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Title: Anarchist Social Organization Author: Scott Nappalos Date: November 14, 2017 Language: en Topics: anarcho-syndicalism, anarchist organization Source: Retrieved on 2020-05-25 from http://ideasandaction.info/2017/11/anarchist-social-organization/
The rise of the right and the incapacity of the institutional left to
offer an alternative is pressing the crucial question for our time: what
is our strategy in pre-revolutionary times? The revolutionary left is
fixated on the ruptures and revolutions of history, and this has done
little to prepare us for the present. In the United States there are no
nation-wide social movements to draw upon in forging a new social force.
Resistance remains largely fragmented, and more often than not
abstracted from the struggles of daily life and carried out by a
semi-professional activist subculture. The challenge then is where to
begin, or more specifically how to move beyond the knowledge,
experiences, and groups of the past two decades towards a broader social
movement?
There are some experiences we can draw on however from the heyday of the
anarchist movement, where similarly radicals in a hostile environment
began to discuss and craft strategic interventions. An overlooked and
scarcely known debate within anarchism was between so-called dualism and
unitary positions on organization.[1] That framing for the disagreement
largely comes from the dualists who were supporters of specific
anarchist political organizations independent from the workers
organizations of their day. This was contrasted against the
anti-political organization anarchists in the libertarian unions who
proposed a model of workers organizations that were both a
politicized-organization and union.
The portrayal of anarchosyndicalists as inherently against political
organization and as advocating unions exclusively of anarchists is a
straw man. If anything the orthodoxy supported political organizations
including: Pierre Bresnard, former head of the International Workers
Association (IWA-AIT), the Spanish CNT (through its affinity groups,
specific organizations around publications, and the FAI), along with
others in the various revolutionary unions of the IWA-AIT. A more
balanced picture of the movement would be (at least) a four way division
within IWA-AIT organizations including: class struggle syndicalism that
downplayed anarchism and revolution (both with defenders and detractors
of political organization), the dominant position of revolutionary
unionism influenced by anarchism but striving for one big union of the
class, political anarchists focused on insurrectionism and intellectual
activities, and a fourth position that is likely unfamiliar to most
readers.
That position I will call the anarchist social organization for lack of
a better term. Elements of this position have existed and persisted
throughout the history of the syndicalist movement, but found its core
within the revolutionary workers organizations of South America at the
turn of the century. In Argentina and Uruguay in particular a powerful
immigrant movement of anarchists dominated the labor movement for
decades, setting up the first unions and consolidating a politics in an
environment where reformist attempts at unions lacked a context enabling
them to thrive.[2] This tendency spread across Latin America from
Argentina to Mexico, at its zenith influenced syndicalist currents in
Europe and Asia as well. It’s progress was checked by a combination of
shifting context and political reaction that favored nationalist and
reformist oppositions. Both Argentina and Uruguay underwent some of the
world’s first legalized labor regimes and populist reform schemes to
contain the labor movement combined with dictatorships that selectively
targeted the anarchist movement while supporting socialists and
nationalists across the region. The anarchist movement of el Río de la
Plata was dealt heavy blows by the 1930s and began to decline.
The theorists of Argentina’s Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA,
Argentina Regional Workers’ Federation) in particular laid out an
alternative approach to politics that was highly influential. Argentina
perhaps vied with Spain as the most powerful anarchist movement in the
world and yet is scarcely known today. The FORA takes its name from an
aspiration towards internationalism and one of the most thorough going
anti-State and anti-nationalist currents in radical history. The FORA
inspired sister unions throughout Latin America many with similar names
such as FORU (Uruguay), FORP (Paraguay), FORCh (Chile) and unions in
Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia just to name a few. They even won over the
membership of established IWW locals in Mexico and Chile to their
movement away from the IWW’s neutral syndicalism.
The ideas of the FORA came to be known as finalismo; so named because in
Spanish fines mean ends or goals, and the FORA made anarchist communism
it’s explicit aim as early as 1905. Finalismo was a rejection of
traditional unions and political organizations in favor of the anarchist
social organization.[3] In the unions, FORA saw a tendency to divert the
working class into reforming and potentially reproducing capitalist work
relations. Unions they argued are institutions that inherit too much of
the capitalism we seek to abolish.[4] The capitalist division of labor
reflected in industrial unions in particular could be a potential base
for maintaining capitalist social relationships after the revolution,
something that the FORA argued must be transformed.
“We must not forget that the union is, as a result of capitalist
economic organization, a social phenomenon born of the needs of its
time. To retain its structure after the revolution would imply
preserving the cause that determined it: capitalism.”[5]
This critique they extended to apolitical revolutionary unions like the
IWW and even with anarchosyndicalism itself, which was seen as arguing
for using unions, vehicles of resistance that reflect capitalist
society, as cells of the future structure of society. Their goal was to
transform a society built to maintain class domination to one organized
to meet human needs; something the existing industries poison.
“Anarchosyndicalist theory, very similar to revolutionary unionism, is
today confused by many who approach the workers movement, and even
participate in it, because they consider that all anarchists who take
part in unionism are automatically anaarchosyndicalists.
Anarchosyndicalism is a theory that bases the construction of society
after the emancipatory revolution in the same unions and professional
associations of workers. The FORA expressively rejects
anarchosyndicalism and maintains its conception that one cannot
legislate the future of society after revolutionary change…”[6]
While participating in class struggle on a day to day basis, members of
the FORA similarly rejected the ideology of class struggle. Class
struggle as ideology was seen as reflecting a mechanistic worldview
inherited from Marxism, that ultimately would reinforce the divisions
derived from capitalism which would sustain obstacles to constructing
communism after the revolution. Class and worker identity are too tied
to capitalist relationships, they argued, and are better attacked than
cultivated.[7]
The foristas were skeptical of political organizations separate from
workers organizations, and believed they posed a danger. Such
organizations would tend to over-value maintaining their political
leadership against the long term goal of building anarchist
communism.[8] The world of political anarchism was seen as drawing from
intellectual and cultural philosophies abstracted from daily life,
whereas the anarchist workers movement drew it’s inspiration from
connecting anarchist ethics to the lived struggles of the exploited.
“Anarchism as a revolutionary political party is deprived of its main
strength and its vital elements; anarchism is a social movement that
will acquire the greater power of action and propaganda the more
intimately it stays in its native environment.”[9]
In their place, partisans of the FORA proposed a different type workers
organization and role for anarchists. Emiliano Lopez Arango, the
brilliant auto-didact and baker, emphasized that we should build
organizations of workers aimed at achieving anarchist society, rather
than organizations of anarchists-for-workers or organizations of
anarchist-workers.
“Against this philosophical or political anarchism we present our
concept and our reality of the anarchist social movement, vast mass
organizations that do not evade any problems of philosophical anarchism,
and taking the man as he is, not just as supporter of an idea, but as a
member of an exploited and oppressed human fraction… To create a union
movement concordant with our ideas-the anarchist labor movement- it is
not necessary to “cram” in the brain of the workers ideas that they do
not understand or against those that guard routine precautions. The
question is another…Anarchists must create an instrument of action that
allows us to be a belligerent force acting in the struggle for the
conquest of the future. The trade union movement can fill that high
historic mission, but on condition that is inspired by anarchist
ideas.”[10]
This position has often been misunderstood or misrepresented as
“anarchist unionism” i.e. trying to create ideologically pure groupings
of workers. The workers of the FORA however held in little esteem the
political anarchist movement, and did not believe in intellectuals
imposing litmus tests for workers. Instead they built an organization
which from 1905 onward took anarchist communism as its goal, and was
constructed around anarchist ideals in its struggles and functioning.
There is a key difference between being an ideological organization
doing organizing versus organizing with an anarchist orientation. The
workers of the FORA tried to create the latter. Counterposed to raw
economics and the ideology of class struggle, they emphasized a process
of transformation and counter-power built through struggle but guided by
values and ideas.[11] Against the idea that syndicalist unions were
seeds of the future society, they proposed using struggles under
capitalism as ways to train the exploited for revolutionary goals and a
radical break with the structure of capitalism with revolution.[12]
In doing so they organized Argentina’s working class under the leading
light of anarchism until a series of repressive and recuperative forces
overwhelmed them. The CNT would eventually follow FORA’s suit some three
decades later with its endorsement of the goal of creating libertarian
communism, but it’s vacillations on these issues (predicted by some
foristas such as Manuel Azaretto)[13] would prove disastrous. CNT scored
a contradictory initial victory, but floundered with how to move from an
organization struggling within capitalism to a post-capitalist order.
Anarchist Social Organization Today
The insight of the FORA was its focus on how we achieve liberation.
These organizing projects are centered in struggles around daily life.
Working in these struggles aims at creating an environment where
participants can co-develop in a specific environment guided by
anarchist principles, goals, and tactics. Ideas develop within through a
process of praxis where actions, ideas, and values interact and come
together in strategy. These are particular weaknesses we have in recent
anarchist and libertarian strategies in the US.
In both political organizations and organizing work, anarchists have
failed to put themselves forward as an independent force with our own
proposals. Anarchist ideology is kept outside the context of daily life
and struggle; the place where it makes the most sense and has the most
potential for positive contributions. Instead ideology has largely
remained the property of political organizations, while anarchists do
their organizing work too often as foot soldiers for reformist
non-profits, bureaucratic unions, and neutral organizations hostile to
their ideas. This is carried out without plans to advance our goals or
independent projects that demonstrate their value.
Similarly, as I argued[14] against the debates over the structure of
unions (craft vs. industrial), the divisions over dual vs unitary
organization carry important lessons but displace more fundamental
issues. At stake is what role our ideas play in the day-to-day work of
struggle in pre-revolutionary times. The foristas were correct in seeing
a positive role of our vision when combined with a practice of
contesting daily life under capitalism, while constantly agitating for a
fundamental transformation. Many dualists miss these points when they
seek to impose an artificial division between where and how we agitate
by organizational form.
Still these issues don’t preclude political organizations playing a
positive role for example with crafting strategy, helping anarchists
develop their ideas together and coordinate, etc. There has been an
emphasis in political thought to speak in generalities, about forms and
structures, and thereby missing the contextual and historical aspects of
these sorts of debates. More important than the structure of an
organization is where it stands in the specific context and work on its
time, and how it manages to make its work living in the daily struggles
of the exploited. That can happen in different ways in a number of
different projects.
Today such a strategy can be implemented within work already happening.
For those who are members of existing organizations such as solidarity
networks, unions, and community groups, militants should begin
networking to find ways to formulate an anarchist program within their
work, advance proposals to deepen anarchisms influence over the
organizations and struggles, and move towards an anarchist social
organization model of struggle. With experience and a growth of forces,
we could contest the direction of such organizations or form new ones
depending on the context.
The existing political organizations similarly can contribute to this
work by advocating for anarchist social organizations, contribute to
agitation within existing organizing projects, and collaborate on the
creation of new projects. In some cases this may require locals of
political groups themselves forming new organizing efforts alone.
Ideally this would be carried out with other individuals and groups
through a process of dialogue. There are at least three national
anarchist organizations all of which benefit from having the capacity to
influence the debate, and could intervene on the side of advancing
anarchism as an explicit force within social movements. The alternative
is for it to remain obscured, clumsily discussed, and largely hidden
from view of the public.
Where there is sufficient interest and capacity, new groups should be
formed. Workplace networks, tenants and community groups, solidarity
networks, and unions can be created with small numbers of militants who
wish to combine their political work in a cohesive social-political
project. In the United States such a strategy has not even been
attempted on any serious scale since perhaps the days of the Haymarket
martyrs and their anarchosyndicalist IWMA. The unprecedented shift in
the mood of the population brought on by the crisis of 2008 has made
these sorts of experiments more feasible if not pressing. It is up to us
to take up the challenge and experiment. Yet the primary work in front
of us is to find ways to translate a combative revolutionary anarchism
into concrete activities that can be implemented and coordinated by
small numbers of dedicated militants, and allow us a bridge to the next
phases of struggle.
The FORA in Argentina. ASP LONDON & DONCASTER
[1] This debate was mirrored in the councilists in the aftermath of the
aborted German Revolution of 1919 with the splits in the AUD vs. AUD-E.
They adopted the term unitary organization to pick out a group that
rejected political organization, and is similar to the approach I will
lay out with the exception that they rejected organizing around the
daily lives of workers, which differentiated them from the FAU at the
time until later when the AUD was in decline and the AUDE moved closer
to anarchosyndicalism and the KAPD organized in the AUD moved closer to
pure political organizations. Unitary organization it should be said is
confusing as those anarchists who are called unitary organizationalists
by the dualists repeatedly polemicized supports of unitary organization
in their writings, by which they meant people who supported a single
united organization for all workers with all ideologies inside.
[2] Solidarity Federation. (1987). Revolutionary unionism in Latin
America:
[3] Lopez Arango, E. Syndicalism and Anarchism. Translated by SN
Nappalos.
[4] Lopez Arango. E. (1942). Means of struggle – Excerpt from Doctrine,
Tactics, and Ends of the Workers Movement, the first chapter of the 1942
Posthumous collection called Ideario. Published in Anarquismo en America
Latina. (1990). ed. Ángel J. Cappelletti y Carlos M. Rama. Prólogo,
edición y cronología, traducción: Ángel J. Cappelletti.
[5] Lopez Arango, E. & de Santillan, DA. (1925). El anarquismo en el
movimiento obrero. Pg. 32
[6] La FORA Anexo 208. Translation of the passage by SN Nappalos. Quoted
in Lopez, Antonio. (1998). La FORA en el movimiento obrero. Tupac
Ediciones. Pg. 73–74.
[7] Antilli, T. (1924). Lucha de clases y lucha social.
[8] Lopez Arango, E. Political leadership or ideological orientation of
the workers movement.
[9] Lopez Arango, E. & de Santillan, DA. (1925). El anarquismo en el
movimiento obrero. Pg. 77
[10] Ibid.
[11] Lopez Arango, E. The resistance to capitalism.
[12] Ibid. Means of struggle
[13] Azaretto, M. (1939). Slippery Slopes: the anarchists in Spain.
Translated in May-June 2014 from the Spanish original by Manuel
Azaretto, Las Pendientes Resbaladizas (Los anarquistas en España),
Editorial Germinal, Montevideo, 1939.
[14] Nappalos, SN. (2015). Dismantling our divisions: craft, industry,
and a new society.