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Preparing to rule Greece: Seeing & seizing extreme crisis

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We have eyes, but can we see?

“What happens when ordinary people push their way down that road of peaceful, structural change in a determined (even desperate) way and run into grim, immovable obstacles?

“And what does it take to force those obstacles out of the way? And what does it take for a determined people to grasp those means?

“If the framework of the old state (parliament,  spectrum of respectable parties, current Army, Golden Dawn police) prove to be those obstacles — then what changes do we all make (conceptually) in the strategies we pursue, and even in the vision of that radical society we are demanding/creating?”

Kasama is participating in a team of revolutionary journalists leaving for Greece. Please help this happen by donating funds.

Often an observer can see and not understand. Sometimes an observer can understand but not describe. Other times a reporter can describe, but the words are not shared. Here are some of my own thoughts as I try to understand developments and possibilities and competing programs in Greece.

by Mike Ely

  • How do we understand events in Greece?
  • What does revolution look like now?
  • How do people prepare and accelerate movements for radical change?
  • What is the difference between “ordinary times” and revolutionary moments?
  • What forges and trains a popular movement of self-emancipators?

Let me start here: I don’t believe in peaceful transitions to radical liberated societies. I just don’t think they happen. And yet i think those transitions that will happen — in our common future — will look different from anything we have seen (or expected).

I know large numbers of people hope for easy solutions — satisfying reforms, peaceful transition to new more just arrangements, liberation as concession (that doesn’t necessarily eject a whole political apparatus and norms from power). Who can blame them?  But the reality is that oppression is entrenched and tenacious. It bribes, corrupts and organized its defenders. It has build powerful apparatus of lies and extreme violence. It has internal allies and international benefactors.

And so, you don’t uproot oppression except with great force, determination and consciousness. No one stumbles into significant change (let alone lasting liberation) easily.

Greece today

Still, all serious people have a  belly-sense of the horror and cost of major dislocation (urban conflict, even civil war, national isolation, armed collision within countries, uprooting of police, collapse of prisons etc.)

I think large numbers of people want to “give it a try” (meaning both give radical new societies a try, but also give attempts at peaceful transition a try).

And this is especially true, of course, in those countries that are not fascist — where there are  avenues for  conducting quite radical politics without immediately ending up in prison.

Some much-smaller cores of people can-and-do pre-embrace that need for force and radical ruptures — and are able to understand this based solely on indirect, historical and theoretical evidence. We gather them in communist movements. But most people need the impetus of life around them, the direct unfolding political experience and the shocking exposures of hidden realities that only crisis brings to everyone’s view.

But what happens when ordinary people push their way down that road of peaceful, structural change in a determined (even desperate) way and run into grim, immovable obstacles?

And what does it take to force those obstacles out of the way? And what does it take for a determined people to grasp those means?

If the framework of the old state (parliament, party spectrums, current army, Golden Dawn police) prove to be those obstacles — then what changes do we all make (conceptually) in the strategies we pursue, and even in the vision of that radical society we are demanding/creating?

Giving words to the possibilities:

The last moments of Salvador Allende’s life, September 11, 1973

* Allende/Pinochet possibility (i.e. fascist military coup backed by major imperialists — named after the overthrow of Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, and facilitated by the fact that the highly engaged people of the lower classes were not armed, while the middle classes were mobilized to support a rightward purge.)

This is connected to the fact that in extreme crises, the ruling classes often can’t rule the old ways.

They can’t continue to endorse the old political programs of their traditional parties. They often can’t allow the free and continued growth of (what Lenin called) “a profound political divergence.”

When significant sections of the people reject the course the ruling class feels it must pursue — then those ruling classes consider whether to violently suppress those significant sections by extreme means.

In the case of Allende, a socialist government was elected in South America — and the ruling classes (both in Washington and in Santiago, Chile) found that profoundly threatening, destabilizing and intolerable. They didn’t just topple that government (with a CIA-backed military coup) but they unleashed a reign of white terror that murdered and tortured large numbers of people (seeking to terminate a threatening popular mood and movement by extreme means).

The Allende government was both the sign that a powerful popular movement for change had emerged, and its unarmed nature was also an opportunity (for the extremely reactionary military) to strike hard and win.

Are there such instruments available to the ruling classes in Europe? Can the Greek police (heavily saturated with neo-Nazi Golden Dawn supporters) function as an instrument of white terror? And if so, who would lead and justify and direct that crackdown? What about the Greek military? Could one of the current “mainstream” traditional parties of Greek capitalism serve as such an instrument?

And of course: The Greek people have seen both a major civil war and a fascist military junta within living memory. I imagine they have a much more sober and intimate understanding of these possibilities than many radical people in the U.S.

Kornilov — his strongman coup attempt in September 1917 reshuffled the political deck, and congealed forces for socialist revolution.

* Kornilov Affair: In Russia 1917, the hunted underground Bolsheviks mobilized their mass support to defeat an attempt by General Kornilov to carry out a rather fascist/tsarist overthrow (from the right) of the new, existing, liberal/socdem government (which the Bolsheviks did not support).

The hardest-left communists emerged as the saviors of the revolutionary process and of the people, and then reemerged as a major player on the national stage. Within two months, they had themselves overthrown Kerensky (from the left) in the October revolution.

One way of viewing this is that in Russia, the attempt at a rightwing coup was beaten back by an increasingly armed and determined people. But the victor of that resistance was not the weak and moderate government-in-power, but rather the parties of revolution who, at the base, mobilized for a defense of the revolution (not a defense of the government). (For some background in this experience, see John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World.)

There were communists in Chile 1973, who tried to turn crisis of Allende into a defeated Kornilov event — by mobilizing the people to confront Pinochet’s armed coup. But they were all (tragically) swept away by the power of the military and the weakness of the popular resistance.

It is worth understanding why: The imperialists were not tied up, divided and exhausted by  a world war (as they had been in the September 1917 Kornilov event). The people included many demobilized and trained soldiers — able to form red guard units to confront Kornilov. The “White Guard” troops were themselves “infected” by the bacillus of revolutionary defeatism, and some melted away at key points  (when faced with the agitation and resistance of red soldiers from Petrograd).

* Kathmandu stalemate: Nepal’s armed struggle reached a first  stalemate by 2005: Maoist armed guerrillas and early peoples government controlled much of the country, but proved unable to defeat the central army in direct battle. They chose to enter a political process, help reformist allies overthrow the King, and get an opening to reach/mobilize urban classes. Ironically, they won elections, and the state they wanted to overthrow was put in their hands. They came to government power, without having the institutional strength to carry through the radical changes that are needed. This gave rise to a second stalemate — involving paralysis within the state, within the people, and (ironically) within the ranks of the Maoists and within their leadership.

In some ways, the old state (the oppressive state apparatus itself) fell into the hands of revolutionaries — without an actual revolutionary moment, without a revolutionary success. And so the momentum to overthrow that state dissipated, and the confusions over the nature of that state ran rampant.

It is a tragedy when the problems of “making the system work” fall into the hands of revolutionaries who represent an understanding that the system cannot work. Electoral victories by revolutionaries (in soviets, or constitutional assemblies, or even sharply contested parliaments like Germany 1930) can make clear their popular support and the legitimacy of their demands. But an overall electoral victory can be extremely complex (whether in Greece or Nepal) because it gives the semblence of power while denying key instruments of power. The poignant question after both Chile 1973 and Nepal 2012: What good is an electoral plurality without a peoples army? And if victories from the position of opposition aren’t serving as means to a victory from the position of  a revolution — then what other purpose is being served?

* Revolutionary situation: When the old politics is discredited even among its old supporters, when the people cannot live the old way and demand basic changes, when the rulers of the old system cannot grant those changes but are wedded to a different and brutal course (and deeply divided amongst themselves), and when there increasingly emerge/congeal fresh determined organized and highly revolutionary political forces with deep ties among the people capable of leading an uprising and envisioning a new alignment of power.

Part of the challenge is to convert deep “constitutional crisis” into a revolutionary situation — part of that change involves objective factors (things largely outside the control of revolutionaries, including what others do, including our enemies), but part of that change involves factors that revolutionaries are central to (whether we have created a strong central core, whether we have a sense of where to do, how much we have fused our program independently with sections of the people, what the nature of our “unity-struggle” relationship with allies is, how much we have retained independence and initiative, the clarity and solidity of our own ranks, etc.)

* A “Euro-Bolivarian” outcome with Chavez-like figure: What happens when millions of people want a revolution (i.e. they reject where the whole political establishment insists they need to go) — but are not ready to create a new socialist society. What emerges?

And if a revolutionary, unstable, undefined radical experiment erupts — what should communists and socialists do during such a “Euro-Bolivarian” period and with such a period? Is this a transition? And if so to what? And how does one imagine the transition happening?

How do those oppressed and discontented become able to actually rule? By what experiences, training and instrumental means?

* Becoming fit to rule: Very early in the communist movement Karl Marx wrote:

“We say to workers, you will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.” [“Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne.”)

What is the actual process (in detail and nature) by which ordinary working people (over time and acute experience) become actually “fit to rule” (and able to wrest power from the trained experts, slick political operators, powerful networks and death squads of their oppressors)?

What exactly would make one group of oppressed people “fit to rule” and another still unable to seriously contemplate it?

And, to inject a simple-sounding question: How protracted or telescoped is such a process?

I.e.  How much was the revolution of 1917 made possible by the training of 1905? How much was the victory of 1949 in china made possible by the invention and summation of many smaller base areas over decates — training cadre, refining policy, discovering erroneous assumptions, building practical experience with leading large numbers of people in very radical campaigns of change? And how does a concentrated crisis (where people sit alert, awake and vigilant in large numbers) enable groups of people to be forged and reforged through a real-time process? And how do revolutionary parties and leaders creatively impact that process?

In short, how does such a “revolutionary people” emerge? And how different is that process in different countries? What is the role of organized communists in the emergence of a revolutionary core among the people (i.e. determined sections of the people who are actively partisan toward socialist leaps.)

How does it actually happen — by what sequence of experiences, with what kinds of concentrated training, through the emergence of which new leaders, through what kinds of set-backs and frustrations? And what are the roles of conscious revolutionaries in helping (or potentially obstructing) that real-life, real-time process?

* Transitional demands: In an extreme crisis, some demands around crucial faultlines mobilize millions of people to confront the central defenders of the old order.

Transitional demands of 1917 communist revolution: “Peace, Land, and Bread.” The Kerensky government would not agree to ending the war. Feudal landholders were dead against peasant demands for land. Wartime crisis createdmass starvation. Three demands rose from the hearts of the people, and yet were impossible for the old order to address. What demands in a modern crisis represents such transitional demands? And how would we identify them in the midst of a complex crisis?

In words these demands are for relief and key changes (“give us food,” or “stop the war,” or “land to the peasants,” or “drop the brutal austerity agreements,” or “resign your posts and go away” ) — but in the context of a specific crisis (and a deadlock within previous mainstream politics) such demands can come to play a specific transitional role — from capitalism to socialism, as the banners under which forces gather for an actual revolution. They arise from the crisis, they concentrate opposing “ways out,” and their development (by revolutionary forces) requires a creative process of mass line.

In non-crisis times, leftists often confine themselves to agitational slogans — spoken and written ways of promoting their politics to new audiences. But in an acute crisis, when they are suddenly speaking to millions and when those millions are suddenly in active motion the nature of slogans and demands changes (in a way that is often disorienting to the more dogmatic and orthodox). the point is no longer simply arguing for a radical program in words, but bringing actual forces to a fighting front with defenders of the old system, and becoming a lightening rod for grievances and hopes that can shatter an old system.

To put it simply: In our context, today, “End the war!” is a familiar demand. It is raised by all kinds of people — and has served as a kind of common rallying ground (during the endless, brutal wars waged by the U.S. government). It is (obviously) a demand for a particular kind of reform, for a concession — the people are demanding that the government end a war (withdraw its troops, stop its bombings etc.) But there are other contexts (and 1917 Petrograd was an example) when “End the war!” was nothing less than a demand that required and drove a movement toward revolution — the people deeply wanted that peace, and the various imaginable ruling class governments were incapable of granting it. So the antiwar demand (which seems almost everyday ho-hum to activists in the U.S. today) became in that crisis and context a cutting edge of the actual real-time drive for a violent socialist insurrection and civil war.

Similarly: It is one thing to demand no cutbacks and no give backs in (say) Wisconsin — and have a year of turmoil in bourgeois politics. But it is a rather different (and much more intense) thing to demand “No to the Memoranda” (the internationally imposed mega-austerity demanded by the European Union) — in this crisis and this moment. The demands seem similar on paper, but pursuing them with seriousness in Greece threatens to up-end the whole established order (and not just in Greece).

Examples from our common history:

The Russian communists had a long-standing agitational program that was called “The Three Whales.” They demanded 1) a republican government (i.e. the overthrow of the anti-democratic autocratic monarchy called Tsarism), 2) land to the peasants, and 3) the eight hour day. This was basically what small illegal circles of socialist organizers agitated for. It was on the slogans of their May Day demos. (And they argued with more moderate forces in their own ranks, who wanted less political, less sweeping, less controversial demands — mainly focused around the more immediate concerns in workplaces and neighborhoods.)

But once world war, and then the 1917 crisis broke out, those Three Whales could not be the framework for the communist work — in part because (obviously) the Tsar was overthrown in February 1917 (in the event that opened up several years of acute crisis). The main demand of the whole left was suddenly (shockingly) realized. And a complex struggle unfolded (among communists, within the larger left, and among the people) over what they wanted now that the Tsar was gone, and how they viewed the moderate reform government that had come to power, and whether a “new revolution” was needed.

And, once the great 1917 crisis erupted, Lenin’s party dumped their own carefully crafted-and-defended Agrarian Program and adopted, wholesale, the land programs of a rival left party (the Socialist Revolutionaries, SRs) — because that SR program had come to concentrate (for the most awakened and engaged peasants) their revolutinary sentiments and aspirations. Even after years of critiquing that SR program and differentiating from it — the revolutionary communists presented the revolution and their party and coming political alliances and a possible future socialist government as being the road to fulfill those heartfelt revolutionary sentiments.

Such crisis  is a moment to apply the mass line on a national scale — to identify faultlines, slogan/language, key points of focus, and shifting allegiances — and creatively enter into a process by which people become unmoored from past political alliances, and arrayed in new, revolutionary formations (under the leadership of those strata and forces most determined to “push on through to the other side” and then continue beyond the breech in the wall.)

And the mass line here is not merely or mainly a matter of finding the right language for a communist movement’s previous demands. (See the polemical discussion of Mass Line: Part 1 and Part 2) It can mean adopting new demands, jettisoning old ones, and adapting to a complex novel terrain.

Climbing on?

* Ride the tiger: How do we create a compact, unified, conscious force that can seize the moment and risk all — to push events toward socialist revolution? How is such a force prepared? What structures can prevent it from shaking apart (in a crisis where everything is shaking apart)? How does it ally with others, while maintaining independence, initiative and distinctive goals? How does it absorb massive new forces (so that it is capable of leading) without changing what is most important in its nature? How, in short, should communists be organized — with what programatic and organizational means? And how is that too dynamically change in the actual rapids of revolution?

Old Maoist saying “Weed through the old to serve the new”

Our concepts and reference points, discussed above, are formed by past famous experiences and  summations of those past experiences.

But our ideas and frameworks now have to enter into the fire of real and current events. Inevitably, the new and the unexpected impact (and even transform) our thinking and expectations. We stand on the shoulders of the past, and are wiser for it. But then our fresh creative work starts.

What happens when truly radical politics starts to win in crisis elections — or when sets of competing “transitional demands” start to emerge?

Do we get: An Allende moment? A Kornilov moment? A Chavez period?  The emergence of right coup vs. left insurrection dynamics? Some specific, eccentric version of an October moment? Or the slow withering and demoralization of a Kathmandu stalemate? Do we get cooptation and counterinsurgency (sometimes in the form of a “left but responsible” government)? Which figures are emerging as saviors of the people and which as saviors of the system, and how will we know the difference?

We will inevitably see  some things completely novel, unannounced and unanticipated by the catalogs of past collisions — and we need to prepare our minds and expectations for that. (Lenin went back and reread Hegel’s dialectics in 1917 — to free his mind from cobwebs and preconceptions — to clear the decks and activate the open-minded creative machinery.)

Above all, what are the responsibilities (and hard choices) of consciously revolutionary forces when a real unprecedented opportunity both beckons them and constrains them?


Filed under: >> analysis of news, Greece, Kasama, KOE, Maoism, Marxist theory, mass line, Mike Ely, revolution, Socialism, vanguard party

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