over time that there is this Left Position (multiple specific left positions) on most subjects, and maybe be somewhat aware of what some of those positions were and are (ones related to issues they already care about probably), so that when the situation calls for it, they are ready to give serious attention to our alternative.

At least in rich liberal democratic states, and in more pockets in other places than one might think…. There is already an infrastructure of sorts that is progressive, or at least mainstream liberal, that permits the expression of left ideas. Lots of excellent fiction and non-fiction books and magazines/journals get published that provide excellent information and stimulating analyses (many are by writers who are not political or radical or left-wing at all). There are university departments in multiple disciplines here, there and everywhere that hire and retain one or even several left-wing scholars and teachers. Lots of thought-provoking art in every form from films and TV to theater and music and cartoons and dance gets produced and exhibited and distributed. There is social media, that allows anyone in possession of a smartphone or laptop and an internet connection to communicate their feelings, observations and comments, although reaching a genuinely mass audience of people who do not already agree with you is quite something else.

All of this is a major resource for left and liberal movements, but it is not the kind of infrastructure that has as its aim the challenging and changing of dominant ideologies in the service of building a powerful left-wing Movement that changes who is in power in the economy, culture and State. For that, we need different kinds of media, schools, thinktanks etc, ones that agitate, educate and train people to build mass left-led organizations.

The Left Opposes Neoliberalism (i.e. Capitalism), Globalization (i.e. Neocolonialism) and Authoritarianism (i.e. The Security State). But We Do Not Have a Plan for Dismantling Any of Them.

(5) As Asef Bayat wrote in his critique of the Arab Spring activists, today’s left may be critical of a long list of specific consequences of what have respectively come to be called ‘globalization’ and ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’. But we do not have either analyses or proposals for the actual dismantling and replacing of the three systems these words refer to -- the neo-colonial (imperialist) system of domination and exploitation of relatively weaker economies, states and peoples by ones with more wealth, power/influence and firepower; the capitalist economic system; the modern security state of surveillance and repression, that is every bit as (potentially) repressive and controlling in rich liberal democracies as it is anywhere else. A Gramscian campaign would seek to remedy this relative lack in today’s movements.

Marxists and anarchists and social democrats in the lefts of the past had plenty of ideas about changing these three systems in their earlier iterations, and learned both negative and positive lessons from practical applications of those ideas in their movements and in their regimes. But we all know that there is a need for a major rethink here. A Gramscian campaign would be centered significantly on stimulating that rethink.

Many Activists Say That They Don’t Need Any Leaders. That Means That They Do Not Need Themselves. Being an Activist is By Definition Being a Leader.

(6) A Gramscian campaign would affirm the need for centers of leadership on two levels, global and society-wide (whole country level).

There can be no unity or solidarity that is pro-active and sustainable over time unless it is organized somewhere by some set of people who agree to some kind of Basis of Unity and some kinds of Plans for Action. Activists today should get over the idea that they actually are non-hierarchical and leaderless in relation to ‘the people’. This is a mix of hypocrisy and self-deception. The vast majority of social movement organizations today are not mass organizations, like unions and socialist and communist parties and anarchist/syndicalist organizations sometimes were in the first half of the twentieth century. They are organizations of activists and, by definition and in what they actually do, activists are leaders. The issue is what kind of leaders are you going to be, including how you will actually go out to organize the mass of unorganized non-activist people, and how you will make yourself accountable in the sense of listening to and learning from the people you are seeking to agitate, educate and organize.

Perhaps Progressive International, or whatever might remain from the World Social Forum movement, could convene a coalition of left organizations to debate and agree to a statement of key organizing principles for a new post-capitalist, decolonized, non-racist, feminist etc society (after a sufficiently long period for debates to be held online and in conferences on the country level). Such a meeting could also agree to a set of organizing campaigns, Gramscian and otherwise, aimed at building an infrastructure and putting this left vision and proposals to as wide an audience of activists and ordinary people as possible around the world. Country-level meetings could follow up. The Billy Graham principle of building a pluralist movement, where specific movements and organizations will interpret and apply the common programme somewhat differently would be explicit.

We do sometimes manage to organize protests on country-wide and global levels around important issues, such as new wars or expansions of weaponry and symbols of neoliberal economic policy such as G7 meetings, but we do not act like an overall Left Movement with an agenda for changing the whole society.

Calling for Participatory Democracy Everywhere Will Not Get Us ‘Power to the People’ Anywhere. We Need Thought-Out Plans for Replacing the Organized Structures of Power That Rule Over Us Too.

(7) A Gramscian campaign would encourage today’s movements to make central the issue of (a) taking power away from those who rule in all of the institutions of society; and (b) replacing it with various forms of democratic power.

This general idea, or at least the ‘replace it with democratic power’ part, is arguably already central in the left of today’s movements. But our thinking about this is extremely naïve and rudimentary and especially ‘one size fits all’. It is the idea that we will just call for participatory democracy everywhere. But that will not ever win popular support, nor should it, because the kinds of decision-making and related processes in a business or government agency or school or hospital or any other institution (a) will each be different because the nature of the work being done in each of these institutions is different; and (b) will be complex, be a mix of expert and representative and participatory forms of debate and decision-making; and (c) has to make sense as a way to organize the actual day to day activity of the people operating within the guidelines of any decision-making.

Most of what happens in any institution is not setting policy, it is the actual doing something of value to society, and that doing requires systems of management and coordination, not just meetings for debate and collective decision-making. Put crudely, people will want to know how our proposals for running all of these institutions democratically will actually let us ‘make the trains run on time’, and to do so more efficiently and humanely than the way that is done under capitalism.

The other part of dealing with power is the ‘taking power away from those who rule’. It is not a one-off event of taking the Winter Palace, or electing a radical left government with over 50 percent of the vote, or announcing the formation of a libertarian Commune in some city or town. It is part of any social struggle to not just try to win demands, but to change the balance of power between the rulers and the ruled in whatever ways possible. But we do not have much in the way of analyses of how power works in today’s society at either the macro or micro levels (there is lots of scholarship on this, but the left has not appropriated and adapted much of it).

In Every Struggle We are Not Just Fighting to Win Specific Demands, We are Also Trying to Change the Balance of Power Between Rulers and Ruled.

We have not done a lot of new thinking about how to actually ‘take power’. Make no mistake, power is a defining feature of any social relationship. There is a ratio of how much power one side of the relationship has relative to the other. Power is not exactly zero-sum, but it is close to that. The more one side has, the less the other has, and vice versa. You cannot just assert your own power autonomous from the others in the same social field as another group that is trying to exercize power. Their power prevents yours. Your winning of power limits theirs. We cannot have ‘power to the people’ until and unless we actually take it from those others who have most of the power now, who are dominant in the social relationship. We can share power in egalitarian and democratic ways, but that is not easy to achieve even if both sides, all sides, are willing. And in most institutions in capitalist society there are rulers who are not interested in that kind of sharing.

There is a very wide agreement among scholars in all disciplines with Max Weber’s definition of power. It is the ‘capacity to realize one’s will even against the resistance of others’. Weber defines the paired concept of authority as ‘the chance of commands being obeyed by a specifiable group of people’, hence the ability to achieve the voluntary submission of others without the use of force or violence to overcome their resistance. The historical sociologist Michael Mann’s classic series of books The Sources of Social Power suggests that there are four main types of power (and therefore, for him, four sets of rulers operating in overlapping networks), each of which involves control over a distinct set of resources – economic, ideological, political and military. Here is my formulation for each type of power:

There Are Four Main Types of Power – Economic, Political, Military and Ideological. Any Strategy Has to Deal With All Four Types.

(a) POLITICAL power is the power to make decisions and then enforce their application.

We tend to think of this power exclusively in terms of the power and authority of all parts of the State (legislature, executive branch and all the government agencies that it oversees and commands, the courts). But of course it applies to decision-making, and the enforcement of the application of the ‘laws’ and policies of decision-making bodies, in any type of institution.

(b) MILITARY power is the capacity to use force and violence, or the threat of same, to get compliance or to actually weaken or destroy individuals and groups.

Military power is usually in the service of those with political or economic or sometimes ideological/cultural power (examples of the latter would be military action in the service of a dominant religion or racialized ethnic group or ‘nation’ like the medieval Crusades or the post-civil war Ku Klux Klan, but this is usually also in service to economic or political power). Military power is exercised by governmental agencies like armed forces and police and prison staff that have some legitimate(d) authority. But it is also exercized by private sphere groups like the security forces employed by businesses or vigilante groups or militia or death squads or criminal gangs and the like.

The rising threat of military power to the freedom of citizens is increasingly in the form of total 24/7 surveillance of everyone (traceable in real time by their phone and laptop, and bureaucratically by their data), and then more secret or at least low-profile forms of repression enabled by that surveillance. How the left deals with a ‘surveillance and repression’ society is a topic we shall return to soon.

Two Things Are Central to All Forms of Power – Ownership and Control of the Resources Needed to Exercize That Kind of Power.

(c) ECONOMIC power is power over the means of production, distribution and consumption of (scarce) goods and services. It is grounded in ownership and control of the ‘means’ of producing wealth: people, Nature (natural resources, land) and technology.

Yes we are in a fourth industrial revolution automated information machine economy. Data is a resource. So are knowledge and skills. They are a means of increasing one’s economic power perhaps (because you own and control resources of greater value), but it is not the foundation of economic power. Ownership and control of all the resources that are means of production etc are.

(d) IDEOLOGICAL or cultural power is the ability to get others to internalize, or at least accept, a usually inter-related set of values, beliefs and norms (informal social codes of behaviour, but also the rules of any institution governing behaviour), i.e. a more or less coherent ideology. Ideologies, or dominant cultures, exist in specialized social spaces of all kinds, but activists tend understandably to focus on those ideologies that expand their reach to dominate whole populations in entire societies.

Ideological Power is Mostly Exercized By Institutions That Produce and Disseminate Values, Beliefs and Norms for Behaviour. But Ideology is Also Typically Instituted in People on a More Intimate and Personal Level.

Ideological power depends for its efficacy on the ownership and control of key institutions of socialization that get people to think and feel and act in certain ways in line with the ideology. This would include families, churches, schools, media, workplace training and instructions, all the activities involved in learning to practice a profession or craft etc. This very partial list indicates that the exercize of ideological power can be more diffuse and decentralized than the other forms of power, but that is by no means always the case. It is perhaps more accurate to say that ideological power is often exercized more intimately, on a micro level (see Foucault on biopolitics and governmentality). There is often some macro level exercize of power behind it. Those with economic or political or military power often want certain ideology elements to be widely promoted and policed.

THE LIMITS OF WHAT IS BEING PROPOSED HERE

I said that if a coalition of the left agreed to a Gramscian campaign guided by a set of social change goals, that it has the major advantage of raising the question of power as a top priority in any left-led mobilization. This somewhat overstates the case. The proposal for a Gramscian campaign launched Billy Graham style only really raises the question of one of the four main types (sources) of power directly, ideological power. For Gramsci, a counter hegemony struggle necessarily raised the question of the other three also, but that was because he was proposing that the campaign be led by a Leninist vanguard party, whose very reason for being is to deal with all four. That is not what is being proposed here.

A Gramscian Struggle is Waged ‘Within Institutions’, Namely in All Those Mainstream Social Spaces Where the Vast Majority of People Live and Work and Play. That’s Where We Need To Be.

Gramsci was an orthodox Leninist. His idea was to wage a cultural struggle (a) within the institutions of the existing society (that was Fascist and capitalist and imperialist in his case); and (b) to do so in periods where there is not yet a ‘revolutionary situation’ where a popular uprising could overthrow the regime. He presumed that such a struggle would be led by a disciplined (illegal and revolutionary) party that could win mass support and recognition as the leading force in the struggle of a potentially revolutionary social group, the working class. He agreed with Lenin that even industrial workers would only rise to the level of ‘trade union consciousness’ (i.e. fighting back consciousness) spontaneously.

And most people who had to be mobilized so that the revolution was championing the majority of the population were in other social classes and groups with more apparent vested interest in a private ownership society. In his case most people were peasants or small ownership class (and white collar workers were not yet largely proletarianized like today). So the counter-hegemony struggle had to be waged both among workers and non-workers where they lived and worked (hence within institutions), if an effective alliance of pro-revolution forces was to be constructed over time in organized ways.

My proposal is very different. I am suggesting that the left-wing of today’s left-leaning movements can recognize that, if we unite on a clear statement of our long term goals at something like the specificity level of the Ten Point Programme that I have proposed, it would benefit the entire left to do a Billy Graham style ‘crusade’ to win as many movements and organizations as possible to do AEO work. They would do so based on their own interpretations (of Problems and Solutions) and applications (of Strategies and Tactics) of the shared goals.

This does not in itself solve any of the issues of Analysis or Programmatic Demands or Strategy or Tactics. But it would put us in a position to have all of us starting to work on solving them in the course of our organizing, and doing so with a shared message about what binds us together as an overall Left -- our vision for an Alternative Society on the level of a clear statement of guiding principles.