John Horgan, in his talk on Noel Browne, seemed to be suggesting that leaders are agency, the led are structure. But agency isn't something exceptional: we here in this room are simultaneously ordinary people, movement participants, and "intellectuals". I want to start from this understanding to tackle three questions: "What's happening? Where do we come into it? and What should we do?" Roughly, these represent the road to Porto Alegre, the road to Ballymun, and the road to the Firkin Crane.
According to Arrighi, globalisation from above isn't new. Put like that, there's a serious risk of fatalism in the analysis. Lebowitz helps to tackle this by talking about the "political economy of the working class": in other words, ordinary people's struggles, everyday and less everyday. In other words, it's not just the powerful who have agency. The social order is reproduced - and changed - by ordinary people's everyday routines. The activist reading of this fact is often pessimistic: if we see ourselves as being the people who do this, things look subtly different.
Globalisation from below, in fact, comes first, in the shape of 1968, the popular rebellion against the world divided by the Cold War. Then, and only then, do we get The Empire Strikes Back, the class struggle from above from the mid-70s on. If what is happening now, in the big popular demonstrations, is the Return of the Jedi, then what needs to be stressed is the word "Return": ordinary people have been part and parcel of this process from the start.
"World-revolutionary moments" like the present are not unusual, then: the late 18th century, 1848, "1919", 1968 etc. are historical examples of the same kind of thing. They are the result of the long development of activism; of sudden participation in movements on a large scale; and of rapid learning processes. 1968, the last such moment, restructured the movement landscape dramatically, leaving new divisions which can schematically be described in terms of "1967", "1968" and "1969".
Barbara Epstein, in an important book, talks about the strengths and the limits of the 80s movements that attempted to deal with this legacy, in terms of the conflict between popular participation and strategic effectiveness. Arguably, the Zapatistas, PGA and Porto Alegre can be seen as prefigurative, not of future societies, but of possible movement resolutions to these dilemmas. At this point, it becomes possible to think that "we can do it": that we can build, and are building, a movement which is participatory, radical, non-sectarian and already capable of some political successes. This fact is leading to interesting shifts in (some) activists' thinking: why only some?
Alongside the familiar histories of the powerful, there is an "other history" of ordinary people, struggling both to meet existing needs and to develop new ones. In the full paper I distinguish different national histories of the post-68 learning processes involved in this, separating an Anglo story, a continental story and a post-colonial story. In the last one, "the State is everything and civil society is nothing" - something which explains many characteristics of the Irish left. These histories, then, are histories of mobilisation structures, which are both strengths and weaknesses.
Irish working-class community development, which often describes itself as "capacity-building", is clearly part of the "political economy of the working class". It represents a remarkable exception on a European scale - not so much in relation to the majority world - of widespread, popular working-class modes of organisation in working-class hands and organised in non-authoritarian structures. This fact, obviously, connects to a post-colonial history which we do not share with most of the rest of western Europe.
Within this, however, nationalist mobilisation structures still affect how "the community" operates, most obviously in relation to "partnershipping", which, if the experience of the Ballymun Housing Task Force in the 1980s is an indicator, was something desired by communities more than the state, at least initially. The effects of this partnershipping process have been sectoral fragmentation mirroring the way the state is organised, an increasingly technical workload dividing a skilled elite from the grassroots, and a widespread unease among activists.
While working-class community activists share much in their approach with some of the groups present in Porto Alegre (I'm thinking in particular of majority world community organisers), it is hard in practice and in Ireland to make that connection. The problem is not ideological or intellectual, except insofar as the orthodox left tends to look down on community activists, when they are aware of their existence at all. It is practical: what would make it possible for community groups to mobilise in alliance with the other movements represented here today?
The history of Marcos and the Zapatistas is very relevant here. The Chiapan peasantry, as Rudé put it, certainly needed - and need - "intellectuals" of all kinds. However, those "intellectuals" in turn need to learn from scratch how to do things. The address to the Mexican parliament, where instead of the media star Marcos the voices of peasant leaders and Zapatista organisers was heard, has important implications for the Irish left; far too many of us are willing to "speak for the nation" as an alternative elite.
Ordinary people's everyday struggles are organised into movements from above or from below by what Gramsci calls "intellectuals" - such as priests and doctors, managers and engineers, shop stewards and activists. The "hegemony" that results is always contested and uneven, not the monolith that the idea of "anti-hegemony" posits - and in so doing rejects any idea of organising effectively. A better and more Gramscian alternative is to think in terms of counter-hegemony: not a uniformity imposed by some mythical counter-organisation, but the combination of different struggles from below in ways that are compatible with one another and capable of cooperation and communication.
Counter-hegemony, in this sense, is part of the learning process of building real alternatives, which starts, very simply, from talking to each other. If movements are learning processes, revolutionary moments are extraordinary learning processes, because they enable kinds of interaction and conversation that rarely happen at other times to flourish across a whole movement.
A "revolution", in any real meaning of the world, consists of ordinary people making the move from "object" to "subject". Inevitably, given the normal self-understandings as "objects", it takes a very widely-shared external pressure, such as globalisation, to make people feel "forced" to react, and an example, such as the "new movement" (for lack of a better phrase), to give them an idea of how to do that. Existing activists, lost in a sea of six billion people, can't make this shift happen; but we can help with the learning process.
To negotiate this transformation effectively, a movement needs autonomous institutions, effective internal communication structures, and appropriate modes of personal sustainability. A "televised revolution", which is a real risk in the Irish case, could be a disaster: if people simply imported from abroad images taken out of context for a few months as a new fashion, we would spend the next five years picking up the pieces. To avoid this, we have to look to our own learning processes. In downtimes, defensive thinking is normal: all the sectarianism, cynicism and general introversion of the Irish left that we're familiar with, in fact. In uptimes, we need to unlearn this fast: we are no longer trying to keep tiny organisations alive in a sea of hostility, but trying to think forwards and find ways of unleashing ordinary people's potential.
At present, these processes are still slow, but rapid shifts are possible. In activist / academic gatherings in Manchester, I've seen people come to terms with the new situation in less than six months. In Dublin, the sense of dynamism around planning for Genoa is remarkable. What is hard to remember, but community educators know well, is that ordinary people's agency is often hidden, even to themselves, and so their learning processes are anything other than linear. We don't know what is going to happen, but it is certainly time to be listening to each other.
I want to finish with a quote, from a lesser disciple of William Thompson, on the non-linearity of this kind of "long revolution", and the kind of situation we need to be orienting ourselves towards:
"Working-class revolutions ... constantly criticise themselves, they continually interrupt their own course, return to what has apparently already been achieved to start it from scratch again. Cruelly and thoroughly they mock the shortcomings, weaknesses and pitiful nature of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent down, only for him to draw new strength from the earth and rise up once more against them, yet more gigantic than ever. They shrink back again and again in the face of the undetermined vastness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes any turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: 'Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!'" (18th Brumaire)
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From Seattle to Genova to war: where are we now? (Jan 2002)
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