conversation with an anarchist

discussion with jason adams @ Immanant Multiplicity

read a copy below
or read pinky's cut-up with commentary

Who Are the Poisonous Weeds of 'Democratic Dictatorship'?
The gang over at Every Day I Wake Up on the Wrong Side of Capitalism have brought up an interesting discussion about presidential elections and Chris Lighfoot's connection to the antiparliamentary perspective of 'ultraleftism' through his recognition that every party that could possibly be elected seemed hell-bent on eroding civil liberties as dramatically as possible:

While I completely agree that to claim there are no differences between the parties are false, it’s still true that arguments of the form, “you must vote x to keep out y,” are always illegitimate. They collapse political activity to ‘realist’ opinion, and so effectively always amount to a capitulation to the ‘y’. This is true even for the worst values of y; voting Labour to keep out the BNP is a capitulation to fascism, because it does nothing to address what makes the BNP popular in the first place; the logical strategy, in such a case, would be for Labour to move as close to the BNP as it can get away with (triangulation). This isn’t to say campaigning for the lesser evil is wrong, but it can only be justified in the context of a wider political campaign – calling for an ‘anyone but BNP’ vote may well be the correct thing to do as an element of more general anti-fascist politics, as there was a case to be made for Anyone But Bush as an anti-war tactic. What’s important, though, is that support for the lesser evil be an element of a campaign that, in the end, challenges the lesser evil as as much as the greater.

Sailors at Krondstadt rebelled against Lenin's nationalization of the previously decentralized and democratic soviets.

The question for me here, as is apparently similarly at issue in the UK right now, is how can one engage the 'Anyone But Bush' tactic, which I succumbed to last election, without ultimately validating the authority of the so-called 'lesser evil' in the process as suggested - I mean honestly, I am not so sure that Kerry was all that much of a 'lesser evil' in any case, and while I wouldn't deny that Nader is, as we learned in 2000, he has almost zero chance of ever being elected in this country, so really I have to ask, why bother at all? To explore this question more carefully, I found myself returning to early 20th century radical political history, particularly since my studying Badiou and Zizek this year, two thinkers I appreciate very much, has also meant going back through some of the writings of Mao and Lenin, two thinkers I have most certainly never appreciated. What I discovered there was that the ultraleftists of their time, like the Kronstadt Sailors, Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Radek and anarchists in general, are all dismissed in pretty much the same way as their contemporary equivalents are by liberals in the United States today - they are quite simply outside the realm of thinkable thought. Mao for instance, defending the New Democracy in his Question of the Intellectuals, insists that against demands for more participation in decision-making processes, "we must help our young people understand that ours is still a very poor country, that we cannot change this situation radically in a short time", while in the liberal-pluralist sounding Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend, he argues further (even while supposedly being 'anti-dogmatic') that while "we are against poisonous weeds of any kind..we must carefully distinguish between what is really a poisonous weed and what is really a fragrant flower". The criterion that he provides for such a distinction (the objectively correct 'fragrant flowers' are those that unite the population, support the existing structures, encourage political centralization, strengthen the Party apparatus, etc., while the falsely Rightist or Leftist 'poisonous weeds' do not), echoes precisely the totalizing mindset that has always underpinned state power, even that of our own electoral system, in which a supposedly 'free market' of political ideas contend, which is why Mao's self-descriptive terminology of 'democratic dictatorship' throughout his writings sounds like such an incredibly appropriate label not only for Maoist China and Leninist/Stalinist Russia but also the United States, particularly as it has emerged since 2000.

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flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-12 16:06 (link)
do you believe that there is any such thing as a weed?

sam
http://www.kapshow.com/newcities
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-12 21:10 (link)
Certainly not in the way that Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, fascists or liberals would use the term - I am particularly interested in how 'radical pluralism' might be possible - the original soviets in Russia before their massification/Leninization are a good example of what excites me conceptually.
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-13 02:49 (link)
but if you agree there is possibly something which must be suppressed -- weeds stealing nutrients from crops -- then:

a) does anyone have the right to play weeder?

and

b) if someone does, does "Leninization" have any meaning as a moral comment?

sam
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-13 03:16 (link)
Well look at Mao's words above - the 'weeds' in his formulation were basically whatever disrupted the bureaucratic rationality of state centralization - that would include not only capitalists, the bourgeoisie, etc., but also the so-called 'infantile Leftists' such as those suppressed by Lenin at Krondstadt - as for whether this has meaning or not, how do you think the insurgent sailors massacred there would respond?
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-13 03:21 (link)
Here are two very clear quotes that apologists for Lenin/Mao/Stalin never seem to quite get, for what reason I have no idea:

"this dictatorship [of the proletariat] itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society"

- Marx

"As soon as there is no longer any class of society to be held in subjection; as soon as, along with class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the former anarchy of production, the collisions and excesses arising from these have also been abolished, there is nothing more to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary".

- Engels
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-13 08:10 (link)
before we leap into "resolved issues" -- this or that evaluation of the Krondstat as a political litmus test -- why don't we have a discussion?

let me ask as clearly as I can: do you believe that political suppression is ever justified?

because if you acknowledge some "ideal case" of suppressing capitalist retaliation to revolutionary government -- hell, if you believe in the concept of revolution itself -- there are thorny issues that need to be resolved.
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-14 07:40 (link)
The 'suppression' of the power of capital, state and other dominations by way of radical, decentralized, pluralistic, participatory democracy is justified - this is a politics that Agamben has called 'means without end' and Vaneigem has called 'revolution of everyday life', to me its a politics of what Camus would call 'rebellion' or Stirner would call 'insurrection' contra what Sartre, Lenin, Mao and other Marxists would call 'revolution'.
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-15 21:15 (link)
How differentiate that position from liberal pluralism, with its constant promises to unseat dominations through participatory democracy?
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-15 23:00 (link)
well for starters liberalism is based in possessive individualism and the private ownership of the means of production - thats a pretty major difference in and of itself, no?
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-20 07:59 (link)
does your pluralistic, decentered democracy need to defend itself as it struggles against private ownership?

if it does, what does it have to fall back on other than possesive individualism?

because it seems to me that a strong defense is neccessary, and either we mount a vigorous collective defense, or we are left with no better defense than to appeal to the liberal values of the bourgeois state. (for example, the "first amendment" protests repeatedly initiated by the I.W.W.)

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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-20 08:02 (link)
Well I think it has the solidarity of everyone who doesn't want to become wageslaves again who can all refuse to work for any private employer who would have nothing to offer them anyway since the majority of the economy would be run by decentralized, directly democratic councils.
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-22 20:11 (link)
but surely this can only be possible long after the real struggle is over? I mean, you could say this about feudalism ("who would volunteer to be a serf?"), but only now, when even the protracted, bloody struggles are all but forgotten.

looking forward into the dark heart of the struggle yet to come, though, this voluntarist attitude doesn't seem sufficient.
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-22 20:22 (link)
Well we obviously have quite different views on how social change would occur - I am not interested in 'bloody revolution', which would only reinstate a new state - I want something more worthwhile.
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
(Anonymous)
2005-04-23 19:48 (link)
how do you imagine a bloodless change in property relations happening, then, when capitalists have shown a total commitment to drown any threat to their dominion in a sea of blood?

do you believe it will come about by martyring ourselves and our forces, or do you hope to de-throne capital with the power of your ideas?
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Re: flowers vs. weeds
jasonadams
2005-04-23 20:59 (link)
i think there are many possibilities, consider seattle 1919 or paris may 1968 for instance - i am not so naive to think there would be no violence at all in the collectivization of the means of production - but i also think that quite a bit can be accomplished by refusing the idea of an 'end' and building a 'revolution of everyday life' - while i am not a pacifist i do think that non-violence should be emphasized in any strategy worth considering.