But leftistly

Do tools have ideological content?

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Before the publication of something I wrote on Serbia’s student movement, editors at the London Review of Books cut a passage I quite liked. This is not a complaint, and their decision was not ideological — the sentences remained until the pages changed. This is it:

Students told me that their movement employed a ‘left-wing organisational model open to the many right-wing members of the student population’. (I’m not sure tactics and processes are inherently progressive or reactionary, but I understood what they meant.)

You may have detected the other reason the cut was justified. This fragment, on something I find quite fascinating, could be an entire essay. This is that little essay.

First, let’s go back to what happened in Serbia. After the collapse of the train station in Novi Sad, students stopped attending classes and formed assemblies that determined their political activities. These assemblies are horizontal and open to all (students), and democratic in that everyone who attends has an equal vote. But these assemblies, in Belgrade and everywhere else in the country, had plenty of right-wing kids in them. Some of them are using the student movement to try to push the country to the right.

As an organizational model and decision-making process, a permanent democratic assembly is something that anti-authoritarian leftists tend to use, so I did understand what the students meant. But I want to step aside from the Serbian case now, because this is an abstract debate. I am certainly not trying to quibble with those young people. They were speaking a language that most people understand. I want to think about the rules of that language.

Let’s take one of the most classically “left-wing” things you could do — the strike. Surely, workers using their collective power against the bosses is progressive. Well, during the administration of democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende, the CIA encouraged Chilean truckers to go on strike. This was a reactionary move, because the goal was not to empower the working class but to create the chaos necessary to justify military intervention. This intervention came in the form of the violent coup and Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. What about street protest? For a while, in certain parts of the world at least, this seemed a progressive thing to do. One of the brutal shocks of the 2010s was the reminder that reactionaries can do mass protest, too.¹ Ok, what about a riot, consisting of attacks on police? Like it or not, surely ACAB violence cannot be right-wing? Well — if, say, it is local ranchers in the Amazon killing the enforcement officers defending environmental reserves and indigenous communities (which is what these cowboys do, and they do call those officials cops) — then the story is different.

In Berlin last month I had an invigorating discussion with students who were too young to remember the cycle of protests that included Occupy Wall Street and the “Arab Spring” and continued intermittently throughout the decade. (The last time I was supposed to speak at a German university, the conference was cancelled because of my support for Palestine). Two old phrases bubbled to the top of that conversation: “the fetishization of form,” and “tactics without strategy.”²

Above, however, I have slightly confused discrete concepts. Strikes and protests and riots are tactics; that is distinct from an organizational form. Let’s consider a spectrum with two endpoints. On the “left,” the fully horizontal and one-person-one-vote grouping, and on the “right,” a hierarchically organized, disciplined, military-style formation with a clear commander. Surely leftists do not want a world in which people are born already-subservient to anybody else; they do not want a world of vast inequality; opposition to feudal hierarchies is one of the principles that gave birth to a “left” in the first place.

But leftists have certainly used tightly-organized command-and-control structures to push for socialist transformation or national liberation. Few would have said that Che Guevara or Frelimo were using “right-wing” organizational models. Indeed, in parts of the 1960s and 1970s, those movements were so automatically associated with socialist revolution that some First World leftists fetishized those guerrilla forms and practices without a clear idea of how they related to their own structural conditions.

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Back to the main question. Can a few fascists get together and plan a pogrom, but do it leftistly? If they are a leaderless collective and take votes, does that matter to anyone?

I think my position is already clear: Shapes do not have ideological content, and neither do tools. They may have associations, cultural residues, and their own history; but their content is a function of their relationship to concrete conditions in the larger system. Movements can be subjectively progressive (according to the beliefs of its members) or objectively progressive (this is not always the same thing), and they can choose whatever shapes and tools that might be appropriate (or deeply inappropriate) to their conditions.

The question of organizational form is more complicated because it is easier to change tactics than to change your shape. Historically, we have seen this problem emerge. An intensely disciplined, hierarchical organization can win state power and then retain its form; or, a fully horizontal and uncoordinated protest can flounder when representation is called for. And if a movement is really open to everyone, then it is always open to the right. One Serbian told me that if her enemies were smart enough, they would just send 20 people to join her neighborhood assembly and vote to abolish it.

These reflections reminded me of the book Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, so I asked Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes for his opinion. His reply:

Indeed, I struggle to think of any tactics that the left can use that the right couldn’t, or vice-versa. Where I’d say the difference comes in regard to strategy and organization is that the left is in principle more concerned with empowerment and participation than the right. And this is always a problem for the left in a way that it isn’t at all for the right: if we are committed to democracy and participation, what do we do about the fact that people might want something at odds with what we believe they should want?

Of course, the right might also want to use democracy, participation, assemblies etc. in situations where that furthers their goals; but if it ceases to do so, and they find themselves constrained to abandon them, they can do so without qualms, whereas the left could easily do the same, but not with a clear conscience, or not without being accused of contradiction.³

— Elsewhere in the Balkans —

You may have seen that Albanians are now protesting a real estate development imposed upon the country by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.⁴ We reached out to Bora Mema, member of the Lëvizja Bashkë party, who is in Tirana actively participating in the movement. She said that the “flamingo” movement also includes people who may vote right-wing or would not consider themselves leftists, but that the movement itself can be considered objectively left-leaning.

“The protest movement does not have an organized structure, as it consists of different social movements, collectives, and friend groups that came together quickly,” she said. “But over time, I think the rhetoric and alternatives offered by the protests have moved to the left. You can call it an environmental movement, which it is; but the people are chanting for a New Albania, chanting against oligarchy and for public beaches, and calling for an economic model that doesn’t favor billionaires.”

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1. I personally spent a lot of time documenting the ways that protest movements organized by leftists can be overtaken by reactionaries or generate right-wing outcomes.

2

My thanks to the Sozialistisch-Demokratischer Studierendenverband for the invitation. When If We Burn first came out, I was mostly discussing the protests of the 2010s with people who had lived through them and already had opinions on the revolts. It was fascinating to see a new generation view the work in an entirely different way, eager to learn for the first time the history of that decade.

3. In October, Haymarket Books will be publishing a new English-language edition of Rodrigo’s fantastic Do Transe à Vertigem.

4. The Serbian students themselves defeated an offensive Jared Kushner project.