“Those who own and manage the society want a disciplined, apathetic and submissive public that will not challenge their privilege and the orderly world in which it thrives. The ordinary citizen need not grant them this gift.” – Noam Chomsky, “Turning the Tide”.
One of the most inspiring things about the Yes campaign in the Scottish independence referendum was how self-motivated, self-starting, and self-managed it was. There isn’t a group campaigning on an issue that matters to us? Let’s start one. This constructive self-activity was a demonstration that the power we have is derived from us, from our communities, from the social impulse inherent in our species. That power isn’t someone else’s to give: it is ours to use now. We don’t need anyone’s permission to use it.
The structures of ossified power and ownership in society hate that type of engagement: it’s a direct threat to them because the power we possess as a population greatly outweighs the power they possess. Their power over us depends upon us being passive. That’s why society’s structures depend upon us using the “correct channels”. It saps our power by putting in place the expectation that our options consist in asking other people to do things for us, and waiting to see if requests are fulfilled.
You may have signed online petitions to Westminster, and have seen the petition reach a critical mass. The issue may even have been discussed in Parliament. But how many of those have effected actual change? Most likely there will be some bland response, and no useful action taken. Expecting others to act on our behalf is an act of self-disempowerment. When we allow our self-will to be turned into a request we don’t just dilute its power, we hand that power to someone else.
And as Noam Chomsky writes, in “Turning the Tide”, within “the constraints of existing state institutions, policies will be determined by people representing centres of concentrated power in the private economy, people who, in their institutional roles, will not be swayed by moral appeals but by the costs consequent upon the decisions they make - not because they are 'bad people,' but because that is what the institutional roles demand."
Instead of waiting for change to come through existing institutions, we need to use the constructive self-activity we are all capable of to create for ourselves socialist alternatives in our communities and workplaces. We can make our own changes by ourselves in the places we live and work. We can build up from the bottom, rather than awaiting reform to be handed down to us from the top.
This might be as simple a thing as instead of waiting for the council to make a footpath in your area feel safer to use by cutting back overgrown vegetation, that you get together as a community group and do it yourselves. Community self-empowerment and self-management can begin wherever you want it to. Maybe your community wants to run its own breakfast club for your local schoolchildren. Or a fresh fruit and veg co-op. Whatever it is that sparks your community’s own imagination.
The bureaucracies around you will hate it, because it’s unpredictable, and because they won’t be the ones managing the activity, you will. But that’s its very power. And from your experiences your community will start to repair its natural solidarity; the practical sense of community, of mutual aid, that has been eroded by decades of neoliberal attrition. And that renewed solidarity will lead on to other things.
In radical literature you may have come across the term Self-valorisation. It’s a horrible term, but a useful concept. It’s about activity rooted in practical, everyday life. It’s about what can make practical everyday life in itself a powerful political act.
Negri and Hardt are the people you’d normally turn to for an explanation. But they write incredibly turgidly, so I wouldn’t recommend them for an easy, transparent bedtime read. Their small book Declaration (2012) is valued by many, and is far less to wade through than Empire (2000), but I’m not going to recommend either. Luckily, Harry Cleaver is there to help us out.
“When Italian autonomist Marxists, especially Toni Negri, appropriated the term “self-valorization” they changed its meaning from the expanded reproduction of capital to the autonomous, self-determination or self-development of the working class. The new use of the term was designed to denote working class self-activity that went beyond being merely reactive to capital, e.g., fighting back against exploitation, to denote working class self-activity that carried within it the basic positive, creative and imaginative re-invention of the world that characterized the “living labor” that capital-the-vampire has fed on but which is always an autonomous power that has frequently ruptured capital’s controls and limitations and that will ultimately, hopefully, be powerful enough to break free completely and craft new worlds beyond capitalism.”
- Harry Cleaver, “On Self-valorization in Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s ‘Women and the Subversion of the Community’”, (2011).
To put it more simply: The answer to the question “What, then, should social activists do?” is easy. They should…
"Seek out and understand the desires and self-activity of the people, and then to articulate them in ways which contribute both to their circulation and to their empowerment”.
- Harry Cleaver, “Kropotkin, Self-valorization and the Crisis of Marxism”, (1993).
If this whets your appetite for the literature, Cleaver’s “Reading Capital Politically”, is a short (though not easy) and practical book, but you do really need to be familiar with Marx’s Capital for it to be any use to you. It’s online here: https://libcom.org/files/cleaver-reading_capital_politically.pdf
But you don’t need to be well-read in radical literature in order to use the potential that already exists in your own community. You just need the will.
Related to self-valorization is Mario Tronti’s “strategy of refusal”. Tronti points out that since the worker is the provider of capital, the existence of the capitalist class itself depends on the labour power of the worker.
“This is the historical paradox which marks the birth of capitalist Society, and the abiding condition which will always be attendant upon the "eternal rebirth" of capitalist development. The worker cannot be labour other than in relation to the capitalist. The capitalist cannot be capital other than in relation to the worker.”
“We might ask a question: what happens when the form of working class organisation takes on a content which is wholly alternative; when it refuses to function as an articulation of capitalist society; when it refuses to carry capital's needs via the demands of the working class? The answer is that, at that moment and from that moment, the systems whole mechanism of development is blocked. This is the new concept of the crisis of capitalism that we must start to circulate: no longer the economic crisis, the catastrophic collapse […]. Rather, a political crisis imposed by the subjective movements of the organised workers, via the provocation of a chain of critical conjunctures, -within the sole strategy of the working class refusal to resolve the contradictions of capitalism”.
- Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal”, (1965).
Again, useful idea though it is, the essay is over long for the concepts it is attempting to transmit, and written very, very turgidly. Also, much of his work remains untranslated from Italian. But if you are interested, for a partial translation of Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital go here: http://operaismoinenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/workers-and-capital.pdf
Don’t feel you need to read this stuff, though: the best distillation of this very simple and useful set of ideas is to be found in the quote from Chomsky which heads this article:
“Those who own and manage the society want a disciplined, apathetic and submissive public that will not challenge their privilege and the orderly world in which it thrives. The ordinary citizen need not grant them this gift.”
Those of us who don’t want to grant them that gift need only to remember that the solution is in our own hands. There are many of us: I see us on Twitter every day. And though I am an avid Twitter user, and can see its immense potential for communication, for sharing radical ideas and information, if all we do with that is pass pithy memes amongst ourselves, then the establishment will not quake. We will have been lulled into thinking our own passivity is activism. Similarly, if we wait for a centralised organisation to decide what to do, we might wait a fruitless century, as the communities did who put their faith in the Labour Party to deliver socialism. Self management is something that nobody else can do for me. The only driver of social change is constructive self-activity. Why should I wait for others to do what I can start to do for myself today?
