“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language…. The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase.” Karl Marx - 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The above quote is just as integral to revolutionary struggle in the 21st century as it was for France in 1852. Across the vast human topography of class society, clear lines are being drawn between those who parody and fetishize the movements of dead generations in order to dominate the movements of today, and those who seek to expand forms of praxis and theory created in the current cycle of struggle, through the self-directed struggle of workers and students themselves.
After several weeks of smears, ad hominem attacks and political diatribes, the conversation surrounding the events of March 4th has finally shifted to the terrain of tactics and ideology. The small segment of humanity actually paying attention to this debate has been gifted with lapidary critiques of Anarcho-Imperialism, Anarcho-Situ-Autonomism, Demand-Nothingism, and dangerous, “anger-based” Anarcha-Feminism. While these critiques are coming from various activist quarters, they all focus their attention on the supposed Take The City “Organization.” Each of these critiques (even if accurate) could land only a glancing blow, because the people who comprise their opposition are neither a party, nor an association nor even a website. In fact, the alleged saboteurs of March 4th, the occupiers of last April, the self-proclaimed “bitches,” the militant feminists, and many others are merely tendencies within a larger, informal network. This group has no party-line, no hierarchical structure and little theoretical unity. The only thing that unites us is camaraderie and solidarity on the one hand and an understanding of direct action and self-organization on the other. The following is a partial critique, by one tendency within this group, of the tactical and theoretical composition of what has been called the ‘student movement’.
Can a couple hundred students at an outdoor rally at Hunter be considered a movement? Can six or seven hundred people standing in a Midtown police pen be considered a movement? The reason the NYC ‘student movement’ must be put in quotations is because the label is largely self-flattery. We hope to show below that the tactics of the coalition of movement-builders are, at best, unhelpful to the development of a strong and vital movement and, at worst, preventative of one.
The Movement-Builders
As far as we can tell, the coalition of movement-builders (hereafter abbreviated CoMB), consists of assorted Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists (MLM), anarchists, and radical liberals. While their ideologies are diverse, the CoMB insist that the student movement requires leadership, transparency, clearly-defined goals, and democracy. Their ultimate criterion is quantitative: numbers of protesters, numbers of rallies, numbers of newspapers sold, numbers of endorsements, ratios of disadvantaged to privileged, dollars of damages, etc. They privilege form over content, while largely ignoring the qualitative aspects of collective action and its potential for a revolutionary trajectory. As for the various Leninists, their idealist conceptions of the ‘necessary’ forms of struggle are a-historical caricatures that suit their ideological hang-ups. They would superimpose patterns of revolutionary struggle borne against a Czarist regime almost a century ago onto the decadent capitalism that exists today in New York City.
The CoMB’s elevation of ideal structures and concepts results, at best, in call for a rally or demo with large numbers – at worst, in full-on counterrevolutionary policing of the movement. Leadership of the CoMB kind can just as easily manipulate and suppress as it can do any “good”. The formal preoccupation with transparency, which for many in the CoMB is just a call for democratic-centralism, has the potential to undermine more militant and forward-thinking action, especially in an epoch of growing state repression. The insistence on defining goals often forces people to think within the realm of reform, thereby legitimating bankrupt power in a time of crisis when militancy and direct action are crucial. The fetishization of formal democracy (especially in an environment dominated by ‘experienced organizers’) can undermine autonomous endeavors that may point to novel and potentially effective forms of struggle. And yet, these abstract ideals are accepted without question within the CoMB. We believe that, as always, self-organized workers, students, and the unemployed -- in solidarity with one another -- will figure out these issues through the course of struggle itself, through their own successes and failures.
In focusing on quantitative criteria as the sine qua non of effective action, the CoMB tow the same line as bourgeois politicians, social scientists and statisticians, and miss the real point. What is far more important than the question of “how many” is the question of “how”: How are these actions manifesting the antagonisms of class society? How is this activity building the preconditions for greater collective action? How are these modes of struggle confronting real material and social needs? How are they contributing to a new repertoire of tactics that address the unique conditions of this era? These lead to other questions: What good is an enormous rally if everyone feels less powerful once it’s over? When does “movement building” actually build movement as opposed to suppressing it? If we apply a critical reading of history, we can see that in many instances more people have been mobilized far more quickly and passionately through collective militant action than through teach-ins, rallies, panel discussions and newspaper articles. The recent uprisings in California are a good example of this.
The whole notion that workers and students need a vanguard (whether consisting of liberal activists, Leninists or other politicians) to lead them is as bankrupt today as it was a century ago. Just as capital constantly rips from workers the rich human content of their work and debases their autonomy in order to devalue their labor, so do the ‘movement specialists’ attempt to alienate them from the creation of self-directed forms of resistance. Part of the reason why so much of the CoMB rhetoric falls on deaf ears is that they demand a discipline and vacuity that is just as easily found behind a cash register or in a factory. Furthermore, the idea that struggles against the imposition of austerity by capital and the state can be fought using standard activist means is absurd. Today, any movement that seeks an end to exploitation and oppression cannot resort to the strategies of its enemies (nor the strategies that its enemies encourage and/or fund), but must transcend the ideas and tactics of dead generations.
On Occupationism
Occupation, as a particular tactic, has become such a frequent topic of conversation in recent time only because it has resonated highly with workers and students across the country. People tend to forget that student occupiers’ inspiration came directly from workers in Chicago who occupied their factory in December of 2008 against the theft of their pay. Soon after the New School and NYU occupations, the students and non-students involved were heading regularly up to the Bronx to reciprocate the support of the Stella D’Oro strikers on their picket lines, and offer support for the potential occupation that the workers were considering. Today poor and homeless people are “occupying” empty land, foreclosed homes, and warehoused properties. So much for occupation as the ‘fetishized’ plaything of privileged elites!
Part of the reason for the resurgence of occupation – and land takeovers more generally – are the particular necessities that it addresses. Not merely a means or an end, an occupation or a land takeover becomes a venue for transforming the use of space for self-directed activity, and forging new bonds of material solidarity. It directly addresses the contradictions of a class society in which privatized space lays empty while public common space is closed and policed, and homelessness surges alongside a startling swell in home foreclosures and warehoused condos. By seizing space and holding it hostage from those who would control it, occupation creates a venue for collective action on a greater scale and can also significantly disrupt the normal functioning of institutions. Workers, students, and the homeless effectively put this form of direct action back on the table in the United States, where it has become the most notable feature of recent mass struggle.
We have seen many caricatures of our notions of effective action over the last week. The most common one appears to hold that our minimum program is heckling activists at rallies and our maximum program is a fetishized type of “occupationism” to be imposed upon passive, unsuspecting people of color. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The frustration evidenced on March 4th was a direct reaction to the opportunistic and unimaginative behavior of the “leadership” of the Hunter “movement.” The scene on the 3rd floor of Hunter West was tense, but liberatory. Students, who had been treated on a good day as mere consumers and on a bad day as potential criminals, were up in the Vice President of Student Services’ face giving him hell for the cuts and the turnstiles. Hundreds chanted, “Whose school? Our school!” laying collective claim to the space of the institution, a radical gesture when surrounded by security and cops. And yet, nobody had been arrested and nobody had been hurt. It was a moment of possibility and solidarity. Still, some element within the demo decided to do the cops, security, and the Hunter administration a favor by helping them to move the indoor demo outside.
As for our supposed obsession with occupation, this is completely false. We are highly active in many struggles and employ many diverse tactics: tendencies within our informal group have recently been active in grassroots unionization at their workplaces, education campaigns with prisoners, free childcare in poor neighborhoods, solidarity actions with industrial workers and organizations for the homeless, militant protection of women’s reproductive rights, organizational networking across CUNY/SUNY – the list goes on. In our experience, people don’t want to be controlled, whether by cops, bosses, or radicals. Furthermore, what people do when they organize themselves and network through lines of solidarity is infinitely more powerful than when orders are sent down from above through a chain of command.
Poetry from the Past
If, in previous critiques, special attention has been paid to the International Socialist Organization, it is because (no offense to Freedom Road or the Spartacus League) they represent perhaps the loudest and most visible activist group on Hunter’s campus. Indeed, among the CoMB, the ISO is most representative of the failed tactics and bankrupt ideologies that plague campus activism in NYC and across the country. An examination of their words and deeds shows why. With its intellectual roots in the Trotskyist faction of the Bolshevik Left, this group was birthed out of the many factional splits that characterized the post-WWII political landscape. The group that is now called the ISO practiced industrial ‘entryism,’ whereby party militants would gain employment in factories in order to recruit and spread “revolutionary consciousness” to the “masses” on the shop floor and through the union structure. After the failures of the international revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and 70s, the ISO shifted its attention to college campuses. Today, this group retains its hierarchical, democratic-centralist structure, its rigid adherence to party dogma, its opportunism and entryist tactics. Most importantly, they seek to control self-organized student movements by stacking working committees with ISO members. Their goal is to turn every instance of struggle into either an ISO front-group and recruiting center, and/or a base from which to disseminate their Socialist Worker newspaper. Still, ISO membership is a virtual revolving door, with astonishing turnover rates.
From the ISO’s “New Members Study Packet”:
“We need socialists in every workplace to agitate around fightbacks on the shop floor. We need socialists in every neighborhood to take up the questions of housing, police violence, health care, and everything else that comes up. We need students to agitate on college campuses. We need socialists in every corner of society inhabited by working people, and we need these socialists working nonstop–organizing struggle and carrying on political discussions.”
It has not historically been “the socialists” who agitate, organize, revolt, strike back, and fight, but the people themselves! Nor should any one group set the agenda for struggle. By co-opting self-directed campaigns (a recent issue of Socialist Worker featured a picture from the April New School occupation on its cover, an event they had nothing to do with) the ISO have a deleterious effect on any broad-based struggle, despite their disingenuous calls for a “democratic movement.” They dominate discourse and push actions in their desired direction wherever they can. They believe in leadership that speaks for others (a recent ISO article on the Black Liberation movement of the 1960s is entitled “Speaking for the Oppressed”). Those who tread on their turf or attempt to critique the ISO are accused of sectarianism and red-baiting, or accused of trying to “control” the same movement that the ISO itself seeks to manage. Some of this behavior may sound familiar to those who have followed the particular shit-storm around March 4th, but it is absolutely routine for the ISO.
The purpose of the above is not to simply belittle a tiny groupuscule of well-meaning but deeply misguided activists, it is to point out the important problems we are facing in NYC and the US as these groups scramble to gain footing in and control over growing movements. Individuals and organizations, whether Trot, MLM or liberal, will continue to describe their fearful, reactionary, self-important behavior as “real leadership” and “movement-building”. This behavior is not only disempowering, but also detrimental to struggle itself.
Besides being opportunistic, centralist vanguardism tends to be highly conservative and elitist. If we look at this historically, it is clear that the ‘disorganized masses’ have often placed the limits of struggle far beyond their supposed ‘representatives’: before the Russian Revolution, an outburst of women and, later, soldiers took the streets but were met with hesitation by the Bolshevik Central Committee, the ‘vanguard of the revolution’, who put the breaks on the workers’ upsurge; In 1917, when the revolution arrived, the Lenin and the Bolsheviks took the opportunity to “lead”, and while the Russian workers’ councils and peasant communes took direct control of over production, the Bolsheviks soon subsumed them under the bureaucratic state; In 1936, workers’ militias and farmers’ collectives abolished private property in much of Spain until the Stalinists, and later the fascists, reimposed it; in 1968, the Communist Party sat on its hands in shock as French students and workers initiated the largest wildcat general strike in history, pushing capitalism to its brink. The stakes are certainly smaller today in this period of crisis and working class retrenchment, but why should we imagine that these processes should play out differently now? Why should we subordinate diverse struggles to a party line or sacrifice them for the greater good of a “movement” that hardly even exists?
Dead Strategies
The CoMB are not merely conservative and reformist, they are stuck in another era, employing anachronistic strategies and utilizing hackneyed concepts. This is unsurprising. The tactical repertoire of the so-called Left is always the product of dead or dying struggles; they are always fighting yesterday’s battles. These specialists in struggle turn what should be dynamic and fluid into something monolithic and sclerotic. In these ways, they act as an actual barrier to contemporary struggle.
The organically produced strategies and theses of yesteryear always become idealized when those struggles fail. Again, there are many examples of this: Jacobinism out of the political struggles of the French Revolution; Blanquism out of the Paris Commune; Leninism, Trotskyism and Stalinism out of the Bolshevik Revolution; Councilism out of the Sparticist Uprising; Syndicalism out of the C.G.T. and the Spanish Civil War; Maoism out of the Chinese Revolution; Situationism out of May 68; Focoism out of the Latin American struggles of the 50s and 60s; Insurrectionism and Autonomism out of Southern Europe in the 60s and 70s; ad infinitum. It is exactly when the tactics and ideologies born of these struggles cease to be operative in praxis that they become dogma; that is to say, when they risk being used by self-styled “leaders” to force “the masses” into their preferred mold.
Every generation discovers, out of necessity, new modes of practice within new conditions. Then, through struggle itself, they construct suitable analyses unique to their times. In this vein, we realize occupations might one day cease to be an important process and become idealized into “Occupationism.” Regardless, all those interested in the universal emancipation of humanity from exploitation, war and division should be focused on the conditions of the present and the potentials of the future. This is not to say that the past has nothing to teach us: it is crucial to study the successes and failures of dead generations. However, raising the theories and modes of practice born of any particular revolutionary situation – whether in the US, Russia, China or Algeria – to the level of dogma is counterproductive and self-defeating.
The Vital Present
Despite the rhetoric of CoMB, militant workers and students in California and NYC are not a “danger to the movement.” These people are involved in some of the most vital and powerful aspects of class struggle. Whatever their flaws, two recent actions – the attempted appropriation of an abandoned bank building in San Francisco and the takeover of a major freeway in Oakland – point towards some exciting possibilities. The real solidarities that have been created across the country by countless students, workers, homeless, jobless, landless peoples have the potential to constitute something powerful and new. Perhaps the time will come when activists screaming at a few weary bystanders to “fight, fight fight!” will cause them to rise up and take back their lives. Perhaps someday selling newspapers to students will actually create a revolutionary force. Perhaps someday appealing to a bourgeois political leader will actually win a higher level of equality and freedom for the working class as a whole.
We say: not likely.
This much we do know: nobody can predict the precise forms that struggle will take amidst this most recent crisis of capital. We can engage in battles on the ground and support those who need support. We can propose actions within movements that could lead to more powerful instances of collective action. We can seek to connect various struggles through affiliation, propaganda and analysis. We can continue to read and talk and understand the system that is killing us. We can all do much, much more than we have been doing. But crucial to this enterprise is confronting and marginalizing those who would use their power to co-opt self-organization and place the supposed “needs” of the “movement” above the revolutionary impulses of the people, while subordinating a range of actions by diverse groups of people -- the whole of which is what constitutes a movement that is real and vital -- to hierarchical management and anachronistic forms of struggle.
We say that the revolution of the 21st century must let the dead bury their dead: so let’s get on with it.
POSTSCRIPT:
The following readings highlight the historically-specific nature of tactics and struggle, and/or provide a history which reveals that anachronistic or hierarchical organizing has a tendency to suppress real revolutionary actions taken by exploited people, who often happen to be women and/or "unorganized" workers and poor.
Martha Ackelsberg - The Free Women of Spain
Maurice Brinton - Bolsheviks and Workers' Control (libcom.org/library/the-bolsheviks-and-workers-control-solidarity-group)
Gilles Dauve – Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement (libcom.org/library/eclipse-re-emergence-communist-movement)
Endnotes - Endnotes I (endnotes.org.uk)
William Henry Chaimberlin – The Russian Revolution
Herman Gorter - Open Letter to Comrade Lenin (libcom.org/library/open-letter-to-comrade-lenin-gorter)
Paul Mattick - Anti-Bolshevik Communism in Germany (marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1947/germany.htm)
Maria Mies - Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia
Comments
Quote: transparency,
If you're against clearly defined goals and you can't think of any that aren't "within the realm of reform" then you don't know what you're doing... Being against transparency and democracy as the CoMB define them might be OK but it will eventually become an excuse for informal leadership cliques.
totally agreed. i wish they
totally agreed. i wish they focused more on the CoMB like 888 says above. otherwise this piece can seem like an attack on a lot of common sense things that anarchists espouse.
a pretty good critique that
a pretty good critique that rings a lot of bells with the experience at Sussex Uni... but i sense some Endnotes fans and this bit jumped out as fatalistic/anti-organisational dogma:
i think the point rests on a false opposition between "the people" and politically conscious workers which falls back on a spontaneist idea that stuff just happens, when the reality is it's often (but not always) the politicised/radical workers that are amongst those doing the agitation, organising etc - being only informally organised doesn't change that. organised (counter-)revolutionaries have played a major part in various revolutionary uprisings, arguably to the extent that the most organised have been the most influential (Bolsheviks/Russia, CNT/Spain), and uprisings without significant organisation have tended to dissipate as quickly as they emerged (Mai '68). since Spain is cited favourably, it should be obvious that libertarian organisation is not mutually exclusive to 'by the workers themselves' (since after all, we are workers too. i'm with Joe Hill on 'the people').
i don't think the quote chosen really captures what's wrong with leftism, indeed if it was anarchists saying "We need anarchists in every workplace to agitate around fightbacks on the shop floor. We need anarchists in every neighborhood to take up the questions of housing, police violence, health care, and everything else that comes up. We need students to agitate on college campuses. We need anarchists in every corner of society inhabited by working people, and we need these anarchists working nonstop–organizing struggle and carrying on political discussions." - then i'd basically agree with it apart from the burnout/work-ethic last sentence. it doesn't imply that these things won't happen if anarchists don't do them, only that if we do then they're more likely to take a libertarian direction.
obviously the problem with the quote is what they don't say; that these activities are done to build the party off the back of workers struggles, which need to be channeled into safe outlets (such as official union structures) so that the party can make the political revolution at some unspecified point in the future, taking power off the back of working class insurrection. thus they need to police militancy to maintain control (the Leninists are prefigurative too!). the problem's with Leninism, not organisation, and it's a mistake to conflate the two imho. in fact arguably the reason the Trots are always in control and the anarchists perpetual critics is precisely the prevailing anti-organisationalism/informal organisation fetish amongst many anarchists.
Joseph Kay wrote: precisely
Joseph Kay
This fancifully extends the boundaries of the concept of fetishism to include its near opposite (although fetishism in fact has no true opposite) and thereby creates a fetish of the term itself.
A fetish is a sort of black box, its function is to mediate decisions on activities within an established set of relations. Thus, if a person keeps the image of a little household god in their front room and requires objective or disinterested decisions to be made over various options that have arisen in their personal life and they feed these options through the filter of the icon asking for judgements which are invariably and magically forthcoming then this process/relation can accurately be called ‘fetishism’ (I draw no hostile conclusion on that procedure for making decisions). However, if another person does not have a little household god in their front room and makes no reference to gods in their decisionmaking then this cannot honestly be called ‘fetishism’.
There has recently developed a tendency amongst ‘believers’, i.e. habitual users of fetishes/black boxes, to claim that those who do not believe are the real fanatics (in other words, fetishists). Non-belief or scepticism is transformed within these arguments into unbending intolerance. The above quote is an example of this tendency.
The scepticism of many concerning the claims of specific organisations is not in fact ‘fetishism’ but rather a lived outcome of the claims and practices of those organisations. That is to say, many people have found that they can make decisions in their lives without reference to the iconography/bureaucracy of such organisations and therefore have no use for their mediations.
Fetishism exists where procedures and structures are pursued but where they cannot be internally tested or falsified. Scepticism and indifference concerning the claims of pro-revolutionary organisations is lived through the non-participation of huge numbers of people in those organisations... but this outcome, i.e. the failure of the masses to become a membership of the organisation, is ‘external’ and has no effect on the organisation’s own assessment of its performance. In fact failure often reinforces the organisation’s sense of its own veracity, it thereby rationalises its external disconnection from the masses by various means (one of them being to blame others, i.e. those non-existent ‘spontenietists’ who are made to insist on something coming from nothing).
Again, I make no judgement on all this but it is much more accurate to identify fetishism as a component of pro-revolutionary organisations than of the practices of those who are not members of such organisations. It is interesting though, that this fetishism cannot be admitted, that somehow it is a shameful thing – no pro-revolutionary group would openly admit to using a black-box/little god to mediate its continued presence but why not? It is impossible to even countenance this line of enquiry. Therefore, we must infer that for a fetish to work, it has to remain unexamined (hidden). And yet, pro-revolutionary practice at its heart is the bringing into the light interpellated practices and hidden forces. What is to be done about this contradiction? If a group, such as Solidarity Federation, were to confront the fetishism at the heart of its project, how would it go about it?
Firstly, it must identify the fetish. This is easy enough, all that is needed is to correlate (a)the length of time an organisation has existed, (b)its claims concerning social transformation and (c)its current membership. Objectively, if an anarcho-syndicalist organisation such as Solidarity Federation still only has about a hundred members after 20 years then it has failed and therefore should disband. The fact that it doesn’t disband, despite its dysfunction, reveals the work of the fetish at its core. There must be something, something irrational and even sacred, which pushes the continued existence of the structure despite its ostensible failure to achieve its stated aims. We have therefore identified the work of a fetish but how may we proceed to illuminate its character? How may we examine its function?
In all examples, in order to challenge the mediations of the fetish, the pro-revolutionary group must increase the proportion of rationality in its decisionmaking procedures, and this process of regulation must contain a dissolution option alongside an awareness of a structural preference not to de-structure (the tendency to keep calm and carry on. Practically, the isolation of the fetish would require a controlled experiment in which the environment in which it flourishes is suspended... for example, if Solidarity Federation suspended its activities for 1 year, allowing its membership free rein we would be able to examine whether this would have a negative or positive effect on the rate of activity of those members.
My hypothesis is that the members of the suspended organisation would greatly increase both the rate and quality of their activities because they would no longer have to feed their interventions through a mediating mechanism for approval and they would no longer have to divert their energies onto ‘building’ the organisation but would be free to move forward into developing their own practices and relations. After a year it would be possible to evaluate the effects of the sabbatical/interregnum/hiatus etc. and consider whether it might be worth reforming the group... after a year a falling away in activities might be identified as isolation and lack of mediation develop into a feedback loop. Many traditional societies use this sort of dispersal/banding together mechanism via festival in order to increase the range of human activities within their relations and to regulate the counter tendencies of dissolution/over-management.
Of course, it is highly unlikely that Solidarity Federation or any other established pro-revolutionary organisation will ever get to the stage where it could rationally consider its own self-dissolution... and this not ever getting to the stage of against a background of wider irrelevance and failure is precisely the work of the fetish. Again, I can see that this might seem like I am hostile to fetishism which I am not (although I am in favour of the complete abolition of commodity fetishism). All human relations are subject to sequential compression and the resulting iconographic units have a tendency to become autonomised within discourses... communist theory must accept in general this limit to bringing into consciousness of unconscious and received practices (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, or rather, there is a practical limit to ‘over-interpretation’) although in each and every specific case critique must work ceaselessly to illuminate and thereby release fetishes.
the failings or otherwise of
the failings or otherwise of actually existing or all even concieveable organisations aside, you can still fetishise informal organisation as a belief, imbuing certain forms with properties which are in fact the consequence of concrete human actions, which was the point.
Joseph Kay wrote: the
Joseph Kay
Well, I think the point (of the original post) concerned the specific fetish of movement builders. But your point is also (I think) valid to the extent that you can demonstrate both that non-involvement within specific organisations is the result of 'fetishism' (rather than genuine critique) and that this approach is derived from a specific denial of concrete human actions being the base of human existence (which is what you allege). It could just be that you have invented fetish-based 'spontaneity' without evidence for its existence, which begs the question why? Also, if your concern is primarily with fetishism why is it that other people's irrationalities are of more concern to you than your own?
fort-da game wrote: It could
fort-da game
there's far too much insurrectionist theory making a fetish of informality for me to need to invent it
fort-da game
the kind if organising i'm interested in is a concrete practice. organisation is a process, not a thing. when it's reified that's a problem, and organisation ceased to be a practice and becomes a fetish..
Joseph Kay wrote: fort-da
Joseph Kay
Perhaps, I did not realise that was your target and you still present no evidence. S. Keil does not self-identify as an insurrectionist.
fort-da game
Joseph Kay
OK, this is where I find your approach most concerning. The concept of organisation as a process is precisely my definition of a fetish. Surely, organisation is a lived relationship? The processing/autonomising aspect of this relationship would be exactly the element that must be most closely regulated as it has a tendency towards 'runaway' (given that the capital accumulated by an organisation is stored in its processing/automatic functions). I am surprised that you emphasise process and do not reflect upon it.
To further illustrate the problem, if we return to an earlier comment of yours (with the proviso that like you, I am squeamish about the term ‘The People’ as it has no objective reality as a subject):
This is a strangely individualist/moralist representation of ‘works’ and activities undertaken by ‘radical’ workers and militants. I don’t want to get into a ‘for want of a nail the nation was lost’ set of recursions but an overly positive emphasis on the organising activities of radicals skews the analysis and evaluation of those who are not ‘radicals’. It thoroughly and systematically separates the role of organisers from the organised... It is the type of approach which also tends within anarchist thought to a runaway of misanthropy directed at those not in revolt.
In my opinion, attention should be directed to larger sets of relations rather than privileging isolated functions within that relation... To expand on this: Firstly, it is not at all apparent that it is the role of ‘organisers’ that ever proves decisive (they may well have a necessary function) because if it were not for the mere organised, there would be no organisation. Secondly, it is not for self-identified ‘organisers’ or 'radicals' to self-select the significance of their own contribution to the struggle, it is quite likely (as I think you somewhat contradictorily suggest) that it will be capital which will force the most decisive moves during a crisis. In other words, it is and will be capital that organises the working class.
This is not to mention the embedded or co-dependent nature of much of militant psychology in relation to the company.
Communism is not a fetish of some process prefigured by militantism but the progressive release of the reproductive circuits of fetishised relations... this release from set patterns of relations in itself might depend on a tactical by-passing of the role of ‘radical workers’.
Is there a way to convert
Is there a way to convert this into a library article? I can't figure it out so I'm assuming I don't have those powers.
I have some sympathy with
I have some sympathy with fort-da games take on the self-delusional aspect of much (but not all) of the routine nature of activity by todays tiny pro-revolutionary groups.
I expressed some skepticism on a separate thread about one particular Solfed activity which I engaged in myself (namely an information 'picket' of an agency supplying scab labour). An activity of some limited value, but not politically distinguisable as pro-revolutionary let alone specifically anarchosyndicalist.
It seems to me that some of these activities are not necessarily in themselves a waste of time but rather that they tend to be invested with a significance and importance that they don't normally possess. They often seem to be selected and organised by members of such groups more as a means of self justification and self-promotion of their particular brand of pro-revolutionary ideology in competition with others in the broader politics of the left than as an effective means of practical solidarity.
Having said that my own experience suggests that Joseph is probably right, up to a point, in suggesting that it is 'radicalised' workers, at least including those from a variety of existing organisations, that are critical in moving many strikes, occupations and other struggles forward. In other words a mix of formal and informal organisation with a flow between the two.
It's hard to believe this was
It's hard to believe this was written less than two years ago, so much has happened since then. It feels like ages ago!
As one of the principal authors of this text (formerly S Keil) I feel somewhat ambiguous about it in retrospect. The context was a really nasty episode for which blame should be placed on many parties, my friends and I included. This resulted in what we now laughingly call The Shitstorm: a concerted attack by many different political elements that utilized some really sleazy tactics (a la Suzy Subway) and racially charged rhetoric (Hunter ISO, Kasama, et al.) I never did take kindly to be called an Anarcho-Imperialist and if this piece reads as overly defensive that's because it was.
I am not now, nor have I ever been an insurrectionist, but folks are right to critique a wrong-headed belief in the 'spontaneity' of particular historical struggles. This was written in the midst of some damning personal critiques by organized leftist groups desperately trying to hold on to their power within student activist circles. This goes some way in explaining why we may have bent the stick too far in a 'pluralistic self-organization' direction.
Ironically, the people with whom I wrote this text turned around soon thereafter and not only scuttled the tenuous unity of the group that we described above, but violently attacked (or supported the attack of) a comrade with baseball bats in a thinly-veiled political power play. Ultimately, this was the result of a naive belief that a small network of militants could overcome the political differences within and without their group through direct action alone. We were excited and active back then, but very isolated and frustrated with the lack of a US response to the financial crisis. March 4th and its aftermath actually showed that 'self-organization' as we understood it was a justification for our collective failure to actually organize ourselves into a coherent, outward-looking group with clear aims and principles. Looking back on it, this was a great lesson on the importance of 'doing politics'.
Still, I think there is still some relevant material in this text. Our defense of the tactic of occupation comes off as pretty prescient given all the OWS stuff over the last few months. I believe even more now that we need to be flexible and non-dogmatic in terms of organizational forms and tactics. I still think the role of communists should pretty much look like this,
And, yeah, this kind of organizing was crucial to the historical episodes we described, especially Spain in '36. So the comments above are spot on in that respect. It is not organized groups per se that 'hold back movements', but the specific type of organizing that the CoMB adhere to.
We have something now in the US that can almost be described as an actual social movement. Of course, the CoMB are still powerful and still around, so maybe this particular text still has some small use.
Schwarz; like i said in my
Schwarz; like i said in my original response, i found this useful and it resonated with a lot of my experiences in the student movement here. my criticism wasn't that it was wrong, so much that the baby went out with the bathwater. on the 'insurrectionist' thing, wasn't aiming to mislable you. a mish-mash of Endnotes-esque communisation theory and insurrectionary communist stuff a la Tiqqun via OccupyCA was pretty popular in the student occupations/movement here at the time, so i guess i saw some similarities and projected that label onto the piece above. obviously Endnotes aren't insurrectionists either, so was sloppy labelling on my part.
Spikymike: For something to be self-delusional, the participants have to think they were doing something other than what they were doing. The Adecco pickets were more or less informational pickets in solidarity with a strike, and a demonstration to Adecco of a potential for nationwide mobilisation. i don't think anyone thought it was any more than that. there's some scope for escalation tactics, although the workers in Cordoba are in quite a weak position having been sacked while striking and already replaced, more or less. Potentially, disrupting Adecco could impact that, though i think we're taking our lead from the strikers somewhat regarding tactics.
I think you're right in terms of "a mix of formal and informal organisation with a flow between the two". i mean, all human groups are criss-crossed with informal social ties, some hierarchic, some more horizontal. there is always-already informal organisation wherever there's a group of people. everyone has friends, associates, acquaintances and so on, and even amongst strangers informal relations arise almost immediately as soon as they interact. i think a common problem though is assuming there's anything inherently subversive in informality (not saying you do that here). informal groups are often the boss' network of grasses, or the means by which conservative peer pressure is applied, or cliques which divide the workforce. management schools train future bosses to identify these informal groups and co-opt them into the management structure (e.g. bribing/promoting influential social leaders). sure, such groups can also be the basis of activity we'd favour (autonomous struggle etc), but this is easily overstated and i think celebrating small examples of it is often making a virtue of weakness. there's always informal organisation, the issue then becomes with or without formal organisation.
i suspect a lot of the problems come as a result of the pervasive slave morality of the left, which carries over into its left-wing critics. the left has long since accepted its role as official opposition and abandoned any pretence of pursuing revolutionary social change. Rather it pushes party politics and trade unions and generally seeks to channel any and all struggles into one or both of these cul-de-sacs (no argument here, i suspect!). the ultra-left then takes one step to the left and criticises this (and with many good reasons). but all too often the baby is thrown out with the bathwater and it's concluded that because the left is highly organised, has strategies, organises stuff, recruits people, is (relatively) powerful, is visible and so on that all these things are in themselves bad (obviously they can be, but aren't necessarily so). so the slave morality is preserved, only rather than the eternal opposition, this iteration is the opposition to the opposition.
finally you get the handful of nihilists - who to their credit take this logic to its end - take one step further to the left and fall into the void of being the opposition to the opposition to the opposition. from this standpoint, even the weakness, inactivity, invisibility and irrelevance of the ultra-left is too much. even the loose editorial groups and web collectives making up the ultra-left milieu are too Organised and too permanent (libcom, a communist website, was recently deemed to be anti-communist and needing to disband, for instance). here, only solitary nothingness is an adequate communist practice. maybe the odd conversation is permitted, so long as it doesn't result in anything more organised than solitary nothingness. top marks to anyone who can take slave morality to the 4th order and 'critique' the nihilists as too organised/formal/permanent/visible/powerful. suicide communism anyone?
Like i say Spikymike, i know you don't subscribe to this logic, but i think trying to find some compromise with it is futile, since it's just a game of radical posturing. it's not really critique at all because it merely reproduces the prevailing slave morality and raises it a level. it should go without saying that a critical attitude to the left, our own activity and indeed more or less everything is imperative. but critique should start with a ruthless critique of slave morality. so i think for or against (formal) organisation poses the wrong question. a bit like how 'for or against technology' is the wrong question. the fact many organisations become barriers to struggle is obvious. a more pressing question is how that happens, the actual processes, whether when it's against the will or conscious wishes of the participants or as a deliberate strategy to demobilise/recuperate. this piece does shed some light on the latter, though as i suggested above, i think it misses the mark in some ways too. i think there's actually various ways this process happens, but this post is long enough already! i'll try and write something up on this when i get the chance.
Joseph Kay wrote: Schwarz;
Joseph Kay
JK: FYI, I didn't take any of the above criticisms the wrong way. In fact, the reason I felt compelled to comment is because this text has some real flaws which I was trying to contextualize (as much for myself as for others). I hadn't really thought much about these texts until Juan started archiving some of them on Libcom.
The mish-mash of ideas you describe was operative here as well, especially if you add in the eclectic absurdity that is The Coming Insurrection. Folks that I rolled with were into all of that while I was engaging with a lot of Endnotes/Dauve communisation stuff. Thankfully I never got the Tiqqun bug...
The way it broke down was pretty interesting actually. There were three university occupations in NYC in the fall of 2008 (New School, NYU, then New School again) that kind of seeded the occupy idea among some American student groups who were already working on their own things. Then, with the tuition shit in California, it really popped off at places like UC Santa Cruz, Davis and Berkeley, most of the ideas and initiatives coming from grad school types and the OccupyCA network. Various other smaller occupations popped up across the US and then California called on March 4th to be a national day of action.
So many anarchos and 'little-c' commies here assumed that the national student occupations would whipsaw back to NYC since CUNY (the city university) and SUNY (the state university) were facing cuts and tuition hikes as well. Well it didn't, for many of the reasons described in the text.
Interestingly, many of us involved in those first three occupations had kind of moved on from that type of activity. The resonance of the Occupy Wall Street stuff really came as a surprise, to me at least, because I assumed that that ship had sailed with the decline of the student revolts in 2009-10. It turns out that what was once an tactic with currency amongst a small group of university students on the East and West coasts has now reconstituted itself as a national thing, in no small part due to international struggles like the UK student stuff, the Indignados, Sygmata square, Tahrir square, etc.
The questions, "What good is an enormous rally if everyone feels less powerful once it’s over? When does 'movement building' actually build movement as opposed to suppressing it?" are still very important. As of now the Coalition of Movement Builders can be found mostly in the overlap between the Democrat/NGO/AFL-CIO complex and OWS. Much of the same rhetoric is at play. Progressive and trot types (who have trailed behind events since the get-go) are aggressively trying to 'defend the movement' by ensuring that OWS events measure up to their ideas of 'safe and effective' action. In practice that means that May Day rallies must get the approval of and be guided by Democratic Party and AFL-CIO adjuncts.
There is also the disingenuous and paternalistic rhetoric floating around about making OWS actions family-friendly and safe for the 'most vulnerable': that is, folks with legal and immigration issues, people of color. This was used by the Hunter CoMB on March 4th to great effect. Of course, some people are more at risk than others when engaging in street actions. But this fact is used by the CoMB to, on the one hand, disingenuously curb any tactics that they deem 'too radical' and, on the other hand, to paternalistically deny agency to the same people whose supposed interests they claim to be defending.
The same accusations that Chris Hedges used against radicals in Oakland ('the Black Bloc used families as human shields!'; 'think of the children!'; 'anarchists are destroying our movement!') will surely be trotted out (pun intended) if May Day turns out to be anything less tepid than the horrible NYC rally hijacked by the SEIU and their peace police on N17.
Schwarz wrote: I hadn't
Schwarz
It's been one of many libcom library projects I've been meaning to do. Actually for more than a year now, since I noticed some of the websites and blogs that hosted communiques and accounts started disappearing. I think the Occupy Everything student stuff of 2008-2010 is really important. I thought it then and think that even more so now that the Occupy movement became a big thing. While there are differences, there are so many similarities and you can see it in some of these pieces such as this one or the Anti-Capital Projects one on assemblies. I'm glad that you're still around to engage with this piece, and I hope more folks who were involved do the same with the numerous other articles I've added to the library.