The Ukrainian Revolution & the Future of Social Movements

[Joe Shlabotnik]

snip...

A few years ago, it was possible to hope that the coming insurrections would be a naturally fertile ground for anarchist resistance. Now it is clear that, although anarchists can find new affinities within them, nationalists can capitalize upon them just as easily. This may be an inherent problem with movements that cohere around tactics, and it poses serious strategic questions to anarchists. Would we have done anything differently in 2011 had we known that we were developing a protest model that fascists could appropriate wholesale?

What had been a purely symbolic conflict over space with Occupy became full-on paramilitary urban warfare in Ukraine. By taking the front lines in confronting the authorities, nationalists and fascists have won themselves legitimacy as “defenders of the people” that will serve them for many years to come. Surely fascists around the world have been watching, and will be emboldened to try the same thing elsewhere when the opportunity arises. Fascists, too, are plugged into a global imaginary; we ignore this at our peril.

But it is not simply a question of fascists emboldening other fascists. The real danger is that the popular imagination about what it means to resist will become militarized—that those who wish to be “effective” will conclude that, like the Ukrainian rebels, they should form hundred-person fighting units with a strict hierarchy of command. We are not opposed to armed confrontation, of course—as we have argued elsewhere, it is essential for any social movement aimed at liberation to be able to push back against the police, and this is rarely pretty in practice. But different formats for confrontation encode different power relations and forms of social change within them. The model we have seen in Kiev opens the way for fascists and other reactionaries to recreate the ruling order within resistance movements—not just by reinserting formal hierarchies and gender roles, but also by confining the substance of the struggle to a clash of armed organizations rather than spreading subversion into every aspect of social relations. Once nationalism is added to this equation, war is not far away.

The other edge of this sword is that, if burning barricades are branded “fascist,” those who oppose fascism will avoid building them for fear of being misunderstood. We can imagine both fascists and pacifists wishing to promote this misunderstanding. Yet it would not be wise to cede barricade-building to fascists in a time of escalating upheaval.

More at: http://crimethinc.com/texts/ux/ukraine.html

*****

I thought this was an interesting analysis of the co-option of tactics, and manipulation of public perception by powerful actors and the dilemmas facing future popular uprisings and nontraditional opposition movements.

[Demeter]

1. All Uprisings are Alike

and when the peaceful roads to change are all blocked, it doesn't matter anymore. There will be blood.

As long as one can tell the difference and not be fooled, nor spend one's life blood foolishly in the service of evil, it should work out.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. ive read other similar accounts of what was going on in Kiev, which is why I am unenthusiastic

Last edited Tue Mar 18, 2014, 07:46 AM - Edit history (1)

about the "revolution" which put Right Faction and Svoboda into power. This is a lose-lose situation, with the rightwing nationalist Russian regime on one side, and a mix of neo-liberal idiots and outright fascists in control on the other side.

[starroute]

3. This isn't a new problem

David Graeber has suggested that anarchism flourishes in times of peace, while times of war and violent repression produce resistance movements that are themselves violent, militarized, and hierarchical in organization. (Not to mention heavily male-dominated.) That was what happened after World War I, when Soviet communism captured the revolutionary left -- with extremely bad consequences that still persist.

This is why is seems silly to blame OWS for "developing a protest model that fascists could appropriate wholesale." It isn't that the fascists have appropriated it so much as that Western propagandists have used it as cover to muddy the public perception of violent right-wing coups.

On the other hand, protest as a model is generally far less effective now that it was in the 1960s, when it was new and exotic and guaranteed to attract TV coverage. Getting a crowd out in the streets doesn't do much if you're not getting your message across. And armed confrontation with the police can be worse than useless if the police themselves are clueless about the system of repression they're upholding.

The real key to Occupy, I think, is that it was not about protest but about *occupying* -- about moving into the greyed-out wasteland of Western industrial civilization and offering better alternatives. And the potentials of that as a model have only barely been explored.

[warrprayer]

4. State Department supporting fascists...

= BAD

[TBF]

5. ...