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Title: "To serve the people” Author: Tim Horras Date: 21-12-2017 Language: en Topics: mutual aid; Dual Power Source: https://philadelphiapartisan.com/2017/12/21/to-serve-the-people-contribution-to-a-defense-of-mutual-aid-revolutionary-culture-and-survival-pending-revolution/
revolutionary culture, and survival pending revolution
Part I: The History of a Tactic
We must not regard our survival programs as an answer to the world
problem of oppression. We don’t even claim it to be a revolutionary
program. Revolutions are made of sterner stuff. We do say that if the
people are not here revolution cannot be achieved, for the people and
only the people make revolutions.
— Huey P. Newton, “We must survive until we can transform society”
(1970)
A debate has been lurking under the surface of the socialist movement:
Can (or should) mutual aid be included by socialists in our repertoire
of tactics? Or are these tactics in fact reformist and
counter-revolutionary? This has sometimes been referred to as the debate
on “serve the people.” The lines of argument generally line up as
follows:
Some socialists argue our movement should prioritize intervening in the
hegemonic political process: through participating in elections and/or
lobbying in support of a progressive legislative agenda or specific
policy demands.
Others support a broader diversity of tactics, which would encompass not
only protest, lobbying, and elections, but also direct action including
the provision of goods and services to working class communities as part
of a larger strategy to build a social base for radical politics within
the working class.
This essay will be divided into two parts. The first half will detail
the history of mutual aid in an attempt to counteract the notion,
prevalent even in leftist circles, that social welfare is “naturally”
the role of the capitalist government, and that activists should not be
involved in social provision, but rather that our role is solely to make
demands on the bourgeois state.
The second part will go into greater detail and address contemporary
arguments made by socialists against including mutual aid or “serve the
people” as a tactic in the repertoire of socialists. I will attempt to
make the case that “service to the people” is an important component of
revolutionary strategy to overthrow capitalism, and that criticisms of
mutual aid ultimately come from a reformist understanding of the
bourgeois state as a neutral entity which can be “transformed” to serve
the working class, and a reformist understanding of activism that has us
either begging for scraps or tailing the liberal segments of the
capitalist class.
I apologize in advance that, in order to tell a story of this magnitude,
I’ve had to telescope events and paint with a broad brush. A more
comprehensive overview of the subject is beyond my ability. I’m also
obliged to say that I’ve relied heavily on the excellent scholarship of
radical academics and activists who have loudly and bravely told this
story at times when few wanted to hear it. However, any omissions or
mistakes are my own.
What is mutual aid?
To understand the political questions within this debate, first we need
to understand the history of mutual aid.
The practice of mutual aid goes as far back as the workers movement
itself. When the workers movement was in its infancy during the
Industrial Revolution, before workers had developed the capacity to
effectively make demands on the state, workers created avenues for
self-help outside the aegis of an unresponsive government.
The movement created economic cooperatives: alternative means of
employment which were democratically-controlled rather than top-down.
They created social welfare institutions to pool the limited capital
which workers had access to in order to create childcare cooperatives,
social security funds and healthcare services.
These mutual aid societies predated the establishment of a state-funded
social welfare system. Indeed, many of the modern social welfare
programs that exist today began life as union-funded initiatives, for
instance, in many of the Scandinavian societies beloved by democratic
socialists, unemployment insurance began as union-funded initiatives
(this was referred to as the so-called “Ghent” system, based on the
model developed in Ghent, Belgium). Even today in the capitalist United
States we have union-administered pension funds, a weak shadow of our
social democratic cousins in Europe.
In the United States, as a response to virulent racism as well as
exclusion from economic and political life, mutual aid societies were
often created by the most oppressed communities, who had the least
access to capital and other resources. As Jassmin Poyaoan writes:
“Some of the first mutual aid societies in the U.S. were formed out of
necessity by groups with limited access to mainstream services and
support. In 1787, the Free African Society was formed to provide aid to
newly freed blacks, so that they could develop leaders in the largely
exclusionary community.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants from various
ethnic and national origins formed mutual aid societies to serve as
social support groups, extending financial support to each member during
illness and unemployment, as well as emotional support during times of
loss.”
These communities understood from bitter experience that they could not
look for support from a white supremacist and bourgeois state. Many of
these individuals also supplemented independent institution-building
with making demands on the state, but they had no illusions that the
existing government was set up to serve their interests.
Given that mutual aid as a survival strategy for the working class
emerged organically from the labor movement, the question arose among
revolutionaries as to how mutual aid fit into a strategy of overcoming
capitalism, i.e. how mutual aid could not only help the working class
today, but help the class overthrow its exploiters.
Karl Marx, the intellectual founder of modern communism, was supportive
of the idea of building independent working class institutions separated
from the bourgeois state, calling them a “victory of the political
economy of labor over the political economy of property” and emphasizing
that “the value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated.”
Engels went even further, describing cooperatives as “transition
measures to the complete communistic organization of society.”
While some evangelists for mutual aid eschewed political action, many of
these cooperatives and mutual aid societies had explicitly political
ends. Some were even directly affiliated with socialist political
parties. In fact, a much larger number of working class individuals
participated in the network of affiliated cultural associations than
ever joined the party proper.
The undisputed model of the “political” approach to mutual aid was the
German Social Democratic Party, which was considered the premier working
class political organization at least up into the 1910s. The scholar
Richard N. Hunt wrote that “Social Democracy was a kind of
self-contained and independent social unit. It possessed its own
institutions of government, its own welfare, educational, and cultural
organizations, its own mass media, its own quasi-military force, its own
system of finance.”
These took the form of “welfare institutions attending to such diverse
needs as nursery care, adoption, unemployment and health services,
travelers’ aid, old age care, etc. – literally a cradle-to-grave
program; educational facilities for children and adults… together with
organized vacation trips and even a Party School; sport and hobby groups
embracing everything from the Workers’ Cycle Club and the workers
Photography Club to the Workers Mandolin Club.”
This dense network of supporting institutions provided a number of
benefits to the socialist party. The buffet of activities provided by
German Social Democracy retained lukewarm party members, attracted new
ones, and reaffirmed the loyalty of the true believers. The party’s
welfare system allowed workers to make the best of things under
capitalism, while strengthening the vehicle which could eventually
overthrow the system.
Sadly, German Social Democracy equivocated on the question of whether or
not the working class should integrate into the bourgeois state. The
party was never able to come to a firm consensus on whether the existing
state could be transformed or if the state needed to be smashed and a
new government created in its stead. The German working class paid for
this ambiguity with the slaughter of millions.
The emerging Nazi movement copied social democracy’s
institution-building strategy with their own fascist institutions,
gaining strength by exploiting the perception of Social Democracy’s
closeness with the hated Weimar government. And of course, once the
Nazis had seized state power, they made quick work of their opponents,
either destroying these social democratic mutual aid societies outright
or coopting them into the service of the Nazi Party.
There are valuable lessons to be learned from this time, specifically on
the need for a clear revolutionary political line and the dangers of
close alliance between socialists and the bourgeois state. But this
brief historical sketch also underlines the power of mutual aid and
non-state institutions as supplements to a larger party-building
process.
“Serving the people” from Mao Zedong to the Black Panthers
Black Panther Poster for the Bobby Seale People’s Free Health Clinic
The present day revolutionary conception of mutual aid traces its
lineage back to mid-20th century China, when the Chinese communists
popularized the slogan, “Serve the people.”
As the New Left of the 1960s searched for an alternative to what was
perceived as the rigid Stalinism of the Soviet Union, they inevitably
sought guidance from another socialist society which was putting itself
forward as a superior model: the People’s Republic of China.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense were one of the revolutionary
groups which were influenced by Chinese communism (often referred to as
“Maoism”). As founding Black Panther Huey P. Newton wrote in his memoir
Revolutionary Suicide, Newton’s conversion to socialism “was complete
when [he] read the four volumes of Mao Tse-tung to learn more about the
Chinese Revolution.”
Taking inspiration in part from Chinese communism, as well as drawing on
the long tradition of African-American self-help, the Black Panthers
embarked upon a series of campaigns to “serve the people,” directly
providing for the needs of the black community. According to Joshua
Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., in their book Black Against Empire: The
History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, the Panthers conceived
of their “serve the people” programs as a key component in support of a
strategy for expanding and cohering the party under conditions of state
repression, improving its public image, garnering political support, and
finding meaningful activity for its members to engage in.
In late 1968, the Black Panthers embarked on an ambitious campaign to
directly address malnourishment in black communities by providing free
breakfast to neighborhood youth. The program was a huge success and
eventually expanded to thirty-six free breakfast programs operating
nationwide by 1971.
And free breakfast was just the beginning. As journalist Andrea King
Collier notes, the Panthers eventually “developed more than sixty Serve
the People programs, including efforts to provide free clothing and
shoes, medical services — including drug and alcohol awareness — legal
aid education, and what was thought to be some of the first true early
childhood education programs in the nation, preceding Head Start.”
The Free Breakfast for Children program threatened the status quo in a
way no protest could have. Embarrassed and threatened in the face of
Panther propaganda, and seeking to neutralize the threat posed by
independent initiative, the federal government formally rolled out their
own School Breakfast program in 1975. The program catalyzed much-needed
changes more rapidly than would likely have been possible if the
Panthers had stuck to a traditional protest/lobbying/elections
framework.
There’s a lesson to be drawn here: there are situations in which mutual
aid can win concessions from the state more rapidly than formal recourse
to protest and lobbying. In other words, direct action (sometimes) gets
the goods.
But mutual aid was not justified simply on the grounds of its
effectiveness in achieving reforms. These programs were justified
variously on the grounds of raising the consciousness of the masses, as
well as in terms of ensuring the survival of their communities.
In addition, the Panthers’ mutual aid programs provided their cadre with
practical training which allowed them to develop a wide variety of
logistical, technical and administrative skills. As Huey Newton in To
Die for the People: “We recognized that in order to bring people to the
level of consciousness where they would seize the time, it would be
necessary to serve their interests in survival by developing programs
which would help them meet their daily needs. For a long time we have
had such programs not only for survival but for organizational
purposes.”
What did Huey Newton mean by the phrase “organizational purposes?” To
take an imaginative leap, we might conjecture that the experience of
running mutual aid programs in the very heart of the communities in
which they were seeking political support provided the Panthers with a
greater exposure to the day-to-day concerns of the masses, a wider
variety of opportunities for skill development and more of a sense of
meaning than they could have ever received from, say, simply phone
banking elected officials in support of a bill or door-knocking for a
candidate’s election campaign.
But these developments did not occur in a vacuum. As a revolutionary
party, the Black Panthers quickly attracted the attention of the
repressive apparatus of the United States government.
Counterinsurgency: Annihilation and co-optation
It was 1969, and the judgment of the America’s top cop was unequivocal:
“The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest
threat to the internal security of the country.” This was the verdict of
J Edgar Hoover, the notorious Director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), whose nearly half a century in office was largely
devoted to (in the words of his biographer) “[waging] war on
homosexuals, black people and communists.”
The Black Panthers represented a unique threat to the legitimacy of the
United States government, not because they had stockpiled some weapons
(which anyway they held and handled in complete compliance with the
law). Rather, it was the potent combination of base-building in the
community yoked into the service of a larger revolutionary strategy
which gave cause for alarm.
Growing community support for the Panthers was bolstered in no small
part by “serve the people” programs such as the free breakfast program.
This comes across explicitly in FBI memos from the time period. For
instance, in May 1969, the following memo was sent to FBI offices across
the country: “The Breakfast for Children Program […] represents the best
and most influential activity going for the Black Panther Party (BPP)
and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by
authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
The FBI’s means for disrupting and neutralizing the Panthers involved
both blatant political assassination (as occurred with Illinois Panther
leader Fred Hampton) as well as more subtle covert misinformation and
activities, today known as COINTELPRO.
But there is another aspect to the “carrot and stick” approach which
needs to be considered: the cultivation by the capitalist state of an
alternative set of civil society institutions of social support: the
nonprofit industrial complex.
While charitable organizations have a long history in the United States,
the immense wealth extracted from the working class during the so-called
Gilded Age concentrated enormous wealth in the hands of a small number
of industrial capitalists.
Consequently, a large number of philanthropic foundations were
established by by the so-called “robber barons” in the early 20th
century. These foundations were created in part to act as a tax shelter
for large fortunes belonging to business tycoons and their relatives;
they were often named after the magnates whose ill-gotten gains they
were established to protect: Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Sage.
The role of these large, private, tax-exempt foundations took on a new
political role during the social insurgency of the 1960s. The Ford
Foundation led the way in the shift from charity toward direct
intervention in social movements. As Andrea Smith writes in the The
Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “The Ford Foundation became particularly
prominent, not only for philanthropic giving, but for its active
involvement in trying to engineer social change and shape the
development of social justice movements. For instance, foundations […]
became involved in the civil rights movement, often steering it into
more conservative directions.”
Simultaneously, the big money provided by private foundations helped to
cultivate a “comprador” layer of black leadership which could function
as a political pole of attraction and provide an alternative to
revolutionary leadership within the black freedom movement. Because the
black freedom movement represented the vanguard of the wider democratic
social struggle, this had devastating effects on the political left.
This history is recounted in books such as Karen Ferguson’s Top Down:
The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial
Liberalism and Cedric Johnson’s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders.
The bolstering of pre-existing brokerage politics was noted as far back
as 1980 by Amiri Baraka and his co-thinkers:
In the aftermath of the 1960’s rebellions, the ruling class tried to
coopt the revolutionary demand of the Black masses for political power
and self-government by confining the political struggle to the electoral
arena and creating illusions that placing Black faces in high places was
synonymous to “self-government.” In fact, real political power remained
in the hands of the monopoly capitalist class and not in the hands of
the masses. While certain reforms were gained through the struggle for
Black representation, the basic conditions of oppression of the masses
could not be alleviated through the electoral process.
Furthermore, as Black petty bourgeois and bourgeois politicians […] did
attain elected office, they were usually bought off to serve the
interests of the bourgeoisie. Representing an upper stratum of the Black
population, they had class interests in maintaining the political
system; and as government functionaries, served a role as part of the
oppressive state machinery itself.”
As the radical Sixties waned and America was slowly but surely overtaken
by a reactionary backlash, many radicals or reformed ex-radicals
retreated into more comfortable positions in academia, the labor
bureaucracy, or the social welfare state. Many who’d hoped for
“revolution in our time,” were deeply disappointed and disillusioned by
the failures of the revolutionary movement. While their motives ranged
from self-serving to making the best out of a bad situation, the overall
direction was toward funneling activists into safer and more
ameliorative ends. As Cedric Johnson wrote, “Political elites, the
intelligentsia, and community activists formed a crucial linchpin in the
success of this social management strategy.”
By the end of the 1970s, a confluence of successive seismic political
and economic shocks — an ebbing and disoriented mass movement, the
economic shocks of emerging deindustrialization, the winding down of US
military involvement in Vietnam, the slow atrophy of union and strike
activity, and more — led to the eclipse of working class mutual aid.
Social welfare programs initially funded through government largess
ended up on the chopping block as profound economic shifts and a
politics of austerity became the order of the day. As part of a larger
pattern of privatization, many functions of the government were shifted
onto completely unaccountable private entities, with private foundations
leading the way in the arena of social welfare.
By the end of the 1990s, the underdeveloped and imperfect state-directed
social welfare state was on its last legs. The nonprofit industrial
complex, formally aloof from the state, remained standing, engorged by
the profits of an expanded corporate sector. By this point, the network
of capitalist institutions had developed deep ties to the social
movements, with capitalist interests picking and choosing more
conservative sections within the social movements through grant monies
and access to power.
The parasite had made its way to the brain of the host and taken
control.
We can only win by destroying them: Against nonprofits, for mutual aid
It should be clear from this brief historical sketch that, in place of a
robust and diffuse network of working class institutions, many of which
were linked to an explicitly socialist political project, the leadership
of civil society is today completely monopolized by the capitalist
class.
Through a successive series of decisions compelled in part by objective
circumstances, the crucial role of mutual aid and social provision which
had originally been the purview of unions, organizations of the
oppressed, and revolutionary political parties was surrendered to the
state, which eventually turned this task over to administration by
capitalist interests directly through their nonprofit arm.
Today, revolutionaries must attempt to counteract and push back against
the influence of the nonprofit industrial complex. But we must do more.
Ultimately, we will need to raze to the ground the nonprofit industrial
complex in its entirety. This network of institutions serves as a
barrier to working class hegemony. Our aim should be to establish social
provision under the direction of unions, mass organizations of the
oppressed, and socialist political parties in the service of a
revolutionary strategy that seeks not to reform or “transform” the
capitalist state, but looks to its overthrow.
In the next part of this essay, we’ll look at the various criticisms
made of mutual aid programs, dig into the underlying political
perspectives informing these criticisms, and attempt to lay out a
coherent explanation of how “service to the people” plays an important
role in building a working class political base.