The Spirit of the Internet Weekly

From ZNet

What’s Different,
What’s the Same,
What Do We Do?

By Michael Albert

Has the world profoundly altered and the overall context of activism changed fundamentally since September 11. I don’t think so.

The basic institutions of our societies are the same now as they were before 9/11. Capitalist ownership relations, corporate divisions of labor, markets, bourgeois states with their various party arrangements, obedient mass media, nuclear families, cultural communities often at hostile odds with one another, these are still the context in which we act.

The basic logic of dissent is also unchanged since 9/11. We choose issues to better the lot of suffering constituencies and to simultaneously increase prospects for more gains in the future. Short term, we raise social costs until elites agree to implement our demands or end policies we oppose. Longer term, we accumulate support and develop movement infrastructure and alternative institutions toward transforming society’s defining relations.

Before 9/11 and now too basic constituencies to organize derive from ownership relations, divisions of labor, cultural community allegiances, gender roles, and sexual preferences.

So what’s different?

We are at war. Or rather we are bombing rubble into ash while starving a country’s population. The U.S. is pursuing policies that could kill a million or more people in the next few months. Of course this places a huge immediate responsibility on us to act to stop the carnage.

Likewise Bush, Blair, and Co. are using fear and anger to ram home draconian and redistributive legislation, precisely in the same manner as was done throughout the Cold War, but much faster. Of course the scale of their hypocritical venality is awesome, and of course this requires our attention as well.

So we must relate to these new priorities, but there is some understandable debate about how. Do we drop everything else? What can we usefully do to end this war and reverse draconian and redistributive government attacks on working people?

The answer is that we can seek to greatly enlarge dissent and to give it a character that tells ruling elements, if you don’t stop your war, the price you will pay will be more than you are willing to bear.

But how can we impose such a price on our governments and the constituencies they primarily serve?

History suggests that we have trouble addressing this question. Some of us think when we reveal to them the scope of their policy’s injustice, elites’ own moral qualms can be the price that will move them. Some of us think that high numbers with high militancy seeking peace can be the price. But the truth is that Bush and Blair and Co. have no morals and can weather any narrow storm. What really catches their attention and can turn their priorities upside down is the threat of movements that not only increasingly oppose today’s war, but move on to oppose, as well, other instances of injustice, and, most threateningly, the basic conditions that breed injustice.

Warmakers make war not because they are sadists who love war, but to defend and enhance their position and power. They think twice about making war not because they get upset about the body count, and not because they are embarrassed by the size of opposition, but only when movements provoked by their war start to threaten the warmakers’ underlying position and power. They think twice, that is, when they realize that pursuing war has the opposite of their intended effect. Instead of serving their position and power, their war cuts their own throats. Then and only then, all things considered, they become inclined to stop. Many factors contribute including instability and opposition abroad, and our own activism in the U.S.

The point is, even for U.S. activists who have no other priority than to stop the war, the current situation calls not for ignoring all other issues and speaking only of war, and certainly not for toning down dissent, but for as many people as possible to be as visibly active and energetic at they are able to be, developing as broad a set of linkages between war opposition and other oppositions as they can possibly generate.

The current situation doesn’t entreat that those who are anti-corporate, or anti-racist, or anti-globalization or anti-death penalty, or anti-tax rip offs, or anti-undemocratic elections, shelve such focuses and become only anti-war. Quite the contrary, it entreats that anti-corporate folks, anti-globalization folks, anti-racist folks, and others with prior progressive commitments be more aggressively anti-corporate and all the rest, even as we also increase our effort to oppose the war. And it entreats for them to try to respectfully bring as many as people as possible who are becoming anti-war, anti-starvation, anti-foreign policy debacle, anti-what have you, into also becoming anti-corporate, etc., and vice versa, since attaining that kind of mutuality is precisely the trajectory of growing solidarity and diversifying focus that will most effectively compel a change in war and in other policies as well.

So what is different since 9/11 is not the ultimate focus of dissent, logic of dissent, or aim of dissent. What has significantly changed is instead: (1) The urgency of dissent specifically against the war and bombing, since the lives of millions of potentially starved souls are immediately at stake; (2) Some additional focuses of dissent including the draconian surveillance and other legislation and the “stimulus” boondoggle for the rich; and (3) The prospects for dissent, since, despite flag waving patriotic media, way more people than before 9/11 are now seriously open to discuss world affairs and activism.

In other words, this is a time for fighting against this war to save innumerable lives as well as prevent catastrophes of even greater proportion beyond Afghanistan. But it is also a time for reasserting our existing focuses and struggles. We should not be running from our earlier progressive priorities nor even just pausing them. We need to enlarge our on-going efforts and to link them to the anti-war effort. That's what will enhance all our prospects, anti-war and all others as well.

Is there a practical implication of all this that goes beyond urging the multi-issue mindset we should each individually embrace? I think we need a new Peace and Justice Coalition. Peace should mean no war, no imposed biological and chemical starvation, no mass policies of assault on populations, plus legal pursuit of and prosecution of all terrorists. Justice should mean rewriting the rules of economic and social exchange to redistribute power and income from the rich to the poor, and this should be so whether we are talking about international trade and globalization or about domestic stimulus and other policy.

Current U.S. policies could starve to death a million people in the next few months while simultaneously inducing all manner of reactionary trends in countries around the world as well as here at home. Surely we can envision the possible human consequences of all this sufficiently to galvanize our attention.

This is a time to fight war by whatever channels we can work through while creating a multi-issue, multi-tactic, popular and mass movement that sets aside squabbles for solidarity and that dispenses with doctrinaire ideology for plain talking, well thought out vision, program, and strategy.

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