Book: Transforming Power: From The Personal To The Political. by Judy Rebick. Penguin Canada, 2009
In this second and last installment on Judy Rebick’s book, we feature excerpts from chapter 13, entitled: “Is the Party Over?”
Do the new movements point to alternatives to traditional political party organizing?
Judy Rebick:
1. Spain
“One of the most interesting electoral experiences happened recently in Spain, where a right-wing government’s attempts to pin the Madrid subway bombings on ETA (a nationalist group in the Basque country) stimulated a massive response from a network of grassroots organizations that basically threw the government out of office. In a poll three days before the election in March 2004, the right-wing Popular Party had a majority. On March 11, thirteen bombs exploded on three suburban trains. Two hundred people were killed and fourteen hundred injured. Activists worried that if it were re-elected, the government would use the bombing as an excuse to repress all radical opposition—as they saw happen in the United States after September 11. The next day the government called a demonstration against terrorism that brought seven million people out into the streets. But instead of supporting the government, the protestors bore banners reading “Who did it? We want to know.” The ETA denied responsibility, but the government kept insisting.
That day, the networks that had mobilized against the war in Iraq issued a call for cacerolazos, or pot banging demonstrations, for Saturday, March 13, under the slogans “The dead are ours. The wars are yours!,” “PP [Popular Party] murders,” “Franco’s sons,” “No to government disinformation.” The cacerolazos were built almost entirely through cell-phone messaging. For every text message received, ten or twenty were sent out. These went beyond the usual activist communications to their families, workplaces, and places of study. One of the activists, Mayo Fuster Morell, reported in the online Mute Magazine: “Everywhere the bleep of SMS messages announced the latest news that spread from mouth to mouth through the crowd.… No flags, parties. Leaders, organizers, or orders. Participation is horizontal, spontaneous, and massive. A video is aired in which a group close to Al Qaeda claims responsibility for the attack, but none of the official media reports it.”
Realizing it was in trouble, the government tried to get the Electoral Council to delay the election, claiming that the demonstrations were illegally organized by the Socialist Party. The Electoral Council refused, and the result was a massive turnout in the election and the defeat of the Popular Party. “They now know,” wrote Mayo, “that, in forty-eight hours, a people can overturn any government.”
Young people with little interest in electing the Socialist Party just decided that it was critically important to defeat the PP and took advantage of a highly mobilized population and a terrible error on the part of the government to defeat them. A large number of youth also mobilized in France during the last election, although they did not manage to defeat the Right. And, of course, an even greater number of young people are mobilizing through the Obama campaign in the U.S. elections. In all these cases, the method of participation in the election campaign is quite different than we have seen before—a different way of doing politics.
2. Canada
At the beginning of the last election in Canada, Jack Layton and Stephen Harper refused to accept the participation of Green Party leader Elizabeth May in the televised leaders’ debate, even though her party was running about 10 percent in the polls and, through recruiting a sitting independent, had an MP. What followed was no less than a national cross-partisan uprising, demanding that she be included. Layton backed down after it became clear the issue was not going away, and then Harper backed down, and May was included. This kind of citizen activism, which is greatly facilitated by the Web, may in fact be a new way to force changes on political parties. In the Canadian election, climate change groups posted sophisticated websites suggesting strategic voting (for the progressive party most likely to win) in swing ridings. It is difficult to say if this had a major impact on the vote, but it was a major part of discussion during the elections. There was also a groundswell of support for some kind of coalition among centre-left and left-wing parties to stop a very right-wing Conservative government. If the New Politics Initiative had succeeded and the Greens and NDP had merged, there might have been an electoral breakthrough for the Left in an election in which the Liberals were particularly weak and the majority of electorate were opposed to the ruling Conservatives. In Canada’s undemocratic first past the post system, the Conservatives won a substantial minority even though more than two-thirds of the electorate voted against them.
3. Bolivia
IN BOLIVIA, the state is very weak because decades of opposition by social movements have succeeded in bringing down government after government. It was this dead end that convinced the indigenous movements that they needed their own political instrument. In some ways it is easier for the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism, led by Evo Morales) to make dramatic changes, but still those changes are being stymied, either by pre-existing laws or by the opposition of the Right.
Created as a political instrument of the social movements, the MAS is not a political party like the others. Candidates are selected in mass assemblies of all those involved in indigenous social organizations. Anyone who is active in one of these social organizations is automatically a member of the MAS. There is tremendous polarization, both in the Congress and the Constituent Assembly, because the changes being proposed involve nothing less than re-founding the country on a new—in Evo Morales’s words—“anti-neo-liberal, anti-colonial basis.” So the minority that benefits from the status quo is fighting like hell to keep their power, which makes consensus-building exceedingly hard outside the MAS itself. Nevertheless, Morales has been attempting to use these methods to find compromise and to solve some seemingly unmanageable problems.
While it is hard to imagine a political situation like the one in Bolivia developing in an advanced capitalist country, we can learn some lessons from this experience and from that of Venezuela. The first is that change will not happen only from taking state power. Power is something that has to be built. As Hilary Wainwright says in an article on rethinking political parties: “In general terms one can say that the goal must move from winning the power to govern for the people paternalistically to being a struggle in collaboration with organized citizens to change political institutions from sources of domination to resources for transformation.”
4. Others
One example of how this could happen is a citizen’s group called the Guelph Civic League in the small Ontario city of Guelph that tapped into just this approach before the last municipal election. Instead of taking the usual citizens’ watchdog role, they decided to ask their neighbours what they valued in their city. Starting with a survey of ten thousand citizens, they developed a list of five values that the people of Guelph supported. They then circulated those values in brochures, saying, “This is what your neighbours think.” In the summer leading up to the election, they hired a handful of students to go door-to-door discussing those values. They found people who were willing to run on these values, and let their neighbours know who they were. These candidates won nine out of ten seats on the city council, and they increased voter turnout from 30 percent to 50 percent. It was a simple switch. Instead of telling voters what the candidate thought, it asked voters what they thought and then found candidates who reflected that thinking. Today the Civic League continues its work by reporting back to voters about how their representatives have supported the values that were adopted. In addition, they are working with other municipal activists to share ideas and develop new strategies for engaging residents in civic government at the municipal level. There are no political parties in Ontario operating at the municipal level, which means citizen groups can relate more directly with politicians, thus avoiding the organizational structure of the party.
As we discussed in Chapter 8, Barack Obama is involving individuals in his campaign in an unprecedented, decentralized, networked manner, There is already discussion about how to to make sure that Obama is accountable to them. It will be up to the myriad of social movements in the United States to keep up the pressure on Obama, perhaps accessing this network, to construct the kind of inclusive, democratic, and compassionate society he is talking about in the campaign.
Using the extraordinarily democratic moment of the primary campaign to mobilize millions of people, Obama actually used the impact of these new voters to pressure the party brass to support him, defeating Hillary Clinton in one of the most dramatic examples of grassroots democracy we have seen in electoral politics. It is precisely this kind of dynamic that Lula’s foreign affairs adviser Marco Aurelio Garcia is talking about. For a party to stay true to its vision and resist the numerous pressures imposed on it by the electoral system and capital, it needs pressure from outside that system. For years, I thought that social movements could provide that pressure, and certainly, where they are strong enough—as with the landless movement (MST) in Brazil or the women’s movement at certain points in Canadian politics—that works, but can we structure a participatory system that keeps that pressure on all the time? Spontaneous online discussions throughout the Canadian election had an impact on the media and the politicians, and while it is hard to argue that these discussions shaped the campaign, they certainly influenced it. On the other hand, the focus on the leader has never been greater and the inability of electoral politics to solve anything has never been clearer. The Wall Street collapse fell in the middle of the Canadian and U.S. elections. If elections worked as the democratic moment they should be, there would have been a thoroughgoing and deep discussion of the alternative solutions to the crisis. Instead in Canada, the major discussion was about whether the government should react to the crisis at all, and in the United States, there was more focus on Joe the Plumber, a voter who was critical of Obama’s tax policy, than there was on alternative visions for solving the economic crisis.
The gap between horizontal networked politics and the North American elections campaigns of 2008 seems like a chasm. Yet the Obama campaign continued to use networking to mobilize new voters and there seemed to be more online citizen organizing in Canada than ever before. In a nationally televised speech before the US election, Barack Obama promised to involve Americans in their democracy again. Of course he has already done that not only through unprecedented voter turnout but through the masses of people engaged in the election itself. How he will do that once he is elected remains to be seen.
The philosophy behind networked politics suggests that the very idea of representation is problematic. Once again I turn to the discussions at the networked politics seminar in Berlin in 2007. At the end of the three-day seminar we tried to summarize what was discussed. Some of the key questions were how parties that aspire to use a horizontal logic can engage with institutions based on a representative one. We noted that representatives are almost always absorbed by the institution to which they are elected or appointed, and rarely continue to be accountable to those who elected them. Ideas that were floated included sharing the role of representative so that no one person accumulates personal power. One example of this is the role of the Zapatista’s Marcos. Because he is masked and therefore anonymous, different people can play the role of Marcos. It is hard to imagine how this tactic could work in the media-driven politics of the Global North, but the idea of rotating representatives or using people who are not professional politicians to represent their communities for a shorter period of time, as in the participatory budget, might work. The problem here is the need for expertise to deal with the institutions of power effectively. It is a difficult problem that requires a lot more practice and study.
Another tough question we discussed was how social movements interconnect with institutions of power without being absorbed or co-opted by them. One strategy, as discussed earlier, is to create alternative self-governing structures next to the hierarchical representative ones and, over time, the more effective, more democratic methods of governance will win out. Ideally, it should work, but in practice power reproduces itself, and it is rare for any institution or even organization to change its culture without a major battle or a collapse.
A more realistic approach was suggested in the final report to the Berlin group:
– Another way of thinking about it is related to a viral logic, to an idea of exploding this radical distinction between us and them. Then the question is how can this logic of horizontal networking migrate into the logic of state institutions themselves? This is a fundamental but unexplored question which points away from the either/or of the past: either protesting against the state or making demands on it; either taking over the state or creating an alternative. For example, what would a political party look like if it wasn’t based on a hierarchical list of candidates, or a hierarchical electoral mechanism?
We have more questions than answers when it comes to political parties, but certainly some of the new ways of organizing at the community and social-movement levels that are discussed in this book can give us some creative ideas about how this might happen. Who would have predicted the more than 100 percent increase in voter turnout in the 2008 U.S. primaries? Who would have thought that a campaign could raise more money in small donations online than from all the powerful political action committees that run U.S. politics? We make the road by walking, and the road to political power that will benefit the majority of people is, like every other journey, begun with the first steps.
All of the elements of the movements we have been looking at in these pages will be necessary to transform the current political system. Like every other progressive social change in history, it starts with ordinary people longing for change, and then coming together to imagine it and work for it. And in working for it , learning with honesty and courage from the experiences – including the defeats and difficulties – of those who have done the same. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but as you have read in these pages, I am far from the only one.”