Paramilitary groups and economic blockades in Ukraine

There was a very interesting article published recently in War on the Rocks about right-wing paramilitary groups in Ukraine, and their destabilizing effects on governance.  Of note is the series of tit-for-tat seizures and blockades of various supply lines that occurred in the first few months of 2017.

In late January, militia members engaged in a very well-coordinated blockade of coal shipments from eastern separatist regions, which soon sparked an energy crisis.  In response, separatist militias began seizing control of factories in the east that were owned by pro-Kiev oligarchs.  In mid-March the fed-up authorities cracked down on the blockades and arrested the unruly nationalist militants — only to provoke mass protests, occupations of government buildings in four different regions, and a new blockade against the president’s candy factories.

Two days after the protests and occupations began, the Kiev government abruptly reversed its position and declared an official ban on all goods from separatist regions until the separatists handed back control of the pro-Kiev oligarch’s factories.  That didn’t happen, and now it seems that Ukraine is making up its coal import deficit with supply from Pennsylvania, with additional talk about cutting down imports from Russia.

What’s interesting in all this is the intersection of militant protest tactics (albeit by armed right-wing nationalist groups), a strategy built around disrupting very specific parts of the economy, and fossil-fuel supply chains.  Perhaps environmentalists can take a cue out of this book for the battle against carbon oligarchs and climate change.  For example, there has been an ongoing fight in the San Francisco Bay Area over a potential coal export terminal at the Port of Oakland.  If the terminal does end up getting built, how feasible might it be for people to blockade the coal shipments coming in from Utah?

Revolutionary internationalism in Greece

This recent story in Al-Jazeera about an Afghan migrant who joins up with anti-capitalist and anti-fascist forces in Greece is a prime example of what revolutionary internationalism can look like today.  Masoud Qahar was formerly a logistical officer for NATO in Afghanistan, a position he held for five years.  The Taliban, unsurprisingly, targeted him and his family, killing his younger sister in 2012.  NATO refused to help him or his family, so he ditched his job and began a journey via land routes to Greece in 2015.

Qahar soon linked up with local anarchist groups who were helping run refugee camps and organize demonstrations.  Now he helps them translate and joins them in anti-fascist protests, and plays a larger role in leveraging his extensive local network in the camps to help connect Greek anarchists and his fellow migrants and refugees.  Along the way, he also seems to have developed an extreme disdain for his former employers, which is no doubt pleasing to his radical friends:

He describes both NATO and the Taliban as “houses of fascism”, before adding proudly: “Now I’m an anti-fascist.”

This connection showcases the Greek anarchist movement’s larger strategy of mutual aid and dual power.  As reported in this favorable New York Times article on the matter, the sprawling complex of service centers run by anarchists across Greece includes 15 squats in Athens that house 3,000 migrants, run cooperatively and collectively, independent from state and capital.

“Refugees and solidarity activists have been protesting together against the far-right and EU policies” [Kelly Lynn Lunde/Al Jazeera]

This is absolutely the right direction for radical leftists in the West to go, insofar as revolutionary internationalism is concerned.  People caught up in the violent churn of global capitalism and imperialism continue to flee their homelands, and are forming new transnational communities.  Qahar’s journey from Afghanistan to Greece is part of a larger trend that seen over 250,000 Afghans making the same journey since early 2015.

Connecting with these communities is how internationalism can be advanced from being superficial statements of solidarity that have no impact on anything, to being a genuine material force that engages in actual, tangible organizing across borders.  And it is particularly interesting to consider how these forms of radical transnationalism can intervene in the trend where anti-imperialist politics is coopted in the Greater Middle East region by far-right religious fundamentalists.  Qahar has clearly broken from the NATO vs. Taliban dualism that afflicts mainstream media discourse about politics in Afghanistan, but in a way that has lead toward radical leftist politics as the alternative, rather than political apathy as is usually the case.  If Western radicals and new diaspora communities from the Greater Middle East continue to network and merge, there is real potential for solidarity politics to evolve into outright transnational revolutionary struggle against all “houses of fascism”, be they Western or local.

Bonus: Video from just a couple of days ago of working-class youth violently clashing with police in Nuremberg, Germany, who are attempting to detain and deport their Afghan classmate.  (Article)

Historical attempts at workers’ inquiry

Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi wrote a lengthy and in-depth introduction to Viewpoint Magazine’s Issue 3 on Workers’ Inquiry.  It is worth reading in full in order to get an understanding of various attempts at the project that have taken place in the West.  Workers’ inquiry started off as an idea by Karl Marx himself to combine the perspectives and experiences of workers with an anti-capitalist communist program.

This practice of workers’ inquiry, then, implied a certain connection between proletarian knowledge and proletarian politics. Socialists would begin by learning from the working class about its own material conditions. Only then would they be able to articulate strategies, compose theories, and draft programs. Inquiry would therefore be the necessary first step in articulating a historically appropriate socialist project.

The analysis looks at the efforts of three groups: the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the USA in the early ’50s, Socialisme ou Barbarie in France in the ’50s, and Operaismo (workerism) in Italy in the early ’60s.  Here are some of the characteristics and insights of each group:

• Johnson-Forest Tendency: Split off from Trotskyism; saw workers’ inquiry as a way to engage in agitation and raise class consciousness by rooting political analysis in the day-to-day experiences of people; largely divided society into four groups — workers, blacks, women, and youth; their work veered more into the realm of historical fiction than empirical analysis, as it seems that they weren’t very embedded among common people
• Socialisme ou Barbarie: Closely linked with the Johnson-Forest Tendency and communicated with them quite a bit; connected with several groups of industrial factory workers over time; advanced the idea of workers’ inquiry to be much more of a fusion between intellectuals and workers researching and analyzing day-to-day proletarian experience (seems similar to the Maoist concept of the mass line); over-determined the importance of male factory workers and didn’t pay much attention to the experiences of race and gender (unlike the Johnson-Forest Tendency); some internal splits over the importance of the workers’ paper and how to balance out intellectual analysis and “raw” and “unfiltered” writings from workers
• Operaismo: Well-connected with workers in various factories; the role of technology in the workplace was a noteworthy focus of analysis and inquiry; as opposed to the other two groups, which seemed to look at the alienating conditions of the workplace as the key contradiction of capitalism, the Italians used their inquiries to look at the larger systemic tendencies of capitalism, and thus built toward the theory of class composition and the role of working-class struggle in being the driving force of capitalist development and restructuring; like the French, they over-determined the role of male factory workers, but this was strongly pushed back by later work by Italian Marxist feminists of the same currents

These seem to be the main groups that took up the most formal kind of workers’ inquiry.  But if we expand the idea of inquiry to be more general, to refer to any kind of serious on-the-ground investigation and analysis of people’s lives and problems and relationships with capital and state, there are a couple of other examples that come to mind, that are actually more rooted in a strategy that embeds research/investigation with an actual revolutionary organization.

• Abdullah Ocalan and the other founders of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) spent at least a year traveling through Kurdish areas of south-eastern Turkey to talk to people, survey their grievances, analyze terrain and geography, and map out the presence of the state, prior to their launching of a more open organizing campaign and the armed actions in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
• Amilcar Cabral, the founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), rooted his political organizing in the surveys and inquiries he made of tribes and other communities in Guinea-Bissau during his time as an agricultural researcher, which took him all around the country and allowed him the opportunity to talk to various social and political leaders.  This enabled him to analyze and synthesize the experiences of many different groups, and ground the revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle against the Portuguese Empire with the nuances of local context.

Regardless of whether we’re talking about a formal kind of workers’ inquiry that is used to generate Marxist theory, or the more general kind of research that is used to arm revolutionary organizations with local knowledge and networks, inquiry is definitely something that radical leftists of all stripes need to take seriously.  Too many radical left groups are yelling into the wind, attempting to engage with an amorphous and abstract “public” through vague denunciations of capitalism — instead of trying to meet people where they are at, make a genuine effort to understand how other people are working, living, surviving, and resisting under capitalism, and understand that abstract texts from 50 or 100 years ago aren’t sufficient for crafting a revolutionary strategy today.

Debates among French Marxists in the 1970s on the class position of engineers

The 1970s saw a lot of debate among French leftists of various organizations and schools of thought on the issue of how to interpret and deal with the restructuring of capitalism and the new classes that were being created.  These debates are summarized quite nicely in “Marxism and the New Middle Class: French Critiques” by George Ross, published in 1978 in Theory and Society, Vol. 5, No. 2.  The debates were about the character of the middle class as a whole (generally understood as those performing mental labor and getting a relatively higher salary), and much of this concerned techno-scientific workers.  The debates happened in the context of the post-1968 era, when people were trying to understand what to make of the student protests and the participation of skilled technical workers in the mass strikes.  Here is a list of each “faction” in the debate, as I understood Ross’ paper, and the main points of their class analysis.

French Communist Party (PCF):  The PCF saw a strict division between the working class and the capitalist class, and lumped any “sub-classes” (i.e. peasants, administrators, shopkeepers) into one or the other main class.  They argued that the new middle classes were part of the working class, and for the need to reach out to them.  But unlike their traditional working class base, they saw the new middle classes as not inherently revolutionary, and so argued for the need to tone down their militancy and put off revolutionary organizing.  This was roundly criticized by other sections of the French left for being reformist and evidence of the party’s decline.  (p. 165-70)

Nico Poulantzas:  This influential Greek-French Marxist-Leninist and comrade of Louis Althusser saw the new middle classes as being petite-bourgeoisie, because they neither owned the means of production, nor directly produced surplus value.  He also saw them as being a primary enforcer of capitalist social relations in the workplace, through their monopolization of knowledge, and tending away from class consciousness due to the way the education system conditions them to be “professional” and career-oriented.  However, Poulantzas also pointed out the divisions within this new middle class: he saw engineers and technicians as being relatively closer to workers, and administrators and accountants and the like being closer to the capitalists.  And despite the role of the education system, the petite-bourgeoisie are still heavily influenced by the level of class struggle in society, and can be brought into a coalition with workers if efforts are made to intervene against pro-capitalist and careerist ideology.  Poulantzas argued that when the petite-bourgeoisie become discontent, their politics tend to range from social-democratic reformism to anarcho-syndicalism.  (p. 171-5)

Baudelot et. al.:  A paper written by Christian Baudelot, Roger Establet, and Jacques Malemort (it was unclear who they’re associated with) argued that capitalist restructuring created both new groups of workers and new groups of petite-bourgeoisie.  They analyzed the wages of various salaried sectors and compared this to the estimated cost of “reproduction” (i.e. the costs of education), and found that some sectors were just barely compensated (accountants, administrative assistants, clerical workers) while others were compensated far beyond the cost of education (engineers and managers).  They also divided the petite-bourgeoisie into three analytical fractions: Fraction I was the old petite-bourgeoisie, the shopkeepers and business-people who were losing from capitalist restructuring and were lurching toward far-right politics; Fraction II was private-sector professionals who identified heavily with their firm’s success, and thus were distant from leftist politics; Fraction III was public-sector professionals who tended to have social-democratic and reformist politics.  Unlike Poulantzas, Baudelot et. al. argued that the politics of the petite-bourgeoisie were generally predictable, instead of being subordinate to the level of class struggle.  (p. 176-80)

Serge Mallet: This dissident militant from the PCF broke somewhat significantly from the dominant Marxist-Leninist currents to argue that the contemporary mode of capitalism was distinct from previous modes.  Mallet periodized capitalism into three phases: first was the mercantilist phase where the vanguard class was skilled craftsmen who were being exploited and displaced, second was the industrial age of mechanized production where the vanguard class was unskilled assembly workers, and the third and newest was the contemporary age of automated mass production where the vanguard class was skilled intellectual workers — engineers, technicians, etc.  Mallet argued that the technical knowledge of the new classes created a contradiction where these workers were fully aware of how to run and control the means of production, but still lacked political and workplace power, and thus would resist and fight capitalist control, and veer toward anarcho-syndicalism and the politics of worker self-management.  (p. 181-3)

Alain Touraine: This apparently famous sociologist seems to have broken the most with Marxism, in that he argued that the accumulation and use of knowledge (rather than the accumulation of capital) was the driving force of a new post-industrial political economy.  Like Mallet, he saw the new intellectual workers as being the key force for socio-political change in this new era, as they demand more real power and resist the capitalist drive for profits and push for self-management; but unlike Mallet, he sees them as a class that can effect change by themselves, rather than being necessarily tied with the old working class.  (p. 183-6)

Of these, the most relevant and interesting arguments to me are those of Poulantzas and Mallet.  Both see techno-scientific workers as being potentially radical forces and allies of the working class in general.  Mallet, in particular, is interesting because unlike many of the other theorists, he was an active militant organizer and seems to have developed his views from real praxis (as opposed to reading things via academia).

Outsourcing imperialism in the Horn of Africa

There have been some interesting things happening lately in the Horn of Africa.  Ethiopia has been getting rocked by unprecedented levels of unrest and anti-government violence since late 2015.  And meanwhile, in neighboring Somalia, the US has been escalating a “shadow war” against Islamist militants — an effort which has depended on close cooperation with Ethiopian military forces since their intervention into Somalia in 2006.

The war in Somalia demonstrates the degree to which the US government has been able to effectively outsource security operations to entities that aren’t closely associated or regulated by the norms and laws that have been pushed by progressive liberals and humanitarians. As the New York Times article points out, the war is being fought largely with “Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies”, in a manner that echoes the way the Obama administration has typically structured its many wars, interventions, and armed engagements, from Afghanistan to Syria to Libya.  Not that Obama pioneered this restructuring of US imperialism; as the article points out, recent military engagements in Somalia can be traced back to alliances forged with Somalian warlords by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks, and the backing of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2006 — which, incidentally, seems to have been the impetus for the formation of al-Shabaab, the main antagonist in the current conflict.

While the US government is busy with military matters, it seems that European officials are also increasing their outsourcing of security matters.  As this article from The Economist discusses, Angela Merkel met with the Ethiopian prime minster one day after the establishment of a six-month state-of-emergency to discuss matters of migration and refugee, and she subsequently urged the African Union to do more to stop the flow of people from Africa into Europe.  Attempting to gain the cooperation of the region’s authoritarian regimes to help protect Europe’s borders is nothing new; this has been the main reason for the increasingly warm relations between the genocidal dictatorship of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and the European Union.  In some sense, this echoes the efforts by the US government to push policies in Mexico to close off and militarize its southern border, as a way to outsource repression against US-bound migrants from Central America.

All of this should better improve our understanding of contemporary imperialism.  Too often, anti-imperialist politics — particularly those in liberal ciricles — grounds itself on rather simplistic understandings of imperialism, thinking that the only “real” imperialism is when a Western country’s core institutions is engaged in a conflict (i.e. a full-scale invasion).  Indeed, this is why liberal imperialists like those in the Obama administration defend their military escalations with the excuse that they are working with “regional partners”; but ultimately, this is only a way to contrast themselves with the overtly chauvinist strategies of the Bush administration, which alienated many regional elites who otherwise supported US hegemony.  In reality, imperialism has always operated on a transnational basis, dependent on the consent and complicity of local elite classes.  The technical tools may have changed, but the social and political strategies remain largely the same.

Sunday Interesting Links

• Overview of the radical autonomous social movements of 1970s Italy, from Issue 5 of Viewpoint

• Analysis on imperial obsession with women’s clothing in South Asia

• Report on private security forces in Washington DC

• Report on efforts in Kuwait to check citizenship via DNA collection

• Photo-essay on environmental destruction around the world

Sunday Interesting Links

• Analysis on the experience of a leftist third party in Vermont, from Jacobin

• Article on the spread of anarchist/migrant squat collectives in Greece

• Article on the European Union’s growing ties with the regime of Omar al-Bashir for militarized border control

• Report from the mass street protests organized by Dalits in Gujarat, India

• Analysis on the millions of jobs in the US related to the trucking industry that are threatened by looming automation

Sunday Interesting Links

• Reflections/observations from a group of communists on the situation in the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley, in south Texas

• Reflections on the tenth year of Mexico’s ongoing war

• Essay on finance capital, international aid, and Ukraine’s oligarchs

• Report on anti-Americanism in Sana’a, Yemen

• Argument about how the Jevons Paradox applies to drone strikes

Political art at a Houthi rebel checkpoint in Sana’a, Yemen

Thursday Interesting Links

• Lengthy, in-depth, and generally excellent essay on America’s White working class and the history of elite/capitalist use of racist ideology to divide the masses

• Overview of recent trends in labor organizing in Amazon warehouses in Poland and Germany, from Jacobin

• Overview of the dynamics and activities of Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Party of America (SPA) during the 1910s, from Viewpoint Magazine

• A polemical analysis of the quiet, unchallenged rise of US military operations across the globe under the Obama administration

• In-depth analysis of the connections and influence of Saudi Arabian elites in US foreign policy circles, from Vox

Sunday Interesting Links

• Lengthy interview with Stathis Kouvelakis on the rise and fall of SYRIZA, from New Left Review

• Michael Roberts ponders more on the continuing debate around issues of imperialism and super-exploitation

• Argument on the imminent restructuring of global capitalism away from neoliberalism, via the theoretical framework of “social structure of accumulation”, from London School of Economics

• Old essay from 2004 on the planned neoliberal destructuring of Iraq under the US occupation government

• New climate model based on energy use per person predicts much more rapid, dangerous warming