<nettime> This is not a call for politics as usual to be appealed to to solve our problems, this is a call to Occupy Government.

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

In a private conversation on that great modern Stoa, Facebook, my
friend Tiziana Terranova, endorsed the Objectives of the Debtors'
Party[1], saying "there's nothing about these objectives I could not
share," but went to ask a rather pointed question:

"It is the notion of starting a political party that leaves me
baffled, coming as you know from an autonomist political background
that has been arguing for constituent power, that is the invention of
new institutions altogether. Why try to reinvent an old formula like a
political party?"



Why a Political Party?

The answer is all around us. mass movements are rising and spreading,
squares world wide are being occupied, demonstrations are attracting
thousands who want their voice heard and their dissent felt. These
occupiers, these demonstrators, have not taken to the street as a
practical means of forming new institutions, they have taken to the
street to make demands.

They address their slogans, their posters and their signs, not to each
other to call for new social forms, but to the "1%," to the State,
to the Police, in other words to authority, to power, to the ruling
elite. Their demands are political damands; "Read My Lips: Tax The
Rich", "End Welfare for the Rich!", "Create Jobs Not War!" among many
others, demanding a right to housing, education, and health without
inescapable debt, demanding a society governed according the interests
of the masses, not the few.

Many of us in the currently exploding movement are also actively
involved in building constituent power, in building new ways of
producing and sharing, in forming and envisioning new institutions
within the shell of the old, but we can do so only within the
bounds of our class condition, and when we are strapped by debt
and precarity, struggling with money and time to meet our basic
responsibilities to family and community, we lack the means to form
and grow our new institutions, and we lack the means to defend them.

These demands are urgent demands and can not be immediately met by
autonomist means alone. So long as we live within a society ruled
by Government, these demands must be met by Government, we require
a political struggle, not in attempt to take power and impose new
social relations through the power of the state, but to contest the
interest of the ruling elite on the battlefield of the political
process. We must undertake a political struggle to to create the space
for alternative institutions to emerge, otherwise they are too easily
snuffed out where they do rise.

We must undertake a political struggle because the masses are calling
out for it, and we must heed that call and respond, not simply reject
it and presume to educate them with theory and instruct then to
leave the streets and the squares, to go back to Kansas and form a
million Kibbutzim because it better suites our vision of the future.
To achieve our future visions, we must address the conditions of the
present.

All we need to do is read the signs, hear the slogans, listen to the
demands of our movements.

The Existence of Demands Proves the Existence of the Demand for
Political Representation.

And who is to provide such representation? Are we to expect the
parties of the plutocrats to provide such representation? The existing
parties have long lost their class character and are essentially
publicity outfits selling voters to lobbies in the marketplace of
political legitimization.

The time has come for new party, a party to stand up to the
representatives of the interests of the ruling elite, the financial
aristocracy, whose power has been unchallenged for decades.

We musrt have a new party that is formed by, and that represents,
the masses that have been dispossessed and are being pushed towards
destitution. A party to face down the profit-seeking interests of
creditors, who having hoarded hoarded the majority of societies wealth
among the few, have the masses into debtors.

The time has come for the Debtors' Party.

This is not a call for politics as usual to be appealed to to solve
our problems, this is a call to Occupy Government.

[1] http://dmytri.info/draft-objectives-for-the-debtors-party





-- 
Dmyri Kleiner
Venture Communist


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