[P2P-F] Fwd: Planetize the Movement! (GTN Discussions)

Sat Mar 28 13:41:37 CET 2020

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 11:23 PM
Subject: Planetize the Movement! (GTN Discussions)
To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

>From William Robinson [w.i.robinson1 at gmail.com]
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[Moderator's Note: The open discussion period will end NEXT WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 1. We look forward to your insightful comments! -- JC]

Surely Val Moghadam could not have known as she prepared her timely essay
that we were at the doorsteps of the global coronavirus pandemic.  Our
existence has never appeared so fragile and also so interconnected.  The
health emergency underscores just how relevant – urgent – is her call to
planetize the movement.  The emergency brings home to us three paramount
matters.

First, the pandemic makes clear, for those who may have any lingering
doubts, how the fate of any one community on the planet is now bound up
inextricably with that of humanity as a whole.  What appeared as a
localized virus in Wuhan quickly spread to just about every country and
community in the world, leading to the lockdown of several billion people
and prompting what some have called the greatest crisis since World War
II.  Moreover, the economic meltdown triggered by the virus underscored how
dependent we all are now on the globally integrated production, financial,
and service system, controlled as it is by the transnational capitalist
class (TCC) and its political agents in capitalist states around the world.

Second, the pandemic shows how the global or planetary consciousness that
people have been talking about ever since globalization entered our
vocabulary in the 1990s is more of a reality than ever.  As several
billions of us hunkered down – although it must be stressed that billions
more did have the luxury of confinement (for them, it was continuing to
work or starve) – we stayed glued to television, internet, and social media
news about the virus and its impacts around the world.  We felt a new sense
of connection, of community, and of solidarity with one another.  We
experienced as never before what Marshall McLuhan, back in 1964,
dubbed the *global
village*.

Third, if we are to have any hope of resolving the dire problems that
plague humanity, from ecological collapse, to war, poverty, inequality, and
disease, we have to collectively confront across borders the powers that be
in the world capitalist system and their control over the means of our
existence.  From U.S. President Donald Trump’s criminal ineptitude in
addressing the pandemic, to the trillion-dollar bailouts for capital, the
threat to survival that billions of precarious workers face as the economy
plunges, and the overwhelming of woefully underfunded and collapsing public
health systems, the pandemic lays bare how it cannot be left to our rulers
to resolve the crisis of humanity.

This is where Moghadam’s essay comes in.  There has been a rapid political
polarization in global society since 2008 between an insurgent far-right
and an insurgent left.  Now, the crisis triggered by the pandemic, a likely
prolonged depression, will leave in its wake more inequality, more
political tension, more militarism, and more authoritarianism.  It will
surely animate far-right and neofascist projects that have surged in many
countries around the world and will do the same for popular struggles from
below.  Social upheaval and political conflict will escalate.  Crises are
times of rapid social change and open up the possibility of pushing society
in many different directions, depending on the outcome of battles among
contending social and class forces.  Any popular outcome to these battles,
in turn, will depend on how the oppressed and exploited may come together
in united struggle – precisely the topic Moghadam takes up.

But how prepared are popular forces from below for these life and death
battles to come, for a “global movement against capitalism, militarism, and
oligarchic states?”  Moghadam affirms that the way forward will have to
involve a new international (or whatever we chose to call it) and a shared
agenda of struggle.  In fact, a number of calls have gone out in recent
years for the formation of a new world party or International.  Just a
month before his untimely death in 2018, the political economist Samir Amin
published a call for the establishment of a global Fifth International of
Workers and Peoples.  Moghadam and I both participated in a 2019 forum to
debate such a new international and were broadly in agreement on its
urgency.

Moghadam goes on to identify stumbling blocks that have impeded the forward
motion of popular struggles from below.  Even as “the rich array of
activist groups and the dynamism and passion they display excite a sense of
possibility,” she says, “the very diversity of movements and their weak
interconnection could constrain the Global Left’s ability to achieve
meaningful change.” Now, having taken the discussion thus far, I am tempted
to simply conclude with a “yes, yes, and yes” to the essay, as I find
myself in agreement with all of her argument.  But this would hardly amount
to a contribution to debate.  So, let me turn to what I think is absent in
her account: a more decisive and forceful critique of the dominant
paradigms that have contributed to this situation of “weak
interconnections.”  We have to analyze *why* there is such a multiplicity
of unconnected struggles as we remind ourselves that the battles to come
are as much theoretical and ideological as they are political.  And why is
the language of class is so absent?

A key part of the story is the betrayal of the intellectuals, for no
struggle of the oppressed can be without its organic intellectuals.  The
mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s opened up space for representatives
from the oppressed groups and others who had earlier identified with the
radical agenda of those mass struggles to join the ranks of the
professional strata and of the elite.  In academia, it opened up space for
a new intellectual petty-bourgeoisie whose class aspirations became
expressed in post-modern narratives and identitarian politics.  Sidelining
class and pushing identitarian politics was a class project of this
intellectual petty bourgeoisie yet it came to infest many social movements,
especially in the Global North.  These narratives shaped the consciousness
and understanding of a whole generation of young people, alienating them
from embracing a desperately needed Marxist critique of capitalism at the
moment of its globalization.

The best identitarian politics could aspire to was symbolic vindication,
diversity (often meaning diversity in the ruling bloc), non-discrimination
in the dominant social institutions, and equitable inclusion and
representation *within* global capitalism.  It is no wonder that the
transnational elite embraced as its own the politics of “diversity” and
“multiculturalism” as a strategy to channel the struggle for social justice
and anti-capitalist transformation into non-threatening demands for
inclusion if not outright cooptation.  The strategy served to eclipse the
language of the working and popular classes and of anti-capitalism.  It
helped to derail ongoing revolts from below.

Moghadam observes that we cannot divorce class from the multiple sectoral
struggles that have raged.  The post-modern identitarian paradigm and its
cousin, intersectionalism, exert a stifling hegemony in the academy.
Notwithstanding their often-radical sounding language, they eschew class
and the critique of capitalism at the level of theory and analysis as they
advance the class politics of the petty bourgeoisie.  Such identitarian
politics should* not be confused* with struggles against particular forms
of exploitation and oppression that different groups face.  Ethnic, racial,
gender and sexual oppression are not tangential but constitutive of
capitalism.  There can be no general emancipation without liberation from
these forms of oppression.

Yet the embrace by significant portions of the Left of the limitations set
by this identitiarian class ideology and politics is an obstacle to
planetizing the movement.

William I. Robinson

***************************************************

March 2, 2020

Dear GTN,

Our March discussion bookends a long GTN series on movement streams that
kicked off in November 2017 with a framing discussion on “the problem of
action.” That initial discussion was introduced by my How Do We Get There?
The Problem of Action
<https://www.greattransition.org/publication/how-do-we-get-there> , which I
encourage you to review along with the rich GTN commentary
<https://greattransition.org/gtn-discussions/how-do-we-get-there-the-problem-of-action>
it generated. Now, we return to the overarching question of how to envision
and catalyze a coherent global movement matched to the task of Great
Transition.

The title for the March discussion—*PLANETIZE THE MOVEMENT!*—is from Martin
Luther King, who understood the need for systemic solidarity for systemic
change. Val Moghadam, a global movement scholar, starts us off with an opening
essay <https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/planetize-movement-moghadam>
(soon to arrive by email as well). Val counsels us to draw lessons and
inspiration from left history as we fashion a uniquely twenty-first century
strategy, intriguingly calling for “two Internationals.” Her essay sets the
structure for our discussion:

*The Historical Conjuncture*
The character of our fraught globalized moment and the systemic change
agents it spawns

*A Missing Global Actor*
Movement fragmentation, the basis for common cause, and the contours of a
unified movement

*Catalytic Action Now*
Strategies for building a global movement and specific initiatives for
getting the show on the road

I look forward to your comments, brief or extended (but less than 1,200
words), through *April 1*. Then Val will respond, and, as usual, we will
assemble a public GTI Forum sampling the internal GTN discussion.

Over to you,
Paul
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