The People's Cries

“Values keep movements honest, while a material approach gets results, and there’s a time and place for both”, writes Mehran Khalili, though they go on to declare themselves inclined towards a material-first politics, and to support the Jeremy Corbyn -backed slate in the current Your Party CEC elections, as opposed to the Grassroots Left slate.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has usefully defined racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death”: as anti-racists (thus equally anti-fascists and anti-imperialists) – that is, the only true Left – we organise against the big-asset owning class and its military/industrial/tech complex by all available means, trying to protect populations from exploitation, expropriation, or other harm related to their vulnerabilities to premature death. Is not such a struggle inherently one of values and of materiality?

The values-first or material-first distinction explored by Mehran Khalili comes from the material strength of the neoliberal authoritarian state’s violence and its associated hegemony of values, it comes from the tendency of people, however victimised, to turn their allegiance towards the strong – the death-deliverers – and not towards the fulfilment of potential, or the survival, or the development of people, populations or environments. In other words, it is part of our disablement. We need to try to write, speak, & act with pre-figurative conceptualisations, such as Gilmore’s, to attempt always to articulate the ways in which our values are related to the material welfare of the oppressed, related to building their capacity to survive and flourish.

Those of us who support a Your Party that is dedicated to ‘grassroots organising’ espouse those values because of intending, however difficult it may seem, to involve dominated, abused populations in collective organising, experiencing a group cohesion in resistance that might enable them to flourish, to flourish materially, even if there is a risk that, under currently developing authoritarian regimes, such organising might also result in them being defeated or obliterated. The other strand of Your Party that wants to get it ‘back on track’ wants to short-cut this work and achieve electoral positions within the hierarchy of violence to enable them to distribute material benefits to the oppressed class, ignoring the inevitable prevention of such largesse by the world-owning class in the absence of self-organised resistance by the organised abused populations themselves. Which side of this debate is really material-first? To my mind, it is also the side that Khalili characterises as values-first.

Capitalism and imperialism have always gone together, and both are systems for delivering death, or various configurations of the threat of death. Resistance requires courage and sacrifice that can only be attempted by organising collectively and by accepting all forms of resistance, big or small, hopeless or productive, as being an expression of the collective will, as the Palestinians have done and as the Kurds are doing in Kobane, and the people of Minneapolis are doing right now.