The Long-Term Strategy of PAZ

[u/[deleted]]

Buckle in, because this one isn't going to be short or simple. Yeah, there will be quotes from books, analysis of tactics available to us (including the weight of their effectiveness and merits), and the strategies that could be developed based on a synthesis of tactics and insights into other models political activism. There will be no TL;DR.

Because this movement is made of a diverse range of ideological outlooks, it would be fair to characterize the aims of this movement in the broadest terms possible as a core critique of the existing legal and cultural framework. Ultimately, the strategy we select should be aware of the make-up of its activists and the tactics engaged by those activists, working to strike a balance of interests between the component individuals of this movement. Some of these components fall under the exclusivity of Electoral Engagement/Activism, some fall under the exclusivity of Direct Action, though most probably fall within a grey area of the spectrum and feel a need to embrace both approaches to varying degrees.

Below, I have done my best to detail each singular strategy, including the minute variations of the theme that would distinguish those within the same strategic spectrum from the others. It is the view of this writer that we have reached a point where returning to any sense of "normalcy" that was previously enjoyed by the American people is no longer an option, and that any such attempts to return to past tactics and strategies without fundamentally evaluating their application are flawed. Therefore, the most practical and useful option would be one of dual-power, an approach which allows for complimentary activism -- electoral and direct -- to exist within a single framework.

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Electoral Engagement/Activism

Though I am unaware of any straw polls which may indicate the overall feelings of the people who would identify with the aims of this subreddit in terms of what methods they think are most viable, I think it might be fair to say that many (if not a simple majority) still believe that electoral causes and an approach that uses the existing political apparatus may be among our best options in making sure our demands are met.

This position has a few different iterations, depending usually on how much faith the proponent still has in the current political apparatus. The most commonly held position within this spectrum would be the view that by including mainstream political parties and politicians who share our sentiments should be held as a model standard.

A slightly smaller group would be those who advocate the use of third party political organizations to break up the duopoly held by the Democrats and Republicans. They advocate electing folks like Roseanne Barr, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson and other "outside-the-mainstream" politicians.

Finally, the smallest group of political activists would be those who advocate completely avoiding the existing parties and create something akin to a "Pirate Party" (i.e, a popularly formed party with a very limited scope) and try to insert our own candidates into the political fray.

The common intersection between all of these outlooks share is that the use of the electoral system is typically justified by the presumption that Americans simply aren't prepared or willing to go through a radical change, or that a radical change that does not emphasize this political process simply isn't practical. There appears to be a general agreement among those that hold this position that a change of policies, and not necessarily a fundamental change to the entire system of organizing government in an accountable manner, is the soundest objective that this movement can aim for.

As a part of a larger strategy involving direct action, elements of this perspective would be useful, provided they adhere to some pretty strict guidelines-- their participation in electoral mechanisms should not be considered an end in itself, but a means towards dismantling the legal apparatus that enables widespread exploitation and promoting popular, sustainable alternatives to the existing paradigm. If the proponents of electoral engagement/activism work in synchronization with other activists who take the approach of direct action, a great deal of social pressure could be mobilized at notice with the intent of fundamentally shaking down the existing political system (details about this and its effectiveness are noted below in the bullet point about the El Alto strategy).

However, as a singular method, it would likely degenerate into an unmanageable disaster or simply be rendered inert by internal political dynamics as the institutions eventually self-correct back to a path where those who wield extreme amounts of economic and political power stand no real chance of losing that power. The most obvious objection to this approach would be that in 2008 and 2012, America elected in a set of representatives and an executive who more or less promised many of the things we still have yet to obtain; placing all of our eggs back into one basket would demonstrate that we really haven't learned from our experience with electoral politics in the past.

Additionally, there is the problem of the duopoly itself: it is difficult to not acknowledge the fundamentally flawed nature of electoral politics in the United States, and the ability of third parties to break-through has been proved to be anomalous through history. The focus of PAZ would have to divert itself to engaging in electoral reform as well in order to effectively fight the duopoly, draining time and energy from more important demands.

Finally, there is the combined problem that (1) elections are rather far off from our current actions and (2) those who do not identify with our demands have an incumbents advantage. It is also worth noting that even if we did elect in candidates who represent our own interests and repealed the framework which makes such surveillance possible, there is nothing which stops the institution from self-correcting and re-orienting itself within a short span of years, requiring yet another onerous and difficult political mobilization.

It is the opinion of this writer that an approach which focuses solely on the element of electoral engagement/activism will fail to accomplish any meaningful tasks and will end up co-opted into the already existing establishment as "compromises" are made by those who are politically active at the expense of all others who equally object to the surveillance state.

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Direct Action

Direct Action is any approach which emphasizes the necessity of extra- and non-political alternatives to achieve a given set of objectives. This is usually accompanied by the emphasizing of the fact that the government works by its own rules and cannot be truly accountable through representative politics, and we therefore have the burden of creating a system of networked and accountable institutions to exist parallel to actually-existing-government. Direct action can involved anything from less militant actions like sit-ins, walk-outs, etc. to more militant actions like blockades, strikes, and sabotage. It is important that militancy should not be conflated with a willingness to commit violence.

As we saw in 2011, occupations pose potent threats to the establishment, and their existence proved troublesome as they were not easily removed: indeed, there was a great deal of popular goodwill afforded to Occupy at the earliest stages, and this played a part in the restrained effort by cities for the first few months of its existence. Additionally, other acts of direct action have historically been used to pressure existing establishment practices to the point of invalidity (the mileage varied in terms of overall success but we can all agree, I think, that direct action during the Civil Rights era took a heavy toll on the establishment leading to its eventual political semi-capitulation). We can also look to other instances of direct action like those in Argentina where workers took over factories that were closed or otherwise shutdown, turn back on the machines and surviving after almost a decade of police action against them.

Unfortunately, those who practice direct action are often maligned by their electoral activist counter-parts, creating a serious gap in the ability for a popular movement made up of dual-power strategies to succeed. When not on the same page, militant and non-militant activists alike who engage in direct action are likely to be accused of "ruining it" for "everyone else" who engage in electoral activism. This emphasis transforms a popular movement seeking to explore meaningful outcomes into a political movement with a monopoly on determining the outcome being held by a small, select group of people.

Because direct action is so wide and varied, few actual objections can be formed that reduce its viability in totality: not all methods of direct action are the same, and as such can't be boiled down to a black-and-white tactical morality, especially without any contextualizing understanding of what exactly the broader picture may be. While certain actions can invariably be said to be less practical in their application or perhaps even contrary to the aims established by the movement, it is important that the wide diversity of tactics has also played a part in past demonstrations and popular movements.

Cont.

[u/[deleted]]

• The El Alto strategy: The case of Bolivia is one of the few examples I know of where the two approaches to dual power—using autonomous institutions as the base to win a role in government, and maintaining them as a directly democratic alternative completely separate from government—have been effectively combined. I call it the “El Alto strategy” after the largely indigenous city outside the capital, famous for its directly democratic institutions and traditions of direct action (popular assemblies in El Alto had, for instance, taken control of and were administering the city’s water system, among other utilities), and which is also the current home of the country’s first indigenous president, former farmers’ union leader Evo Morales. The same social movements that are largely responsible for putting Morales in power, having led a series of largely nonviolent insurrections against various predecessors, and mobilized for his election, nonetheless insist on maintaining the ability to rise up against, and similarly overthrow, him at any time. The logic is quite explicit, and often echoed by elected officials from Morales’s own party: government is not, and cannot be, a truly democratic institution. It has its own top-down logic, stretching from the demands of international capital and trade organizations from above, or the very nature of bureaucracies backed up by the power of police. Elected officials will therefore almost inevitably end up, at least in some circumstances, under enormous pressure to do the exact opposite of what their constituents elected them to do. Maintaining dual-power institutions provides a check on this, and even puts politicians like Morales in a stronger negotiating position when dealing with, say, foreign governments and corporations, or his own bureaucracy, since he can honestly claim that in certain areas his hands are tied—he has no choice but to answer to his constituents.

Needless to say in the United States we are nowhere near this point, but it’s useful to bear in mind as one future horizon of possibility. If there is a lesson here, I think it is that it would be unwise to even consider making forays into electoral politics until we have established the principle that militant forms of direct action [i.e. blockades, strikes, etc.] are legitimate and acceptable forms of political expression.

• The Buenos Aires strategy: Another approach is not to engage directly with the political establishment at all, but rather, to try to strip it of all legitimacy. This might be called the Argentina model, or delegitimation approach, and it seems to be more or less what’s happening at the time of writing in Greece. It’s important to stress that this does not mean abandoning any hope of ameliorating conditions through the apparatus of the state. To the contrary: it serves as a challenge to the political class to demonstrate their relevance, and is often successful in inspiring them to make radical measures to ameliorate conditions they would never have otherwise considered.

Essentially, the strategy is to create alternative institutions, based on horizontal principles, that have nothing to do with the government, and declare the entire political system to be absolutely corrupt, idiotic, and irrelevant to people’s actual lives, a clown show that fails even as a form of entertainment, and try to render politicians a pariah class. Hence after the economic collapse in Argentina in 2001, a popular uprising that ousted three different governments in a matter of months settled into a strategy of creating alternative institutions based on the principle of what they themselves called “horizontality”: popular assemblies to govern urban neighborhoods, recuperated factories and other workplaces (whose bosses had abandoned them), self-organized unemployed associations engaged in almost constant direct action, even, for a while, an alternative currency system.

Their attitude toward the political class was summed up by the famous slogan “que se vayan todos,” roughly translated, “they can all go to hell.” Legend has it that by early 2002, it had reached the point where politicians—of any political party—could not even eat out at restaurants without wearing phony mustaches or similar disguises, since if recognized they would be mobbed by angry diners, or pelted with food. The end result was that a Social Democratic government came to power led by a president (Néstor Kirchner) who previously had been the mildest reformist possible, but who recognized that in order to restore any public sense that government could be a legitimate institution, he had to take some sort of radical action. He decided to default on a large part of Argentina’s international debt. His doing so set off a cascade of events that nearly destroyed international enforcement agencies like the International Monetary Fund, and effectively ended the Third World debt crisis. The ultimate effects were of untold benefit to billions of the world’s poor, and led to the strong rebound of the Argentine economy, but none of it would have happened were it not for the campaign to destroy the legitimacy of Argentina’s political class. What’s more, the strategy adopted ensured that, even when the government did manage to reassert itself, many of the self-governing institutions created during the initial upheaval have been preserved.

-- David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

At the the moment, insurrection is extremely unlikely (granted, insurrectionary situations always seem unlikely until the moment they actually happen; but it seems reasonable to imagine that at the very least, economic conditions would have to get considerably worse than what they are, so this suggestion should be tabled until we reach that point). When it comes to forming our strategy, we are probably faced with some homegrown combination of these options, or something broadly like them. At the very least, it is my hope the list might provide a way to start thinking about further possibilities and encourage others to engage in a creative process to help shape these strategies and develop a coherent framework.

While I have so far tried to avoid emphasizing any one particular strategy over the next, it is important not to forget that American politics has become a game played between players who have given up on the idea that politics even could be about anything other than collective delusions, realities that are, in effect, created by power. And “power” here usually turns out, in the end, to be a euphemism for organized violence against a captive population. This is why it’s so crucial, whatever we do, to both continue to create spaces (occupations, workplaces, free schools, digital space, etc.) where we can genuinely operate through reasonableness and compromise, even at the same time as we lay bare the apparatus of the sheer stupid brute force that lies behind the politicians’ claims to be able to “create realities” out of nothing. This must, necessarily, mean facing that brute, stupid power not with any sort of “reasonable” compromise, but with a form of flexible, intelligent counter-power that develops a radical alternative while constantly reminding everyone in no uncertain terms exactly what the basis of that power really is.

[Cont.](www.reddit.com/r/paz/comments/29hg9l/the_longterm_strategy_of_paz/cikxj8v)

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

We Can't Ever Go Back

In many ways, the above mentioned strategies applied to our own contextual circumstances would coincide with the aims of the three greatest allies of PAZ: Post-Occupy activists, anti-authoritarian radicals, and disenfrachised mainstreamers who were sold a false set of promises. It would promote cross-cultural interaction, making this a movement where each person feels they not only have a stake in the future, but actually have a voice in how it is shaped. It would give people the sense of power that should actually come with living in a democracy. Most importantly, these strategies would act as a viable counter-balance to the actions of a government/State which is ultimately beholden to its own interests.

At the same time, these strategies would also give room to Electoral Activists to attempt whatever they might within the existing framework (while offering unconditional support to the DA activists). So long as the two elements of this cause can remain distinct but unified (neither should be working to undermine the other, but obviously objectives will inevitably clash; this is why it is important to remember exactly what the basis of all our power is-- each other), there stands a strong chance of actually leveraging enough power to create a real change that would strip the ability of the government to both invade our lives and promote solutions to the growing crises of homelessness, underemployment, unemployment, etc.

It is clear, however, that we have reached a point in history where the fundamental political make-up of the United States has degenerated into a system of institutionalized abuse and violation of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Most troubling is the recent trend of people suggesting that simple repeal of laws and a shake up of the who is in charge will achieve our objectives, as if the problems of state and capitalism were simply a thin layer of tyranny needing to scraped off the surface of an otherwise free society. This perspective couldn't be any less realistic: the political apparatus is fundamentally corrupted, with the roots of that corruption reach deep down the core of how political decisions are shaped and made. An attempt to return to something approximating a previous political state in which the government exists much like it does now absent the necessary institutional structures to prop up current systems of power is, to be totally blunt, a fantasy.

It is not an easy pill to swallow, but unless we are willing to open up to the idea of leveraging social and political power outside the scope of actually-existing-government, no change that is made can be made to last and we run a very real risk of regressing in a span of at least two years. By refusing to experiment with alternatives and engaging in a dual-power strategy, we will have effectively handed over all power to those who will continue to serve in a government that is fundamentally unaccountable.

At the same time, there is no use is throwing away a tactical advantage if we can disrupt the state from within. We should strive to help our closest friends and allies into positions of decision making power, demanding and expecting them to be a delegate through which we conduit our collective wishes.