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Title: Charting Revolt Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: January 19, 2021 Language: en Topics: sociology, revolution Source: Retrieved on January 20, 2021 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/charting-revolt-resisting-tendency-towards-reactionary-sociology
In the eventuality capitalism maintains its stranglehold on the planet,
the official histories of the present moment of resistance, decades from
now, will claim that the battles raging around us began with the
economic recession of 2008 and were further exacerbated by a second
recession in 2020. The reason for this framing is fairly obvious: it
obscures longer histories of revolt, particularly the exact forerunners
of greater rebellions; and it portrays us, the plebes, as simple
mechanical accessories that only enter into dysfunction when the economy
fails to produce abundance, as though we were just puppets dancing on
the strings of finance.
It is more unsettling, though far from surprising, when such framings of
our history come from within the movement, although nearly always, the
academic wing thereof.
What revolts do we miss out on with this framing? In fact, we exclude
all the important revolts that successfully broke with the Cold War
logic that had suffocated social struggle for decades and developed the
very logics and practices that would be deployed so forcefully after
2008. The Oka Standoff in 1990, the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the
Zapatista uprising in 1994, the Seattle riots of 1999, the Second
Intifada of 2000â2005, the Black Spring in Kabylie in 2001, the
Argentine general strike and riots of 2001, the Bolivian Gas War of
2005, the French banlieue uprising of 2005 and anti-CPE riots of 2006,
to name just a few.
What revolutionary developments do we excise when we do not view these
movements as the originators of our current wave of rebellions?
Practically everything important:
capitalist system to its knees
organizations
insistence on disrupting their summits and their managerial dominance
intervene after police murders
deaths after police encountersâincluding those who commit suicide after
being humiliated by the policeâwith massive riots
following the theory of insurrectionary generalization
specifically anti-vanguardist, that seeks to create spaces of dialogue
across social movements rather than controlling such movements, and that
breaks with the statist practice of subsuming revolution to a military
contest
assembly-based decision-making structures as more legitimate and more
liberatory than state structures
Interestingly, we can find a few of these features in the movements that
occurred during the Cold War, such as wildcat strikes and antiracist
urban rebellions, but all of themâfrom Paris â68 to Wattsâwere quickly
marginalized, coopted, or stifled by the more formally organized forces
that were dominant in those movements. Additionally, the vast majority
of movements in that time period took seriously the fictions of
neoliberal freedom in the NATO bloc or democratic centralism in the
anticolonial movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Such fictions
hold little water today.
Without the developments described above, the revolts that come after
2008 can be scarcely understood, and explaining them as byproducts of an
economic recession is disingenuous, not least of which because itâs a
sloppy explanation: the insurrection in Greece in December 2008 came
before the recession was really felt in the streets; the plaza
occupation movement in Spain began after austerity measures were
announced but before they took effect, and major rebellions in Turkey
and Brazil took place when those countries were in moments of rapid
economic growth.
Even more importantly, the first major victories against
neoliberalismâin Bolivia in 2003 and 2005, in France in 2006âoccurred
before our current rebellions supposedly began. Is there not the shadow
of a possibility that our fierce resistance, by marking a hard limit to
financial expansion, was a factor in triggering the economic recession,
rather than being a mere product of it? It makes perfect sense why
capitalist economists would never want to consider the possibility that
we the plebes might become movers of history and wreckers of economies,
but why would supposed anticapitalists insist on ignoring that
possibility? Just to continue spoon-feeding a decrepit theory that goes
from clownish to macabre when it continues to insist, after 150 years of
disasters and bad calls, that it constitutes a scientific approach to
revolution?
The economistic, quantitative analysis that claims our resistance begins
with economic downturns shares more in common with the gaze of those
hired to dissect revolt than with the gaze of those who participate in
it. As summarized in 23 Theses Concerning Revolt, âToday all belong to
the ruling class who view their own lives from above.â
â Distri Josep Gardenyes
Which movements are unduly emphasized by claiming a starting date of
2008 to the current wave of resistance? The plaza occupation movement in
southern Europe and Occupy Wall Street in the US certainly benefit from
this framing. Both of these movements explicitly spoke the language of
anti-austerity and positioned themselves as popular responses to the
economic crisis, even though they both constituted, if not the outright
astroturfing of a movement, then certainly academic interventions whose
real revolutionary potential arose in those moments they were subverted
by their own participants.
In the Spanish state, the plaza occupation movement arose at a time when
neighborhood assemblies, affinity groups, and independent labor unions
were already developing a popular, combative response to the outrages of
capitalism, specifically breaking with the major âyellowâ unions that
had successfully operated as the managers of the working class since the
end of the fascist regime. The âIndignadosâ movement specifically
attempted to capture that terrain, strip it of an anticapitalist
analysis, pacify it, and shift it to the terrain of politics, where it
led to the formation of a new political party that now forms part of the
ruling coalition. All the revolutionary developments of this movement
came from those cities where radicals defeated the pacifying efforts of
would-be movement leaders. As for Occupy Wall Street, the most radical
developments came from Oakland and, on a smaller scale, other cities
that embraced the importance of an antiracist analysis over the populism
of the 99%, and that rejected the pacifism and democratic strictures
against freedom of action imposed by the organizers.
Here we glimpse another reactionary tendency of the quantitative
approach: a reticence to acknowledge the centrality of white supremacy
to capitalism. When the mainstream media analyze the rise of the far
Rightâor at least what passes for analysis with themâthey often code it
as sympathy for the âworking classâ. However, many sociological
anticapitalists have done the same thing, which is, again, sloppy. In
the US, it was Black workers who were most hurt by the forms of
deindustrialization that actually did occur, whereas largely white areas
of the South experienced an increasing industrialization. Explaining
white supremacy through an economic white anxiety is a canard that plays
into a normalization of said white supremacy. Yet some go even further,
decentering the antiracist character of the wave of rebellions that
swept the US, the UK, France, and other countries in 2020, portraying it
as a proletarian revolt in which questions of Blackness and
anti-Blackness were mere identity. (Obviously, class conflicts did run
white hot through the middle of that rebellion, but they cannot be
addressed except from the standpoint and history of Black revolt without
unwittingly aiding the efforts of the pacifiers.)
They reduce vast social conflicts stemming from oppressions that predate
capitalism to identity and claim identities are a mere product of class,
the only identity that they choose to naturalize, excising all of
history that cannot be told by the quantitative flow of capital. This is
the same white universalism of earlier generations of
revolutionaries-turned-reactionaries, such as the disgruntled white
Marxists who, no longer allowed to be the default revolutionary subject
due to the outrages of âidentity politics,â joined the Republican Party
to become the architects of the Culture War in the 1970s.
By identifying the roots of the ongoing rebellions in the earlier
experiences, from 1990 to 2006, that I just mentioned, the fact that the
smartest and fiercest resistance to capitalism is reacting largely to
capitalismâs colonial, white supremacist nature becomes undeniable.
Again, we see this distance between what people are insisting and
experiencing in the streets, and the objective explanation others try to
impose on the streets from outside and above. Of course, ideology is
strong enough that one could even venture into the streets and see only
what one wants, but what use is this to those who want to learn from and
extend revolts? What use is an insurrection if we donât feel its rage
and learn its secret history, if we strap it down, hook it up to an
engine, and harness its tremors to shake all the people who passed
through that crucible into their proper categories?
Ultimately, this is a failure we have already suffered from. Comrades of
the autonomous movements of the â60s and â70s have already told us that
their scientific assurance that capitalism was inevitably, mechanically
on its last legs contributed to their defeat and their inability to
pivot around their disappointments. We have read a similar decay of
assurance into disappointment in the revolutionary chronicles of the
early 20^(th) century. Shall we now theorize a post-late capitalism?
When does the millennium arrive this time, brother?
Historical memory can make the difference between a robust struggle and
one that is manipulated and waylaid. When we tell our history, we must
be sure to construct it in a way that makes it useful to us, that
reflects our own needs and experiences, rather than conforming to
ideologies that are incompatible with the reality in the streets.