Anarchist organizations

Yeah Chuck drew that up after an argument here on the strength of the USA anarchist movement - as the example of SCAF show its largely wishful thinging but even so the circulation figures for publications are frightningly low. In proportion to population the highest (a once off crimethinc publication) is only equal to the bimonthly figure for Workers Solidarity and almost everything else is less even when you ignore population sizes. And Crimethinc simply seemed to be a small number of people with a vast amount of cash so that once off publication and the other 6 significant circulation papers they produced don't tell you much more than that they had a lot of money. It seems to have been squandered as nothing has emerged out of that huge expenditure.

The publication figures suggest that the USA anarchist movement per head of population is 1/50th that of Ireland and other European countries. The reach of almost all those publications in less than 10 per million population which is below the membership per million rate of many European organisations and way, way below the heavy hitters of the CGT, SAC and CNT.

What matters here is not the 'my movement is bigger than yours' pissing contest but the self delusion in pretending everything is rosy in the US when the figures speak of a weak movement in deep crisis (very few of the organisations or infoshops listed are more than a few years old). As long as that delusion is propagated by those who have their ego invested in 'success' then things can get no better.

The first step to dealing with a crisis is acknowledging it.

I think building very strong organisations at the state and small groupings of states level with a very much loose continental linkage of these organisations as they grow (something more like an international organisation). I'd say everywhere we should be aiming for 1 person in every thousand being a member of an active anarchist organisation by the time the next revolutionary upsurge gets underway. That sounds like a lot (300,000 people in the USA, another 30,000 in Canada and 90,000 in Mexico) but actually 1 per thousand would still amount to almost nothing when you break it down to workplaces and even neighboorhoods.

Smaller than what?

Seeing how I am an American anarchist with 20 years experience in the movement and the coordinator of the largest anarchist website, I think I'm in a good position to write up an overview on U.S. anarchism.

I also have years of experience in the publishing industry and as a librarian and bookseller. Crimethinc is by far one of the most important, effective and smart anarchist agitprop projects out there. It's no coincidence that other projects like prole.info mimic what they are doing. Crimethinc has accomplished quite a bit, which simply can't be ignored. Not only have they published influential books and magazines, but they have also published posters, stickers, and a variety of materials which can be found everywhere. Crimethinc understands correctly that anarchist ideas can only make a difference if they are popularized and taken to the masses. This is in contrast to many anarchists, who prefer anarchism to be a little club where people have the correct line and where outsiders are denigrated as "lifestylists" or other fucktard pejoratives.

Crimethinc is not an organization rolling in cash. They are working class people who are just very organized and very, very resourceful. The organized bit is very key. Being a tight, organized project is something that seems to beyond "organizational" anarchists who primary method of "organizing" is to spend all day posting to Internet forums. If you are running a project like Crimethinc, or AK Press, or any of the other excellent projects, you don't have time to post to Internet forums.

The U.S. movement is facing some challenges, but it isn't in any crisis. The U.S. movement is much bigger than it was 10 years ago. See, the problem is that you are comparing apples and oranges. Worker's Solidarity probably has a bigger ciruclation that U.S. anarchist publications. But Ireland is a small, densely populated country. I suspect that you have many readers who come from a tradition of reading left wing publications. I don't know what your distribution situation is like in Ireland, but here in the U.S. it is extremely difficult to publish and sell an anarchist publication at mainstream bookstores. Anarchy, Fifth Estate, Clamor, Earth First and the others have some newstand distribution, but they still get screwed in the process. Publications like Anarchy and APR have beens crewed numerous times by distributors and book chains. When a distributor goes under and owes you $13,000, it's hard for an anarchist magazine that is published out of pocket to recover.

The U.S. is a vast country, so it is extremely difficult to organize here. I have to drive 17 miles to get to my infoshop in Kansas City. Lawrence is 45 minutes away and Columbia, Mo. is 2 hours away. I just flew to San Francisco for the anarchist book fair. That involved a hour flight to Chicago and a 4 hour flight to San Francisco. Next month I fly to NYC for their book fair. That's another 2 hour flight.

Despite these hurdles, anarchism has penetrated small town U.S.A. The Trots and communists haven't been able to do this. The anarchists have.

I've been following the infoshop movement for years. Infoshops do come and go, but the number of infoshops is larger than 10 years ago and projects are more permanent. The infoshop I helped start in Washington, D.C. is nearing it's fourth anniversary. We've had an infoshop open here in KC for almost two years total. The infoshop in Lawrence has been around for at least 3-4 years. They are expanding. A new infoshop has opened in Columbia, Missouri. The one in Springfield, Mo. had to close, but they are moving to a new location. The Madison Infoshop has been around for years.

We could talk about Bound Together Books in San Francisco or Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley which have been open for years. AK Press has been around for 15 years. The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair for 12 years and the BASTARD coference for 7 years. The NCOR conference in D.C. just happened. They had 800 people, down from around 1500, and they've been going for over 10 years.

I just don't see why U.S. anarchists are down on our situation right now. We may not be making the news, but our movement is widespread and has lots of potential.

Maybe you should look at your own activities. How many posts have you made to this board? I think you've posted more than I've posted to Infoshop Forums.

Chuck

1100 odd over 850 days so that is around 1.3 a day.

Now on the other hand your account has been here for 7 weeks during which you've posted 155 times. That's 3.2 posts a day or almost 250% of my rate.

You should probably do the maths youself before coming back in this sort of manner. Unlike infoshop you can't delete my posts when I catch you out here.

The same sort of maths tell you that crimethinc have access to the sort of cash most of don't have access to. Looks to me like their publishing and distribution costs must be pushing a million dollars. You say there are 20 of them, that is 50,000 each. I'm not making any judgement as to the quality of their propaganda, I am saying you can't measure success in tonnage of publication when as in this case its fueled by access to a huge pile of cash. BTW I'm guessing that as the cash seems to have dried up this was probably an inheritence of some sort.

And yes there will always be a new infoshop opening and an old one closing. And at some points in time more will open than close. But this random noise doesn't cover up the extreme fragility of the movement in terms of both numbers and ideas. A big tent with next to no one in it isn't actually any sort of progress.

i don't really care about the "anarchist" label. The issue is changing the society. The working class in the USA has been under major attack for 30 years. The real wage rate hs fallen as much as 20 percent. Unions are down to less than 8 percent of private sector workforce and still shrinking. This is due to a very aggressive and powerful assault by the capitalist elite and their professional/managerial class allies and think tanks and political operatives. The working class may also be under siege from neoliberal trends in Europe, but the ruling class has gotten its way to a much greater degree in the USA, due to the historic weakness of working class organization and the left in the USA.

The entire left is very weak in the USA, and the weakness of the left in the working class gets reflected in the weakness of unionism, which then gets reflected in the inability of the working class to defend itself. We could survey the situation of the African-American population and find that it is in a severe crisis as well, with extreme levels of imprisonment and other problems. it isn't just a "class" thing. i don't really see very much of a coherent , visible "anarchist movement" that is able to relate in a productive way to ordinary people, altho there are certainly more anarchist invididual activists doing good things here and there than there were 15 years ago.

back in the '60s/'70s period anarchism was close to non-existent in the USA, and things have definitely grown since then, but that's starting from an extremely low starting point. There was no organizational anarchist tradition in the USA worth talking about. And still is no national organization with an orientation to mass organization building and class politics, other than the IWW which defines itself as a union, not a political organization, and this defines its focus.

it would be useful to have a national political organization that can articulate a coherent perspective, regroup activists, provide resources for a really good publication or two, facilitate sharing of experiences and political dialogue, and develop common perpspectives on, and strategy around, the key areas of struggle, such as workplace organizing/unionism, struggles against gender inequality, against racism, linking the workplace and the community, linking environmentalism to class and anti-racist struggles, and so on. but this would presuppose sufficient trust and agreement among a sizeable group of activists in various parts of the USA. in the absence of a visible organization making the case for a general, coheretn left-libertarian perspective, this tends to retard the development of a coherent movement.

I think you are looking at workers as the object of the left and unions, not the subject of history.

The working class will be weak if class consciousness is low and anti-capitalist ideas have little development among working people. This condition of the consciousness of the class will be reflected in weakness of unionism and the left. How exactly the consciousness of the working class changes is a complex question. Weakness of the left and of unionism is symptomatic, in other words, of the condition of the working class.

I can think of plenty of examples of where 'the left' and 'unionism' are strong precisely because the working class is weak. There are still sections of the chinese gov't that are criticizing the new property lay by saying that it detracts from China's role as a 'socialist' state. I believe China has about 25% union membership as well.

Thus 'the left' and 'unions' are strong, but both of these act against the workers in China.

I don't want to say necessarily that all groups which could be called 'left' and all 'unions', in the abstract, are against the working class; I am saying that the working class are the motor force in history, not something to be strengthened by 'the left' and 'unionism' in abstract.

To put it more simply, it's like when Utah Phillips inverted the song from "when the unions inspiration through the workers blood has run..." to "when the workers inspiration though the unions blood has run..."

Strength of unionism isn't the same thing as numbers of people belonging to something called a "union". Authentic unionism is weak in China. And strength of Left coordinatorism is not a sign of strong revolutionary class consciousness. That's because Left coordinatorism represents the interests of a class that dominates and exploits the working class. But even Left coordinatorism is weak in the USA. And we weren't talking about China but the USA.

Whatever. You've been here longer so your average is bound to be lower. My average is higher because I was posting here alot in January/February out of boredom when Infoshop/Flag was down.

Crimethinc has access to the same sources of income as you and me. They are just smart and well-organized about printing, distro and finances. I don't know their exact printing arrangements, but I do know that, for the most part, they aren't paying full price for printing.

Inheritance? Crimethinc continues to publish new materials on a regular basis. They gave me some new stuff last week when I saw them at the book fair. And yes, you can judge success in tonnage distributed. They are reaching far more people than anarchist publications which just want to argue with other anarchists. Crimethinc has created plenty of new anarchists.

I guess I'm just more realistic about the progress that is happening than those of you who get all depressed because you don't see the "right" kind of new anarchist projects developing. I take the fact that there is anarchist activism and organizing happening in the Midwest and southern United States as a sign that we are making progress. Slow progress, but progress nonetheless. It's not like we have to deal with any Trots or authoritarian communists out here.

Maybe the situation seems more bleak to you because you have to deal with a larger leftover left there in Europe. Maybe if Brit and Irish anarchists would stop obsessing over American anarchists, you could get your shit together and give the Trots the ass-whopping they deserve.

Chuck0

Quote syndicalist: So comrades, which way forward for the North American anarcho-syndicalist, class struggle anarchist and anarchist-communist movements?

Quote gatorojinegro:
"it would be useful to have a national political organization that can articulate a coherent perspective, regroup activists, provide resources for a really good publication or two, facilitate sharing of experiences and political dialogue, and develop common perpspectives on, and strategy around, the key areas of struggle, such as workplace organizing/unionism, struggles against gender inequality, against racism, linking the workplace and the community, linking environmentalism to class and anti-racist struggles, and so on. but this would presuppose sufficient trust and agreement among a sizeable group of activists in various parts of the USA. in the absence of a visible organization making the case for a general, coheretn left-libertarian perspective, this tends to retard the development of a coherent movement."

Reply:
I would say that it would be interesting for like minded folks to engage in a conversation between miliatnts from the currently existing anarcho-syndicalist, class struggle anarchist and anarchist-communist organizations. perhaps there could be some more cooperation. surely discussions over issues would be of not only specific, but of a borader interest as well.

Fucking hell, we've got plenty of damage to undo, lads!

I'm getting the feeling that your definition of "progress" is vastly different to mine. Holding bigger demonstrations which attract more of the activist ghetto into your big tent doesn't sound like progress to me. Maybe you're referring to something else, any examples?

Amusingly - and this is true- I was getting near the end of writing a long reply to your post when I got a call on my mobile and had to go cover this instead

http://72.232.163.18/article/81663 for the details

My 1.3 posts a day are not really getting in the way and when they do I drop them.

It's probably not fair to expect you to know much about Ireland Chuck but for your information I'm pretty sure that what was the larger of our two trot parties (The IST one) probably feels they have received an 'ass-whopping' from anarchists here already. The other one (CWI) are actually people you can work and debate with so apart from nicking the occasional member off their youth section we get on ok.

Ten years back the anarchist movement in Ireland hardly existed, it was about as weak in proportion to population as the anarchist movement is in the USA. Now if you take population size into account the equivalent sized movement in the US would have
- a platformist organisation of 3000, an anarcho syndicalist organisation of 600 and an umbrella network of around 15,000 as well as a lot of local and issue groups with comparable memberships.
- would have organised mass direct actions of 18,000 and a banned demonstration of 300,000
- would have 180 infoshop type spaces, more if you included offices
- would have a newspaper every two months with a circulation of 420,000, a twice annual magazine with a print run of 6,000. And some other publications of similar or great size to the magazine.
- could attract 48,000 to an anarchist bookfair (or more realistically that total figure spread out over 25 bookfairs).

Now actually such a movement in the USA would still be very weak, we are not strong in Ireland just less weak and irrelevant then we used to be. In my opinion for the anarchist movement to consider itself to have got somewhere you need to multiply every one of those figures above by 100. However to reflect the actual reality of the movement in the USA you pretty much need to do the opposite and divide most of them by 100 (division by 50 is more accurate I think).

You feel cheerful because of a tiny rate of growth (for infoshops). Leaving aside if the average growth is real (it may or may not be) my point is that the sort of growth rates you are cheerful about would perhaps get you to a real movement in 1000 years if uninterrupted. That sort of growth - even if it is real - is so slow as to be useless. And I'm not entering into the quality question at all here. In comparison currents rates of growth in Ireland could result in a real movement in as little as a decade if everything works out right. Anarchism in other words in quite a short period of time may move from an obscure hobby for activists to something capable of helping overthrow capitalism. Again by real movement I'm talking of something that organises one person in a thousand - that is still very, very weak but probably at the fringes of being able to influence mass struggle in a libertarian direction.

Now I'm not being down on the reality in North America to be mean. For reasons which will become clear in the next few months it is something I'm giving an increasing amount of thought to. And anyway Ireland being a very small Ireland crammed with US owned corporations would be in a lot of trouble in a decade if a libertarian workers revolution here put those corporations under self management without a truly huge libertarian workers movement in the USA willing to at least defend that step.

The problem - and it is one across US anarchism including those organisations I love - is a chronic lack of ambition. I gurantee that if I was to go to any US state and say 'our medium term goal is a movement of one in a thousand' just about everyone would think I was nuts. Your target for Kansas BTW is a modest 2,688. But frankly if you are not think of getting to that point in the next 25 years your anarchism is just a hobby with no future beyond being a complaining corner of capitalism.

Gato, my point was that if there is anything useful which could be termed "leftism" or "unionism" (and I am especially pessimistic that anything useful would ever be called "leftism"), then the strength of these things comes from the working class, the working class is not made strong by these things.

I would have expected another anarchist to agree with this.

Also what trends of "leftism" are not "left coordinatorism"?

Joe Black: I agree absolutely on the ambition point. I think the problem is that most US anarchists do not think that there will be an expansion of radical class consciousness and militancy in which they can play a part.

Speaking of the IWW in particular I am optimistic that we can have five branches (or localities) wth at least 500 members and 20 branches with at least 100 members in the short/medium term period, hopefuly five years but maybe 10. Specifically I read something mentioning that the Paris local of the CNT-F went from 10 to 1000 members in about a decade and think that going from 100 (current membership in the Bay Area) to 1000 is therefore not too ambitious.

However I've seen you make similar arguments in the past, and I do have one critique which is that while we are all active agents in the class struggle, the ability to break out from the size of a large affinity-group-style organization (which is what most groups with under 50 members are) to something where not everyone kows each other, is really depedent on the reactions of the workers around us to events.

Going back to the IWW, if we are going to have an organization worthy of our name it means it will have to be completely member-run and operate, as an organization at least, with a real critique of Capital. There was quite a faction fight in the 1980s between those who wanted the IWW to be only a democratic union, nothing more, and those who wanted the IWW to be true to its name. The latter won, but its entirely possible that if the former had won the IWW might be bigger now (though, it would really just be another business union, albeit a shittier one since it would not even have the membership or money which the large ones have).

I guess my point is that an organization of 30 in Ireland can be built by contingency or coincidence, i.e. militant worker A or student-who-read-Goldman B come across the WSM and join (and its small enough for them to all be friends). However in order for real mass groups to come into being it takes workers struggling and questioning on a mass scale and this can't be created artificially.

There's also the factor of trying to organize personality-based groups across large distances. Maybe it would be more accurate to compare Ireland to a smaller area such as the greater Bay Area? I think Ireland would still come ahead.

Anyways I agree with the thrust of your post but I'd noticed it before and wanted to throw out this critique. I'm also curious what this development is that you hint will happen over the next few months - will WSM export some members to help build an organization in the US?

Oliver: "Gato, my point was that if there is anything useful which could be termed "leftism" or "unionism" (and I am especially pessimistic that anything useful would ever be called "leftism"), then the strength of these things comes from the working class, the working class is not made strong by these things."

They're not made strong by the working class automatically. It depends on the development of working class consciousness. It's development in the process called "class formation" is reflected in increasing strength of both of these things. The process of "class formation" is complex.

Social anarchism is a form of leftism in the language of the general population. That's because any anti-capitalist perspective is leftist by definition.

Oliver: "I would have expected another anarchist to agree with this."

Then you're not paying attention. Probably because I don't use your terminology. You need to focus on the real meaning behind the words.

Oliver: "Also what trends of "leftism" are not "left coordinatorism"?"

the libertarian left is generally not coordinatorist (even tho there are those who lack a clear theory of the coordinator class). social-democracy and leninism are generally left coordinatorist, tho individuals working in those traditions may at times have personal political instincts at odds with that.

t.

I tend to agree with JoeBlack2's comments about the underdevelopment of an effective social anarchist movement in the USA. a problem that we have is that you need to achieve a certain critical mass to be able to develop an organization that can be self-sustaining and thus be a pole of attraction, facilitating its growth. no plausible social anarchist group has yet done this. when we formed WSA in 1984 we grew to close to 50 members, and we had about four or five chapters, but we didn't have enough people, skills and resources to keep our magazine going, and that was our main way of achieving visibility and the group shrunk by half after we stopped producing it. a means of public political expression is not sufficient, because we need an organization that can be actively involved in struggles too, but a regular visible publication is at least a necessary condition.

we need to have a political organization in the sense of an organization that is defined by a political perspective, agreeing with that perspective is a condition of membership, and people are expected to not be a paper member but an activist and organizer (at least to some degree). such an organization enables pooling of resources to do things like produce publications and provide thru not only "propaganda" but also active involvement in struggles, a certain public visibility for our politics. much more can be accomplished when there are groups of people working together on things. The fact that there are others with a similar commjtment helps to sustain commitment in the members. My hunch is that lack of this kind of organization, and the commitment that goes with it, tends to encourage lackadaisical and flaky behavior, which has always been a feature of quite a few American anarchists in my 30+ years of experience with this milieu. a political organization, as i'm defining the term, means it is more than a single-issue or single-sector type of organization but one that can offer an overall political perspective, a vision of a self-managed, classless socialist society, a coherent understanding of the complex society we live in and a realistic and coherent strategy for change, including perspectives on activity in, and helping to build, mass organizations controlled by their participants in the various areas of mass struggle. Such an organization need not be "vanguardist".

when the activists, organizers, publicists with explicit revolutionary commitments in their thinking work to concentrate power over movements in their own hands, this is vanguardist. Avoiding this requires working to constantly develop skills and knowledge in rank and file participants in movements (unions or whatever) so that expertise isn't concentrated into the hands of an activist minority, and work in general to facilitate self-management of the movements.

I wouldn't call the sort of political organization i describe above as "platformist" (too arcane and narrow a term), or "anarchist-communist" (I'm not a "communist" and I don't see any point to using that term, i don't see any reason people have to agree to pinning the :"c" word on themselves to participate in such an organization). but I doubt that "platformists" would disagree with the sort of organization i just described, tho.

t.

I really doubt it. You and I can both see that at least part of the anarchist milieu recent small scale growth has been in areas where the SWP used to draw its recurits from. I doubt if they do. As far as they are concerned they are out of that part of the trade now and are chasing the big time through their quest to build a "new left". It's odd watching an organisation self-destruct and not even notice. When I joined the Socialist Party, the SWP were clearly the biggest thing on the left here and they had a real swagger to them. And then, very quickly, many of them were gone. Nowadays they crawl after us looking for an alliance of some kind which is just bizarre given their methods for decades before.

I think their reorentation rather than your growth accounts for the bulk of their shrinkage though, and they are still, you should remember, a multiple of the size of either of the anarchist organisation.

In general we'd say much the same about the WSM. The SWP may be closer to us in formal politics but they are and have always been an utter nightmare to work with. Not that I have to tell you that, of course.

I agree with your general points about ambition, about activism oriented towards changing the world rather than towards endlessly marginal activism, and about honestly assessing where a movement is. But Oliver is right that this kind of scaling up you are using doesn't work. A disciplined organisation of 6,000 activists in the US would be both vastly more significant than 40 odd platformists in Ireland and also vastly more difficult to build. The old Workers Party would not have been equivalent to a Stalinist party with a membership of 200,000 in the USA! Small scale organisations, whether of half a dozen or a couple of hundred can be built in most places with any kind of population, at most times, with objective circumstances playing a much lesser role than they would in an attempt to build an organisation of many thousands.

T.: your original statement was that:

I responded that a union movement worthy of the name, and a left that has anything to offer to the working class, would be created by the working class defending itself, not the other way around.

I'll raise this by saying that historically, the strength of the left (and from your statement, a strong left leads to strong unionism) is a key factor in the "inability of the working class to defend itself." If the SDP had not had the hegemony it did within the working class in Germany (and specifically hegemony over 'unionism') then perhaps the working class could have defended itself much better against WW1.

You're right, insofar as a real organized labor movement would interact with the entire class dialectically - any real labor movement must be based on the millions of usually minute actions that working-class people do every day when they are resisting capital, and at the same time it could become an inspiration for more and more people to take action at work.

However, I still think you're denying agency to the working class. Moreover you're denying the poisonous role that much of 'the left' has. The stronger the ISO is, for example, the larger barrier they will be to any independent working-class activity.

To paraphrase a classic slogan, the workers don't need the left; the left needs the workers.

Again, Oliver, you're not paying attention to differences in how we use terminology. I obviously use "left" more broadly than you do. The fact that Germany built a working class political party with an official anti-capitalist point of view shows greater strength of working class consciousness in Germany in the late 19th century than in the USA, and this is consistent with that particular type of working class ideology -- late 19th century social-democracy -- having debilitating features, such as the way a parliamentary strategy tends to help bureaucratize a movement. From the fact that the SDP was a product of the German working class, it doesn't follow that it can't develop left coordinatorist tendencies or debilitating strategic commitments. The working class, in the course of its "formation" as a class force, doesn't automatically hit upon an effective strategy or automatically avoid traps. The working class does need the left in the sense that it does not free itself automatically or spontaneously. It needs to develop ideas about strategy, critique of capitalism, ideas about where it wants to go. And this means a "left" (anti-capitalist) perspective. We differ from other left trends on what that strategy and vision should consist in, but it's still left.

In periods when there has been a mass upsurge in working class militancy and growth of unionism in the USA, worker activists of the radical left have always played an important part as activists, people who articulate a way forward, and their radical anticapitalist ideas are important in motivating and inspiring them. A self-managed mass workers movement with anti-capitalist tendencies doesn't just happen "spontaneously."

t.

H'mm I think people have taken what was meant as a fairly crude comparison of the movement in Ireland and the USA to illustrate the weakness of the US movement at something more than that. Obviously one will not be identical to another if you simply multiply by 60 (the population differential) and the technique could hardly be used to judge 'Anarchist Universe 2007'.

The debate about objective circumstances is more interesting. I actually do not accept the idea that objective circumstances will be the major determining factor in whether or not an organisation can reach a density of 1 in a 1000. They will determine how fast that might happen but really 1 in a 1000 is such a low density that it is a target that can be reached by subjective factors (i.e. the creation of an organisation or organistions that 1 in a 1000 consider worth joining). This will be connected with how the organisation interacts with the objective circumstances but even there the subjective actions of the organisation will be the key. IE struggles happen all the time, if the perception is of an organisation that interacts well with them it should grow, if badly it will not and may collapse, that perception is formed not by the fact of the struggle but by the actions and words of the organisation and its members.

Once you have reached that 1 in a 1000 then objective circumstances start to come into play but not I suspect in a dominant factor until you are well above 1 in a 100. By the time you talking of 1 in 10 they are probably the key question but I think the excuse that rightly applies to that sort of ratio is used to hide behind to much today. (Just in case it is not clear these numbers are a crude model to illustrate the argument and nothing more)

Finally 1 in 1000 can in no way be considered a mass organisation, for two reasons
1. In terms of numbers its not that much 0.1% of the population is pretty damn small even if it is a whole lot bigger than where we are now.
2. Mass organisation is a political and not just numerical term, indeed you can have mass organisations that consist or very much less than 0.1% of the population (a union for instance). The point of mass organisation is that it is where workers organise as workers whereas I'm talking of workers organising as anarchists, a political organisation. More on that distinction in the essay 'The problems posed by the concrete class struggle and popular organisation' at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1743

Joe phrasing things in terms of "one in a thousand" is useful to show the kind of organisational strength necessary to have a real impact. It isn't useful in terms of illustrating how easy or otherwise it is to build such an organisation. It disguises the very real difference between building an organisation a few dozen in an area with a relatively low population and an organisation of a few thousand in an area with a high population - the latter of which is ordinarily a much more difficult task. Organisations of a few dozen anywhere are not "equivalent" to much larger organisations. Larger organisations, even ones which are well below "one in a thousand" in terms of the population mean a very different set of problems.

This is amply illustrated by the tiny number of occasions on which organisations to the left of Stalinism (Trotskyist, Left Communist, Anarchist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Council Communist, etc) have managed to build organisations of more than a few thousand anywhere since the war. In many cases a lack of ambition played a role. In other cases it did not. We are dealing with a problem bigger than that.

'IrrationallyAngry' I broadly agree with all of your qualifiers above, as I said I'm mostly making a crude argument for illustrative purposes not proposing a 'Anarchist Universe 2007' competition.

Indeed I think the interesting problem is not even at the tens of thousands level - their also seems to be a very much lower block which makes it difficult for an organisation to get much beyond a dozen in any particular city. The actual observed division of the anarchist movement if you lumped together 100 cities
- lots of groups of a dozen or less
- very few organisations with groups in more than one location, these groups of a dozen or less
- tiny amount or organisations with groups in more than one location, these groups of a more than a dozen
- a miniscule amount of organisations that break into the 100's or 1000's in cities, these all being unions

The different emphasis on leadership of leninist organisations means that while the first category is the most numerous for anarchists the second one is probably the most numerous for leninists so you even get 'internationals' like the Workers Power one that actually consist of no more than the 'less than a dozen' type groups in half a dozen cities around the planet.

This I think is too low a threshold, at least for Trotskyist groups on the non-mental end of the spectrum. It's probably accurate for the Spartalikes and, for different reasons, for the anarchists. Trotskyist groups do often run into the same problem but it's more that it becomes difficult for the organisation to get much beyond 100 or 150 members in a city. This gap can mostly be explained by "mainstream" Trotskyists taking recruitment seriously in a way that very few anarchists do.

What are the things that could be done if one took recruitment seriously?

The CTC in Atlanta at one point had 30 members, primarily because the small group of founders took recruitment seriously.

Of course there are issues that arise when you have fast growth which we had no experience in dealing with, such as, very broad level of political heterogeneity, with some new members knowing very little beyond that they were anarchists. This put a lot of strain on the more well-read members who wanted to have an egalitarian organization, not one in which they were de-facto leaders.

Oliver's comment brings up another important point: Ability to do training and orientation of members. We have this problem with WSA. We're a group that has a history going back to the late '70s, and in the course of numerous discussions and projects developed a certain set of positions and ways of approaching things. But someone who is new, who is younger, who didn't go thru that experience, won't automatically understand how you do things, or why you hold a certain position, or how to defend the politics of the organization in debates with others, and their lower level of knowledge about various things leads to the problem of the longer term members having more responsibility de facto. The problem is development and orientation of new members. There is an analogous situation in mass organizations where the organizers need to train and orient new members so that they can be more efective participants in making decisions. When a political group is small, it can be especially hard to do orientation of new members. People may feel they don't have the time. I'm thinking that this problem can be addressed by things like forums, classes, and study groups, as well as pairing new members with older members in actual projects or areas of organizing. But a larger organization is likely to be better able to do these things, i think.

t.

OT:

The WSM is not and does not intend to be a mass group. It is a political, or specific organisation, and as such operates within mass organisations and tries to develop the political consciouness of the members of the mass organisation, and of course, to refine its own politics through its experiences of struggle within mass organisations. Anarchist-Communism isn't just Anarchists who are Communists, it's a particular tradition of theory and practice. It's deadly, too.

The IWW, although I am no expert, seems to be both a combination of political and mass organisation.

dara: "Anarchist-Communism isn't just Anarchists who are Communists, it's a particular tradition of theory and practice"

I would only partically agree with this. I would say that it has become current for there to be a certain identification, and particularly with folks in the platformist and especific current. On the other hand, there are some of us who consider themselves non-platformist or espfeco anarchist-communists who are more sympathetic to anarcho-syndicalist traditions. Or the communist anarchist traditions of Maximoff (who was esentially an anarcho-syndicalist). I would this this was the dominent perspective of the now defunct ACF of North America.

While I respect many of those sharing your particular views, I think that anarchist-comunism has embraced a number of different currents over the decades (including folks that both our tendencies might have strong disagreements with).

Anyway, its been interesting to watch the WSM development all these years. I remember our first contact with you all before you were even the WSM! Send me good wishes to Alan (Dublin) and Kevin (Cork).

Salud y anarquia,
mitch