An AhoraNow Working Paper Series
by the Program Demand Group of the Strategy Center

T oward a Program of Resistance

Introduction

The authors of this document—the Program Demand Group—are individual left organizers who have built a substantial degree of political unity through struggles in shared practice over a long period of time.  We met each other through our work in mass campaigns initiated by the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. Our unity as a group is based on a common commitment to antiracist organizing in the United States set within an internationalist framework.  As organizers, we have chosen to spend the majority of our energies on the exceedingly difficult tasks involved in building multiracial, multi-class, independent social movements that confront corporate and governmental elites in the arenas of civil rights, mass transportation, reforms in labor union organizing, and environmental justice.  As we faced the 2000 Presidential Election, we determined that our ability to contribute to coalescing an effective antiracist tendency on the Left and among progressive organizers in the U.S. rested on clarifying our political line: What does it mean to situate antiracist struggles within the larger strategy of building an international united front against imperialism?  A draft document was circulated nationally at the time and has been the basis of the last year's work and many productive discussions with other antiracist organizers. The struggle for clarity of political line drives our continuing efforts to consolidate our unity and communicate it to others in this version of the document.

State of the State

Situated as we are within the United States, we begin with a critique of the U.S. government. Based on such a critique, we seek to articulate a program capable of countering both pro-imperialist political parties, the Clinton/Gore/Democratic Leadership Council and the Bush/Cheney/Scalia/Thomas right-wing that proceeded to steal an election and successfully execute a political coup. 

Under Bill Clinton's internationalist globalization strategy, the U.S. was confronted with its inability to manage its world affairs. The U.S. more and more took over NATO (North-Atlantic Treaty Organization), the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and the World Bank as instruments for U.S. ruling class hegemony. With Operation Desert Fox, Clinton continued the bombing of Iraq begun by George Bush Sr.'s war in the Persian Gulf, Operation Desert Storm.

With a deceptive feint to "compassionate conservatism" during the Presidential campaign, followed by Democratic Party claims that Bush was weak and would have no power, the Bush administration in Washington has in fact moved with the rapidity of a revolution—or counterrevolution—to break the back of what remained of liberal/center agreements within the U.S. ruling class.  Overnight Bush began to court oil drilling in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, eliminate the inheritance tax, withdraw funds for worldwide programs offering access to abortion, place the U.S. openly in defiance of all international treaties, and "reinvigorate" sanctions against Iraq. Bush went after the unilateral right for the U.S. to rule the world without even nominal checks to its power: "reject Kyoto, reject anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaties, reject regulation of arsenic, reject human rights challenges to the death penalty, reject international courts, reject United Nations (UN) declarations, reject the Geneva Accords."

The Bush administration made clear its disregard for international decision-making processes by walking out of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, that many oppressed nations and peoples embraced as an arena to advance their demands.  People all over the world watched as the United States used defense of Israel in an attempt to hide its own history as a genocidal settler state built on stolen lands, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the profits of enslaved labor within the U.S.

U.S. imperialism was already under the spotlight on the world political stage when on September 11, 2001, the U.S. population suffered the devastating consequences of the "new world order," over which the United States exercises dominion.  How did the illegitimate, unpopular, but enthroned and aggressive Bush presidency respond? In the face of tragedy, the Bush Sr./Cheney/Bush Jr. apparatus exploited the fear felt by the U.S. population in order to legitimate and expand their control over the long-standing U.S. military incursion into the oil-rich Middle East. Bush immediately declared a state of war against an amorphous enemy and moved for congressional approval of expanded powers.  George W., now catapulted onto the stage of history—as his father dreamed he would be—rose to his position as Commander-in-Chief, called all military forces into action, restricted civil liberties, and unleashed a wave of U.S. patriotism that has revealed the true nature of the U.S. empire.  Even as protesters in New York shouted "Our grief is not a cry for war!" the Bush administration began to bomb Afghanistan. 

For years, U.S. domination in the Middle East has produced anti-western/anti-U.S. sentiment.  On September 11, some force, as yet unproven, achieved what was planned on February 26, 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed but not destroyed. The fear the strategic multi-target strike instilled in the U.S. public gave a president who lacked a mandate to govern the charge to "protect the free world."

For the eight years since the 1993 bombing, if not more, U.S. administrations have understood the dangerous effects on the U.S.— strikes on the so-called "homeland"—of their bipartisan plan for imperialist economic expansion, military aggression, political control and cultural hegemony.  If war is necessary to rescue stagnating imperialist economies, the Bush dynasty certainly knows it and has long considered war an option for fueling the military-industrial complex in the face of domestic economic crisis, even without being attacked. When congress inevitably approves an  "economic stimulus package" (which Bush hoped would yield $89 billion in 2002 and $73 billion in 2003), big dollars will be spent to extend corporate tax breaks and tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby enabling implementation of his already-existing economic reorganization plan.

George W. Bush, ushering in the new phase of his right-wing faith-based crusade, will find and destroy "evil" in the name of securing U.S. interests abroad.  His policies will dismantle domestic civil rights and democratic liberties in order to achieve "homeland defense."  As the U.S. closes its borders and goes to war against the entire Middle East and Muslim world behind the slogan "Infinite Justice-Enduring Freedom"—in order to defend the entire "civilized world"—the world crisis of bourgeois democracy became apparent. While we count the Bush response to the September tragedy as an acceleration in a long history of civilian death in the name of "one nation," the "united states," we also recognize that the U.S. response marks a qualitative leap into a new period of increasingly reactionary U.S. foreign and domestic policy.  Bush, Jr. says the enemy is so-called "terrorists"; in actuality it is people of color, Arabs, Muslims, oil-producing states, nations in the "axis of evil," nations that harbor "terrorism" or produce weapons of mass destruction, and anyone who defies or attacks U.S. dominance.  We fear for the people of the world. 

Why write this document?

We reject the Bush administration's program for imperialism and its distasteful opportunism in turning pain and fear into hatred and aggression. We realize that any alternative to the Bush/Cheney regime will involve a politics that is not a liberal extension of the Democratic Leadership Council strategy but rather its opposite. In order to advance such an opposition, we are attempting to go beyond a list of righteous demands and present an approach to a program of resistance that challenges the policies of the two-party capitalist democracy of the United States.

The current situation raises the stakes for all oppressed people who suffer at the hands of this country.  All around the world, the Left is struggling to find a common path forward to oppose the latest U.S.-initiated war.  As many progressive forces seek solidarity in fighting for their demands, our approach as the Program Demand Group is to offer coherence, then focus, to a series of interrelated structural demands against the institutions of U.S. imperialism. Together, these demands constitute a program of resistance.

The demands we present require militant, multiracial, mass-based left social movements and developed national and international coalitions of organizations, movements, and political forces—the very forces that have been dismantled in recent decades or are not yet in existence.  As history has shown us, the forces we believe are required cannot be willed into being, they must and will evolve out of existing forms of struggle.  Yet, the burden on social movements to make history has never been greater. We believe that a key link in the evolution of a unified antiracist, antiimperialist tendency in the U.S. Left—especially at this historic juncture—is the articulation of oppositional proposals, which can be exchanged, explored, debated, and tested in practice.

We believe that the different ways progressive people respond to such proposals, especially to the interconnections between them, establish commitment to one or another strategy, whether we are aware of it or not.  We think that all of us who are situated on the front lines of struggles of resistance will benefit greatly from theorizing our practice, and thus propose writing positions that we can exchange, sharing discussion of our aims and experiments, debating the lessons we think we learn from the different political lines of march we take..

Problems of imperialism

We are aiming demands at the institutions of U.S. imperialist power globally and domestically—U.S.-based transnational corporations, the U.S. government, the pro-imperialist political parties, and international bodies which the U.S. dominates such as the Group of 8 (G8),1 World Bank, and IMF. We consider the current international political economy to be imperialist; ever-new developments transform capitalism as history unfolds but the kind of revolutionary transformation that would end imperialism as we know it has not yet developed.

Why target the U.S. when many in the world and certainly within the U.S., even many progressives, see its domination of world order as just that—a capacity to dominate, with a responsibility to maintain order in an increasingly chaotic world in which U.S. bourgeois democracy looks pretty good compared to the violence and repression occurring in other nations? Our starting point is always that we are here in the "homeland" whose privileges are made possible by the superprofits of our government's economic, political, and military aggression in defense of U.S. interests.

For the purposes of developing demands, we assert the Program Demand Group's fundamental unifying premise that the mechanisms that establish the class, race, and gender relationships we struggle over on a daily basis are integral to the operation of a transnational imperialist world system dominated by the United States. U.S. imperialism depends upon the subjugation of whole nations and peoples manifested in a global program of systematic economic exploitation, national oppression, the subjugation of women, the degradation of nature, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and increasing imposition of human suffering and destruction of human dignity.

We understand imperialism to be an advanced form of capitalism in which all corners of the globe are integrated in an economy driven by finance capital to scavenge the globe and exploit every opportunity for maximization of profit and domination.  While this global system appears all-powerful and its pressures seemingly cannot be resisted, it is in crisis. There is no doubt that capitalism as a system has a vast potential to recuperate and gasp for one, then another breath. But capitalism is not a sustainable economic system; it must constantly expand its markets by one nation defeating another through competition, colonization, military aggression, or war.  At its imperialist stage, its rate of profit is declining. It has no new lands to "discover," and it cannot possibly accommodate all nations in an egalitarian world system. Equality aside, capitalism is no longer a stable, self-reinforcing global system of inequality; it is "moribund," in the process of dying.

The increasing integration of all nations into a single world economic system is characteristic of capitalism's drive to expand.  As capitalism reaches its monopoly stage, global integration is forced through the systematic subjugation of nations and peoples in order to maximize the advantage (profit) of financiers and the countries that harbor them, peoples who produce are subjugated to satisfy the whims of those who exploit.

We reserve the term "imperialism" to refer to this late monopoly stage of capitalism as a global economic system when it is most far-reaching but also in crisis. Under imperialism, transnational financial oligarchies join together to monopolize not just national markets, but global markets as well.  In this integrated economy, imperialists seek superprofits. 

Under monopoly capitalism, the exploitation of the working class at home intensifies and the subordination of women into an invisible economy maximizes their superexploitation. As this system is driven to conquer foreign markets, exploitation takes the form of oppression of whole countries and the superexploitation of colonial and female labor in an internationalization of a shadow economy comprised of cheap labor, slave labor, and "free" labor. Certainly, the working class and poor peasants, principally women, in every country are exploited by domestic or regional capitalists. But the decadent nature of imperialism's concentration and centralization of power in very few transnational finance capitalist enterprises, backed by very few nation-states, gives birth to a new form of class struggle on a world scale. In this internationalization of antagonism between exploiters and producers, class struggle often takes the form of national liberation struggle. Indeed in some countries an identity is reached between these struggles.

In this light, struggles for national liberation from the superexploitive domination of imperialism and for the protection of the right to self-determination are essential to any possible future achievement of a voluntary union of nations. We believe that our opportunity to transform the contradiction between the productive nations and peoples of the world and the exploiting ruling classes of imperialism lies in an international strategic alliance of the multinational working class movements (industrial and agrarian) with the national liberation struggles against the apparatuses of imperialism. This alliance can find strength in the very instability of the imperialist nation-states. This is the basis for our insistence on analyzing imperialism today—particularly U.S. imperialism—and devising an antiimperialist strategic plan.

We use the term "imperialist patriarchy" to refer to the system of relations of domination under capitalism and imperialism which could not exist without the subjugation of women and colonies. In other words, capitalism in all its stages (and the ownership of property before capitalism) has only ever been patriarchal.  Thus, national oppression and women's oppression function together to achieve the extra profits needed by the system.

We target imperialism at a time when global integration is posited by the ruling elite as the policy for development of "undeveloped" nations and, alternately, by progressive scholars as the cause of "underdevelopment" itself. To us, the phenomena of global integration are not policies but rather economic and political necessities in the development of imperialism. 

As a generalization, we don't use the term "globalization" because the anti-globalization movements in their use of the term tend to refer to the policies of neoliberalism.  Consciously or not, this use erases the specific manifestations of imperialism, such as racism, patriarchy, environmental devastation, as well as the specific impacts on oppressed nationalities inside and outside the U.S. The term "anti-globalization" is politically amorphous and vague in a way that lets U.S.-led imperialism off the hook because it does not identify a particular enemy. This, in turn, impacts what demands are made against who: for example, there's a big difference between the trade union demand "keep U.S. jobs here" and, alternately, "reparations." From our point of view, globalization itself is not a bad word under a non-capitalist social, political, economic system. "Workers of the world unite…" is, in fact, a call for socialized globalization.

Furthermore, the term "globalization" is chosen very consciously by some to replace "imperialism," in the belief that imperialism is the term used to describe a prior period, however much empire-building is operative now or however much the economic imperatives characteristic to imperialism continue to drive world history. We imagine that they don't want to be saddled with the obvious but daunting problem that, in order to end oppression and achieve liberation, imperialism must be overthrown. In this light, it is much simpler to see globalization as a set of policies that should be changed. The Program Demand Group emphatically rejects this maneuver, which we believe serves only to strengthen imperialism by the presumption that it can stop its globalizing "policies." For us, the analysis of imperialism is more powerful in explaining the contradictory phenomena we are describing and in understanding that these contradictions describe an economic system driven by crisis through competition in a struggle for its own survival—an unstable, collapsing system whose ferocity is a manifestation of eating itself alive.

The subjugation we describe as inherent in imperialism is supported by the systematic cultivation of racist ideology, reactionary nationalism, xenophobia,  male supremacy and misogyny. We know that successful world domination by the United States today depends not only on its openly repressive practices but, increasingly, on all the manipulative ideological practices involved in building world-wide consent to its empire. Ideological agreement is fundamental to the functioning of U.S. hegemony, that is, domination by means of consent—consent to integration into an international economy pegged to the dollar.  While imperialism is defined by its development as a capitalist mode of production in a stage of decay, there is a "relative autonomy" between economic and political spheres within this complex social totality. Thus, the social constructs of racism, xenophobia, supremacy, and misogyny, while definitely serving to subordinate and superexploit groups of people for economic purposes, also work somewhat independently to suppress political resistance to imperialism. Difference, discrimination and hate take on a life of their own; racism spreads independent of the material basis for it. When such supremacy appears to be based on "natural distinctions", the decay of imperialism is put on display in everyday life.

As oppressed nations and peoples refuse to consent and fight back by trying to limit the scope of this subjugated form of integration, the imperialist imperative for integration intensifies—and conditions for war are present everywhere. We aim to challenge the program of U.S. imperialism, its policies and practices with a strategy of resistance.

Components of our approach to demand development

The individuals in the Program Demand Group work within projects of the Labor/Community Strategy Center.

The Strategy Center was formed from day one as multi-issue, with a multinational, multiracial, multilingual grouping of women and men with roots in the working class—with black autoworkers, Chicano academics, Latino and Korean immigrant activists, white antiracist organizers, feminist labor historians, welfare reform resisters, students and workers, radicals, revolutionary nationalists, and communists within our common internationalist political orientation. The art of achieving our organizational culture is crafted through a constant balancing between respect for our differences and pursuit of our common goals. In order to achieve a culture capable of sustaining this "unstable balance," the Strategy Center has consistently sought to achieve a certain political clarity—not necessarily agreement—to create an environment that supports experimentation, searching, learning.

From its beginning, these very different people have shared a fundamental approach to tactics aimed in a clear direction: fight to win. Through much experimentation we have built a "think tank/act tank" that is consistently integrating theory and practice in the course of everyday struggle: social practice is the arena in which the social totality can be seen, the current conditions analyzed, the burning questions of our time theorized, and strategy and tactics conceived, tested, and imagined again.  The Strategy Center's history rests on a practice of building a mass base of oppressed people; fundamental to this practice is the process of developing demands that link specific mass struggles to the need for broad structural changes.  In this way, we strive to situate tactical campaigns within an overarching strategy.

At the Strategy Center, organizers have chosen—within the strategy to struggle against imperialism from inside the U.S. empire—to build social movements of the multinational working class as our primary activity. A central objective of our work has been to organize mass social movements, new organizations, and coalitions that—in the course of waging resistance struggles against the fundamental ideals of capitalism—build leadership, consciousness and organization among oppressed nationalities, women, immigrants and the multiracial/multinational working class.

We believe in the role of the conscious organizer. That is to say, the organizer at the Strategy Center cultivates her base by contextualizing the experiences of oppressed people in an analysis that recognizes that the vast majority of peoples' sufferings are systemic manifestations of U.S.-led imperialism. Therefore, paramount to our base building is the political education of oppressed people. Through political education we make every effort to move people from an individual outrage toward an antiimperialist politics that explains specific atrocities through the lens of a global analysis of U.S.-led transnational capitalism and institutional racism.

Our organizing model has given us the opportunity to build multiracial/multinational organizations that achieve a voluntary unity which can only be gained through the daily practice of struggle.  The struggle we are talking about entails common practice in a consciously-constructed plan to join together very different people with a commitment to engage contradictions among us that have historically obstructed Left unity in the United States. Latino  immigrant Spanish speakers, black revolutionary nationalists and antiracist whites, for example, deal together with questions of organizational composition on a daily basis and together formulate tactical plans that can combat the specific oppressions of different peoples as well as the attacks they suffer in common. We see our role as developing successful experiences in multinational organizing.

To be clear, we work with and support "national-in-form" organizations in their vital role of speaking directly to the specific needs of Asian/Pacific Islander, black, Latino and indigenous peoples among others and advancing their peoples' struggle for liberation.  Our strength is organizing all peoples who stand in contradiction to U.S. imperialism—building the alliance between movements of the multinational working class and national liberation movements.  

Our approach to developing multinational organizations and labor/community coalitions has generated some of the most powerful social movements in Los Angeles for two decades. In the Reagan/Bush-Clinton/Gore era of lowered expectations, the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open stopped General Motors from closing down the last and largest auto plant in California for a period of ten years; the Labor/Community Watchdog environmental justice campaign exposed Texaco and the oil giants who are poisoning the low-income, predominantly Latino community of Wilmington; and the "Billions for Buses" campaign of the Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros is aggressively obstructing the Los Angeles MTA's racist destruction of the regional bus system.

There are many contradictions, crises, and atrocities that concern us as we build multiracial, multinational, multi-issue organizations of women and men who also speak different languages (in the Bus Riders Union, predominantly Spanish, Korean and English), and it is often difficult to select priorities. Over time we have evolved an approach that guides the process of demand development so that contradictions are analyzed,  dilemmas addressed and priorities chosen with greater clarity.  Our radical approach to reforms is reflected in campaigns, demands, mass movements of oppressed nationalities and the multinational working class, and an ideology of resistance. 

The Program Demand Group, born out of this history of common work, is applying this approach in an effort to devise ideological and structural challenges to the foundations of empire. As we present the strategic demands that follow, we want to explain the framework we are using in demand development.

A . Antiimperialism. We select demands that situate a specific campaign within an international framework of opposition to U.S. imperialism in order to confront structural racism, national oppression, xenophobia, patriarchy and suffering from indignity that is perpetrated throughout the world by the country in which we live and work.

B. New constituencies for a strategic alliance. We select demands that coalesce new constituencies to expand the base of working class people of color who are capable of leading a strategic alliance of the multiracial, multinational working class and the oppressed peoples' movements for liberation.

C. Unity in diversity. We select demands that have the potential to build unity within the multiracial working class in the U.S. while addressing the specificity of needs of different peoples.  We select demands that create opportunities for oppressed nationalities, women, and immigrants to expand consciousness and lead struggles.

D. Learning through new forms of counterhegemonic struggle. We select demands that create new forms of struggle that break out of a culture of accommodation to expand space for antagonistic, adversarial negotiation with corporations and the government. We select demands with counterhegemonic content that can challenge the domination of capitalist ideology. We select demands that create collective learning experiences that expose the complex interrelationships of the U.S. political system we are challenging and create the basis for ideological transformation.

E. Institution building. We select demands that create new forms of organization as platforms for expanding power from which to demand greater rights, power and influence.

F. Redistribution of resources/Redress and reparations. We select demands that, if won, would radically redistribute power and resources to the oppressed.  We select demands that, if won, would redress the wrongs of historic oppression and superexploitation specific to peoples who have suffered from the brutality of U.S. imperialist expansion.

This document is a work-in-progress that we hope will provide a basis for discussion. We proceed with the understanding that the demands are incomplete, their scopes are different, and the distinction of categories, while useful, is fluid and ultimately artificial. There are many important single-issue demands being presented by people around the world in struggle against U.S. imperialism. Where possible, we are trying to incorporate the demands of existing social movements, while struggling to sharpen the politics that has become our basis of unity. In every category there are political differences among progressives, and at times the demands that we initially thought we embraced actually contradicted each other or we simply did not yet agree. By looking at them together we have made some sharp political choices that are reflected not only in our strategic demands but in the demands for the focus campaigns we prioritize. We have selected demands that are transitional; they do not constitute a program for a future in which the people of the world control their economic and political relationships, although our vision of the future is imbedded in our present demands. We hope to pose an alternative set of possible political choices that, taken together, create a vision of a more just and humane world society. We aim to plant seeds of change in a counterhegemonic program that captures our imaginations and can motivate masses of people to envision "the possible."

Thus, while at the present time we present the demands in outline form without extensive explanation, our immediate purpose is to illustrate our approach and cohere a political unity that will be distinct and establish a basis for debate and for the development of more elaborated writings and engagements.

The specific procedure we have undertaken in building our unity in this document involved the following steps, which correspond to the categories that organize the text that follows.

n Conditions. We have attempted to analyze the current conditions defined by the center-right political consensus that governs U.S. imperialism.

n Dilemmas. We have grappled with some of the dilemmas for the Left posed by the contradictions inherent in our work, dilemmas that cause disorientation and ultimately require decisions that become decisive in shaping different political trends.

n Strategic challenges. We have categorized demands into strategic challenges, that is, structural demands that challenge the premises of U.S. imperialism so that, if won, they would advance radical, systemic change.

n Tactical campaigns. We have selected and emphasized the radical demands of campaigns we prioritize. These demands are, at least in theory, winnable under imperialism. Yet, taken together, they create a picture of what we would propose for an alternate form of governance.

Note

1 The Group of 8 includes the U.S., Japan, Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Canada, Russia—the major industrial "democracies"  whose heads of state or government have been meeting annually since 1975 to address the major economic and political issues facing the international community as a whole.