Hi

If anyone is interested in campaigning for every single person on the
planet to receive unconditional basic income to lift them above the poverty
line, as a 'directional demand' (see below) some of us are meeting on-line
this evening at 21.30 UTC (8.30pm UK time) to discuss.

Drop me a line privately for details.

Cheers

Mark

*>>Why/what are Directional Demands?*

The idea of the ‘demand’ has long been at the heart of political
organising. Some demands are framed as an opposition – an end to a war, the
privatization of water services, the rule of a dictator, or against the
closure of a local library. Other demands are framed as a demand for
something – the right to vote, the 8-hour day, equal access to healthcare,
a wage-increase, or for national secession. These demands are evidently
different in terms of what they immediately want to achieve, yet there are
also fundamental differences in the very nature of the demands themselves.

Some schools of socialist organising – most notably laid out in Trotsky’s
Transitional Program – recognised certain types of ‘transitional’ demands
as central to any revolutionary strategy. Premised on the idea of an
intellectually immature working class and the need to establish a
dictatorship of the proletariat, these demands were theorized to ‘help the
masses… to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program
of the revolution’ (Trotsky 1938). As such, the ultimate aim wasn’t so much
to fulfill the demands, but rather to reveal the impossibility of seemingly
reasonable demands being fulfilled within capitalist society. In helping to
clear the ‘false consciousness of the masses’, these demands would thus
hasten the capturing of the nation-state and implementing the revolutionary
plan.


We agree neither with the necessity of capturing of the nation-state, nor
the narrow conception of demands as simply tools for aiding the
‘transition’ to socialist rule. However, we share (at the most basic level)
an understanding that ‘demands’ have concrete political effects – they help
‘create’ political identities, give expression to otherwise ‘latent’ anger,
frame visions of how things could be different, and name enemies (whether
that be people, processes, laws or systems). In other words, demands are
interesting not only because of what’s being demanded, but because of the
effects they have on the composition of social movements, the people that
compose them, and what that means for making the seemingly impossible
become possible.


We are only introducing the idea here – and so won’t go into much depth –
but we suggest instead that we need to start thinking about political
demands in terms of their direction. Directional-ism is the premise that we
must develop and evaluate ‘practices and processes according not to their
pro- or anti-capitalist ‘essence’ but according to their beyond-capitalism
dynamics’ . A directional demand must therefore ‘be capable of cognitively
reorienting us far enough out of the present organization of social
relations that some kind of critical distance is achieved and the political
imagination of a different future is called to work’ . These are demands
that, in their fulfillment and/or the struggle for their fulfillment, have
a concrete effect on how we think about what is possible.<<

http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/radical-municipalism-demanding-the-future/

Attachments

text.html (text/html) 5.5 kB