Somewhere between Co-optation and Isolation: Maintaining autonomy while making strategic demands from electoral politics?
Stevphen Shukaitis (of Rise Up Radio)
It is perhaps ironically accurate that you can judge the success of your organizing efforts by the amount of effort the power structure devotes to either trying to co-opt or to destroy them. This is especially true with the many tendrils of the loosely connected strands grouped under the heading of environmentalism. The fact that McDonalds or some similar establishment offers veggie burgers, or that multinational summits now phrase their plans for ecology-destroying profit mongering in terms of sustainability is a perverse sign of victory.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who can't help but make a nasty face every time I see a shiny new gas guzzling SUV emblazoned with a giant 'meat is murder' sticker. I never fail to be mystified by such. How do people simply not get the connection between how it would be wrong to kill a cow, but somehow slaughtering several hundred thousand Iraqis or polluting Nigerian lands and killing indigenous tribes is somehow a separate issue - or not an issue at all?
Having spent some time looking at the relation between different forms of oppression it baffles me that such inherently interconnected issues can be addressed as separate concerns. It seems that confronting any given issue in isolation leads to the branding of dissent. One can express a disagreement in an almost consumer like display, but stay content that such is easily reintegrated back into the system, the spectacle, or whatever else you would like to call it.
These concerns over co-opting the risks (and occasional benefits) of single issue campaigns will become all the more apparent and pertinent in the United States as 2004 presidential election nears. There will be many attempts to turn the energy and organizing that has gone into the efforts against the war, neo-liberalism, racism, sexism, corporate power, ecological destruction, and every other possibly related issue, and to unite them into a huge voting block to get rid of Bush. This almost certainly will involve great amounts of admonition to 'be pragmatic' and to get behind the candidacy of some random Democrat, perhaps Nader, perhaps someone else - the individual is really inconsequential. There will probably be some efforts made to show how such an individual voted against one particular war resolution or particularly egregious piece of business backed legislation, and this will be used as a pretext for declaring how anti-war or pro-environment such person is. Again, the details are generally rather inconsequential.
This leaves those of us on the more radical end of the political spectrum in somewhat of a quandary. Yeah, Bush is by all means an evil presence who has wrought great damage over the past four years, and it would be great to see him booted. However, replacing him with another neo-liberal happy fuzzy faced Democrat (or Green) really doesn't seem to accomplish much at all. In perspective it's really amazing how much horrendous conservative garbage Clinton managed to pass (1994 crime bill, 1996 welfare reform act, NAFTA, gutting the FDA, etc.) while managing to somehow maintain the image of being a liberal. Just looking at recent political events in South America would seem to be warning enough about the pitfalls of electoral political action. I was somewhat amused and encouraged when Chavez started to refer to himself, Lula, and Castro as the 'axis of good.' While Lula and the Worker's Party briefly seemed like they might accomplish some actual good, it wasn't long before he started licking the capitalist boot and implementing some neo-liberal reforms like slowly taking apart the pension system.
It would be fairly simple to leave it as that: electoral action is the essence of co-option itself, and there is no hope for achieving any sort of actual social, political, environmental change through the ballot. Does that mean that our only option is the bullet? For that reason among others I simply just can't leave it that. For me when people talk about using a diversity of tactics, that would imply using the widest possible of all tactics to achieve one's ends. Conversely, when Malcolm X would speak of securing human rights by any means necessary, that would suggest that any tactic or method that could advance such goals would be worthy of consideration.
I'd like to invert the question of electoral politics as it is usually asked in reference to political activists and community organizers. Instead of the question being how the Democrats or the Greens, or whoever, can mobilize a base of support drawing from certain people with promises often broken and plans left unimplemented, I think the question we should be asking is what do we want from them? In other words, to think actively and tactically about the electoral process, to think of what demands can be made of such a process that serves our needs of mobilizing outside of the electoral process rather than letting our concerns and demands become token chips in the encompassing and enveloping blob of electoral politics.
To borrow a phrase from Dead Prez, to think about how we can pimp the system, rather than being pimped by it. To do such would be to steer the course between flat out rejection of electoralism and the co-optive tendency of embracing it. It would be what Saul Alinsky might describe as jujitsu electoralism.
Recently Nell Geiser and I interviewed Jason West, the newly elected Green party mayor of New Paltz, New York, for the radio show we both work for (Rise Up Radio on WBAI 99.5 in New York City). Going into the interview I expected to be barraged by the usual array of typical 'Green' responses to most questions, the importance and primacy of electoral action, and the usual rhetoric one would expect. I was very curious as to how one could expect or plan strategically so that victories as such could be made sustainable and prolonged, to not have any noticeable gains just be recapitulated in the next electoral season or two. This is especially important as West's victory occurred in part due to an anomalous split in the town's usual voting blocs.
Although Mayor West answered questions in many ways that I suspected that he would - preferring to focus on issues like converting the municipal vehicles to biodiesel fuels and to improvements in the ecological impact of the local sewer system - he said a number of things that I did not expect from him. He was very open about his not seeing electoral political action as the be-all-and-end-all of organizing, but as a means whereby short-term concrete gains could be achieved and then used as a catalyst to further efforts for deeper and more systemic changes. At several points he made reference to 'Pacifism is Pathology' by Ward Churchill in discussing how strategic long term political planning makes excluding any form of action a questionable idea, and indicated support for both the Animal and Earth Liberation Front.
A number of the things that he said were really quite thought provoking for me, to a large degree because, rather than taking what I have found to be the usual response of Greens and those engaged in electoralism to autonomous organizing (generally summed up as 'one must focus on pragmatic and realizable goals, which you're not doing'), he saw obvious connections between how local electoral campaigns could be benefited by more radical forms of organizing, and how such could also be to the benefit of those trying to create autonomous spaces, new forms of community, and who are engaging in more radical forms of resistance. Some tentative ideas for this might involve support for the development of autonomous social centers, squats, the creation of community run programs and support for public spaces, from where forms of resistance and contestation often emerge.
So, rather than putting forward any sort of definitive position, I would like to put forth the question: how can those of us who have a vision of a more just, sustainable, and free world based upon increasingly autonomous communities, the destruction of the state and capitalism, make strategic demands of electoral campaigns that we can use to forward the kind of work we want to engage in? How can we use the electoral process to benefit our aims and desires rather than being caught up in the quandary of either being isolated from the marginal form of democracy this represents, or co-opted by it? How can we use the continued failures and absurdities of representative democracy to begin discussions and organizing to create genuine democracy, economic democracy, direct democracy?
I'm far from knowing exactly what such steps might look like, or whether they even exist, for this would most likely have to be decided upon based on the conditions where it is occurring, but I think there is a good deal that can gained from looking at such questions. And the time to ask those questions is now, before we're stuck with four years of the lesser evil or worse, and without anything to show for it that can get us any closer to building the world we want to live in.
Rise Up Radio is a youth produced social justice radio show airing Fridays 11:00-11:55 am on WBAI 99.5 in New York City.