Enter the Alter-Left

Abstract

Weary as it is, the still-standing U.S. Left continues to refuse to take no for an answer. However, we face two prominent conundrums: How do we decipher the meaning of “revolution” during a post-socialist and particularly counterrevolutionary period in history? And how do we address an increasingly compromised natural world whose very ability to sustain organic life has been dramatically called into question?It’s been a few hundred years since anything resembling a revolutionary tornado has touched down on U.S. soil. Whereas peoples living throughout Latin America and the Middle East are quite fluent in the idiom of revolution, U.S. leftists have relegated the notion to a poetic dustbin dwelling somewhere just to the left of the deep past. Many entertain notions of particularistic “revolutions” in domains of the human spirit, art, technology, and even sexuality, yet they cannot expand the concept to encompass society as a whole. This loss of revolutionary memory and vision is tied, at least in part, to the collapse of revolutionary projects associated with the works of Marx.At the same time, we are facing a monstrous expression of capitalism: neoliberal tentacles are squeezing the life out of prior attempts by progressives and radicals alike to appease its appetite to devour all things human and nonhuman. In such times, questioning the “need” for a Left in the United States is more than slightly decadent.Moving any further to the right brings yet more crude liberalization and deregulation — and thus more dispossession and ecological destruction. Surfing the wave of leftist progressive liberalism or social democratic reformism will merely keep us treading water in the very muck we are trying to climb out of.Too often, well-meaning leftists opt for merely turning the capitalist clock backward. Many yearn for a revival of the 1930s-era New Deal, thinking back to a time when “we” enjoyed a kinder, gentler capitalism. In so doing, they romanticize a time when the state did its best to curb corporations’ ravenous demands, subsequently allowing many members of America’s white majority to enter a consumer-driven, car-crazed, working-middle class that enjoyed retirement benefits and Disneyland vacations. Sadly, the second coming of a dreamy New Deal blew up in our faces in 2006 when the bursting of the housing bubble ushered in another Great Depression, which we are still experiencing currently. Who has the time or dough to say, “see you in Disneyland” today?U.S. leftists who long for more than a revitalized New Deal gaze upward toward Canada or set their hopes on a more European style of social democracy. Our utopian horizons are studded with starry notions of state-subsidized health care and higher education, and lengthy paid-for summer vacations. When the best dreams that leftists can muster are of European welfare states (which are currently being eviscerated by neoliberalism), we have not only lost our revolutionary nerve, but our revolutionary vision as well.The question is not whether we need a Left, but what kind of a Left do we desire? What kind of Left is capable of moving us from a corrupt republican democracy to a direct democracy? What kind of Left can allow us to shift away from a capitalist system that empties out the meaning of what it means to be human? What kind of Left can create a moral economy in which citizens extend a logic of self-governance to realms of production and distribution, creating a democratized and ecologized economy? And finally, what kind of Left is capable of cultivating a way of thinking ecologically and democratically that can guide a revolutionary process to carry us in the direction we need to go in order to survive?Unless we are to prop up the ghost of the communist revolutionary tradition, we must think up another solution to the problem of what is to become of a Left bereft of a workable and coherent plan. Anyone donning a centuries-old garment should be willing to consider that its hemline or waistband might be due for a major alteration. And the U.S. Left might take a lesson or two by looking at what its more radical wings have been up to in the Leftist alteration department. There have been at least two riotous and instructive attempts to alter the U.S. Left that are worth taking note of in the past fifteen or so years — the anti–World Trade Organization protests of 1999 and the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in the fall of 2011.The anti-WTO protests of 1999 (a sort of “mini–May 1968”) did not come out of nowhere. It was a series of movements that I have decided to call the “Alter-Left” that bore this Seattle-based fruit.The Alter-Left had been growing since the 1980s, with deep roots in anti-neoliberal Latin American movements. During the 1980s, groups throughout Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico began to view the leftist project through an increasingly internationalist lens, coining the term neoliberalism to describe a resurgence of the vulgar liberal individualism associated with an Enlightenment gone awry. Neoliberalism is the structure under which corporations gained rights — as “individuals” — to operate unfettered by state-determined regulations, taxes, and standards that might hinder their individual corporate freedom.In the 1980s, countries throughout Latin America were roiling with hunger, poverty, and unemployment caused by rising debt to global loan-shark agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (renamed the World Trade Organization in 1994). These agencies in turn created structural adjustment programs, strong-arming countries to trade national debt for reduced state regulations in the domains of trade, labor, and the environment (including water treatment and access).As they organized in opposition to deregulation/neoliberalism, leftists began to alter the structure and culture of the Left, creating a novel Alter-Left. Before the 1980s, Latin American militant activity tended to emerge within labor unions or workers parties. In the 1980s, in contrast, movements were increasingly led by peasants, indigenous peoples, women’s groups, anti-poverty activists, ecologists, and human rights activists fighting forms of dehumanization ranging from racism to heterosexism. Rejecting a central party or leadership structure, groups worked autonomously, assisting communities facing chronic poverty, landlessness, and hunger. Going beyond the Marxist idiom, groups altered leftist discourse, calling not only for workers’ control, but also for democratization and citizens’ rights.What does all of this have to do with Seattle and the U.S. Left? The U.S. Left was in deep dialogue with global anti-neoliberal activists, taking note of others’ new ways of redefining leftist political structure and goals. Indeed, by the mid-to-late 1990s, a new set of international activists and organizations gained prominence, voicing global discontent not only with state-driven economic and political policies, but also with supranational bodies bolstering neoliberal capital.There is a clear line drawn between the 50 Years Is Enough campaign, for instance, and what has been called the Battle of Seattle. The 50 Years Is Enough project was a network of 300 grassroots groups from more than sixty-six countries that was founded in 1994 to decry the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of supranational agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. By saying “enough,” this network sent a message in a bottle on behalf of the downtrodden in the Global South. And U.S. activists in our very own far Left caught that bottle with both hands.The line strung between 50 Years Is Enough and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle also runs through another key Alter-Left moment: the Zapatista uprisings of 1994. The Zapatista mobilizations sent ripples around the world, inspiring leftist political cultures globally to become increasingly international, anti-capitalist, identity driven, directly democratic in character, and ecologically focused. And meanwhile, Left-altering organizations such as Peoples’ Global Action and the World Social Forum emerged, as well. The marginalized from the world over voiced solidarity against neoliberalism, its attachés (nation-states), and its ring of supranational disciplinarians.And so when U.S. activists learned in 1999 that the WTO would be meeting in Seattle, they too joined this effort to alter the Left, throwing a signature sensibility of American “movement democracy” into the mix. By movement democracy, I mean a form of leftist organizing where activists design movement meetings, plan direct actions, and design organizational structures along directly democratic lines. Under this model, there are no leaders endowed with autonomous decision-making power. Instead, a network of small groups called “affinity groups” are each empowered to express their collective will to the larger movement via rotating delegates chosen by the groups themselves. Activists first meet in affinity groups to clarify and define their groups’ position on particular issues facing the movement as a whole. After reaching a decision, the affinity group sends its spokes-person to the larger spokescouncil, which functions as a coordinating committee for the movement as a whole. In this way, decision-making swells from the bottom up. At the “non-top” of this non-hierarchy are recallable delegates who have no decision-making power at all. Through movement democracy, activists engage in face-to-face direct democracy, flexing and developing the democratic muscles required for the radically new society to come.Forms of movement democracy surfaced in the sixties but were further refined by anarchist wings of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement. The hub of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement was the Clamshell Alliance, a decentralized network of over eighty groups and organizations scattered throughout New England. The U.S. anti-nuclear movement was a particularly successful endeavor; it radically deterred the government’s grand plan to make the country 80 percent nuclear-reliant. Through organizing in opposition to nuclear arms and energy, activists created the country’s largest-ever network of decentralized and horizontal decision-making bodies aimed at ridding the world of nuclear technology. The anti-nuclear movement popularized the idea that a movement could be built up out of many affinity groups that trained and worked together. The affinity groups of the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for Alter-Leftists committed to nonhierarchical and socially cohesive forms of movement democracy.The anti-nuclear movement was also marked by an expressive political sensibility. Its drum circles, public art installations, and whimsical nonviolent direct actions captured the imagination of many throughout the world. In Seattle of 1999, a new set of leftist actors, agendas, non-structures, and post-hippy expressive sensibilities exploded like a confetti ball when the WTO came to town. Today, many associate Alter-Left demonstrations with the sky-high street puppets first pioneered in the 1970s by the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. By 1999, David Solnit from Art and Revolution had begun working with Bread and Puppet artists, teaching young activists to craft the puppet-driven demonstrations so many have come to expect and enjoy.For more than one rainy week, indigenous groups, peasants, workers unions, women’s groups, anarchists, ecologists, anti-racism activists, and queers from around the world poured into Seattle to say “enough” to neoliberal non-democracy. Neoliberalism’s grand meeting (real and metaphorical) was at least temporarily cancelled. As activists drummed on garbage cans and milk jugs, the Alter-Left chanted a collective “no” to the WTO.After Seattle, a question arose: did the over-the-top aesthetic of the anti-WTO protest help or hinder the growing alter-globalization movement? Many in the country were alienated by these counter-cultural images, but on the other hand, the drumming, chanting, dancing, and puppetry helped capture journalists’ attention. Undoubtedly, many journalists were determined to depict activists in violent terms, reinforcing notions of activists-as-criminals. Yet, the front pages of newspapers the world over were instead graced with images of activists in whimsical butterfly costumes (referencing studies on the toxic impacts of genetically modified foods on monarch butterflies). The expressive protest culture also helped assuage protesters’ fears of the state’s potentially violent response to activists’ nonviolent actions, and participation in a common aesthetic helped forge a deep, if transient, sense of political community. The celebratory protest culture of Seattle became a wellspring of inspiration for Alter-Leftists to come.A post-Seattle political culture propelled similar actions internationally, as people in Canada, Prague, Southern France, and Italy cultivated their own carnivalesque and nonviolent protest culture. Yet suddenly, out of nowhere, a plane zoomed into Manhattan. Then another. Death and more death ensued, now in the form of war with Iraq and Afghanistan.When those planes destroyed the Twin Towers, they also shot through the blossoming center of the U.S. alter-globalization movement. The U.S. Alter-Left was hijacked by a McCarthy-like U.S. political culture that equated U.S. activism with terrorism. Although a fragmented anti-war movement did surface throughout the country, it tended to regress back into a top-down and colorless protest culture unable to capture the imagination and moral outrage of the U.S. populace.And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the fall of 2011. The housing bubble burst as subprime mortgage loans went flying. Government bailed out Wall Street with our last cents. And there it was again: the U.S. Alter-Left, re-born in the form of Occupy Wall Street. That year, Occupy went national, then global. People from all corners of the Left enacted movement democracy, becoming the kind of democratic, self-governing, life-affirming revolutionaries the world needs now more than ever.Sometimes, leftists must look at what we do — rather than at what we don’t do — to understand the path we’re on. What the more radical, far-flung Left has been up to is altering the Left, creating a newfangled version of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something that blew in all the way from Latin America.For those who rightly note that the Alter-Left is bereft of what the New Left was missing as well — a coherent revolutionary theory — we are justified in noting so. We have altered the U.S. Left’s legacy of labor-centered theory. We have altered the old Left’s lingering shadow that led activists to privilege the idea of “workers” as the key site of revolutionary action. Now altered, we move from a theory that privileged workers to a perspective attending to the many for whom the system simply isn’t working (the 99 percent). While Occupy rightfully included union leaders and workers, it also welcomed the Alter-Left’s cadre of homeless and unemployed people, youth, queers, students, climate justice activists, and racial justice activists, to name but a few.We have indeed altered the methods of movement building and organizing, improvising decentralized, directly democratic networks of expressive activists who are willing to engage in civil disobedience and direct action. And we have tossed in all matters of ecology as we take stock of a dual disaster in the making — one humanitarian and one planetary. And we are indeed ready. All we need is a coherent revolutionary theory — a plan.Those who brought us Seattle and Occupy Wall Street are young and old, ready to draw from the best of the old Left, the New Left, and the social movements that brought us the women’s movement, black power, ecology, and the LGBTQ movements. We are ready to create an Alter-Left with revolutionary nerve.The motto of the World Social Forum is “Another World Is Possible.” The many who created the forum felt weighed down by a politics of refusal that could only say “no” to what it didn’t want, entertaining only a vague sense of other possible worlds to come. The French expressed a similar desire to go beyond an “anti” politics captured in the term “anti-globalization.” Creating instead a notion of alter-mondialization (alter-globalization), French activists captured the notion of alterity — or an “otherness” built out of imaginative and humane possibility. This idea of alternate worlds — the notion that we can redeem humanity and the rest of the natural world through compassionate and intelligent human ingenuity — is breathtaking.As we catch our breath together and conspire (which literally means to “breathe together”), we can draw and direction from the of social more than social from around the world have a collective to move the Alter-Left beyond our post-socialist toward a directly democratic, radically and ecological ecology key which to political direct democracy social and These are ready to be or by peoples around the world to create a just and Social ecology for in in this means to these means each is to its on the way each is into this idea of in into means this world of states into a horizontal of This could the form of and even international In this way, each or could a political life in which committed meet in to the political their world. By in face-to-face direct democracy, each on education, technology, or for instance, would be to a common in the What we call would be determined by the as of direct democracy, social and ecology to the way common are and In this way, this project would to the a capitalist economy that of and By ourselves to these social throughout the world to a socially democratic, and ecological of social ecology did to this vision of a — a vision for how to move away from our and society and toward a just and ecology a coherent revolutionary Yet in its for it a to a a to a Instead, it all of our communities to engage in how to its to our particular cultures and movement building us to a logic of direct democracy, social and ecology to a revolutionary process that will to a society that those very people are by state and ecological destruction. The U.S. Alter-Left is well to move our society away from this position and toward a vision that and the rest of the natural world to time to come together to create a movement that and also working to create a global of directly democratic communities together by a The way to that movement is by a in which we our thinking through how to these into a political movement capable of a society in need of radical problem with the American Left is that it its far left time to catch our our and think ecologically as we our way to a world that is for the