Reformist Political Action as a Diversion, Part One
Posted by Kevin Carson on Mar 31, 2010 in Feature Articles • 9 commentsOver the weekend I saw some sort of Coffee Party event in the DC area featuring Annabel Park and other movement organizers.
I have to say, they seemed like a pretty nice bunch of people. Of course after this past year, that’s a pretty low bar to clear. They weren’t taunting people with Parkinson’s Disease, or screaming “nigger” and “faggot,” or generally giving the barking mad impression of someone about to start speaking in tongues and biting the heads off of snakes.
But nice or not, I got the clear impression that they could be best described by one word: goo-goos. If there’s one dominant theme in all the remarks by Park and other movement leaders up on that stage, it’s civic engagement and particpation. One of them–I forget her name–quoted Churchill on democracy: It’s the worst system except for all the others. The political process is all we’ve got, she said, so we have to particpate in it and make sure it works as well as possible. Throughout the meeting, I heard the same general idea restated by many different people: Government is neither good nor evil, but a tool–and our responsibility is to see that it’s used for good.
The Tea Party folks may believe Obama was born in Kenya, or that he’s secretly a Muslim or a Marxist. But they have one belief I agree with: their distrust of government. That doesn’t mean I endorse the batshittier stuff about black helicopters or white boxcars. But even on that level, I think it’s safe to say that the boundaries between the kind of creeping bureaucratic authoritarianism we’ve experienced over the past thirty years of assorted wars against drugs and terror, and a full-blown dictatorship, are a lot blurrier than most people assume.
But even stipulating that most people engaged in government policy-making mean well (which is probably true), and leaving aside my moral objections to the initiation of force as a libertarian, I believe that making government the primary vehicle for achieving your ends is a fool’s errand.
One of the people at the Coffee Party event seemed to suggest as much, although I don’t think he fully grasped the implications of what he was saying. He questioned the Coffee Party movement’s centrism, arguing that–far from simply wanting to split the difference between the “extremes” of left and right–most people in the movement were horrified by the corporate takeover of the political system and were critical of the Democratic leadership from the left. And he pointed out just what a terrible, uphill struggle it was to participate in government or exert control over it in any meaninful sense without addressing the structural role of corporate power in the political system. People could put every ounce of effort into electing “progressive” candidates–Obama and Pelosi are probably the most “progressive” president and speaker who will be elected for a generation, and hold the largest majority Democrats will probably hold for that length of time–and they still operate within a framework set by the corporations that fund their campaigns and provide most of the “expert” advice for their staffs in drafting legislation.
I think that guy had in mind a “solution” based on public campaign finance, or something of the sort. But if he thinks that would end the corporate nature of our political system, he’s sadly mistaken. I’ll concede it might lead to a form of corporate serfdom that’s a bit more tolerable for us serfs, like the Western European model of social democracy. And given a choice between two forms of statism, I’ll be the first to admit I’d prefer the one that weighs less heavily on my neck. I’d rather have six week vacations and free healthcare than live under the kind of sweatshop banana republic that people like Dick Armey and Tom Delay have wet dreams about.
But if that friendly left-wing critic of the Coffee Party movement thinks the European model of social democracy is any less corporate or any less capitalist than the Reagan-Thatcher model, he’s–again–sadly mistaken. Like our American system, the European continental model is a system of power based on collusion between centralized big government and centralized big business. The faction of organized capital that controls it is a little more enlightened and humane than the one that controls our banana republic, and they’ve got a big more sense when it comes to their long-term interests, but that’s about the only difference. As I’ve said before, the main difference between the social democratic or New Deal corporate liberal model, and the Reagan-Thatcher model, is that the faction of organized capital that controls the former is like a humane farmer who thinks he’ll get more work out of his animals in the long run from taking good care of them; the faction that controls the latter is like Jones in Animal Farm, thinking it’s more profitable to work them to death and replace them.
But regardless of how humane our masters are, it’s hopeless to believe that political participation will make them any less our masters. The state, in its essence, is a machine suited to control by insiders, and the coalition of insiders that controls it will always outlast any attempt at outside democratic control in the long run.
Stay tuned.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
"They weren’t taunting people with Parkinson’s Disease, or screaming “nigger” and “faggot,” or generally giving the barking mad impression of someone about to start speaking in tongues and biting the heads off of snakes."
I would actually like to see some evidence that any of these things happened at a tea party event. Pretending that some arrogant corporate shill like Rush Limbaugh making fun of some earnest corporate shill like Michael J. Fox constitutes all tea party goers taunting people with Parkinson's is a stretch. The claimed shout of "nigger" wasn't documented on the video that allegedly "proves" it happened.
I understand that you don't like the tea party events you've been to, Kevin. How many has that been? Zero? But your description of individuals who are seeking freedom as crazy people is a sickening display of elitism.
So is your entire thesis that everyone at the Coffee Party had different ideas and were smart, clever, bright, while everyone at the tea parties has identical ideas and are all insane. I'm very confident that I don't want any part of the elitist culture you dwell in.
It gets worse. Comments like "stipulating that most people engaged in government policy-making mean well (which is probably true)" fail utterly to impress. You haven't met most people engaged in government policy-making. Generating an assumption about what most of them intend is silly at best, disingenuous at worst. Politicians have only one imperative: re-election. Bureau-rats have only one imperative: control a larger budget. Neither of these demands for continuing (and expanding) power functions as a good intention. Judging them only by the results of their actions, everyone in government is self-serving and vicious.
Minarchy in practice is tyranny. Gradualism in practice is perpetuity. The only way to remove the corporate control over government is to end the state. As long as the state represents any power at all, it will be co-opted by big biz.
Perhaps in part two you can suggest how those of us who do not dismiss the tea party goers as useless fools and who are not bigoted toward persons of a different education level might engage some of them in some useful activity.
My continuing complaint about the center for a stateless society is how utterly useless it is about showing ways to create a stateless society. As long as what you are about is criticising political society and attacking the state and statists, your group is about the state, not about statelessness. Indeed, the very concept of a stateless society is derivative of the state – the condition of statelessness being a peculiar variant of the societies which have states. Indeed, I am for a proliferation of societies which have no state, societies of free individuals. I would not be satisfied with "a" stateless society, but would want a great many in competition. Fifty million would be a good start for a number of such societies.
Perhaps part two would be better?
I too am kind of disappointed that you'd assume the media reports regarding racial slurs are true when 90% of what they report isn't…
… but Jim, while some of your criticism is spot on, most other parts are either tangential or attacking strawmen.
I am not a Tea Party supporter, but do think it is strange that you take the word of the MSM & the self serving remarks of some congressman as gospel. I just finished reading Karl Hess's autobiography, Mostly On The Edge, & in Chapter 13, entitled Goldwater, he discusses some of the dirty tricks used by Nelson Rockefeller against Goldwater. One of the incidents he recounted was during a campaign stop in NYC where a Goldwater 'supporter' kept shouting out things like Goldwater would keep "them n*****s" in their place. Hess confronted him & he turned out to be a Democrat state legislator & a Rockefeller supporter.
Why can people rightly accept that the state can murder hundreds of thousands of innocents & imprison harmless people for noncrimes but scoff at the idea that the enemies of freedom would stoop to using petty dirty tricks to acheive their goals?
My "batshit insane" characterization is of the entire milieu that includes Tea Partiers, birthers, and the base that people like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber appeal to. And it's based on what I've seen with my own two eyes during many months of TV coverage of town hall meetings, demonstrations, and national Tea Party events. I wouldn't put it past someone to organize a liberal version of "Pissers for McGovern," but when it's entire crowds of people, over and over and over–well, that's a lot of pissers. I don't think most of those people need any help from Obama's supporters trying to make them look crazy. I don't believe the pollsters, who report a major segment of the Red State population believes Obama was born in Kenya or that he might be the antichrist, are part of a disinformation conspiracy; and it seems pretty likely to me that such people are disproporationately in the Tea Party demographic. As politically incorrect, insensitive and elitist as it may be, I don't have any problem with saying straight out that that view is shit-for-brains, fucked-in-the-head stupid.
And more broadly, the media imagery I've seen dovetails with my cultural impression of right-wingers. Culturally, they're angrier and more prone to senseless violence, for the same reason they have a greater tendency toward Archie Bunker-style authoritarianism against outgroups and dissidents. Liberal bloggers and anti-war bloggers are a lot more likely to get personally threatening comments, tinged with eliminationist rhetoric, from people on the right end of the spectrum, or to get their cars vandalized for the wrong bumper sticker, or to get threatening phone calls at home. It's part of the "borderer" or "Ulster Scot" thing Joe Bageant comments on.
As I've written elsewhere, the Blue State folks have their own cultural problems–most prominently intellectual smugness. They're more prone to the lazy tendency to assume that the fact that "no one *I* know" (in the faculty lounge) believes something, is sufficient refutation of it without actually having to refute it. And they're prone to goo-gooism, which I think is fundamentally misguided (the actual subject of this post, by the way).
I would also add that, however repulsive I find the screaming, mouth-frothing birther lunatics on a personal level–and as you might have guessed I do find them repulsive–I believe the real danger comes from the sane, soft-spoken, "serious" people who have good manners and are much pleasanter to deal with on a personal level. You know, the people Ward Churchill and C. Wright Mills called "little Eichmanns" and "crackpot realists," respectively.
I think I've made it clear enough times what I think of managerial centrists, elsewhere, to be able to dispense with drinking the Kool Aid about a bunch of batshit insane know-nothings like the lovely folks I see screaming on my TV set.
Sometimes I've thought of going to a tea party event just to see what it's all about, and then I realize: I don't look white, I don't look christian. I'd probably never even "pass"! I'm sure I'd be fine with coffee party folks, leftists of any stripe, or at libertarian party convention.
Well, js, they have the national convention of the Libertarian party in St. Louis this year at the end of May. You should come see what that’s like.
Still not seeing any practical suggestions for creating one or more stateless societies. Guess I’ll run over to part 2 and see what that looks like.
Jim, I think it would be worth you reading a bit more of Kevin’s work, which is a lot more involved than these mere bagatelles posted each week here. If you want to know where he thinks a stateless society may come from, you need to have a look at his “organisation theory” and “homebrew revolution” books.
JimDavidson wrote “Gradualism in practice is perpetuity”.
I don’t know why people are prone to quote Garrison on this, as though it was authoritative. He was, quite simply, wrong, both in general and in particular. It was slavery in particular that Garrison was speaking of, and slavery was eliminated nearly everywhere in the world by just such incremental, gradual methods with very little associated violence (the after-effects and costs of emancipation contributed to the later overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy, and in the British West Indies there was a minor and short lived slave revolt against emancipation that ended when the gradualism was explained).
“The only way to remove the corporate control over government is to end the state. As long as the state represents any power at all, it will be co-opted by big biz.”
But since big business is itself a source of strength for the state, and is maintained by it, ending one leads to ending or at least weakening the other, and there is no reason why the overall strategy shouldn’t include addressing one aspect even while the other is still present. Indeed, it may (or may not) be more practical to address each separately at the same time so they each have their hands too full to assist the other.
Kevin Carson wrote ‘And more broadly, the media imagery I’ve seen dovetails with my cultural impression of right-wingers. Culturally, they’re angrier and more prone to senseless violence, for the same reason they have a greater tendency toward Archie Bunker-style authoritarianism against outgroups and dissidents. Liberal bloggers and anti-war bloggers are a lot more likely to get personally threatening comments, tinged with eliminationist rhetoric, from people on the right end of the spectrum, or to get their cars vandalized for the wrong bumper sticker, or to get threatening phone calls at home. It’s part of the “borderer” or “Ulster Scot” thing Joe Bageant comments on.’
Just how conscious are you of the irony of someone called Kevin Carson holding that view of ‘the “borderer” or “Ulster Scot” thing’? You do know from whence your ancestors came, that they were those, right? Of course, culturally and historically, there was nothing senseless about it at all, except maybe the anger; many Celts were and are quite capable of useful (in its own terms) violence with no animosity at all (“For the great Gaels of Ireland / Are the men that God made mad, / For all their wars are merry, / And all their songs are sad” – The Ballad of the White Horse, G. K. Chesterton).
Quite conscious, PML. Quite conscious. I live in the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks, and I recall as a child watching the Beverly Hillbillies wondering why the laugh track got so loud when Granny described the meals she was cooking. And I have no doubt my periodic impulses to “show” somebody this or that, or “teach them a lesson,” have something to do with this. That the Republican Party’s political culture appeals so strongly to such impulses in their base is probably one reason I find them distasteful. Of course it doesn’t help that most of us, like our ancestors fighting the King’s wars, still direct our ressentiment toward manufactured enemies supplied us by those in authority rather than our real enemies (i.e. the people in authority).