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I posted this to the North Star comments section of the post Louis shared with us.
This is at such a high level of abstraction that the author almost completely lost me, until I realized that at such a level, resistance is transformed into a perfect vacuum: it contains nothing, it says nothing, it implicates no commitment, it wards off no attack, for those the author makes central to his analysis are not, in fact, resisting a damn thing. They are disembodied essences with no skin in the game because they have no skin at all.
Let me suggest he come down to the ground of real cases and real conditions and the real people who are under attack. And I want to insist all the way to the ground, for in referring to "more traditional, humble sphere of grassroots organizing against war and capitalist mayhem," he provides a link that is, I guess, meant to represent this humble, grassroot organizing but in fact is to a grant-making foundation called "resist":
"Resist is a foundation that supports people's movements for justice and liberation. We redistribute resources back to frontline communities at the forefront of change while amplifying their stories of building a better world," is how it describes itself.
I have no idea who these folks are and indeed, I hope they are the most excellently righteous foundation ever. But that is not grassroots organizing. The grass roots continue to be the object of this "resistance," not its subject.
But the real resistance is on the ground, from and among those who are directly and personally involved in the war and really have no choice about it.
At least among the Latino immigrant community, the point of resistance is to defeat the attacks, and to resist means first of all to organize and to train the community in HOW to resist. Right now a central element is "know your rights"-type education and literature and pushing for so-called "sanctuary" policies, which in reality is about ending complicity with ICE that takes place through municipal and institutional voluntary cooperation with the immigration gestapo.
(And, BTW, this is not a new post-Obama strategy designed for the Trump era, but what various groups had already been doing for a couple of years in the #Not1more and #ICEFreeZone campaigns).
Although strategically defensive, the fight for sanctuary policies is offensive and viewed as anything but inoffensive by most liberal democrat politicians. For Latinos, "resist" doesn't mean putting on a T-shirt but actively fighting to blunt and turn back attacks on the community.
The author talks about "a resurgent left" and says: "Its own road to victory will not be paved by resistance—nor can it be backward-looking, attempting only to recover territory ceded to opponents in past struggles."
And here we see the problem with handling things in the outer reaches of stratospheric abstraction. We're not resisting to recover metaphorical territory "ceded to opponents in past struggles" over policy. We're resisting to stop the deportations going on now, not the three million carried out by Obama. "Politically" stopping deportations may seem like a battle lost long ago, but for the girl whose father was stopped and dragged away while driving her to school, it is not at all a repetition.
The conclusion waxes poetic and sounds quite combative. Rather than resisting, the fight "must be based on bold, iconoclastic visions for a human future that rewrite the political script in its entirety. To formulate, promulgate, and implement such a platform for action is to assume the offensive."
That's very pretty but as written a preposterous non-struggle position. I'm sure the author didn't mean to present what is in essence passive capitulation to the attacks going on right now, but that he has, in effect, done so is a direct consequence of handling matters so abstractly in categories like "resist" rather than coming down to the ground and engaging with the real battles that are going on.
On 3/30/2017 10:21 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
Amidst the near-ceaseless upheaval that has characterized the first two months of the Trump administration, the term “resistance” has acquired seemingly unprecedented currency within the American political lexicon. The rhetoric of resistance has migrated far and wide from its more traditional, humble sphere of grassroots organizing against war and capitalist mayhem, infiltrating even the conservative editorials printed in such powerful opinion-making organs as The New York Times.
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