It’s coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
that this ain’t exactly real,
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.It’s coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
What's this about - how can it possibly make sense to say that democracy is coming to the U.S.A.? And what does it have to do with the history of left-wing extremism?
Glad you asked.
The word 'left' - and related words like 'radical' - started to be used in politics in the eighteenth century, the period of the French Revolution and the American declaration of independence. What these words meant, back then, had to do with being in favour of democracy: if you were on the Left, you weren't happy with monarchy, aristocracy, hierarchy, tradition and so on. If you wanted democracy you were on the Left; if you thought that somebody else wanted too much democracy, you'd say they were on the radical Left.
In the mid-nineteenth century what Marx called "the question of property" began to be at the centre of political debate. The question was not whether citizens should be politically equal (that battle was in the process of being won) but whether they should be materially equal. For Marx this was related to the question of class power, and class struggle. Perhaps foreshortening the historical process slightly, Marx envisaged the confrontation between workers and bosses (proletariat and bourgeoisie) ending in the revolutionary victory of the workers, just as the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had ended in a bourgeois victory.
These are often seen as two very different political battles, but I would argue - as Ralph Miliband argued, and Alexis de Tocqueville before him - that the "question of property" was also the question of democracy: what the workers of Marx's time were demanding was, precisely, the right to manage their own work and their own livelihood, rather than being dependent on capitalists and subordinate to them. The battle of democracy had been won on one front; it shifted to another.
The record of socialism and Communism in the twentieth century was, it has to be said, mixed. On one hand, we can't deny that the defeat of the Nazi regime was very largely the achievement of Stalin's Red Army. On the other, if you had the choice you wouldn't want to be in Stalin's Red Army, or a citizen of Stalin's USSR for that matter. The total collapse of Communism as an economic and political system after 1989 told its own story: nobody believed in the system - or had done for some time - and they didn't believe in it because it didn't work. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Communism was to hold up the possibility of an alternative. For many years, governments in the West felt that they needed to make some concession to demands for workers' rights and socialised welfare, because the alternative might be an upheaval that could take their country into the Communist orbit. The rise of neo-liberalism coincides quite closely with the disappearance of the Communist bloc; I don't think it's a coincidence.
Be that as it may, throughout the 20th century the Communist bloc seemed to be - and claimed to be - the socialist alternative to capitalism, and it didn't look too inviting. Perhaps it was this perceived blockage to the left which led to the emergence of a third version of the Left: a Left which stressed individual freedom and creativity, which celebrated disrespect for authority and demanded the right to re-create everyday life. And this new Left - inventive, intransigent, confrontational, sometimes comical, sometimes alarming - did what the socialist Left had never achieved (at least in one country), immobilising France in a wildcat general strike and bringing it to the brink of revolution.
Perhaps more importantly, the tactics and ideas and attitude of this mid-20th-century Left - the creativity, the disrespect, the intransigence - have contributed some major innovations to the language of the mainstream Left, and they continue to do so. The Situationist approach to politics was echoed by Occupy: like the Situationists, the Occupy movement demanded the right to democratise the present moment, transforming everyday life into revolutionary festivity.
Can we fit this very different form of leftism into the same framework as the earlier ones? I htink we can. The English revolutionaries of 1649, the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the French revolutionaries of 1789 wanted political democracy, abolishing aristocratic rule. The revolutionaries of 1848, 1917, 1949 wanted economic democracy, abolishing the rule of capital.The Situationists in 1968 and Occupy in 2011-12 wanted democracy in an even more far-reaching form, abolishing all forms of unaccountable authority. It's a continuing story, and it hasn't ended yet.
Next week we'll be looking at how a similar movement played out in Italy, and - unhappily - how parts of the movement drifted into the blind alley of terrorism.
The word 'left' - and related words like 'radical' - started to be used in politics in the eighteenth century, the period of the French Revolution and the American declaration of independence. What these words meant, back then, had to do with being in favour of democracy: if you were on the Left, you weren't happy with monarchy, aristocracy, hierarchy, tradition and so on. If you wanted democracy you were on the Left; if you thought that somebody else wanted too much democracy, you'd say they were on the radical Left.
In the mid-nineteenth century what Marx called "the question of property" began to be at the centre of political debate. The question was not whether citizens should be politically equal (that battle was in the process of being won) but whether they should be materially equal. For Marx this was related to the question of class power, and class struggle. Perhaps foreshortening the historical process slightly, Marx envisaged the confrontation between workers and bosses (proletariat and bourgeoisie) ending in the revolutionary victory of the workers, just as the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had ended in a bourgeois victory.
These are often seen as two very different political battles, but I would argue - as Ralph Miliband argued, and Alexis de Tocqueville before him - that the "question of property" was also the question of democracy: what the workers of Marx's time were demanding was, precisely, the right to manage their own work and their own livelihood, rather than being dependent on capitalists and subordinate to them. The battle of democracy had been won on one front; it shifted to another.
The record of socialism and Communism in the twentieth century was, it has to be said, mixed. On one hand, we can't deny that the defeat of the Nazi regime was very largely the achievement of Stalin's Red Army. On the other, if you had the choice you wouldn't want to be in Stalin's Red Army, or a citizen of Stalin's USSR for that matter. The total collapse of Communism as an economic and political system after 1989 told its own story: nobody believed in the system - or had done for some time - and they didn't believe in it because it didn't work. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Communism was to hold up the possibility of an alternative. For many years, governments in the West felt that they needed to make some concession to demands for workers' rights and socialised welfare, because the alternative might be an upheaval that could take their country into the Communist orbit. The rise of neo-liberalism coincides quite closely with the disappearance of the Communist bloc; I don't think it's a coincidence.
Be that as it may, throughout the 20th century the Communist bloc seemed to be - and claimed to be - the socialist alternative to capitalism, and it didn't look too inviting. Perhaps it was this perceived blockage to the left which led to the emergence of a third version of the Left: a Left which stressed individual freedom and creativity, which celebrated disrespect for authority and demanded the right to re-create everyday life. And this new Left - inventive, intransigent, confrontational, sometimes comical, sometimes alarming - did what the socialist Left had never achieved (at least in one country), immobilising France in a wildcat general strike and bringing it to the brink of revolution.
Perhaps more importantly, the tactics and ideas and attitude of this mid-20th-century Left - the creativity, the disrespect, the intransigence - have contributed some major innovations to the language of the mainstream Left, and they continue to do so. The Situationist approach to politics was echoed by Occupy: like the Situationists, the Occupy movement demanded the right to democratise the present moment, transforming everyday life into revolutionary festivity.
Can we fit this very different form of leftism into the same framework as the earlier ones? I htink we can. The English revolutionaries of 1649, the American revolutionaries of 1776 and the French revolutionaries of 1789 wanted political democracy, abolishing aristocratic rule. The revolutionaries of 1848, 1917, 1949 wanted economic democracy, abolishing the rule of capital.The Situationists in 1968 and Occupy in 2011-12 wanted democracy in an even more far-reaching form, abolishing all forms of unaccountable authority. It's a continuing story, and it hasn't ended yet.
Next week we'll be looking at how a similar movement played out in Italy, and - unhappily - how parts of the movement drifted into the blind alley of terrorism.
Play us out, Leonard:
From the church where the outcasts can hidefrom the Masque where the blood is dignified
like the fingers on your handlike an hourglass of sand
we can separate but not divide.
And I know your baby’s missingbut we sighted her today,
she was cleaning her machine-gun,she was waving her beret:Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
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