[pp.int.general] Why Activism Isn't Enough | TorrentFreak

[seykron]

I can tell you something about the piracy experience in Argentina.

We are a movement. But we are a political party as well (well... we're
trying to get the legal status, but it is another story).

Why a movement? Because we are very close to the bases, our fights are
not behind any particular interest but in the community's daily life
practices and problems. From this perspective, we're engaged to the
community through specific topics: common goods, privacy and
surveillance, alternative production models, cooperative movements, net
neutrality, education, public transparency, housing shortage, and a long
"etc" that depends on collective interests. We usually call ourselves
"a movement of movements", but also the "political party of movements".

Why a political party? This answer is not that easy, but I will give it
a try. The movement perspective usually is not a political perspective.
It usually lacks the organized understanding of how the bureaucracy
works at State level, it doesn't create political spaces in the way
that their fights are contrasted against the public agenda, they don't
have representation in public debates and they usually don't want to get
involved in classical politics. And more important: movements are a
mistake from the State perspective, they're out of the State structure
so they could be dangerous.

Being both a movement and a political party has several advantages:

1. You're close to real fights, so you have a strong base supporting
you. The engagement from people is stronger than in common political
parties, because people have a real relationship with the party.

2. You can protect movements from the public opinion. It is very very
easy to belittle movements from state structures because they are in
the borders of "illegality". You can protect victories as well to avoid
being robbed from other political parties. It is very frequent that
movements finally negotiate with a party to achieve something, and the
party takes the victory that was from a collective fight.

3. You get funding from the State (at least here).

4. You can be aware of what is being cooked in the State's kitchen. You
have voice in the places where decisions are made. Of course, probably
it means nothing. Most of the parliamentary work is made in committees
and the political party with more power is the one that wins. All
others parties have to negotiate. But it is better than nothing.


And it has a lot of disadvantages as well:

1. You cannot be just a political party. If you focus on "doing
politics" instead of representing people interests, you quickly loose
legitimation.

2. Funding is a pain. No one wants to fund organizations that neither
produce more money nor represent particular interests.

3. You have to work a lot to create an identity and promote common
principles and practices among the party and movement.

4. If you get a seat in the parliament, you cannot operate as a normal
party, and it could be extremely painful.


This isn't something new, political parties at the beginning of 20th
century did work like this. They were usually called "mass parties". But
they faded out when the society turned more and more complex, and now
parties are like "cartels", they just find fundings and convince people
that they have something to give, but finally the facts show the real
face. Right now politics work just like a vote (free) market.

Finally, I would like to mention that mass parties didn't work for
people. When they entered into the State bureaucracy a new elite did
arise and the supporting people were left very far from decisions.

In the PPAr we're trying to do something similar but without elites :).
I read this email list and I cannot believe that there are some people
trying to figure out which is the best software to fix democracy when
the real problem (IMHO) is very far away from keyboard.

Regards,

Matías


On Tue, 3 Jun 2014 23:07:40 +0200
"Cal." <peppecal at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://torrentfreak.com/activism-isnt-enough-140601/
> 
> I thought about this. I saw it as a reply to this:
> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-05/26/pirate-party
> 
> I ended up with two points.
> 
> 1. The one and only reason for pirate party's existence in life is to
> get that disintermediated representation; and as such, there is not
> and should not be ethics involved, in the electoral phase, at all. The
> platform becomes "everything that gets us elected."
> 
> 2. Are (were?) we a single issue movement? What happens to single
> issue movements is that others take their issues and fuel them,
> killing the movement; and that is the single-issue-movement definition
> of success.
> 
> What happened? What are we?
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general

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