Written on October 12, 2008

INTRODUCTION

1. Why Radicals Need to Understand the Financial Crisis: Not everyone takes an interest in economics, obviously. Nor do they need to, in general. But anti-capitalist activists do have a special responsibility to be well-informed about what is happening in the capitalist system, especially in times of extraordinary turbulence and instability. In recent months, the capitalist financial system has plunged into a state of profound crisis. Millions of people the world over are beginning to question the claim that markets offer an efficient way of allocating resources. The very idea that capitalism is a system that actually “works,” in contrast to proposals for more just and democratic alternatives which supposedly do not “work,” has been dealt a serious blow. In such a situation, radicals really do need to develop some rudimentary understanding of what is going on, for at least two reasons. First, radicals need to develop an informed activist perspective on how to fight back against attempts by corporations and governments to pay for the crisis on the backs of students, workers, the poor and the unemployed. And second, radicals need to find ways to use this occasion to promote participatory-democratic alternatives to capitalism.
2. The Approach Taken Below: In the following comments, four things are attempted. First, several of the factors that set the stage for the crisis are reviewed, in a simple but hopefully not simplistic way. Second, the actual crisis is concisely described, from its early stages in the sub-prime mortgage market, through to its spread throughout the U.S. (and ultimately the global) financial system, culminating in several high profile bank failures. Third, some more difficult questions are briefly addressed, including the relation between financial crises and macroeconomic crises, and the distinction between a ’structural’ crisis and a ’systemic’ one. These three parts are intended to offer readers a rudimentary analysis of what is going on in the financial system today, with an emphasis on developments in the U.S. (For other perspectives, see the Suggested Readings, at the end.) Finally, a perspective is offered on how radicals should approach the question of short-term ‘policy responses,’ as well as the more fundamental question of how to forge an egalitarian and democratic “participatory” alternative to the capitalist system itself.
   

I: SETTING THE STAGE FOR DISASTER

1. Low Interest Rates: In response to the 2001 recession, especially after 11 September 2001, the U.S. Federal Reserve kept interest rates at unprecedentedly low levels, encouraging borrowers (businesses and consumers, including home buyers) to take on more debt. The strategy – sometimes called “privatized Keynesianism” – was to use household debt to play the demand-fueling role that had once been played by public sector deficit-spending in the Keynesian era (from the 1930s to the 1970s). From the late 1990s to 2007, the ratio of household debt to GDP in the U.S.A. went from just over 60% to almost 100%, with households taking on an additional $3 trillion of debt.
2. Rising Housing Prices: In the 10-year period preceding the crisis, from 1996 to 2006, the average resale price of U.S. homes almost tripled. This “bubble” (or speculation-driven price rise) in the housing market turned residential real estate into a magnet for speculative financial investment, which continually drove prices up, further inflating the bubble.
3. Lax Lending (and Refinancing) Standards: In the context of steadily and rapidly rising home values, mortgage lending began to seem like an increasingly safe bet for lenders, since the money loaned to home buyers was being used to purchase assets (namely, houses and condos) of ever-increasing value. They could be sold at any time, at a profit, so the risk of default seemed low. As a result of this perception of safety, and spurred on by greed and competition for a piece of the action among financial institutions, lending standards were lowered. A new market in “sub-prime” loans, that is, loans offered to low-income borrowers, and borrowers with questionable credit histories, emerged to draw more buyers into the housing bubble economy. Often, these loans were “predatory” in nature, in the sense that they lured gullible borrowers in with initially low introductory rates, which could be “re-set” at as much as twice the initial rate of interest a few years into the loan period. As long as house prices were rising, even these sub-prime loans seemed like a safe (or at least attractive) way to enlarge a financial institution’s share of the riches being generated by the housing boom.
4. Securitization of Mortgages: The ever-expanding pool of mortgages initiated in the context of the housing bubble did not stay on the books of the original lending institutions. Rather, they were packaged together and sold to speculators in the “secondary mortgage market” as transferable financial assets (“securities”), whose new owners took over any risk posed by the prospect of defaulting borrowers. This is a crucial part of the story, because these “mortgage-backed securities” created a tight connection between the fate of the housing bubble and the health of financial markets. It was this connection that could lead the bursting of the housing bubble to have profound effects on the entire financial system.
5. Opacity of Financial Instruments: Moreover, these mortgage-backed securities – precisely because they were designed to be sold to speculators, not kept on the books of the lending institutions – tended to be opaque, in the sense that those buying them could never be quite sure how risky their financial investment was. A breakdown in the system of assigning credit ratings to these securities made the problem even worse.
6. Over-leveraging: Another crucial stage-setting element was the widespread practice of “leveraging” by speculators. This is the habit of using (among other things) asset-backed securities as collateral for borrowing further money, to be used in turn to speculate on still more financial assets. If the assets used as collateral prove to be worth far less than previously thought, the owners of these assets have to “de-leverage,” by selling assets to raise the cash needed to service their debts.

II: THE ONSET OF FINANCIAL CRISIS

1. Falling House Prices: The U.S. housing bubble, which began around 1996, peaked in 2006. Prices then began to fall sharply. In itself, this was a problem not only for the financial sector, but also for the “real” (productive as opposed to financial) economy which had come to rely heavily on housing to boost GDP growth. However, the financial sector was especially heavily reliant on rising housing prices, because the sub-prime mortgage market (and the secondary market for mortgage-backed securities) was premised on the assumption that house values were rising, which was in turn supposed to ensure that the danger of defaults was minimal.
2. Defaults in ‘Sub-prime’ Mortgage Market: As home prices fell, the value of the assets (homes) purchased by “sub-prime” borrowers fell in relation to the debt burden they carried. Increasingly unable to keep up with payments (especially on the predatory “adjustable rate” loans), and with diminishing prospects of refinancing their mortgages, given that (contrary to expectations) their homes had proved not to be worth more than their original purchase prices, many sub-prime borrowers began to default on their debts. In mid-2008, 2.75% of all U.S. home loans were in foreclosure. This was the highest rate of foreclosure ever recorded by the Mortgage Bankers’ Association (which began collecting data in 1979).
3. Deflation of Mortgage-Backed Securities: As the rate of mortgage defaults rose, the market for mortgage-backed securities (whose value is determined, ultimately, by the income stream created by actual mortgage payments) responded to the fact that these assets were less valuable than their purchasers had thought. Accordingly, as the demand for these assets (securities) declined, prices – which had been artificially high because of rampant speculation – declined sharply.
4. Contagion: For a time, it seemed to many as though the collapse of the market for securities backed by sub-prime mortgages could be contained. But the interlocking system of financial asset markets is so complex – so that, for example, risks associated with some financial products are themselves bought and sold in “derivatives” markets – that it was both, objectively, hard to contain the damage to only one category of financial instruments, and, subjectively, impossible to be confident that anyone quite understood exactly how a collapse in one part of the financial system might produce unforeseen “ricochet” effects in other parts of the system. The contagion spread, therefore, partly because of its actual impact on the balance sheets of financial institutions, and partly because the opacity of the scale of the problem severely undercut the confidence of financial speculators in their own capacity to distinguish between safe and unsafe financial investments.
5. Investment Bank Insolvencies and the De-leveraging Spiral: At bottom, the financial crisis is a crisis of the balance sheets of financial institutions. That is to say, banks and other financial firms have found themselves with too little capital, relative to the size of their debt. They are “over-leveraged.” To stay afloat, they have to raise money by shedding financial assets. But the market for such assets is now so weak that they can only sell them at discount prices, which – by lowering the value of financial assets further – makes the problem even worse. It is a downward spiral of “de-leveraging,” a vicious circle of selling because assets are worth too little, and thereby further deflating asset prices, requiring even more selling, at ever-lower prices, and so on. So severe have the problems been at this balance-sheet level that some of the hugest, most powerful investment banks and other financial firms have been plunged into insolvency, either collapsing outright (as in Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns) or being bailed out or nationalized by governments who deem them to be “too big to fail” (as in AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
   

III: FROM FINANCIAL CRISIS TO ECONOMIC CRISIS

1. The Relation Between Speculation on Financial Asset Prices and the Financing of Real Investment: In theory, financial markets simply transfer ownership claims to income streams in the real economy from the sellers to the buyers of an asset (such as a mortgage-backed security). If it really were as simple as that, such transfers would not affect the actual value of the assets that change hands (which is determined by the income stream itself, over time). However, real world financial markets, especially in recent decades, are sites of massive, highly speculative casino-style betting on the future value of the assets being bought and sold. So prices of such assets can rise and fall dramatically, sometimes quite suddenly, without it necessarily having a noticeable impact on the real economy (for example, without causing any industrial firms to go bankrupt, and without impacting unemployment rates or causing inflation). But we can think of the financial system as having two very different functions: first, to facilitate speculative gambling on the future prices of financial instruments (like mortgage-backed securities); and second, to make credit (i.e., loans) available for firms planning to purchase investment goods (or finance operations generally) and for consumers hoping to make major purchases (car loans, students loans, credit card debt, mortgages, and so on). The first of these functions is surprisingly limited in its impact on the wider economy. In principle, a collapse of the market for speculative financial products is of no particular importance to the real economy of industrial and other non-financial firms, consumers and labour-force participants. Financial speculators do make purchases, of course, but it is likely that a bad year for Wall Street speculators would mainly affect the demand for high-end luxury consumption, and not much else. What makes a financial crisis troubling for the fate of the real economy is that second function of financial markets: extending credit to firms and consumers. If a collapse of financial asset prices, due to panic among speculators, affects the balance sheets of financial institutions, so that they have to rein in their lending to firms and consumers, the financial woes of Wall Street transform into something with much wider implications: a “credit crunch,” or shortage of credit.
2. Insolvency and the Credit Crunch: In the U.S. and parts of Europe (but much less so in Canada, as of now), there are signs that the speculative collapse in financial asset prices is transforming into a credit crunch affecting the real economy. It is notable, though, that these signs are still limited. We have not seen credit shortages leading to major layoffs, or a dramatic rise in unemployment, at least not yet. (Layoffs in the automobile sector may be partly related to credit issues, but not wholly.) And we have not seen large non-financial firms facing bankruptcy – again, at least not yet. But there have been new difficulties obtaining short term loans, even for highly trusted corporations and banks. And this seems to be because financial institutions are compelled by bad balance sheets to “de-leverage,” or sell off financial assets, in order to raise money. In any case, it seems highly, highly unlikely (and few if any commentators would dissent from this judgment), that it is possible for very long to avoid a significant credit crunch (and resulting “recession”) in the coming months in the U.S. and globally (including in Canada). There seem to be only two questions: first, how long will it take for the credit crunch to make itself felt in the real economy in a big way, and second, how severe will its impact be (especially in light of the uncertain effects of the “bailout” attempt by the U.S. Treasury and the policy response more generally).
3. Conjunctural, Structural, or Systemic Crisis?: In order to put the present crisis into perspective, it is necessary to address the question of what kind of “crisis” is underway. There are three different ways in which capitalism can be “in crisis.” First, and least serious, is the conjunctural crisis. In a conjunctural crisis, there is a convergence of various short term contingencies, which jointly create problems for the system which curtail growth, or lead to declines in GDP, as well as rising unemployment and pronounced industrial overcapacity. Conjunctural crises are often called “recessions.” More rare, and much more serious, are structural crises. In a structural crisis, a certain way of organizing capitalist production has reached a kind of impasse, so that only fundamental economic (and sometimes political) restructuring can restore the economy to profitability and growth. One example: the Great Depression of the 1930s, in which only a Keynesian restructuring process (which took years to carry out) could bring capitalism out of its structural crisis. Another: the “Stagflation” (stagnation/inflation) crisis of the mid-1970s, which only a process of neo-liberal restructuring could bring to an end. Structural crises are certainly serious. But they are not, in and of themselves, fundamentally threatening to the capitalist system. By contrast, a systemic crisis occurs when the system itself runs out of options: it confronts problems that cannot be resolved within the framework of the system itself. A systemic crisis poses the question of what comes next, after capitalism. So, the question for us to ask today is: are we witnessing the unfolding of a systemic crisis of capitalism? It is clear that we have gone beyond a mere conjunctural crisis. That is, it is clear that nothing less than a serious restructuring of contemporary capitalism could possibly be sufficient to address the system’s current problems. The whole trajectory of modern capitalism which, since the dawn of the neo-liberal era at the end of the 1970s, has been bound up with a process of financialization and ballooning levels of private debt, has clearly reached an impasse. That diagnosis would suggest that at least a structural crisis is underway. But, what distinguishes a structural from a systemic crisis is that in a structural crisis the system has options for restructuring itself to restore profitability and growth. Does contemporary capitalism have such options? If the answer is no, than we can say that a systemic crisis is underway. However, it is impossible to say with any certainty that this is the case. To be sure, there is no program waiting in the wings for a restructuring agenda to be put into effect as a way of rescuing the system from its current predicament. The ruling class is presently at a loss about what to do. Throwing borrowed money at the problem, in order to socialize the losses from worthless or at least over-priced financial assets purchased by Wall Street speculators, as in the U.S. government’s Paulson Plan, is the best idea they can come up with right now. And although it may postpone, or even avert, a total collapse of the financial system, it certainly offers little hope of sparking a real and lasting recovery. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility that, over the course of the next few years, as a protracted structural crisis unfolds, there may yet emerge a pro-capitalist political project for a post-neoliberal package of structural reforms, to be imposed on workers with the backing of states.
   

IV: A ROLE FOR RADICALS

1. Weakness of the Radical Left: A new pro-capitalist restructuring agenda, to reorganize capitalism on a post-neoliberal basis, may or may not emerge in the next few years. But this much is clear: whatever the troubles of capitalism right now, the weaknesses of today’s anti-capitalist Left are even greater. What existed in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the 1970s, but no longer exists in the North Atlantic countries today, is a powerful current of anti-capitalist radicalism, able to seize the opportunity of an off-balance ruling class in order to put forward a viable radical alternative. In the absence of such an alternative, it seems highly unlikely that the system itself could be replaced in the short- to medium-range future. We have to face this reality in a sober way, even as we try to move beyond the limits of the contemporary Left, and build a new Left capable of actually winning in its struggle against capitalism.
2. The Need to Have Something to Say: Because radical politics in North America (in contrast to, say, Latin America) remains, for the time being, a marginal political force, it would be deluded for us to expect that our proposals would stand any chance of being implemented in response to the present crisis. We might, then, be tempted to think that there is no need for us to offer proposals about what to do about the financial crisis. This, however, would be a fatal mistake for the radical Left. As radical activists, we need to have something to say about all this, even if we know perfectly well that we will not get our way. The point is not to pretend that our view might actually be implemented; rather, the point is to show that radical politics speak to today’s concerns, in a way that points to a different approach to politics and public policy, and ultimately toward a different kind of society. What kinds of things should we be saying? Evidently, there are two questions that have to be addressed: first, what policy response do we favor in the short term, to deal with what’s happening now?; second, what alternatives do we propose over the long term, to really address the roots of the present crisis in a failed system of profit-motivated, greed-fueled capitalist production?
3. A Radical Policy Response: In principle, radicals should be suspicious of “policy” debates. By their very nature, these debates take for granted precisely those institutional constraints of present-day society that we regard as most problematic: the capitalist economy and the capitalist state. And yet, if we have nothing to say about policy debates, above all during times of crisis, we ourselves will be viewed with suspicion and disdain. So we have to have a point of view on the proper policy response to the present financial crisis. And yet, whatever policies we propose ought to be transitional in nature: pointing toward a path that leads beyond the limits of the capitalist system. In the present context, that means advocating a short-term policy approach based on embarking on the transition from a for-profit banking system focused on enriching financial speculators to a democratized and not-for-profit financial system in which most lending is undertaken by credit unions (non-profit financial co-operatives) or by public sector lending agencies, subject to participatory priority-setting. Rather than a taxpayer-funded “bailout” of banks, what is needed is transitional nationalization of insolvent banks, so that they can be converted into not-for-profit credit unions operated democratically and in the public interest. As Canadian Autoworkers union (CAW) economist Jim Stanford has pointed out recently, “bread-and-butter lending (to home-buyers, consumers, and real businesses) is…something we all depend on, but can’t trust the private market to reliably supply. Developing public or non-profit vehicles to perform this function (including publicly-owned banks, credit unions, building and mutual societies, and other non-profit vehicles) is thus a credible and timely demand.”
4. A Post-Capitalist Alternative: Ultimately, what radicals have to offer is three things: an analysis of what’s wrong with our society, a vision for an egalitarian and democratic alternative to it, and the beginnings of a strategy for getting us from here to there. So, while we have to address questions about policy responses to the financial crisis, our real focus is quite properly on something else: working toward the realization of a long-term vision for how to address problems of this kind at their roots. The roots of the current crisis, like so many of the social problems that plague humanity today, lie in the greed-driven, competitive system of capitalist production. Our vision of a radically democratic and egalitarian post-capitalist participatory economy, founded upon political and economic democracy, and social and environmental justice, grows more relevant with each passing phase of this crisis. This is a contribution that is unique to radicals, because if we don’t play this role, no one else can or will. The LPPS publication, What is Participatory Economics?, written by Michael Albert, author or co-author of several books on the subject, takes up the question of what a post-capitalist alternative could look like. What is rather more obvious is what it will not look like: It will not be a system in which the greed and irresponsibility of financial speculators end up posing a grave threat to the livelihoods and economic security of billions of poor and working-class people around the world. The effort to put a stop, once and for all, to an economy like that is surely a worthy project. And that is our project: the project for a post-capitalist participatory society.
   

SUGGESTED READINGS [Click titles to view these articles]

I. Introductory

I. Schmidt, “Wall Street Panic, Main Street Pain, Policy Choices” (6 October 2008)

N. Chomsky, “Anti-Democratic Nature of US Capitalism Exposed”

D. La Botz, “The Financial Crisis: A View from the Left” (September 2008)

W. Bello, “Afterthoughts: A Primer on the Wall Street Meltdown” (1 October 2008)

J. Stanford, “The Global Financial Crisis for Beginners” (19 June 2008)

II. Intermediate/Advanced

F. Baragar, “The Credit Crisis in Canada: The First Six Months” (late 2007?)

S. Gindin and L. Panitch, “Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis” (July 2008)               

J.B. Foster, “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (2008)

D. McNally, “Global Instability & Challenges to the Dollar: Assessing the Current Financial Crisis” (2008)

P. Kellog, “The Septembers of Neo-liberalism” (29 September 2008)

W. Tabb, “The Financial Crisis of U.S. Capitalism” (October 2008)

R. Brenner, “Devastating Crisis Unfolds” (January 2008)

D. Henwood, “Reflections on the Current Crisis” (Part 1, August 2007; Part 2, April 2008)

Panitch and S. Gindin, “The Current Crisis: A Socialist Perspective” (30 September 2008)

III. Readings on the Wider Issues of Capitalist Stagnation and Financial Instability

J.B. Foster, “The Financialization of Capitalism” (April 2007)

J.B. Foster, “Monopoly-Finance Capital” (December 2006)

F. Magdoff, “The Explosion of Debt and Speculation” (November 2006)

W. Tabb, “The Centrality of Finance” (2007)

D. McNally, “Turbulence in the World Economy” (June 1999)

R. Brenner, “New Boom or New Bubble? The Trajectory of the US Economy

Introduction

In non-revolutionary times, a revolutionary strategy has to acknowledge the distance that separates the preparatory phase from the crisis phase of anti-capitalist struggle. In a preparatory period, that is, when revolution is not yet a foreseeable prospect, the crucial tasks are to weaken the position of our adversaries (employers and the capitalist state) and to strengthen the position of our own side (the combined anti-capitalist forces). In a period of crisis, by contrast, the crucial tasks will include overthrowing the political and economic power of employers, displacing their elitist and authoritarian institutions with our own democratic and egalitarian ones, and consolidating popular rule against attempts by capitalism’s defenders to restore the rule of big business.

The distinction between “preparatory” and “crisis” phases of anti-capitalist struggle is important because a strategy that makes perfect sense if one is trying to achieve one set of tasks might be disastrously misguided if one is trying to achieve the other set of tasks. Arguably, this is a trap into which both Leninists and anarchists have repeatedly fallen, and which time after time has led small groups of radical activists into ever increasing isolation from mass movements and ever decreasing capacity to meaningfully engage with events in the real world.

The present period, evidently, is a non-revolutionary period. The forces of the Left are in disarray, whereas the strength, confidence and boldness of our adversaries have seldom, if ever, been greater. To turn this situation around will be difficult, but precisely for this reason the Left needs to think strategically about how to maximize our capacity to resist and challenge the power of employers and the state, with the ultimate and guiding aim of radical social transformation: a revolutionary replacement of capitalism with a new, democratic and egalitarian economic and political system. In this article, I want to outline what I call the “anti-capitalist attrition strategy,” as an appropriate revolutionary strategy for the preparatory phase of this struggle.

I want to begin, though, with a word of caution. The conceit of the Old Left, that the struggles of the exploited and the oppressed against the capitalist system could be subjected to the kind of “command-and-control” regulation associated with military (or bureaucratic) hierarchies, has no useful role to play in the rebuilding of the Left. The point of strategic thinking is not to prepare ourselves to lead our forces into battle, like pawns in a chess game. Rather, we strategize because, as activist-participants in the midst of struggles that we have neither the capacity nor the desire to direct or control, we need to orient ourselves, and to equip ourselves with the intellectual resources to differentiate between what counts as a real advance and what counts a step in the wrong direction. What the strategy of anti-capitalist attrition offers us is not a “master plan,” but a way of thinking more fruitfully about how to contribute to the struggles we participate in, both in the long term and the short term.

Attrition or Overthrow?

The notion of “attrition” in this context is a reference to the distinction, made famous by the military historian Hans Delbrück (1848-1929), between strategies of attrition and strategies of overthrow (or annihilation). A strategy of “overthrow” focuses on confronting the enemy and defeating it in decisive battles. A strategy of “attrition” seeks to avoid decisive battles, usually because these cannot (yet) be won, and seeks instead to exploit every opportunity to strengthen one’s own forces and weaken those of the enemy. Of course, it is not necessarily a matter of either/or. In the strategy of anti-capitalist attrition, for example, attrition is used in the preparatory phase, with the understanding that shifting into a strategy of overthrow will become an urgent necessity during the crisis phase.

It has to be said that the idea of deploying an attrition strategy for the anti-capitalist movement is burdened by a considerable amount of “baggage,” historically. For one thing, the first explicit proponent of an attrition strategy for the radical Left was Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), who used it to argue against a political strategy for democratization (in Germany in 1910) proposed by Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), which relied crucially on the use of militant mass strikes. In Kautsky’s view, attrition was the “prudent” approach, and Luxemburg’s supposed “overthrow” approach recklessly risked provoking a wave of state repression and thereby squandering the considerable gains that had been made over the years by the German Left. Thus, the term “attrition” was first introduced into strategy debates on the Left in order to justify a rejection of militancy in favour of a passive, electoralist strategy, like that proposed by Kautsky. Attrition meant not rocking the boat.

Later, Kautsky’s distinction (derived from Delbrück) was reinvigorated by Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), in his Prison Notebooks. Gramsci reformulated Kautsky’s distinction as a contrast between a “war of position” (attrition) and a “war of manoeuvre” (overthrow). [see FOOTNOTE #1] Unlike Kautsky, Gramsci did not use the distinction to argue against extra-parliamentary militancy. However, he did believe that the capacity of the ruling class in Western capitalist countries to rule through consent (“hegemony”), even more decisively than through force, meant that anti-capitalist struggle in those countries could not focus all its attention on a war of manoeuvre against the state (that is, the “seizure of state power,” like that which took place in 1917 in Russia). Instead, revolutionaries had to win over the masses to an anti-capitalist political project by establishing an anti-systemic hegemony of the radical Left in place of the pro-capitalist hegemony that usually prevails. Although Gramsci here hits upon a crucial insight, which all anti-capitalist activists need to take seriously, some decades after his death his ideas encouraged a generation of “Eurocommunists” to focus all their efforts on a parliamentary-reformist strategy, no different from that of Kautsky, and thereby dissolved large sections of the ostensible far Left into the camp of parliamentary socialism.

So, there is some reason to fear that a contrast between a conflict of position/attrition and one of manoeuvre/overthrow tends to encourage (or simply reflect and make explicit) the degeneration of radical politics into one or another version of reformism.

To be sure, this can sometimes be true, as the cases of Kautsky and Eurocommunism illustrate. But here we need to distinguish between attrition as an approach to rebuilding the Left, when its forces are in disarray and marginal to mainstream politics, and attrition as an approach to deciding how to deploy the considerable forces of a strong Left when it is in a position to effectively confront the employers and the capitalist state. When Kautsky was arguing for attrition, the Left in Germany was stronger than the Left has ever been in any country in the entire history of the world, not excluding Russia in 1917. The idea of using an attrition strategy in that situation amounts to giving up on radical politics as such, in favour of a project of permanent reformist electoralism: what is sometimes called “Fabian socialism.” But the mere fact that reformists can justify their political project in terms of the notion of “attrition” does nothing to change the fact that, during the preparatory phase of anti-capitalist struggle, a strategy of attrition is the only approach that the Left can reasonably take, just as a strategy of overthrow is indispensable in a crisis phase of the struggle. (For what it’s worth, in this matter I follow Lenin’s view of the relation between attrition and overthrow, as he expresses it in “The Historical Meaning of the Inner-Party Struggle in Russia,” written late in 1910. See Collected Works, 4^th English Ed., 1967, Volume 16, p. 383. As he was later to discover, he overestimated in 1910 the proximity between Kautsky’s view of “overthrow” and his own.)

There are two reasons why the anti-capitalist Left needs to think explicitly in terms of attrition, in the present, non-revolutionary period. The first reason is that the struggle between our forces and those of our enemies is an asymmetric one: simply put, they are stronger than us, so it is self-defeating to invite decisive confrontations (which is very different from saying that we should not engage in confrontational tactics). And the second reason is that the struggle is bound to be a protracted one: it will take many years, probably many decades, to put ourselves in a position where we can seriously think about enacting a strategy of overthrow. In a protracted, asymmetric conflict, the appropriate strategic framework is offered by the notion of attrition, or in Gramsci’s terms, a war of position.

Strategic Objectives of Anti-Capitalist Attrition

To adopt an attrition strategy for rebuilding the Left is to accept that the strategic tasks facing today’s anti-capitalists, in this preparatory phase of our struggle, are to be defined in terms of strengthening our side and weakening our opponents. Specifically, we aim to strengthen our political resources, our capacity to resist assaults, to challenge privileges, to win allies, and so on, and we aim to weaken such capacities in our adversary.

But what does a “strong Left” look like? What exactly are we aiming at?

It will be helpful, I think, to identify a few crucial strategic objectives, which jointly add up to a fairly clear idea of what rebuilding the Left means, concretely. In the context of an adversarial situation, like that between the anti-capitalist Left and the defenders of capitalism, it is to be expected that there will be a close correlation between factors that strengthen one side and factors that weaken the other. And it is just so in this case. The strength of our adversary – and our own weakness – in this struggle derives from three sources. The first source of capitalism’s strength is the relative social stability that creates a false impression of legitimacy, and makes the system appear invincible. The second source of its strength is the existence of widespread popular loyalty to the system, which extends not only to the government and the political system, but also to the economic institutions (private ownership of productive assets; profit-motivated production; etc.), and even to the cultural values of capitalism (consumerism; economic individualism; bourgeois ideals of ‘success’; etc.). The third source of capitalism’s strength is the lack of a unified force opposed to corporate rule, one which could pose a powerful challenge to the combined power of the capitalist class and its political representatives in the capitalist state.

Thus, to rebuild the Left, and in that sense to successfully carry out our tasks in the preparatory phase of anti-capitalist struggle, we need (1) to undermine the social stability of capitalist societies, (2) to undermine mass loyalty to the economic and political systems and cultural values of capitalism, and (3) to construct a powerful alliance capable in principle of mounting an effective challenge to corporate rule. That set of circumstances would signal the emergence of a strong Left, and an undermined, weakened ruling class. Anti-capitalist attrition, therefore, in the preparatory phase, identifies three strategic objectives: fomenting widespread civil unrest; subverting popular loyalty to the system; and building a powerful anti-corporate political alliance.

But how? Obviously, a workable strategy with direct practical implications has to be developed by activists “on the ground,” by applying broad strategic principles to the concrete circumstances in which they work. So, here, I’ll only address the practical implications of the anti-capitalist attrition strategy in very general terms.

Fomenting Civil Unrest

Let’s start with the first strategic objective: fomenting civil unrest. This is something that the Left knows how to do, in principle, however difficult it may be in practice. In general, we do it by building broad and militant social movements of grassroots opposition to the system and its adverse effects on people. At the tactical level, that is, at the level of methods used to attain strategic objectives, we can single out three elements of the attrition approach to movement-building and spreading social unrest:

• Grassroots Popular Mobilization: First, note that a crucial implication of framing the issue of movement-building in terms of “fomenting civil unrest” is that we are not looking for “a seat at the table.” The project of anti-capitalism cannot be advanced, ultimately, by allowing our forces to get bogged down in the political process of capitalist-state politics. On the contrary, we want to sharpen the antagonism that divides the anti-capitalist forces of the Left from the pro-capitalist forces of the Right. From this it follows that our approach to politics will focus on extra-parliamentary politics, above all, grassroots popular mobilization. An attrition strategy must guard carefully against winning so-called “gains” that in fact have the effect of strengthening our adversaries by allowing some of our forces to be co-opted into the “mainstream” political process, in pursuit of the deluded aim of “working for change from within.” We need to fight from outside the system, even as we make demands on it.

• Strategic Dispersal, Tactical Concentration: Second, the anti-capitalist attrition strategy should motivate us to combine strategic dispersal with tactical convergence. Building oppositional social movements that are effective requires tactical convergence (a concentration of oppositional forces, taking action in “united fronts,” for maximum impact). On the other hand, if the organizational and political unity of the Left is too complete, the task of weakening and containing it is made too easy for the authorities: if they neutralize one or two organizations (or tactics), by whatever means, the movement can be derailed indefinitely. But a movement with multiple organizations, pursuing multiple tactics, and working on multiple fronts, is much harder to defeat – as long as it is capable of timely tactical convergence, i.e., coming together for united action in support of particular demands with broad appeal. Successful movement-building requires that we work on getting the balance right between strategic dispersal (organizational multiplicity) and tactical concentration (united-front action).

• Tactical Militancy. Third, when we pursue an attrition strategy, we seek to avoid decisive confrontations, by which I mean “betting the farm” on an all-out struggle against an opponent more powerful than ourselves. But that does not mean that it disavows confrontation as such. Far from it. It demands an appropriate use of militancy, whenever its use can strengthen our side and weaken theirs, above all in the context of mass protests or strikes. Such tactics can have important positive effects, notably these three: building the confidence and boldness of the anti-capitalist opposition, polarizing the political debate in society around a certain issue, and provoking outbursts of self-defeating state repression. These benefits can be crucial in helping us to build movements, but also to attain the other strategic objectives of the attrition strategy.

Subverting Mass Loyalty

Now let’s consider methods for pursuing the second strategic objective of the attrition strategy: subverting mass loyalty to the system. Here we need to separate out the three kinds of subversion that the attrition strategy urges us to pursue simultaneously: economic, political and cultural.

• Economic Subversion: On the economic front, the task of subversion implies winning people away from their attachment to the profit-driven, market economy – which they may see as inevitable, and upon which they almost certainly depend for their survival and/or well-being. Today, in particular, this requires that we go beyond vague ideals about equality and democracy. We have to draw people into actually existing, viable alternatives. This means taking very seriously the task of building up the so-called “social economy” (also known as the “solidarity economy”): workers’ co-operatives, consumer and housing co-operatives, experiments in “participatory economics,” small-scale barter economies, and other forms of democratic and egalitarian economic activity operating in the margins and interstices of contemporary capitalism. Marx rightly saw in co-operatives the seeds of a new, radically democratic and egalitarian alternative to capitalism, and today’s Left needs to do much more to promote them as a living alternative to profit-motivated economics.

• Political Subversion: On the political front, the task of subversion implies, in the short term, drawing people into forms of civic engagement that lie beyond the mainstream political process, notably participating in movement activism, as opposed to voting and joining electoral political parties, and in the long term, cultivating the emergence of alternative, parallel political institutions, beyond the control of capital and the state, such as popular assemblies or councils, like those that have accompanied so many of the major social upheavals of modern times. In short, the Left must offer modes of civic participation which compete effectively for the loyalty and identification of masses of people: a politics that is oppositional rather than integrative.

• Cultural Subversion: On the cultural front, the task of subversion implies the cultivation of a counter-culture of values, lifestyles and social practices that tend to cut against both acquiescence in the rule of the market and identification with its characteristic values. A clear example of a subversive lifestyle would be the anti-consumerist lifestyle of “simple living.” Any such lifestyle or value system will be vulnerable to co-optation, as capitalists seek to exploit the ostensible alternative as a vehicle for selling a line of products tailor-made to cater to its participants. But this just implies the need for constant vigilance and ongoing attention to the problem of sustaining anti-capitalist consciousness in spite of pressures toward co-optation and assimilation (‘counter-subversion’).

Constructing an Anti-corporate Alliance

Finally, we need to identify some basic methods for pursuing the third strategic objective of the attrition strategy: constructing an anti-corporate alliance, capable of posing a real threat to capitalism. The first thing to do is to specify the appropriate “constituency” of such a political project. The forces of anti-capitalism are now few in number, but we need to gain influence among a constituency much broader than ourselves. Here we need not innovate: the Left has traditionally identified as its audience a broad sector of the populace, consisting of the membership of working-class organizations, classically including unions and co-operatives, and their “natural allies” in those democratic and egalitarian community organizations working within civil society to achieve social and environmental justice, and political and economic democracy. This constituency has the two advantages of being both potentially receptive to anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) politics, and potentially powerful in the threat that it can pose to the status quo. So, what we need to do is mobilize this constituency to build a powerful anti-corporate alliance of labour and community organizations. But, no less important, we need also to ensure that radicals, of varying political stripes, are able to operate within these labour and community organizations, and to have a certain influence within them, which will naturally tend to be greater in times of significant social upheaval, and weaker in other periods.

The value of such a labour/community alliance for the anti-capitalist project is clear. But what, tactically speaking, can we do to build it? Here’s two crucial elements of the answer to that question.

• Social Movement Unionism: First, within the labour movement, we need to challenge the “economistic” narrowness of “business unionism,” by organizing at the grassroots level within unions for a “solidarity” or “social movement” unionism, which focuses not only on bargaining for wages and benefits, but also on a broader political agenda for democratizing the economy, and for promoting social movements against racism, sexism, poverty and environmental destruction.

• Class-struggle Social Movements: Second, within the wider civil society social movements (feminism, environmentalism, etc.), we need to promote a consistently anti-corporate, pro-worker consciousness, as an indispensable aspect of Left politics. Thus, for example, we need to make the case for a class-struggle feminism, a class-struggle anti-racism, and a class-struggle environmentalism, and so on. Doing so will both enhance the effectiveness of these movements on their own terms and sharpen the antagonism that divides these movements from the economic and political elites of capitalism.

Conclusion

A strategy of the kind proposed here – which is suitable for a period of protracted, asymmetric conflict against a powerful ruling class – cannot overthrow capitalism. That requires a specific strategy for defeating the employer class and the capitalist state in a decisive struggle to resolve a profound social crisis in favour of the anti-capitalist Left. But the strategy of anti-capitalist attrition can serve as a long-range strategic orientation for radicals in the contemporary period: a framework for setting goals, choosing tactics, and assessing gains and losses.

{SJ D’Arcy is a member of the London Project for a Participatory Society. Send feedback to Steve, at “radicalism@gmail.com”}

__________________
FOOTNOTE[1] Unfortunately, Gramsci’s introduction of “war of manoeuvre” as a name for the strategy of overthrow invites confusion. The contrast between attrition strategies and overthrow strategies is all too easy to confuse with the very different contrast between a “war of attrition” and a “war of manoeuvre” as these terms are used by many contemporary military strategists (see, e.g., John Mearsheimer, “Maneuver, Mobile Defense, and the NATO Central Front,” International Security, Winter 1981/82, Vol. 6, No. 3; and William Lind, “Military Doctrine, Force Structure, and the Defense Decision-Making Process,” Air University Review, XXX, No. 4, May-June 1979). World War I, with its famous trench warfare, was mainly fought using strategies of annihilation (overthrow), not attrition in Delbrück’s sense. Yet, in the idiom of contemporary military strategists, it was a war of attrition. To writers like Mearsheimer and Lind, a “war of attrition” is – like Delbrück’s strategy of annihilation – primarily focused on seeking out and conducting decisive battles, in a mutual test of strength. When they say “war of maneuver” (or manoeuvre), on the other hand, they have in mind attempts to use bold and unexpected movements to strike suddenly at an adversary’s “Achilles heel,” leading to a rapid breakdown of the enemy’s morale and system of command and control, etc., so that victory may not go to the largest and most well-equipped (hence strongest) side in the conflict. In any case, because the strategic discourse of the Left has been shaped mainly by the usage familiar from writings by people like Kautsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg and Lenin, in this article I adopt their Delbrückian vocabulary, even if it is somewhat passé in strategy circles today.

============================================

The LPPS is an anti-racist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist organization, based in London, Ontario.

Our movement desperately needs to undergo a process of renewal and reinvigoration. But as we rebuild our movement, we need to avoid a whole series of mistakes that have brought us to our current state of ineffectiveness and despair. Too many of us have allowed our analysis to be clouded by apocalyptic scenarios that foster fear and inaction. Too many of our discussions have been mired in debates, fueled by racism and pseudo-scientific “projections,” concerning the alleged “threat” posed by immigration to “affluent” countries. And too many of our most high profile activists and organizations have committed themselves, if not out of cynicism then out of naiveté, to a strategy that looks to corporations and their political representatives as sources of funding and potential converts to a “green agenda.” The result is a movement that is at once massively funded, enormously popular, and largely ineffective. In this time of looming ecological crisis, such mistakes are no longer tolerable. We need a radical overhaul of the politics of our movement: its aims, its analysis, and its strategy.

But where do we begin? Above all we need to learn from the worldwide resistance to neo-liberal globalization, which – by adopting a consistently militant, anti-corporate and internationalist political stance – has begun partially to turn the tide against neo-liberalism, notably in Latin America. The successes of that movement have come in spite of what only a few years ago seemed like impossible odds stacked against the project of progressive change. It is an example that we – having failed at the fundraise-and-lobby strategy that still dominates our movement – need to take very seriously.

What, then, would an environmentalism that learned from the global justice movement look like? The basic principles of such an anti-corporate environmentalism can be summed up in the following six claims.

1. Corporations are the root cause of the environmental crisis. The vast majority of the world’s environmental problems, from climate change to deforestation, from toxic waste to environmental racism, are caused by the blind pursuit of profits by the most powerful institutions in the modern world, transnational corporations. Seeking only private gain, corporations spend billions promoting irrational over-consumption; they choose the cheapest rather than the most sustainable production processes; and they give no thought whatsoever to the public interest, to social justice, or to the ecological impact of their decisions. The result of this irrationality is becoming all too clear as we survey the damage done by big business to our environment, our health, and our quality of life.

2. The problem to be addressed is not simply survival or sustainability, but social and environmental injustice. We need to continually remind each other that the environmental crisis is not some inevitable side-effect of population growth or technological innovation. It is a grave injustice: the cumulative effect of centuries of systematic disregard for the interests of the world’s people. The most dynamic and effective environmental organizing of recent years within North America has been led by activists of colour who have redefined many environmental issues in terms of environmental racism, or more generally in terms of environmental injustice. The result has been the emergence of a current of environmentalism – allied with similar struggles in the global South – that addresses issues such as air quality, toxic waste and climate change in the context of a broader challenge to social inequality and economic exploitation. This points the way forward for “progressive” environmentalists. It also distinguishes our project from all nostalgic or apocalyptic forms of “green” politics.

3. The struggle for environmental justice is an anti-corporate struggle. We have to be honest about the fundamental failure of mainstream environmentalism. Vast quantities of time, effort, good will and money have been expended by a movement that has yielded none of the sweeping social changes that the crisis demands. The reason is clear: our leading organizations have viewed corporations (and their representatives in government) as potential allies and “partners” of the environmental movement. As environmentalists, we must finally reject this dangerous illusion and identify corporations, not as possible “partners” to be won over to our side, but as implacable adversaries that must be opposed at every turn.

4. Only a grassroots movement of popular resistance can effectively challenge corporate power. A realistic strategy for advancing the agenda of global environmental justice must aim to mobilize a powerful alliance of workers, their unions, grassroots environmentalists, advocates for immigrant and refugee rights, anti-racists, feminists, and student activists. Only a strong, active, diverse, and militant alliance of social movement activists and organizations can mobilize the kind of popular resistance needed to counter the power of a corporate elite united in its determination to protect the profit system from the kind of changes that environmental justice demands.

5. There are solutions to the crisis, but they are radical solutions. Effective action will demand far-reaching institutional changes to our economy and our political process. Our society must shift from its present focus on maximizing corporate profits (euphemistically called “economic growth”) to a new focus on building a sustainable economy aimed at meeting genuine human needs. For most of us – all those outside of the investor class – this is a prospect that we should look forward to with hope: an economy whose primary aim would be promotion of the public interest, as constrained by the demands of worldwide social and environmental justice.

6. The struggle for environmental justice is a global struggle. The environmental crisis is global in scope, and the resistance to corporate plunder of the planet’s ecosystems and its peoples must be a global struggle, taking full advantage of the power of international solidarity. Our struggle cannot be confined by borders established and maintained for the benefit of a system that threatens not only our well-being, but our survival. A progressive environmentalism, moreover, can find no common ground with the kind of pseudo-environmentalism that scapegoats immigrants or population growth in the global South for a crisis that originates in the irrationalities of “advanced” capitalism, above all in Europe and North America.

These principles are only starting-points. But they seem to me to be necessary starting-points for a political project that has broad appeal, but that can only succeed if it overcomes the obstacle of powerful corporate interests that – through their direct economic power and their indirect stranglehold on the formation of public policy – will fight tooth and nail to block any meaningful change. We can win, but only if we understand clearly what we’re up against.

I. WARS AND ANTI-WAR MOVEMENTS

The first question that we, as anti-war activists, need to ask ourselves is this: what causes wars? Of course, there are long and complicated answers to that question, and answers specific to each individual war. But there is also a short and simple answer, which is quite general. The short and simple answer is that wars are caused by the calculation, on the part of rich and powerful people, that a war policy would offer more benefits and impose fewer costs than would a peace policy.[ftn.1] The benefits that they expect may include lucrative opportunities for war-profiteering, a convenient pretext to undermine entrenched civil liberties, geo-political advantages in global power politics, electoral gains for a governing party, or a way of enforcing terms of trade more favorable to Western corporations. In each case, the goal is the same: to enhance the wealth and power of the corporate elite and its political representatives.

Something important follows from this. If wars are caused by a cost/benefit calculation by elites, then wars can be stopped by increasing the costs and decreasing the benefits of a war policy. This, then, sets the task of every anti-war movement: to change the context in which elites calculate the advantages and disadvantages of going to war, so that it seems less appealing to them, and more threatening.

But how?

There is little we can do, directly, to stop the war-profiteering, or to affect the terms of trade between Western powers and third world countries, or to shape the geo-political context in which wars unfold. What political resources, then, do we as grassroots activists have access to, that can raise the costs and lower the benefits of war for our society’s elites?

The anti-corporate strategy for the peace movement is intended as an answer to that question.

II. STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES OF THE ANTI-CORPORATE STRATEGY

There are three strategic objectives of the anti-corporate strategy. The first objective is to create a large and growing mass movement of active and vocal opposition to the war, by agitating among workers and students, the poor and the unemployed. The second objective is to win wider layers of those people to a radical critique of capitalism, or at least of the power of corporations (or the ‘corporate agenda’), as it operates at home and abroad. And the third objective is to create or intensify divisions within the corporate elite concerning whether the war’s costs to their interests are outweighed by its benefits.

This strategy is based on two assumptions. The first assumption is that the most powerful sector of our society is the corporate elite, and that therefore the anti-war struggle is ultimately a class struggle: a struggle against a corporate agenda aiming to reap benefits from imperial warfare. The second assumption is that sections of the corporate elite can be led to turn against a war policy if they feel that the opposition to that policy is driving large numbers of workers, students, poor and unemployed people to begin to question, not just the war policy itself, but the corporate power served by that policy. In short, the strategy flows from the thought that, if opposition to the war can be made to develop into a wider critique of the whole range of policies that serve, not human need but corporate greed, then that opposition can pose a real threat to the corporate elite: a threat great enough to provoke elite defections to the anti-war side.

The corporate elite will never be led to oppose a war on moral grounds, on humanitarian grounds, or by the force of rational arguments. The capacity of activists to influence their decision-making is always indirect: by creating a level of dissent, both wide enough (encompassing masses of people) and deep enough (opposing not just a particular policy, but the whole corporate agenda and the corporate power structure that imposes that agenda), that the corporate elite has grounds to worry that its position of unquestioned privilege and societal ‘hegemony’ or leadership is being placed in jeopardy by the war policy that is fuelling this dissent.

So, the anti-corporate strategy aims, first, to mobilize and politicize masses of workers and students, poor and unemployed people, to speak out and protest against the war. Second, it seeks to educate and ultimately radicalize those politicizing people by demonstrating to them that the war is rooted in the greed of corporations and the servility of the state in relation to those corporate interests. And, third, as the movement grows and more people begin to turn against the corporate agenda and develop a willingness to oppose it and demand that governments refuse to serve it, the anti-corporate strategy aims to cause sections of the corporate elite to defect from the pro-war camp, out of fear that their privileges are threatened by the growing and deepening opposition to corporate power being fuelled by anti-war sentiments.

III. TACTICS FAVORED BY THE ANTI-CORPORATE STRATEGY

‘Tactics’ are methods or means by which we pursue strategic objectives. What tactics does the anti-corporate strategy for the peace movement recommend?

The prospects for success of this strategy hinge on being able to build opposition to the war, and the corporate agenda it serves, in a way that tends to grow both wider (drawing in ever more people) and deeper (radicalizing people by leading them to develop a systemic critique of corporate power, imperialism, etc.). This necessitates that two tasks be pursued simultaneously, even though there may often be a tension between them. On the one hand, there is the task of turning neutrals or supporters of the war policy into opponents of it, expanding the sheer numbers of war opponents, especially active opponents. On the other hand, there is the task of radicalizing those people, by winning them over to some kind of anti-corporate political project. The tension arises from the fact that moves toward radicalization within the movement (in pursuit of the second task) tend to narrow the appeal of the movement to neutrals and war supporters, and even to war opponents who are not active participants in the movement.

How can we promote both aims – radicalizing the activists, while drawing the non-activists into oppositional activity – at the same time? Again, there are long and complicated answers, which ultimately vary from individual to individual. But there is also a simple, general answer. The simple and general point here is that we need different tactics to appeal to different people, to start where individuals or groups of people are “at” right now, and to help them take the next step in their political development, to draw them into a more active opposition to the war, and help them draw more radical conclusions about the war and its roots in the corporate agenda.

For some people, the best way for them to find an entry-point into the anti-war movement will be attending a political film-showing, organized by anti-war activists. There, they can begin to hear arguments missing from the mainstream debate, including anti-corporate arguments, and arguments about the racist and sexist nature of our society and its foreign policy. There, too, they can learn about what other people are doing, locally, nationally, internationally, to oppose the war along with other forms of social injustice. This can be the first step in a process that culminates in their radicalization.

For other people, the best entry-point will be more “action-oriented”: a mass demonstration. Participation in mass action may help them to break out of their isolation and sense of helplessness. They may come to feel that there is something they can do, that they can work with others to publicly voice their opposition. This might feel empowering to them, and inspire them to make a deeper commitment to building the movement.

For still others, mass demonstrations may seem too limited. They may feel that civil disobedience is necessary, and that they are willing and able to engage in it. They may want to occupy the constituency office of an M.P., or block traffic, or disrupt efforts to recruit people into the military. [ftn. 2]

For others, writing an anti-war article may be one of the contributions they feel they can make, or a letter to the editor, or putting on some ‘guerrilla’ street theatre, or whatever.

Clearly, any and all of these tactics can help to draw more people into the movement, and set in motion a radicalization process through which their dissent spreads from opposition to the war policy into a newly developed opposition to the broader corporate agenda, and ultimately to the corporate power structure inherent in capitalism itself.

This process of radicalization will be greatly facilitated by a vocal and visible presence, in every sector of the movement, of radical anti-racist and feminist politics, both as a source of radical analysis of the effects of the war on women and people of colour, and as a source of critical perspectives on how anti-war organizing could be more effective by broadening its perspective so that feminism and anti-racism are systematically integrated into the analysis, the strategy, and the tactics of the movement at all times.

From the point of view of the anti-corporate strategy, what is crucial is that all of the many tactics at its disposal should be deployed with the strategic objectives of the anti-corporate strategy in mind.

IV. WHAT ABOUT THE ELECTORAL PROCESS?

Some people will object to the anti-corporate strategy on the grounds that it ignores the electoral process. What about finding an anti-war political party, and voting it into office? A related strategy looks to influence public opinion: if public opinion can be led to oppose the war, political parties that now support the war will be led to oppose it, and when they are elected the war will be ended.

The problem with this thinking is that it exaggerates the responsiveness of governing parties to public opinion, and underestimates their responsiveness to corporate power. To be sure, protest parties – parties with little immediate prospect of governing – can be led to come out against a war even if it is supported by a unified corporate elite. But will governing parties – by which I mean parties that have a realistic chance of forming a government in the next election – oppose a war, out of deference to public opinion, even when the corporate elite is united behind that war? Usually, it seems, they will not. Think of Vietnam: both U.S. parties continued to support it, even when public opinion turned against it. And what about the U.S. occupation of Iraq today: both parties support it still, and debates are mainly confined to disputes about troop levels, or about military or political tactics. To the extent that mainstream political parties in the U.S. are entertaining the idea of coming out against the war altogether, this reflects the very kind of considerations that the anti-corporate strategy highlights: it is a matter of the parties responding to defections within the corporate elite, as some sectors of the investor class begin to fear that the mass opposition to the war threatens one of their primary interests, namely the political viability of the assertive pro-business foreign policy they favor, which is detailed in the notorious document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, by the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century [ftn. 3], and which is sold to the people under the misleading label, ‘War on Terrorism.’

V. CONCLUSION

The anti-corporate strategy adopts as its starting-point an analysis of contemporary war as an expression of corporate interests and a reflection of corporate hegemony or dominance in our society. For this reason, it attacks war by creating a threat to that corporate dominance. By encouraging masses of people to turn against corporate power, it threatens to destabilize the willingness of people to acquiesce in or accept that power. In this way, the anti-corporate strategy aims to increase the costs and to decrease the benefits of war, from the point of view of the economic and political elites who now favor a war policy, and to encourage more and more of them to defect and come out against the war policy, until that policy becomes politically unsustainable.

END NOTES:

[i] On this point, and for a detailed elaboration of a strategic orientation very similar to that of the anti-corporate strategy, see Michael Albert, “Ten Q & A on Anti-war Organizing,” http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=2527

[ii] See, Matt (Hartford S.D.S.), “Toward a Direct Action Anti-War Strategy,” http://studentsforademocraticsociety.org/organizer/opinion-and-commentary/toward-a-direct-action-antiwar-strategy/18

[iii] http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf