Workerists vs communisers: barney!

Submitted by R Totale on April 23, 2020

If anyone needs some high-octane excitement, they don't seem to have posted it here yet, but the Angry Workers lot have recently reviewed the new Endnotes, and come out with some pretty strong critiques of the Endnotes brand of communisation as being essentially a reflection of neoliberal atomisation: https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/endnotes-no-5-a-melancholic-goodbye-to-neoliberalism-and-the-era-of-communisation/

comradeEmma

3 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by comradeEmma on April 23, 2020

I haven't read Endnotes 5 so I can't comment directly on how good the polemic actually is but i really like how they(edit: AWW) reference their own practice and experiences. Other polemics within the "ultraleft" milieu often just feels like it turns into a Marx-quoting war without much regard for what they are actually saying means in reality, especially the ones that happened in Riff-Raff after Marcel left.

R Totale

3 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by R Totale on April 23, 2020

I haven't read Endnotes 5 either (or the arguments that happened in Riff-Raff for that matter), but if you're referring to AWW I fully agree, I really appreciate the way they link up their big picture analysis with day-to-day practice and experiences.

Spikymike

3 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on April 24, 2020

Interesting... and maybe a ''working class party'' of a different kind to that of the past or the present so far ...gets a surprising mention this time. Might upset those anarchists who claim they were the first 'communisers'.

comradeEmma

3 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by comradeEmma on April 24, 2020

To be fair even Mario Tronti writes a lot about the creation of a real working-class party, not as an electoral formation but as a social force that can overthrow capitalism. With its paper being the inverse of what Lenin described as the "collective organizer".

But this practical work, articulated on the basis of the factory, and then made to function throughout the terrain of the social relations of production, this work needs to be continually judged and mediated by a political level which can generalise it. This is a new kind of political level, which requires us to look into and organise a new form of working class newspaper. This would not be designed to immediately report and reflect on all particular experiences of struggle; rather, its task would be to concentrate these experiences into a general political approach. In this sense, the newspaper would provide a monitoring of the strategic validity of particular instances of struggle. The formal procedure for carrying out such a verification would have -to be turned on its head. It is the political approach which must verify the correctness of the particular struggles, and not vice-versa. Because, on this basis, the political. Approach would be the total viewpoint of the working class, and therefore the actual real situation. And it is easy to see how such an approach takes us, away from the Leninist conception of the working class newspaper: this was conceived as the collective organiser on the basis of, or in anticipation of, a Bolshevik organisation of the class and of the Party. These are impossible objectives for us at this stage of the class struggle: this is the stage where we must embark on a discovery, not of the political organisation of advanced vanguards, but of the political organisation of the whole, compact social mass which the working class has become, in the period of its high political maturity — a class which, precisely because of these characteristics, is the only revolutionary force, a force which, proud and menacing, controls the present order of things.