A Good Meeting

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a meeting.

The phrase "pleasure of attending a meeting" is rare enough in its utterance as to be nearly a paradox, particularly in New York.

The meeting itself is somewhat hard to describe. Its title was "From Wisconsin to New York: Crisis, Austerity and Resistance". It has a Facebook page, so those of you who have a Facebook login (which I don't) can view it at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194911303884295. It was convened by a nameless group of mostly-young leftists who seem to be more or less in an academic orbit, who refer to themselves, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, as "a group of friends who are interested in revolutions." The conveners seem to be largely of a left-communist cast. This was the second such meeting I attended; the prior one, last month, was about the revolutions in the Arab world. At the earlier meeting, the Solidarity organization was in evidence; if its supporters were present at this one, they were not known to me.

The speakers included Loren Goldner of Insurgent Notes, and two younger guys who are not public figures in the same way Loren is, and who therefore I do not know if they would appreciate having their full names published in this connection. Loren spoke on his observations of the Wisconsin protests, in much the same vein as this article. There was also a well-researched historical presentation on the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis and the politics of austerity, and the third speaker gave a presentation of the austerity measures contained in the newest New York State budget. (A presentation which, in content and style, seemed to reflect his job in the legislative office of a New York City council member more than his professed anarchist politics, but which was nonetheless informative.)

For now, however, I will not comment so much on the content of the discussion as on its style. For, in a room that included left-communists, anarchists, Trotskyists (in addition to myself, there was Jan Norden of the Internationalist Group), as well as several people whose political viewpoint was more difficult to pinpoint (social-democrats?), the discussion remained cordial and (mostly) focused throughout. Even Norden, who did filibuster a bit, contributed in a meaningful way and a comradely tone. In fifteen-plus years of leftist militancy, I don't think I've ever attended such a meeting. (The prior meeting called by this grouping certainly couldn't have been described that way.)

A couple of suggestions, however, addressed not only to the conveners of this meeting but to anyone trying such an enterprise:

1. We need to do away with the academic norm of repeatedly giving the original speakers in a discussion the chance to respond. Yes, if they've been asked a direct question, let them respond, briefly, but if it's done after comments as well, it interrupts the flow. More problematically from a perspective of human emancipation, it derives from a presumption of hierarchical expertise. In this particular case, it did not seem to me to result in anyone not getting their say, but it often has that effect.
2. I am greatly tempted to propose a rule that no political meeting disperse without a democratic vote on at least one concrete action of follow-up. Even if the concrete action is just to call another meeting. Toward the end, there was a palpable sense in the room that this sort of thing should continue, but no one (and I certainly include myself in this) made an attempt to propose something specific. The initiative remains with the informal "group of friends," and I hope they'll take it.

The main thing it helped me to do was to clarify my thinking a little bit on the question of proletarian political organization. The basis of the need for such organization is not the existence of different ideas in the minds of individual workers, but the need for the immediate interests of the most exploited and oppressed to be brought forward, as they coincide the ultimate interests of the class as a class-for-itself. Otherwise, the tendency to break into sectoral patterns within the framework of capitalist politics will prevail, as remains the case so far in anti-austerity struggles in Wisconsin, California and New York. (With the struggles in the last location being far behind the prior ones in scope and militancy.) More on this later, but not immediately.

A note on the next post: I believe it was about eight years ago that Sy Landy gave me a photocopy of an old Hal Draper article, entitled The "Inevitability of Socialism": The Meaning of a Much Abused Formula (The New International, December 1947), a polemic against arguments by C.L.R. James (then in the Socialist Workers Party) and George Novack. Draper had, many decades before, been Sy's mentor, and much of his theoretical work amounted to critiquing and setting aside much of what he had been mis-taught by Hal. On this article, he had a gut feeling that Hal was wrong, but neither were James and Novack right, and he wanted someone with more philosophical training to take it on. On and off over the following year, it turned into a sprawling project that took me through Hegel, Plekhanov, Althusser, the philosophy of science, various schools of "ideology critique," etc., going far beyond the original ambit of critiquing what is, actually, a rather slight and amateurish article. The question of "historical necessity" proved to be way more complicated than Draper or his SWP opponents wanted it to be. The results were sheafs of hand-written notes in my barely legible scrawl, and occasional e-mails to various people about what I was thinking about--not even an internal discussion article, because more urgent questions abounded. But the upshot of all this was my conclusion that the necessity of a classless, communist society was a historical hypothesis.

So imagine my disappointment in 2008 as the ex-Maoist, and incurably obscurantist philosopher Alain Badiou was making a splash with his notion of a communist hypothesis--which uses the exact same words I had fastened on four years before, but gives them a very different meaning.

The point of this is not to claim intellectual priority or make a claim to some kind of copyright--Badiou can keep his royalties unperturbed. It's to indicate why, in setting out my thoughts about politics, I now have the duty of beginning with a polemic against Badiou. That will be the subject of my next post. (Probably not today, but hopefully by tomorrow night.)