Self-organization, self-emancipation and identity
What can we learn from indigenous peoples, blacks and
lesbigays?
Peter Drucker
(This article originated in August 1998 as a
presentation to the summer school of the Belgian Socialist Workers Party, and
was published in the Dutch-language journal De Internationale no. 67, Winter 1999.)
Whenever
we as Marxists talk about self-organization and self-emancipation, we must
remind ourselves and others that Marx and Engels invented
self-organization and self-emancipation as the central element of a strategy
for human liberation. The tragedy of 20th-century Marxism is that Marxism
became identified with movements that had hardly anything to do with
self-emancipation. The most important task for Marxists at this start of the
21st century is to reinvent the concepts and tools for self-organization and
democratic control.
I'll
begin with a citation from Lenin, that I want to use as a sort of motto for my
presentation. The citation is of course from a polemic, in this case a polemic
against Dutch and Polish revolutionary leftists. The piece is called 'The
discussion on self-determination summed up'; the year is 1916; and the occasion
for it is the Irish Easter Rising that took place that year. Lenin says:
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable
without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without
revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its
prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian
and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church,
and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate
social revolution.
Here
we see an essential aspect of Lenin's thought. Lenin was definitely a Marxist,
and he saw the strategic role of the working class in a socialist revolution as
central and indispensable. But he was the first major Marxist who also saw
semi-proletarian and non-proletarian movements as indispensable to a
revolutionary strategy. This evening I want to examine the issues of
self-organization and democratic control from that point of view, to
talk about self-organization of movements other than the workers' movement and
democratic control by social groups other than the working class. The question
is then, What relationship can the workers' movement and must the workers'
movement in general, and revolutionary organizations in particular, have to
these other movements? In our time as in Lenin's time, I think, this is a
central strategic question.
As
examples I will cite movements in three different categories: movements of
Indians, indigenous peoples, in Latin America, with the Chiapas uprising as a
major recent case; movements of blacks and immigrants in the United States and
Western Europe; and movements of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, also in the
US and Western Europe. These examples sometimes bring us very close to the
present. This means that we often lack the advantage of historical distance, so
that my conclusions necessarily have a provisional character. I do have some
ideas about how we should approach these movements, but I also have doubts. My main
goal here is to help stimulate discussion.
My
argument is in any case that specific forms of self-organization and democratic
control can never be set in stone for us, but rather must continually be
reinvented. Our goal is to build a bridge between the forms taken spontaneously
by actually existing movements and the overarching institutions of grassroots
democracy that must become the centres of power of a new, socialist society.
The closer we get to a moment of revolutionary crisis, the more cohesive these
structures can become, the more closely they can be linked to each other, and
the more they can be centralized.
In
this historical period, unfortunately — I hope that we agree on this — we are
still very far from a moment of revolutionary crisis of this kind. This means
that the forms of self-organization of different movements are very different,
very diverse, and very distinct. We need to pay attention to the many
specificities and the unique — though sometimes very young — traditions of the
various movements. This means that the content of a concept like 'democratic
control' is rather different right now than it would be in a period with a very
strong and dynamic workers' movement. The question that people ask in many
movements right now is not so much, 'How can we control those powerful workers'
institutions?' as, 'How can we safeguard the forms, the places, and even the
atmosphere in which we feel comfortable as a specific oppressed group?'
In other words, at this historical moment democratic control is often seen less
as a matter of power and effectiveness, and more as a matter of identity. We
need to be sensitive to this.
I
think it will be easier to understand what I'm getting at if I talk concretely
about particular examples. I'll begin with indigenous peoples in Latin America.
This example shows how important Lenin and the Bolsheviks' influence was. Only
pressure from the Third International made socialists in many parts of the
world begin to think about the role of oppressed nationalities in revolutions
in colonial and semi-colonial countries. Lenin and the Bolsheviks often had to
swim against the current: in Russia itself, where the first soviets in Central
Asia in 1918 and '19 for example were virtual apartheid soviets, from which
Muslims were excluded; in South Africa, where even whites who considered
themselves communists chanted the workers must 'unite and fight to keep South
Africa white'; and in the US, where even a left-wing socialist like Eugene V.
Debs considered that African-American oppression was not a topic of special
interest for socialists. In Latin America, also in the 1920s, a founder of
revolutionary Marxism like José Carlos Mariateguí had to swim against the
current in order to maintain that Indians would be a crucial force for
revolution in a country like Peru.
The
rise of Stalinism ensured that Mariateguí's lesson would not be fully learned
for a long time. In countries like Bolivia and Guatemala, countries with Indian
majorities where major revolutionary processes unfolded in the 1950s and later,
indigenous people were often marginalized within those processes and on the
left. There were honourable exceptions, such as the Peruvian peasant movement
under the leadership of our comrade Hugo Blanco, but they were only exceptions.
Only
in the 1980s and '90s did this situation really begin to change, mainly I think
because of three major experiences. The first was the trouble that the
Sandinistas went through on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, from which they and the
whole Latin American left learned a lot. Unlike in Russia, in Nicaragua taken
as a whole self-emancipation did to a large extent remain a central aspect of
the Sandinista revolution throughout its brief course. But in that one
particular region and among some indigenous peoples, the revolution was not
experienced in that way. The contras benefited considerably from that failing.
The
second major experience was the upsurge of Indian movements around 1992, when
500 years of indigenous oppression were commemorated. As a rule the Latin
American left sees itself as the defender of its nations against the US,
imperialism, the IMF, etc. So it was a hard adjustment for the Latin American
left to get used to the idea that all these nations are themselves based on
five centuries of genocide and oppression. The consequences of this experience,
in organizational as well as ideological terms, have sometimes gone very deep.
Our comrades in Ecuador for example have taken part in a regroupment,
Pachakutik/Nuevo País, which began as a federation of left parties alongside
social movements and independent Indian organizations. That was something new.
The model in which the revolutionary party or even the
revolutionary front plays a leading role in all progressive movements
apparently did not carry enough conviction, at least not in this particular
country in that particular period in these particular circumstances.
The
third major experience of Indian self-organization was of course the Zapatista
uprising. The Zapatistas were the first leftist movement in Latin America in
which indigenous people have played an absolutely central role. They have a
self-image as defenders of the Mexican nation and simultaneously as champions
of Indian autonomy. At the same time the Zapatista movement has had significant
limitations: the dire poverty of the Indians in Chiapas, among whom a civil
society barely exists; the fact that the working class in Mexico was still
almost entirely under the thumb of the ruling single party, which made
formulating a national strategy much more difficult; and the international
conjuncture, which made the idea of taking power seem implausible.
For
these reasons we need to view the EZLN consistently from two different angles.
On the one hand it is an ideological current that has had a great power of
attraction on a world scale. For us as the Fourth International it has been
very important to carry on a dialogue with this current. I think comrades like
Daniel Bensaïd have done that well. But on the other hand the Chiapas
revolutionary committee is a form of self-organization of oppressed people in a
specific region. For their grassroots base in Chiapas, showing respect for
their traditions and their achievements means more than strategic debates. One
might even think that the Indian communities' struggle to survive might be hard
to reconcile at some moments with developing a national or international
strategy. Perhaps there has sometimes just been more to lose with manoeuvres in
Mexico City with the various tendencies of the PRD and the rest of the Mexican
left, or in Madrid or Paris with all those European anarchists or Trotskyists,
than the people in Chiapas have had to gain from them. One can hardly reproach
the EZLN leadership for thinking of this aspect of things. Perhaps we should
consider some of the Zapatistas' statements about 'power' and 'parties' not only
as theoretical arguments, but also as a way of avoiding certain debates
and certain risks, so as to safeguard Indian autonomy. We also need to be able
to respect that.
The
second category of self-organization that I would like to discuss is the
self-organization of blacks and immigrants. In this respect too a certain
continuity can be seen between the Third International in the 1920s and
Marxists today. In the US for example the CP managed to link up in the early
1920s with the revolutionary nationalists of the African Blood Brotherhood.
African-Americans' involvement with revolutionary Marxism continued with
Malcolm X's relationship with the Socialist Workers Party [then the US section
of the Fourth International] in the early 1960s. But unfortunately the negative
role of the left was even more important for the development of
African-American movements. In the early 1960s social democrats, and in
particular the circle around Max Shachtman [earlier a leading figure of the
Fourth International in the 1930s] and Bayard Rustin had substantial influence
on leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the radical wing
of the civil rights movement. These African-American student leaders became the
founders of Black Power after 1964, after having been betrayed by white social
democrats whose highest priority was ensuring Lyndon Johnson's victory in the
1964 presidential election. The US left is still suffering the consequences of
the divisions between white and black that go back to the 1960s. But there were
also some positive lessons learned in those years, The key concept of Black
Power still holds true for the US, I think: blacks need to organize their own
community first, and only afterwards look for allies. Otherwise they can never
ally on an equal footing with whites.
Today
in Western Europe the forms of black and immigrant self-organization have not
yet entirely crystallized. But it is important to note that while continuity
has been central to the experience of Indian communities in Latin America, discontinuity
has been central for black and immigrant communities in Western Europe. This
means that specifically African, Arab, Turkish or Caribbean elements take on a
different meaning and function in a Western European context. The specifically
European experience of racism becomes more important than a particular
national origin to a European black or immigrant identity. This is visible in
the spread of a cultural form like rap music, which does not come from Africa
or the Middle East, which is sung more and more often in French or Dutch [as
well as English], and which has been borrowed from another racially oppressed
people in another imperialist country. Politically this may mean that immigrant
youth in the Netherlands or Belgium will organize, not together with youth in
general or as Moroccan or Turkish or Muslim youth, but as immigrant youth. Or
perhaps a genuinely multicultural youth culture will develop; today for example
many immigrant high school students in big Dutch cities speak a kind of 'smurf
language', which incorporates many Turkish, Berber and Surinamese expressions.
But this youth culture would then have to become an explicitly, actively
anti-racist culture; otherwise it cannot really be multicultural.[1]
In
any event, these developments are still not very much reflected inside our
organizations in Europe. We must be aware that immigrants are severely
under-represented in our ranks. In a city like Amsterdam, where a majority of
public school students consists of immigrants, we do not have a single
immigrant in our youth organization. Evidently the solutions to this problem
cannot be primarily organizational. But I am convinced that the solutions will
be partly related to democracy, in the broadest sense of the word: in the sense
that people see their experience reflected in an organization and see the
organization as their own. I pose the question: could it be that young
immigrants will not be won over to the revolutionary movement purely as
individuals, but rather as immigrants, as such, organized autonomously
in immigrant groups? Or at least organized in youth groups in which a very
substantial minority consists of immigrants? These are important questions — we
are talking about a big part of the new generation of the working class.
I
can give more organizational examples from a third category of autonomous
organizations, of 'lesbigays': lesbians, bisexuals and gay men. We cannot say
as much about Lenin and the Bolsheviks' opinions about this category — though
we can say more than you might think. The Bolsheviks played an important role
in the 1920s in the congresses of the World League for Sexual Reform, which
German and Dutch gay groups took part in. But this history is only very
indirectly relevant to contemporary lesbigay movements. Thanks to Stalinism,
fascism and further waves of anti-gay repression in the 1950s and '60s, the
discontinuity in lesbigay movements has been particularly pronounced. This
discontinuity is in fact even more characteristic of lesbigay movements than of
immigrant movements, because almost no one is born into a lesbigay community.
Lesbigay communities are only a product of the development of capitalism since
the late 19th century, and in their contemporary form since the 1960s. This
makes it all the more remarkable that strong movements, in which
self-organization and a distinctive lesbigay identity play a central role, have
emerged from these communities.
The
turnouts for lesbigay pride marches can even seem improbable to people on the
left who are unfamiliar with the lesbigay world. In the US, for example, between
half a million and a million people turned out each time for lesbigay
demonstrations in 1987, 1993 and 1994. In Paris in 1998, there were 150,000
participants; in Berlin in 1998, 200,000; in Paris for Europride in 1997,
350,000.[2]
Nor can they be seen entirely as apolitical parades, although every big
political demonstration takes on this character to some extent. In general they
are organized by political associations, in some cases with quite radical
political programmes. The organization has always been done independently,
without any significant support from existing labour or left organizations. In
this way independent lesbigay organizations have arisen.
The
left can sometimes learn things from the forms of democratic control that the
lesbigay movement: positive lessons as well as negative ones. One positive
example is the organizational structure of the three national demonstrations in
the US [in 1979, 1987 and 1993]. The structure showed how essential it was that
all elements of the community felt themselves fully represented. The most
important decisions were made each time by big national conferences, in which
representation was carefully allocated in advance: each time 50 per cent women,
25 per cent people of colour, fixed quotas for each region, and so on. And the
structure worked, because all parts of the community mobilized for these
marches.[3]
The
downside of this positive example is that a political culture has developed,
above all in the US but also I think increasingly in Europe, in where people
who do not feel represented in a particular organization can very
quickly lose patience with it and adopt very confrontational tactics. The forms
of action that have given the French sans papiers for example such a
great success in the media can sometimes be used when differences of opinion
arise within progressive movements. That happened for example at a Labor Notes
conference in the US. These conferences, which are always the most important
gatherings of the class struggle wing of the North American trade unions, are
to a large extent organized under the leadership of members of the Marxist organization
Solidarity.[4] Nonetheless
a conflict broke out at the 1992 Labor Notes conference between the organizers
and the lesbigay caucus. The details are of secondary importance. The important
point is that the lesbigay caucus, which did not feel represented by the
organizers, at a certain point simply ignored the decisions that the organizers
had taken, seized the microphone, and explained its point of view to the
roughly thousand participants — who incidentally responded quite positively.
All this took place inside the framework of the labour movement: the members of
the lesbigay caucus were all union activists or even staffers.
This
is only one example of the kind of tactic that has become more common, in
organizations like Act Up in (for example) Paris, among immigrant youth, etc.
Marxists cannot take comfort in the assumption that we would never be targeted
by this kind of tactic, because we're on the left and everyone understands
that. If class struggle enters a new ascendant period, if the labour movement
recognizes its responsibility to defend all oppressed people, and if everyone
gets to know each other better in the framework of a broad movement, then
people will be able to see more clearly who is trustworthy, who is on the left
and who isn't. But for the new generations that are now emerging nothing can be
assumed; everything must be demonstrated in practice at each decisive
moment. For us Marxists much will depend on what we look like, who our
spokespeople are, and how much we have learned from the organizational forms
that have been developing around us.[5]
All
of us have to learn this in order to be able to intervene effectively — as
revolutionary Marxists, of course — in the independent organizations of
oppressed people. To the extent we manage to educate ourselves, our own
organizational forms in our own organizations will inevitably change. This
process has been under way for 30 years now. I haven't mentioned the women's
movement yet in this talk, but feminism provides the best examples of how we
have had to change. Well into the 1970s we held to the tradition (which
incidentally was Lenin's tradition and the tradition of the whole Marxist
current) that we were not feminists, that there were no central contradictions
between men and women, and that fully independent organization of women was not
appropriate within Leninist organizations. You can still find that last
position on women's caucuses in the Fourth International's resolution on
women's liberation from 1979, which on feminist issues in general and in other
respects was a crucial moment of cultural transformation for us. Fortunately
we've changed our position since then, and we are continuing to change.
In
order to create organizations that are truly welcoming to and inclusive of
women, lesbigays, blacks and immigrants, we will have to continue to change our
organizations. The process will not always be easy. But as Lenin observed over
80 years ago, if you really want a social revolution, you have to learn how to
intervene in all sorts of movements and earn a leading role in them. By means
of this process the workers' movement itself can be rebuilt, and the
revolutionary current within it can be rebuilt. What's at stake is building the
organizations that we would all like to see: organizations that can lead the
revolutions of the 21st century.
[1] [Footnote to English translation, 2005:] Today, after 9/11 and the rise
of Islamophobia, I would add that Muslim identity, which has clearly become
more important to many immigrants in Europe, should not be seen simply as an
aspect of the culture that immigrants brought with them to Europe, but
primarily as a reaction to the particular form that European racism has taken.
[2] [Footnote to English translation, 2005:] Since this article was written
larger European pride marches have occurred in Paris and Berlin, while an
estimated half million people attended Europride in Rome in 2000 and an
estimated 600,000 the US national lesbigay demonstration that same year.
[3] [Footnote to English translation, 2005:] Unfortunately the fourth
national march, in 2000, was a top-down operation, dominated politically by the
conservative Human Rights Campaign Fund and Metropolitan Community Churches,
and had none of the democratic representation characteristic of the three
earlier marches. In this case the high turnout came largely from more
conservative lesbigays from areas of the southern and western US whom the
earlier marches had not mobilized to the same extent. The 1994 march mentioned
earlier was strictly speaking an international lesbigay march on the UN.
[4] [Footnote to English translation, 2005:] The predominance of Solidarity
members among Labor Notes organizers has gradually decreased since this article
was written, though without any particular conflict or break.
[5] [Footnote to English translation, 2005:] Arguably the rise of the
global justice movement since 1999 has created a framework in which many young
activists in different movements have gotten to know each other better. To what
extent indigenous peoples, blacks, immigrants and lesbigays feel included in
and represented by the global justice movement today is a different question.