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Title: (Re)Proletarian Survival Author: Joel Olson Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, anarchist history Source: 1995 Jan/Feb issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160613072520/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/61
For the first time in its six-year history, Love and Rage had a
successful conference. Of course, the conference (held in Minneapolis
from Oct. 8–10) was not free of serious problems; but, for the first
time, the Love and Rage Federation, as a membership organization:
engaged in serious political discussion, made decisions on activist
strategies based on these discussions, and chose a structure to carry
out these decisions. Not only did this conference prove that Love and
Rage (and the anarchist politics it represents) is far from dead (as
many critics have long hoped for and prematurely declared), it also
showed that our politics, as undefined as they are, have the potential
to help build and influence a mass movement.
However, the conference also did something else. Up to now, the
organization’s main goal has been its own existence. After this
conference, the challenge for Love and Rage is no longer to survive
until the next conference. We have reached the point where we must judge
Love and Rage not by comparing its present condition to its past
ineffectiveness, but by its ability to understand the world we live in,
and to play a role in changing that world. Such understandings were not
achieved in Minneapolis. However, for the first time, they were raised
and debated by the organization, and the political work we chose to do
at this conference is partly a product of these debates.
The debate over Love and Rage’s role in revolutionary struggle was
initiated by Saturday’s political discussion entitled “What is the
Federation for? Why is it floundering? Where should we go?” The main
debate was over who or what should be the focus o f Love and Rage’s
political work. Chris Day, a longtime Love and Rage member, argued that
Love and Rage should focus on organizing a particular social base for
revolution. This social base, commonly called “Generation X,” Day calls
“reproletarianized youth,” or reproles, for short.
Reproles are the twenty-something offspring of the mostly-white North
American middle class. Day argues they are potentially revolutionary
because they are the first generation of America’s middle class that
will not live better than their parents, and they know it. Instead of a
happy future of suburban housing, two cars, broken marriages, and white
privileges, reproles face a job market that is more competitive, work
that pays less and is more boring, college degrees that are nearly
useless, and a financial situation in which they will scarcely be able
to pay the interest on their credit-card debts, much less finance a
mortgage. As their class and race privileges fade, reproles are being
forced into a position where they straddle a fine line: their new class
position could tilt them toward fascism or it could radicalize them to
fight for a free world alongside other (relatively more) oppressed
groups.
Reproles are also the social base of Love and Rage: Like it or not, we
are an organization that is primarily white, primarily middle class, and
primarily in our twenty-somethings. We are a Generation X organization.
However, we are also a revolutionary Generation X organization. Day
argues that because Love and Rage’s social base is reproletarian, our
main goal as an organization should be to win over reproles to
revolutionary politics and to ally with other oppressed peoples
(especially people of color) and away from fascism. We should stop
pretending to see ourselves as representing the aspirations of the whole
of oppressed humanity, and instead acknowledge our social base and work
to revolutionize it in order to ally with other revolutionary groups.
(For a more detailed explanation of his “reprole” thesis, see the Dec.
1994 Federation Bulletin, address below.)
In contrast to Day’s position, others, such as Laura Schere and Noel
Ignatiev, argued that, while Love and Rage’s social base may be
reproletarianized youth, it is a mistake to make “revolutionizing
reproles” the purpose of the organization. Instead, we must think and
act universally: While we should openly acknowledge our present social
base and its limitations, our politics are much broader than this base,
so we shouldn’t limit ourselves to it. After all, as Schere argued,
reproles are not the only p eople who are potential anarchist
revolutionaries. What we should be fighting for is our politics; our
political consciousness (and thus our political activity) is not, and
should not be, limited to a particular social base. Day’s reprole
strategy may be a strategy for recruitment, but it is not a strategy for
political activity.
Several members at the conference, a significant number of them women,
criticized the discussion over reproles and Love and Rage’s social base
as too limited. They argued that the discussion should have been opened
up, not only to broaden the debate, b ut also to encourage greater
participation, which was primarily dominated by men (see below for more
on this). This is a valid criticism: The terms of the debate were
largely set out by Day and Ignatiev, and those who were unfamiliar or
dissatisfied with these terms could find no way to redirect the
discussion. However, the reprole issue is an important one, for it has
and will continue to determine the nature of our political work in the
future. Many of us have faced the same question in our local politi cal
work: Do we focus our work on developing a revolutionary politics and
practice that we hope will transcend the limitations of our presently
mostly white and middle-class social base, or do we, as representatives
of the revolutionary wing of our social base, concentrate on fighting
the reactionary elements within our social base (like nazi skinheads,
the Klan, etc.)?
After this discussion, the conference debated which political struggles
we should choose to focus on as an organization. As anarchists, we are
opposed to all forms of oppression. However, as a small organization, we
have a limited amount of resources. Given our desire to fight infinite
oppressions with finite resources, what are we to do? Should we attempt
to fight whatever injustice pops up at the moment and risk stretching
ourselves too thin, or should we determine the key pillars holding this
society up and then make a strategic decision on how to topple those
pillars? The unanimous decision was to choose a few areas and focus on
them. Four areas of struggle were proposed: anti-fascism, an anti-police
campaign, MĂ©xico solidarity, and prisoner support/prison abolition.
After some debate, the conference agreed to choose three of them as the
primary work of the federation: anti-fascism, MĂ©xico solidarity, and
prison work. However, the choice of which struggles to undertake was not
based so much on choosing three out of four proposals, but on the
strategy members believed was necessary to build a revolutionary
movement in the US. Essentially, the debate over our focus was about
dual power. Noel Ignatiev put forth the position that the purpose of any
revolutionary organization should be to build a dual power. A “dual
power” strategy means that our political work should be geared toward
building resistance movements that not only oppose oppression, but also
embody an alternative (i.e. a “dual power”) to t he primary institutions
of power in this society. According to Ignatiev, an anti-police campaign
(which could involve monitoring the police, videotaping their actions,
etc.) would represent a dual power because it would create direct
community intervention and alternative institutions in constant conflict
with existing law enforcement institutions. In this way, we could link
revolutionary urges (everyone hates the cops) to a revolutionary
counterpower that challenges the main pillar upholding capitalism and
white supremacy: the state and their pigs. Therefore, Ignatiev argued,
an anti-police campaign would be more effective in building a
revolutionary counterpower than an anti-fascist campaign that focused on
the racist right. He also argued that while solidarity and mutual aid
with our comrades in MĂ©xico and in prisons is essential and must not be
ignored, it is a mistake to make them a primary political strategy of
the federation.
Ignatiev’s position, however, was in the minority. Several people felt
his proposal was not necessarily revolutionary (or no more so than
supporting the Zapatistas, for example), and others argued that it is
simply unrealistic to attempt to organize a dual power: organs of dual
power come from mass movements, not small organizations like Love and
Rage. In the end, the dual power strategy lost out, as did the
anti-police campaign proposal.
Although it was never explicitly stated, the decision to establish
anti-fascist, Mexican solidarity, and prisoner solidarity/prison
abolition campaigns was a decision by the conference both to reject a
dual power strategy and to endorse a “reproletarian” analysis of our
strengths and possibilities. The strategy and tactics of the federation
now concentrate on organizing primarily white and middle-class youth
against far-right, white-supremacist organizations, and on creating
alliances with other potent ially revolutionary sectors of society
(revolutionaries in MĂ©xico and prisoners). This is evident in the
long-term goals each of the three working groups presented to the
conference after all three groups caucused.
The Anti-Fascist Working Group’s presentation focused on building an
organization that can confront fascist movements across the continent
(politically and physically) with the intention of “stealing the social
base” of fascist groups (disaffected working- and middle-class whites:
reproles) out from under them. The Mexican Solidarity Working Group
pledged to establish closer contacts with Amor y Rabia (México’s Love
and Rage member organization) and to provide material support for the
Zapatistas. It also pledged to work toward creating closer ties with
Latino communities and supporting Native sovereignty struggles in the US
and Canada. The Prisoner Support/Prison Abolition Working Group pledged
to expand prisoner support work within the federation, and to help
enable prisoner members of Love and Rage to participate more in the
organization.
Aside from the broad criticism that these strategies fail to build a
dual power, several people in the federation have raised questions about
the particular strategies each working group has chosen. For example,
there is an emerging feminist critique o f the almost exclusive focus of
anti-fascist strategy on far-right, white-supremacist groups. Does
fighting white-supremacist groups fight all sections of the
proto-fascist right? What about militant anti-choice organizations, for
example?
Furthermore, even though the anti-police campaign proposal was voted
down, many people want the anti-fascist group to focus on anti-police
work as well. However, the past history of Love and Rage’s anti-fascist
work (anti-Klan demonstrations in New Hop e, PA; anti-fascist days of
action on Kristallnacht [Nov. 9]; the Anti-Racist Summer Project in St.
Paul, MN; etc.), as well as the present proposal, gives no concrete
indication that the focus will broaden. However, if the Anti-Fascist
Working Group does decide to mesh anti-cop, anti-Klan, and
anti-anti-choice work, how will it avoid the classic anarchist tendency
to struggle against everything until we’ve spread ourselves so thin that
we effectively build nothing? Expect a rich debate on this issue.
Despite the high level of political discussion, the conference was not
free of problems. The biggest problem at the conference was an old one:
male domination. With the exception of some of the working-group
caucuses, the discussions at the conference were dominated by men. Men
outnumbered women, and, according to the conference minutes, men spoke
at least twice as often as women (many of women’s comments were
criticisms of the fact that many of them felt structured out of
participating in the debates) . The problem is not that there are no
articulate and politically experienced women in the federation. Neither
does it seem to be primarily a problem of gender dynamics in meetings:
few women felt they were actively discouraged from participating
(although this does not mean that gender dynamics played no role in
inhibiting women’s participation).
Instead, there were two main gender troubles with the conference. First,
the terms of the political discussions (especially the initial one on
reproles) tended to structure out some people from participating in the
debates, particularly women. By focusing almost exclusively on Chris
Day’s reprole analysis, the conference failed to discuss other key
issues that, were they discussed, might have encouraged broader
participation. A second problem was identified by Rebecca H. in the
lively debates about gender issues that have occurred since the
conference (see the Jan. 1995 issue of the Federation Bulletin). The
problem, she argues, is that good gender politics for Love and Rage boil
down to being nicer to women and opening up spaces for them to speak.
This is fine, but what is lacking is a commitment to making women’s
liberation a political priority of the federation. None of the three
working groups’ proposals, she points out, have any explicit strategies
for women’s liberation, nor is there anything necessarily feminist about
them. This does not mean the working groups entirely neglect feminist
issues, but without an explicit feminist commitment it is unlikely that
the terms of political debate within the federation will open up to more
women.
To address Love and Rage’s gender troubles, an impromptu women’s caucus
was called for dinner Sunday night. While no concrete proposals emerged
from the discussion, a variety of diverse opinions on gender issues and
Love and Rage were expressed. The discussion has far from ended since
that caucus. In fact, the debate over gender issues is one of the most
lively, interesting, and important ones happening within the federation
right now.
The final discussions surrounded the structure of the federation. After
reports and updates on the various newspaper production groups, offices,
and (old) working groups, the conference discussed and debated the
by-laws proposal written by Jean-Marc Diveliour and yours truly. Debates
over structure aren’t exactly thrill city, but what basically happened
is that a set of by-laws was adopted that should enable the organization
to carry out the decisions it makes at conferences and in between. The
structure of Love and Rage is now as follows: The federation consists of
members brought together in local branches (where possible) that
participate in local activism and try to build the federation and/or
revolutionary anti-authoritarian politics in their area . Local groups
must work on at least one of the three struggles chosen by the
federation, in addition to any other work they choose. Coordinating
local struggles with each other is the job of the three working groups,
each of which has chosen a contact person. The two newspapers (Love and
Rage and Amor y Rabia) are produced by production groups in New York and
Mexico City, respectively. Space is reserved for traditionally oppressed
groups to form autonomous blocs within Love and Rage. An autonomous bloc
i s a group created by traditionally oppressed members of Love and Rage
that band together with other members of that group (not necessarily
Love and Rage members) to fight oppression within Love and Rage and to
act autonomously from the federation in struggles for
self-determination, while still receiving support from the federation at
large. As of yet, there are no autonomous blocs formed, though there has
been discussion about creating a women’s autonomous bloc. The major
decisions of the federation are to be made democratically at annual
conferences. A Coordinating Committee (CC) of five people (currently in
Minneapolis) was elected as an administrative body for a year in order
to see that conference decisions are carried out and to facilitate
communication and debates within the organization. Interim decisions are
to be made by an elected 10-person Federation Council. The CC is
responsible for organizing the debates surrounding interim decisions,
tallying votes, and making sure the decisions made are carried out. In
an attempt to address gendered power imbalances within the organization,
six out of the ten persons elected for the Federation Council are women,
and four out of the five persons on the CC are women as well. (For a
copy of the by-laws, writ e to the Federation Office address below.)
While it’s a bit of a stretch to call this structure a “federation,” it
is a radically democratic model in which the goal is to encourage the
maximum amount of participation in federation activities by members. It
is also a structure that is suitable f or the present size of Love and
Rage, with a bit of room to grow into as well.
Whether the accomplishments of the Minneapolis conference will foster
growth in the organization is up for grabs. Whether or not our work will
contribute toward the creation of a broad revolutionary movement is an
even bigger question. In addition to i ts traditional commitment to
fighting all forms of oppression, Love and Rage now faces a test of its
commitment to long-term political work and its willingness to change
course should the need arise. As we look ahead to our role in the larger
social struggles against capital and all forms of domination rumbling in
the world’s underbelly, our task—reproles or not—is to develop an
anti-authoritarian alternative to the world we live in and the world
some crackpots (on the left and right) would like to build. If this
conference is any indication, I think we are on the right track.