Critical Comments on the NEFAC Workplace Position Paper
Dec 22 2005 23:20
As promised and in time for the holidays. I thank you (or despise you) in advance for your patience and withering comments. I had to put it in the library, i can delete it later. It was just too long and it wouldn't post as an attachment, which means it is a little harder to read than i would have liked, making it a little longer feeling, if not actully longer in text.
http://libcom.org/library/node/1885
cheers,
chris
Feb 20 2006 02:16
#2
redtwister wrote:
As promised and in time for the holidays. I thank you (or despise you) in advance for your patience and withering comments. I had to put it in the library, i can delete it later. It was just too long and it wouldn't post as an attachment, which means it is a little harder to read than i would have liked, making it a little longer feeling, if not actully longer in text.http://libcom.org/library/node/1885
cheers,
chris
That could really do with some use of italics, indents and stuff to make it easier to read.
Feb 20 2006 13:58
#3
Right, but as, I presume, a member of the North West Anarchist Federation, what would you say to the criticisms in question? The core of their aims and principles I agree with, but the same critique applies almost exactly. Take for example, "we want to socialize and democratize the economy, putting it under the control and ownership of all people." And related, the "maintaining of rights", "workers' control, "direct democracy" and so on.
Not that I'm havin' a dig, comrade.
Feb 20 2006 21:42
#4
Volin wrote:
Sure, but d'you take the position then of several extreme Left Communists who reject people fighting for self-management out of hand? In places like Argentina, Zanon famously, which has significantly improved the lives of the workers and people living in the community? Bosses and not capitalists and capitalism have been challenged, but the people are remarkably radicalised. Why isn't self-management a step towards greater gains?
No, I don't take such a position. I am interested in the way the communisation discussion tries to discuss this, where self-management is both a necessity and necessarily has to be overcome at a certain point. This might be what I would call the Left Communist side that emphasizes the councilist origins, without making a fetish of councils.
Another take on the matter is that self-management is a diversion, that it interrupts the breaking of the power of capital and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This position gets expressed in several, mutually opposed ways by various left communists. There is a more traditionally Leninist-Bordigist reading, but there is also a reading that integrates the experience of the German Communist Left and the Anarchists in Spain, alongside some more subtle appreciation of the current period. In this latter view, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a state in the traditional sense, but a semi-state in the sense of the Commune: the organization of the systematic repression and negation of bourgeois society: capital, value, markets, etc. through which a coherent re-organization of society can take place. I am also interested in the way this milieu poses the question because they attempt to seriously address issues in a different manner, one which takes the political problems very seriously.
In either case, we have to start from what people really do, from what they (we) have to work with. To me, there is not such a great distance between such ultra-Leftism (a la Wildcat UK and the ICC, as I suppose primo examples) and the strident militant atheism of a Daniel Dennet or Richard Dawkins. I also find a certain similarity between such people and the religious Right they excoriate, so that I could be accused of accusing that milieu of a similar way of thinking and behaving.
Quote:
Communism's not an idea that must be planted in the working people, till they all accept and...we're there! But a process that develops within their struggles OK, this is easily accepted; what does it mean? You yourself state that you don't have alternatives. We should atleast know that criticising without offering some idea of another isn't good enough; what kind of struggle do you advocate?
Not proposing an ideology or a special theory is not the same thing as not looking to try and see and feel out the direction of struggles, of the development of capital, etc. The ICG put the matter after their own fashion as the idea that you cannot build the party because the party is nothing more than the systematic expression of the tendency towards class unification (what they call the inherent associationism of the class, what others call the tendency to self-organization, etc.), but communists have an obligation to try and lead this party or systematic tendency to self-organization. That may sound odd, but I think that Marx and Bakunin, and later people like the KAPD and the Makhnovists, each in their own way, tried to do just that. Leaving aside the question of methods and success or failure, what does that mean?
On the negative side, it means that groups that play at trying to win the leadership of anti-working class and non-working class organizations only set themselves up to be absorbed, to become reactionaries. Our task in such a situation is largely critical and, where the opportunity presents itself, to be communists within our own world, not seeking to find someone else's struggles to leech onto. Most of the left operates in this leeching manner, where they want to co-opt struggles they have no organic relationship to, to push their program, to win the leadership under a reformist program in order to be the best, most consistent reformists, etc. and thereby build "the party", i.e. their "party" or group.
On the positive side, our forces are small and esp in the US, very isolated. It is hard to play a role of speaking out at one's work without becoming completely isolated. This is what I do, but what can I propose to people? Either they will do something, in which case it will probably develop at first quite "spontaneously" or I will jump ahead and try to get people to do something and become a target or draw the attention of the unions that have tried organizing my workplace for decades and have them try and use me as their "in".
Outside of that, i try to maintain relations with a diverse group of people internationally, to support collective efforts among us, to try and find chances to work with or support their activities, etc.
Where some activity presents itself in a community, certainly one can find ways to be connected, too. I have not had that opportunity so much here as organizing on community lines in the US is overwhelmingly racial and ethnic, but I know people who do that, but very rarely do they maintain any kind of principled relationship once they start haggling with local Democratic Party politicians, NGOs and not-for-profit organizations (the latter two often being what we call "poverty pimps"). One of the better examples i knew of was Flor y Canto anarchist community center in LA and I had hoped at one point to do something similar here in Baltimore, but it requires a) a space, and real estate skyrocketed out of my reach here, and b) people, and I am new to Baltimore with few contacts and the anarchist scene has its own coffee shop/bookstore in the hip middle class areas, not what I would do.
I would say that my main thoughts reflect how I have internlized the SI critique of militancy, where one is a professional in revolution, an organizer of other people who is fully trained in alienating himself/herself from himself/herself in order to spend the maximum amount of time organizing other people and doing the "work" of the organization. So I try to figure out what i can do from my own situation, in my own life, in my own milieu and I keep a very careful distance from the left ghetto.
I have one or two people in the US with whom I have done productive intellectual and political work since 2000 and had i stayed in Chicago that would likely have grown by now, but i uprooted my whole life and so now it is starting over in a much smaller, much less politically and intellectually active city. The upside is that Baltimore is not infested with the leaders of the little sects, while Chicago is one of the three centers of Leftist groupuscules in the US (San Francisco and New York being the other two.)
Is that too autobiographical? Does it answer your question?
chris
Feb 20 2006 21:53
#5
I think your left communist roots are showing abit, as if anarcho syndicalism fetishised self management for the sake of self management. This is orthodox marxist bullshit that takes the worst possible reading of "self management" (ironically a reading more apt for council communism). It's worth remembering that the CNT, a organisation of over 1.5 million adopted libertarian communism as it's goal, this was not a society of self managed capital. Likewise in the area where circumstances allowed the CNT were at at the forefront of abolishing money and implementing the most daring examples of communism history has seen.
It seems left communists have took a very long time to grasp what many anarchists have taken as granted for decades.
Feb 20 2006 23:01
#6
revol68 wrote:
It's worth remembering that the CNT, a organisation of over 1.5 million adopted libertarian communism as it's goal, this was not a society of self managed capital. Likewise in the area where circumstances allowed the CNT were at at the forefront of abolishing money and implementing the most daring examples of communism history has seen.
To point out CNT's mistakes is not to undermine but to recognise where its underlying communist tendency was achieving success. Without doubt, we must greatly acknowledge their, the members', amazing historical precedent but on the whole the 'ultra-left' and indeed anarchist critique is spot on. Surely, you're aware of what this amounts to? Where's the argument that they "fetishise[d] self-management for self-management's sake"? Did they fetishise self-management full stop? If we know what that means I really don't see how we can disagree. What is it? Workers' 'rebellion' within capital.
You bring up collectivisation as an argument against? I'm sorry but that's just not valid. Collectivisation proceeded, where it did, by an almost total neglect of the revolution in toto, classically the negation of the state relation. When we had the greatest number of collectivised villages and towns the time when the working people 'had control' in a wider and more real sense had already passed (and only existed for a short time). The failure for holding onto this control falls to a great extent on the role organisations such as the CNT played. We can see it repeatedly in their writings and speeches and of so many famous anarchists. Buenaventura Durutti etc. The fact that these were heroic figures, and they were, does not detract from the fact that on this (crucial) point they were wrong.
As I understand it abolishing money in collectives in general was rare? I do know the CNT participated in this, but was a widespread practice of theirs? In any case one Trot put it, and I'm sorry but I agree, they [the CNT] burnt money in Aragon and then 'tiptoe[d] in the presence of high finance'. Like in the Russian fable The Inquirer, "The inquirer, who had visited the zoological gardens, is describing what he managed to see ... makes reference to insects as small as a pin, but nowhere mentions the elephant."
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Chris, I like much of your stuff and I'll reply to your post when I have more time. However, in my own case, I would have to distance my from Left Communism.
Feb 20 2006 23:06
#7
Volin wrote:
revol68 wrote:
It's worth remembering that the CNT, a organisation of over 1.5 million adopted libertarian communism as it's goal, this was not a society of self managed capital. Likewise in the area where circumstances allowed the CNT were at at the forefront of abolishing money and implementing the most daring examples of communism history has seen.To point out CNT's mistakes is not to undermine but to recognise where its underlying communist tendency was achieving success. Without doubt, we must greatly acknowledge their, the members', amazing historical precedent but on the whole the 'ultra-left' and indeed anarchist critique is spot on. Surely, you're aware of what this amounts to? Where's the argument that they "fetishise[d] self-management for self-management's sake"? Did they fetishise self-management full stop? If we know what that means I really don't see how we can disagree. What is it? Workers' 'rebellion' within capital.
You bring up collectivisation as an argument against? I'm sorry but that's just not valid. Collectivisation proceeded, where it did, by an almost total neglect of the revolution in toto, classically the negation of the state relation. When we had the greatest number of collectivised villages and towns the time when the working people 'had control' in a wider and more real sense had already passed (and only existed for a short time). The failure for holding onto this control falls to a great extent on the role organisations such as the CNT played. We can see it repeatedly in their writings and speeches and of so many famous anarchists. Buenaventura Durutti etc. The fact that these were heroic figures, and they were, does not detract from the fact that on this (crucial) point they were wrong.
As I understand it abolishing money in collectives in general was rare? I do know the CNT participated in this, but was a widespread practice of theirs? In any case one Trot put it, and I'm sorry but I agree, they [the CNT] burnt money in Aragon and then 'tiptoe[d] in the presence of high finance'. Like in the Russian fable The Inquirer, "The inquirer, who had visited the zoological gardens, is describing what he managed to see ... makes reference to insects as small as a pin, but nowhere mentions the elephant."
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Chris, I like much of your stuff and I'll reply to your post when I have more time. However, in my own case, I would have to distance my from Left Communism.
sorry but am i missing something?
Have i defended the CNT's joining of government or it's liberal response to state power in 1936?
I really don't see what your argument is?
I was merely pointing out that anarcho syndicalism in theory and practice went further in communisation than any other tendency.
p.s. i don't a fucking lecture on ultra leftist critiques from you. 
Feb 20 2006 23:54
#8
Soory I posted this on the wrong thread [EDIT]
Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to read either of the documents, or read all of the thread. I think that it is an important issue, and I want to counter the arguments now. I apologize if I have missed things that people have talked about before, and I will read the texts later, and come back in more detail.
First the attacks on Giles Dauve:
Quote:
Have the dauve-types ever proposed a course of action that wasn't totally vague and mystical? Have they ever actually done anything, ever (apart from writing shiny silver booklets)?
I don’t know him, and I suspect that you don’t either, and I don’t think that either of us knows much about his group’s activity. Actually, I met him once (he says trying to drop names), we spent quite a nice afternoon bottling wine, getting pissed (in my case very), and talking about our impressions of England. The point ‘what do they do?’ seems a bit pathetic to me. Giles Dauve has written some books that I think are important, and have helped some people understand what Communism is, and isn’t. In my opinion that’s important.
Then the attacks on Left Communists in general:
Quote:
Well tell me what they have attempted, apart from writing stuff?
O.K., I am a left communist, and in my time have been involved in work place organizations. Now I work in a small workplace of about 20 workers (but we were on strike last week, and won. Please, let me bask in my moment of glory), but work place organization isn’t that relevant to my personal position.
However, if you believe that only the working class change society for the better, and you believe that the working class is potentially strongest in large scale concerns then work place organization is of prime importance.
I am going to talk about my experience in workplace organizing now. I think it is relevant, but I can understand if others would think it boring.
I was involved in something that started as a ‘rank-and -file group’, and then went on to be something else for a period of about three years in the late 1980’s. The group was started by three ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ (I use the inverted commas to show that there were very different opinions amongst this group of people even at the time of starting the group). Of the original three, I went towards Left Communism, one stayed with anarcho-syndicalism, and one became a Trotskyite. The group attracted more members, mostly anarcho-communists, and ‘councilists’, but also a few ‘non-politicals’ and ended up having huge internal arguments about politics. We produced about thirteen issues of a workplace bulletin, were involved in strikes (including a national one), and were attacked (verbally) by the union officials, which must have meant that we were doing something right.
I learnt a lot from this experience about how to organize workplace groups. I discovered that even in basic propaganda about workplace issues there is a profound difference between what may seem at first very close political positions. For example, The Trotskyites want to talk about controlling the union, the anarcho-syndicalists want to talk about democratizing the union, and the left communists/anarchists don’t want to talk about changing the union, but want to talk about class struggle, and self organization.
Before I start to get the hate mail from anarcho-syndicalists, I want to say that they talk about class struggle and self organization too. However, an important part of their criticisms of the unions are about their structure, and organization whereas the important thing about the ‘lefts’ criticisms are about the role of the unions. This may seem abstract, but you don’t feel that it is after you have spent ten hours arguing it in a smoke filled living room, and it is six o’clock in the morning, and you are just about to start your shift. There is a difference between even our basic propaganda.
In conclusion how would I organize as a communist if I worked in a large workplace, industry.
1) Form a group across the industry of people with similar political positions. It is a propaganda centre, not a mass movement. Try to be sure that you can work together, and agree on core issues. We had a distribution of between five and nine thousand of our magazine whilst having a core group of less than ten.
2) Make, and cultivate all the contacts that you can. Maybe in some ways things have changed, and the era of mass communication makes it all easier, but in those days (says Granddad) it wasn’t so easy. We ran a national organization(?) built around a centre, and it’s supporters. Nowadays, there could be more co-ordination, and discussion. We had a very small group, but a lot of people distributing our stuff. I think the anarcho-syndicalist way would be to encourage more and more people to join in order to work towards building mass workplace organizations. I think it is important to keep control over your own propaganda. In a revolutionary situation huge groups of workers will move towards ‘revolutionary organizations’. What do you do when the majority of your organization turn around and say ‘that sounds reasonable’. The Italian Unions in the early twenties democratically voted against worker’s revolution. It is important to retain our independence as revolutionaries.
3) The important thing for revolutionaries groups is not to lead the class (Bolshevism is dead even if just because workers today feel cynical about people like student leftists-let alone people like Lenin( who never did a fucking (the first time I have sworn on this site) days work in his life)). I don’t think that it is the job of revolutionaries to lead the class, but they should argue consistent points in worker’s organizations during periods of struggle, and coherent positions, and a unified propaganda assists in this.
888 said
Quote:
The ICC is an absurd joke. If you group yourself with them you must be too.
The ICC is an organization with a lot of problems (I am trying to be polite). However, I think it is good that it is there because for all its faults it does defend revolutionary positions, and whatever we may think about it acts as a pole of clarity (compared to people who want to support Hamas, the IRA, the Iraqi resistance, or whatever tomorrow’s faction of imperialism is). Also their website is a valuable resource if you can read between the lines.
I haven’t even read the documents yet.
In solidarity,
Devrim Valerian
Feb 21 2006 00:14
#9
Quote:
The ICC is an organization with a lot of problems (I am trying to be polite). However, I think it is good that it is there because for all its faults it does defend revolutionary positions, and whatever we may think about it acts as a pole of clarity (compared to people who want to support Hamas, the IRA, the Iraqi resistance, or whatever tomorrow’s faction of imperialism is
Devrim, I liked your post and am trying to read the whole document before throwing myself into the discussion. But, you must realise something about the ICC. Let me introduce a metaphor - consider a broken clock - it tells the time correctly twice a day. But otherwise, what use is it?
Feb 21 2006 02:59
#10
Quote:
....to be communists within our own world, not seeking to find someone else's struggles to leech onto.
What does this mean. I'm part of the working class. Its a collective entity. I've never been involved in a struggle around an issue that directly affects me. But I've been involved in struggles that directly affect other parts of my class and there for indirectly affect me (Anti-racist stuff, anti-bin tax stuff, rossport solidarity, int'l solidarity etc.) To me thats what good anarchists/communists do.
Quote:
Most of the left operates in this leeching manner, where they want to co-opt struggles they have no organic relationship to, to push their program, to win the leadership under a reformist program in order to be the best, most consistent reformists, etc. and thereby build "the party", i.e. their "party" or group.
What does this mean? I'll ignore the reformist bit. I don't like reformists either, whatever that means. But you seem to be opposed to pushing a programme. Why? Most of my activity is in porpoaganda stuff, producing and distributing Workers Solidarity, 'activism' and stuff with the Anarchist Society that I helped set up in my college. And to be honest I think that worth while, not in order to build the 'party'. But because, in order for a revolution to happen people need to have revolutionary ideas and have confidence in those ideas. (A) propaganda gives people confidence in their revolutionary ideas and helps create a revoultionary movement.
Quote:
I would say that my main thoughts reflect how I have internlized the SI critique of militancy, where one is a professional in revolution, an organizer of other people who is fully trained in alienating himself/herself from himself/herself in order to spend the maximum amount of time organizing other people and doing the "work" of the organization. So I try to figure out what i can do from my own situation, in my own life, in my own milieu and I keep a very careful distance from the left ghetto.
I broadly agree with the SI critique of militancy however it can be pushed to far. So that you can end up saying, as many people influenced by the SI have said to me, that they won't join a political organisation because it would be alienating, disempowering, swapper-like, and because they don't believe in organising other peoples struggles. But really all the resistance to organisation ensures is that resources get hopelessly divided and every time you want to do something, anything you need to start over again. Being in the WSM saves me time and money. It does not result in me alienating myself from myself in order to spend the maximum amount of time organizing other people and doing the "work" of the organization.
So what I'm trying to say is I'm a platformist activist and proud of it. (And this despite having a Dauve quote as my e-mail signature) 
Feb 21 2006 04:58
#11
knightrose wrote:
Devrim, I liked your post
Yes, impressive and coherent.
Feb 22 2006 13:32
#12
Revol68 wrote:
Have i defended the CNT's joining of government or it's liberal response to state power in 1936? ... i don't a fucking lecture on ultra leftist critiques from you.
I think you clearly fucking do, mate.
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Georgestapleton, good post and I can't really add much more to what you've said. Tbh, I did find redtwister's remarks just a tad vague.
georgestapleton wrote:
what I'm trying to say is I'm a platformist activist and proud of it. (And this despite having a Dauve quote as my e-mail signature)
I still consider myself a platformist anarchist-communist, whilst being in agreement with the substance of the various strands of Libertarian Marxism. I don't see anything inherently contradictory in that. The anarchist-communist groups, despite their size and problems, are the better examples of specific organisation we have going. However, it's just the (natural) reality of the situation that we have a more dynamic theoretical output from people within the 'Marxist' tradition. There isn't, or shouldn't be, a massive split between the two.
Feb 22 2006 16:34
#13
Volin wrote:
I still consider myself a platformist anarchist-communist, whilst being in agreement with the substance of the various strands of Libertarian Marxism. I don't see anything inherently contradictory in that. The anarchist-communist groups, despite their size and problems, are the better examples of specific organisation we have going. However, it's just the (natural) reality of the situation that we have a more dynamic theoretical output from people within the 'Marxist' tradition. There isn't, or shouldn't be, a massive split between the two.
Couldn't agree more. See my very long argument with some comrades on the virtues of Marx on the Value, Price and Profit Reading thread. Us anarchists are the real Marxists that's what I've always said. 
Feb 22 2006 17:29
#14
georgestapleton wrote:
Quote:
....to be communists within our own world, not seeking to find someone else's struggles to leech onto.What does this mean. I'm part of the working class. Its a collective entity. I've never been involved in a struggle around an issue that directly affects me.
Wow. Really? Don't get me wrong, I like your posts and think you seem really sound. This just surprises me. Thinking about it the only struggles I've been involved in the past what 2 years have directly affected me. I couldn't be bothered otherwise (not counting media stuff I do with libcom)
That's bloody good Chris, undoubtedly the position paper's summed up by the very first line,
"As anarchist-communists, we want a radical reorganization of the workplace."
NEFAC's got it's heart in the right place but, like every other anarchist communist group I can think of, they repeat the same old concepts in the abstract (and in certainty) without a great deal of theoretical critique. As if by necessity they speak of a conceptual united working-class as though it actually existed. It's killing me to say that tho. But I'm not also completely sure of myself. The complete dumping of 'democracy' I agree with, yet I don't actually differ to any real extent to when I 'accepted democracy'...the points made against the concept never really applied (or apply) to what many people mean by direct democracy. Self-management on it's own is a reform, and you and many others rightly say it's little more than the workers managing their own piece within capital, for capital. Sure, but d'you take the position then of several extreme Left Communists who reject people fighting for self-management out of hand? In places like Argentina, Zanon famously, which has significantly improved the lives of the workers and people living in the community? Bosses and not capitalists and capitalism have been challenged, but the people are remarkably radicalised. Why isn't self-management a step towards greater gains?
Communism's not an idea that must be planted in the working people, till they all accept and...we're there! But a process that develops within their struggles OK, this is easily accepted; what does it mean? You yourself state that you don't have alternatives. We should atleast know that criticising without offering some idea of another isn't good enough; what kind of struggle do you advocate?
Would certainly be interested to hear other people's views and perhaps a response from NEFAC.