[rad-green] The World Up in Arms Against Austerity and Authoritarianism

*https://newpol.org/the-world-up-in-arms-against-austerity-and-authoritarianism/
<https://newpol.org/the-world-up-in-arms-against-austerity-and-authoritarianism/>New
Politics          October 26, 2019The World Up in Arms Against Austerity
and AuthoritarianismBy Dan La Botz**[PDF]
<https://newpol.org/the-world-up-in-arms-against-austerity-and-authoritarianism/?print=pdf>[Print]
<https://newpol.org/the-world-up-in-arms-against-austerity-and-authoritarianism/?print=print>*

*Much of the world at this moment is a laboratory searching for the cure
for capitalism, and the social scientists running the experiments are in
the streets.*

Around the world, people are rising up in arms, on nearly every continent
and in more than a dozen nations. In the last six months there have been
rebellions in France, Catalunya, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile,
Ecuador, Honduras, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria. These rebellions have in
general had a popular and left leaning character and they are angry,
militant, and defiant. The common feature is these are rebellions of the
lower middle class, the working class and the poor. These various movements
have everywhere overflown the banks of the political system. The waves of
protest beat against the foundation of the state. The activists in the
street everywhere call into question the system, whatever that system where
they live is called. When the governments have attempted to crush these
movements, the people fight back, refusing to give up the streets. What
lies behind these rebellions, what has caused them, and where are they
going?

The political situation in each of these countries varies tremendously and
the detonating events were quite different: from an objectionable new law
to a stolen election, from decades-old dictatorships that have become
unbearable to increases in public transit fares. In Lebanon it was the
imposition of a tax on Whatsapp telephone calls. In Ecuador the
government’s decision allowed an increase in the price of gasoline. In
Chile an increase in the metro fare. In Honduras it was the discovery that
the president aided his brother who led a drug cartel. In Puerto Rico it
was a corrupt and misogynist president. In Hong Kong the promulgation of a
law that infringed on local autonomy. In Catalunya in the State of Spain,
the meting out of long sentences to Catalan nationalist protestors. In Iraq
the people have risen up against unemployment, corruption, and an
unresponsive government. In Algeria and Sudan, the populations’ weariness
with longstanding authoritarian governments. In Nicaragua, a social
security pension reform. In Haiti too protests against a corrupt and
authoritarian president.

Everywhere, there was a different trigger. Yet the central issue everywhere
is the desire to be treated with dignity and respect.

There are common elements among these rebellions: economic inequality, the
imposition of austerity, and governmental abuse of their power. The feeling
is, they don’t care about us. In many of these countries the state has lost
its legitimacy and the citizenry no longer has confidence in the historic
political parties, but generally speaking there is no political party in a
position to put forward an alternative political agenda or a new
leadership. Yet the revolts have shaken the powers-that-be in each country
and sent powerful shockwaves through the international political order. We
seem to be in a period of synchronized though uncoordinated political
revolts demanding democracy and a better life. We have been here before.

This is not the first time that there has been an apparent international
simultaneity of revolt and even of revolutions. The first such wave—almost
an entire epoch—occurred the in the last quarter of the eighteenth century
with the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776, then the French
Revolution of 1789, followed by the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and then the
Latin American Revolutions of 1810 to 1821. Another such wave occurred with
the European Revolution of 1848 that swept through France, Germany, and the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and we might include in that wave the Chartist
movement in England. The period from 1917 to 1919 brought revolutions in
Russia, German, Austria, and Hungary, as well as the Ottoman Empire. And
while 1968 brought no revolution, it was a year of radical upheavals from
France to Czechoslovakia, to Mexico. Just as today, during each of these
periods of radical upheaval the detonating events in each country were
unique, yet at the same time one could see common elements and often also
similar dynamics. While in most cases the bourgeoisie put itself at the
head of the revolutionary movements sooner or later, still it was working
people and the poor who generally gave these rebellions their radical
thrust and provided the cutting edge.

In different periods, different conditions created the pre-revolutionary
situation and a wide variety of events sparked the revolutionary movements,
but it is usually possible to discern commonalities in each wave. The
growth of international trade, imperial rivalries, and the contrast between
the old aristocratic order and the emerging bourgeois society conditions
the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The
rise of capitalism in England and then in France, the factory and then the
railroad, together with the rise there of the liberal state and
representative government, drove the conflict of 1848 as the ideas of the
West pushed East, until the threat of working class revolution drove the
bourgeoisie into the arms of the aristocrats, and those together then
crushed the democratic and socialist movement both. The expansion and then
the domination of capitalist financiers and industrial corporations in
rival states led to modern imperialism and then to world war in 1914, and
the war with its millions of dead and massive destruction led to revolution
and then to the collapse of the old empires: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and
the Ottoman empire. The Russian Revolution of October 1917, an uprising
from below of workers and peasants, led to the attempt to spread workers’
councils and socialist revolution throughout Europe and beyond.

The Driving Force Behind the Upheavals

Today’s revolts in all of the countries we have named are driven by several
forces that have reshaped the balance of power between nation states as
well as the social classes within those state and led simultaneously to the
crisis of the neoliberal order and the more significant final collapse of
the post-World War II order. The transformation of China into a highly
successful capitalist society, the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe in the 1990s, and then the 2008 recession taken together have almost
erased the old division of the world into capitalist, Communist, and Third
World nation or the more recent developed and developing nations. We live
now in a world with a mosaic of extreme wealth and unnecessary poverty in
nearly all countries.

The driving forces underlying these developments—some of them hardly
visible at the moment through the water-cannon’s jets or the clouds of tear
gas—will be found in financiers’ reorganization of the world economy,
driven by the desire for profit and economic control. The financial and
corporate moguls have in the last fifty years, and at an increasingly rapid
pace in the last twenty, transformed industry by satellite and microchip,
by computers and automation, by new forms of managerial organization of the
workforce and have created workplaces overseen by electronic surveillance.
The incredible augmentation of production throughout the world—from mineral
extraction to manufacture to services—all channeled through international
trade agreements and carried by the logistics industry with its warehouses
and shipping containers has, within the neoliberal economic framework, led
to an enormous growth in economic inequality. Everywhere the capitalist
class and its political partners have enriched themselves at the expense of
the working classes and the poor. All of this has led to tremendous and
well-justified resentment by the majorities in countries around the globe.

There is no doubt that in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, we
entered into a new political period where rebellion alternates with
repression, beginning in 2011 with Movement of the Plazas in Spain, Occupy
Wall Street in the United States, the Arab Spring in the Middle East and
North Africa. The economic crisis also gave rise to new rightwing
nationalist parties and political personalities, from the Northern League
in Italy to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), from Boris Johnson in
England to Donald Trump in the United States. The ramifications of the
crisis are still felt almost everywhere, though North America (Canada, the
United States, and Mexico) remain so far practically immune to the radical
contagion.

In all of the recent upheavals, we see the working classes and the poor
rising up and taking action outside of or even against the social
organizations and institutions, the labor unions and the political parties
that have in the past pretended to represent them. When the left political
parties and union bureaucracies have attempted to restrain these movements,
as they have in many places, the workers themselves have either bypassed
those institutions or they have tried to force them to act and have striven
to push aside the current leaders and to alter the organizations’ policies.
Without political parties of their own working people have often been
unable to formulate a clear program, but their militant actions and their
slogans have made it quite evident that they demand an altogether different
sort of society, one where workers’ voices are heard and their needs met.

These concurrent revolts have diverse characters. In France the Yellow Vest
movement, which for months tied up traffic throughout the country and then
took their protest to the wealthiest parts of Paris, is made up of working
people who have no unions, the hairdresser and the handyman, people who
have not been defended by industrial unions of the General Confederation of
Workers (CGT) or the Socialist Party. In Chile students detonated the
rebellion by refusing to pay the new higher fare and jumping the
turnstiles, but when the government put tanks on the streets for the first
time since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, the dockworkers
walked out on strike. In Hong Kong everyone from restaurant cooks to
computer programmers have joined the protests. In Nicaragua the elderly
were joined by students and then by the general population that barricaded
entire towns.

Almost everywhere the governments have responded with attempts to repress
the movement using riot police, water cannons, tear gas, beatings, arrests.
Almost everywhere there have been deaths and severe injuries. In some
places like Hong Kong and Nicaragua, the police have been supplemented by
gangsters or paramilitaries. In Sudan and Chile, the army was sent out to
crush the movement, while outside of Hong Kong the Chinese Peoples Army
remains massed on the border, awaiting a call to intervene. But the people
refuse to give up the street, call out others, look for new avenues of
protest, and the many-headed hydra just keeps reappearing around the next
corner. As the revolts spread, they can begin to shape the contemporary
*Zeitgeist*, legitimizing the idea of rebellion and raising the question of
revolution.

Still, one must not exaggerate and we must remember that all of this
turmoil takes place against a backdrop of entrenched despotisms and
authoritarian governments that rule most of the world’s people: the
Communist Party dictatorship that manages capitalism in China, the personal
dictatorship of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic mafia in Russia, Bashir
al Assad in Syria, the personalist authoritarian regimes of Narendra Modi
in India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Rodrigo Duerte in the Philippines,
as well as the new rightwing government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Those
governments keep their populations locked down to prevent precisely the
kind of militant movements for change we are discussing here.

Stand with the People in Rebellion

Returning to our discussion of the revolts themselves, where much of the
population either sympathizes with or joins the protests, these become
popular rebellions, that is, rebellions of the entire population.
Consequently their class character may become vague and indeterminate, even
if is the working people are driving them forward. Similarly their demands
for democracy are sometimes unclear and undeveloped. Their call for
democracy may obfuscate the inherent contradictions between those who want
a liberal state and parliamentary democracy—dominated by the banks and
business—and those who want some sort of working class democracy where
everyone has an equal voice and vote. Precisely because these are mass
upheavals they contain within them many social groups and widely divergent
ideas and are riven with controversy and debate—and that is both necessary
and very good.

The fact that many of these revolts are popular and not led by leftist
parties and not guided by socialist ideologies, and that they contain many
contradictory currents, has caused consternation among leftist groups both
in the United States and elsewhere. Their confusion arises from the fact
that they have not for almost fifty years had to try to understand and
interpret such mass popular movements. When one Hong Kong demonstrator
carries a sign that says “Trump Liberate Us” or a handful of Nicaraguans
goes to Washington and speaks with Republican congressmen, leftists in
other countries may abandon the rebellion because they have no experience
with mass popular movements and their complexities and contradictions. Even
in their own countries leftists may be unable to comprehend what’s
happening, as in France where for months much of the left characterized the
Yellow Vests as fascists.

We should, on the contrary, recognize that mass popular revolts enter into
a political quest and a search for their program and leaders. We know from
history that that if and when social revolts become political, the leaders,
parties, and programs will be tested in the struggle against the old order
and in the contest between different tendencies within the movement to
establish a new order. The movements need time to work out their views,
perhaps to divide into different or rival positions. And to get that time,
they need our solidarity.

Here again we can see some trends, though they are only that and not yet
definite political alternatives. In places like Hong Kong, which wants to
keep the dictatorship at bay, or in Algeria or Sudan where the movement
rises to overthrow and old dictatorial order, the initial demand is for a
parliamentary democracy and civil rights, which represents an enormous
advance over dictatorship. The same is true where the population thinks the
government is betraying democratic norms, as in Puerto Rico, and Honduras.

Still, history suggests that in struggles for parliamentary democracy,
working people will also raise economic and social demands while their
struggles may produce new institutions as alternatives not only to the old
parties but perhaps even to the old constitution and the parliament. In
other places, such as France and Chile, from the very beginning the
struggle over economic issues and for democracy are completely intertwined.
The truth is, however, that with the exception of Algeria and Sudan, and
perhaps Chile, almost none of these countries is in a pre-revolutionary
situation, and in virtually none of them has the social rebellion given
rise to a revolutionary political party. Yet it is also true that much of
the world at this moment is a laboratory searching for the cure for
capitalism, and the social scientists running the experiments are in the
streets.

All of these struggles deserve our support, unconditional in many cases,
though not uncritical. We support those fighting for democracy in the
street, but we also understand that, much like ourselves, they have yet to
clarity their political positions and produce the necessary political tools
to change the society. We are witnessing a great concurrent movement from
below for democracy and economic justice across the world and we stand with
those movements.

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcykjwQTZopdeHDZ0-qSQnhr%2B%2BDhqxQSc-Ut%2B%2BGYK1vq7Q%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>