Methods of Dis-Organization

Faluja. Najaf. The shattered bodies continue to fall. American imperialism faces a minor public relations nightmare at home with torture and the persecution of civilians bringing home a little more concretely the core truth of occupation that mainstream America seems incapable of understanding. It also races towards imposing a "civilian Iraqi authority" in place that will ensure the future of the American neo-liberal expansion. The anti-war movement in the US has held on — it struggles to stay poised at the threshold of a new mobilization. The World Tribunal on Iraq – New York (WTI-NYC) hearings unfolded on May 8th, 2004. The illegality of the war on Iraq, the crimes of war and the crimes of occupation were all documented with a systematicity that we had not seen in the US before. The first signs of the US anti-war movement coming into a close alliance with the global anti-war movement came into place with the WTI-NYC hearings. February 15th, 2003 was a sign of hope that we could build an anti-war movement that spans the globe. May 8th has done much to hold that hope in place and even advance it.

And yet, the question that bothers me is: Where have the South Asians gone? Has not the South Asian participation in the anti-war efforts in the US dwindled?

I acknowledge that this question has the potential to be self-righteous. I also acknowledge that there are South Asian Americans who continue to be involved (notably in BTN). And I ask the question only out of anguish because I feel that we cannot abandon the responsibility of being inside the US and not being part of anti-war efforts in some serious and significant ways. If SAMAR readers point to an error in my reading of the situation then I will only be glad — happy to be wrong. I will happily acknowledge that I am wrong and that my question is based on some kind of reading of what is happening in NYC at best. However, the question of desi involvement with the anti-war effort is something that I found myself thinking about after the last editorial on questions of solidarity. Are there ways in which we can think of solidarity more concretely if we were to frame the anti-war movement as a significant priority in our lives?

The primary strategy to build solidarity, I had argued, was to locate ourselves historically and theoretically rather than experientially. The ability to rise above our own experiences and the emotional excess of something so personal is through placing that experience within the realm of history and theory. I would argue that this is the only mode to make a personal experience both empowering and viable within politics. I am delighted that there are so many out there who have responded. There is nothing as wonderful as an honest conversation. For the sake of brevity I will ignore all the agreements outlined in the responses and focus solely on the critiques that my position drew: 1. The so-called left (read Marxist) also peddles a specific and closed version of truth (read Stalinist). 2. To demand that we rise above our personal experience is to fail to understand the deep impact of North American racism on people of color who grew up and came to politics in contexts that are almost entirely white.

As descriptions of what exists out there and what had indeed happened to many of us, I could only agree with both positions. However, I also do think that in both responses, there is a complex kernel that needs some decoding.

Here is a hypothesis: Politics can only be enabled through organization. To be political outside of organization, at best serves to marginally strengthening movements and at worst deals with a personal desire to political correctness. I centralize this as a principle of political action because of what I see as a strong anti-organizational sentiment within the American new left of which we are all a part. Many progressives, and surely a large segment of desi-progressive friends seem to view organizations inherently with suspicion. If there are two modes of political action: the first, where you deploy yourself as a political agent and participate in organizations at your will, determining the extent and kind of participation solely by your specific level of desire to get involved — a kind of voluntarism that leaves control with you; and the second: where you broadly identify with a political organization and enter it with a commitment to serve within it for a long stretch and negotiate the politics that you disagree with from within the body of the organization — again, a voluntarist project but one where you have far lesser control. If these are two models of political action, then much of the new left, those of us who came to politics over the last decade or a little more, prefer the former model, where we keep control and we never fully commit to any specific organization voluntarily (this of course does not include where we work as employees because there is nothing particularly voluntary about a job).

I would argue that this suspicion of organizations and the inability to subject oneself to an organization is deeply rooted in a complex of discourses that even American progressives are not free of: subservience to an organization becomes easily equated with Stalinism, and if organizations seek to be broader than one's own identity, they are incapable of being responsive to one's specific needs and desires. There are other discourses and trajectories that strengthen this anti-organizational sentiment: an unbridled individualism, which we must understand as part of American nationalism that we are all subject to, undermines any idea of organization because it is after all the individual who succeeds or fails, an individual who makes a difference or not. To this fetishized individualism that we may carry unconsciously, add strains of left ideology — Trotskyism and Anarchism, both of which profess a certain politics of purity in political principles and finally the theoretical justification that feminism has given us (however misunderstood) that the personal is political. Then we have all the ingredients to dismiss "organization" under whichever guise that sounds the worst — "Stalinist" if that has currency or "insensitive to specific identities" if that is what will work.

Coalitions are by definition weak organizations. Again and again in the anti-war movement in New York City I have seen these two accusations flying about — that one coalition or the other is Stalinist or that one or other organization is insensitive to the specifics of racial struggles and identities. I do not for even a moment suggest that the anti-war coalitions in NYC have no internal problems, but these are struggles that one carries on from the inside. To stay out is itself a privilege. And the only thing that builds our capacity to struggle inside organizations is our capacity to leave some part of ourselves at the door with our shoes as we step into the spaces of coalition. If we cannot leave some part of ourselves at the door before we step into spaces of negotiation then is not 'self-absorbed' an apt description for us?