Learning from our (collective) mistakes in activism

Thanks! I totally agree. I think it's important to keep in mind the bigger picture and not get bogged down by sparkly but relatively small and sometimes not so vital stuff.

Welcome to babble docalf

I agree Freedom 55. 

While acute incidents and war criminals need to be dealt with, it is important (while devoting time to that) to remember to feed the dog and the kids, recycle, write those letters that were in your to do file, and  read the news to keep abreast of what else is happening.

Oh... and don't guilt trip yourself if you don't happen to get everything done.

What the fuck is "visionary organizing"?

Clearly you know more about it than me, M. Spector. I'd say bullshit flies are attracted to bullshit, and fruitflies are attracted to honey.

But regarding the actual point, I think it is always better to build rather than destroy, and I think there are plenty of struggles in which people think they have to engage and defeat an enemy, when in fact they can just go around them or even (Oh No!).. work with them.

What did that fellow say? 

Love is better than anger

Hope is better than fewr

Optimism is better than despair.

What do you think? Seems like bullshit to you? 

To answer the original question posed in this thread, I'd say the one mistake in activism that I would like to avoid making again is getting into arguments in meetings over things that don't really matter, but that can hurt friendships between activists and damage group dynamics.

I'm not suggesting that we reduce everything to lowest common denominator politics or that we never air legitimate differences, just that we not get into petty arguments over things that have no relevance to the actual class struggle. For example, getting into an argument over whether a group with an active membership of 10 people needs a 3 person coordinating committee.

I'm in agreement with M. Spector that it's important to protest when notorious war criminals come to give a speech, or when Canada launches a new military attack on another country, or to use a verry current example, when the government engages in electoral fraud.

At the same time, it's important to continue the work of getting politically organized; of analyzing the political situation to determine which causes, events and actions warrant our time and effort; and of putting forward an alternate political and economic vision. Often though, the more routine work of activists becomes in-services for the left, detatched from the actual class struggles going on around us.

Seems to be code for abandoning the actual class struggle in favour of in-services for the converted. The reality in this country is that due to the level of political organization of the working class, the class struggle generally takes place on terrain decided by the ruling class. When the ruling class engages in class war, the working class needs to take on the ruling class and defeat their attacks. To not fight back against the attacks by the ruling class is to abandon the class struggle, which was Lenin's definition of sectarianism.

Lenin defined sectarianism as withdrawal from struggle, by which he of course meant the class struggle, and I tend to agree with him. Class struggle is of course the expression of class conflict from a socialist perspective. This means that in order to engage in class struggle, workers have to actively come in conflict with other social classes, namely the bourgeoisie or ruling class. If we don't do that, then we have withdrawn from the class struggle into sectarianism. All of which means that it makes sense for workers to engage in activism that actually forces the ruling class to respond to what we're doing; as opposed to in-services for the left which go completely unnoticed by the ruling class. Unless of course said in-services for the left generate concrete actions which force the ruling class to take notice and respond.

I think that's it. It's about finding ways to organize within your communities that build solidarity and class consciousness while also having a tangible impact on people's day-to-day lives.

I think this podcast gives some insight into what Grace Lee Boggs is getting at:

Becoming Detroit

http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/being/programs/2012/01/18/201201...

Likewise, the podcast Freedom 55 posted should clear up what Boggs meant by the term, as well as how she actually put it into practice . Hardly inservice, IMO.

Although how that is turned into an insult I don't know. People working for change are just supposed to follow orders and not educate themselves in order to understand WHY? 

Sorry... not part of my revolution.

I still support strike actions or actions like picketing based on the logic that any time workers collaborate there's probably good reason for it. There are also good reasons for nationalization, like the notion that some assets are sustainable when publicly owned, though I think the Argentinians have it right, and when a company picks up and leaves, take their shit and create a worker coop - occupy it, literally. Utilities could be nationalized, a national oil utility so the resource can be managed by the people who own it. Perhaps we can agree today's conflicts require very creative thinking on the part of activists. 'Visionary organizing' sounds like reframing reality for people.

Corporations can twist a strike action into something that is said to affect the public and the strikers can be blamed, but that only works with an ignorant public. Perhaps todays activist has to also be an educator, just like activists of the past. I'm sure the previous generations of capitalists also misrepresented - to counter feudalism in Canada activists in the 1800s went out and talked to their neighbors - real grassroots stuff - just teaching people how they were being abused - no internet. So in a sense this is part of a long lineage. Some of the  settlers here were activists and didn't know it, they were just fighting to eat and stay out of jail for debt or some other harassment by the laird.

The person who talks to his or her neighbor knows how they're doing. I'm preaching to the converted. Just don't give up the fight even when it appears discouraging - people do admire the courage and principles of the occupy activists, for example, and despite the MSM coverage (poor) people know they were up against some pretty powerful foes.

Funny how proposals for positive social change are "easily reversed", but it seems that right-wing neo-liberal changes - like privatizations, NAFTA, and the GST - are somehow impossible to reverse once a different government is elected with an opposing ideology.

No that's what I'm saying, eh. Renationalisations are easy just renationalise. Ask Vlad Putin how easy it is to borrow billions from Chinese state banks in renationalising Yukos Oil, some natural gas companies, and vodka production. 

So why can't the NDP just go swing a deal with China's state-owned banks, you ask? Good question, and I won't return to it soon.

But seriously, there is an easier and more subtle way to strangle the bastards into submission without adding to the massive national debt hole they dropped us into accidentally on purpose. Think about it. Think about this game of wack a mole with nationalisations followed by conservative-Liberal governments pawning things off to the four stock market winds for a split second and get back to us after you've figured it out for yourself.

Privatizations are easily remedied. I am not worried about privatizations. Private corporations can be taxed as per free market mechanisms available to every country except for Canada and maybe Mexico somewhat. Although I am not sure what they agreed to under NAFTA, but they prolly weren't half as out to lunch as Chretien and Manley and dozens and dozens of Ottawa lawyers were in 1993-94. But before we can fix that situation, we will need to renegotiate or reneg on NAFTA a few times ourselves. Could take two to five years for the Yanquis to see things our way, though. So we need a plan for the first four years in order to get re-elected at least once in a row. And you aren't offering anything other than the same old same-old, which I think is a sure recipe to get us thrown out of power by the start of term numero deux.

As I was saying about old guard solutions which are no solutions now under neoliberalism, they were great fun back in the old days.

It's the deregulation and lax rules for foreign investment that want reversing. Then you can actually begin to do something to stop the neoliberalized sea water rushing in that's holding your submarine on the bottom. Nationalisations in good time but first you need to be able to pay for it and not appear to be just another fiscal Frankenstein on a par with the Liberals and Tories same old stories. They can get away with their fiscal idiocy because they have the "fourth estate" backing them up. We socialists, on the other hand, will actually need to deliver some results lasting more than a neoliberal business cycle of two to three year's worth of boom-bust. Three decades three recessions later and we need to come up with a real plan to counter the neoliberal counter-Enlightenment. And it has to be hardened in the test lab of the actual world not fantasyland.

I dunno about you but I want my socialist revolution to last more than one lousy term in federal power.

I dunno about you but I want my socialist revolucion! to have both political and populist cred and be referred to around the world by other socialist revolutionaries as a model for success against Maggie's and Milton's "TINA."

Marx was bang on the mark when he said that finance capital and banksters should never be allowed to overthrow industrial capitalism. He just didn't think they would be so colossally stupid as to let it happen. They were, and they have, though. New plan of attack needed, get it? And don't be thumping Das Kapital or the manifesto and quoting word for word as if you've been taken over by the holy spirit of Karl. They were guidelines more than literal instructions to be followed point by point two millenia later or however long it's been. i'm sorry but you're going to need to get behind the largest opposition party ever elected to oppose phony majority government in Ottawa,  because advocating for the non-existent anti-NDP party has gotten you nowhere real fast, comrade M. Go for it I'm listening.

And what's more, Marx said the mode of capitalist production was unstoppable. He said that capitalist industrialism should spread around the world. But not to worry, because some day all of it would be owned by the workers. 

But we don't have those same relationships between workers and the owners of the means today. The owners have offshored jobs and even the means of. It's why former ElectroMotive workers in London Ontario should be protesting on Parliament Hill not an imaginary picket line in the righttowork state of Indiana where their jobs and means of were taken with rubberstamp approval by our corrupt stooges in Ottawa.

Capitalists are incapable of viewing money as a means of exchanging the commodities they produce for the commodities they require. Capitalists view money as just another commodity and believe that money can make money. But we socialists know that isn't really true, because wealth is created by the sweat, blood and tears of the workers. Without workers, capitalists and their efforts to "create wealth" are kaput.

Marx said that money is invested by capitalists to produce commodities to be sold at a profit (M-C-M). But this is no longer true as of about 1987 or so. Today the formula for production of capitalist wealth is M-C-M or money begets money(M-M), which is a great fiction as Marx would tell us today. Finance capitalists have overthrown industrial capitalism, and now ElectroMotive workers in London have no one to picket against in the struggle. There is no longer a geographical-physical factory location inside their country which can be taken control of by the workers as Marx and Lenin said they should do.

You can't nationalise jobs and technological innovation created by Canadian workers that have since been taken from you and exported to another country. At least, not without sending troops to occupy some Caterpillar plant location in the heavily-armed righttowork state of Indiana. I just don't think its on.

But we can counter the privatisations without bankrupting the country in a never ending game of wack-a-mole nationalisations followed by crooked selloffs to friends of the party. Why? What's stopping us from simply nationalising the profits, and let capitalists have their feel good about owning some bricks and mortar and decaying equipment devaluing year after year? 

What manufacturing? 

Okay jokes aside, we can still play the game. Canada exports massive amounts of energy in various forms to the U.S. to feed industry and industrial and other expansions there. Energy is the backbone of all economies no matter the socio-economic setup. It's difficult for our largest trade partner to replace Canada as a source of energy. But we need a strong central government in Ottawa in order to bargain with the U.S. and using trade mechanisms available to every democratic country.  

Corporate tax rates can also be raised across the board without pitting smaller provincial economies against larger ones. But we would need a strong central government not the weak and ineffective ones in Ottawa Canadians are acccustomed to.

Chavez didn't nationalise banks during his first term in power nor did he campaign on it. And he did put various constitutional changes to a referendum. And besides, our central bank is already nationalised - it's just not being used to create much money or credit.

But Canada is not Venezuela. Venezuela is still a mostly poor and developing country after years of corruption and U.S. oil companies draining the national wealth.

In the end our friends in the old guard are angry because the NDP are not promising to go caps in hand to private bankers to borrow high finance capital to pay for nationalisations, which are not really necessary in the near term. The old socialist CCFers would never have borrowed money at high interest to pay for nationalisations. And not immediately after taking control of a province in the hole. And current federal debt is no small matter. The two old line parties have thrown us into a deep financial hole since 1975. These anti-NDP leftists never mention the debt or how they would finance nationalisations, or the fact that would have to borrow from capitalist bankers to achieve what they apparently think the NDP should promise to do during a first term in power. 

I'm just saying we can do things inside the first four year term in federal government which are not so radical and still leave voters with the impression that the NDP deserves a second term and a third term. We can begin by raising overall federal tax revenues as a percentage of GDP to just the OECD average. Not the communist Nordic country average or even the socialist EU-15 average just the OECD average. We don't need to start a cold war in this the last bastion of political conservtism in the world in North America. This would represent another $35 billion or so in federal revenues to begin with. The NDP could really make this money work for them and the rest of the country. 

 We have to realize the real object of the game and not to be taken by surprise as Bob Rae's ONDP government was by David  Petersen's snap election call for short term political gain in 1990. We need to realise that the corrupt stooges before us have bankrupted the country similarly and allowed foreign multinationals a free hand in Canada for too long. There have been more than 14,000 foreign takeovers of Canadian corporations and valuable crown assets since just 1985. 30 key sectors of our economy are majority foreign-owned and controlled and mostly by rich Americans. And they were had at firesale prices before assets and share values were inflated on stock markets. Ottawa is already in the hole to the tune of more than half a trillion dollars.

We could transform Canada into a net creditor nation, like Norway with its soverign oil fund. We could have free university education, nationalised daycare and well funded socialized medicine for all Canadians, like Norway has today. I think that would be doable in the nearer term than playing wack-a-mole nationalisations with the two old line parties and their rich friends. What the old guard want to do is spend billions and billions on nationalisations right away and to look terrible on paper by the next election in order for some large percentage of voters to reject us. And I think it is the wrong approach doomed to failure not because it would not work out in the long run but because we would necessarily have to consider the electorate and democracy in general. Old style socialists would be in power today if they had a modern plan of attack appealing to some large minority of eligible voters doing the choosing in this country. Bless them to bits because their intentions are certainly well meaning.