Samhain '98 Samhain '98This is a good time for an Irish green/alternative magazine to be thinking about the state. With Labour and Democratic Left in government, and increased EU intervention and subsidy, many activists in the different social movements, “non-governmental organisations” and local initiatives find that they have more funds available and greater access to the corridors of power than ever before. The question, of course, is if this is a double-edged sword: if the price that is paid for funding is a loss of radicalism, and if the price for involvement in decision-making is a new role as implementer of state decisions. The professionalisation of activism is not a bad thing in itself (we need skilled people who can devote themselves fulltime to movement activities), but not at the cost of demobilising other activists and ordinary participants, as grassroots movements disappear and only the high-flyers who have mastered the language of NGO-speak, know how to lobby civil servants or how to organise a conference remain.
One deciding factor will be whether movement activists are fixated only on scoring goals for their own issue, or whether they are also committed to democratising the process of decision-making itself (which means something other than a few professional activists being allowed to join the power elite!) Without knowing it, many activists are turning to the strategy known in the eighteenth century as enlightened despotism. The theory in this case was that it was sufficient for absolute monarchs (Frederick II of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Austria, Catherine of Russia) to acquire a coterie of Enlightenment philosophers for social progress to happen: “knowledge” and “reason” – according to the theory – could be imported from on top.
Something similar is visible in today’s Ireland. Tired of grassroots organising, of trying to convince ordinary people, and of the democratic road to transformation, many activists have found that it is simply easier, and more in keeping with the way they live and work, to target decision-making élites (civil servants, ministers, “the media”, “Europe”) and try to bring about change from on top. So we take the road to the courts rather than standing on doorsteps, we try to change the language of the media or the content of the curriculum rather than bringing our arguments onto the street, we see the way forward in clever little tactical exercises in lobbying and contacts rather than in working from the bottom up. Hence the emphasis on “information” and “education”: we assume that all we have to do is to use the “existing channels” to tell people how to think.
This strategy has already failed in other countries: it failed in the States, where an emphasis on high-powered lobbying and top-down arguments about language and literature completely failed to stop the New Right from mobilising a frightening backlash at grassroots level that is now seen in their control of many school boards and of course in the Gingrich Congress. It failed in Britain, where Labour’s top-down approach to social change meant that real gains like the NHS, the extension of mass education or the development of welfare state simultaneously symbolised for many people a form of disempowerment and authoritarianism that made them fall for the pseudo-libertarian rhetoric of Thatcherism (legal, police and military power has of course increased massively since 1979). It will fail in Ireland as well: unless legal gains in terms of women’s rights, environmental protection, or whatever else are backed up by large-scale popular movements, they are castles built on sand, just waiting for the next New Right populism to come and wash them away.
One area where this is already happening is in the “debate” (in inverted commas because only one side is speaking) over crime: the moral panic over drugs, the use of the Guerin assassination to justify yet more encroachments on civil liberties (on top of the Public Order Act – see issue 1), the “porn on the Internet” stories (similar material is regularly available in computer games shops without exciting the same shock-horror reactions), and so on. The environmental and women’s movements have played a particular part in translating demands for social change into demands for legal intervention. The initial difficulty with this strategy, as with all strategies that depend on the state, is that we do not control the state: the Public Order Act is used against animal rights activists as much as against Youth Defence, for example. In West Germany, legislation against political “extremists” has been used far more against the left (in particular, banning leftists from holding any state or public employment) than against the far right (the Republikaner remain legal, for example).
The more fundamental problem is that this strategy reinforces the “legal mode of domination” – the idea that whatever is right must be enforced by law. The trouble is that for other people – and if we do not set out to do some serious convincing they will be the majority – what is right includes preventing gay and lesbian couples from adopting children, copperfastening religious control of schools, driving heroin users into poverty, criminalising youth culture... the list goes on.
This is the same kind of short sightedness that leads us to support military intervention whenever it can be justified by the evilness of the opponent (and there is no doubt, for example, that Milosevic or Hussein are not nice people): we want to believe, against all experience, that wars might be fought to restore good in the world rather than to further the political and economic interests of the powers in question (the same people who recognised the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, helping to set off the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, or who sold arms to Iraq in the knowledge that they would be used on the Iranians and the Kurds).
This makes our articles on the European process, especially on its military components, particularly relevant. Increasingly, the EU is acquiring state functions (although it will not be a simple remake of the nation-state on a larger scale). It is becoming an increasing focus of wish-projection by those who want someone else to step in and take over from tired movement activists. For some, it is a site of negotiation where a few concessions on “their own issue” can be extracted in return for support for the EU process as a whole; for others, it represents an easy alternative to convincing and organising majorities at home. In a word, it is the continuation of clientelism by other means.
Democratisation, participation in decision-making, grassroots organising, non-hierarchical organisations, freedom and diversity: these represent the attractive face of the new social movements for many of those who are not directly concerned by their specific themes. The women’s movement in Ireland was able to mobilise massive support because it was seen as challenging power and authority in the name of autonomy and freedom to choose how to live; the environmental movement has been successful in many places where it has represented community control and the reassertion of local priorities against those imposed by capital and the state. If movement activists sell this heritage for a “mess of pottage”, they can hardly be surprised if we get anti-welfare populism, a new religious right, a rising tide of local racism and yet more policing instead of politics.
Laurence Cox
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An Caorthann (The Rowan Tree) Irish green-alternative magazine Editor: Laurence Cox Web weaver: Anna Mazzoldi |