The Shock Doctrine of the Left
(Radical Futures) by Graham Jones
(2018).
[My notes appear in brackets-JR]
_________
Introduction
....Podemos ....Syriza
[Organizations to be admired and emulated, apparently. A classless left conglomeration employed to rationalize concessions to the E.U. ruling class in Berlin.]
....Some feared that starting another top-down organization would repeat the failures of the anti-austerity movement; others worried that a lack of leadership could see another Occupy-like mobilization that created no lasting institution. Some railed against leftist language which alienated the majority, while others feared that a lack of analysis of capitalism would lead to a movement that forever reproduced it. Some objected to the hostile location of a university building. Others were just thankful we had booked a wheelchair accessible venue.
....Chaos is not randomness – it is extreme sensitivity. Where there is disorder in a dynamic body – like a human body, a city, the earth's ecosystem – small changes can cause anything from no effect to earth-shatteringly large outcomes. Its future is still, however, determined by its past, but at a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict.
....neoliberalism had come to power through manipulating chaos.
....Milton Friedman
....right wingers learned to use these moments to their advantage.
....Terror attacks, natural disasters, civil wars and economic crashes have all
been used to enact changes far beyond what would normally be possible.
[Policies and programs of the state whose interests represent the dictatorship of capital are not implemented by an academic cabal. Limiting austerity, warmaking, and anti-labor offensives that have been pursued by the bourgeoisie internationally for four decades to products of a think tank in "Chicago" is both incorrect and a disorienting approach to class reality. It leaves workers and farmers unprepared for the self-activity of party-building and a program of independent labor political action. The revolutionary socialist party, and not nostrums cooked up at all-night campus bull sessions, is the irreplaceable instrument in organizing our class to overthrow the dictatorship of capital.]
....We can embed our visions in a network of organizations; align the left around a preparation for shocks; and in those moments enact rapid, irreversible change.
....to move beyond reactive mobilizations and towards an active collective project.
[Is the program of the international petty bourgeois left (evidently populated by academics, professional squatters, and small-bore NGO potentates) to gird their loins for the next crisis? With cadre of zero social weight, will these meritocratic engineers use the crisis to shove tens of millions of workers into carrying out their blueprints? And what if the laboring masses reject their schemas? What corrective shocks to the body of labor will be employed to carry out such doctrine?]
....people come together across wide areas demanding social justice for oppressed people, restructuring our movements away from domination by the white, the male, the able-bodied, the neurotypical, the heterosexual, the cisgender.
....Are we actively building an entirely new world today that we hope can take over tomorrow? Are we healing ourselves and our communities from oppression, marginalization and exploitation? Or are we taming those problems through incremental changes enacted by the state? These four categories – Smashing, Building, Healing and Taming – will be used as lenses through which to examine how complex systems operate, while remaining relevant to political action.
[Jargon and obscurantist euphemisms used to paint-over the true relationship of class forces in any struggle, much less an anti-working class program of healing via smashing, is not a road to workers power. It is a road to self-satisfaction by a small coterie of self-selected leaders who, when their schemas fail, can happily blame the poor, dumb, racist, neurally typical workers for their fiasco's defeat.]
....From this we can develop a strategic framework that incorporates these different logics, while mitigating their failures. This meta-strategy is what I call the Shock Doctrine of the Left.
....language activates more than just definitions; it triggers emotions and networks of embodied knowledge. A word like 'system' links into such technical language as process, error, diagram, logic, administrator. In contrast, a word like 'body' will tend to trigger evocative and widely understood concepts like human, naked, sex, heart, soul, death. By using this more vivid, bodily language, we can make analyses more emotionally engaging. I propose to use an overarching metaphor of the body for this reason. Our existing bodily experience will be used to introduce new concepts. Where possible, language is re-framed: 'systems' become bodies, 'trajectories' become paths that we walk down, 'bifurcations' become forks in that path, and so on.
[No amount of absurdly manipulative nomenclature, aimed at turning democratic discussion away from clarity and toward acquiescence to our privileged left overlord, can shield the fact that this is just another get-rich-quick scheme, its actual political content a whateverist concoction cutting across class lines and ultimately aimed at saving our city, our country. It's the same social democratic class collaboration that led to defeat after defeat for our class in the 20th century. The proletariat can do without more Menshevism with a human face.]
________
1 The Body Model
....The human becomes part of a relationship, nested within a family, which is within a community, which is within a town or city, which is part of a global intercity network, which is part of the earth. In the same way, the human can become part of an organization, which is part of a local coalition, in a city-wide social movement, itself part of a national uprising, and a global revolution. A whole body can become a part of a larger body. This nesting of bodies-within-bodies-within-bodies allows us to picture the linkages between psychological, social and global organization.
....The body model of 'parts–relations–wholes, pasts–presents–futures' can be used as a tool for engaging in social struggle. When planning action, mapping the parts and relations within our opponents can highlight their weaknesses and our potential allies. When building organizations, a focus on how parts are interacting can inform how we design and structure bodies to create the powers we want to emerge. In mediating interpersonal disputes, and unlearning and healing from oppressions, it can help to understand how bodies on divergent paths have created conflict, and to ensure that the needs of all bodies affected are taken into account, in all their differences of experience and knowledge. And in navigating the corridors of power, it can help us understand how and why our paths can be corrupted, and what we can do to prevent this.
....every body is an organizer
....We are born into social bodies with histories that guide, constrain and empower us. Structures of oppression, poverty, neoliberal ideology, 'that is just the way things are'; all are the memory of bodies, of the clashes of the past, embedded in social and psychological structure. And yet it is we who reproduce this, in our individual and collective behaviour, in every moment. We create the present which will be the next generation's past, shaping the future for ourselves and for every generation to come.
....Making people aware of this power, and equipping them with the skills to use it, should be the focus of the left.
....An organization that is currently disconnected from social movements can become revolutionary, such as how churches formed the backbone of the civil rights movement. A whole city can become a revolutionary body, like the contemporary municipal movements in Spain, or a cross-country network of bodies like the Venezuelan system of communal councils.
[Municipal councils and communal councils in both Spain and Venezuela have been promoted for two decades by the revolt-without-taking-power wing of the left intelligencia, just as Chomsky and his ilk used to promote the Zapatistas. These are all anti-working class nostrums aimed at thwarting independent labor political action and the line of march toward workers power. They are presented as more 'realistic.' The workers of the world have been dying by inches thanks to the 'realism' of their misleaders.]
Further Reading
The Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi provides an overview of the complex systems concepts which underlie the rest of this book. Political Affect by John Protevi translates the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari into complex systems terms, using the similar concept of 'bodies politic' to analyse events like Hurricane Katrina and the Columbine massacre. Process-Relational Philosophy by Robert Mesle is an accessible introduction to Alfred North Whitehead, whose 'philosophy of organism' shares aspects of our body model – the notion of 'concrescence' for example reflects the synthesis of past, present and future. Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science by Alexander Bogdanov was an early attempt (by a rival of Lenin's) to adapt Marxism towards a systems perspective similar to ours, and a precursor of today's complex systems theory. The Entropy of Capitalism by Robert Biel is in contrast one of the only sustained applications of complex systems ideas to contemporary Marxist analysis.
[The only moralizing habits Jones leaves out of this constellation of utopian structural sociology are vegetarianism and how to make one's own compost. But seriously, this low level grasping at ideas from academia is another bitter gift of Stalinism, which drew a curtain of suspicion over the hard-won body of thought called scientific socialism. So we are left with a reading list crowned by the god-builder and blood-transfusion crackpot Bogdanov! The weekly meetings at the local pub, promoted at the end of this chapter, must be something to behold.]
____________
2 Smashing
....using disruptive actions to create our own chaos, as the initial spark of an accelerator of movement growth, to feed larger and larger shocks.
....left in Britain likes to focus on marches ending with long rallies, before going home. These are not necessarily useless, but alone they are. If these mobilizations were used to draw people into workshops teaching them new skills of self-organization and direct action, forming new organizations on the spot, this momentary empowerment could be made to last. Big central London marches could be the engine to accelerate swarms of action across the country.
....Compare this to the Russian revolutions of 1917. A network of Soviets – workers' councils – was already established prior to the October insurrection, providing an infrastructural vehicle which could take over governance. This body-of-bodies was therefore one of the 'initial conditions' which the chaos of the revolution could quickly realign around.
It is clear then why, with the collapse of the neoliberal order, we have seen such growth in the poles of both socialism and fascism. Shock in other words forces people to 'get off the fence', and this can increase public support for our movement, if we have prepared the ground. We have little control over when many such shocks will occur. To create an active and not simply reactive strategy therefore, we need to be able to plan our own chaos.
(Radical Futures) by Graham Jones
(2018).
[My notes appear in brackets-JR]
_________
Introduction
....Podemos ....Syriza
[Organizations to be admired and emulated, apparently. A classless left conglomeration employed to rationalize concessions to the E.U. ruling class in Berlin.]
....Some feared that starting another top-down organization would repeat the failures of the anti-austerity movement; others worried that a lack of leadership could see another Occupy-like mobilization that created no lasting institution. Some railed against leftist language which alienated the majority, while others feared that a lack of analysis of capitalism would lead to a movement that forever reproduced it. Some objected to the hostile location of a university building. Others were just thankful we had booked a wheelchair accessible venue.
....Chaos is not randomness – it is extreme sensitivity. Where there is disorder in a dynamic body – like a human body, a city, the earth's ecosystem – small changes can cause anything from no effect to earth-shatteringly large outcomes. Its future is still, however, determined by its past, but at a level of complexity that makes it impossible to predict.
....neoliberalism had come to power through manipulating chaos.
....Milton Friedman
....right wingers learned to use these moments to their advantage.
....Terror attacks, natural disasters, civil wars and economic crashes have all
been used to enact changes far beyond what would normally be possible.
[Policies and programs of the state whose interests represent the dictatorship of capital are not implemented by an academic cabal. Limiting austerity, warmaking, and anti-labor offensives that have been pursued by the bourgeoisie internationally for four decades to products of a think tank in "Chicago" is both incorrect and a disorienting approach to class reality. It leaves workers and farmers unprepared for the self-activity of party-building and a program of independent labor political action. The revolutionary socialist party, and not nostrums cooked up at all-night campus bull sessions, is the irreplaceable instrument in organizing our class to overthrow the dictatorship of capital.]
....We can embed our visions in a network of organizations; align the left around a preparation for shocks; and in those moments enact rapid, irreversible change.
....to move beyond reactive mobilizations and towards an active collective project.
[Is the program of the international petty bourgeois left (evidently populated by academics, professional squatters, and small-bore NGO potentates) to gird their loins for the next crisis? With cadre of zero social weight, will these meritocratic engineers use the crisis to shove tens of millions of workers into carrying out their blueprints? And what if the laboring masses reject their schemas? What corrective shocks to the body of labor will be employed to carry out such doctrine?]
....people come together across wide areas demanding social justice for oppressed people, restructuring our movements away from domination by the white, the male, the able-bodied, the neurotypical, the heterosexual, the cisgender.
....Are we actively building an entirely new world today that we hope can take over tomorrow? Are we healing ourselves and our communities from oppression, marginalization and exploitation? Or are we taming those problems through incremental changes enacted by the state? These four categories – Smashing, Building, Healing and Taming – will be used as lenses through which to examine how complex systems operate, while remaining relevant to political action.
[Jargon and obscurantist euphemisms used to paint-over the true relationship of class forces in any struggle, much less an anti-working class program of healing via smashing, is not a road to workers power. It is a road to self-satisfaction by a small coterie of self-selected leaders who, when their schemas fail, can happily blame the poor, dumb, racist, neurally typical workers for their fiasco's defeat.]
....From this we can develop a strategic framework that incorporates these different logics, while mitigating their failures. This meta-strategy is what I call the Shock Doctrine of the Left.
....language activates more than just definitions; it triggers emotions and networks of embodied knowledge. A word like 'system' links into such technical language as process, error, diagram, logic, administrator. In contrast, a word like 'body' will tend to trigger evocative and widely understood concepts like human, naked, sex, heart, soul, death. By using this more vivid, bodily language, we can make analyses more emotionally engaging. I propose to use an overarching metaphor of the body for this reason. Our existing bodily experience will be used to introduce new concepts. Where possible, language is re-framed: 'systems' become bodies, 'trajectories' become paths that we walk down, 'bifurcations' become forks in that path, and so on.
[No amount of absurdly manipulative nomenclature, aimed at turning democratic discussion away from clarity and toward acquiescence to our privileged left overlord, can shield the fact that this is just another get-rich-quick scheme, its actual political content a whateverist concoction cutting across class lines and ultimately aimed at saving our city, our country. It's the same social democratic class collaboration that led to defeat after defeat for our class in the 20th century. The proletariat can do without more Menshevism with a human face.]
________
1 The Body Model
....The human becomes part of a relationship, nested within a family, which is within a community, which is within a town or city, which is part of a global intercity network, which is part of the earth. In the same way, the human can become part of an organization, which is part of a local coalition, in a city-wide social movement, itself part of a national uprising, and a global revolution. A whole body can become a part of a larger body. This nesting of bodies-within-bodies-within-bodies allows us to picture the linkages between psychological, social and global organization.
....The body model of 'parts–relations–wholes, pasts–presents–futures' can be used as a tool for engaging in social struggle. When planning action, mapping the parts and relations within our opponents can highlight their weaknesses and our potential allies. When building organizations, a focus on how parts are interacting can inform how we design and structure bodies to create the powers we want to emerge. In mediating interpersonal disputes, and unlearning and healing from oppressions, it can help to understand how bodies on divergent paths have created conflict, and to ensure that the needs of all bodies affected are taken into account, in all their differences of experience and knowledge. And in navigating the corridors of power, it can help us understand how and why our paths can be corrupted, and what we can do to prevent this.
....every body is an organizer
....We are born into social bodies with histories that guide, constrain and empower us. Structures of oppression, poverty, neoliberal ideology, 'that is just the way things are'; all are the memory of bodies, of the clashes of the past, embedded in social and psychological structure. And yet it is we who reproduce this, in our individual and collective behaviour, in every moment. We create the present which will be the next generation's past, shaping the future for ourselves and for every generation to come.
....Making people aware of this power, and equipping them with the skills to use it, should be the focus of the left.
....An organization that is currently disconnected from social movements can become revolutionary, such as how churches formed the backbone of the civil rights movement. A whole city can become a revolutionary body, like the contemporary municipal movements in Spain, or a cross-country network of bodies like the Venezuelan system of communal councils.
[Municipal councils and communal councils in both Spain and Venezuela have been promoted for two decades by the revolt-without-taking-power wing of the left intelligencia, just as Chomsky and his ilk used to promote the Zapatistas. These are all anti-working class nostrums aimed at thwarting independent labor political action and the line of march toward workers power. They are presented as more 'realistic.' The workers of the world have been dying by inches thanks to the 'realism' of their misleaders.]
Further Reading
The Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi provides an overview of the complex systems concepts which underlie the rest of this book. Political Affect by John Protevi translates the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari into complex systems terms, using the similar concept of 'bodies politic' to analyse events like Hurricane Katrina and the Columbine massacre. Process-Relational Philosophy by Robert Mesle is an accessible introduction to Alfred North Whitehead, whose 'philosophy of organism' shares aspects of our body model – the notion of 'concrescence' for example reflects the synthesis of past, present and future. Tektology: The Universal Organizational Science by Alexander Bogdanov was an early attempt (by a rival of Lenin's) to adapt Marxism towards a systems perspective similar to ours, and a precursor of today's complex systems theory. The Entropy of Capitalism by Robert Biel is in contrast one of the only sustained applications of complex systems ideas to contemporary Marxist analysis.
[The only moralizing habits Jones leaves out of this constellation of utopian structural sociology are vegetarianism and how to make one's own compost. But seriously, this low level grasping at ideas from academia is another bitter gift of Stalinism, which drew a curtain of suspicion over the hard-won body of thought called scientific socialism. So we are left with a reading list crowned by the god-builder and blood-transfusion crackpot Bogdanov! The weekly meetings at the local pub, promoted at the end of this chapter, must be something to behold.]
____________
2 Smashing
....using disruptive actions to create our own chaos, as the initial spark of an accelerator of movement growth, to feed larger and larger shocks.
....left in Britain likes to focus on marches ending with long rallies, before going home. These are not necessarily useless, but alone they are. If these mobilizations were used to draw people into workshops teaching them new skills of self-organization and direct action, forming new organizations on the spot, this momentary empowerment could be made to last. Big central London marches could be the engine to accelerate swarms of action across the country.
....Compare this to the Russian revolutions of 1917. A network of Soviets – workers' councils – was already established prior to the October insurrection, providing an infrastructural vehicle which could take over governance. This body-of-bodies was therefore one of the 'initial conditions' which the chaos of the revolution could quickly realign around.
It is clear then why, with the collapse of the neoliberal order, we have seen such growth in the poles of both socialism and fascism. Shock in other words forces people to 'get off the fence', and this can increase public support for our movement, if we have prepared the ground. We have little control over when many such shocks will occur. To create an active and not simply reactive strategy therefore, we need to be able to plan our own chaos.
[The only cohort in politics today promoting the idea that racist and fascist forces are on the rise is the petty bourgeois left. In the U.S., every time a Republican candidate is elected president, hey-presto fascism is here!]
....The 'Stop the War' movement against the invasion of Iraq brought millions of people onto the streets. It included the largest protest in British history, and walkouts in schools, universities and workplaces. So why did it fail in its ultimate goal? In his book Rebel Cities, David Harvey argues that the key to successful mass action is found in disrupting urban processes, as witnessed in the effectiveness of transport and logistics strikes:
Jane McAlevey shows in her book No Shortcuts how those unions that take regular militant worker-led strike action to disrupt businesses get far more transformative results than those focused on closed-door negotiations. The workers are the parts of the workplace body that maintain it through their interactions, so a collective stoppage effectively kills the business.
....Mockery can be a powerful tool, but too often it remains merely symbolic – such as the liberal US comedians who failed to harm the rise of Donald Trump.
["Harm the rise" of Trump? Clearly it is for Jones the Republicans in the U.S. who cry out for defeat, and not capitalism, capitalists, and the dictatorship of capital. Harming the rise of any bourgeois politician is a dead-end: the bourgeoisie has ten thousand more Clintons, Trumps, and Sanders to step up and take over. Jones' politics are home-town in their horizon; Londonism, not internationalism.]
....Returning to 'Stop the War', action that directly targeted the metabolism of the state war-machine was minimal and ad hoc, the movement's leadership largely not supporting escalation. The strategy seemed to be to put pressure on the government through the sheer weight of public opinion. This can work, as politicians need popularity to win elections and keep their jobs. But in this case, it was clear when the war began, one month after the historic protest, that this strategy had failed. Alternative points of leverage would have needed to be found. Walkouts were symbolically powerful but did not cause enough disruption to the metabolism of war; sabotages in weapons factories, occupations of arms dealers, and blockades of ports might have been a different matter.
....We shouldn't discourage organic leaders in order to have equality in disempowerment; we should go out of our way to empower those who are less
decentralization not through destroying our own nodes of power but by massively proliferating them.
....If, however, we can absorb that released energy and feed it back into creating further shock, then we have a consistent engine, which I call an accelerator.
It involves mapping the bodies around us – their parts, relations and wholes, their paths and speeds – and developing interventions for altering them to our advantage. This allows us to expand 'acceleration' from a state-focused strategy (e.g. investing in technology), to one in which interventions can be made in bodies at any scale. Such analyses could also lead us to slow certain processes, or to accelerate not their growth but their collapse.
....New and existing parts – ideas, skills, interests – are combined to create new whole abilities, new powers – how to organize a strike, or a public assembly, or build a local campaign.
....If, following a shock, we are able to guide people towards friendly, accessible and holistic training, providing them with all the basic tools they need to keep organizing, then we stand a better chance of getting more sustainable results from waves of mobilization.
[The whole history of the middle class left refutes these self-important and egotistical daydreams. The UK's pro-Hamas pro-Assad Stop the War Coalition is not an incubator for local "accelerationist" cadre who will disrupt the urban "metabolism." Stop the War leaders have no interest in giving organizational space to competitors. Like Momentum, StW is clogged with people who think it's been a good day when they can buttonhole someone and tell them about the pivotal role of Jews in the slave trade.
["Activism" is an endless Groundhog Day that demoralizes anarcho-liberal opportunists. Attracted by the idea that they can improve their life styles by being a do-gooder, burn-out is the only climax.
[The most weighty and "transformative" political movements in the U.S. were proletarian through-and-through. The building of the CIO in 1933-1948 was led by seasoned militants from earlier labor struggles. The subsequent mass proletarian civil rights movement stood on the shoulders of the CIO's rank-and-file leadership. These achievements paved the way for antiwar and women's movements in which bourgeois figures and Democratic Party hacks could not dominate. A broadening revolutionary leadership could have been built out of these struggles but for the corrupting impact of Stalinism internationally.
[Jones paints pictures in this chapter of massive disruptions of logistics and everyday like not for rulers but for workers. To what end? Making the ruling class swear-off Milton Friedman and embrace - what?
[These are political leaps in imagination are a lovely example of activism completely separated from working class reality. Jones can spend the rest of his life sucking these nostrums out of his thumb and demanding his friends join him in jumping over their own heads. It's fun and disruptive and completing reassuring to the class enemy.]
___________
3 Building
....create the kind of resilient, large-scale, long-term bodies needed to replace dominant powers.
[With their own directing authority?]
....if we want a world of workplaces owned and run cooperatively, of political decision-making power in local community hands, we stand a much better chance if this is already being built in time for social shocks.
[A collection of progressive NGOs and recycled clothing cooperatives prepared to step in master the world market after a hurricane or stock market hiccup? ]
....creation and growth of alternatives
....coalition
....workers' cooperative
....create the kind of resilient, large-scale, long-term bodies needed to replace dominant powers.
....The DNA of a social movement organization can be broken down into Story, Strategy and Structure. Story is the situation that the group is fighting against and what it is fighting for. Strategy is what concrete interventions the organization will take to bring about that vision. And Structure details the formal aspects of the organization that people need in order to participate – agreed principles, membership rules, democratic processes and so on. These core elements must be clear, memorable and accessible. It is essentially another way of mapping bodies: the relations between people within an organization, the relations between organizations in a social movement, and the relations between a movement and the broader social context. In contrast to this detailed DNA, Occupy was incredibly simple: a name, a tactic of occupying public squares, and the 'We Are the 99%' identity. This allowed it to spread rapidly and virally, and for it to adapt to varying geographical and social contexts. But it also meant that there was little to stabilize the different groups around, no shared goal or long-term strategy. Camps developed in incompatible directions, some liberal and pro-electoral, others radical and favouring militant direct action. Fractures within camps make synchronization between camps in various locations more difficult, and prevent a lasting global institution from forming.
[The dead-end of "Occupy" and its unscientific, emotionalized, and self-righteous understand of this epoch is correctly analyzed here.]
________
4 Healing
....The landscape, too, functions as part of the extended mind, constantly reminding of the past. Yet collective traumas also become focal points, which a community can come together around and create new healing relationships, such as the 'disaster communism' of self-organized aid that follows in the aftermath of events like Hurricane Sandy.
[So-called self-organized aid in the face of hurricanes requires first that workers and farmers have state power. Otherwise it is middle class charity work. Look at the United Way of the Red Cross].
....Our vision of the future likewise has power over us. If we believe there is 'no alternative' to neoliberalism, we lose all reason to fight. If we fear the consequences of an action, we are less likely to do it. When we are already on a particular path – our career, family, friendships – then options are judged against those existing futures. If it does not offer clear relation to our hopes and desires, an option will seem less relevant to our lives, and we are less likely to engage. The futures we see in the present set us on a path to creating them, but can
also obscure alternative possibilities.
....police then act as the white blood cells of the capitalist body. Activated at any sign of disorder, and using 'lawful' repression – such as protecting private property or 'public decency' – they cleanse the social body of this entropic population. Prison – as well as death from violent policing – produces a cycle of further community trauma, breaking up families and friends and local ties of support, putting further lives into chaos, pushing people closer towards homelessness, drug addiction and imprisonment. Once marginalized, people can become quickly entangled in loops that flatten difference from social norms and accelerate collapse in their ability to survive.
....In her book The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks argues that if we aim to create a future free from the drudgery of wage labour, we cannot simply argue that, for example, 'care work is work' or 'sex work is work' and imply they should be valued for that reason alone, because that still entails that work is inherently valuable. Our alternative definition of work in contrast shows that work is not inherently valuable ....
....Work is 'bullshit' to the extent that it works against this resilience or health. Digging a hole and filling it in may be equivalent work in energy terms to helping bathe an elderly patient, but the former is not essential to the creation of resilient bodies like the latter is. We need food; we do not need advertising or management consultancy. And we cannot just say that reproducing a body is valuable work, if that body (such as a corporation) is then destroying others through its practices.
....By foregrounding both the autonomy of cognition and the felt experience of consciousness, the Shock Doctrine of the Left wards off tyrannical uses of the strategy.
....The 'Stop the War' movement against the invasion of Iraq brought millions of people onto the streets. It included the largest protest in British history, and walkouts in schools, universities and workplaces. So why did it fail in its ultimate goal? In his book Rebel Cities, David Harvey argues that the key to successful mass action is found in disrupting urban processes, as witnessed in the effectiveness of transport and logistics strikes:
Jane McAlevey shows in her book No Shortcuts how those unions that take regular militant worker-led strike action to disrupt businesses get far more transformative results than those focused on closed-door negotiations. The workers are the parts of the workplace body that maintain it through their interactions, so a collective stoppage effectively kills the business.
....Mockery can be a powerful tool, but too often it remains merely symbolic – such as the liberal US comedians who failed to harm the rise of Donald Trump.
["Harm the rise" of Trump? Clearly it is for Jones the Republicans in the U.S. who cry out for defeat, and not capitalism, capitalists, and the dictatorship of capital. Harming the rise of any bourgeois politician is a dead-end: the bourgeoisie has ten thousand more Clintons, Trumps, and Sanders to step up and take over. Jones' politics are home-town in their horizon; Londonism, not internationalism.]
....Returning to 'Stop the War', action that directly targeted the metabolism of the state war-machine was minimal and ad hoc, the movement's leadership largely not supporting escalation. The strategy seemed to be to put pressure on the government through the sheer weight of public opinion. This can work, as politicians need popularity to win elections and keep their jobs. But in this case, it was clear when the war began, one month after the historic protest, that this strategy had failed. Alternative points of leverage would have needed to be found. Walkouts were symbolically powerful but did not cause enough disruption to the metabolism of war; sabotages in weapons factories, occupations of arms dealers, and blockades of ports might have been a different matter.
....We shouldn't discourage organic leaders in order to have equality in disempowerment; we should go out of our way to empower those who are less
decentralization not through destroying our own nodes of power but by massively proliferating them.
....If, however, we can absorb that released energy and feed it back into creating further shock, then we have a consistent engine, which I call an accelerator.
It involves mapping the bodies around us – their parts, relations and wholes, their paths and speeds – and developing interventions for altering them to our advantage. This allows us to expand 'acceleration' from a state-focused strategy (e.g. investing in technology), to one in which interventions can be made in bodies at any scale. Such analyses could also lead us to slow certain processes, or to accelerate not their growth but their collapse.
....New and existing parts – ideas, skills, interests – are combined to create new whole abilities, new powers – how to organize a strike, or a public assembly, or build a local campaign.
....If, following a shock, we are able to guide people towards friendly, accessible and holistic training, providing them with all the basic tools they need to keep organizing, then we stand a better chance of getting more sustainable results from waves of mobilization.
[The whole history of the middle class left refutes these self-important and egotistical daydreams. The UK's pro-Hamas pro-Assad Stop the War Coalition is not an incubator for local "accelerationist" cadre who will disrupt the urban "metabolism." Stop the War leaders have no interest in giving organizational space to competitors. Like Momentum, StW is clogged with people who think it's been a good day when they can buttonhole someone and tell them about the pivotal role of Jews in the slave trade.
["Activism" is an endless Groundhog Day that demoralizes anarcho-liberal opportunists. Attracted by the idea that they can improve their life styles by being a do-gooder, burn-out is the only climax.
[The most weighty and "transformative" political movements in the U.S. were proletarian through-and-through. The building of the CIO in 1933-1948 was led by seasoned militants from earlier labor struggles. The subsequent mass proletarian civil rights movement stood on the shoulders of the CIO's rank-and-file leadership. These achievements paved the way for antiwar and women's movements in which bourgeois figures and Democratic Party hacks could not dominate. A broadening revolutionary leadership could have been built out of these struggles but for the corrupting impact of Stalinism internationally.
[Jones paints pictures in this chapter of massive disruptions of logistics and everyday like not for rulers but for workers. To what end? Making the ruling class swear-off Milton Friedman and embrace - what?
[These are political leaps in imagination are a lovely example of activism completely separated from working class reality. Jones can spend the rest of his life sucking these nostrums out of his thumb and demanding his friends join him in jumping over their own heads. It's fun and disruptive and completing reassuring to the class enemy.]
___________
3 Building
....create the kind of resilient, large-scale, long-term bodies needed to replace dominant powers.
[With their own directing authority?]
....if we want a world of workplaces owned and run cooperatively, of political decision-making power in local community hands, we stand a much better chance if this is already being built in time for social shocks.
[A collection of progressive NGOs and recycled clothing cooperatives prepared to step in master the world market after a hurricane or stock market hiccup? ]
....creation and growth of alternatives
....coalition
....workers' cooperative
....create the kind of resilient, large-scale, long-term bodies needed to replace dominant powers.
....The DNA of a social movement organization can be broken down into Story, Strategy and Structure. Story is the situation that the group is fighting against and what it is fighting for. Strategy is what concrete interventions the organization will take to bring about that vision. And Structure details the formal aspects of the organization that people need in order to participate – agreed principles, membership rules, democratic processes and so on. These core elements must be clear, memorable and accessible. It is essentially another way of mapping bodies: the relations between people within an organization, the relations between organizations in a social movement, and the relations between a movement and the broader social context. In contrast to this detailed DNA, Occupy was incredibly simple: a name, a tactic of occupying public squares, and the 'We Are the 99%' identity. This allowed it to spread rapidly and virally, and for it to adapt to varying geographical and social contexts. But it also meant that there was little to stabilize the different groups around, no shared goal or long-term strategy. Camps developed in incompatible directions, some liberal and pro-electoral, others radical and favouring militant direct action. Fractures within camps make synchronization between camps in various locations more difficult, and prevent a lasting global institution from forming.
[The dead-end of "Occupy" and its unscientific, emotionalized, and self-righteous understand of this epoch is correctly analyzed here.]
________
4 Healing
....The landscape, too, functions as part of the extended mind, constantly reminding of the past. Yet collective traumas also become focal points, which a community can come together around and create new healing relationships, such as the 'disaster communism' of self-organized aid that follows in the aftermath of events like Hurricane Sandy.
[So-called self-organized aid in the face of hurricanes requires first that workers and farmers have state power. Otherwise it is middle class charity work. Look at the United Way of the Red Cross].
....Our vision of the future likewise has power over us. If we believe there is 'no alternative' to neoliberalism, we lose all reason to fight. If we fear the consequences of an action, we are less likely to do it. When we are already on a particular path – our career, family, friendships – then options are judged against those existing futures. If it does not offer clear relation to our hopes and desires, an option will seem less relevant to our lives, and we are less likely to engage. The futures we see in the present set us on a path to creating them, but can
also obscure alternative possibilities.
....police then act as the white blood cells of the capitalist body. Activated at any sign of disorder, and using 'lawful' repression – such as protecting private property or 'public decency' – they cleanse the social body of this entropic population. Prison – as well as death from violent policing – produces a cycle of further community trauma, breaking up families and friends and local ties of support, putting further lives into chaos, pushing people closer towards homelessness, drug addiction and imprisonment. Once marginalized, people can become quickly entangled in loops that flatten difference from social norms and accelerate collapse in their ability to survive.
....In her book The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks argues that if we aim to create a future free from the drudgery of wage labour, we cannot simply argue that, for example, 'care work is work' or 'sex work is work' and imply they should be valued for that reason alone, because that still entails that work is inherently valuable. Our alternative definition of work in contrast shows that work is not inherently valuable ....
....Work is 'bullshit' to the extent that it works against this resilience or health. Digging a hole and filling it in may be equivalent work in energy terms to helping bathe an elderly patient, but the former is not essential to the creation of resilient bodies like the latter is. We need food; we do not need advertising or management consultancy. And we cannot just say that reproducing a body is valuable work, if that body (such as a corporation) is then destroying others through its practices.
....By foregrounding both the autonomy of cognition and the felt experience of consciousness, the Shock Doctrine of the Left wards off tyrannical uses of the strategy.
[Do Jones and his comrades pick and choose their places of employment by this moralizing criteria? I'll be curious to hear about the response they get going door-to-door telling "fellow workers" their jobs are b.s. curiously, the only types of jobs Jones mentions by name are care workers and sex workers.]
____________
5 Taming
....Approaches to the state are often categorized as either reformist or revolutionary: you either aim to use the existing state to gradually tame the excesses of capitalism, or you wish to suddenly smash it whole and create something new in its place. Problems with the latter should be clear from the previous chapters – the huge unpredictability caused by chaos, the need to have alternatives already built, and the potential cycles of trauma caused by wide-scale violence.
....Reforms often patch up surface problems without dealing with their root causes. And being at the whim of the electoral cycle, while creating rapid mobilization at first, also brings unavoidable demobilization, rarely translating into a sustainable, organized movement beyond election day.
....The centralized state is fundamentally incapable of surmounting our current complex crises, and must be replaced with a more participatory, decentralized and adaptable structure in order for us to survive.
[Only a centralized workers state is capable of handling today's crises. The anarcho-opportunist daydream proposed here is worse than useless: it is misleading and a miseducation. (See Bakunin's Lyons fiasco for the first of countless examples.)]
....Although persuasion is important in building movement, we must recognize when the effort is not worth it. Thus the contemporary question: should we debate with Nazis?
[Who thinks this question demands more ink?]
....Extending this to a political body on the left, take the UK activist group Momentum. On the one hand, its close coupling to the Labour Party, and particularly Corbyn, has allowed it to influence its evolution, pulling it to the left and massively popularizing socialist ideas. At the same time, this coupling is a weakness. Actions will always be based around Labour, and any shock that hits one can reverberate through the other. At the time of writing it is unclear what might happen to Momentum should Corbyn step down; it will be interesting to see whether it has developed enough autonomy and a clear path to survive.
[Momentum was born with Corbyn's rise and will peter-out if his political career suffers further defeats.]
....When a government is young, the future feels open, with many opportunities and possibilities; years down the line, however, they will have accumulated many associations of failure, broken promises, scandals and so on. As time goes on, people will increasingly lose faith in that government. However, once every few years, all those connections are broken apart. New faces are elected, weak links are cast off, popular ones remain, cabinets are reshuffled, and the nation is reinvigorated with a sense of potential. This is one reason for the relative resilience and perceived legitimacy of liberal democracy: conserved energy is released in controlled, deliberate collapses, rather than a sudden total release, such as at the end of a decades-long dictatorship deliberate collapses cause chaos, and so open up the possibility of directing change, whichever party is in power. Being prepared for the effects of elections is therefore necessary, even for those who would otherwise wish to abstain from party politics. The alternative is simply to be swept up by its waves without any control whatsoever. The Shock Doctrine of the Left must reject incremental reformism which keeps us locked into the current path of the state. Neither, however, should it rely on totalizing shock to break away from such a path – 'smashing the state' – which leaves us vulnerable to hugely unpredictable chaos. This dilemma can be overcome through coordinating smaller but escalating shocks, each time increasing the power of people to organize beyond the state.
________
6 The Meta-Strategy
....All parts of the left should seek to develop and participate in an ecology of organizations. By this I mean a network of autonomous organizations that share no single organizational form, but which come together in a sustained pattern. It favours neither the hierarchical revolutionary party, nor the localized action group. Instead, the organizational form of any part will be shaped by both its local needs and its function within the ecology, rather than a dogmatic assertion of some ideal form.
....The ecology must both resist and aim to replace current power. Not a coalition of campaign groups alone, nor just trade unions, cooperatives, or NGOs, but networks which bring these together and create active relations between them. Not merely an abstract agreement, a name added to a list of supporters on a website, but the development of functional social economies which share skills, resources and platforms. The radical hairdressing salon should be able to play as important a part in this as the alternative media centre or the antifascist action group.
....The internal democracy could take many forms, but I would nonetheless suggest that alongside a nesting of assemblies, there be a sortition-based guiding coalition.
....'Guiding coalition' implies not a hierarchical leadership as in a central committee, but a body whose job it is to ensure the health of the ecology – its mandated 'body builder'.
....'Sortition' involves random selection, as in jury duty, from a pool of people willing to take on important roles
....Work is the source of oppression most widely shared by human beings. As the best potential site of common ground it absolutely must play a core role in a revolutionary movement. But given the initial conditions of our struggle will guide its direction, we cannot simply accept the concept of work as it currently exists, with its implications of an oppressive capitalist work ethic. We must struggle to redefine work. The Care Ethic recognizes the 'work' that people perform simply in order to survive, and how this is at present unevenly distributed. It recognizes that work is not inherently valuable, but only by virtue of the role it can play in building a resilient new world, and fighting against the current one. The Care Ethic requires that we are always open to the complexities of bodies, seeking to understand people, organizations, communities and so on in all their parts and wholes, pasts, presents and futures.
....We must avoid close coupling of the ecology to the state, but maintain room for those who do engage with it, such as NGOs, charities and so on. The question is always whether any action leads to an increase in autonomy and power.
....While different reforms could be argued for within the same model, I would advocate proposals such as: lowering the working week (giving more time and energy to organize); decriminalizing squatting (providing spaces in which to organize); decriminalizing solidarity strikes (allowing greater popular power); supporting workers to take over businesses and state-run services (expanding autonomy beyond state and capital); introducing a universal basic income (expanded autonomy from need to work); the 'universal basic services' proposal to extend free public services into food, transport, internet and housing (supporting individual and organizational metabolisms).
....The world is a body. You are a body. And every body is an organizer. So, organize!
[Anarcho-opportunists want to eat their cake and have it, too. Jones proposes replacing the capitalist state of today with small-scale decentralized coalitions and co-ops. How will the capitalist state be replaced? With a workers and farmers government? No, with activists leveraging natural and social disasters to herd workers and farmers in a binge of smashing. Which tells us something about the political level of thinking here, as well as the utter contempt felt toward the working class by geniuses like Jones and his ilk.
[A socialist revolution establishing a workers and farmers government and joining the international struggle for socialism is the only realistic response to the disasters wrought by capitalism in its death agony.]
Jay
12 January 2019
____________
5 Taming
....Approaches to the state are often categorized as either reformist or revolutionary: you either aim to use the existing state to gradually tame the excesses of capitalism, or you wish to suddenly smash it whole and create something new in its place. Problems with the latter should be clear from the previous chapters – the huge unpredictability caused by chaos, the need to have alternatives already built, and the potential cycles of trauma caused by wide-scale violence.
....Reforms often patch up surface problems without dealing with their root causes. And being at the whim of the electoral cycle, while creating rapid mobilization at first, also brings unavoidable demobilization, rarely translating into a sustainable, organized movement beyond election day.
....The centralized state is fundamentally incapable of surmounting our current complex crises, and must be replaced with a more participatory, decentralized and adaptable structure in order for us to survive.
[Only a centralized workers state is capable of handling today's crises. The anarcho-opportunist daydream proposed here is worse than useless: it is misleading and a miseducation. (See Bakunin's Lyons fiasco for the first of countless examples.)]
....Although persuasion is important in building movement, we must recognize when the effort is not worth it. Thus the contemporary question: should we debate with Nazis?
[Who thinks this question demands more ink?]
....Extending this to a political body on the left, take the UK activist group Momentum. On the one hand, its close coupling to the Labour Party, and particularly Corbyn, has allowed it to influence its evolution, pulling it to the left and massively popularizing socialist ideas. At the same time, this coupling is a weakness. Actions will always be based around Labour, and any shock that hits one can reverberate through the other. At the time of writing it is unclear what might happen to Momentum should Corbyn step down; it will be interesting to see whether it has developed enough autonomy and a clear path to survive.
[Momentum was born with Corbyn's rise and will peter-out if his political career suffers further defeats.]
....When a government is young, the future feels open, with many opportunities and possibilities; years down the line, however, they will have accumulated many associations of failure, broken promises, scandals and so on. As time goes on, people will increasingly lose faith in that government. However, once every few years, all those connections are broken apart. New faces are elected, weak links are cast off, popular ones remain, cabinets are reshuffled, and the nation is reinvigorated with a sense of potential. This is one reason for the relative resilience and perceived legitimacy of liberal democracy: conserved energy is released in controlled, deliberate collapses, rather than a sudden total release, such as at the end of a decades-long dictatorship deliberate collapses cause chaos, and so open up the possibility of directing change, whichever party is in power. Being prepared for the effects of elections is therefore necessary, even for those who would otherwise wish to abstain from party politics. The alternative is simply to be swept up by its waves without any control whatsoever. The Shock Doctrine of the Left must reject incremental reformism which keeps us locked into the current path of the state. Neither, however, should it rely on totalizing shock to break away from such a path – 'smashing the state' – which leaves us vulnerable to hugely unpredictable chaos. This dilemma can be overcome through coordinating smaller but escalating shocks, each time increasing the power of people to organize beyond the state.
________
6 The Meta-Strategy
....All parts of the left should seek to develop and participate in an ecology of organizations. By this I mean a network of autonomous organizations that share no single organizational form, but which come together in a sustained pattern. It favours neither the hierarchical revolutionary party, nor the localized action group. Instead, the organizational form of any part will be shaped by both its local needs and its function within the ecology, rather than a dogmatic assertion of some ideal form.
....The ecology must both resist and aim to replace current power. Not a coalition of campaign groups alone, nor just trade unions, cooperatives, or NGOs, but networks which bring these together and create active relations between them. Not merely an abstract agreement, a name added to a list of supporters on a website, but the development of functional social economies which share skills, resources and platforms. The radical hairdressing salon should be able to play as important a part in this as the alternative media centre or the antifascist action group.
....The internal democracy could take many forms, but I would nonetheless suggest that alongside a nesting of assemblies, there be a sortition-based guiding coalition.
....'Guiding coalition' implies not a hierarchical leadership as in a central committee, but a body whose job it is to ensure the health of the ecology – its mandated 'body builder'.
....'Sortition' involves random selection, as in jury duty, from a pool of people willing to take on important roles
....Work is the source of oppression most widely shared by human beings. As the best potential site of common ground it absolutely must play a core role in a revolutionary movement. But given the initial conditions of our struggle will guide its direction, we cannot simply accept the concept of work as it currently exists, with its implications of an oppressive capitalist work ethic. We must struggle to redefine work. The Care Ethic recognizes the 'work' that people perform simply in order to survive, and how this is at present unevenly distributed. It recognizes that work is not inherently valuable, but only by virtue of the role it can play in building a resilient new world, and fighting against the current one. The Care Ethic requires that we are always open to the complexities of bodies, seeking to understand people, organizations, communities and so on in all their parts and wholes, pasts, presents and futures.
....We must avoid close coupling of the ecology to the state, but maintain room for those who do engage with it, such as NGOs, charities and so on. The question is always whether any action leads to an increase in autonomy and power.
....While different reforms could be argued for within the same model, I would advocate proposals such as: lowering the working week (giving more time and energy to organize); decriminalizing squatting (providing spaces in which to organize); decriminalizing solidarity strikes (allowing greater popular power); supporting workers to take over businesses and state-run services (expanding autonomy beyond state and capital); introducing a universal basic income (expanded autonomy from need to work); the 'universal basic services' proposal to extend free public services into food, transport, internet and housing (supporting individual and organizational metabolisms).
....The world is a body. You are a body. And every body is an organizer. So, organize!
[Anarcho-opportunists want to eat their cake and have it, too. Jones proposes replacing the capitalist state of today with small-scale decentralized coalitions and co-ops. How will the capitalist state be replaced? With a workers and farmers government? No, with activists leveraging natural and social disasters to herd workers and farmers in a binge of smashing. Which tells us something about the political level of thinking here, as well as the utter contempt felt toward the working class by geniuses like Jones and his ilk.
[A socialist revolution establishing a workers and farmers government and joining the international struggle for socialism is the only realistic response to the disasters wrought by capitalism in its death agony.]
Jay
12 January 2019
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