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Title: Less Talk, More Regroupment Author: Jasper Conner Date: August 25, 2011 Language: en Topics: anarchist organization, United States of America Source: Retrieved on 10th December 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/less-talk-more-regroupment
There’s been a lot of debate throughout the internet, and I’d assume it
continues in person(I live in the country, so I wouldn’t really know)
about anarchists and organization. The basic point of this piece is to
say, enough hollering at each other, just fucking get to it.
I think debate is important for strengthening revolutionaries, but I
think there’s also a point where it becomes masturbatory, and I think we
crossed the line a while back. Some seem to be convinced, whether pro or
anti organization, that what we most need to do, is to win over more
anarchists(and questioning commies) to our position. Perhaps this isn’t
really an expressed idea, but its clear that many tendencies within
anarchism believe it. One group recirculates 100 year old pamphlets
retracing the same tired arguments on the need for an explicitly
anarchist organization, the other mocks the article and publishes
another incomprehensible article against organizations. Regardless of
our stance in the debate, we spend most of our time discussing
organization within the left, rather than implementing them and
developing a praxis. Certainly we’ll get more out of practical work with
the people who are daily fighting oppression than we will discussing
ideas on websites. We should also be aware that we’ll never perfect this
or that strategy as our approach should always be adjusted for new
historical developments. So the question is, when are we gonna shut the
hell up and get to it? With all this bickering, and little to show for
it, are we any better than Trotskyists who continue to publish
newspapers with nothing but attacks on Stalin?
So now that I’ve admonished the reader, I want to move forward with some
particular ideas. And mostly, I want to lean on the platformists and
especifists, or who ever else finds themselves on that end of the
debate.
Platformists and especifists have made their point, its been written a
million different ways. Its time to move beyond advocating for the
anarchist organization, and get to it. The task of this tendency is not
to convince others with words, the task is to actually build the
organization and develop its politics. I think most people in this
debate have given little time to what would actually be the strategic
orientation of such an organization, other than it’d be an
especifist/platformist organization. The hardline insurrectionists are
(hypothetically) doing their thing, and the syndicalists are moving
forward with a solid enough strategy around fastfood workers. Its time
we got our shit together and actually started discussing the ins and
outs of an anarchist organization that has real strategic and tactical
unity.
To start, I’d like to point to one organization on the left that I think
models where we need to be headed as a tendency. Bring the Ruckus was
started in the ashes of Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist
Federation, and they seem to be a concoction of anarchists and left
communists. I think BtR models the sort of organization often advocated
by anarchists of our stripe. They have a specific analysis of
capitalism(they’re way into CLR James, if that tells you anything), and
from this analysis they have six political criteria that they use to
determine whether or not they should be engaged in particular political
work. I’m not a member of the group, so this isn’t an advertisement, but
an attempt to pull out the valuable organizational structures they use.
Here’s their six criteria:
consciousness among the working class.
We should be spending our energies moving toward something more defined,
like this, rather than debating the need for a specific anarchist
organization with people who are entirely opposed to organization.
Obviously, the first task is to coalesce around a defined anarchist
analysis of the current world, one that goes beyond “capitalism and the
state are bad, and oh yea so is white supremacy and patriarchy.” An
anarchist organization that can’t go beyond this shallow analysis, will
do nothing more than hold annual reportback meetings about all the neat
things people are doing.
What we need is an analysis that understands the unique nature of living
in an advanced imperialist state where capitalism is built upon white
supremacy and patriarchy. We need to approach some sort of theoretical
unity around the particular way in which capital maintains control in
this country, because that theory is the only thing that can inform
useful action as a group. In response to the rampant class reductionism
of many on the left, many anarchists have been brought up with the idea
that all oppression is equal and the same, which I believe substitutes
morality for material reality. Capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy
all function in different ways, all carry a different historical
significance, all interact with one another in different ways. The
shallow analysis that treats them all the same, leads to “just do
something” revolutionaries who act aimlessly. We need to begin to
grapple with things like, the central role white supremacy has played in
the advanced development of capital and the deep divisions in the US
working class. We need to go beyond the Liberal feminism that only
stresses internal dynamics(but not without it) to analyze how the unpaid
work of raising generations of workers has hindered class unity. The
goal is the abolition of class, race, and gender along with the tools
that maintain them, but we have to move toward understanding the exact
way these play out if we really want to be affective revolutionaries.
We need an organization that understands how to maximize the impact of a
small number of dedicated revolutionaries. In rejecting the synthesis
anarchist organization where we all sink in a boat together, we must
also reject the “just do something” strategy that comes with it. Where
is struggle already moving forward? What parts of the class are daily in
serious conflict with capital and the state? What parts of the country?
In what part of the community, is it on the job, or on the block(cell or
otherwise). We have to seek out political work where we can be most
affective in advancing the class struggle, even if it seems to reject
the old ideas about how the struggle appears.
We need a humble organization that recognizes that it is in the struggle
of oppressed people today that the nucleus of the new world exists; and
that it is our duty not to lecture people on Kropotkin, but rather to
study this new world in the making, challenge its builders, and spread
the word about every stride made toward an egalitarian world. We need an
organization that draws its membership from these people, rather than
one that requires a masters degree.
Here and there I see organizations that attempt to grapple with these
and other important questions, but in general we are without real
analysis and strategy. One impetus for writing this piece is to possibly
nudge the organizers of the Class Struggle Anarchism Conference away
from the standard reportback/workshop conference toward something that
can start to actually build toward an organization with defined politics
and strategy. We can all read about what organizations are up to online,
in person events such as this are most valuable for being able to
struggle with each other toward actually creating the organization we’re
always advocating in facebook flamewars.
We all understand the need for an anarchist organization with
theoretical and strategic unity, our task is to fucking build it.
Hopefully this will help spark discussions that can actually lead to
something real.