Don't Move to Canada--move to Alabama.

A thoughtful essay. . . .

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Don't Blame The People November 09, 2004
By Andrej Grubacic

I have to start this short piece with an apology. My knowledge of the situation in the US is, indeed, very limited. After all, I have just moved here. However, I think that my political work back home, in post Yugoslavia ( that is the term that few of us enthusiasts have chosen to call this political and geographical space in order to fight nationalist and ethnic discourse), allows me to be brazen enough to offer few analogies that might be of some use to US readers. Namely, after reading a good numer of essays on ZNet, permeated with understandable feelings of desperateness and powerlessness, I couldn't help notice an approach which we ourselves, in Yugoslavia, in the time of Milosevic, also tended to surender to.

Activists were too often, and too loudly, "disappointed in people". People voted for Milosevic. It was obvious that the guy was a ruthless thug. So they are to be blamed. After the second electoral triumph of Milosevic a good number of Yugoslav leftists actually moved to Canada - the same move that many of my American friends seem to be suggesting after Tuesday's elections. We were disgusted by the "fundamentalist, church-going, uneducated masses" who live somewhere outside of Belgrade (capitol of what-used-to-be-called-Yugoslavia).

Contrary to "them" we were developing "our" own, "urban" cultural forms, of life and resistance, contemptuous of "those common people in Serbia's countryside". Milosevic was in power all the way to the 2001. There were only a handful of activists who did try to suggest that this, well, elitist approach, is probably not ideal. I was myself almost crucified by the Yugoslav "progressive community" (official speakers for the "civil society") and later, after Milosevic, was kicked out from my University, because I dared to suggest that there is a bizarre congruency between the politics of cynical and manipulative contempt of the masses employed by Milosevic and the politics of genuine contempt of the same masses employed by "civil society" and so-called democratic parties (isn't that an amuzing oxymoron?).

Our suggestion was very simple: it is not "people" who are to be blamed but activists and arm-chair privileged radicals who are not willing, or able, to communicate with the people and live up to their responsibility; all of us, in other words, who are speaking in the name of an "enlightened and radical few" but unable to destroy the barriers between activism, work, and life.

The experience, in trying to do so, altered our activist identities. We came to see part of the struggle against capital as a struggle to dissolve the separation between 'activism' and 'life', to transcend activist/non-activist identities, different from those of old left- preparing people for their historical mission - but also from "civil society" folks imposing the view of "us" versus "them". People - American or Serbian - are not to be condemned but understood. It would be much more salient to try to listen and communicate with people, not to treat them as "others", to understand those "moral values" who maintained Milosevic (or Bush) in power for so long. Not just to condemn homophobia, conservativism, and misogyny.

Incidentally, one of the criticisms which was leveled in Yugoslavia at people who, like myself, endorse participatory economics (www.parecon.org), was that we are somehow vanguardist when arguing that we should offer a coherent and meaningful alternative vision to people, related to class, gender, and race, which would arise as a result of our involvement in real struggles, local and global.

I think that those critics had missed the point and that is one of the more useful post-electoral lessons for US activists. We have to embark on an adventure of understanding the everyday habits and mindset of so called common people. To understand the way a certain mental atmosphere is being formed or transformed. Not to engage ourselves in post structuralist interpretation of Max Weber's “Protestant Ethics” or in a subtle elitism which insists that an enlightened few should secede to Canada, but to develop meaningful communication with people from "red counties" we too easily condemn.

Many of the reactions after the elections reveal what I would call a "coordinator tendency" among activists (http://www.zmag.org/bernardoclass.htm ). We have to focus and address real problems that we face. I don't think that I would be off the wall if I say that one of the greatest mistakes of Kerry's campaign was a lack of focus on serious issues of economy (a pretty amazing mistake if we take in regard that Bush had left 400 000 people without jobs).

But let me come back to my analogy. What happened in Yugoslavia? I guess for quite some time we were guilty for all the approaches above. But political parties did, after a few unsuccessful election attempts, realize that they had to get beyond Belgrade. They did what activists in Yugoslavia were trying to do before: they went in to the Serbian countryside to meet those "uneducated and fundamentalist" Milosevic voters. I dare to suggest that they even might have learnt something from them.

After few years spent in the "desert of Serbia", activists and political parties have managed to find a model of communication which precipitated a shift in general mood, and, in final consequence, led to a mass refusal of Milosevic's agenda. But how does all of this relate to the US today? Aware of the possible criticism that I am an irredeemable populist, I would suggest that instead of moving to Canada we should move to the Mid West, move, that is, in a sense that activists should go where they are most needed.

I am sure that they are many wonderful and exciting initiatives already happening. I mean, I was yesterday at the launch party of Binghamtons indymedia – in an impoverished up state New York town which used to be dominated by Republicans. It was an event full of hope.

I have to confess that I don't have much faith in political parties. As a stubborn anarchist I am protected by my moral values from a liberal belief that meaningful change is possible through political parties or elections. But I do believe in our movement, in building alternative, grassroots institutions and programs, in constructing a politics from below, a politics of asking questions, in a language understandable to everyone, nourishing a dialogue with the common people who some of us wrongly dismissively castigate as living in "Jesusland" (see maps on www.counterpunch.org) .

Am I completely mistaken? It could be. But that kind of going to where people are is what brought about a serious political change in Yugoslavia. I am in the US for far too brief a time as yet to give any advice. In spite of that, perhaps the Yugoslav lesson has some merit for the US context. And that lesson could be summed up very easily: don't blame the people but those on the left who think that "the people" are always to be blamed.