Intro
Watching the anti-immigrant movement is an interesting case study of careful and well thought out political action. The minutemen under the leadership of Jim Gilchrest have artfully used the weaknesses of progressive social movements to advance a minority agenda at odds with the multi-cultural and inclusive ideological position of the urban majority. The anti-immigrant movement follows in the footsteps of the anti-abortion movement and others which successfully undermined the social democratic consensus of the post war era in the interests of the most reactionary bloc of capital. Understanding reactionary social movements from a strategic and tactical point of view might illuminate the weaknesses of progressive social movements, which seem constitutionally unable to (1) establish programmatic unity, (2) consolidate geographic base areas, or (3) understand the relationship between the contradictory geographies of power — economic and political.
Viewing the work of the Minutemen through the lens of classical Marxist theory — which I’ll attempt briefly here — exposes the strategic genius of the theoreticians of the far right.
Without Revolutionary Theory there is no Revolutionary Praxis
The blueprint for the October Revolution was not Lenin`s State and Revolution or What Is To Be Done but rather the dry and unreadable The Development of Capitalism in Russia, a study out of which those purely political tracts flowed.
In order to address tactical questions and to derive appropriate political interventions and organizational forms necessary to implement such a political program it is imperative that the concrete structures of the political economy be examined.
The post modern moment is a data rich environment; census data and economic data are readily available via the web; polling data is also freely available. The hardware and software required to make sense of the mass of data and information are inexpensive and ubiquitous. What is more challenging is developing the theoretical tools to parse through masses of information to glean the salient points and discern trends [an intelligence function, -ed.].
Any theoretical construct is an abstraction a distortion, a generalization for the purposes of clarity.
Marx`s 18th Brumaire provides an example of political economy marshaled to explain a particular historical moment in its complexity.
A historical and dialectical approach to understanding the dynamics of movement and change in society starts with an understanding of contradiction, the concrete class composition of an existing social formation, and the archeology of its development.
There is a fundamental gap between the processes of thought and the processes occurring in the really-real world beyond human sensory perceptions, but that contradiction is continually in a incomplete process of resolution… through collective action in specific forms of practice — political, scientific, and social.
Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks sketched in general terms his notion of Hegemony — a conceptualization that encompasses the full range of capitalist domination, and incorporating an analysis of the role of organic intellectuals in naturalizing the existing social structure rendering it legitimate and invisible. Gramsci in the section of this text entitled “The Modern Prince” uses a military metaphor to describe the class struggle, distinguishing between a war of position and a war of movement. A war of position is incremental, cumulative, and targets institutional structures with the goal of creating space and a base for social action. A war of movement is dependent on a rupture, a break, a crisis of legitimacy when quiescent social forces are drawn into motion. Classes in their truest sense only become in and for themselves, become conscious forces at these times of crisis, inevitable due to the cyclical nature of capital accumulation. Crises do not lead lock step to revolutionary upsurges, there is no necessary outcome, but rather it is the organized intervention of political parties or others forms of cadre organization which determine the outcome and direction of movement during these periods of rupture.
Mao outlined in his work the specific characteristics of capitalism in China, and described in his text “On Protracted War” the tactics of a weak force arrayed against s stronger, well equipped army. Specifically directed at the Japanese occupation, he carefully summarized the experience of the Chinese Communist Party and People`s Liberation Army in their fight against Imperialism. The key point of interest here is his insights into the means by which the weaker force can turn local advantages and political will into tactical victories.
The Minutemen illustrate masterful execution of the principles outlined by the Twentieth Century exemplars of revolutionary praxis. They demonstrate a keen understanding of political economy, an ability to engage with organic intellectuals and deploy culture in a war of position. They demonstrate the ability to turn weakness into strength under the leadership of Jim Gilchrest.. Tracing the general outlines of their work from vigilante border actions to locally targeted interventions in the DC area is a tracing of an astute grasp of the key features of the American social formation. As moral entrepreneurs the Minutemen have successfully moved from the smallest scale to the largest scale, exploiting the fears of a shrinking white majority.
The high profile vigilante actions in the borderlands were executed in the geographical base areas of white power, the far west and California. In and of themselves these actions were insignificant, but acted as a catalyst. As chaotic interventions, they acted as a magnet for the mass media focusing on immigration. Against the backdrop of talk radio and an active micro-market of web sites and blogs, these actions echoed across the many to many communications networks.
Deploying a diversity of tactics approach, mobilizing letter writing campaigns to sympathetic elected officials, together with direct action in the grey area between legality and illegality, base areas and key constituencies were consolidated. As a loose brokered network, programmatic unity rather than ideological unity was achieved. As shock troops, organizations such as the American Nazi Party and the Klu Klux Klan were included in the broad united front, neither condoning or condemning either their racialist standpoint or questionable practices, such groups provide the armed muscle, and render the civil society pressure groups as the reasonable alternative.
Moving on a variety of fronts, the Minutemen focused on Washington, selecting key battles to influence the media market in the National Capitol area. Instead of mass marches, they choose to target day laborer sites , social service funding, and housing occupancy regulations in very small areas within the DC area of dominant influence. Once again, deploying national funding and bio-power they were able to change the composition of the city council in Herndon Virginia where the day laborer site controversy was propelled into the national media spotlight. Ironically, Herndon is not much different than the rest of Northern Virginia, demographically or in terms of voting patterns. Overwhelmingly Democratic and 38% minority, it was the concerted effort of anti-immigrant activists doing retail politics door to door that shifted the balance in an election with low voter turnout. The outcome of powerful display of strategic agility as the (self-fulfilling?) illusion of a mass populist movement.
Working to the advantage of the nativist white supremacists are the divisions within the progressive opposition. Essentialist minorities within the black liberation movement, the dominance of social democratic reformist NGOs — dependent on funding streams based on grants and direct mail campaigns — tend to fragment the business of social change into niche marketing categories contending for the same dollars, which inherently disrupts the ability to work cooperatively. From a political standpoint NGOs are narrowly concerned with the national scale, without an understanding of scalar effects.
A clear contrast
A comparison of the Minutemen to the activities of the anti-war movement is revealing.
An acknowledgment of the anti-war movement’s accomplishments is in order. Doggedly persevering in changing the narrative the various coalitions have managed to define the war in Iraq on their own terms. The movement has managed to shift the composition of congress through electoral action in combination with other progressive forces, and highlighted the abuses of power by this administration. However, these actions have been essentially defensive in nature, unfocused at the highest level of analysis.
The oscillation between mass mobilizations and electoralism without a recognition of the geographic base of the anti-war movement or the tactical agility to take advantage of shifting terrains of struggle or the media environment points to organizational disarray and theoretical inadequacy. Locked into a permanent war of position, constructing ideological unity rather than programmatic unity limits the traction of the movement beyond the core — which itself is a politically taboo subject.
A profound distrust of diversity of tactics limits agency. Unlike Jim Gilchrest, the anti-war movement is unable to distinguish the unique characteristics of urban regions. The Washington metro area is visualized in terms of the Federal City, not in terms of five million inhabitants only indirectly connected to the core industry in one media market.
The American Left seems unable to comprehend the nature of scalar effects or hegemony. Content to function only at the grandest level of national politics, or the smallest scale of the local, the American Left finds it impossible to create a big tent under which the various strands and currents among what is objectively a majority can be united. The Left also fails to construct a social imaginary which could provide the symbolic glue binding together these threads into a cohesive resistance. Instead the American Left opts for the defensive politics of retreat and the creation of small enclaves on the margins of the body politic.
Admittedly, bourgeois property relations and the structures of bourgeois democracy preclude a one for one correspondence between the strategies of power and the tactics of the sub-altern, but in the final instance the central question is the question of organization and that depends on an understanding of political economy beyond caricature. One hopes that the US Social Forum might be the mechanism that might serve to create agency in the context of a resurgent extralegal fascist current.
It might be worthwhile to take some tips from Jim Gilchrest and the far right.