What is a "mass organisation"?

You didn't. I didn't. But you implied that the historical experience I referenced had fuck all to do with dara's question. Your posts on here are getting increasingly irrational and high pitched.

cf.

Where did I imply "it will be alright on the night" - there's a whole part two of my post you conveniently overlooked which explicitly contradicts that. However, were a large libertarian communist organisation to have existed in, say, Portugal '74-'76 it would be a very grave mistake to confuse this with the organisations that were thrown up during the events themselves. It's this conflation of poltiical groups, unions, 'mass organisations', single issue groups all into one woolly category that I'm arguing against - and it applies equally to your views as the unionists in the IWW - despite being at different poles, the assumptions are extremely similar.

Catch, I'm not sure but I think you're making to different points here:

The first has two categories - "organizations thrown up during events themselves" and another kind which you don't name. I think your point here is about substitionism. Is that right? No particular organization stands in for the whole class? Or is it about long-standingness? no long-lasting organization is the same as the organizations created in intense moments of possibility and conflict? Or just clarity? I'm not sure what the point is I guess. (Maybe this is about willed vs spontaneous organization?)

The second is about being clear about different types of organizations, all of which it sounds to me like you're saying are disctinct from "the organizations thrown up during events themselves."

Is that right?

Yes.

Well I'd say permanent, since intense moments of possibility and conflict could last for years. Organisations that last beyond those periods (i.e. not destroyed during them) invariably change - either a massive reduction in size or accommodation to capital. To take the CNT as an example, it dramatically expanded and contracted many times between 1918 and 1936 iirc.

That too

Haven't read that. I have a feeling Henri Simon takes this a bit further than I do though.

Yes, I think organisations which are created by revolutionary minorities - especially during periods of reaction - are fundamentally different from organs of struggle (which also spring up during periods of reaction albeit in a limited way).

I wrote a ratty post last night and then decided not to post it. Catch I think you are inventing and demolishing strawmen, while that may feel satisfying it in no way advances discussion. However there is something useful in this discussion so rather than get annoyed about this I'll outline my actual view.

1. "Trade union consiousness" - I think this is one of Lenin's sillier ideas, however I think it is almost as silly to deny the use of a revolutionary minority in helping to spread particualr ideas and methods and then defending this through the implication that anyone who disagrees must be a leninist.

2. Spontanety - it is an obvious truth that libertarian forms of organizations can and do emerge spontaneously from struggle. However so do other forms and in any case there is seldom such a thing as a genuine spontaneous struggle because a significant minority of workers have developed political ideas. In my experience it is very common to discover at the heart of what appeared to be a spontaneous struggle ex members or fellow travelers of republican, social-democrat or even far left groups. Or in community struggles people who have been union reps. A lot of 'spontanety' talk makes the same mistake Lenin does in treating the working class as a whole, that is as if every individual is a blank slate only capable of progressing to a certain point. The reality is that as struggles emerge those workers who have organizational experience and skill sets will naturally tend to become the leadership and as such will probably 'infect' the struggle with whatever ideology they hold or held. Even in quiet times probably one in 50 workers have such experience in western countries.

3. Pre-existing groups - some of those will be members of pre-existing organizations. Other will be ex members who dropped out but remained on good terms. Some will be ex members who are bitter about their former organization but who will probably still hold many of the political assumptions and methods because that is their experience.

Lets simplify things to two organizations, one with 6 members and one with 6,000 (and maybe 12,000 ex members). Assume the spontaneously emerging struggle is not centered in one workplace so it won't have one or a small group in uncontested leadership. It's quite obvious that the group with the 6,000 members is going to have very much more initial say in the direction of things because it will have very many members and ex members who spontaneously are in positions of local leadership. What is more they will already have both formal and informal contact networks between each other along with information will flow in a faster and probably more accurate fashion, at least for a while. So at least in the short term their control will increase.

4. Contradictions - it is probably, indeed likely, that contradictions will exist between the ideology of this leading group and between the spontaneous movement. It is possible that the small group of 6 may have an ideology far closer to the actual spontaneous direction of the movement. Over time this may mean the influence of the big group shrinks and the ideas of the small group become more popular. The traditional interpretation of the period between the February and October revolution in Russia is that something like this happened,

However this particular example demonstrates that our group of 6 would be silly to place their faith in such a process as from an anarchist perspective most of this shift in the two key urban areas went to an organization that pretended to be in tune with the movement but which had little intention of implementing at least some of its own slogans (ie all power to the soviets). From that PoV outside part of the Ukraine where the anarchists were more numerous and organized at the start the shift took not 9 months but five years (the gap between the February revolution and the Petrograd strikes that preceeded Kronstadt). And to be honest this is probably assuming a much greater level of coherance in the Petrograd working class in early 1921 than that which may have existed.

5. The modern experience or revolution - Russia is anchent history and what is more a process driven by extreme conditions of brutal war and civil war. More recent examples of which many readers have knowledge would include Paris 1968, Portugal 1974-76 and Argentina of the last few years. None of these examples give any comfort to the 'it will be all right on the night' faction as despite the fact that all contained spontaneously emerging libertarian tendencies in all three cases these tendencies were easily contained by pre-existing organizations for the period of the crisis. In France the CP may have been forced to shift to retain control of the workplaces but it did retain control and isolate those tendencies for the period when it mattered. In the aftermath trotskyist, maoist and anarchist organizations emerged and grew out of the contradictions but in terms of a challenge to capitalism rather than CP hegemony this was too little too late. In both Portugal and Argentina a multitude of pre-existing organizations initially rode the popular movements and then increasing undermined them by filling the assemblies with protracted ideological squabbling that tended to alienate many.

6. Your experience - a lot of readers will have had some involvement in the globalisation and/or anti-war movements. Which means that at first hand you have witnessed how even a crappy organizations with major contradictions with the bulk of the people in such movements can, through numbers and organization alone, effectively lead it for the months in which it remained a sort of movement. There too you will have seen or even been part of the groups of six whose ideas were much more in tune with a least a section of the movement but which lacked the numbers, organization, network and perhaps experience to have any significant impact while the movement lasted. You may well have people who opposed you as sectarian at the time coming up and saying 'You know you were right' but its too late.

7. The minority of revolutionaries - the problem with the idea that this side of the revolution the revolutionaries will be in the minority is not that it is wrong. It's almost certainly correct. It is that as here it becomes an excuse for the revolutionaries to be a minority of 6 (or 12 or 20) in a country of 50 million. It has become a formula for tiny groups to trot out to explain why their insignificance doesn't matter and why its fine that all they do is produce a photocopied bulletin attacking everyone else (or in the modern form maintain a bulletin board).

8. Minorities don't have to be tiny - Without arguing at all that the question of a revolution is to recruit one by one until a majority is reached I argue that for libertarian ideas to overcome other when the 'spontaneous' moment arrive the libertarian organization(s) have to number not 6 or 12 but thousands and tens of thousands if not millions. So that a good proportion of the leadership that spontaneously emerges will not have its experience in leninist methods and organizational practise or social democratic ones or radical nationalist ones but in anarchist methods. Unless that happens in advance of the revolutionary period then the anarchists will play their traditional role as groups of 6 or a dozen correctly predicting where it is all going to go wrong but incapable of influencing events.

Incidentally there are some texts of talks from 10 years back that expand on some of the above
Four Myths of the October Revolution

Modern revolutions or is revolution still possible?

I agree with pretty much everything JoeBlack2 says above, give or take a few extraneous uses of the word "libertarian". It probably won't help much for me to say this but It's a view which would be perfectly at home in the mainstream of the Trotskyist movement.

Yes that should help out a lot!

More seriously I'd expect any revolutionary who'd looked at the detail of revolutionary history for more than identifying who to blame to come to broadly similar conclusions whether they were trotskyist, maoist, republican or anarchist. But the 'groups of 6' approach is by no means unique to anarchism either, the Sparts would be a very obvious example of the same sort of thinking from orthodox trotskyism. Arguably the group around The Blanket is a republican version although that may be a little unfair. And there are lots of nutty maoist ones.

Always glad to be of assistance.

Small group sectarianism is certainly present in the Trotskyist movement but the kind of thinking used to justify it is different.

One of the defining characteristics of Trotskyism is the view that it is necessary to build a mass revolutionary organisation after all and even the Spartoid end of the spectrum formally takes that position. Any Spart you have the misfortune to talk to will be only too glad to give you a spittle flecked rant about the limits of sponaneity and the need to build a revolutionary party. There is, of course, a serious disconnect between this political view and the actual behaviour of Spartoid groups, but that's a slightly different issue.

Joe, you've recently admitted to posting strawmen just to wind people up on here. I don't think you're in a position to criticise anyone's methods of discussion, especially when your own posts are full of demolished strawmen themselves.

Well this is a straw man - who said revolutionary minorities shouldn't try to spread particular ideas and methods? Not me. Nor anyone on this thread. If I thought that why would I spend so much time on a site who's primary purpose is circulating information and ideas?

And another. Who has claimed that these forms of organisation are spontaneous? Not me. Nor anyone on this thread. Or that workers don't have developed political ideas? In fact I believe I specifically said in my post, which you've still not dealt with, that even people with very reactionary ideas can change pretty rapidly when those ideas are challenged by events.

This is a bit of a flawed comparison isn't it? How about 100 groups of 60 with varying relationships or even 1,000 groups of 6 compared to your one big group. Try again.

What you fail to note is that many of these organisations claimed to be revolutionary. There's no guarantee that a large "libertarian" organisation won't be just as reactionary as some Trot sect when the time comes - again, Mexican syndicalists fighting against Zapata on behalf of the Republican government is one of the more extreme examples. Or the many, many reactionary ideas held by self-proclaimed anarchists over the years - from individualism to pacifism to national liberation and the rest.

Well I don't know exactly who this is aimed at but it doesn't really apply to me. I was never very interested in the anti-globalisation movement, and although I turned up to a few anti-war demos (both the marches and 'direct action'), and met some of the now libcom admins at them, that was about it. And again I disagree that it was a movement in any meaningful sense - it didn't feel like it at the time (although some things were encouraging), and it certainly doesn't feel like that now.

Well that's something. I wonder if dara agrees.

Are you going to try to argue that all we do is maintain a bulletin board, because if so then you're simply lying - given you know full well many of us libcom admins are involved in workplace organising, some are in other organisations, and have participated in other real-life political activity together both very recently (dispatch) and in the past.

This is not only a strawman, but a purely formalist argument (libertarian vs. authoritarian) which ignores any kind of content. A libertarian organisation of thousands which doesn't have any solid agreement on fundamental issues like the role of unions, the state etc. is just as likely to be manipulated as those 'spontaneous' ones which you apparently have little confidence in. They have just as much potential to be damaging as Leninist or Social Democratic groups and the rest. Again - there's historical examples, joining Republican governements to fight peasant uprisings, joining Republican goverments to fight Franco - both resulting in their own members being slaughtered by those Republican governments while in the case of the CNT, their leaders remained in office.

Also you fail to explain how you see this organisation of tens and hundreds of thousands arising. Even the Trot sects with their obsession about mass parties and even bigger mass organisations to control via the mass parties can in many cases muster no more than the half-dozen members you deride in your strawman. Groups like the IWW, with extremely open criteria for membership remain tiny as well. And small groups intending on growing big, and having influence, are rapidly abandoning principles before they even get to a certain size. Again it's this lack of realism (often passed off as realism) which leads down some very unpleasant dead ends.

There is very little here for me to actually reply to - for instance I'm not sure where I'm meant to have suggested that there was some "guarantee that a large "libertarian" organisation won't be just as reactionary as some Trot sect when the time comes" In fact I'm pretty sure I posted the example of the Casa entering the anti Zapatista alliance on this very site a month or so back so you could probably have assumed I was aware of it. And I'm sure I must have mentioned, at least in passing, that perhaps the CNT going into government wasn't such a great idea at least once. In fact there is no way you could honestly claim not to know my position on either of these events so I presume this is some sort of weird play to the crowd tactic. It looks pretty weak too me.

Likewise I fail to see where I suggested that building on organization of thousands or tens of thousands was easy. Nor do I see why the ease that it could be done is of any relevancy whatsoever anyway. My point is that successful libertarian revolution requires pre-existing large scale (1 in a 1000) libertarian organization. That this might be hard to build or that if built it may become corrupt is neither here nor there as there are no other alternatives.

Actually I haven't. I 'admitted' that my lumping together of post leftists and libcoms was as valid as the libcom lumping together of anarchist communists and trotskyists. I've been very, very amused since by the way libcoms have repeatedly returned to this demonstrating their complete inability to take their own medicine. But neither of these comparisons is an example of a strawman argument regardless of what one thinks of the value of the comparisons themselves.

Oh nice shift from claiming I'd said something I haven't to implying Dara did. Unless you honestly believe that mass now means majority your lying again. Maybe you do.

Joe - you were contrasting large organisations to small ones simply on the basis of size - while suggesting the reason the small ones were small was because they had tight political agreement and were 'sectarian'. Since you didn't explain how the big organisations got big, I could only assume this was down to them having looser political agreement and not being 'sectarian' - perhaps you'd like to explain that then?

And you've not posted anything which distinguishes the libertarian organisations from the non-libertarian ones - apart from calling them libertarian - again, this is only formal and doesn't deal with the content.

I'm still waiting to a response to this by the way:

And yet why do you feel the need to blast specifically libertarian efforts at organising? I'm basically in agreement with Joe on this.

When it comes to the IWW, whilst criticising an organisation is perfectly valid and necessary in its own debate and direction, some of things said about it on libcom are frankly amazing. How many of us do you think are going to defend no-strike clauses? Or most of the critcisms we've seen? For what it's worth, I see the group as an organisation of militant workers who can and should do some of things in traditional union territory (like, I don't know, providing support for sweat shop workers in our own country) but I'm against pretending it is that. The IWW has done some worthwhile things and can do more; its ambition to grow and become more practical is an entirely positive step in the right direction. Lumping us all in the substitutionist camp is both false and a slap in the face for grassroots activity.

Well I hoped none of you on here, but that doesn't change the fact that you're in an organisation that's signing them. How many of you defended members of parliament (who were also bosses) in the Scottish Parliament branch? And yet they stayed in there.

Like I've said, libertarian by itself means fuck all to me. I'm all for pro-revolutionaries organising ourselves though - it's the implication that it's our role to organise/represent or otherwise substitute ourselves for workers in general I have an issue with.

Y' see I can't disagree with this (apart from the claim that there is lttle other than this to reply to in catch's post) but the notion of 'turning' a mass movement into a libertarian communist one is not the same as the need to build a mass libertarian communist movement.

But Joe whats with this anarchist-communists as opposed to libertarian communists thing, if you'd said platformists in place of anarchist communists I could have saw where you were making the distinction - otherwise its nonsense (I know catch disagrees, and some of his mates pander to that to make him feel better )

bingo. Like I said, premises of the original question were wrong.

I'm sorry, wtf are you talking about?

Don't mention it.

Wasn't really serious (hence the wink that you didn't include in yer quote), just a reference to an earlier libertarian communists aren't necessarily anarchists discussion we disagreed on. No Biggy - I'm surprised at Joes apparent distinction though unless he feels he can get away with substituting anarchist-communist for platformist and the use of libertarian communist to describe anyone not in his 'tradition'.

Well I got that much. fwiw I think libertarian communist isn't great terminology (and I'm glad we're libcom.org and not libertariancommunism.com) - the main thing for me is that both the anarchist and marxist traditions have encompassed both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies in their history - and that some significant movements have been influenced very little by neither - so clinging to one or the other doesn't make sense to me any more.There are false divisions between the two strands, and just as importantly false unities within each.

to clarify, this is what i said:

not, how to turn a mass organisation into a 'libertarian' one.

Catch, can you expand on and/or recommend something I read on this:

cuz on the face of it I'm like "yeah, sure, makes sense" -- like, if a group of libcommies started a group based around us being libcommies that's different from a group of people being like "fuck this, the boss/landlord/whoever is treating us too badly, we're going to do something about it." But like, say this group of libcommies all worked in the same place, and instead of getting together to talk libcommunism they said the other thing, "fuck this... let's do something" etc. Know what I mean?

Well nate its that sort of thing that animates the spanish CNT, who's idea is that when there are CNT job sections (=branches), those sections should make their own decisions based on assembly, but they should also promote the assembly of all the workers to make collective decisions.

So the libertarian communists who all work in the same place work together to promote their ideas, but they don't substitute themselves for the entire workplace.

Nate, didn't manage to get to the Simon even yet. Recent stuff along these lines - Workers of the World Tonight, Glaberman on the WWII anti-no strike clause movement in the UAW, Norman Mailer on Portual '74.

Yep.

Well, are all the employees at the workplace libcommies or just some? Four out of ten, four out of 6,000? But generally I'd say in such a situation it could be either - they could be organising as workers (with their poltiics relatively incidental to their actual interests in organising), or they could've all taken similar jobs together to salt it, or it could be a huge workplace with a tiny group of poltiicos - in which I'd definitely say the latter unless they were doing something in immediate response to an event and rapidly got other workers involved. We both know that situation doesn't come up all too often though Neither is necessarily better than the other, but again I think it's important to delineate a bit.

My point still stands - the task is to build a mass libertarian communists movement not about how I see a mass organisation becoming libertarian communist. Turning or becoming its the same arse about face mess.

I'm not so sure that all of the "anarcho-spartoids" are actually in favour of a building a mass revolutionary organisation. Maybe I'm missing something, but I get the impression that many of them really don't see the purpose of building such organisations at all. That's certainly different from the thinking of the Sparts and their ilk on the Trotskyist left.

Some of the "anarcho-spartoids" on the other hand clearly do have some kind of formal adherence to the idea of having a mass revolutionary organisation. The problem is, as you say, that they are opposed to any kind of halfway useful step towards building such an organisation. That line of thinking is close to that of the Sparts, but even then there are differences. The Sparts really do think that it is vitally important to take steps towards creating a mass organisation, starting with building their own grouplet here and now. The problem is that everything they think might be a useful step towards that goal is actually wildly counterproductive.

To put it another way: Those "anarcho-spartoids" who want to see a mass revolutionary organisation are not in favour of doing anything much about it. The Sparts on the other hand are in favour of actively pursuing that goal, but do so in an utterly lunatic way. You would never get a Spart telling you that it makes no difference whether you have a group of 6,000 or a thousand groups of six. Instead they'd tell you to build the group of 6,000 by hanging around at other groups meetings denouncing everyone except paedophiles.

If there are anarchists and others who want a 'mass' organization, they are doing a horrible job.

Or - more likey - they have set before them a task which cannot be done at this point in history.

split to here: http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/catch-anarcho-spart-20122007#comment-250001

This comment has been moved http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/catch-anarcho-spart-20122007#comment-250000

ok, you're right on this. i phrased the question poorly. What I mean to ask is do you see a role for libertarian communists in mass organisations, if so, what? Basically, I don't understand how your stated policy translates to concrete activity. This is from an old website, but I couldn't find your As & Ps on the blog.

What is an active part?

By request of Joe Black, moving this back here:

I'm not flouncing, there is nothing to reply to.

What you have done repeatedly on this thread is the equivalent of "You like Hitler and your wrong because he is a bad man.' There is little point in me spending time demonstrating that I don't and that you have no evidence for such a claim. I tried to deal with that constructively in the long post and you simply pulled the same stunt again.