Quick thought on a future journal - Learning From the Past

[Simon Thorpe]

Hi folks

I think if we end up doing any sort of journal, I might propose something like this as a first special issue theme: Anticapitalism and Social Change, Learning From Past Social Movements.

This picks up one of the really strong ideas from the convergence as a practical project that would be a really worthwhile subject to collect knowledge on. I prefer the idea of specifying anticapitalism as I think the strategy and tactics of identity politics is rather different, while obviously overlapping and far from irrelevant. But a broader topic could be something like: From Reform to Transformation in Past Social Movements.

It's that tipping point that's occupying my mind at the moment, in the development of a movement from an Event, to a Process, to a Movement, to Social Transformation rather than smaller cooptive gains. How can we define that achievement and how have movements achieved and failed to achieve it in the past?

Some interesting David Harvey provocations below for anyone interested. I think the task of trying to relate/reconcile these kinds of challenging ideas to traditions and strategies of prefigurative politics is a very important one.

David Harvey on The Fetishism of the Local and Horizontal

and

Harvey at World Social Forum 2010: 'Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition'

"A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut it down as the prime motor of human history, requires a sophisticated understanding of how social change occurs. The failings of past endeavors to build a lasting socialism and communism have to be avoided and lessons from that immensely complicated history must be learned. Yet the absolute necessity for a coherent anti-capitalist revolutionary movement must also be recognized. The fundamental aim of that movement is to assume social command over both the production and distribution of surpluses.

We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times. I propose a “co-revolutionary theory” derived from an understanding of Marx’s account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices:

a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption

b) relations to nature

c) social relations between people

d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs

e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects

f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements

g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction."