Category: Leftist theory

It’s odd that I’m in the middle of a psychology reading binge, given my professional interest in climate and the current horrific climate chaos that has millions of people displaced in Asia, people dying from record high temperatures in Europe, and your run-of-the-mill 38 degree celsius here in Toronto. But I won’t spare you my random thoughts on this reading on that account.

Continue reading “on mass and personal traumas”

http://www.zcommunications.org/after-socialism-by-justin-podur

Review of Gabriel Kolko?s ?After Socialism: Reconstructing critical social thought?. Routledge, UK. 2006.

Continue reading “After Socialism?”

What follows is a paper for presentation at the Z Sessions on Vision and Strategy, to be held in June 2006. It is fairly schematic. I have fleshed out the ideas with examples in other online work (see this essay and this interview). The aim here was to present the main ideas to a leftist, activist audience, advance the ideas somewhat, and seek feedback. I’m hoping for feedback from those who attend the sesions. But I hope to get more feedback in the ZNet wiki, in the discussion pages…

My presentation is motivated by what I believe is a weakness across the political spectrum: handling the interaction of different cultures and identities in accordance with principles of equality, solidarity, and liberty. My optimistic belief is that if we – leftists – can get this right, in our own communities and organizations such as they are, then we can solve some of the debilitating problems within our organizations and communities. If we can do that, we will be more attractive, bigger, stronger, and better able to face the battles we will need to fight in future.

Definitions

I am obliged to start with some definitions. I am going to define a few very commonly used terms. In my definitions I am going to stick fairly closely to what I think people mean when they use these terms, but I am going to select meanings in order to make it easier for me to make my points.

I define a community as a group of people who share something in common. Who is in or out of the community is determined by the community and by those outside it. The Black community, for example, is not one based solely on self-identification. Who is Black has been defined, historically, by whites, not blacks. The journalistic or scientific ‘community’, a very different kind of community, is not defined from the outside – or is defined from the outside to a much lesser extent.

Identity is most simply membership in a community or group. Like the boundaries of community, identification happens in two ways. One’s own consciousness is important. But so too is that of the group – in many cases, membership in a group is contingent upon the group’s acceptance. And also, identity can be imposed from the outside – by states who confer ‘status’ or ‘non-status’ identity on their subjects.

I am going to define culture differently from anthropologists. To anthropologists culture is everything that is not defined by biology. But I will define culture as the shared language – not only language, but nonverbal cues, assumptions, norms, customs – that enable members of a group to communicate internally and to strengthen the identification of individuals with the community. But the capacity to communicate is moderated through cultural institutions – media, educational, religious… indeed every institution has a cultural element, which is the reason for phrases like ‘working class culture’.

Race is just a particular kind of group identity, correlated with continent of origin and physical features like skin colour. In North America ‘racial’ identifications are basically: Asian (sometimes divided into East, West, South), Indigenous, Latin@, Black, and white. Ethnicity is a more nuanced understanding of the concept, relying on country or language of origin.

Next is racism. Leftists used to have some control over the definition of this word, but I believe we have lost it, and this has led to some of our problems. Common usage of the word racism is that racism is bigotry, prejudice, resort to stereotypes. In this common usage, Blacks can be just as ‘racist’ as whites. Another idea is that racism is simply the irrational hatred of Black people. In this usage, ‘racism’ is reserved for anti-Black prejudice, and differentiated from anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and hatred against other groups. This usage leads to the idea of ‘reverse racism’, which in common usage is discrimination against whites and is usually suggested as an argument against affirmative action programs.

Leftist usage of the word racism is different from common usage. In leftist usage, racism is either a system of power that one group (whites) holds over others, or any individual or institutional behaviour or pattern that reinforces this system of power. I believe this is a useful definition – indeed the most useful – but because of its limitations, it has been mostly rejected in favor of the common usage. I will discuss these limitations in a minute – first I will dispense with the definitions.

Multiculturalism is a proposed solution to racism. In a multicultural framework, all cultures are respected and indeed, all cultures are equal. Groups are free to express their cultural preferences and dominant groups are to have special respect for minority groups. Tolerance and diversity are the order of the day. Cross-cultural understandings are sought. Multiculturalism posed as the counter to the common-usage form of racism.

Multiculturalism is not, however, a solution to racism as leftists refer to it. Indeed, if a system of power is still in place, multicultural ideals of respect, tolerance, and diversity can then be used as arguments against mobilization aimed at identifying or redressing power imbalances (as divisive or intolerant). Ideas of fairness and equality developed as an antidote to bigotry become arguments against affirmative action. It is official policy in Canada, and it plays out in perverse ways: it is a table built on dispossession at which the gatekeepers of the different communities compete for resources based on their ability to convince the others that they ‘represent’ their communities. The result is that the dominant group, presumed to have no ‘culture’ (having to settle for wealth and power instead) gets to wield strict fairness and equality arguments against these ‘cultures’, who sound like they want ‘special rights’.

At the same time, leftists helped develop multicultural analysis and the multicultural ideal. That it has become mainstream speaks to its basis in good values (fairness, equality, diversity). That it is used as a weapon against oppressed constituencies speaks to its limitations.

Limitations of Multiculturalism by Leftists

The limitations of the leftist definition of racism are related to the limitations of multiculturalism. Both are highlighted by the proposed solutions to the problem. If we are against power differentials between groups, do we eliminate the differentials but preserve the groups? Or do we eliminate the groups?

If we want to preserve the groups neatly and separately, we have a separatist solution.

If we want to eliminate the groups, we are after assimilation.

But both such solutions – and in its crudest form multiculturalism is a separatist solution, albeit with an injunction to ‘tolerance’ between the separate groups – are solutions based on cultural homogeneity. They are based on a flawed idea that people live their lives as members of a single group or a single identity.

The flaw and its application in multiculturalism is described by Vijay Prashad in his book ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting’:

“Are cultures discrete and bounded? Do cultures have a history or are they static? Who defines the boundaries of culture or allows for change? Do cultures leak into each other? … To respect the fetish of culture assumes that one wants to enshrine it in the museum of humankind rather than find within it the potential for liberation or for change. We’d have to accept homophobia and sexism, class cruelty and racism, all in the service of being respectful to someone’s perverse definition of culture.”

Adding to Vijay’s list of rhetorical questions are two posed by Michael Rabinder James’s book ‘Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity’: Do individuals choose their cultural identities, do they inherit them, or are they imposed from without? A group’s claim on resources or restitution may depend on this question. When we are talking about resources, we are talking about the economy, and class, and perhaps of conflict between classes. Why should a group based on self-definition have any special claim on resources? The truth is, Rabinder James argues, that in fact, choice and inheritance, internal group acceptance and external imposition, all play a role in identity formation, in virtually all cases.

Most of our views about culture and multiculturalism underestimate diversity within groups. They overlook how group boundaries can shift over time.

Amartya Sen’s recent book, Identity and Violence, also makes this argument. He makes two main points. First, that individuals have multiple identities that overlap and can change. Second, that there is always some role for choice in how identity plays out in any given situation.

This is not a matter that requires great imagination. It merely requires recognition of daily reality. It is in front of all of us. But it has some important consequences.

Polyculturalism

Robin Kelley, 1999 ColorLines, describes this recognition as ‘polyculturalism’, which he counterposes with ‘multiculturalism’.

“…we were and are `polycultural.’ By `we,’ I’m not simply talking about my own family or even my `hood, but all peoples in the Western world. It is not our skin or hair or walk or talk that renders black people so incredibly diverse. Rather, it is the fact that most black people in the Americas are products of a variety of different `cultures’ — living cultures, not dead ones. These cultures live in and through us everyday, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy or meaning. In this respect, I think the term `polycultural’ works a lot better than `multicultural,’ since the latter often implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side — a kind of zoological approach to culture. Such a view of multiculturalism not only obscures power relations, but often reifies race and gender differences..

“…While this may seem obvious, for some people it’s a dangerous concept. Too many Europeans don’t want to acknowledge that Africans helped create so-called Western Civilization, that they are both indebted to and descendants of the very folk they enslaved. They don’t want to see the world as One — a tiny little globe where people and cultures are always on the move, where nothing stays still no matter how many times we name it. To acknowledge our polycultural heritage and cultural dynamism is not to give up our black identity or our love and concern for black people. It does mean expanding our definition of blackness, taking our history more seriously, and looking at the rich diversity within us with new eyes.” (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=3865)

Consequences for the Future

First of all, I still do want to eliminate power and class differentials between groups. So restitution – programs that pay attention to history with a view to eliminating equality and fairness in the present – is important, for example in North America for Blacks and Indigenous peoples in particular. I cannot see justifying inequalities on the basis of tolerating diversity, nor do I see any reason to view a reparations programme that decreases inequality as ‘special treatment’. But there is a flip side. First, the programs have to be carefully designed so that they actually do decrease inequality. And second, wanting to eliminate inequalities between groups does not mean tolerating inequalities within groups.

This is where a possible tension emerges between cultural autonomy and solidarity. This is not a plea for cross-cultural tolerance, because we do not live in a single identity. We can have solidarity with others on the basis of shared identity, even if we have only our shared humanity as a basis for solidarity. But if we don’t want to use cultural relativism as an excuse to tolerate injustice within groups, we also don’t want to allow powerful groups to violate the autonomy of weaker or smaller groups based on their own values or norms.

But what does it mean in the real world of institutions and groups and populations to say we cannot ‘allow powerful groups’ to do something? What kind of protection is there for a minority within a country, or for a small independent national community in the family of nations? There are legal, political, and media protections that could help a society deal with this problem.

Formal, legal protections in constitutions and international law, protections that require consensus or huge majorities to change. But these can be violated by powerful groups.

Voting systems can be arranged to provide incentives to politicians and campaigners to reach out across obvious community divisions. But these, too, could be ridden with conflict.

Major media institutions could be encouraged to operate based on fairness criteria. These criteria include:

1. Representing all subgroups in the wider community
2. Presenting all different positions in the wider community
3. Being accessible to anyone
4. Facilitating communication or translation between groups
5. Developing the ‘common culture’ of the wider community

Smaller, community media institutions might have a more specialist role. These might not be held up to the same standards of fairness. Nor would they have the same levels of public support or access to public space. They would just be independent media, available to anyone and protected by free speech laws.

What I’m sketching out here, for media institutions, is an important principle for a polycultural framework. The wider society has a responsibility to make its institutions representative of the diversity of the communities within it. But it should also encourage and help the creation of autonomous institutions for those communities: institutions that are not held to the same strict criteria of fairness, because, unlike society-at-large, people are free to exit them.

Michael Rabinder James, in his “Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity”, suggests fairness criteria for judging democratic processes: aggregative equality (each person has roughly the same voting power), deliberative equality (each different position is represented regardless of its popularity), aggregative autonomy (choice between different candidates and positions), deliberative autonomy (a chance to develop positions free of coercion and with full information), aggregative reciprocity (equal coalition-building opportunities), and deliberative reciprocity (a tendency to view others as partners and understand their positions). He also suggests voting systems that would encourage people to seek votes across identity groups.

Legal, political, and media protections can all facilitate a polycultural framework. But in spite of them, powerful groups could wield control over resources to shut out or misrepresent alternative views or consign them to the margins.

I believe, however, that beyond institutionalized protections, the ultimate protection is the development of a ‘common culture’ in which people do not ‘vote’, or even think, reliably or consistently as a member of their ‘community’ only as opposed to the larger society. This is the best protection against communalism and, in India, it has been the main brake on communalism. People do not vote, or live, in a single identity. A sound society would not ask them to.

What about across societies? What about if cases of oppression or violence are occurring within a community or a nation? When does the wider society – or the family of nations, or an external agent of any kind – have the right to intervene?

In the most extreme cases, this can be resolved with a simple rule proposed by Arthur Waskow in the 1960s in a small book called ‘Keeping the World Disarmed’. The basic rule is simply this: intervention is allowed, but more force requires more consensus. So any country could send a single unarmed observer or investigator to investigate claims that a country was arming or committing rights violations against its people. To send more would require more consensus, and full armed intervention would require some super majority.

Consequences Today

I said earlier that people do not vote, or live, in a single identity. A sound society would not ask them to. I should also add that a sound political movement would not ask them to. I should also add that I believe that leftists do ask people to, and that is a mistake.

There is no such thing as a homogeneous group or movement. The idea of representativeness in common spaces and the creation of autonomous spaces can almost always be applied. Criteria of deliberative and aggregative autonomy, reciprocity, and equality can always be applied. I believe that we can, and should, evaluate our own institutions and processes according to these criteria. I believe that we can improve our work as antiracists by recognizing the multiple, overlapping identities and the element of choice in them. We can also avoid the error of asking people to live or think in a single identity.

This framework has led me to a skepticism about the label ‘people of colour’ used by leftists. ‘People of colour’ is a flimsy identity, externally imposed. It lacks the elements of shared history, language, experience, or territory that make for coherent communities. It obscures power differentals and oppression within its too-wide boundaries. Antiracists do better to rely on stronger bonds of solidarity, whether based in coherent communities or in shared principles and practice. I do not believe that the benefits of excluding whites are so great that they make up for what is lost. For racial identity, I am in favor of more precise labels: Black, Indigenous, East, West, or South Asian, Latin@, and white – these, too, however, are subject to fluid and shifting boundaries and internal (class, power, gender) diversity.

I also believe that leftists analysis of ‘privilege’ is either too often used or too selectively used. Especially in the absence of positive aims and political strategy, it is common leftist practice to attack individuals on grounds of identity and consequent privilege. Without positive aims or objective criteria, critiques on the basis of identity have the potential to destroy any group and any organizing effort that is not completely homogeneous or atomized. While this is not an argument for denial, silence, or complicity in the face of inequalities or hypocrisy, I will say that such attacks need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, on the basis of their strategic value and on the basis of the likelihood that they will advance positive antiracist aims of decreasing power differentials, strengthening solidarity, or expanding freedom. Many are made instead for the sake of self-expression or because they are easy to make. The attackers are too often unreflective of their own privilege. I suspect that this is the experience of many leftists trying to function in activist circles. Indeed, Michael Rabinder James suggests criteria for when a minority group would be justified in political struggle against the majority. As you may have guessed, the idea is that the majority has to have failed the tests of deliberative and aggregative equality, reciprocity, and autonomy. It is worth keeping this in mind, too, when we are deciding whether or not to struggle against one another.

As I mentioned earlier, I interviewed Richard Stallman earlier this month. Just published the interview and set up a forum (linked at the bottom of the interview) where folks can introduce themselves if they’d like to help begin the exploration on possibly converting ZNet to free software.

The whole discussion and Stallman’s work was of great interest to me, with implications that go beyond software that I would like to explore if I get the chance. Meanwhile, take a look at the interview!

http://www.zcommunications.org/free-software-as-a-social-movement-by-richard-stallman

NOTE: ZNet has begun to explore the possibility of converting to free software. If you would like to help in this effort, please go to the Free ZNet Project forums, register, and introduce yourself.

Richard Stallman is one of the founders of the Free Software Movement and lead developer of the GNU Operating System. His book is ‘Free Software, Free Society’. I caught up with him by phone on December 1/05.

JP: Can you first of all explain the “Free Software Movement’.

Continue reading “Free Software as a Social Movement”

Any category or concept is going to leave important things out. It’s the nature of abstraction. Using the term ‘Black’ to describe a group of people can obscure more than it reveals. As a biological category it is meaningless, as is the concept of race generally. There is no clear biologically relevant distinction between blacks and non-blacks. There are some genetic diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, that are more prevalent among those with African ancestry compared to those with European ancestry. Other diseases prevalent in the Black community, like hypertension, however, are related to social, not biological phenomena.

Even as a social category, it abstracts a lot of differences. Within the group of Black people, there are men and women, there are children and adults, there are wealthy and poor, there are powerful and disenfranchised, there are those with access to resources and those without, there those with legal status and those without. So a lot of detail and nuance is lost in the use of the concept.

Despite this, it is still very meaningful as a social category. Black people in the United States, for example, have less wealth, less income, suffer poorer health, and are disproportionately incarcerated compared to people who are not Black. To say that the concept of race has no biological value and that individuals are what they are, cannot be made into an argument to deny the social reality of racism. Racism is real. It is brutal. And in the system of caste that is US racism, Black people, and indigenous people, are at the bottom.

What about the concept of ‘People of Color’? That, too, obscures a great deal. It obscures differentials in political power; it obscures class differences; it obscures gender differences; it obscures questions of imperialism; it obscures the crucial distinction in this world of those who have papers and passports and can cross borders and those who do not, cannot, and are ‘illegal’.

Does it, however, have merit, like the concept of Black race or ethnicity, that countervails what it costs in abstraction? It has the merit of excluding whites, who, while they can be oppressed on gender or class lines, are at the top of the racial caste system. It can be a useful substitute for the term ‘non-white’. But it can also lead to simple-minded analysis.

When whites in movements argue that everyone needs to get over race, transcend it, and work on common issues of class, against capitalism and the ruling elite, antiracists are unimpressed because such an approach enables the most privileged and powerful groups to impose their agenda on the rest. Such an approach denies problems of privilege and differentials of power within movements and organizations for social change. Denial is no basis for solidarity. As a substitute for denial, antiracists ask white activists to think about privilege, to be attuned to hierarchies and exclusion that can happen in organizations, and to work to overcome them. Pretending equality is already here is a recipe for maintaining inequality. Addressing and attempting to make structural redress for inequality can make a group, or a movement, stronger.

The way to fight racism is not to deny differences and hierarchies of privilege but to bring them out in the open and try to change them. But if that is the case, the ‘People of Color’ label is often not helpful, for several reasons.

First, because it leads to the same kinds of denial as comes from denying race altogether. There is a hierarchy of privilege within the group ‘People of Color’. At the bottom are poor African Americans, indigenous people, and Latinos. At the top are an elite of people from different ethnicities selected and adopted into the ruling class. In between are groups of immigrants, some of whom have historically had a degree of upward mobility and are used against those below them as rhetorical devices: ‘model minorities’ who are supposed to have ‘made it’, proving that racism does not hold ‘People of Color’ back and thus that African Americans (as an example) have not ‘made it’ through their own fault. There are also groups of brutally exploited and oppressed immigrants and refugees, who work at low wages to try to remit money to support their families in poor countries under constant threat of deportation. These groups are treated differently within the racial system. They are subject to different stereotypes. They have different, and sometimes opposed, interests. Black people, for example, have an interest in a tighter labor market, while immigrants have an interest in the chance to go to the US to work. Many institutions, and often the law, think affirmative action obligations to Blacks to redress centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation and violence are met when an upper class Asian is hired.

Collapsing all of these groups under the rubric of ‘People of Color’ does exclude those at the top of the hierarchy (white people) but it leaves the rest of the hierarchy intact. As a result, people at the top of the new hierarchy – in movement organizations these are often drawn from the ranks of class-privileged academics from the least oppressed racial groups – can claim the oppression of everyone below them as their own. Rather than trying to understand and addressing our own privilege and hierarchy, we can posture and be righteous. This does not help those we ought to be most concerned about – those who are most oppressed, those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

If addressing privilege and working against it within social movements and organizations is onerous, then why should whites shoulder the burden alone, since they are not the only ones with privilege? If, conversely, as antiracists claim, addressing privilege and working against it is a positive personal growth experience, then why should whites monopolize such a wonderful thing? We could all benefit from understanding how privilege and hierarchy work, and taking an honest look at where we stand. Perhaps we could start by being a little more specific about the racial system and its impacts, which do not come down on everyone equally. Using a better set of categories might help. The categories I use for North America, with their own flaws and problems, are: European or white, South Asian, East Asian, West Asian, Latino, African or Black, and Indigenous; always with the question of citizenship and status (immigrant, refugee, status/non-status).

Recognizing these differences is particularly important when ‘People of Color’ groups, caucuses, and organizations are formed. A ‘People of Color’ caucus in a community antiwar group is an example. The idea here is good: to create an autonomous space where an oppressed group can work and develop without constantly negotiating boundaries and issues of privilege. So long as the creation of such a space does not come at the expense of representation of the oppressed in larger, integrated groups (in the antiwar example, the existence of a caucus should not prevent people of color from being represented in the leadership of the larger antiwar organization or coalition). But if the autonomous space is a ‘people of color’ space where highly privileged people of color interact with much less privileged people of color, the most oppressed still have no space, and can now be denied a voice, of their own.

It’s true that no set of categories or concepts is perfect, and it would be easy to come up with arguments against the set I’ve chosen. But starting with a concept like ‘People of Color’, which obscures privilege and hierarchy within the racial system itself, can often make work harder for antiracists.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto.

Sorry for the missed days. For yesterday at least I have an excuse – I share a computer, and another user of my computer downloaded enough pop-up programs and viruses to destroy my computer. That problem still isn’t fixed, so I’m blogging from elsewhere.

Continue reading “Morals and tactics”

I’ve been wondering about a lot of different things lately.

I have thought of myself as an opponent of nation-states and national ‘sovereignty’, for example. I believed that nationalism (or what Basil Davidson called ‘nation-statism’ in his useful book ‘The Black Man’s Burden’) was usually exclusive (in North America, for example, it is often a kind of settler ideology that excludes both exploited immigrants, displaced indigenous people, and african-americans) and often destructive. I thought of national ‘sovereignty’ as an excuse used by elites to do terrible things to their populations. I made some of these arguments in an interview with Mike Albert.

But recently, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between nationalism and imperialism, and it seems to me that in this world national sovereignty is one of the only possible political defenses against imperialism that has some power. You can attack Colombia’s Uribe or Israel’s Sharon for their vicious mobilization of nationalism for murderous purposes. But you can’t forget that Venezuela’s ‘proceso’, or Bolivia’s movements, are about developing a country for the benefit of the people of that country — a nationalist idea, that ends up being an anti-imperialist idea. And indeed, it seems to me that the strongest grounds for opposing the US occupation of Iraq (or the coup in Haiti) is the nationalist idea of “Iraq for the Iraqis.” Tricky there, too, because there are losers in these national projects — certainly Saddam’s version of nationalism was a horrific one for those excluded from his notion of the national identity.

The question is, what is the next step? If you don’t like imperial occupation and colonization, what do you fight for? A vision of a different global order, open borders, some innovative protections for culture and freedom, the kinds of things I was arguing for in the interview? Or should we dream first of nation-states of citizens who can democratically control their own fates, decide on their own development, decide on their own resources, without interference or imposition from outsiders?

The United Nations is supposed to be a body that balances the universal needs and rights of all people with the reality that national states are the arena where most rights and responsibilities are exercised. I don’t think we’re going to jump from the current imperial nightmare into a just global order without something happening in between (maybe what happens in between is something like what George Monbiot proposes for a global order?)

Is the arena for that the national state? Is the mobilizing force behind it nationalism? It has certainly been one of the strongest anti-imperialist forces in the past, for all its flaws.

Let’s change scales and look at a different strategic question. Vijay Prashad’s latest ZNet Sustainer Commentary makes some interesting points about relating to electoral politics (something I try to think about as well). He says that the Anybody But Bush argument is the wrong one to have: it’s ineffectual, it’s the wrong issue — “Nader’s 2.9 million votes in 2000 is far less than the number of people who went to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 on its opening night: the point is not to fight over those who come to the polls, but to engage those potential voters who have either been deviously disenfranchised, or who feel no stake at all in either the democratic institutions or else in the movement for social change.”

To Vijay, “Our communities are active in many arenas (against police brutality, against workfare, against racism, against warfare, against domestic violence, against ecocide, against homophobia, against the working-class, against local sovereignty, against injustices of all kinds) – we need to move from these vibrant, often successful struggles to a different level. We have to have the courage to move toward the electoral domain to solidify our gains and to risk governance, with all its problems.”

The idea is that we “already have a social movement that has made many gains, and it is up to us to move our base to the polls to elect viable and decent local candidates who are accountable to our movements.” Examples? “The successful candidacies of Boston’s Felix Arroyo, Providence’s Miguel Luna, Austell’s Alisha Thomas, Tucson’s Raul Grijava, Newark’s Ras Baraka, New Platz’s Jason West…” I don’t know anything about these folks — but I would be interested to learn more about them… perhaps from the book Vijay cites, called “How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office” by the League of Pissed Off Voters. They have a 30 year plan. I like the last line of Vijay’s comment — the task is to make “the link between the struggle and the election. This is a far more important task than to treat our vote as a commodity and decide which shop to sell it to in exchange for some measure of personal satisfaction.”

Keeping that link alive though is tricky, because what inevitably happens is that elected politicians cease to be accountable to their constituencies. And progressive local politicians quickly discover that the real power lies elsewhere. How can a movement that can achieve a degree of local power make a transition to real power at the national or international level, without getting stuck?