revolutionary organisation

Yeah but they're only not cos they lost the elections, and so their jobs. They should've gone on strike against the electorate.

Catch, all of those are fair criticisms. There are members who probably have as harsh or harsher of things to say about all this as you do. I know this has been said on here before but I can't find it. The IWW is three or four things to its members, in general. A union acting in workplaces, an activist group holding and attending demos, a history/cultural club for leftists putting on public education events, and a social club for leftists that hangs out together. The only part of that that's worth much is the first. The other things seem to be going away across the union, in general. Not in a totally even way and there's still a lot of work to do. And among the first there are still disagreements and so on which are important (and, as a member who tires to pay a lot of attention to them, often very frustrating and tiring) and again there's a lot of work to do.

What all this says, though, is that the IWW is very diverse internally such that the weakest and silliest moments of the organization are only moderately a reflection on a lot of other better parts of the organization. There are different internal tendencies or trajectories in the direction the organization is going, at local levels and larger levels including organization-wide. I'm a member because the better parts of those directions/aspects are very exciting and I think they're increasing while other directions are decreasing (again, unevenly, and there's still much work to do).

I'm still with Catch on more or less every point so far, but this discussion does seem to have been useful in clarifying a number of points about the very different perceptions and reasons why different people posting here (and others) are currently involved in either the Sol Fed/IWA or the IWW, and pretty contradictory they are too!

Certainly the reason why some have joined the IWW (primarily as a means of agitating within the workplace as part of an organised network) I, and probably Catch, could agree with, but frankly it doesn't sit happilly with the formal and historically based presentation of that organisation.

Catch wouldn't lie to join up even on the above basis, but it did cross my mind to dip my toe in the IWW water along with a couple of AFers who subscribed to the above approach. As it happended my first experience of a local meeing put me right off due to the individual who appeared to be running the show, which wasn't helped by subsequent discussioins with the AF members involved. I can appreciate why some people would persist in areas with a better record (and it being the only show in town perhaps) but as Catch and some others have pointed out this set up is at best muddled and at worst counterproductive.

I'm afraid Jacques contributions continue on the usual dogmatic, ideological bent and do no favours to the Sol Fed in this particular debate, except in so far as (s)he has drawn our attention to the Sol Feds support for Assembliest Forms of miltant struggle which does at least seem to be a common point of agreement amongst most posters here.

I am also in favour of specific pro revolutionary organisations and attempts to unify internationally, but along with Catch, I believe organisations like the ICC are, in the current period, prematurely centralised on an overly ideological basis which goes way beyond any basic set of political principles, something I have dealt with elswhere on other threads. Having said that I think the ICC have a more realistic approach to the role of organised pro revolutionary minorities than the platformist Dundee_United (which doesn't necessarily preclude such pro revolutionaries playing an organising role in some workplace circumstances and times but not in the Union capacity ascribed them by D_U).

So the Party doesn't actually exist at all, quite an amazing crock of pseudo mystical nonsense you just posted.

As if communism is some inevitable task of the proletariat, as if it is some spirit unrelated to the actual contradictary concrete individuals, groups, and interests of the class. Of course such a party as you describe can only descend from the heavens by an act of judgement, that is with real subjective intervention, you proclaim this is the correct line, this is reactionary, this represents the abolition of capitalism, this is communism and this isn't and so on, essentially it means your Party like God has to take on a earthly form, the CNT, POUM or Friends of Durruti, Workers Assembly's, Factory Committees or Soviets and these I'm afraid contain individuals with desires and aims not automatically tuned to the historical mission of 'the class' and there will be disagreements, factions and splits. Once again your party will have to let itself known, it will have to take on a name, afterall by such a stage we're well into the New Testament, the messiah can't be deferred forever.

Ahh Chris it's been a minute, good to know you're doing well.

What I said was "being in nearly any organization at all is better than none." Note the "nearly." Obviously being in an organization that moves us backward is worse than not being in one at all. But two things. One, if I meet an individual who is a member of a group I don't like (like FRSO), that individual isn't necessarily onboard with the whole program - a lot of groups have clueless type folk who are just waking up to this stuff and joined whatever they happened to find. That's why I was close to PLP for a bit when I was 18. Those people's membership doesn't indicate full on commitment to their group (especially the lower in the ranks they are). It does indicate wanting to do something rather than be a hobbyist, and I respect that a great deal. You argue - and you know I agree - that there are organizations that do damage. That is, there's a way to be in an organization that has no good class content. I think there's an "outside of an organization" mirror image to this - that of being a hobbyist. People be outside of organizations because they're main interest in these kinds of ideas and history is as a consumer or fan, like a history or philosophy enthusiast. I expect you agree. People who are in groups are at least not hobbyists, and I like that. (Though some groups are just clubs for hobbyists, which is a problem too. But better a collective hobby than an individual one.)

Second, while I do think formal organization is wicked important, I didn't actually say "formal organization." The life of formal organization is always informal organization, which is relatively ongoing collective self activity. You listed being"active at your work or wherever you feel possible" - presumably being active with other people, yeah?, "writing for whatever political zines will publish you" and "studying the ideas and history of our class with a few other people". All of those are organizations of a sort. I prefer that those get or be as big as possible. I think once they get above a certain size some level of formality will become helpful, but the life of formal organization is always informal organization(s).

You asked what I meant by “internally heterogeneous". I mean there's disagreement and we're not all on the same page about every little thing. (Like the reading group we were in, where you wanted to talk about Hegel and Stan wanted to talk about Russia and Jen wanted to talk about patriarchy and I was mostly confused.) And in some case there's disagreements about some big things. Those differences can be a problem, but they don't make a group automatically useless. People in a group may not be onboard 100% with everything, or they may change their minds. Organization is partly a process of education. We learn from each other and try to hash out disagreements. This isn't complicated. And yes I'm for "an organization that tolerates indiscriminately communist, liberal-left and even reactionary political positions" provided the organization is doing decent work. For one thing, the organization can start to move people from worse to better views. I've seen this happen repeatedly in the IWW and I'm sure other groups do this too.

I don't understand your distinction between ideas and political positions. Can you clarify that? I agree that "everyone has some shit somewhere they need to work on", I think that will happen best in a collective setting.

Also please notice I didn't say we need one organization or just one. I think our class can use many many organizations of many types - mass organizations working on various issues built out of the self-interest of participants and smaller groups built out of pre-exsting ideological agreement - and of various levels of formality.

On this:

Chris, do you REALLY believe that any attempt to make exploitation more tolerable is anti-working class or reactionary or counter-revolutionary or whatever the term is? If so, then this commits you to a view that most of the working class is reactionary (or whatever) too. It also commits you to a view that we shouldn't do anything to make exploitation more tolerable, which strikes me as absurd on the face of it. Of course our goal needs to be more than just more tolerable exploitation. You may think that (relatively) short term struggles for more tolerable exploitation can't ever contribute anything to the struggle to abolish capitalism. I disagree.

Also, the point of this bit of advice that you pulled out is that if you start a ruckus at work the boss will try to fire you. If you give the boss an excuse, the boss will take it. This doesn't apply to just union activity. As an organization who regularly tells people "let's start a ruckus at work" it would irresponsible not to tell people this additional piece of advice. As for "your job is worth fighting for" that's not a claim about the IWW wanting to preserve waged labor or whatever. It's simply that we don't want people to start something at work that will create problems for their co-workers only to bail when the boss turns up the heat and thereby leave their co-workers high and dry. It's also to say "quitting isn't going to solve the problems at your work" because most problems at work derive from that work being waged labor - one form may correct the abuses of another, but waged labor itself is an abuse. In the short term, we want people to fight their waged labor where their at rather than hunt around for other ones.

From "Marx and Open Debate'

Red Wrote:

Dundee Utd wrote:

A jealousy regarding bourgeois organisational efficiency is absolutely the problem here.

Organisations are firstly mechanisms for accumulation, they are secondly structures of decision making. It goes without saying that decisions made tend to express the mechanism for accumulation. In other words, the content of policy cannot run against the frame within which it is formulated without destroying the organisation.

The problem is not the use that Lenin put Democratic Centralism to but the manner in which this particular form of decision making reproduces a latent form of corporate organisation which exists in all examples. In this case, the content (communism) is not able to overcome the form (class hierarchy) – for that reason those organisations which adopt the bourgeois strategic form are bound fatally by their structure to produce decisions that are precisely counter to both their original intent and to proletarian interest. In the end they are capable only of reproducing the structuring of an apparently neutral ‘effectiveness’ in decision making.

To the leaderless leninism which Dundee Utd subsumes himself (‘I'm currently involved in co-ordinating a couple of campaigns that I voted against’) which I would define as the reduction of existence to lines of policy and procedure, I would suggest a disinvestment from formal structures of decision making altogether in favour of attempts to relax the hold of those determining factors which have thus far caused the proletariat to consistently decide wrongly.

regards,

p.

I think you misrepresent Red on this – he is not at all against organising into defined groups. I would be interested though in his explanation of why he is in favour of such groups in the abstract/historically but what the reasons are for him not being able to organise a group (equivalent to the SI model he mentions) in the real world?

My opinion is that it cannot be done, too many factors militate against organising a group that speaks for the epoch. From my perpective I think he is too conservative on this question and could perhaps make a more simple distinction between organisation and Organisations. Whilst it is impossible to be against organisation, it is a necessity to be against organisations – particularly of the type proposed by Dundee Utd (as an example).

If organisations work, then why aren't they working?

The reason I have attempted to connect the above discussion with both Catch's points on this thread and with John.'s on the working class/communist demands thread is that they are related and define the absolute minimally stated position of the free-communist relation to the world as we presently experience it. This position is deliberately set against both political demands and ideologically based organisations – the motivation for this is simple: learning past failure.

p.

The question wasn't what do we see as communism, what is meant by the smashing capitalism, or what is the task of the proletariat, the question was about 'what is the party' and all you've done is lay out some babble that makes the party whatever is in the vanguard of superceding capitalism, overlooking the fact that such superceding needs to be defined, interpreted and articulated by actual organisations, with actual programmes and actual ways of organising themselves, that will be by no means homogenous, that will split, fall out and find each other on either side of the barricades and that means one can no longer say they are in favour of 'The Party' but rather has to say I support the Friends of Durruti in their interpretation of implimenting the revolution or I support the Kronstadt insurgents, it means a battle between federalism and centralisation, it means all the nitty gritty shit. If one doesn't root the content of communism in concrete forms what we get is a vague abstraction, another eternally defered 'heaven' at best or a dangerous ideological break between means and ends, whereby the 'content of communism' subsumes the concrete forms and so these necessary forms of direct democracy, federalism, that is the very organs necessary for the suppression of economic hierarchies and classes and the checks and balances against their redevelopment can be short circuited in an attempt to create the content and only end up reproducing capitalist forms expousing communist content.

And yes I do think communism has to be the task, it is the subjective position that gives the proletariat any positive potentiality but at the same time it has to be made solid and that will mean navigating the groups, individuals and interests of the 'so called sections of the working class'.

Hello my brother from another mother...

First, the point I picked out. "Model employee" and "Your job is worth defending and improving" are, IMO, rather different from "Don't be reckless and expose yourself to unnecessary harassment and termination. If you are successful organizing, you;ll get enough of that anyway." It just rankles me because it is the same line i got from Trotskyists, and the language indicates to me an orientation. Fuck, I'm not a model employee and I don't encourage anyone to be one. The Model Employees are assholes, and becoming a Model Employee means becoming an asshole. And my job isn't worth saving. It sucks. It pays the bills, but I hate it. And that is something i share with almost every one of my co-workers. I may like the kind of work i do or I may not, but the job usually sucks. and if it doesn't what the fuck are you doing joining a union, much less an anarcho-syndicalist union????

As for organization, you and i have been here. I don't think that formal and informal organization can be treated as equivalents, and if a formal organization is determined by its informal aspects, this can be a really bad thing. I have been in organizations where informal rather than explicit relations determined who was "in" and who was "out". I don't see our reading group as having been "an organization". It was a somewhat organized activity lubricated occasionally with wine between people who had a very minimal degree degree of political agreement at all, with one interest: reading Capital. I hope the IWW has a little more stringency than that, but maybe it doesn't.

I also see the need for people to form organizations when they need them, but an organizations created in a struggle (consciously or not, spontaneously or premeditatedly) and for the purposes of that struggle simply is not the same as an organisation which exists based on an activity independent of struggles, that is, which sees a merit in its existence regardless of the level of struggle or its engagement.

If we can't come to some understanding on that, it makes it hard for me to see how we even have this discussion. My whole point in responding to you was to simply shake the tree, to say that if anything, of the vast multitude of organizations out there one can be a part of, you actually find few of them worth being in. I didn't mean informal groupings or organizations in a struggle because I hope we are always in the former to some degree and the latter sadly are rarely something we get to choose to be a part of, esp in this country at this time.

Chris

The problem which confronts working class people is not one of avoiding accumulation but of taking responsibility for the prevailing situation and turning thought into action.

On the sad misconception that the communist programme is something given or decided by a group, rather than being the accumulation of our class' historical experience, IMO the alternatives are a sectarian claim of the right theory in a line of descent or a completely eclectic hodge-podge with no inner unity. We all fight for what does and does not constitute what is valuable from the history of proletarian struggles (practical and theoretical), what constitutes critical contributions, not as a list of demands or a special theory of communism, but as a series of illuminations that deepen our understanding and awareness of what the abolition of class society involves. We fight for it, and against other things we consider reactionary. That is why arguments over democracy, councils, unions, electoralism, etc become so sharp, not simply because of pettiness or intra-leftist competition for recruits, though sadly those also matter for so many groups, but because they lead to different political conclusions.

Within that, certainly I would differentiate between groups that defend that historical programme of our class from those that do not, but life is not so simple as those who get it and those who don't. Every group or person that is not simply a part of the constituency of the left wing of capital defends some aspect of it and our arguments reflect the necessarily partial embodiment of that legacy. But it also is the case that groups and persons who grasped something essential, who at one point illuminated an aspect, can then also decay into a rotten husk. Organizations and persons are thrust forward, and in the transformation of moments, lose their way if for no other reason than new situations and new struggles and new compositions of capital are tremendously disorienting.

The task of communist factions in this is to defend and fight for, insofar as each understands it, this historical programme of our class; to act as a class memory, and these days in the US it seems that no one remembers anything, that time is compressed into an eternal present of work-consumption; to put forward the the interests of the class as a whole irrespective of nation, region, industry, etc.

What a priori knowledge? That the proletariat is the only universal class with no interest in this society, that it and it alone is revolutionary? That communism is the abolition of capital, exchange, markets, etc?

These are based on the critique of capital, which is also its concrete analysis, itself a product of and growing from the development and struggle of the proletariat. There could have been no Marx, Bakunin or Proudhon in 1750 because there was no proletariat in 1750 and capital itself was not even socially dominant in 1750. It is no accident to say that each of them developed these earliest critiques of capital in response to the beginnings of the working class becoming socially and politically coherent as a force in society. What is a priori about that?

Or do you mean that you believe that maybe communism, the abolition of capital, may or may not involve the abolition of the essential relations of capitalist society? Maybe you think that markets are necessary? Or that wage-labor might still exist? Or that money will remain? Throwing words like “a priori” around doesn't make your comment profound.

Your first argument is as much an argument against the possibility of the abolition of class society. When has the abolition of class rule ever happened? Never. In every case i am aware of, class society has over-run pre-class societies, and capital has certainly over-run everything in its path.

As for the Bolsheviks, I happen to think that their party became, for a moment, something more than what it had been. It became the party over a million workers in Russia when that class was barely 10 million. It became the pole of attraction for millions of workers around the world. But certainly the Bolsheviks, through their internal and international politics, crippled and then killed the International. But to blame only the Bolsheviks is to overlook the failure of revolutions and revolutionaries elsewhere to overthrow capital, a fact which lent even more credibility to the Bolsheviks at exactly the moment when they were proving inadequate. The Bolsheviks can hardly be blamed for the failure in Germany in 1918-19, and that failure more than anything solidified Bolshevik control of the International.

As for centralization, it means nothing more and nothing less than the need for the proletariat to organize itself as one class with one task, the abolition of capital, and to subordinate every tactical decision to that task, something which obviously is only possible in the course of a revolutionary upheaval for large sections of our class. It means developing the concrete means to coordinate the struggle against capital globally, to give political direction to that struggle. It does not mean to try and determine from above the specific forms taken by that struggle under various conditions, nor to lay claim to be able to determine the tactical decisions in specific situations. That has to be worked out on the ground, so to speak. In this sense, what I mean by organic centralism has more to do with the KAPD and Otto Ruhle, even, in his “The Revolution is Not a Party Affair.”

The alternative seems to me to be a federalism that denies the unity of our class and emphasizes its differences, differences that reflect capital's domination of labor.

Well, I suppose it had to come down to this didn't it? Your notion of value as “what people value”, of exchange, of markets, is textbook bourgeois micro-economics, and your attempt to escape the concept of value by turning to price is also textbook neo-classical economics. You are simply repeating the categories and arguments of bourgeois economics. It is not even at the level of classical political economy. It is the subjectivist economics a la Marshall, Walras, and the rest of the neo-classicals.

I am not here arguing that there is not an relationship between the notion of Value in the critique of political economy and what become “values” in the ethical sense, but that is certainly not the sense in which I refer to it here and to work out that relation is beyond this comment.

It does seem that this is why you think getting rid of the market is all it comes down to, as if the market was about merely allocating goods, rather than exploitation, about the production of commodities not for use but for sale, to get from M to M'.

Value is not about price determination, it is about getting at the root social relation of exploitation. That is why Marx refers to the value-form, the money-form, the commodity-form, the capital-form. Value is not an epistemological or logical category, it is an ontological category.

As I expected as well. The heterogeneity of the proletariat is not the source of its strength, but its weakness. At least we agree that unity and cohesion and solidarity increase in struggle, but the revolutionary potential of the proletariat resides in its universality, in the fact that the proletariat is a class whose existence is produced and reproduced through the constant separation of the laborer from the means of producing, the fact that every concrete labor exists for capital only as abstract, homogeneous labor that produces abstract wealth, i.e. value in the specific form of money, which is no longer wealth in actual things, but in a technically limitless, infinite, purely quantitative sense. All things are available to he or she who has the money, and money is only made by exploiting labor, by constantly subjecting all workers everywhere to the domination of labor by capital, to the domination of workers by work, to the pumping out of a surplus of value, i.e. of commodities, which exist only to be sold so that more abstract wealth may be made.

As for whether the heterogeneity disappears, who claimed such a thing? I never said that one has to meet each particular problem with the same answer, only that the content of the answer must be the same: abolition of capital and its essential determinations, such as wage-labor, value, money, exchange, etc. Also, the heterogeneity you note is the heterogeneity of capitalist society. Income? Skill? Race? Nationality? These are not 'natural' divisions, but social ones produced by capital's functioning. Their particularities are no doubt the outcome of the particular, specific historical conditions under which capital moves to subordinate first pre-capitalist (non-wage) labor, and then alongside and beyond this, the response of capital to the particular struggles of labor against capital. The particulars have to be sussed out, but they only make sense in relation to the development and extension of the subordination of labor.

Again, I suspect that you think by party I mean this or that group, when i have been quite explicit in rejecting that. The historical party of the class develops organically out of the need to coordinate and unify struggles on the one hand, and on the other the preparatory work of, broadly speaking, communists, who try to clarify and illuminate the class division in each struggle, the emancipatory potential of the proletariat, the need for each struggle to overcome exactly the heterogeneity of the class as it exists as labor for capital.

By party here, as elsewhere, I have tried to indicate something akin to Marx's idea of “the party of anarchy” against the “party of order.” That is why, despite IMO the importance of preparatory activity by communists, the party is not some formal organization built by communists through recruitment or classes or reading groups. Neither Marx nor Bakunin created the IMWA. Even Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not create the Communist International. They called for, organized for it, mislead it, but it was the Russian Revolution that polarized workers, that drew many of the best militants of that generation to it, even though many of them would quickly break with it as the Communist International produced merely a more militant form of social-democratic politics, as they suppressed the proletariat, the soviets, the factory councils (something not well known outside of Russia in 1918-20 btw.) Without the Russian Revolution, or some victorious proletarian revolution, there might not even have been a new international. It was made possible by that revolution, and combined with the work of the communists (regardless of Marxist or anarchist or syndicalist) who opposed the war, who denounced it as an imperialist war, who demanded that the World War be turned into a civil war of labor against capital.

As for “mass organizations”, what do you mean? This or that formal organization? No doubt many organs of struggle will be created, from strike committees to unions to political parties to insurrectional armies to councils to soviets, etc. Whether one hangs fetishistically onto councils or talks of assemblies or soviets or likely forms we have not yet seen, just as the commune passed out of existence with the end of the 19th century, it is clear that some kind of organs of class must exist which will certainly have to deal with the concrete details of the struggle to abolish capital. They will have to make decisions and coordinate concrete processes. But no formal organization is as such communist. Stripped of a revolutionary content, they can become, as they did in Germany in 1918-19, a vehicle for counter-revolutionaries.

Chris