From Protest to Self-Government

 

Purple Library Guy states here that left-wing movements tend to not be capable of moving beyond protesting to governing.  That they could (conceivably) swarm a city, temporarily scare-off the authorities, but afterwards they can't organize themselves to produce a budget, enforce the collection of the taxes necessary for the provision of public services necessary for a functioning society.

PLG notes the exceptional quality of the Zapatista's in Mexico.  Which made me want to look up something recent about them.

As most students of the Zapatista project observe, challenges facing the movement are many. They range from defections as a result of the government’s co-optation campaign through subsidies and improvement programs, to the dependence on funding by sympathetic NGOs, to the persistence of patriarchal tendencies and internal inequalities. Yet, despite the challenges, in 26 years of their struggle for autonomy, Zapatistas have built functioning social arrangements based on bottom-up democracy, cooperation and communal justice, which place community well-being over individual profit.

Through these arrangements, Zapatista communities have secured rights, protection and basic needs that the Mexican state has denied or failed to provide them with. As Dora Roblero of Frayba, an organization that has been accompanying Zapatistas since the very beginning, recently noted, Zapatistas may be the only community in Mexico prepared to weather the pandemic—thanks to their years-long self-organization of basic services.

With the states failing to protect and provide for so many around the world, the Zapatista experience offers an inspiring community-centered alternative.

Back to the topic at hand.  The left's incapacity to exercise power is due to the retreat to anarchism due to the fear of authoritarian tendencies that arise out of a quest for power.  Stalinist and Maoist dystopias showed what can happen when political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.  Further down the line of authoritarianism is the patriarchal, managerial tendencies of political parties which seem to inevitably become top-down, "professional" entities dedicated to their own abstract interests rather than those of their memberships.  And all of this "success" is merely to negotiate with the representatives of capitalism in parliaments where the voices of the people are rarely heard (and ignored on the rare occasions when they are heard).

The same things can happen in other institutions.  Full-time, professional union bureaucracies become divorced from the concerns of the rank-and-file.  All groups with professional leaderships end up this way.  And then they go up against similarly run capitalist organizations that have much better funding, more resources and more power.  As PLG and I have been saying; the oligarchy isn't necessarily smarter but they do have numerous advantages.  Money. Power. Control over the legal system.  Control over our livelihoods.  Propaganda.

PLG then mentions how modern internet communications networks can improve our ability to organize spontaneously.  Mentioning "loomio.org" specifically.

Make decisions together online

A safe place for collaborative organizations to work together to achieve shared goals

Include people in decisions that affect them

Improve equality by giving people a voice

Value diversity through richer contributions to make better decisions

There IS people power that arose inadvertently on the internet.  Blogs gave people the chance to get their viewpoints out to potentially millions of people.  Something went wrong though.  Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.  That's why the oligarchs are so keen to censor social media under the guise of combatting disinformation.  (Meanwhile ALL their media can continue to lie to us.)

I have always believed that a revolution that will have lasting good effects must arise from out of the desires of the majority.  For that reason it must appeal to the majority; specifically their self-interest and their internalized value system.  It must happen in a million places at once.  Again, I used to preach my "Workers as Citizens" idea.  Democracy is a value we all supposedly share.  Bringing democracy into the work place through a constitutional reform utilizes shared values, agreed upon ways of effecting change, and it is obviously in the material self-interest of the majority to have higher wages and job security as well as a greater say in their conditions of work.  

This isn't really the reply that I wanted to make but it will have to do.