SuperWeed

The aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan got me thinking about leadership, messianism, and anarchist tactics.

On the day of the assassination, I found myself picking up and starting to read a book that’s been sitting on one of my backlog piles for years, Vittorio Lanternari’s 1963 The Religions of the Oppressed: A Study of Modern Messianic Cults. This isn’t as odd a choice as it might seem. Bhutto was a quasi-messianic leader who had been targeted for assassination by religious extremists. And, while Islam certainly has not always been a relgion of the oppressed (1), fundamentalist Islam — which sometimes draws upon the concept of the Mahdi or redeemer — now does tend to serve the function of embodying the hopes and directing the liberatory actions of dispossessed peoples with legitimate grievances.

I can’t say that I recommend the book, which is both dated and Eurocentric, but it does provide a survey of a number of the multitudinous ways that colonized peoples have blended their local beliefs and practices with messianic ideas derived from Christianity or Islam, often for the purpose of driving out their monotheistic overlords. Of course, few liberation projects have turned out as one might have hoped. Post-colonial history is replete with military dictators and other tyrants, not all of whom can be explained away by the ethnic faultlines and resource scarcities left behind by the departed colonial powers. I wonder whether liberation movements fueled by messianic faiths predispose people to defer to charismatic leaders in the same way that fundamentalist Christianity leads some people to feel perfectly comfortable ceding their civil liberties to George W. Bush.

Which brings me to Benazir Bhutto, whose courage and commitment I admired in my previous post but whose persistent — unwillingness? inability? — to make the truest use of her considerable personal power was a disappointment to me and many others.

Some people have more power than others. Sometimes the extra power flows from unjust sources, such as inherited wealth or membership in a privileged race/gender/ethnicity/etc. Sometimes the extra power flows from personal characteristics such as creativity or whatever it is we mean by charismatic energy. Bhutto had both kinds.

With unjust unearned power, the ethical path is relatively clear to see although not always easy to follow. You’ve got to do your best to divest yourself of it and, no, you can’t do that by just pretending you don’t have it. Instead, you’ve got to find ways to either give it away (as with my friend who receives dividend checks from a family corporation and immediately signs them over to non-profit organizations meanwhile earning her own living by working in the non-profit sector) or deploy it in the service of and at the direction of those who are oppressed by that variety of inequality (as with a young man I knew who did anti-rape workshops for other young men under the direction of a feminist organization).

Extra power that comes from personal characteristics is more tricky. If a group of people is defering to you because you truly know more about or are better at whatever it is you are trying to do together, then maybe all you have to do is exercise responsible leadership. But maybe you also have to be thinking: “Why do I know more?” “How did I come to be better at this?” “Is there something I could be doing to develop the capabilities of the others instead of just being the boss of them?” If your leadership is a result of charisma, then you’ve definitely got some extra responsibilities along with that extra power — whether you asked for it or not.

I learned that the hard way. Many years ago, I was a member of a non-hierarchical activist organization that decided everything by consensus. We had a number of successful campaigns and actions but then there came a time when we were going through a very rough patch, expending time and resources on an only moderately successful campaign, losing members, losing focus, and just generally feeling annoyed rather than energized by our work together. If things didn’t change, the group was probably going to fall apart.

I was discussing the problem with another group member over coffee one day when she said to me, “as the leader of this group, you’ve got to do something about this.” “I’m not the leader. We don’t have a leader,” I replied, looking at her askance. She fell out of her chair laughing. “You never noticed that we always just happen to do whatever you think is a good idea?” she asked. Then she got serious and made it clear that, as far as she was concerned, whether I had sought leadership power or not, I had it and therefore had the obligation to use it ethically. As we talked, I realized that meant that I needed to make a conscious effort to redistribute the power in the group more equitably. Luckily, I knew (from earlier coursework and experiential learning in group processes) that I do tend to aggregate power in groups even when I don’t (consciously) mean to do so, so I wasn’t entirely unprepared for the challenge.

Over the years since, I’ve had lots of opportunities to practice the art of giving people back the power they tend to give me, including simple things like talking less in meetings; noticing who isn’t speaking and asking for their opinions; suggesting other people for important tasks; and, outside of meetings, sharing skills such as speech writing with other group members.

Even those things aren’t always enough. Sometimes, in meetings, I’d notice that everybody was talking to me rather than to each other. So, what I’d have to do was invent some excuse to leave the room for a while, thereby forcing people to talk to each other and make decisions without me. All of that came in handy when I became a tenant organizer. In organizing, you have to go in, give people the tools and information they need to organize themselves, and then get out.

This is all small-time stuff, obviously, in relation to the opportunities and challenges facing Benazir Bhutto. Still, I can’t help but wish that somebody she respected had sat her down early in her career and helped her to see how easy and truly gratifying it can be to be a conduit rather than an aggregator of the energy we call power. Then, she could have helped the people who so adored her to see that they don’t need a redeemer because they already have the power they need.

Already have the power? In a military dictatorship? How can that be? We saw a glimpse of it in the wake of Bhutto’s death. No, I’m not talking about the shop-smashing and bus-burning, which endangered innocent people and made the perpetrators targets for police authorized to shoot on sight. Those sorts of insurrections, however emotionally satisfying they may be, are easily put down by armies and tend to end up hurting common people far more than they hurt the ruling elite.

No, I’m talking about the one anarchist tactic that has the power to bring governments and the capitalists who fund them to their knees: The general strike. In the wake of Bhutto’s death, striking Pakistanis shut down Karachi and other major cities. If the people have the will to stick to them, general strikes can bring down governments. They can’t be put down by armies.

Bhutto’s PPP is one third of the Pakistani electorate. Many others share the digust of the PPP with Musharraf’s government. Instead of looking to Bhutto’s teen-aged son or some other politician as the next redeemer, I hope for grieving PPP members and other critics of the Musharraf regime to learn the lesson of Karachi and realize that the power to bring down the regime is in their own hands, which they only have to keep in their pockets, neither working nor buying, for the relatively short time it would take their inaction to grind the gears of the economy to a halt.

Happy new year, everybody.

—
(1) Islam was the driving force behind the oppressive Ottoman Empire that spanned three continents in the era preceding the age of Christian/European imperialism; Islam justified the trans-Saharan slave trade, which preceded, lasted longer than, and enslaved many more people than the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and, of course, Islam is the ideology of the rulers of a number of very wealthy states. This is not to say that Islam is any more inherently oppressive than, say, Christianity but merely to contest the common misconception that Christianity has been associated with imperialism/slavery but Islam has not. They have been, so far as I can tell from my reading of history, equivalently guilty of both motivating and justifying the dispossession and enslavement of people of other faiths, especially pagans.

January 1st, 2008 | Category: Activism, Anarchism, Politics, Religion | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL