I cite

The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role in the creation of Reddit, the wildly popular social networking news site. When Conde Nast purchased Reddit, Swartz received a substantial sum of money at a very young age. He became something of a legend in the internet and programming world before he was 18. His path to internet mogul status and the great riches it entails was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting themselves to making more and more money long after they have more than they could ever hope to spend.

But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good."

Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and knowledge as available as possible. Here he is in his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the movie-industry-demanded legislation that would have vested the government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet.

Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these causes merely by talking about them or advocating for them. He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That's what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.

In 2008, Swartz targeted Pacer, the online service that provides access to court documents for a per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense. Along with a friend, Swartz created a program to download millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain." For that act of civil disobedience, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never charged.

via www.guardian.co.uk

America’s Productivity Climbs, but Wages Stagnate - NYTimes.com

Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.

“We went almost a century where the labor share was pretty stable and we shared prosperity,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “What we’re seeing now is very disquieting.” For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979.

Some economists say it is wrong to look at just wages because other aspects of employee compensation, notably health costs, have risen. But overall employee compensation — including health and retirement benefits — has also slipped badly, falling to its lowest share of national income in more than 50 years while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share over that time.

Conservative and liberal economists agree on many of the forces that have driven the wage share down. Corporate America’s push to outsource jobs — whether call-center jobs to India or factory jobs to China — has fattened corporate earnings, while holding down wages at home. New technologies have raised productivity and profits, while enabling companies to shed workers and slice payroll. Computers have replaced workers who tabulated numbers; robots have pushed aside many factory workers.

“Some people think it’s a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It’s possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don’t share in that gain.”

via www.nytimes.com

Back to the Party (again, with Zizek and Badiou)

Zizek provides one of the most compelling arguments why the party is not outmoded, why we have not entered a political time that has surpassed the need for a party, and why the party is not a form confined to the limits it encountered in a prior sequence. The most succinct way to put the argument is the "proletarian struggles with a foreign kernel." Another way to make the same point is to say that the proletariat is not self-identical; it is split. Or, the proletariat doesn't know what it desires; it confronts its own desire as something foreign or mysterious.

What are the implications of this idea for thinking about the potential of a party for us? I begin by looking at how Zizek approaches his discussion, namely, via Lenin's paraphrase--and revision--of Kautsky with respect to the idea that the working class needs non-working class intellectuals to bring knowledge to them. This idea has been widely criticized, viewed as elitist or as a failure to trust the workers. Zizek emphasizes that Lenin and Kautsky are not the same here:  where Kautsky says that intellectuals are external to the class struggle, Lenin says they are external to the economic struggle, which means they are still within the class stuggle. So, the first thing to note is that the perspective of the party is one that is not external to class struggle but embedded within it.

Nonetheless, there is an externality here, an externality to the economic struggle. This is important insofar as without this external perspective, the working class remains subordinate to bourgeois ideology. Its spontaneous development can go no further. The perspective of the party, then, is one that situates the economic struggle within the larger class struggle. It makes the economic struggle appear not as a matter for these workers in this factory but as part of a larger, more fundamental conflict, the antagonism constitutive of capitalist society.

Another way to express the same point is to note that the working class is a bourgeois subject. It is constrained within a field or discourse configured by and for the bourgeoisie; it gets its position from within this field. So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are still confined within a field given by the bourgeoisie, configured for its interests, in its behalf. To be another kind of subject, the subject of another field, discourse, politics (sequence?), to be proletarian, requires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the Party.

Badiou has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its 'true political identity' and 'its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices' (8). He writes: "the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of it specific bourgeois inversion ... This unity of opposites is determined .. by the general bourgeois space" (9). And, "the bourgeoisie makes a subject" (42); "the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people" (42).

 Zizek writes: "'external' intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its 'mission'--this insight has to be mediated through an external element." This external element is the Party.

The Party is not identical to the 'external intellectuals.' As we know from "What is to be Done?" Lenin assumed that the membership of the Party would come from intellectuals and workers, in fact, that those categories blurred and intermingled; they were not fixed and firm as some kind of split between mental and physical labor. The Party, then, cannot be localized onto a specific, empirical set of people. In fact, because it is not reducible to a number of given people, it cannot be said to 'substitute' these people for the workers, proletariat, or masses. To assume so is to make a kind of category mistake.

The Party "gives form" to the external element, to the setting in which the workers are situated but which remains opaque to them with respect to their own position in it. It does this in several senses.

First, the Party occupies the position of the proletariat's own decenteredness. It takes that place; it inserts itself there. Zizek writes: "it is not possible for the working class to actualize its historical mission spontaneously--the Party must intervene from the outside, shaking it out of the self-indulgent spontaneity." He continues, "in psychoanalysis there is no self-analysis proper; analysis is possible only if a foreign kernel gives body to the object-cause of the subject's desire."

[Unfortunately for me as I typed this I realized that psychoanalysis is in fact rooted in Freud's self-analysis. My best guess is that the way out of this would be to focus on Freud's dream analysis and his writing, understanding these as practices of externalization and working through that ultimately were taken up in letters to and discussions with others.]

I understand the analogy between working class and analysand/Party and analyst as relying on the insight that we do not know our own desire; desire remains opaque to us; it is unconscious, manifest in our actions, our practices, in various symptoms or distortions, but not something we know. Nor is it something we choose--rather, we are who we are because, in  a way, desire has chosen us; we are who are because of the desire that makes us. It is in us more than ourselves, a constitutively foreign, even alienating kernel. [I add alienating here as a step toward rejecting a politics rooted in a critique of alienation; alienation is constitutive and unavoidable.] 

The argument for the split nature of the working class is important as a response to those who would posit in workers a clear knowledge of what they want and who would link this knowledge to politics. Put in old fashioned Leninist terms, this can only take us as far as trade union consciousness. It remains within the economic struggle rather than the class struggle.

Second, the Party gives form to a new kind of knowledge, knowledge rooted not in some determinate content but linked "to a collective political subject." The Party doesn't know everything; it provides a position from which to know. We could say that it opens up another field, another discourse. The Party holds this field in place, providing the working class within a new place, the place of the proletariat. 

From within the economic struggle, only the opposition between worker and bourgeoisie was possible. The external element of the Party opens out another field, one in which the proletariat is its subject. Zizek writes,

"What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our 'I' in the "we" of the Party's collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line--just don't do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan's formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party's knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth."

So, with respect to knowledge, the Party is not necessary because of its knowledge of history, of struggles, or of anything. It's necessary because its knowing stems from class struggle. The Party speaks from the position of the truth of class struggle as the fundamental antagonism. To say that the position of the Party is true is to designate the position from which the Party speaks, the fact that it holds in place a field or discourse or set of meanings.

[A filled out account of the Party as analogous to the analyst would note that the subject is in the position of addressee and that the master is remaindered. This suggests a formal way of describing the perhaps some of the resistance felt towards the Party and its demands, its requirements and its discipline that we know may be wrong or arbitrary and may very well result in failure insofar as the Party cannot guarantee its own political success; again, the Master is remaindered.]

Third, by giving form to the divided working class (the class within the field of the bourgeoisie), the Party occupies the place of its division and establishes the field for a new subject, the proletariat (or, in my jargon, the people as the rest of us, the people understood in terms of the primacy of division). With respect to the analogy with the analyst, this does not mean that the Party knows the secret of the working class (and thereby turns it into the proletariat). Nor does it mean that the Party cures the working of its bourgeois tendencies, and thereby subjectifies it. Rather, the Party holds open the place necessary for this subjectification. 

If we think of analysis as providing the space within which the analysand can concentrate his or her feelings, fantasies, and experiences, then we can think of action in relation to, in the context of, the Party as an analogous kind of concentration. Badiou is appropriate here when he condemns the idea of 'convergence of struggles.'

You may 'coordinate' them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject. The geometric character of 'convergence' must be replaced with the qualitative character of concentration . . . Convergence is the typical objectivist deviation, in which, once the work of subjective purification is spirited away, antagonism finds itself ill-advisedly dissolved (44).

To sum up, the Party is necessary because the people are split. They are split between the way they are given, positioned, within capitalism. They are situated within a field that tells them who they are and what they can be, that establishes the matrix of their desire (Zizek's definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. The Party asserts this truth, it speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities, a discourse for another subject. In contrast, opposition to, capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of another subject, a collective, political subject.

At this point, I have basically repeated points I've already made in Zizek's Politics and The Communist Horizon.  Why bother? Because at least one element of the analogy between the party and the analyst remains unexplored, the status of each as a transferential object. This is what I want to explore next--the party as a transferential object. What does this mean and what does it accomplish? My intuition is that this is a crucial matter for a defense of the party. Accounts of small, open, and fluctuating groups and associations generally ignore transference. That is, they proceed flatly, as if associations were nothing but assemblages of people working together (with varying degrees of conflict). The unconscious component of association is ignored. I'll take this up in subsequent posts.

"Failure of Epic Proportions": Treasury Nominee Jack Lew’s Pro-Bank, Austerity, Deregulation Legacy

MATT TAIBBI: I think there’s a couple things. I agree with everything that Professor Black said. I think it’s—the symbolism of this choice is, I think, very important for people, just the mere fact of picking somebody from Citigroup and from that same Bob Rubin nexus that Timothy Geithner came from. And, you know, you heard Barack Obama, as he’s introducing Jack Lew, praising Tim Geithner as somebody who’s going to go down in history as one of the great treasury secretaries of all time. I think what this tells everybody is that Jack Lew is going to represent absolute continuity with the previous treasury secretary, who had a very specific agenda when it came to Wall Street. And I think we’re just going to expect more of the same, more of the same really being overt and covert support of these too-big-to-fail institutions that Lew worked for, Citigroup being the worst and most disastrous example of that kind of company. So I think it’s—the choice of somebody from that particular firm is fraught with pretty upsetting symbolism for the country, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to 2010, when Jack Lew appeared before the Senate Budget Committee for a confirmation hearing after he was nominated by President Obama to head the Office of Management and Budget. During the hearing, he was questioned by Senator Bernie Sanders.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Do you believe that the deregulation of Wall Street, pushed by people like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, contributed significantly to the disaster we saw on Wall Street several years ago?

JACK LEW: Senator, I—as when we discussed, I mentioned to you, I don’t consider myself an expert in some of these aspects of the financial industry. My experience in the financial industry has been as a manager, not as an investment adviser. My sense is, as someone who has, you know, generally been familiar with these trends, is that the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation. There was an increasing emphasis on highly abstract leveraged derivative products that got us to the point that, in the period of time leading up to the financial crisis, risks were taken. They weren’t fully embraced. They weren’t well understood. I don’t personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t believe that deregulation was the, you know, proximate cause. I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jack Lew responding to Bernie Sanders, who, when President Obama announced his nomination of treasury secretary—to treasury secretary of Jack Lew, Senator Sanders said, "We don’t need a treasury secretary who thinks that Wall Street deregulation was not responsible for the financial crisis." Professor Black?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, I mean, we can agree that he lacks expertise in the area, but he was supposed to have expertise. This was supposed to be his area of expertise, both in his role as OMB head under Clinton, and then, of course, as being in the industry and actually implementing the fruits of this deregulation.

via www.democracynow.org

Billionaires gain as living standards fall - World Socialist Web Site

The world’s 100 richest people added $241 billion to their combined wealth in 2012, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top 100 controlled an aggregate $1.9 trillion as calculated by the prices on world stock markets December 31, for an average of nearly $20 billion apiece.

If the top 100 were a separate state, their combined wealth would outstrip the Gross Domestic Product of all but eight countries. They would rank behind Italy, but ahead of India and Russia. Of course, being billionaire capitalists, the top 100 don’t actually produce anything. They own, and they reap the benefits of the labor of others.

The main driver in the increasing wealth of the super-rich was the rise in global stocks, up 13.2 percent worldwide, as measured by the MSCI World Index; up 13.4 percent in the US, as measured by the S&P 500. The Stoxx Europe 600 index is up 19.6 percent since June, when investors judged that the Greek debt crisis would not bring about the immediate collapse of the eurozone.

The United States accounted for nine of the top 12 billionaires and 37 of the top 100, with the combined holdings of American multibillionaires comprising half the total. Europe including Russia followed with 34, while Asia accounted for 14 and Latin America for 11.

The biggest single gainer among the top 100 was Amancio Ortega of Spain, the 76-year-old founder of the Inditex SA retailer, operator of the Zara clothing chain, whose fortune rose from $35.3 billion to $57.5 billion. This vaulted him into third place in the global index, passing American investor Warren Buffett, and trailing only the two who have headed the index for many years: Mexican banking, telecommunications and media mogul Carlos Slim, and Microsoft chief Bill Gates.

Ortega was part of a trend, as retail proprietors among the billionaires showed the biggest gains for the year, up 20 percent. Other retailers include IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, 86, the world’s fifth-richest man, at $42.9 billion; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com; and the four direct heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart.

This increase was all the more remarkable since consumer spending has essentially stagnated since the 2008 Wall Street crash. The retail bosses are increasing their fortunes not so much because sales are rising, as because their smaller competitors are being ruined by the crisis, giving the biggest companies monopoly profits. Bezos, for example, added $6.9 billion to his net worth in 2012, in the wake of the collapse of rival Borders, which led to the elimination of 20,000 jobs.

The divergence between the rising fortunes of the billionaires and the declining living standards of the masses is an essential feature of global capitalism. Nowhere is the contrast starker than in Spain, where Senor Ortega, the founder of Inditex and its 1,600 Zara stores, increased his fortune by $22.2 billion in the course of 2012.

The capitalist crisis has brought disaster for Spanish working people. Household wealth has fallen by 8 percent on average, second only to depression-ravaged Greece among European countries, while both overall unemployment and youth unemployment set records at 26.6 percent and 56.5 percent, respectively. The right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has announced a series of massive cuts in public spending, devastating public education and other essential services.

But while the Spanish working class suffers through the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, one Spanish billionaire possesses a personal fortune greater than the total amount of the cuts announced by the Rajoy government. At $57.5 billion, Ortega’s wealth would have allowed him to carry out last month’s $52 billion bailout of the Spanish banking system, which effectively wrecked Spain’s national budget, and have billions left over.

In recent months, Spain has been the scene of social tragedies unheard of since the depths of Franco fascism, including suicides by victims of foreclosure, and unemployed workers and the elderly picking through garbage dumps for food.

via www.wsws.org

Is Occupy Dead? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

What can this little excursion into punk history tell us about Occupy? Sometimes things blow up very quickly, unleashing utopian dreams. The Sex Pistols raised hopes the faux rebellion served up by the music and other cultural industries can be laid to rest once and for all, for example. But the world is more intractable than that. Nevertheless, even if they are not able to change everything, such blow ups may deliver enduring forms and practices which can be powerfully reused.

Occupy Wall Street was precisely such a blow up. I have been around activist milieus since the late eighties, and this was the first time I witnessed a movement that actually seemed intent on profoundly changing the US. The new left of the sixties had such intentions, but it was exhausted by the mid seventies. If you want, you might claim it had an afterlife in Jesse Jackson’s primary runs in 1984 and ‘88, but those ultimately failed to halt the Democrats’ drift to the right. And there was no real follow-up to that. Occupy quickly spread to over a thousand cities, and for a time held the nation rapt. And in a shocking departure for American social movement practice, it pointed the finger squarely at the ruling class, even if its term, “the 1%,” was not literally an accurate description. By contrast, both the global justice movement and the Nader campaign of 2000 seemed overhyped, limited in their impact, and timid in their denunciations of “corporations”.

Occupy encampments were already starting to suffer exhaustion when they were swept off the streets by the police after about two months, without having changed much of anything about the US. It wasn’t obvious at the time that this would be a devastating blow to the movement. Movements have been known to meet in union halls, community centers and many other places. You don’t actually need a camp out to have a movement. And yet Occupy did go into a tailspin. Everywhere, it seemed, the general assemblies could not hold themselves together without the camps. Some of them managed to keep going or restart themselves, but with none of the elan and unpredictability that dominated the first couple of months. The sense that the movement was growing and growing, that a call for a radically different sort of politics had truly touched a nerve, that “we are unstoppable” has utterly receded.

And yet, much like punk, I think it has left a legacy that will long be with us, to be reinterpreted, reworked, and revitalized as activists see fit. Some of the aspects of that legacy include a willingness to take chances when others are not, pressing the boundaries of permissible protest, creating space for people to bring their whatever skills they can offer, using general assemblies to open up control of a movement to all, and connecting problems by identifying enemies rather than treating each issue as disconnected and posing its own solution. Ask yourself how many unions, community groups, or left parties are doing any, let alone all of the above. Even if all the remaining Occupy groups disappeared tomorrow–and they won’t–some mix of these approaches is likely to resurface.

via www.counterpunch.org

Pashukanis: commodity and subject

(here)

In the development of legal categories, the ability to execute exchange transactions is only one of the concrete phenomena of the general quality of the capacity to have legal rights and to conduct transactions. However, it is historically mainly the exchange transaction which furnished the idea of a subject as the abstract bearer of all possible legal claims. Only in the conditions of a commodity economy is the abstract form of a right created, i.e. the capacity to have a right in general is separated from specific legal claims. Only the constant transfer of rights taking place in the market creates the idea of their immobile bearer. The person receiving an obligation in the market undertakes an obligation himself at the same time. The position of a creditor is transferred to that of a debtor. Thus, the possibility is created of abstracting from the concrete differences between these subjects of legal rights, and of putting them under one generic concept. [33]

Austerity drives up European unemployment to record levels - World Socialist Web Site

The policy of unrelenting austerity adopted by the European political elite has driven up unemployment across the continent to record levels, as shown in data released Tuesday by the Eurostat statistics agency.

Unemployment in the 17 European countries that make up the euro zone rose in November to 11.8 percent, with the number of jobless workers hitting 18.8 million. This is the highest figure since the single currency was introduced in 1999.

Euro zone unemployment rose by 0.1 percent compared to the previous month and was up by 1.2 percent from November 2011. Joblessness across the 27 members of the European Union was 10.7 percent and topped 26 million for the first time.

The biggest increases in unemployment have occurred in those European countries that have been selected by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union for economic shock treatment. Joblessness in Greece soared to 26 percent in September, an increase of over 7 percent from September of 2011. The European leader for unemployment, however, is the continent’s fourth largest economy, Spain, where 26.6 percent of the work force was registered as unemployed in November.

Commenting on the latest European statistics, the chief economist at the British Institute of Directors, Graeme Leach, said, “It is clear that the economic implosion of several member states continues at a troubling pace… The headline figures spell bad news, but that is compounded by the political and human impact of terrifying levels of youth unemployment in Spain, Greece and Italy.”

According to the Eurostat figures, youth unemployment is currently hovering around 50 percent in Greece and Spain and topping 30 percent in Italy. All of the leading economic indicators point to a worsening of the economic situation in Europe and a further increase in unemployment in 2013.

The bald statistics fail to reveal the enormous suffering and despair gripping tens of millions of families across the continent. The inevitable consequence of record levels of unemployment is levels of poverty in some of the most developed economies of Europe on a scale unseen since the 1930s.

In a recent report, the Oxfam Aid charity warned that the austerity measures introduced by the Spanish government at the end of last year, which include severe cuts to unemployment benefits, could drive the number of people categorized as living in poverty to 18 million, or 40 percent of the population, over the next 10 years.

In Greece, more than a third of the population now lives below the poverty line, according to official estimates. Soup kitchens have become commonplace in major cities, and bartering communities have been established in parts of the country to enable the income-less poor to exchange commodities.

via www.wsws.org

Tech's Hot New Market: The Poor | Wired Business | Wired.com

Using data-crunching skills polished at Google, Merrill says ZestFinance analyzes 70,000 variables to create a finely tuned risk profile of every borrower that goes far beyond the bounds of traditional credit scoring. The more accurately a lender can assess a borrower’s risk of default, the more accurately a lender can price a loan. Just going by a person’s income minus expenses, the calculus most often used to determine credit-worthiness, is hardly enough to predict whether a person will pay back a loan, he says.

“Our finding, much like in Google search quality, is that there’s actually hundreds of small signals, if you know where to find them,” Merrill says.

For instance, he says, many subprime borrowers also use prepaid cellphones. If they let the account lapse, they lose their phone number. Would-be borrowers who don’t make keeping a consistent phone number a priority send a “huge negative signal.” It’s not about ability to pay, he says. It’s about willingness to pay. By examining factors that don’t play into standard credit scoring — and are therefore ignored by traditional banks — Merrill says ZestFinance can help bring the “underbanked” back into the financial mainstream.

Currently ZestFinance licenses its technology to SpotLoan, an online lender that offers loans of $300 to $800 at rates it advertises as about 50 percent less than those of standard payday loans. On a recent visit to the site, the standard annual percentage rate (APR) for a loan issued to a California resident was 330 percent — $471 for a $300 loan paid back over three months, the smallest, shortest-term loan the site offered.

By comparison, standard payday loans available online offered APRs of about 460 percent, though the term was just 14 days. The rates on 30-day loans ran a little less than half that. Either way, a $200 loan ends up costing about $235 in financing if paid back on time via the old-school payday lenders.

Merrill acknowledges that ZestFinance-powered loans still aren’t cheap.

“We are an expensive loan compared to credit cards or what you can get from your family,” he says. “The problem is not everyone can get credit cards, or can borrow money from their family.”

via www.wired.com

Daniel Bensaïd and the shape of socialist strategy | Counterfire

Two strategic hypotheses

A large part of Bensaïd’s analysis of socialist strategy concerns two broad strategic hypotheses that, in his view, emerged during the experience of twentieth-century revolution. These are the “insurrectional general strike” of the type seen in Paris Commune and the Russian October 1917 revolution, and a “prolonged people’s war” on the model of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions.

Noting that these two variants are found in various combinations, Bensaïd provides an insightful survey of revolutionary projects in Latin America from the Cuban to the Nicaraguan experiences. (pp. 76–84)

The concept of an insurrectional general strike, he says, guided most revolutionary movements in developed countries during the 1960s and 1970s, the years of radical upsurge. Such a strike would permit workers’ power to be established through a transitional process of dual power, in which “legitimacy would be transferred to forms of direct or participative democracy.” (p. 84) Bensaïd is referring to soviet-type structures similar to what emerged in Russia in 1905 and 1917. The weakness of such formations, he says, is their possible “corporatist logic, [as] a pyramidal summation of particularist interests – of a locality, factory, or office.” The mediation of a multi-party system is needed “to develop particular viewpoints into global proposals.” (p. 85)

Bensaïd advises dropping the term “dictatorship” as a description for workers’ rule: the word has become a “fetish” that only generates confusion, he says. However, he defends the underlying concept as developed by Marx and Lenin of the need for “a new legal framework, expressing new social relations, which cannot be born from the continuity of the old law.” (p. 89) There will necessarily be a “break in continuity, including with regard to law, between two forms of rule and two legitimacies.” (p. 91) The triumph of the new legal framework can only be achieved by the application of force by the working-class majority.

via www.counterfire.org