The necessity of a revolutionary working class program in times of coup and civil war scenarios

Completely agree with the need to get more rooted and build an organisation, but surely drawing up the program is the easy bit? It's one thing to have a sense of what you want to do and it's another to have the ability to actually do it. There's a ton of left groups out there with specific plans and stuff but the working class basically ignores them all. How do you see yourselves overcoming the situation the rest of the left has found themselves in?

a more rigorous analysis and a better program is all we need! one more footnote and better internal discipline and the revolution is ours! what a sick fucking joke...

One more direct action and occupied town square and the revolution is ours!

Reply to the "sick fucking joke" (Badger) posted by AngryWorkersWorld:

You're right - it's not funny to repeat the miserable mistakes of 100 years ago, with "libertarians" declaring they want to create a "communist party". Putting "communist party " in lower case letters doesn't make it any better. Like the Leninists of Unity and Struggle you link to , you just want to parade your specialist revolutionary role by organising an organisation. Programs are for TV watchers.

AWW refers to Unity and Struggle's sad little contribution "How do we stop a coup" . In ItsGoingDown it's given the quaint title "How Could Everyday People Stop a Coup?"- a peculiar version of "ordinary people", a patronising attitude because people are both ordinary and extraordinary, everyday and critics of the everyda. It's as populist as Trump's use of "the people". (see this, if you haven't already seen it: https://dialectical-delinquents.com/war-politics/why-should-we-belong-to-the-people/ But that's IGD for you.

The good bits of U and S's text don't really add to Gelderloos's pretty excellent critique (https://fr.crimethinc.com/2020/10/04/preparing-for-electoral-unrest-and-a-right-wing-power-grab-an-analysis ). But it subtracts from it by coming out with all sorts of "shoulds", which take away from the independence of readers. E.G. "Against calls for passivity
and nonviolence, the left should celebrate and spread resistance, linking it with the long history of labor and freedom movements in this country....The general approach should be to establish a narrative of popular resistance to a Trump coup, power to the people, etc. Knowing the Right will try to goad protesters into confrontations and pose as victims, we should try to avoid physical confrontations unless attacked."
A non-should version of this would be to point out what calls for passivity and non-violence have meant in the past, or how Right-wing goading people into confrontations and posing as victims has functioned and what it's led to in the past and let the reader work out his/her own practical conclusions. But then Leninists without Lenin tend to want to give instructions to people and not encourage them to think for themselves and develop their own initiatives. I also have a problem with addressing "the Left". This still sees things in terms of political alignments rather than the dispossesed as a whole. It's those who have no control over their lives, not specifically "the Left", who need to take initiatives in response to all the post-election scenarios if they/we are to develop a sense of their/our own power and confidence.

I’ve read some of Unity & Struggle stuff on their site, and they seem to be a small sect for whom a critique of the old workers movement from a radical point of view (eg this from over 50 years ago:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/4.htm ) seems to have passed them by. Seemingly this is also the case with AWW. See some of their longwinded theory of theory (or is it ideology of
ideology), such as - http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2013/02/what-is-to-be-done-need-for-organization/,
and http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2012/03/notes-on-lars-lih-lenin-rediscovered/.
. And in their http://www.unityandstruggle.org/2020/05/party-form/ they ask “Is an anti-authoritarian Leninism possible?”. Maybe they should have asked “Is an anti-authoritarian red fascism possible?” (see Otto Rühle’s
https://arplan.org/2020/05/16/otto-ruhle-red-fascism/ ). I haven’t gone
through the whole of the 40+ minute video but I noticed that they say “Party building is one project among many”. All the standard Leninist organisations - Trtoskyist, Maoist, orthodox tankie-Stalinist - would probably agree nowadays, even if they’re cruder about it. In fact,
even Social Democrats would agree on that. You can’t attract recruits merely by setting up a Party Recruitment Centre at the corner of the street – you have to hold up the carrot of a party-mediated connection to history in order to bear the stick of organisational conformity in a
variety of ways these days. Such “projects” are almost invariably instrumentalised as a means to build the party . And maybe their contribution to IGD is one of these ways. They even advocate “Lenin without Leninism” alongside their fantasy of “an anti-authoritarian Leninism”. Maybe the next contortionist idea will be “State Capitalists without State Capitalism” alongside an anti-authoritarian capitalism.

If there’s one individual who contributed more than any other single individual to the counter-revolution in the 20th century than Lenin, tell me. He influenced massacres of proletarians and peasants throughout the world from 1918 onwards, whilst being presented as the model for
proletarian subversion, and anybody who doesn’t get to the roots of this vile confusion almost 100 years after his death can only - at best! - give with the right hand what s/he takes away with the left. And usually worse.

So why does AWW not only tolerate the intolerable but embrace it? Why act like we're one big happy family with people whom any authentic anti-authoritarian is going to be engaged in a bitter and potentially lethal struggle against if the class war ever becomes dangerous for the current ruling class. A new ruling class, versed in political roles and the bureaucratic mentality needed to organise an organisation, has always arisen amongst those who people had previously seen as being on their side when the old rulers had been forced out of power.

***
Re. the election:
Given that many people will be on the streets round about this election, the alternative to putting oneself on the line in a repeat of largely ritualised confrontations is not a communist party with a pretentious program. This just amounts to remaining on the risk-free sidelines. There's a third way which people need to discover for themselves.
I totally sympathise with not wanting to risk oneself in what could be something very nasty
if there’s no move towards a supercession of false choices. There’ll be a lot of people hoping to go beyond routine confrontations. Learning something of the strengths and weaknesses of the last 10-20 years - the anti-globalization movement, anti-war protests, squatting, libertarian subculture, prison rebel solidarity efforts, #occupy2014, BLM, the insurrectionary tendencies of May and June this year, etc. . Even a small short, but well-publicised, occupation
involving something original, including a theoretical reflection of aspects of these limited breaks with dominant social relations, as well as a critique of the contradictions of antifascism, might possibly inspire others, and might also avoid the usual risk of teargas, flashbang grenades and shooting. But organising an organisation will not teach anybody anything other than how to be a good politico and bureaucrat and play the usual " revolutionary" role. Whilst adding to the sense of depression and resignation that's driving people to suicide and/or madness everywhere.

PS Much of the above comes from discussions with friends

there's so much to object to in your entire project, but enumerating them all would be tedious and repetitive and ultimately pointless; virtually every revolutionary anarchist and anti-state anti-leninist communist who's addressed these issues has done it adequately (and better) over the past century. that said, i must seriously object to your (unintentional?) self-parody when you invoke

so called 'anti-organisation' groups

which groups call themselves "anti-organization"? if they don't call themselves that, then why do you insist on referring to them as

so called 'anti-organisation' groups

? surely this is a baseless rhetorical jab? but please, indulge my skepticism and provide the names of these allegedly "anti-organization" groups; two would be sufficient (since one could just be some bizarre outlier). and then perhaps indicate why their existence is a threat to your project...

the especially amusing thing about hyper-organizationalists calling those who respond skeptically "anti-organization" is that your type can't seem to comprehend that a refusal to accept your organizational model and/or to join your organization is not a rejection of organization; it's merely a rejection of your style and your project. if you were really interested in, or knew much about, radical history then you'd know that the organizational question looms large among radicals of all stripes, but especially among anarchists and anti-state communists. the party form is universally rejected by the best of them, and they've always outlined precise reasons for that rejection. it would seem that your interest in radical history is quite limited insofar as you continue to embrace the party form in word and in deed.

To be clear I don't have the same criticisms that Badger or Antiopa or the other left communist milieu types. But, when you ask what the others are proposing, you in turn have to be a bit clearer about what you're proposing, because the stuff in this article isn't exactly clear.

Like this bit:

All this needs organisation – a communist party, in the sense of a living strategy for the self-emancipation of the working class. An organisation that is rooted amongst the tech workers without pandering to their intellectual loftiness. Amongst the productive mass workers without ending up fostering their trade unionist sectorialism. Amongst the poor without fanning their insurrectionist illusions and populist tendencies. We have to point out that social power doesn’t lie in the besieged government building, but in the productive fabric of society. We need to analyse the concrete struggles and find the advanced points where the divisions between these three segments are called into question. We have to break the weakest links. We have to research militantly how uneven the productive knowledge and resources are distributed amongst the class and counteract this through political strategy. We have to be rooted in the day-to-day struggles without losing sight of the program. We need to judge every proposal and activity of the left whether they prepare and unify the working class for the take-over or whether they deepen the belief in identitarian solutions and state representation.

Is a statement so generic that nearly every leftist group would agree with it. Most anarchists would agree with it too, depending on how you define "party" in this context. This is something that needs to be fleshed out more -- will it have a central committee? Will it be a federation? In a greater revolutionary situation, what will it do? Will it take control politically? Will it run as a list in council elections? Is it to form a government? If yes, what sort? Etc.

Most political groups spend too much time discussing organisational matters and historical minutiae instead of interesting strategies, but AWW seems to have the opposite problem. When you speak of the need for a communist party in a libertarian forum without clarifying this stuff, I think you should expect some hostile reactions.

Black Badger

surely this is a baseless rhetorical jab? but please, indulge my skepticism and provide the names of these allegedly "anti-organization" groups; two would be sufficient (since one could just be some bizarre outlier).

This is a pretty silly objection, imo. You know as well as I do, in fact probably better, that one of the key arguments made by people who have a critique of formal organisation, is that people can organise to fulfil certain tasks effectively without taking on the trappings of formal organisations, such as official group names. Since you obviously know this, I can't see what the point is of using "name some affinity groups, informal cliques and street crews" as some kind of a gotcha.

Anyway, had not seen that recent Gelderloos text linked above before, so thanks to NA for linking that.

and then perhaps indicate why their existence is a threat to your project...

Where did AWW claim that?

AWW comrades, please slow down. You're digging yourself into a hole of abstraction when you tell us, in the U.S., how we need an organization -- specifically a party -- to stave off the civil war and a (non-existent) coup d'tat.

When you talk about Greenford and Southall, you're on terra firma. But when your analysis of working class conditions in the U.S. is based on a debate with the drivel written by a Leninist micro-sect of no more than 30 people, you're floating in the stratosphere and your prescriptions become incoherant and are lost in the vapor. I might add that that micro-sect are conservative leftists, who my comrades and I met once a few years ago.[EDIT] It was in Southern California and 15 of us had just been given a tour of the massive Los Angeles/Long Beach Port complex (the largest in the Wester Hemisphere), guided by an active longshore militant, who had first worked the port decades before as a railroader for BNSF. Later, we had lunch with some Latinx port troquero organizers, one of whom brought his cousin who worked at warehouses in the massive Inland Empire logistic hub served by the port in the next counties to the east. The micro sect was Unity & Struggle, the cadre having come to join the tour from the U.S. South, and at that time their website reflected how organizationally they used a Trotskyite model of cadre-based membership, while theoretically they adhered to the persective of Endnotes. I know I'm being hyperbolic, but this is like saying organizationally they used the Unification Church (Moonie) model to recruit, but theoretically they followed the ideas of the Scientologists. It was nuts. So much so that when we, including a British comrade (mutual friend to many of us) participating on the tour, asked the two Unity & Struggle cadre about their impressions of the port complex, they said we needed to "organize the surplus population." This non sequitur threw us a curve; it was like we were talking class struggle in the logistics sector and they were talking baseball.

If that wasn't wacky enough, the idea of the greatest threat to the U.S. working class being a coup seems cooked up by college students sitting in their dorm rooms under a Che Guevara poster, smoking too much dope. In their paranoia, they imagine that the white nationalists are much, much more powerful than they actually are. It's almost like while high, they tuned into Fox News and believed what they heard.

So I've taken in upon myself to provide you a reading list to better understand the conditions of the working class in the U.S.

Start by reading of Arlie Hochchild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Despite its flaws (the author is an academic), it's a useful look at what drove people in Louisiana to the Tea Party and anti-environmental politics. While first-person accounts are more desirable, I think some ethnographical data compiled by sociologists can be useful.

When protests arose in response to Governor Scott Walker's attacks on the public sector in Wisconsin in 2011, it's often forgotten that 6 years before congressional rep. Jim Sensenbrenner -- who represents District 5 in the suburbs of Milwaukee -- proposed HR 4437 as a far-right attack on immigrants. So read Katherine Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Cramer is a sociologist, but to her credit traveled the state and conducted tons of interviews. It can open anyone's eyes to how the town-country divide in Wisconsin is one point of conflict in the rise of Walker and how much rural residents resent the liberals of places like Madison (the state capital and colleget town, where the author is a professor at the state's largest university), as well as seeing everything spawned by the university as opposed to their interests (mostly revolving around environmental regulation). People in Louisiana had similar gut-level reactions when they heard that Hochchild was from Berkeley.

As a footnote to Cramer's book, read Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, so you can see the decade-long pendulum swing from progressive Republicans like "Fighting Bob" LaFollette to the fascistic Wisconsinites like Sensenbrenners and Walkers of today. Here you can read how the results of deindustrialization in Milwaukee make the conditions of the black working class perhaps the worst of any major metropolitan area of the country. This book succinctly detailed how much of that misery was inflicted as a result of intentional government policy. It details the strengths and weaknesses -- and ultimate failure -- of the half century of "sewer socialism" in that city.

Another incredibly insightful text is Phil Neel's Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. The author is a white guy from the far northern reaches of remote, mountainous California and his book captures why rural residents of the west -- in places like eastern Oregon -- are so anti-government. He uses opposition to polities of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to drive this point home. Being a first-hand personal account, with descriptions of his work on BLM crews, this book is excellent, despite his political conclusions being open to debate. From his analysis you can see where right-wingers like the Bundy clan were coming from and why they spearheaded the "Sagebrush Rebellion" and led the 40-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. This books concisely answers those questions.

After Hinterland, I suggest any of a handful of books about the rural west and how much of the opposition to designation of wilderness areas was based on Mormon right-wingers and that religion's "productivity ethic and the spirit of capitalism," including instrumentalist ideas about the exploitation of nature because it exists solely to serve the needs of humans, and in the case of this Mormon-based ideology, the bourgeois needs of business. This is useful, especially to see the pervasive influence of Mormonism in the Great Basin and Southwest. One example is Christopher Ketcham's excellent This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West, which looks at this struggle in rural regions from an environmental perspective. You can see Mormons behind every attempt to mine, drill, frack, log or graze on public land -- even National Parks!

Now for a deeply moving first-hand account of a working class woman, Sarah Smarsh, in her Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. You can see more clearly the family history of teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, and rural poverty of where Sarah grew up in Kansas.

To get a deeply historical perspective about rural/agricultural deindustrialization in "flyover country," read Osha Gray Davidson's 1990s book Broken Heartland: The Rise of America's Rural Ghetto, about Iowa with accounts of the rise of local groups of the right-wing Klan-influenced Posse Comitatus. One powerful metaphor was that when small town and rural hospitals closed, as part of health care mergers and monopolization, poor rural residents often made the practical decision to forgo health treatments rather than drive hours to a regional hospital and a metropolitan center to face inflated medical bills -- especially as with deindustrialization, many lost company-provided health insurance. This can be seen as the precursor to the opioid crisis as self-medication became the solution-of-choice to deal with increasing poverty and hopelessness. Also, facing COVID-19, one can see how devasting the health crisis is for rural areas, where there are literally no medical facilities available at the time of a pandemic. So the working class simply suffers and dies.

I could go on and on, but a few more are Tara Westover's first-hand account in Educated: A Memoir about growing up working class in Idaho. I reluctantly recommend reading Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis with an extremely critical perspective, especially as Vance's reactionary account has just been made into a movie.

I'll finish off my urban/rural working class dystopian readings with Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City about the huge number of black -- and some white -- working class tenants who are continuously pushed out of housing in a revolving door of dispossession in Milwaukee, a city that is the poster child for working class dystopia.

Now all those readings are for a grounding in class composition in the U.S., but you should also read the plentiful texts about class struggle, strikes and resistance -- about how the working class is fighting back in the U.S., although at a relatively low level, which does't require a party but instead requires the confidence that struggle is possible.

The historical moment is not the 'civil war' or coup scenario

Come on now, you start with a headline urgently screaming;

The necessity of a revolutionary working class program in times of coup and civil war scenarios

... as your announcement of a Party building programme and then quickly back pedal when Hieronymous rightly challenges that? Ambitious as you are, if you want to be taken seriously you need to be way more considered and careful in your approach than that.

Do we disagree on any of these points? Do you find it necessary to intervene in this debate? If so, how would you do it? What would you suggest to 'young comrades' in this scenario?

I think it's clear being over hasty from a great distance is problematic. If all I know about a subject is what I read in the papers and on here, with wildly different evaluations from people much closer to the situation than me, I will have more to learn than to teach. The far right threat in the UK is so far much different from the US, though events in the US will influence them here. I don't feel an obligation to be part of a 'formal position' on every topic.

AngryWorkersWorld

To comrades who will be quick to remark that, ‘the program emerges out of the movement, not the other way around’, we respond by saying that we are at the point in time when steps towards a program and a pragmatic vision of revolutionary rupture, itself become a necessary propelling force for the movements of our class. The alternative easily turns into the nihilistic violence seen in Syria or to a paralysing despair.

While I found your efforts in Greenford inspiring, I remain unconvinced about this.

You just throw your hat in the ring with an abundance of others in the lefty marketplace of ideas. How can your ideas outcompete theirs? Here, comrades, I just have to agree-to-disagree.

And living in the belly-of-the-tech-economy-beast here in the U.S., these formulations don't resonant with the experience of myself or my comrades working in Silicon Valley.

As for strikes, yes there were some attempts at Amazon fulfillment centers and by gig economy and other "essential" workers, but these didn't amount to much -- yet. The more relevant pre-pandemic strikes were in 2018-2019 by a nationwide swath of education workers, from all 55 counties of West Virginia to the Los Angeles public schools. And since the beginning of the pandemic, health care workers have continued to demonstrate their traditional militancy. These struggles of the American working class should be the point of departure of analysis, not prescriptive programs written from afar.

AngryWorkersWorld

But perhaps we disagree when it comes to the practical and organisational consequences?

Yes, we can respectfully agree-to-disagree.

AngryWorkersWorld

In the current moment the reactionary forces want to draw us into a culture war and armed confrontations – a type of struggle in which the working class can only lose.

Do you really take this seriously? If so, based on what? Isn't that called "class war," that's existed as long as capitalism?

AngryWorkersWorld

Regardless of the election outcome it is almost certain there will be an increase in violent physical attacks on sections of the working class. Everything possible must be done to defend people from these attacks. The maximum possible unity of the working class in the face of both the right wing militias and the state forces must be sought. But the idea, held by some, that this growing ‘war’ on the streets can somehow lead to revolutionary change is a dangerous fantasy.

Who are the "some" that hold this idea? The U.S. is already so homicidally violent, how will the election change that? Why not just ignore this social media fomented fear-mongering? Aren't claims of "coup" and "civil war" just the latest version of a Fox News-generated conspiracy theory?

My co-workers are most concerned about:

1. Housing: it's not uncommon for workers to pay over 50% of their wages in rent/mortgages (although rents in San Francisco just dropped as much as 31% last month due to a mass exodus of tech workers who can now work from home; Twitter made this policy indefinite, while others in the tech sector are expecting workers to be in-person again no earlier than summer 2021)
[EDIT]Another subtext to this are the massive tent cities that exist in all major metropolitan areas along the West Coast (perhaps they exist on the East Coast and other cities that had been economically booming pre-pandemic), which are the result of this housing crisis that in some areas dates back to the 1980s. In these camps, drug use -- these days mostly opioids, like fentanyl -- runs rampant. Increasing drug overdoses, alcoholism, liver disease, and suicides lead to rapidly growing morbidity and mortality rates, as well causing a decreasing life expectancy, even more pronounced among whites. And even more recently, with the pandemic lockdowns, homocides are up too. Since so many of us are facing unemployment and eviction, all of this is on everyone's mind. And it segues to #2
2. Health care: the U.S. spends the highest per capita on healthcare in the world, has the largest biotechnology sector in the world, and paradoxically ranks near the bottom of the OECD’s 37 countries for various health indicators like life expectancy (#28), infant mortality (#33), and rates the highest for obesity (#1). The causes of these dismal results are various, but the main reason is that the U.S., unlike every other economically advanced country, does not have universal healthcare. Instead, it's a system dependent on either employer-provided private health insurance or healthcare costs being paid out-of-pocket by individual consumers. Under this market logic, healthcare has become a highly rationalized just-in-time industry where the push to extract value leads to consumers paying higher rates for increasingly inadequate services of a very poor quality, made even more disastrous during the COVID-19 pandemic when many workers have had their health insurance cut off -- in addition to the tens of millions who never had it in the first place
3. Wages: follows obviously from #1 & #2
4. Global warming & wildfire: for exactly 30 straight days (August 20 - September 16) air in the northern half of California was so unhealhty (AQI above 151) that we were advised to not go outside

So, my respected AWW comrades, I appreciate much of what you have done and articulated. I don't disagree with your list of proposals for analysis and critique. But the formulations you developed in Greenford simply don't translate to where I live and work. Universals always have that flaw. Why not just compare and contrast class composition analyses generated by those in the U.S., as well as accounts of organizing and struggles, and find commonality (and ignore the silly nonsense from the irrelevant "left")?

[EDIT]Addressing systemic racism in the U.S., from a class perspective, is the Gordian knot of opening up revolutionary possibilities. Much has been written, but very little of it satisfactory. And a facile response on my part does no justice to such a serious concern. Yet it must be confronted; my sense is that only through struggle will a theoretical position become clear.

* Our experience is that many so called 'anti-organisation' groups are led by cliques and wanna-be alpha-males. We therefore think that a certain formalisation of structures and responsibilities is a step forward.

In what way is it a step forward? Wouldn't these cliques and alpha-males just assume formal leadership positions as easily as they do informal ones? We know that's usually the case since all formal organisational structures leninist or otherwise have countless examples of the leadership or at least a significant segment of the leadership essentially getting into a position where they're able to ignore what formal pressure and accountability that exists on paper.

Even in the few cases were a formal mechanism for redress like mandate recalls etc that I can think of that have worked, it wasn't the mechanism itself but the strength of the opposition from the rank and file that forced the issue, or in some of the more formal groups the critical flaw was defying someone even higher up and more alpha than them.

Well thanks for the response but II think you've missed the point I was making, that wasn't "structurelessness is great actually" it was a "yes you've identified problems with informal groups, but everything you've listed is endemic in formalised groups too, so the conclusion you've drawn appears faulty" I've been in groups that have no structure or clear leadership so know they can have a lot of problems, but I've experienced those same problems in every group I've been close to or a member of regardless of what the code of conduct and complaints procedures are.

For example you've listed a number of issues with groups you've joined, but they are exactly the same issues I've faced in multiple formal groups and parties and unions and collectives over the years.

"* I think due to a lack of visibility of structure (certain transparency of division of labour, of 'educational process', of functions) new members often have to 'become friendly' with the old core group first, before they can really participate. "

Bombarding a new member or potential joiner with a lengthy rulebook or confusing procedures and ways of conduct often lead to new members including myself "becoming friendly" with more longstanding members who would at least give us advice on what to actually do, which effectively created informal power dynamics to go with the formal ones, and sometimes it took years before new members started participating in anyway that wasn't completely passive.

But if they did become experts on how the group did things immediately that usually meant they were close to one of the cliques or factions in the group and were being recruited to benefit them, or in the rare case they were totally new they were one of those hyper determined alpha types that were actively gunning for a position of influence and leadership.

And of course by making these things "official" a consequence of this usually is that it stymies and even punishes spontaneous actions and self activity.

"Personal fall-outs often result in people leaving the group."
Well, yes but that isn't related at all to group compositions, its an unfortunate result of human relationships breaking down, it happens in every group and organisational system ever devised. I don't want to be flippant but the only alternative to this is building some mechanism to control and police the membership, which strikes me as much worse than respecting the wishes of individuals to associate and disassociate as they see fit.

"* Lack of clearer structures and division of labour (minutes, clearer time-line of decision making) also often means that people with less time (due to work, parenthood etc.) have less say"

on paper maybe, but in practice these things can easily balloon and takeover meetings as a sort of formalised ritual and provide ammunition for clique infighting and factional rifts, which meant that discussion groups lasted for hours effectively freezing out members with other commitments.

"* All this in turn also results - due to some kind of unconscious self-limitation - in informal groups rarely exceeding 20 - 30 people size, as a much larger group would need more distinct levels of engagement etc. and an 'open display'"

Funny thing, most of the formal groups I belonged to had local memberships in the hundreds, attendance of any of our events and meetings was at best 20 and most of those were the same people, and if you read histories of the big labouring organisations this is a common phenomenon that dates back over a hundred years.

You seem to have juxtaposed your experiences with an imagined perfect new form, there are autonomous and loose groups that have managed to avoid or deal with most of the issues that plague the others, so I suppose their are examples of the other kind working great, though every example I've seen of that supposedly happening was either from a propagandist for the group or just one disgruntled ex-member leak away from exposing that they're actually very dysfunctional and prone to all the usual bottlenecks and flaws after all.

AngryWorkersWorld

*** I don't really understand the first sentence. Do you refer to the idea of a 'transitional phase' which is primarily marked by a reduction of working time and generalisation of socially necessary labour? Do you mean that the idea of the three (separated) class segments which might play a significant role is not helpful or correct? For us these two thoughts are at the centre of the text, but so far all the other 'triggers' seem to have prevented really discussing them.

I really have no position on a "transitional phase" -- until that becomes a question of material concern. Not that it isn't important, nor has it been ignored. My comrades and I have thought a lot about it. But I do cleave towards the arguments that some of our ultra-left mutual comrades have been making since the early 1970s, mostly in France.

I think this is the best summary:

[quote=Dauvé]The idea is fairly simple, but simplicity is often one of the most difficult goals to achieve. It means that a revolution is only communist if it changes all social relationships into communist relationships, and this can only be done if the process starts in the very early days of the revolutionary upheaval. Money, wage-labour, the enterprise as a separate unit and a value-accumulating pole, work-time as cut off from the rest of our life, production for value, private property, State agencies as mediators of social life and conflicts, the separation between learning and doing, the quest for maximum and fastest circulation of everything, all of these have to be done away with, and not just be run by collectives or turned over to public ownership: they have to be replaced by communal, moneyless, profitless, Stateless, forms of life. The process will take time to be completed, but it will start at the beginning of the revolution, which will not create the preconditions of communism: it will create communism.[/quote]

How will we do this? When we get there, we'll have to decide. It won't be easy, nor will it follow a prescriptive formula.

AngryWorkersWorld

***There is no class program without a class subject.

"Class subjects" aren't just conjured up out of our imaginations. They come out of material reality, as a process.

As someone pointed out earlier in this thread, an excellent text to situate ourselves as class subjects is Chapter 4 "The Proletariat as Subject and Representation" in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (reading Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike is highly advisable as well). Our analysis begins with the death of all previous revolutionary traditions, and the very few revolutionaries that remain, scattered, ineffectual and weak as we are, must elaborate a body of analysis of class struggle where it presently exists and based on that, with other communist internationalists, begin to make a contribution to the reconstitution of revolutionary theory.

And that theory must be generated in the practice of our class.

E.P. Thompson

. . . it has become very clear in recent years that class as a static category has taken up occupation within very influential sectors of Marxist thought as well. In vulgar economistic terms this is simply the twin to positivistic sociological theory. From a static model of capitalist productive relations there are derived the classes that ought to correspond to this, and the consciousness that ought to correspond to the classes and their relative positions. In one common (usually Leninist) form this provides a ready justification for the politics of 'substitution': i.e. the 'vanguard' which knows better than the class itself what its true interests (and consciousness) ought to be. If 'it' does not happen to have that consciousness, then whatever it has is 'false consciousness'.

But this is the more relevant part:

E.P. Thompson

To put it bluntly: classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process. [emphasis mine -- H.]

(from “Eighteenth-century English society: Class struggle without class?”, Social History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (May 1978), Chapter IV, pp. 147-149)

So if one agrees with Thompson, as I do, we begin the process with struggle.

AngryWorkersWorld

"Addressing systemic racism in the U.S., from a class perspective, is the Gordian knot of opening up revolutionary possibilities."

Agreed. Interested to hear more on how you think this is possible. What do you think about STOs position? ('the left choses those issues in workplaces that can create quick unity amongst black and white workers, we should chose those topics that would require white workers to question their privilege') - which sounds very 'consciousness comes before struggle' to me.

Sounds like a prescriptive formula to me. STO described themselves as "unorthodox Leninists," so their ideology is obviously vanguardist.

I found the first-hand accounts of the black workers in the Johnson-Forest orbit more compelling. Like Si Owens, author of Indignant Heart (under pseudonyms Matthew Ward and Charles Denby), Jimmy Boggs, before he and Grace Lee took a black nationalist turn, and John Allen. John personally told me a story of meeting Paul Mattick for a Capital study group in the back of a bar in Chicago when he was a teenager. They were kids, who could never remember Mattick's name, but said he had a thick German accent, so they just called him "Karl Marx." John also regaled me with stories of collaborating with CLR James.

There were some interesting stories about the struggles of STO, but something about their approach always seemed cultlike to me.

Who's gonna attempt a coup?

[quote=Judith Shulevitz]This September, Michael Anton, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration, published an essay called “The Coming Coup?” in The American Mind in which he warned, Anton

“We now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup.”

In the Democratic putsch, Biden would refuse to concede his loss, harvested ballots would show up in tipping-point states, and fights would break out in the streets.[/quote]