So, as the movements promised, Oct 12 was a day of mobilization against Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Oct 12, I didn’t realize until the day itself, is the “Day of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance” in the Americas. In Colombia there was a march of some 300,000 — in Medellin, Cali, Bucaramanga, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and other cities, there were large demonstrations. The platform was against bilateral “Free Trade” with the US, against Uribe’s re-election, and a for political solution to armed conflict.
In Peru, the main action of the 12th was the beginning of the collection of signatures to begin the process of an official referendum on Free Trade.
In Bolivia, thousands began on October 11 to march from Caracollo to the seat of government in La Paz (a distance of 190km, so the plan is to get to La Paz on the 18th). They want a new law regulating hydrocarbons and they want to sanction the President for human rights violations.
In Costa Rica, 30,000 marched against bilateral free trade with the US. There were other demonstrations all over Central America and the Caribbean: El Salvador, Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.
On a personal note: While they were battling neoliberalism in Latin America, however, I was experiencing neoconservatism in the United States. It made me realize just how different these two killers of aspirations in the world really are.
I listened to a little talk radio, for example. All of the AM radio stations are talk radio. Local hosts. All deeply, profoundly right wing and taking repetitive, hateful aim not at the left (which doesn’t exist in any form which these guys think it’s worth attacking) but at “liberals” and “liberalism”, exemplified by Kerry.
I realize there’s been a ton written about this but I realized then that the difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush is not so much what they say or what they promise to do or what they will do once in office. The difference is that John Kerry is a slimy politician flailing around looking for a winning formula and George Bush is at the head of a massive, incredibly well organized, incredibly well disciplined, incredibly well resourced, truly revolutionary movement. And movements, radicals ought to understand, are serious business.
Movements can force governments out of power. Movements can constrain what elites can do even from a position of opposition. Movements can organize for the long haul and change the culture and context in which everyone has to operate. Movements can set the agenda even if they do not have majority support, compensating for that with ideological clarity, discipline, and organization. And that is exactly what the right has done in the US.
Its enemies, as I have said, are not the left — if, by the left, we mean people who want equality, solidarity, some radical notions of democracy, liberation for the third world and oppressed people. Those principles are not part of mainstream discourse, they are not part of the political culture, and the right doesn’t need to take them on in any serious way. Instead, the enemies of the right are the liberalism that people outside of the US have long believed defined the US: secularism, the separation of church and state, checks and balances in government, freedom of speech, journalistic independence, academic freedom, and indeed rational thought or debate itself. It is not any particular arguments about society or the future that is being undermined day by day in the US by the work of this movement. It is the possibility of having rational argument itself, the basis for having an argument — agreement on the rules of evidence, logic, and reasoning.
I just started reading Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the matter with Kansas” which this article by Serge Halimi about these issues cites. These pieces describe how all this came to pass.
I realize I’m coming to all this a little late in the game, but that’s part of the point — people outside of the US have very little idea what an important development the coming to power of this movement is. Partly because the movement itself is so oriented towards the US and part of its ideology is contempt for the rest of the world. Partly because radicals in the rest of the world are so focused on neoliberalism as the enemy.
But like many latecomers, once I notice something I start to see it everywhere. Like in Chomsky’s blog entry today:
Activists have quite different concerns. They are engaged with the public, and try to help in the growth and development of popular organizations that will become powerful enough so that they cannot be ignored by centers of power. If Pat Robertson says, as he recently did, that he’ll start a third party unless the Republicans are sufficiently extreme in “support of Israel,” that’s a threat, because he might be able to mobilize tens of millions of evangelical Christians who already form a significant political force, thanks to extensive work over decades from local levels and on, and on numerous issues apart from the political choices from school boards to presidents.
A lot of different ideas come up. In a book of interviews with David Barsamian called “Confronting Empire”, lifelong anti-imperialist activist Eqbal Ahmad said that one limitation on the US’s ability to be an empire was that the American people just “did not have the will to dominate”. His example? The American people’s reaction to the Clinton sex scandal — a society with a real will to dominate would have punished Clinton severely. I believe that things have changed in the years since Eqbal Ahmad said those words, and that things go further and further in the direction of domination each day. In the 1990s, Michael Albert described the United States as an “organizer’s paradise” because dissatisfaction with the status quo was so widespread. Well it was an organizer’s paradise, and then the right went to work, and now tens of millions of the poor are diehard and organized with the goals of destroying liberalism and, to use a phrase out of Thomas Frank’s book, “repealing the twentieth century”.
I’m about to watch the debate now, but I can already tell you that the liberals are not ready for this battle. They aren’t sure they want to fight it, and they definitely wouldn’t know what to do if they won. They want to try to convince the constituency of this movement that the fact that the Democrats would slow the slashing of what little economic programs still exist makes them the natural choice for the working people who are voting Republican. But it won’t work. Those people are not being duped by the Republicans. They are making moral choices — in their view, to defend America, to spite hypocritical and patronizing liberals, to stop the murder of foetuses, to keep the sacred right to bear arms. And, like radicals, they are willing to sacrifice for these moral choices. Sacrifice education for their children, maybe, sacrifice health care, maybe, sacrifice a whole world of opportunities and solidarity, even. Though, to be fair, no one is offering them any of these latter — certainly the Democrats are not, and radicals don’t really get the chance.
What’s important for radicals to understand though is that the enemy isn’t just elites and it isn’t just the business class or corporations or neoliberals. It is an organized mass movement, including a huge number of poor people. Bush is so effective because he concentrates on his constituency and ignores the rest — the majority of the population. Liberals might be more effective if they did the same: if they focused on blacks, latinos, women, unionists, immigrants — on cultural, social, and political issues. Making moral arguments and writing off the hard right movement’s constituencies the way the hard right has written off these constituencies. But they won’t do so. What’s left for them is to try to convince the elite that they can do the job better than the Republicans can. The trouble is that this movement is now a player in the game, perhaps every bit as powerful as the elite, and has to be taken into account in any equation of power. This is a new environment. Radicals have to understand this in order to figure out how to operate in the world.
Now I’m off to watch the third and final presidential debate.