What the fuck is precarity anyway?

Maybe the IWW hoboes and CNT dancers should form an army of dreamers, and maybe join hands and break fences?

right so you think hat it's decent enough to be reposted at great length, but your having difficulty with my much much much shorter more coherent post?

Seriously though if you found my post hardwork fuck knows how you can read Empire.

Or perhaps you cna only read things that appear to have been put through babble fish 5 times.

aye, jack that is about the jist of it.

Oh plus I felt like having a pop at Negri and Hardt cos I spent a good 20 quid on multitude thinking it would further explain what it was, but at best all i could take out of it was a wider understanding of the proletariat ie beyond industrial workers or at worst a social agent so wide and ill defined that the books says fuck all.

Also Negri and Hardt seem to mistake concepts such as post fordism for actual reality.

<Points, laughs>

OK, so I bought Empire, I may be stupid, but at least I'm not fucking stupid

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I must be a pseudo intellectual twat

"anti-socials" he he Is this the new term for lumpenproletariat, yes and I will be happy in that definition. And no I haven't read empire, as I have no academic training like your superior self, multitude is much easiar and I got more out of it.

RAW

p.s. is it a self-esteem thing that you have to continously show your superioroity all the time? I find that people who have studied politics usually know less about the actual reality they live under than people who don't.

what academic training do you think i have?

Don't play the poor everyday man, it doesn't become you.

And yes Multitude is much easier to read and all the better for it, but it's central argument is one that has been understood for many for decades and in a much more sophisticated ways. What confuses me is that Negri isn't stupid and came out of a tradition that understood the proletariat to always be wider than the industrial working class, that began to understand capitalism a social factory. So why does he put up a strawman argument to knock down with the "multitude"? One reason I think is that for all the advancements of italian operismo it never fully broke from leninism, and so it never seriously came to grips with those tendencies such as anarcho syndicalism which anticapated autonomist theory many decades in practice over half a cnetury before.

This is what Negri and Hardt have to say about one of if not the most important social revolutions in modern history. Perhaps they are just ignorant or perhaps they don't want to dig too deep or they expose the profound banality of their own writings.

Revol68 - so why is this becoming an argument about negri and the italian autonomia operaia movement? There is some ideas which negri as well as tronti, bologna present which are very interesting in terms of conceptualising and understanding class struggle dynamics. If you think however that I fully accept Negri's arguments on the forming of a multitude, well alot of it goes over my head, other elements interms of his use of certain analytical tools I think are very useful, I find that theory follows from life and struggle so find myself using what I see, what I experience and what I communicate and hear from living as a basis in either agreeing or disagreeing with certain theoritical arguments.

If however, we are now discussing Negri's politics and the politics of "Empire" or "multitude" then perhaps I will have to re-read it but I don't really see the point in having this argument with youse.

I have completely forgot what this thread was about anyhows

RAW

well i was drawing links between the WOMBLES hard on for "precariat" bollox, which is very influenced by italian autonomia and Negri, and how this "Precariat" theory allows activists to imagine themselves as the vanguard of the multitude. I was also pointing out that "mutlitude" serves this purpose because it is soo wide that it loses all critical content, and hence shit like the PGA, WSF and on a less grand scale substitutionist wank like the WOMBLES engage in are elevated to expressions of actual resistance. No attempt is made to understand how these movements actual express the divisions within the multitude. What we are essentially looking at is the proletariat as "multitude" and party as "social movements", it's postmodern leninism.

i don't read all this thread, i don't understand very well what you says but i'm very disapointed by insults like "anti-socials" : only policemen, militaries and politicians are anti-socials surely not comrades of Social centers.

And i'm very surprized that you reject the conception of "precarity". In France all anarchists , all the Left, are speaking about "precarity" ("la précarité") ; there are differents movments of "précaires" (of "without home", of "without papers", of "wihtout work" ...). It's the actual reality in France , the precarization, the degradation, of workers rights and socials conditions since 20 years (less right for workers, immigrants, and more rights for bosses to exploit).

and i don't think that collectives of "illegal" immigrants in France are influenced by Negri ....

Revol68 - what utter bollox, again going to prove what a one-handed keyboard jockey political theorists you are.

We don't imagine ourselves as any sort of vanguard and we never will.

Anyway its a nice little conspiracy but I like to associate myself with reality rather than your little fantasy. And as yet, you are still writing incoherently, like a ranting post-graduate. I do not know what the fuck your talking about, and I find it hard knowing where to begin. Indeed, I find myself wondering way I should take another 10 minutes outside of my brief life to make you understand things.

"No attempt is made to understand how these movements actual express the divisions within the multitude. "

Over here people have been calling it "casualisation" for years. This is a word almost everybody understands. The number of people who know what "precarity" is is limited to the tiny anarcho scene. I'd imagine one or two thousand people at best. It's just another bit of subcultural activist jargon that means nothing to most people.

ahhhh .... ok John ... now i understand more.

So John, is "casualisation" used to describe people without papers, or insecure housing? Precarity concerns itself with areas in & OUTSIDE work, thats why we make the distinction. We are NOT just talking about casualisation in work hence the use (SOMETIMES) of the word "PRECARITY"

aye but everyone know that when you lot talk about precarious housing you mean finding somewhere for a sound system, squat party or k den. Are your social centres filled with immigrants? Are they even to do with long term homelessness or are they doss houses for a bunch of activists who thnk they are above being wage slaves?

Do you think people who don't use the word precarity don't do actions around immigrant rights? Do you think they don't attempt to set up social housing? They do and they do it alot more seriously than youse gobshites who seem to think it has something to do with Womrades leading a bunch of "canon fodder" into a tescos to do some autoreduziona or whatever fancy "french" term youse lot are giving to decent working class shoplifting

Take a look around your activist scene, if it's so fucking precarious how come it's 98% white largely made up of people who have actively chosen a precarious lifestyle.

Again I think you wish to talk about the precariat in order to give a crap justification for your subcultural nonsense. Nah, we're not a bunch of middle class gobshites playing at being marginalised, we are the precariat, we are the dissolution of the proletariat, we are the multitude, we are the rebels tearing down fences and taking the long arch of histories trajectary right up our fucking arses and straight out our shite smeared mouths.

As I said before i think alot of the "precariaty" stuff is of interest, but not when used in activist discourses and certainly not when it is used to look down on the rest of the proletariat.

Again, your completely missing the point for your misinterpretations and overconfident attitude. You sound like a self-appointed self-righteous defender of proletarian values, well who the fuck is asking or needs you to be.

RAW

oh calm down ducky, sure only a few more years of this revolutionary soul searching and then you'll get to run daddies wine company, then you'll have a new understanding of precarity, I believe that italian wine market is very competitive.

Aside from my distrust of the politics and theory around 'precarity', it is an attempt to grapple with a genuine change in the organization of labor coming out of the 1960's. There are two basically good discussions of this that I have found that are not wound up in the new academic-activist fashion of Negri-Hardt-Virno. Most activism, too busy “doing” to think, usually adopts current academic fashion to do its thinking for it, thereby reproducing in its own midst, without any clue at all, the separation of mental and manual labor that is at the very core of class society, with the proviso that some of the activists become the doyens of correctly interpreting (read: dogmatically spewing) the current academic fashion and become the “leaders” of whatever activist crapfest they find themselves in.

Werner Bonefeld's piece from 1995 is, while not terribly readable, IMO, to the point re: the transformation of labor. http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/material/cs17bone.htm

There is also the Richard Sennett book The Corrosion of Character (and to a lesser degree, Respect in a World of Inequality.)

Wildcat Germany and Aufheben have a lot of interesting stuff too.

I'm not interested in the whole "there is no more value" argument a la Negri, but rather has the form of the capital-labor relation changed? I think it has in some important ways that make certain forms of organization irrelevant in the countries where they developed, while they seem to be reappearing in the so-called 'newly industrializing countries', with the twist however that the NICs are not the leading edge of forms of exploitation, but the place where a lot of it has been exported to, alongside some of the new forms as well (India is an interesting example of this.)

Are we likely to see unions of the old industrial sort forming? What was the connection between Social Democracy and skilled industrial labor? Between the CPs and mass industrial labor? What other organizational forms developed in working class struggles? Just as I think you can't apply Bakunin or Marx's organizational practices to the current period, both of which represented different sections of the working class in practice.

I could argue, roughly, that Social-democracy was the political expression of labor that viewed revolution as simply taking over and running capital through simply conquering the state and workplace, and had its workplace correlate in the skilled trades unions; the CP/Bolshevik-type organization also viewed revolution as taking over, but only by smashing the state and replacing it with a new state, as the political expression of unskilled/industrial mass production labor, with industrial/mass unions as the workplace correlate. Even in Spain, the FNT-CAI worked out in a somewhat similar fashion. This is very rough and schematic because it begs the question of what forms posed the negation of capital rather than the management of capital? the obvious answer seems to me to be councils, but rarely were they able to develop very far and in no case can we simply talk about 'betrayal'. Its just not an explanation of such large scale defeats.

IMO, in the post-WWII period, this developed into wildcats and a lack of organizational political expressions, or of micro-propaganda/theoretical organizations (the SI, the Johnson-Forrest Tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Solidarity, maybe Sojourner Truth Organization, etc.) who were not mass organizing or properly political groups. Certainly, partyism seems to have largely disappeared in the radical expression of the revolts after WWII. Nowhere in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Paris 68, Portugal 74-5, etc. do you see any mass political organizations among the workers, only councils.

In the so-called Third World, the anti-colonials basically adopted the guerilla warfare model, popularized by Mao and Tito, using the name of Leninism and some of Lenin’s ideas, but in many ways a 20th century version product of conducting a bourgeois revolution in a world already dominated by capital, and unlike the Bolsheviks, very much disconnected from the urban working class. It reminds more of the SRs than the Bolsheviks in practice, in terms of who they organized and to some extent how. But limit the anti-colonial revolutions to bourgeois revolutions they certainly did, and maybe that was only possible because the anti-capitalist impulse in those places was simply too weak to stand independently of the overthrow of capital in the imperialist countries.

But with the slow decline of industrial labor in the "developed" capitalist countries, the shifting of industrialization "South", etc. we have seen more disorientation in the workplace, an increasing absence of struggles (where they are somewhat radical, there is a distance from the unions), and in part it seems because capital has made daily life more precarious, more unstable. However, I am not sure this indicates a new phase of capital or an ongoing crisis, that capital has fled around the world into the form of money, especially money as credit/debt, and instead of a new "cognitariat" or "multitude", we see a failure of capital to find a coherent new organization of labor for exploitation.

Maybe what we are witnessing is the end of the production of these dominant forms of exploitation that gave rise to forms of organization that in one fashion or another were ways of integrating the working class. Maybe there is no space for a new "reformism" and this is why reformism seems to take the form of spectacular protest politics, but with no real connection to daily working class life.

I really don't know. All I can do right now is ask the question. What I am sure of is that getting hung up looking backwards to the organizations created by/participated in by Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Pannekoek, Luxemburg, Kautsky, etc for answers to this question is a huge political and theoretical mistake. Not that it is not worth looking at how they asked their questions, it very much is, but we cannot adopt their analysis of concrete questions and events as if they had any bearing.

I think this is why I am so insistent on the importance of really grasping what was valuable and why if someone had no notion of how to critique, of "theory", they are of no interest to me and should be dumped. Nobody's particular organizational model is of any value. IMO, Marx's greatest credit is his refusal of such models and I think you will not find one in his work, but an insistence on being involved in the ones organically growing out of the class struggle, no matter how limited he found them (his comments on the Lasalleans in Germany, as practical organizers, and his assessments of the limits of the IMWA are interesting in this respect.) Post-Marx Marxism has no interest in this and instead made a fetish of organizational forms, of the ‘activity’ of ‘revolutionaries’’ and ‘revolutionary organizations’ and from what I have seen, anarchism fell into the same disputes (collectivism vs. platformism vs. no organization vs. anarcho-syndicalism), without any of them recognizing that they merely made a fetish of something transitory and as often as not, an impediment to the seemingly spontaneous forms of organization thrown up by the workers' uprisings, more insistent on shaping them or leading them than on nurturing them and giving them critical tools.

That is inadequate, I know. Maybe even a wholly wrong approach. Mostly because it fails to answer the question of what new forms of organization are developing when people take action, especially actions that seem to break with the existing structures and organizations. Maybe this is partially because offensive struggles have been so few and far between. The few we have seen have been somewhat ambiguous, such as the struggle in Chiapas, which started out as more of the same, but for some reason the EZLN did not retreat into the same old crap. In Argentina, it seemed to largely take the form of “out with them all”.

What I am saying is that maybe there is no positive expression of revolution anymore, in the sense of mass economic or political organizations, that represent the class, that have mass popular support, or where they do, they represent the side of the class struggle that is the development of capital, rather than its overcoming. If I am correct, then I think I am very much right in distrusting “political” organizations or organizations that claim to be organizing workers, that sees its own existence as one of leadership or of “organizing” anyone other than themselves. But I also think this means that any kind of little, voluntary collective that also seeks to disconnect itself from capital, including in the name of “refusing to be waged labor”, is likely to end up a reactionary or spectacular gob of snot itself, especially in the absence if a broader movement. Rather, the efforts like those of Common Ground in New Orleans or community centers that simply try to create a space without expecting people to miraculously “drop out”, as if that was possible for most people, seems more appropriate. That may require micro-propaganda groups, but maybe with no pretense to doing anything more than talking to people, to simply saying what no one else says, what seems impossible (and no, this does not mean we don’t do anything, but that what we do is about our actual daily life, rather than playing at professional revolutionary or activist or, gack, “community organizers”.) Rather, we are obliged to refuse both the cult of the activist/militant and the cult of the organization of theory (by which I do not mean a group of people who discuss ideas, but a group that has a special theory that is its own hobbyhorse and that is the predicate for membership, a la News & Letters/Marxist-Humanism or the SI), being rather no more than people active in the world we inhabit, reaching out practically and intellectually to other people who we meet. And maybe such things should be allowed to rise and fall, be born and die, with their own rhythm, according to what brought them together, rather than trying to make them permanent. Such things usually end up taking on a life of their own.

Anyway, I really rambled off-topic… just where the problem and people’s responses took me.

chris

have to say i don't buy into this shit about anarcho syndicalism organising being an expression of the mass industrial proletariat, especially as in Spain the CNT organised amongst peasants, precarious seasonal workers, artisans, immigrants, unemployed and what not. I think there is a tendency for every generation to think of itself as a rupture from what went before.

As for rejecting blue prints, well yes im in agreement but i still think that we should have a fair idea of what works and what doesn't. This kind of wait and see approach can lapse into acritical nonsense ala Cleaver on the Zapatistas and national liberation movements.

Thanks redtwister for a very interesting and thought provoking post.

Some comments that come to mind ...

- Corrosion of Charcter is a lovely book, beautifully written and well worth reading, but I don't think Sennett makes any convincing arguments that the changes he is describing are changes occurring universally (in the west). If you look for it in the book you won't find very much data supporting his arguement. (as someone once said to me, all it proves is that Sennett travels first class on international flights).

- I also don't buy the idea that forms of organisation, such as trade unions were only 'in one fashion or another... ways of integrating the working class." This is quite a top=down, one sided, one dimensional way of looking at growth and function of organisation. If this were the only case, why then would Thatcher and her neo-liberal chums spent such enegry destroying trade union power, or would companies in the new growth centers be so adament about exculding tradeunions? Yes all dissent can be incorporated, and certainly it can be seen that this has happened to much of the trade-union movement, but this incorporation isn't the only process at work.

-You also mention the idea of focusing on more local 'community' types of activity, but its is worth highlighting that this sphere of activity isn't any less vunerable to incorporation than the workplace. Certainly in Ireland the social partnership model has been very sucessful in undermining and buying off all types of political activity, whether it be the trade unions, the community activists or even activist groups.

I guess I'm saying that the seach for some ideal type of political sphere is going to be pretty fruitless, so its best to use different criterea to define what areas in which we are going to focus our enegries (criterea such as where are we strong, where can we build alliances over the long term, where are we likely to win a few victories, build success).

I've more thoughts, but that'll do for now

thanks again

Revol and sovietpop,

Indeed, I was not terribly clear in some points and this is more a thought experiment, wondering out loud, if you will, than any kind of worked out position. As I said, I could be completely wrong, but I think I am at least touching something that is all too often overlooked.

sovietpop first: my point regarding unions is based on my argument that unions as such are predicated on making things better for workers within the confines of the labor-capital arrangement. Unions are not per se a threat to capital. This does not mean that unions were or even necessarily are reactionary, but it expresses their limits. Rather, they are a way of conducting and formalizing a certain kind of workplace struggle and for example with the CIO in the US, it was bureaucratic from the get-go (as were most unions in the US), but the struggles that took place within the context of its formation were quite radical in practice. However, the union form could either be a goal in itself or a step on the road. For the unionist and the union official, unions are an end in themselves. That does not mean that unions cannot be valuable and may even in some cases be necessary. Today's unions, however, seem so hopelessly tied to the state and to labor laws that it is very hard to see how they would break out of that mold and a new wave of unionization did not characterize the struggles in the developed countries after WWII, but struggles against the unions as well as against management. I think you will be hard pressed to find a union that did not play a rotten role in every social upheval after WWII, or rather, you may at best find some exceptions, and I suspect that most of those will be outside the major federations (the COBAS in Italy come to mind) or were eventually suppressed by the larger federations or central bodies. So I hope that is a bit more nuanced.

I am NOT proposing 'community' organizing. I am proposing that communists right now are better off being grounded in their own workplaces and communities where they have actual relations with people than in seeking to create distinct organizations/subcultures of 'activists' or 'revolutionaries' that operate as outsiders coming in to other peoples' struggles with themselves being grounded in nothing, which happens all too often. This in no way precludes networking such groups so that they share struggles, circulate them, to use the old operaist notion, ideas, resources, etc. But to form an organization based on some principles or share ideas where few people are grounded in a specific workplace and/or community almost always (I say almost having never seen an example otherwise) reproduces the kind of Leftist inbred subculture that substitutes for relations with people who are not like us, difficult, sometimes unpleasant, rarely in agreement, but who are the people who will change the world. then again, it is my contention that workers do not need professional revolutionaries/professional activists/specialists to organize them. There is a role for us practically in our own communities and in the necessary critical intellectual work that requires a level of intellectual training and access to resources that many people do not have. Such people need not be middle class or bourgeois intellectuals, either, but the clas does have a need for that kind of intellectual work. that should not convey "leadership" or practical privileges.

So, for example, I do what I can in my community and workplace, but that does not prevent me from writing for and to and exchanging ideas with other people, from trying to take up questions much larger than what is happening in my backyard. Hence I am getting a piece on New Orleans published by Wildcat in Germany, and hopefully a few others, even though I am not from New Orleans, while I simultaneously use that article to alert people to local radicals doing good work where they are.

Revol,

The case of Spain is very interesting. Spain itself was prolly the least developed country in Western Europe outside of Portugal. The large peasant population and the relatively small, but failry industrialized working class posed problems more akin to Eastern Europe in many ways. You also had a mass anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist tradition under such conditions. What i am describing as tendencies grounded in actual class struggles and developments, not some kind of 'laws' of development operating outside of or above that struggle. In Spain, it is hard to imagine the anarcho-syndicalists not being involved as such, but i also seems to me that anarchism proper had its strongest base in more agricultural countries (Italy, Spain), and that anarcho-syndicalism and even syndicalism proper had stronger roots in France and the US (the IWW was probably a more syndicalist than anarcho-syndicalist body, and in France by the early 20th century, syndicalism proper was also the strongest tendency, both rejecting the socialist electoralism of the socialist parties in their respctive countries. tThe Bremen Left in Germany, evetually closely associated with Pannekoek and the Dutch communist Left, were very close to syndicalism and rejected the electoralism and skilled craft unionism of the SPD, and formed a core component of the KAPD, whcih had a much larger base among unskilled, industrial workers.) Given pain's peculiarities of a small but fairly developed working class in a country with a large peasant population, anarcho-syndicalism's strength is not surprisig to me anymore than their organizing across all lines.

then again, Spain to me was the most developed, most interesting of all of the revolutions between 1917 and 1939, far surpassing the Russian Revolution in many respects.

chris

ps - terms like 'developed' I use soley in terms of their relative engagement with the most advanced means of production and methods of production used by capital at the time and relative position in the world market, not as a moral or political valuation.

Well I think the IWW's syndicalism will always be forced outside the narrowly "economic" by the very nature of working class struggle. Anarcho syndicalism I think offers much richer lessons, especially to us wishing to deal with the decomposition of the industrial proletariat in the west. Of course if we see anarcho synidcalism and council communism as frozen, fixed blue prints removed from historical context then yes it is a pile of balls.

As for the IWW from what i can see it's little than a propaganda group dominated by "politicos" imagining they are an actual labour movement. Not knocking alot of good people in it, but I think it's up there with the IWA in terms of playing off history more than contemporary effectiveness.

That's a very important point. If anything it has often proven easier to incorporate community activists in many contexts - to give an English example you only have to look at the way in which clever local Councils try to drag uppity residents into the consultation process when they are trying to privatise a Council estate. Without the (sometimes rudimentary) backbone of class and collectivism which the unions have to on this is often very effective.

I'm completely in favour of community based activism and certainly don't see it as opposed to or even entirely seperate from workplace or union related activity, but from an Irish context it is worth noting that much of the recent emphasis on community stuff amongst socialists has been a response to low levels of industrial struggle rather than some kind of grand plan.

On Sennett, of course. It is not a sociological piece in the traditional sense. It is an exploration based on personal contacts, with the attendant limits. But his discussion of the bakery in New York I can take to almost every place i have worked in the U.S., as well as the IT guy and his discussion of suburbia. Whether or not this applies to anywhere else, I cannot guarantee. I was merely suggesting that this book is one way of looking at precariousness of the current period. From what I have discussed with people in Italy, France, England, Germany, Israel, Norway, Japan and other places, it resonates with some of their experiences, though prolly to varying degrees and depending on what industries one is in. That was also why I posted the link to the Bonefeld article, which is specifically grounded in England. These are interesting examples of practical changes, not a defense of the theorization of these changes as 'precarity'.

As for where to focus, I have seen that approach before. But what determines where "we" can win "victories"? Who is this 'we'? What relationship do you or I have to this "we"? Its all good and well to talk about the class as a whole, but people do not relate to the class as a whole. Your position is that we should target upon some strategic consideration of who is the correct 'object' of organizing, and what is the most important 'issue', which struggle is likely to break it all open. I have watched many different groups and kinds of groups engage in such an approach and it is always opportunistic when it is more than solidarity work, and even then it is often opportunistic. After 20 years of watching groups operate within this logic, I am all too certain that it is shit (not that my opinion should stop anybody.) But frankly, you are the one advocating looking for an 'ideal political sphere', you are saying we should actively pursue strategic alliances, as if we were generals sorting a battlefield, whereas I am saying that we should be active where we have roots and relationships and that we may be forced to be patient and refuse voluntarist activism if there is nothing in our actual lives that demans activity of that sort.

Again, that does not preclude intervening in discussions, debates, sharing ideas or even solidarity work with other struggles outside out milieu, but those have different logics from seeking strategic targets. Solidarity work optimally forces us to accept the practical limits of somone else's invitation and willingness to act, as a display of respect and trust, and if we find that we cannot support them within those limits, then we are obliged to not support them and be honest and open as to why.

There is nothing glamorous or quick or certain in what I am proposing and it is not an antidote to bad politics, but it is one way of having a practical way to check and think about one's activity. It can force us to ask "Who is around me? Who would I work with? What concrete activity could I engage in? How would it be received with people I live and work with? Who would work with me on it? On what basis? What discussions do I need to have?" the other model, IMO, tends to assume an organization of always-already ready to go activists who "issue hop", looking for the 'next big thing', the next 'win'.

That may not seem fair, but it is how your post strikes me on that point.

Chris

I think out of all your very long posts that is the pertinent point yet.

Revol,

I did not mean to imply that the IWW was a 'pile of balls'. The IWW was the highest point attained by any radical workers' movement in the US, IMO, weaknesses and all. I am merely arguing that the IWW was possible only under a certain set of concrete conditions in the development of capital, under specific labor processes, etc. The IWW was a product of and a response to those conditions, and a powerful one, but I don't think we can reproduce it and I think to try and do so is a waste of time. Even if one uses the same name, the same methods simply won't work because labor in the US is not structured concretely in the same way as it was in 1910.

What appropriate forms of organization are today, what will develop, how we will relate to them, are not historical questions but living ones and the IWW can help us in some ways (their notion of solidarity, their approach to immigrant and black workers practically, etc. are powerful stuff), but it is not going to give us a model of how to organize.

chris

ps - I may be wrong, and this may be part of the confusion, but I see anarcho-syndicalism as more of a model of organizing than as a a mode of critique, and as such while thinkers like Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rocker, Goldman, etc may influence anarcho-syndicalism, for the most part I do not see it as a means of levelling a critique of capitalist ideology. It is a primarily practical intervention which tends to not articulate itself very systematically theoretically, and as such i see no impediment to working with anarcho-syndicalists even though i am a communist on practical issues unless there is a practical difference (which may or may not be informed by theoretical differences.) I feel more distance from Lenin-bots and social democrats than from most class struggle anarchists in practice.

yeah, prolly true.

And would sovietpop and Irrationally Angry stop saying that I am promoting "community activism". My post NOWHERE said that. In fact, I expressed evident disgust with being a "community organizer". "gack is the choking sound of disgust, not of approval.

chris

I'll shut up now, unless someone misrepresents my argument again. And if you must make such a claim, please back it up by citing or quoting me, as Revol has done.

chris