Political change might come from the tip of a spear, a nonviolent one.
The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JPMorgan to BlackRock by Scott Aquanno and Stephen Maher Verso 2024
Why Civil Resistance Works, The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan Columbia University Press 2012
We can always come to different conclusions over our lifetimes. It did seem like we’d have a significant revolution in our lifetime. The last Century did have that sense of optimism, what with Peoples War and a “new” left, built on an anti-Stalinist, humanism Marxism. In the end of history we might have a reversal of land enclosure as the best act achieving global ecosocialism.
All that moment expecting global revolution did was make us cynical with Lin Biao’s plane crash fleeing a failed cultural revolution and more recently in a very different context the Wagner plane crash as a mutiny reprisal. The latter had hoped for some military participation and even a revolt and coup, but “whichever narrative the Kremlin chooses, international news will now be focused on the mystery behind Prigozhin’s apparent death rather than Russia’s continuing problems in Ukraine, a win for Moscow’s propaganda machine.” The disinformation machine always wins, because of history’s winner’s curse of authorship. More importantly in Blanquism, there are no temporary dictatorships like Trump’s impending “one-day” version.
I wrote earlier in ACM about why we might not be able to reach a proletarian revolution and recently had that reminder in a review of the latest, Anthropocene popularizing book by Kohei Saito on “degrowth communism”. The reviewer concluded that Saito had neglected the need and even the necessity for proletarian revolution. thus begins the circular argument charging vanguardism, revisionism, counter-revisionism, etc.
We participate where we can, and according to our abilities, and even in the context of the Paris Commune, Blanquism as a vanguard didn’t much care for rabble. Trumpism and its Leonard Leo and Chuck Koch, is also Blanquism and only a comic book character like Trump would promise a “one-day dictatorship”
As I recall, Jules Feiffer created a similar comic character for Esquire, a capitalist who financed a revolution from his Wall Street activity “Bonds by Day, Bombs by Night”. Unfortunately even terrorism requires more capital than labor as we know from 9/11, referred to by a CNN terrorism analyst on that day as “high concept, low cost”.
I created a Spirit swipe (The Eel) and a Flash swipe (The Streak), a Lone Ranger swipe (The Masked Caballero) a Hawkman swipe (The Vulture) and even a Clip Carson swipe (Gunner Dixon: “Gunner Dixon is not meant to be a bold super athletic math genius who with his super powers turns to do good in this war-torn world — NO! He’s just an ordinary guy, he’s no mental giant, he can’t lick an army with his bare fist, but he can hold his own in any fight. All he is, is an American”).
www.tcj.com/...
One version of vanguardism comes with a largely American neoliberalism brought on by post-war hegemony. Unbridled economic growth gets to be rebranded as “wise development” and the environment remains damned with “workfare” the cudgel to reinforce labor’s exploitation.
Degrowth suffers from that same schism of capitalism and communism where even its name has a “branding” connotation that leans to austerity policies.
Traditional Marxists distinguish between two types of value creation: that which is useful to mankind, and that which only serves the purpose of accumulating capital.[9]: 86–87 Traditional Marxists consider that it is the exploitative nature and control of the capitalist production relations that is the determinant and not the quantity. According to Jean Zin, while the justification for degrowth is valid, it is not a solution to the problem.[130] Other Marxist writers have adopted positions close to the de-growth perspective. For example, John Bellamy Foster[131] and Fred Magdoff,[132] in common with David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein, Paul Sweezy and others focus on endless capital accumulation as the basic principle and goal of capitalism. This is the source of economic growth and, in the view of these writers, results in an unsustainable growth imperative. Foster and Magdoff develop Marx's own concept of the metabolic rift, something he noted in the exhaustion of soils by capitalist systems of food production, though this is not unique to capitalist systems of food production as seen in the Aral Sea. Many degrowth theories and ideas are based on neo-Marxist theory.[9] Foster emphasizes that degrowth "is not aimed at austerity, but at finding a 'prosperous way down' from our current extractivist, wasteful, ecologically unsustainable, maldeveloped, exploitative, and unequal, class-hierarchical world."[133]
en.wikipedia.org/...
If the authors of the 3.5% rule are correct, overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.
We should lead any real revolution with this fact, but as good Blanquists, we know that mass protests are always only one form of violence. There will always be gun barrels, if only at one phase, for self-defense, despite the need for ploughshares. Critical mass as the prerequisite for revolution always has suffered from errand-boy misogyny in creating a revolutionary vanguard.
With age we’ll let the next generation worry about that. But in the next piece I’ll try to get to the ways in which financialization, especially land financialization, can be a revolutionary tool where only a vanguard can succeed.
The consolidation of the risk state, based on a range of new economic practices, also suggests a new period is underway. Nevertheless, the future of this new finance capital is uncertain. Indeed, the continued power of pro-austerity forces has prevented the formulation of a coherent new policy paradigm, despite calls for this from finance capitalists and policymakers. Whether the hegemony of this new class fraction can become consolidated, particularly in light of stock market volatility and rising interest rates, remains to be seen.
What is clear is that, as Sam Gindin has put it, there is today a polarization of options. If a social-democratic class compromise is off the table, then the challenge to contemporary global capitalism can only come from an organized and mobilized working class.
The central task of socialist politics — more pressing than ever in the face of the mounting environmental crisis — is to build the capacities within the state to run finance as a public utility. Only through establishing a democratic economic planning regime can investment decisions come to serve social and ecological need rather than private profit.
jacobin.com/...
Analysts of financialization often present it as a sign of capitalist decline, yet the rise of finance has actually strengthened capitalist domination. The only way to challenge this power is by converting finance into a public utility.
Can this conversion happen without violence.
(2021)
LAST WEEKEND, 100,000 activists marched through Glasgow, where the UN’s climate summit was taking place, demanding that governments do more to tackle global warming. Many carried the banners of Extinction Rebellion (XR), a global environmental movement that specialises in disruptive protests. According to XR’s website it needs “the involvement of 3.5% of the population” if it is to succeed in achieving its aims. They are still some way off: in Britain that would amount to around 2m people. The “3.5% rule” comes from Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, who found it was a useful predictor of a protest’s success. What is so special about this figure?
The 3.5% rule posits that no government can stand up to that share of the population mobilising against it. Ms Chenoweth came up with it in 2013, after studying 323 violent and non-violent protests that occurred between 1900 and 2006 worldwide. In every case when at least 3.5% of the population attended a “peak” event, such as a mass gathering, they achieved their aims. One example was Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003. More than 180,000 protesters (equivalent to 4.7% of the country’s population) gathered outside the parliament to oust President Eduard Shevardnadze, a strongman left over from the Soviet era. Protesters handed out roses to soldiers, who lowered their weapons. Shevardnadze was removed from power without bloodshed.
www.economist.com/...
Degrowth:
"The case for a transition to a steady-state economy with low throughput and low emissions, initially in the high-income economies and then in rapidly growing economies, needs more serious attention and international cooperation.[37]
E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful predates a unified degrowth movement but nonetheless serves as an important basis for degrowth ideas. In this book he critiques the neo-liberal model of economic development, arguing that an increasing "standard of living", based on consumption is absurd as a goal of economic activity and development. Instead, under what he refers to as Buddhist economics, we should aim to maximize well-being while minimizing consumption.[87]
Land privatisation
Baumann, Alexander and Burdon [138] suggest that "the Degrowth movement needs to give more attention to land and housing costs, which are significant barriers hindering true political and economic agency and any grassroots driven degrowth transition." They are saying that land (something we all need like air and water) privatisation creates an absolute economic growth determinant. They point out that even one who is fully committed to degrowth nevertheless has no option but decades of market growth participation to pay rent or mortgage. Because of this, land privatisation is a structural impediment to moving forward that makes degrowth economically and politically unviable. They conclude that without addressing land privatisation (the market's inaugural privatisation - primitive accumulation) the degrowth movement's strategies cannot succeed. Just as land enclosure (privatisation) initiated capitalism (economic growth), degrowth must start with reclaiming land commons.[139]
en.wikipedia.org/...
One hopes that a 3.5% nonviolent revolution can succeed.
Just as land enclosure (privatisation) initiated capitalism (economic growth), degrowth must start with reclaiming land commons.
This can be the first step if it doesn’t make antidemocratic moves like executing kulaks, etc. Assuming exurbanism can even be attractive beyond the rump capitalist attempts to seize land like Solano County California, degrowth can become a national policy.