Security Politics, Anti-Capitalism, Student Activists, and the Left
I gave a lengthy interview to Margins, a progressive student magazine at Yale. We talked a lot about a lot of things.
We talked about the increasing securitization—terrible word, I know—of politics. But, as I said, what I think is most significant about that trend is the growing opposition to it. Compared to what was going on in the 90s, or the aughts, the movements on the ground against the security state are tremendous. The only question is: can they build and last? We’ve seen lots of blips of movements in the last 15 years: against the WTO, the Iraq War, Wall Street, debt, and now the police. Their half-lives seem to be getting shorter and shorter. In part because we’ve yet to devise an organizational form that can withstand the forces that are arrayed against the left. But, I conclude:
I also think social movements go through a learning process, and it may very well just take a while for people on the Left to begin to work through some of these issues. And you have to have some patience for that process, and not just think you can recreate a party structure or a this or a that, whatever may have worked 50 to 100 years ago, but you have to also have a certain amount of confidence or faith that people will figure out some kind of an organizational model or apparatus that can do that and can survive. This way, I hope some of what we see the national security state doing becomes a salutary lesson to people that really are serious about transforming this culture, and this economy, and this politics. If you really are serious about that, and if you really believe that there is a ruling class that is determined to stop you or at least to hold on to its power, well, you’re going to have to come up with forms of counterpower that can resist and ultimately overturn that. This came up, I remember, during the discussions after Occupy, people brought up, ‘Well, look, the state smashed it, and that’s what happened.’ And that’s true, but the state has always tried to do that, and it has oftentimes done it far more viciously and violently than it did, so you kind of have to accept that that’s part of the political reality that you need to figure out a way of overcoming.
We also talked about anti-capitalism and the left, and the impact that the collapse of communism had on the left:
Even though the Left has been many different things, the 20th century left was overwhelmingly dominated by this idea of the transformation of social relations under capitalism. That idea was a very much in bad odor in the 1990s, and it affected lots of different kinds of Lefts, because the whole idea of political transformation, the whole idea of political agency, and being able to intervene in social relations, became suspect, so you had much much more quietistic models of politics, and anybody who identified as an activist, or thought of themselves as on the Left, was automatically suspect.
We talked about solidarity, about taking local grievances and making them universal:
A whole philosophy of the Left—and I don’t mean just unions or people who are socialists, I mean, just generally, the whole philosophy of solidarity and what the Left stands for—is that you take a particular grievance and ultimately, through a process of political action, you come to see in that grievance a whole world of systemic injustice and inequality that needs to be taken on and overthrown. And then, when the Left is really doing its job, it’s enabling local citizens and local activists and actors to see the world in that grain of sand, to use a little Blake metaphor, and that’s when the Left is doing what it’s supposed to be doing: it’s getting people to act on their particular grievance or sense of injustice or whatever it may be, and to begin to see a wider pattern in it that needs to be taken on—and slowly but surely people start looking at a broader systemic problem in society and begin to understand their own situation in those terms. That’s what political transformation is all about.
And we talked about student activism:
Well, I was never big on the whole idea of student activists. In fact, I think that’s what kept me away from being involved in campus politics for a long time, but I think because the situation of students has actually changed so dramatically—I just think this debt issue is so foundational—if we use it as an opportunity and see it as an opening, I think students are very well-positioned, both because of the debt that they have accrued and because of the kind of economic opportunities or lack thereof that they’re facing, to start mounting mass movements around this issue. Trotsky was 25, and he led the St. Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 revolution. Martin Luther King was maybe 27 when he led the Montgomery Bus boycott. All these people, were extraordinarily young, so when you have that history on the one hand, and then the fact that students are really in the crux of all the economic transformations that we’re talking about in terms of the increasing assumption of debt, the privatization of public education, and then the disaster of an economy that they are facing, well, that’s an opportunity. I talked to somebody the other day, who was applying to graduate school, and he works as a freelancer, but he temps, doing word-processing at that age. So I said, “What do you get paid?” And he said, “You know, 15 to 16 dollars an hour,” and this is in New York City. I thought, when I graduated college in 1989, I moved out to the Bay Area for a year, and I was temping, I made 15 dollars an hour. So that tells me there’s been such an economic constriction that I do think students are very well placed to take a leadership role on some of these foundational issues of our time.