Anarchist organizations

wtf, I am stunned. I literally don't know what to type. I'm sorry I didn't use the concepts used "Anarchist-Communists: A Question of Class." But I've read through it several times, so don't give me a fucking lecture on what anarchist-communism is or isn't, or why the WSM doesn't want to be a mass group, it just wants to tell ideas to people in the mass group.

I mean, pop out of your dogmatic platformist bubble and realize that "mass" has more definitions than the one that Italian anarchist-communists give it. There is a qualitative difference between any organization with 30 members, and any with 300 or 3000 - namely the ability to know everyone else in the group means that there will be a much different dynamic, particularly if it is located in one or two cities.

Y'know, I have disagreements with the platformist 'current' on certain things but I think the groups and people involved have 'net positive value'. However, there is a certain condescension sometimes, such as your above post towards me or claiming that anarchist-communism is "a particular tradition of theory and practice" and naming the Friends of Durruti or Camillo Berneri into that tradition.

By the way, the CNT was "a combination of political and mass organization". And the FoD and Camillo Berneri both supported that.

Personally I think arguing against a standard definition of mass organisation (by no means one only found in an Italian pamphlet) in favour of one where 3000 becomes a mass organisation makes little sense especially in the context of the USA where 3000 amounts to 10 people in every million. All the more so when I've already argued that we shouldn't consider 1 in a thousand (which is 1000 in a million, two magnitudes greater) as a mass organisation.

Incidentally - and I think I understand why - you are also over estimating the size of a group at which it is possible to know everyone (I presume you are using this in a more meaningful way then knowing someones name). Providing you have a social life outside the group the point at which you know people starts to fade quite rapidly above 20 and I find I get into difficulties with even clearly remembering peoples names at around 30. Above about 10 you can't even talk of an affinity group as the mechanics of having a pint in the pub will mean fragmenting into sub groups - part I suspect of the reason why many anarchist organisations have a real problem sustaining a membership of more than 12 in any city - they depend too much on affinity as the common bond. 10 is I reckon the optomium size for a single branch, perhaps party for this reason.

This all strikes me as a diversion from the main conversation but perhaps an important one as you raised it?

Well Joe I was giving numbers with the WSM in mind. If I'm not mistaken, the WSM has roughly 30 members now. Any organization with 30 members wil have a much different dynamic than one with 300 or 3000 members. We can argue about whether an organization with 3000 members is a 'mass group', and I'd be inclined to say that in the US its still pretty pathetic, though it'd saturate Ireland pretty well; however we'd be shitting ourselves with excitement if any anarchist or fellow traveler groups in the US had anywhere near 3000 members. One important difference that I brought up is that an organization of 300 or 3000 especially is not built by individual recruitment, its built by large numbers of workers coming to agree with that organizations praxis. Another is that an organization of 300 or 3000 will exist in multiple cities, and will even have a presence in many smaller cities where there is no leftist presence.

Anyways when I spoke of mass groups I was not doing it in the paradigm of 'mass group' vs. 'specific anarchist group'. I think the standard understanding of a 'mass group' (especially in the context i used it in) by the man-on-the-street is much less rigid, and takes a lot of factors into account: the actual membership size, the size of the peripheral support, the actual impact that said organization and its periphery have on society and in social struggles. I wasn't just referring to some hypothetical 'mass organization' which has its politics injected from a smaller and sleeker 'political organization'. I think most people woulds say that in several contexts (such as Portugal in the 70s), various CPs and SPs have been 'mass groups' for better or worse, or the republicans at various points in Irish history. The BPP as well as SDS were certainly 'mass groups', by any common definition, in American society.

I'm curious why you think I'm overestimating the size at which all-around 'affinity' becomes impossible? Anyways I don't think it's that important whether 20 or 30 is the upper limit at which its still feasible to personally know most or all other members of your group - my points would still stand for the difference between orgs of 20, 200, and 2000.

LOL, JoeBlack: Anarchists Anonymous Sponsor.

Joe do you have a Twelve step program in mind?

Nate:

Well, i think that the tendency for knowledge and decision-making expertise to get concentrated inside a mass organization, through a role as elected delegate or on a shop committee, is a danger that we need to have a program to explicitly work against. If the mass organization such as a union is to be a means to self-management of their own struggles by workers, there needs to be a way to get them involved, train interested members about all the ins and outs of running a union -- how to negotiate, file a grievance, deal with lawyers, relevant labor law, basic understanding of economics, etc. And there needs to be a way to train people to become organizers, to learn thru practice.

I think of the political or "specific" organization somewhat differently. It's relationship to the mass organizations is more informal, a matter of the influence of its activists. But i do believe that the specific organization needs to have some programmatic guidelines in terms of what it does in the context of a mass organization. For example, i don't think it would be a good idea to have people run for union office as local president or whatever unless this fits in with a program about how the union should change, a program that aims to make the union a self-managing mass organization. For example, a part of the program of the "specific" group within a union might be advocating the setting up of a training program such as that which I described above.

The "specific" organization should try to get beyond being limited to only propagandistic activity because the role of activists embedded in mass organizations trying to apply our ideas to that context helps to develop a social base for the influence of our ideas. The aim is to develop a social base for our ideas in the sense that the ideas have an influence that radiates in mass organizations.

t.

I thought that might be why you were using that particular set of figures all right. Actually we are nearer 50 now and its precisly because in the last decade I've gone from a group of 5 to near 50 that I don't think it is at all useful to assume that everything within this range will function in the same way. I suspect this assumption is why a lot of anarchist groups fail to get beyond a dozen in any city because trying to co-ordinate 40 people divided into three branches in one city is a completely different task to trying to do the same with 5 members.

In fact I'm pretty sure that the problems of co-ordinating 40+ between 3 branches will have a lot more in common with 300 between 30 branches then it does with that group of 5. And that is precisely because affinity starts to break down one you go above 10 people and one group. Problems can't be sorted out in a semi formal chat. Members will not see each other on a regular basis but only at conference and a growing percentage of members will not even recognise other members from other branches on the street. Big cultural gaps will open up which means you can't overcome this through social meet ups because people will (or at least should) not share the same tastes in music, sport or even diet.

On the 'affinity' thing - by 'affinity group' I understand a group of people who know each other well and have a personal in additional to political trust in each other to a high degree. This enables them to operate on the base of affinity - where you know someone else in the group has your back because you share a strong social bond with them. My experience is that this fades once you get past 10 people - actually I've just realised that both sport teams and basic military units generally also have around 10 members so it may be quite a hard wired setting. Also in my experience ad hoc affinity groups for militant actions fall apart once you have more than 8 or so people, the ideal is in the 3-5 range. The idea of an affinity group of 30 I just find weird although I guess if you spent most of your life in a sub culture of that many people (ie a squat) you might develop affinity at that sort of level - indeed some of the larger and better organised squats seem to to organise processes to promote this that others outside find quite alienating. But otherwise if someone was trying to run a group of 30 as an affinity groups I wouldn't expect to see it around in three months time - it simply won't work.

What makes that prospect so exciting is the fact that it seems impossible and it seems like that number of people would have a massive impact. As you get there will you find that both reduce because you realise that having 1 member per 100 000 population is not so different from having 1 member per million. It is different and such growth is significant but unless they all happen to be concentrated in one or two locations only really makes you more visible and slightly more able to influence events.

I think in relation to the US your fooling yourself here - one person in 100 000 is still very much the sphere of 'individual recruitment'. Sure at times you will get small groups joining all at once but you'd be a million miles from mass recruitment. One per 100 000 is the level we are at but if you think Ireland too small for a suitable sample consider Britain where the SWP was claiming 10,000 members a decade back - that is one in 5 000 of the population. Even allowing for a probable exaggeration factor of at least 2 they were a magnitude over the relative figure for the US and somewhat greater than the absolute figure. Not only did this not mean an end to building by individual recruitment but their belief that it did is probably a good chunk of the reason why their membership figure has collapsed as they tried all sorts of things to make this happen.

I reckon one in a 1000 is where you can start to think of that sort of change. Now that doesn't have to be in the USA as a whole (where it would be 300,000), it might be in one city (actually I think Militant probably hit that in Liverpool back in the 80's, any idea NI?) or in one industry or even one neighboorhood although the problem with the local options is that it makes it very much easier for the state to isolate and crush you (as happened in Liverpool).

I'd have though one of the lessons of the BPP was that while they wanted to build a mass group and may even have though they had done so the relative ease with which the state crushed them showed otherwise. The danger of thinking being a lot bigger than you used to be equals becoming a mass organisation. It's off topic but the habit of seeing only positive lessons from the BPP experience has always puzzled me - there is probably at least as much value in what they tried that didn't work.

OT - sorry for the tone in my post. it was pretty wankerish.

Perhaps one can say that Socialist and Communist Parties have at time been 'mass' organisations in terms of numbers, but it maybe that it is easier to accomplish this with a hierarchical organisation.

I think in the case of the WSM, we have developed reasonably good methods to make decisions across the organisation, with all members involved, and are currently discussing ways to ensure that theoretical and tactical unity remain intact throughout our growth. Obviously, the more people an organisation has active, the more that people will come into contact with our politics. So perhaps growth becomes easier rather than more difficult as orgs grow. The crux is how to keep a specific organisation coherent while growing. I think we're doing well at this level, but could definitely improve in several respects.

Dara - apology accepted. I was a bit wankerish myself.

I think the WSM is well organized.

Joe - I agree with most of that. I wasn't saying that the BPP being a mass group was positive, anymore than I was saying that about all the CPs and SPs. I was only saying that most people would consider it one.

well, how has the WSM gone from 5 to 50 members? What enabled the WSM to grow?

t.

It won't go down well around here but I'd say
1. A solid core politics which allows us to avoid being defensive about who we talk to
2. Taking organisational tasks, in particular finance seriously so they didn't distract from political work
3. A sustained intervention in the globalisation movement - probably 80% of the increase came from the libertarian end of that movement.
4. A willingness to work with others on the left and other libertarians
5. A strong orientation to practical work as well as theory including a willingness to play a leading role
6. A willingness to do a lot of core organising work without feeling the need to brand that work as our own

I would generalise it as follows, every few years a wave of radicalisation comes along. Most often for a variety of reasons existing groups fail to orientate to such waves in a useful fashion. Most often they simply demand that those involved in the wave abandon what their doing and follow instead the carefullly polished strategy of the existing group.

Those that do positively orientate will grow, those that don't probably won't. Unfortuantly if no one does that the wave implodes into a myrad of weak/informal organisation most of which lack the experience to last and those who do will often miss the next wave. With the exception of NEFAC this seems to be what happened in North America, as much as Chuck0 might like to deny it.

Looking back I think one useful thing we did was in discussing the 20th anniversary of 1968 asking how come 'Socialism or Barbarism' had given up in '67 and were unable to reform in '68 despite Paris being an expression of their politics more than any others. This was part of a process of internal examination about the way we did things.

All that said although the growth is impressive in percentage terms or as a proportion to population it really it no more than the journey from nowhere to nowhere much. As I keep saying 1 in 100 000 is pretty irrelevant, you need to be 1 in 1,000 when one of those waves comes along to really hope to make something of it.

It's good that you were able to pick up members from the anti-globalization movement. NEFAC came out of that as well, i think. but here in the USA there was only a burst of activism around globalization in approximately 1998-2004, and it seems to have subsided. Running off to protest elite meetings around the world doesn't ultimately build a social base in one's own community, it seems to me. It's not clear that this wasn't just a lucky decision on your part. I mean, what criterion would you use to decide what types of protests to be involved in? Here in the USA anyway, there are all kinds of issues that generate areas of protest. My sense is that it would be best to choose something directly related to working class communities. An example here in the USA would be the immigrant rights movement, since there is such a large immigrant working class population.

t.

Joe i agree with most of that and while i hate to toot my own organization's horn, i think the IWW actually is still in the process of undergoing change as a result of the infusions of those who came to politics in or shortly after the globalization movement but wanted to be involved with something less spectacular and activist, and saw struggles at the workplace as at least a good place to start from. I think one of the reasons that the IWW was able to do this was that, despite other problems, it had a national structure, a reputation, and many of those already in it at least had the desire to see a praxis based on more than just activism.

Also I think many of the folks who are part of the 'new generation' of wobblies came from very similar attitudes as those who founded NEFAC, on matters such as the usefulness of the existing 'anarchist' movement and its seperation from everyday working class people, etc.

Ahh this is a good example of what I'm talking of. Your give a formally correct critique of the movement, one in fact shared not only by us but also by anyone with any brains involved at the time. Internally, at least here, the idea that you needed to be involved in your own community/workplace was a widely accepted cliche. The problem was that you had lots of very young people who didn't really have a community or workplace in a meaningful sense of the word and pretty much no experience of making contacts. In fact even from following infoshop its quite clear that loads of activists have tried various 'community' projects even if just what they tried might be some distance from what seems sensible - how sensible were we at 19?

But if that critique was external it was probably not heard or judged as the old left lecturing the new left on what to do. A familar history. The only real organisational challenge was to help activists find what they wanted but that required more than a lecture as to where the real struggle lay.

Incidentally on the immigrant rights movement being another wave I'm inclined to agree, although so far it has much less of an ideological impact in terms of number it is seems far bigger than the globalisation events. Struggles happen, we don't make them, we interact with them for better or worse.

yeah, i guess some struggles just burst out and you have to figure out how to relate to them, given your larger perspective. I'm not saying that being involved in the anti-globalization movement was wrong. I was pointing out why it was probably going to peter out. But this was hard to predict in advance.

t.

I'll write about the spanish situation. Some friends and I made an estimation of the number of anarchists in Spain. Well, it is really difficult to know a credible number, as the definition of 'anarchist' is too broad and inaccurate. AFAIK there are 5000 members in CNT [1000 in Madrid, 400 in Seville], 60 000 in CGT (not all anarchists), and a few thousands in other groups, scenes, movements...

So, it is possible that in Spain there are 30 000 anarchists and anarchist-like people (punks, anarcho-skins, hippies, ecologists, activists, squatters, counter-culture bohemians, etc. and anarcho-syndicalists, specific anarchists, insurrectionalists, primitivists and so on). Less than 1 in 1000. but near, anyway.

In the area of Barcelona, there might be easily 3000 councious anarchists (those who call themselves anarchists) and up to 10 000 in total (also counting those who do not consider anarchists but they are ). In this area live one third of the anarchists in Spain. Asuming that the Barcelona metropolis has 3 million people, that makes 1 concious anarchist in 1000. And 3.3 left-libertarian ppl in 1000. And I can tell you that that doesn't make any difference. We're still a marginal movement. We don't represent any threat to capitalism, government or institutions. There're around 2000 squatters, 400 cnt-e members, 12000 cgt members, and the highest rate of activists in Spain (except for the basque country)...

And there is a core of perhaps 300 militant people... the real organisers. They do make a difference, because without them there would not exist any kind of movement. All I say is that we need to be 10 times more than now to be count on.

Hi Salvoechea, thanks for these figures, I reckoned Spain was at around the 1 in a 1000 level but didn't mention it for fear of the usual distracting who is really an anarchist argument that so often results.

In case its not clear I don't think that level of membership can in itself make a difference. I think it is getting towards the sort of number where you imagine having a major influence during a big upsurge in struggle, where one could have some hope of a revolution becoming libertarian.

That the figure probably exists in Barcelona does demonstrate that is is a possibility to build that sort of organisation(s) outside of periods of intense struggle - that is the 'objective conditions' are not yet king at that level and as such can not be used as a catch all excuse elsewhere.

i wouldn't be surprised if at a push there were several hundred self-described anarchists/there or thereabouts in brighton (pop 300k, 450k for the whole conurbation), but that would be including all the bohemians, activists, wadical wiberals etc.

certainly the last thing resembling an upsurge of struggle here - the anti-war movement c2002/3 - was influenced in a libertarian (activisty) direction (no police permission for marches which meant 5000 taking over the streets on the day the war started, with roads blocked, minor rioting, the town hall looted - when if the swppies/liberals got their way it would have been a nice a-to-b stroll), which i guess supports joeblack's ratios.

shame the current milieu is more activism than class struggle, but we're working on it.

We have to make a distinction between passive and active membership. The latter are the important people, the militants. Most of anarchists in Barcelona (and in the rest of the world) are passive. They don't care about the movement. They are anarchists as a hobby and don't take things seriously.

One of the newer WSM members PMed me to ask if I had any of the documentations on this, while looking I realised that the last 2/3 of this 1997 article - http://www.struggle.ws/rbr/rbr3_organise.html - cover a lot of this argument.

I just stumbled on this so apologies if I'm bumping up an old thread. I saw the question "Is BTR still around?" so I just wanted to say that "Why yes, we are still around." In response to the question about what is a cadre group, I'd point folks to this article on our newly redesigned website:

http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/31