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Title: Nothing To Syndicate
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2018
Language: en
Topics: capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, syndicalism, critique, post-leftism, Labor Movement
Source: Retrieved on  2020-07-29 from https://itsgoingdown.org/nothing-to-syndicate/]], [[https://itsgoingdown.org/aiming-at-ghosts-on-the-limited-usefulness-of-a-critique-of-19th-century-syndicalism/]

Anonymous

Nothing To Syndicate

Nothing To Syndicate: Against The Democracy Of Work & The Work Of

Democracy

A Critique Of Syndicalism From An Anti-Industrial Position.

“We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety.

There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society

that does away not with the category of worker, but with the imposition

workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words,

the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work

and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation

and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This

scenario crowds out other post-revolutionary possibilities, i.e.

idleness etc.”

— Frank Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”

“A sickle can be used for something other than to reap, and a hoe can

serve to dig the grave for all that has outlived its time.”

The Daily CNT, (Spain, January 2, 1933)

“To remember what they had lost and what they became, what had been torn

apart and what had come together, the fugitives and refugees and

multitudes in flight were called the Sisala, which means ‘to come

together, to become together, to weave together.’”

— Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Cue the groans, leap to whatever pre-formed expectations you may have,

and swipe left to instead arrive at a far sexier (and far shorter) piece

on some racist shitbag getting punched or whatever, cus’ you’re

currently reading a critique of anarcho-syndicalism. There’s a long

history of pieces like this, and most of the time they’re dry,

demogogical, and philosophically vapid. Get out now! But if you’re still

with me, I promise there’s a kind of timely necessity behind this

hesitantly written piece.

The last two years of US social movement activity, since the ascendancy

of the Trump candidacy and subsequent backlash among broad sectors of

American society, have been a whirlwind of growth and crisis. In this

time a huge wave of new faces have found themselves eager to join in the

historical moment of occupations, street conflicts, anti-racist

community defense, and grassroots organizing.

Not unlike the highways and bridges around us, much of the anarchist

infrastructure we had built in the mid-2000s—radical bookstores,

newspapers, ‘zinedistros, social centers, regular assemblies, medic and

tech collectives—was too small or in disrepair, ill-prepared to absorb

this exponential increase in brand new, un-vouched for, and totally

passionate bodies that we were meeting in the streets.

Assemblies in my town, for example, swelled from a couple dozen to

nearly two hundred people immediately following Trump’s election. Most

of these people had never participated in such an event and held little

to no personal or political context for one another. Among many there

was a vague desire to organize in an autonomous and non-electoral way,

but very little shared experience with how to do so. And at least a few

of these new faces were likely informants.

Enter the strictly public-facing and lowest-common denominator politics

of more traditional activist organizations. Following this political

moment, organizations like the Indivisibles, the Democratic Socialists

of America (DSA), and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),

previously nonexistent or peripheral to most combative politics actually

happening on the ground, exploded in size. It’s not hard to see how that

happened: show up to a meeting, sign a membership card, agree to a

remarkably thin level of political affinity with other complete

strangers, and you’re a part of things.[1]

I say all this out of sympathy. As a teenager in a small southern town

in the late 90’s, I had a pretty awkward time finding radical and

anarchist politics myself. I remember, after attending my very first

demonstration, during which a squad of about 30 black-clad punks with

golf clubs and hockey sticks attacked a limousine en route to a

presidential debate, being desperate to get involved in any way I

could.[2]

“And what if certain kinds of human alienation—in this case from the

natural world and our own dependency upon it—are hardwired into the

rationalist form of industrialism itself?”

I couldn’t find the crazy people with hockey sticks—they were mostly

from one town over, and kind of intimidating regardless, even without

the hockey sticks—so I walked up to the first table I could find and got

chicken-hawk recruited by the ever-timid, incredibly condescending,

totally manipulative International Socialist Organization. Fast forward

through two years of paternalistic programming where my own experiences

of wage work and alienation didn’t seem to fit their one-dimensional

projections of the revolutionary subject, and I was outta there. That’s

just how shit goes sometimes.

But in our current context, it can be hard to take the time to step back

and actually engage in constructive critique of the ideas behind these

political ports of entry. Some might argue that the dangerously

resurgent fascism and far-right politics we’re confronting make it a

poor time for obscure internal arguments over revolutionary strategy,

but I think history shows this is the most necessary time to debate our

visions for a different kind of future.

Unfortunately, American radicals in particular are notoriously terrible

at authentic, substantive debate; we are a world of endless splits,

passive aggressive “cooperation,” personal ad hominem attacks,

inappropriately weaponized privilege politics, and twitter-shaming. The

“best” outcome in this context is often that a kind of big-tent attitude

develops where all critique is sidelined—but this merely papers over the

contradictions in vision, organization, and tactics that will inevitably

emerge in revolutionary struggle. I believe that people with different

experiences who want different things can still work to mutually

beneficial aims, especially when autonomy and self-determination remain

guiding principles, but growth is always limited by inauthenticity.

Hopefully, this critique, and any responses to it, can avoid those

pitfalls to some degree. I believe passionately that developing trust

and affinity is both possible and absolutely necessary amongst those

with differing ideas, but that conflict must be intrinsic to this

process. On that note, I’m tremendously thankful to the many who have

challenged me (and who continue to do so) in my own political

assumptions over the last 20 years.[3]

TLDR Intro: This is a partly theoretical and partly personal critique of

syndicalism, the “movement for transferring the ownership and control of

the means of production and distribution to workers’ unions.” This idea

has a long history within (and outside of) anarchism—it has inspired

everyone from immigrant miners in Colorado to starving Catalan brick

layers to South African laborers, and offers a radical alternative to

the pro-capitalist business unionism of groups like the AFL-CIO. It was

part of the philosophical backbone of the millions-strong social

revolution in 1930’s Spain, and, as contemporary Spanish anarchists

admit, also bears some of the responsibility for that revolution’s

betrayal and failure. And in an oddly anachronistic resurgency,

syndicalism is a driving force of the IWW, which has grown tremendously

in North America in the last two years and been impressively involved in

a range of activity, from anti-prison agitation to anti-racist defense

and fast food worker organizing.[4]

As anarchists, it is taken for granted that we are struggling to abolish

rather than democratize the state. But a strange blindspot continues to

exist for many, who frame their efforts as a struggle to democratize

(rather than abolish) the economy. As this article demonstrates, this is

not a battle over mere semantics; it strikes at the heart of the

world(s) we want to share, and what paths we choose to get there.

This piece integrates a number of theoretical perspectives and

emphases—anti-state communist, afro-pessimist, ecological,

“insurrectionary,” and the personal, to name a few—that are fairly

ubiquitous in much anti-authoritarian writing of the last ten years and

directly relevant to syndicalist thought, but seem to remain largely

unexamined by many of the newest “recruits.” A central shared theme in

all these critiques, while they approach the question of workers’

self-management from very different backgrounds and histories, is that a

revolutionary approach which emphasizes the democratization of the

economy, rather than its destruction, is extremely likely to reproduce

the patterns of whiteness, bureaucracy, ecological destruction, and

alienation that characterize the economy as it currently exists.

Act I: On The Practice Of Polishing Green Turds

In a landmark report recently released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel

on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate scientists warn

that there are “only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a

maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly

worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for

hundreds of millions of people.”[5] The report makes clear that only

extreme action would have a chance to prevent carbon emissions from

pushing us over this 1.5C line. These types of reports are not

atypical—it feels like every five years or so a new dire analysis

attempts to politely and futilely convince global industrial capitalism

to step off the path of its inevitable death march. But this was the

most intense warning to date, and comes at a time when many of the

world’s major economies, from capitalist USA to “communist” China, are

particularly inclined to ignore it.

To be frank: the global industrial economy threatens the very existence

of human life on this planet. Those who suffer the ecological effects of

runaway climate change are, predictably, the poorest, people of color,

the indigenous, and quite often the currently or formerly incarcerated.

Ecological crises are themselves drivers for further economic

stratification, ever more Orwellian forms of state control, and

capitalist accumulation. By juxtaposition, it should be obvious that a

classless and stateless society in which wealth and resources were held

in common—accessible to everyone and owned by no one—would not just

result in but require a fundamentally different relationship between

people and the natural world around us.

Syndicalists, along with many other “classical” anarchists and leftists,

have usually offered a woefully inadequate response to environmental

problems. It is suggested that, with the unions in charge and the profit

motive removed, there will no longer be a structural impetus for

environmental destruction. There is a certain logic to this—I can

imagine it being a little easier to convince my co-workers to stop

polluting in a certain way than my shitty boss who’s beholden to a

growth-obsessed economy. A no-growth economy would certainly be better

for the earth than our current situation. But what if these pollutants

are intrinsically necessary to a certain form of industry? Or, as it

stands, to virtually all forms of industry? And what if certain kinds of

human alienation—in this case from the natural world and our own

dependency upon it—are hardwired into the rationalist form of

industrialism itself?

To give a more precise example: a common industrialist response to the

current climate crisis, from opportunistic green capitalists and

progressive politicians to the IWW’s own “Environmental Unionism

Caucus”, has been to propose a wide range of “alternative” solar and

wind power.[6] But these industries’ technologies are themselves

remarkably toxic, difficult or impossible to recycle, and require mining

and resource extraction that is highly dangerous to workers and

reproduces authoritarian governance all over the world. The problem of

solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three

decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste

and they are not easy to recycle,” said one Chinese solar official

recently. Said another expert in Germany, “Contrary to previous

assumptions, pollutants such as lead or carcinogenic cadmium can be

almost completely washed out of the fragments of solar modules over a

period of several months, for example by rainwater,” making safe

disposal almost impossible.[7] Similar materials (and problems) are

required for wind power.

I propose that cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, and sulfur

hexafluoride do not cease to cause cancer when it’s a union flipping the

switch instead of a Board of Directors. A car driving off a cliff is in

big fucking trouble, and if there are no brakes, it doesn’t matter who

is in the driver’s seat.

The specter of ecological colonialism also remains. It is not a

coincidence that industrial resource extraction and modern state

coercion evolved on the historical stage side by side. Alternative power

sources and most industrial machinery and robotics require a constant

new supply of heavy metals, much of which must be mined in Africa and

the Global South. Do we realistically think that, with the profit motive

and state coercion removed from the equation, African laborers will

voluntarily mine cobalt—an incredibly dangerous and toxic process—to

power the cell phones of millions of westerners 10,000 miles away?[8]

One might argue that with the solar and wind industry I’m unfairly

choosing a convenient exception to pick on, that the vast majority of

industries could be collectivized and self-managed by their current

workers with little modification required to have them run in an

environmentally sustainable manner. But does anyone actually believe

that? That the economy that gave us nuclear bombs, PVC, DDT, superfund

sites, and Miracle Whip just needs a little green, self-managed

tinkering and everything can keep on humming like normal? And if we

don’t believe that, then how does a predominantly syndicalist strategy

for social revolution—in which unions take power from bosses and

continue to run all these workplaces for society’s benefit—make

sense?[9] If we’re honest about the ecological need to close, destroy,

or totally re-structure the vast majority of the economy’s workplaces,

is a syndicalist strategy for revolution, in which workplaces are

privileged as the primary drivers for transitions in power and

self-governance, the best option?

A common, usually defensive response to this ecological critique has

been to accuse the author of advocating a pre-industrial Stone Age, a

kind of Hobbesian hunter-and-gatherer existence where everyone dies a

miserable death with no penicillin and no teeth at the ripe old age of

40.[10] But this a remarkably false dichotomy that I think most readers

can see through. A post-revolutionary world will likely look like

nothing we can currently imagine, past or present—it might incorporate

formerly industrial technologies in non-industrial ways, it may be a

world where much work and labor is being done with no “workplaces” or

“economy” whatsoever, and it will probably look radically different from

one bioregion to the next[11]—but it cannot look like a rehashed,

worker-managed version of this world, or that car is going to drive off

of that cliff.

Act II: Precaricats, Robots, And The Universal Wage

As Peter Gelderloos points out in an article released after Trump’s

election, “The corporate architects of the new economy, like Google,

Apple, and Facebook, may be the only hope for capitalism to survive the

ecological and financial crises it has created. Economic growth based on

fossil fuels and manufacture, followed by financial bubbles, has had a

three hundred year run and it might be meeting its geological limits. Of

all the capitalists, only those of the IT sector are ideating

game-changing transformations to this dynamic, and developing the

technologies to make them feasible, from ethereal production to AI to

extraterrestrial exploitation.”[12]

A few readily identifiable shifts in the life of North America’s working

class(es) are important in this part of the conversation. First, many

sectors of this class that might have once worked one steady, relatively

well paying job for decades no longer have that “privilege.” Though

racial and gender hierarchies among wage workers remain more entrenched

than ever, the reality of 2, 3, 4, or even 6-income households, as a

necessity for survival, are a fact of life not just for the most

marginalized but for most of us.[13] A variety of neoliberal shifts in

monetary policy, the globalization of production and labor markets, the

explosion of the prison-industrial complex, and the transition to a

service economy all played a role in this. A drastic loss of unions—down

now to around 11 percent of the private economy—played a role too, but

this was far more the result than the cause of these changes.

And it’s not just that we’re all working a weird handful of precarious

part-time jobs. We’re working all the time, even when we’re not at work:

creating ad revenue for Facebook, logging into our work app to get more

hours, answering emails while on “vacation,” cooking rushed meals for

our kids between shifts, fixing shit our landlord won’t repair, selling

our own identities on Instagram and Etsy, spinning the millennials’

mousewheel in a desperate effort to turn social capital into actual

capital. We’re supposed to be fighting back against our bosses, but it

can be difficult to even pinpoint who exactly our boss is, if it’s not

just the economy itself.

Of course, understanding work only through the lens of the union, the

workplace, and the wage has usually meant leaving more than half the

population out of the equation. As feminist theorists like

MariarosaDalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and Selma James pointed out years

ago, understanding unwaged labor, like housework, as work that is

intrinsic to the “reproduction of labor” requires us to completely

reframe our ideas about anti-capitalist resistance, not just in theory

but in practical terms of where resistance takes place and how that

resistance is seen (or not). To take seriously the resistance of those

who engage in feminized labor—whether it’s paid or not, or performed by

men or women— in part requires that we decenter the workplace as the

sole or primary site of struggle.[14] And because so many forms of

unwaged, feminized labor are racialized as well as gendered in specific

ways, refusing to decenter the workplace in our understanding becomes an

act of whitewashing class struggle. As workplaces continue to become

ever more diffuse and decentralized anyway, the observations of these

feminists become more poignant than ever.

Roboticization and AI threaten to speed up these changes even more. For

all of Trump’s racist dog whistling about immigrants, it’s Chappie and

Wall-E that are “taking jobs,” not undocumented folks, an obvious fact

that both Republicans and Democrats find convenient to ignore. The

neoliberal economic shifts that we rioted against in the late 90’s and

early 00’s—alongside squatters in Prague, Mayans in southern Mexico, and

steelworkers in Seattle—met effective, widespread resistance and also

have a certain built-in limit: once capital is fully free to roam the

globe, labor prices can only get so much lower.

Robotics and AI solve that problem and help capitalists re-localize

production: no need to move a factory to Singapore if you can pay

computers absolutely nothing to do the work right at home. This isn’t

just a manufacturing phenomenon either, as we were once assured. The

service economy is starting to prove successful with this too, as

worker-less Amazon Go! stores well demonstrate.[15]

Gelderloos again: “On the other hand, AI and robotics threaten the

social contract by undermining the historic point of unity between the

capitalist logic of accumulation and the statist logic of social

control: control people and profit off of them by putting them to work.

Any solution to that crisis would require bold interventions by the

State approaching some kind of utopian yet corporate socialism (a

prediction that was already made in 2009[16], that socialism would not

result from the development of productive capacities, as Marx foretold,

but rather repressive capacities, once the State had the techniques to

surveill and control those who were no longer kept in line by the threat

of hunger).”

This “corporate socialism” is part leftist utopia, part

techie-capitalist scheme. For example, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has

been a loud voice for the universal basic income, a guaranteed salary

provided to all by the state regardless of employment, but undoubtedly

tied to a whole range of bureaucratic measurements and citizenship

standards.[17] In other words, an ingenious form of social discipline,

with a wide range of support from the Left, that helps solve precisely

the kind of tension (presented by increasing numbers of “under”-employed

people) that the transition to AI and robotics creates. Think of

welfare, updated to the 22^(nd) century.

What does all this mean? For one, it helps explain why the most

advanced, militant, and widespread resistance to state, capital,

whiteness, and citizenship of the last 20 years has mostly occurred

outside the workplace. This is true from the caracoles of the Zapatistas

and the accompanying “anti-globalization” movement, to Occupy, to the

organizing and sub/urban riots of Black Lives Matter, to Standing Rock,

to the prison strikes[18] of 2016 and 2018, to #OccupyICE, and beyond.

It also helps explain why so many of our creative tactical adaptations

of late have focused on sabotaging capitalism at the points of

circulation and extraction (think highway blockades, die-ins at malls,

mass looting and burning, expelling police from neighborhoods, the

occupation of airports and plazas, blocking rural access points for

mining or pipelines), rather than at the point of production. It’s

mostly working class and dispossessed people engaging in these tactics,

but they are not the mass factory lock-ins or strikes of a century ago.

It is telling that the only notable “general strike” of our generation,

that of Occupy Oakland on November 2, 2011, succeeded in accomplishing a

(partial) retail, service, and port shutdown not primarily by internal

workplace action but rather by tens of thousands of people blocking

ports and roadways and physically attacking businesses from the outside.

Even the port workers, themselves a powerful union, stood on the

sidelines, mostly supportive but constrained by their own contract and

regulations. There were thousands of people who refused to work that

day, but their participation in the strike and its accompanying attack

on capitalist normality was not centrally catalyzed by a union, but

rather by other organizing structures.

The reason for this tactical and strategic shift has not primarily been

ideological but practical. It’s not because all these people have

something fundamentally “against” organizing at work, or love their

jobs, or whatever. It is the world we live in.

We are also no longer living in the modernist era of the “big

organization.” The large, bureaucratic, and corporately structured

bodies which characterized resistance in the first half of the 20^(th)

century are either gone or hold little of the relevance and power they

once did. Social movements of the 21^(st) century, at least in their

autonomous and radical expression, are necessarily an infinitely

complicated venn diagram of coordination and contradiction. None of the

recent examples of struggle given here relied primarily on a singular,

unified mass organization.[19]

While movements still need to provide clear entry points to new would-be

insurgents, it is no longer “One Big Union” that holds sway in these

moments, but the multitudinous interactions of a thousand collectives,

affinity groups, gangs, crews, projects, assemblies, spokescouncils, and

smaller organizations. This does not make us weaker—it makes us

stronger!—and anachronistic efforts at uniting everyone behind one

single organization are destined to be either bureaucratic,

recuperative, or fail entirely.[20] We do need open and overlapping

spaces of coordination between these diverse structures and efforts; we

don’t need a forced or superficial unification. And to be clear, this is

not an argument “against organization,” but in favor of more

organization that is flexible, autonomous, localized, efficient, and

responsive to immediate practical needs rather than theoretical

positions, egotistic personalities, or bureaucratic machinations.[21]

The mainstream press and sociologists have explained the diverse and

diffuse nature of contemporary protest simply as the product of new

“social media,” while socialist cadre groups dismiss this dynamic as a

sign of “political immaturity.” These are both lazy explanations that

fail to take into account a whole array of material and cultural shifts

in the last 50 years, not to mention the conscious choice of radicals to

avoid the well-charted mistakes of the past.

It should be clear what all these changes in the nature of work mean for

syndicalism: It is difficult to organize the workplace if there is no

workplace. It is even harder if there are no workers. Of course, there

still are workplaces, and we are (mostly) still workers, and people have

been organizing at their jobs however we (still) can. This should

continue as long as these conditions of work remain—we should be

organizing and rebelling in every place in which this world is

reproduced, which is everywhere—but it’s no wonder that a strategy which

centrally privileges the workplace as the primary site of counter-power

feels bizarrely out of date and hopelessly inadequate.

Many North American anarchists work in service sectors that are still

vulnerable to self-organized worker-driven resistance.There remains

enough of a bourgeois desire to “be served,” and psychological barrier

to experiencing that service from a robot, that we still have these jobs

for the time being.A lot of these employers are smaller and have less

access to variable capital, and so myriad opportunities to undermine

their credibility with the public and sabotage their profits still

exist.

But even when social conflict does erupt on the job, the material shifts

laid out in this section suggest a radical change in how we organize at

(and against) work. The union, as it is traditionally understood, is a

calcified fossil that evolved in a very different time period—perhaps it

can be dusted off and reinvented, but it will never again be the primary

driver of revolutionary change. From mutual aid networks and

non-workplace-based assemblies to neighborhood pickets and

21^(st)-century relevant forms of cyber and industrial sabotage, we need

a newly diversified toolbox to attack this era of capitalism.[22] As

these tools continue to reshape our struggles, it becomes clear that our

efforts must point to something other than democracy and workers’

self-management.

Act III: Burning Down The American Plantation

To observe these facts of 21^(st) century resistance outside of, beyond,

and against the workplace is not to express unqualified validation or

universal approval of these movement spaces. Within every encampment,

every prison strike noise demo, every highway takeover, every airport

occupation, and every open assembly, there remains a multitude of fault

lines, all of which pass through the central, racialized contradiction

that is civil society.

Critical theorist Frank Wilderson writes, “There is something organic to

the Black positionality that makes it essential to the destruction of

civil society.” This can be thought of through the lens of one’s

relation to the economy and work:

The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci’s

new hegemony, Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, in a word,

socialism). In contrast, the slave demands that production stop, without

recourse to its ultimate democratization.Work is not an organic

principle for the slave.”

Civil society—that sphere of the capitalist world, outside of government

but beyond “private” life, that supposedly makes living in a democracy

so special— is the “discursive and structural territory for the (white)

fear of black proletarian rage.”[23] It assembles the horizontal power

of the PTA board, the union bureaucrat, the church BBQ, the permitted

protest and peace marshal, the non-profit board, the deputized slave

patrol and its willing volunteers—all as a kind of state auxiliary. In a

democratic settler state such as our own, it is a rhizomatic but crucial

governing organism, a permanent force designed to maintain state,

economy, and above all, white supremacy. Civil society speaks to us of

justice, rights, peaceful protest, the rule of law, and innocence. It

chants at us, This is what democracy looks like![24]“Whereas the

positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a

monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage)

gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society,” writes Wilderson,

“the positionality of the Black subject (whether a prison-slave or a

prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil

society.”[25]

Does a slave rebellion gesture toward the democratization of the

plantation, or its destruction? What about a prison riot? The good

protesters may defend our “rights” as prisoners, but no one is trying to

democratically self-manage their prison—they’re trying to burn that shit

down and get free.[26] As author Saidiya Hartman puts it, “I refuse to

believe that the slave’s most capacious political claims or wildest

imaginings are for back wages or debt relief. There are too many lives

at peril to recycle the forms of appeal that, at best, have delivered

the limited emancipation against which we now struggle.”[27]

Some might object to the relevancy of all this to a critique of

syndicalism, but the historical parallels, in particular at the end of

the Civil War, are abundant. When well-intentioned Northern bureaucrats

traveled south with “justice” in their mouths, charged with restarting

the post-war agrarian economy, their task was clear: By hook or by

crook, force former slaves to sign labor contracts with their former

masters, who had been restored ownership of their former lands in direct

opposition to the slaves who had been occupying them.[28] Some laborers

signed willingly, some resisted, and others remained marooned as far

away as they could.[29]

To be fair, I am not accusing “syndicalism” of the mistakes of the

19^(th) century Freedmen’s Bureau. But the logic of production, of

preserving the economy at all costs, and of maintaining the form of the

economy under the guise of “justice” in a post-revolutionary period, all

ring true. The “conceptual anxiety” in the face of Black rage and

freedom, of which Wilderson accuses those anti-capitalists hoping to

democratize the economy, also reverberates throughout the personal

memoirs of Northern white abolitionists of the time.

Ultimately, for all the conflicts that existed between Northern and

Southern visions of progress and race relations, the betrayals and

economic transitions of the Reconstruction period were jointly built

upon a deeply held white anxiety towards a Black freedom that reformers

(correctly) understood can only mean the end of America.[30] Instead, a

paper freedom was offered, a right to (sometimes) sit in a voting booth,

witness booth, or prison cell, and even this was suffocated by the still

unending realities of forced labor and social death. The convict lease

system, the restoration of expropriated plantations to their “rightful”

owners, the modernization of police forces and penal codes, and the

expansion of state prison systems all reflected this: that bondage had

not been abolished, but rather democratized. The red and blue lights

that periodically flash across the walls of my neighborhood, and the

streetfights we find ourselves in with Proud Boys and neo-Klansmen, are

equally a reminder of this fact. Here we are 150 years later, still

living in this “afterlife of slavery.”[31]

The question behind this history, that still approaches us urgently in

the 21^(st) century, is: If the democratization of slavery brought us

prisons, what will the democratization of the modern economy bring us?

Act IV: Bon Appétit, Asshole

I would add another dimension to the more removed critiques mentioned so

far: that of individual desire. These critiques mean nothing if they do

not engage dialogically with our own personal experiences of the

workplace, democracy, and racialized and gendered labor.

Speaking as someone who has worked in the food industry, and in

particular fine dining and the catering industry, for nearly 20 years

(with a variety of other wage jobs mixed in), I can barely find the

words to express how absolutely disinterested I am in “self-managing”

this industry, whether it’s right now or after some kind of worker-led

revolution.

I love cooking for and feeding the people I care about.

I hate serving clients. I hate the way their eyes glide over me like I’m

not there, the way I’m trained to be invisible, the way I’m scolded for

eating their food, the way they stare at me with derision when I mix

their drinks, the way their backwashed filth feels when I scrape and

rack their plates, the way my feet and back and wrists hurt at the end

of the shift, the way the black and white uniform is an unspoken

reminder of the Plantation, the looks of depression and alcoholism and

exhaustion on my friends’ and co-workers’ faces. And considering that I

have a degree of white privilege—and am paid above average for the

service sector I’m in—I can only imagine the anger and frustration

others feel. Nobody who gets free is trying to do this shit one minute

longer than we have to, regardless of whether there is a boss or not.

And I think that’s true for tens of millions of service workers across

North America.

“Why should the ghost of capitalism be allowed to prescribe the creative

and decision-making forms of a new society?”

This anger and depression is only heightened by the critical awareness

that there is simply nothing necessary about this work—nothing I do

would be needed for any kind of egalitarian society to function. In a

decent society parties and weddings (which themselves would be a

completely different affair in a stateless and non-patriarchal world)

could easily be “run” by the guests and their friends themselves. Only

in a society as completely alienated as our own do narcissistic,

self-absorbed people pay thousands of dollars to have their most

intimate and personally important days attended to by complete strangers

who stare at them in barely hidden contempt.

I do not want a world where this workplace continues to exist in any way

shape or form. I want it gone. I want my time taken up teaching and

learning with kids, growing and finding food, cooking and eating with

the people and animals I love and whom I depend on to survive. By all

means I desire to (and do) struggle alongside my current co-workers

around the immediate needs that we have—most of which looks like theft

and fudging our hours, given the array of institutional, cultural, and

temporal constraints that make aboveground institutionalized organizing

difficult in our industry—but no amount of post-revolutionary

self-management will make this workplace tolerable. If the rev happens

on a Tuesday, I can promise you that we’ll be smashing the plates,

stealing the silver, and torching the tents by Wednesday morning.

One could argue that our “union” could choose to carry on a different

activity than the labor we carried out before the rev—maybe we turn one

of the wedding venues we work at into a school or collective housing,

for instance—but then it would make more sense to invite in a whole new

set of (former) workers with more skills and experience in that field,

at which point our “caterers’ union” would be a redundancy. And why

should our union, constituted by humans somewhat arbitrarily assembled

by capitalism, get the final say with what happens at that venue anyway,

any more than the other people who live in the area or have immediate

needs and visions for how to use the space? Why should the ghost of

capitalism be allowed to prescribe the creative and decision-making

forms of a new society?

While anarchist organizing in our workplaces may have an immediate

relevancy in the here and now, in the sense that it helps us meet our

short-term needs and opens another site of conflict, it can hardly be

the central or sole driver of human organization after a social

revolution. TLDR: I have no interest in making the catering industry a

democracy. Thanks but no thanks.

In Conclusion

Above all, the critiques in this piece share a deep rejection of the

goal of democratizing our economy. They vary from the historically

materialist, feminist, and ecological to the anti-racist, ontological,

and even “existential.” To be sure, these points of critique could also

be aimed at other, more statist versions of the socialist project. And

this is just as relevant to an approach that sees syndicalism as a

transitionary stage—don’t worry, the One Big Union will wither away on

its own, ideally before the sea levels rise much more!—as opposed to an

“endgame” in itself.

A few side notes regarding this project of democratization: If the work

of most socialists is to make the economy more democratic indirectly

through the state (either through totalitarian single-party rule or the

farce of elections), the strategy of anarcho-syndicalism has been to

bypass the state and do so directly. But while this more direct approach

has historically opened up space for broad and meaningful antagonism

with the state and capital, it remains conceptually wedded to democracy.

In the context of a supposedly anarchist revolution, this implies its

own paradox: a democratic body with no central enforcement apparatus

(i.e. a state’s monopoly on violence) or singularly legitimate

decision-making body (again, a state), that rests instead on the premise

of autonomy and self-determination of its members, is no democracy at

all, but something else entirely. Labeling the structure a “direct”

democracy does not resolve this conceptual confusion.[32]

It is no coincidence that history’s democratic ancestors (Athens, etc.)

were predominantly militarized slave states, and that the central

vehicles for white supremacist expansion in North America were

democratic in form—this kind of state has historically been adept at

military expansion, soliciting consent from privileged but governed

majorities, and stabilization in times of crisis.[33] On the other hand,

for leftists to retroactively label certain indigenous stateless

societies as “democracies” because it gives them the warm

diversity-fuzzies is both Eurocentric and racist. The sooner we discard

the democratic absurdity and develop new language for our visions of

individual and collective freedom, the better off we’ll be.

Returning to the questions at hand, I admit that the criticisms in this

piece attack the question of workers’ self-management from very

different directions, and harbor internal conflicts with each other. In

this sense I am not presenting a singular program, but rather a set of

different (but related) problems fundamental to the syndicalist project.

Frankly, I’m still thinking my way through all these problems and what

they mean for the day-to-day struggles of which I’m a part. I’m

immediately skeptical of grand, universalizing theories that claim to

offer the perfect scientific formula, and am more comfortable in the

negative role of (active) pessimist and experimenter.

I am also not proposing a new “site” for attack, to replace the

workplaces of old as the central, privileged lever at which we will

assert revolutionary power. There should be no new “revolutionary

subject” to replace the idealized “worker,” “peasant,” or “lumpen,”

around which detached middle-class socialists will salivate and spew

forth their objectifying projections and predictions.

I believe it is both necessary and to our strategic benefit that any

sort of anarchistic social revolution attack our oppression at all

points of its reproduction—this still means the workplace, but also the

home, the urban neighborhood, the back roads and mountain hollers,

schools, suburban developments, forests, swamps, deserts, reservations,

everywhere. To state once more, in anticipation of a mountain of

misunderstanding: this article is not suggesting that we abandon

conflict with our bosses. It is arguing that we de-center the workplace

as the primary site of such struggle, and that we understand this

struggle to be gesturing towards something fundamentally more

revolutionary, terrifying, and beautiful than the democratization of the

economy. A worker once wrote in a very old, dusty CNT newspaper: “A

sickle can be used for something other than to reap, and a hoe can serve

to dig the grave for all that has outlived its time.”

If this takes us using an informal neighborhood assembly to coordinate a

raid on a state armory all led simultaneously by a militia of mechanics,

a collective of Quaker clergy, and a platoon of power-line attacking

squirrels, I’m fucking down for that. Shit may get weird. But that’s a

better option than privileging one sector of resistance over others, or

centralizing a single node or channel of decision-making (i.e. the One

Big Union) because that’s what our revolutionary blueprint tells us to

do.[34]

“In an economy, different spheres of life—work, play, ritual, family,

friendship, creativity, learning—are starkly alienated from one another,

and all are typically subordinated to that which best continues to allow

the economy to function.”

As the false life of white civil society is torn at the seams, it is to

be expected that a wide range of workplaces might be destroyed,

abandoned, or completely re-appropriated. Communization—the both

spontaneous and organized act of creating communal and stateless forms

of life—has to be understood as a broadly diffuse and social process,

not limited to or prescribed by the nodes of individual workplaces as

they evolved under capitalism.

In an economy, different spheres of life—work, play, ritual, family,

friendship, creativity, learning—are starkly alienated from one another,

and all are typically subordinated to that which best continues to allow

the economy to function. This is a state of affairs to be opposed

resolutely, and tactics of revolt and forms of organization that allow

these spheres to blend back together indistinguishably are to be

encouraged.

Put differently: As anarchists, we are not struggling to democratize the

state. In the same manner, it needs to be understood that we are not

struggling to democratize the economy. Just as we reject the notion of

handing the reigns of the state over to a new set of owners, we ought

reject any such proposal for the economy. This doesn’t mean the

dispossessed and exploited will not “lead the way”—they already are—but

it does challengea workplace-centered approach geared towards preserving

the economy and production in their currently understood sense.

Just as a graveyard comes to provide soil for new life once unknown to

the tombs and concrete slabs surrounding it, the death march of capital

can give way to totally new pathways for creativity and abundance. But

this requires more than a struggle with the current owners of the means

of production; it means an antagonism with the logic of production

itself, and by extension, the version of ourselves that this logic has

produced. Our task is not to “crowd out” the many post-revolutionary

possibilities available by adhering to a blueprint that is hopelessly

anchored to this world, but to open the door to a new world “in which

many worlds fit.”

Aiming At Ghosts: On The Limited Usefulness Of A Critique Of 19th

-Century Syndicalism

Both A Defense Of Workplace Organizing As Well As A Critique Of The

Article Nothing To Syndicate, Which Was Recently Published On It’s Going

Down. Includes Some Discussion Of The Ideas Of Frank Wilderson, And

Their Limitations.

As the anarchist movement has responded and adapted to the increased

level of social struggle seen over the past few years, it feels as

though a lot of the tired old debates of the past have been pushed

aside, as we’ve been confronted with newer problems and challenges.

Nothing to Syndicate: Against the Democracy of Work & the Work of

Democracy, a recent critique of anarcho-syndicalism, feels like kind of

a throwback, the sort of thing that one might find in the middle of a

heated argument between Evasion-era Crimethinc and NEFACers.

The author argues at length against the idea of workers’ self-management

of the economy and gives a basic introduction to anti-work positions,

but never makes it quite clear who they’re arguing against.

In a telling footnote early on, they say that, “This article is

primarily directed not at a specific organization or its members but at

an idea. In the majority of cases I’ve found modern-day wobblies to be

solid people who, though sometimes driven by a strange nostalgia for a

more radically “authentic” past, possess a genuinely anti-authoritarian

ethos and comradely nature.” And that’s the thing: are these ideas

actually widely held among modern-day wobblies? And if not, what’s the

point of the critique?

It’s notable that, out of a very long and wide-ranging list of sources,

they seem to cite precisely one contemporary wobbly/syndicalist text,

which seems to suggest a certain lack of engagement with the ideas and

tendencies that they’re meant to be arguing against.

One of their strongest points is made early on, when they discuss the

ecological impact of the technology needed for solar and wind power.

These questions – how a post-capitalist society would relate to the

earth and manage “natural resources,” what technologies and materials

are compatible with the continuing survival of life on this planet and

which ones will have to be abandoned, and how we’ll cope with the

absence of those resources we can’t rely on anymore – are, I think,

pressing ones for us all. But things become less impressive when they

move on to ask whether “the economy… just needs a little green,

self-managed tinkering and everything can keep on humming like normal?

And if we don’t believe that, then how does a predominantly syndicalist

strategy for social revolution—in which unions take power from bosses

and continue to run all these workplaces for society’s benefit—make

sense?”

And there’s the thing – who exactly are they arguing with here? Which

contemporary wobblies actually see liberation in terms of keeping the

existing economy and workplaces running under workers’ control?

Indeed, it’s questionable whether the author’s caricature of

anarcho-syndicalism has ever been accurate: in another footnote, they

talk about how, “Even in the heyday of syndicalism, Spain’s glorious CNT

was largely dependent on informal neighborhood networks run mostly by

women, and decentralized armed affinity groups operating clandestinely

and outside of formal union channels.” I’m not sure why they offer this

as evidence to support their argument, when it instead seems to show

that syndicalism has always been more thoughtful and complex than the

strawman they wish to argue against.

Later, they assert that “the most advanced, militant, and widespread

resistance to state, capital, whiteness, and citizenship of the last 20

years has mostly occurred outside the workplace. This is true from the

caracoles of the Zapatistas and the accompanying “anti-globalization”

movement, to Occupy, to the organizing and sub/urban riots of Black

Lives Matter, to Standing Rock, to the prison strikes of 2016 and 2018,

to #OccupyICE, and beyond.”

One obvious point of contention here is whether or not the prison

strikes occurred in workplaces. They do at least acknowledge this issue

in a footnote, but insist that it’s not really the case. Beyond that

point, it’s also unclear whether this is meant to be a list of

international struggles (as the mention of “the Zapatistas and the

accompanying “anti-globalization” movement” would suggest), or purely

U.S. ones, as with the later examples. Even just confining myself to the

US, I would suggest that looking at the organizing work that led to the

attempted assassination of Judi Bari, the mass walkouts on May Day 2006,

the movement in Wisconsin 2011, the longshore dispute that coincided

with the high point of Occupy, and the wave of illegal education strikes

that took place earlier this year – along with the prison strikes of

2016 and 2018 – provide a powerful list of counter-examples, especially

when remembering that many of the education strikes involved mass

defiance of the law.

Discussing the attempted general strike in Oakland 2011, they assert

that “the only notable “general strike” of our generation, that of

Occupy Oakland on November 2, 2011, succeeded in accomplishing a

(partial) retail, service, and port shutdown not primarily by internal

workplace action but rather by tens of thousands of people blocking

ports and roadways and physically attacking businesses from the outside.

Even the port workers, themselves a powerful union, stood on the

sidelines, mostly supportive but constrained by their own contract and

regulations.”

This is a serious misrepresentation: apart from anything else, it’s

worth stressing the point that outside pickets were so successful in

disrupting the port precisely because the port workers had a strong

tradition of radical workplace organization, which allowed them to win

contract provisions that mean they can respect outside pickets. That

strong workplace organization is why Oakland port workers were able to

shut down the port, not just during Occupy in 2011, but also, for

instance, against the Iraq War back in 2007, in solidarity with Black

Lives Matter in 2015 and against Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Years

after Occupy Oakland, the port workers are still able to carry out

disruptive workplace actions in solidarity with a wide variety of social

struggles; the “other organizing structures” praised by the author seem

not to have aged quite so well.

They spend a while stressing the changes in the nature of work, pointing

out that, “It is difficult to organize the workplace if there is no

workplace. It is even harder if there are no workers.” Before

immediately conceding that “there still are workplaces, and we are

(mostly) still workers, and people have been organizing at their jobs

however we (still) can. This should continue as long as these conditions

of work remain—we should be organizing and rebelling in every place in

which this world is reproduced, which is everywhere”.

This is a pretty massive concession. And just saying that “we should be

rebelling everywhere” passes over some pretty important questions – at

what sites do we have relative power? Where do we have more or less

leverage? And even leaving this point aside, out of “everywhere”, where

do we spend most of our waking lives?

Perhaps in the future, most of us will be part of the surplus

population; but right here, right now, there are around 156,795 thousand

people reported as employed in the US. That being the case, for a lot of

us, fighting where we stand means fighting at work.

To Our Friends – not usually seen as a particularly old-fashioned text –

also has relevant insights to offer here:

“What defines the worker is not his exploitation by a boss, which he

shares with all other employees. What distinguishes him in a positive

sense is his embodied technical mastery of a particular world of

production. There is a competence in this that is scientific and popular

at the same time, a passionate knowledge that constituted the particular

wealth of the working world before capital, realizing the danger

contained there and having first extracted all that knowledge, decided

to turn workers into operators, monitors, and custodians of machines.

But even there, the workers’ power remains: someone who knows how to

make a system operate also knows how to sabotage it in an effective way.

But no one can individually master the set of techniques that enable the

current system to reproduce itself. Only a collective force can do that.

This is exactly what it means to construct a revolutionary force today…”

They insist that “a strategy which centrally privileges the workplace as

the primary site of counter-power feels bizarrely out of date and

hopelessly inadequate”; it would be nice if they considered what

contemporary IWW strategy looks like, with its embrace of community

self-defense via the General Defense Committee and prison organizing via

the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. And, indeed, it might be

worth engaging with the full history of revolutionary anarchist

unionism, like the FORA in Argentina, which attempted to build power

outside the workplace way back in the early decades of the 20^(th)

century.

“They insist that “a strategy which centrally privileges the workplace

as the primary site of counter-power feels bizarrely out of date and

hopelessly inadequate”; it would be nice if they considered what

contemporary IWW strategy looks like, with its embrace of community

self-defense.”

In the next section, they draw on the work of the

stockbroker-turned-academic Frank Wilderson, who asserts that the true

Revolutionary Vanguard – sorry, the subject with the most irreconcilable

positionality – is not the worker, but the Black subject. In my opinion,

Wilderson’s thought is well overdue a critical examination, with an eye

to figuring out how far it can be useful to anarchists and other

revolutionaries, and how far it’s mainly a good toolbox for academics

and would-be specialists in/managers of revolt. In the meantime, a brief

examination of the uses to which it’s put here will hopefully show some

of its limitations.

The author offers a supposedly insightful quote from Wilderson:

“Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker

demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a

social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the

positionality of the Black subject (whether a prison-slave or a

prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil

society.”

It’s actually impressive how much Wilderson manages to get wrong here,

in such a short space of time. Perhaps the most glaring error is how, in

his keenness to draw lines around the One True Revolutionary Vanguard,

he posits “an immigrant” as an entirely separate category to “a

prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting.” This might make for a neat

conceptual model, but it’s hard to square with the reality of those

border states where immigration offenses such as illegal re-entry make

up a high proportion of those who become prison slaves, or indeed the

existence of immigrant detention centers – do places like the Northwest

Detention Center really resemble “civil society” more than they resemble

prisons? It’s worth noting that, in contrast to Wilderson’s dismissive

attitude, the prison strike organizers took a far more inclusive and

solidarity-building approach, specifically including detention centers

in their call and stressing the similarity in conditions between

immigrants and others affected by the prison system.

Wilderson’s false distinction between immigrants and prison slaves isn’t

just a factual mistake, it’s the grounding for a theoretical claim: “the

positionality of… an immigrant gestures toward the reconfiguration of

civil society” – that is to say, the demands put forwards by immigrants

are inherently reformist and nonthreatening, in contrast to those of

Black subjects. Of course, I don’t want to deny that immigrants, like

anyone else, can put forward reformist demands for inclusion, but it is

also the case that the state – any state, not just the US – can only

function by drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, so those that

cross borders without permission are subversive to the state’s functions

in a much deeper way than Wilderson admits.

This is one of those points where the right – from the Pittsburgh

murderer specifically choosing to target a synagogue that he saw as

threatening because of its work with migrants, to Trump militarizing the

border, through to conservative social democrats writing articles

against open borders and saying “If “no human is illegal!,” as the

protest chant goes, the Left is implicitly accepting the moral case for

no… sovereign nations at all” – actually have a far clearer

understanding of why border control is so important to the state than

Wilderson does.

It’s also worth noting how his similarly dismissive reference to “a

white woman demanding a social wage” simultaneously shows an ignorance

of what “white women” actually demanded in texts like “Wages Against

Housework”, which rightly or wrongly posited the social wage as a step

towards the overthrow of the system as a whole, and serves to posit the

whole issue of reproductive and domestic labor as solely a white thing,

as though unpaid reproductive work was not also carried out by Black

women, as though attacks on the social wage aren’t often put into

practice precisely by aiming at the figure of Black “welfare queens” and

so on.. If Black women put forward the same demands for a social wage

(as historically they have done – see Piven and Cloward’s discussion of

the National Welfare Rights Organization in Poor People’s Movements for

more on this point), is it still a reformist demand for the

reconfiguration of civil society, or does it suddenly become a

revolutionary demand aiming at the disconfiguration of civil society?

Following Wilderson, and the author insists that prisoners are part of

the proper innately revolutionary no demands vanguard, telling us that

“no one is trying to democratically self-manage their prison—they’re

trying to burn that shit down and get free.”

At this point, it’s worth comparing the overheated projections of

Professor Wilderson and his followers to the actual demands put forward

by the prison strikers. Contrary to the ideology that claims prisoners

have such an irreconcilable positionality that there’s no way they could

demand anything short of “burn that shit down and get free”, prisoners

speaking for themselves actually put forward demands like voting rights

and the restoration of Pell Grants – not exactly a total

disconfiguration of civil society. Or how about that document written by

an inmate after the Vaughn Uprising, “For a safer, more secure and more

humane prison” – real “burn shit down and get free” stuff, right?

Of course, to point out that the prison strikers made reformist demands

for inclusion is in no way to insult them or downplay the significance

of their struggle, and there are lots of cases of reformist demands for

inclusion leading people towards revolutionary conclusions. But it does

suggest that, if Professor Wilderson’s analysis of the positionality of

prison slaves can only work by talking over and ignoring the actual

voices of prisoners themselves, there might be a few problems with it.

Any struggle always faces the possibility of reformists trying to

co-opt, tame and manage it. There’s no shortcut that can get us around

the need to engage with and fight against this possibility. It’d be nice

if Professor Wilderson had managed to find the One True Revolutionary

Struggle that is always inherently radical and can never be co-opted or

managed; but I don’t think that’s the case, prison struggles have to

face these problems just like any others. Indeed, to the extent that

they make it harder to get a clear understanding of what’s going on, and

encourage a false complacency about the potential of reformists

co-opting such movements, Wilderson’s ideas actually make it harder to

fight against prison reformism.

The next section is a personal critique of the food service industry

based on the author’s experiences. There’s some good stuff in there, but

it mostly just made me think “we’ve all read Abolish Restaurants” –

although perhaps the author hasn’t, since they seem so unaware that it’s

possible to have a critique of work and still to see the workplace as a

strategically important site of conflict.

It is also worth pointing out that, when workers in the past did win

extremely limited forms of control over their work, or even just

expressed aspirations toward it, they have made attempts to transform

their workplaces rather than just managing them, as in the Lucas Plan or

the Green Bans in Australia.

The author seems to simultaneously suggest that work is so obviously

terrible that no-one would ever want to self-manage it, and also to

criticise syndicalism and other workplace-focused strategies in a way

that implies that no-one from these traditions has ever noticed how much

work sucks, as if no syndicalists or wobblies have ever expressed

critiques of work that go beyond “let’s manage all this ourselves.” Even

if you think the Lucas Plan or the Green Bans are hopelessly inadequate

compared to what real liberation would be like, they do at least serve

as examples of the fact that over and over again, class struggle in the

workplace has gone beyond just asking for higher wages or questioning

who gives the orders, and whenever we get strong and confident enough,

we always start trying to transform what we do and how we do it.

They ask, “Why should the ghost of capitalism be allowed to prescribe

the creative and decision-making forms of a new society?” But again, who

exactly says it should? Again, Argentina’s revolutionary union, the

FORA, was arguing that: “We must not forget that a union is merely an

economic by-product of the capitalist system, born from the needs of

this epoch. To preserve it after the revolution would imply preserving

the capitalist system that gave rise to it. We, as anarchists accept the

unions as weapons in the struggle and we try to ensure that they should

approximate as closely to our revolutionary ideals”, way back in 1904 –

and that quote is taken from a history published by another

anarcho-syndicalist group in 1987, showing that anarcho-syndicalists

have always been thinking about these issues.

There’s a lot to engage with in their critique of the service industry,

but pretty much all of it is already covered in Abolish Restaurants –

so, since these criticisms and ideas have been expressed before, and

since wobblies and class-struggle anarchists have always been involved

in helping to spread these ideas and keep them in print – see, for

instance, the role of the IWW-affiliated project Thoughtcrime Ink in

printing AR, and the fact that the IWW sell it through their publication

department, and host it on their website (admittedly, with a slightly

critical disclaimer), then what’s the point of a critique that explains

these ideas as if wobblies have never even engaged with them?

Approaching the conclusion they claim that their critique “is just as

relevant to an approach that sees syndicalism as a transitionary stage…

as opposed to an “endgame” in itself”. Which, I think, is frankly

untrue: a strategy that sees workplace organizing as a centrally

important part of a strategy for the abolition of wage labor and the

economy (again, the approach first set out by the FORA is relevant here)

is a different thing to a strategy that aims towards unions

self-managing the economy, and you can’t just say that a critique of one

works as a critique of the other. At the risk of stating the obvious, to

say that the service industry should be abolished is a fair objection to

make to people who don’t want to abolish the service industry, but it’s

not really a relevant critique to make of people who do.

They also state that, “There should be no new “revolutionary subject” to

replace the idealized “worker,” “peasant,” or “lumpen,” around which

detached middle-class socialists will salivate and spew forth their

objectifying projections and predictions.” Which, again, makes me wonder

why they spent so much of their essay plugging Wilderson, since the

whole purpose of the Wilderson quotes they cited setting “the

positionality of the Black subject” against workers, women and migrants

was precisely to establish a claim about a new idealized revolutionary

subject.

They say that, “it is both necessary and to our strategic benefit that

any sort of anarchistic social revolution attack our oppression at all

points of its reproduction—this still means the workplace, but also the

home, the urban neighborhood, the back roads and mountain hollers,

schools, suburban developments, forests, swamps, deserts, reservations,

everywhere”. But “do everything everywhere all the time” isn’t really a

strategy. To start off with, there’s the simple question of what it

actually means to fight where we stand. On a very basic level, most days

I spend a lot of my waking hours at work, and none at all in a swamp or

the desert. Obviously, not everyone would say the same, but I think that

statement is probably true for a pretty hefty percentage of the

population, and that not that many people can say the reverse, that they

spend more time in swamps or deserts than at work.

So, just looking at where we tend to spend our lives, before thinking

about any real strategic questions about where we have power and

leverage and so on, I think that the workplace has an importance that

other places on that list don’t have. Next, if we question what it means

for “the back roads and mountain hollers.. forests, swamps, deserts” to

be counted among the places where our oppression is reproduced, I would

tend to suggest that these places are important to capitalism, to the

state and the economy precisely in so far as, and to the extent that,

they are workplaces where people are getting paid to do something, and

that attacking the system in those places tends to consist of trying to

stop people do the things that they’re getting paid to do there. So

again, we arrive back at the strategic importance of workplace struggle:

if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no-one there to hear it, does

it still reproduce capital?

The author hastens to stress that they are “not suggesting that we

abandon conflict with our bosses”, but simply arguing against

“privileging one sector of resistance over others, or centralizing a

single node or channel of decision-making (i.e. the One Big Union)

because that’s what our revolutionary blueprint tells us to do”. In an

important footnote, they add “One might respond that syndicalists are

already organizing in a variety of sectors, not just the workplace. This

is admirably true, but only more so begs the question why this dated

strategy has not has not updated itself for the 21^(st) century. So

often the activity of the militant speaks to a reality not yet

explicitly recognized by our ideas, which remain millstones around our

necks.”

But again, I find myself asking: is this really a case where a dated

strategy has not been updated, or is it one where the strategy has

indeed been updated, but people offering critiques argues as though it

hasn’t? At the risk of repeating myself once again, I think it’s worth

looking at the strategy explicitly set forward by the FORA, and the work

of syndicalists and wobblies in keeping that tradition alive.

The article closes with a restatement of some ideas from communisation

theory about the abolition of the economy, but again I’m unclear why the

author seems to assume that syndicalists have never encountered these

ideas before, as if only people who were ignorant of these perspectives

could still have a strategy that sees workplace power as being centrally

important.

As we struggle to live out our ideas and apply revolutionary strategies,

whether anarcho-syndicalist or not, to the challenges we face, we’ll

find ourselves faced with all kinds of conflicts and arguments. But I

think a lot of them will be far more interesting than just rehashing a

critique of early-20^(th)-century syndicalist ideas and arguing as if

no-one’s ever encountered Abolish Restaurants.

Anarchist communism 4eva, if destroyed still true.

—a tired old workerist dinosaur

The Ghosts That Still Haunt Us: Old School Syndicalism Not As

Irrelevant As It Should Be

A Critique Of Another Critique Of A Critique Of Syndicalism. This Piece

Addresses This Essay, Also Published On It’s Going Down.

“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.”

– Lopez Arango, E. & de Santillan, DA.

Theorists affiliated with FORA as cited in Anarchist Social Organization

by Scott Nappalos

I’ll be honest—I’d never heard of FORA before reading “Aiming at

Ghosts”, a recent article published by It’s Going Down critiquing

another recent article “Nothing to Syndicate.” But I’m going to make a

wager here: most wobblies haven’t heard of FORA either.

Let me start by saying that I am not the author of Nothing to Syndicate

although I was very excited by it’s publication. I have also distributed

numerous copies of the pamphlet (and will certainly continue to do so).

“Aiming at Ghosts” takes its name from the author’s primary premise: the

syndicalists described in the original essay do not exist, they are

phantoms of the imagination. Today’s syndicalists, the author suggests,

have evolved past their caricature as people LARPing the 1930’s.

However, the evidence is rather scarce that this is the case. The

article is further fleshed out and includes a large digression where the

author puts their ignorance of afro-pessimism on display.[35]

First off, lucky you. I wish I had the privilege of never meeting a

noteworthy number of said LARPers. In fact I’ve met far too many

wobblies, destroying their lives in awful workplaces as their sacrifice

for the union, intent on recreating the conditions of the early 20^(th)

century heyday of labor organizing. Rather, their most efficient work is

often the sabotage of other non-syndicalist radical efforts.

The author begins by conceding a point in the original article about the

ecological considerations of syndicalism. However, they again posit an

ignorance about who would actually advocate for the position critiqued.

Well, the section of the original article in question in fact cites not

simply the IWW, but their “environmental” caucus in particular, as being

out of touch with the full implications of the ecological catastrophe

we’re living in. If the self-proclaimed environmental unionists are

falling short, why would we expect better of those who don’t claim any

unique considerations for the environment?

It is here the author first cites one of two articles (by the same

author) about FORA, the Argentina Regional Workers’ Federation, that

they will cite multiple times throughout the piece. Unfortunately, it

does not reflect upon the whole of syndicalists that a single author

wrote two articles across two years that engage a bit critically with

the IWW’s history. Interestingly enough, FORA probably goes further than

the author does in their criticism—in fact, FORA outright rejects

anarcho-syndicalism, and calls for the abolition of unions (although

only “after the revolution”).[36]

Next, the author compares their list of recent waves of workplace with

the original article’s list that attempts to highlight those outside the

workplace. The author brings up contention around whether or not prisons

count as workplaces, as well as the 2006 strikes and walkouts, the

education strikes this past year, and the longshoremen’s involvement in

the west coast Occupy movement. Let’s take these one at a time.

The author seriously misses the point of the original article about the

November 2^(nd) “general strike”, which was not really arguing whether

or not the Longshoremen’s union (ILWU) organizing helped pave the way

for the port shutdown to be effective. To the extent that November

2^(nd) in Oakland, CA was a general strike, it was accomplished not

through workplace organizing but by the blockading and even attacking of

businesses. The purpose of that afternoon’s anti-capitalist

demonstration was to shut down what hadn’t yet closed. The ILWU would

have gone to work as usual had tens of thousands not made their way to

the port and shut it down. If they did not have “a strong tradition of

radical workplace organization, which allowed them to win contract

provisions that mean they can respect outside pickets” the night might

have ended with those massive crowds having to more diligently enforce

the shutdown.

This might in fact be the most controversial position of this whole

essay, but I believe that considering the prison strikes as a workplace

issue narrowed the scope of struggle significantly. 2016 saw prisoners

Holman repeatedly take over the dormitories, set fire to guard towers,

and attack guards—one fatally. With this momentum, how can calling for a

mere work stoppage seem appropriate?[37] Of course, that prison strike

saw inmates all the way from Florida to Michigan take collective and

riotous action. Actions like these, in addition to work and hunger

strikes, helped fill out the mosaic of the 2016 prison strike. In 2018,

the prison strike was still understood as primarily involving work and

under strikes, which was reinforced when reporting on strike activity:

“There have been many protests, disruptions and unusual occurrences in

prisons across the US in the last two weeks, these incidents might be

strike related, or they might simply be occurring at the same time.

Outside organizers are pursuing leads and seeking confirmation. In our

strike roundup we’ve been careful to only include instances of protest

that were explicitly connected to the nationwide strike and its

demands.”

–IWOC’s website

This creates a self-fulfilling narrative where strike activity as

understood in the strictest definition is what circulates on the inside,

and then we only catch wind of the actions that can fit that within that

framework on the outside.

There are other struggles that have emerged around workplaces that the

author mentions, like this past year’s education strikes or those around

May Day in 2006. The original article made no attempt to suggest that

there have been no resistance erupting from workplace struggles. Only

that the workplace has been decisively de-centered as the site of

conflict.

Lastly, the author dismisses the original article’s personal testimony

from the service industry as simply rehashing the ideas from the

prominent text, Abolish Restaurants. To say nothing of the way this

dismissal perhaps mirrors the way syndicalism flattens all workers’

experience, it’s also not an argument to say that someone else has

criticized something before and that’s the end of it. Critiques of

syndicalism are not made because they are new—syndicalism was critiqued

even when it was relevant about a century ago. It’s also not evidence

that the IWW engaged with ideas because they host the article on their

website with a disclaimer saying that such ideas are “ultra-left

dogmatism.”

In the end, I think that if syndicalists actually take to heart the

lessons laid out in the original article, then they have come so far

from syndicalism that the label hardly matters anymore. If one believes

that there are many worthwhile struggles that happen outside of the

workplace, that don’t need to be mediated, that unions are in fact a

product of capitalism, and that self-management is not a goal but

instead one aims for a much more vast and deep transformation of

life—why consider yourself a syndicalist anymore? It doesn’t matter to

me anyway.

But this is where the author and I diverge. There are a number of

syndicalists who still base their organizing around the strategies of

early 1900s, whether they’re older and stuck in their “NEFAC”[38] ways,

or younger and haven’t read Abolish Restaurants, or any political

analysis written in the last 50 years besides what’s included in the

union newsletter. And I am personally very thankful that someone wrote

such a thoughtful (much more so than this article) critique of

syndicalism for the present day.

[1] This essay is not a critique of public-facing or “formal”

organizations per se. Revolutionary movements need a variety of

accessible entry points for new folks, whether that’s a union, a social

center, a medic collective, or something else, and the failure of

anarchist infrastructure to adequately fill this role in 2016 partly

explains the emergence of more reformist groups like DSA. Rather, this

piece takes aim at some of the ideological baggage carried by the more

prominent leftist organizations currently playing this role.

[2] They called it a sports bloc, by the way, and I was thrilled at how

instead of being content to just chant slogans against the rich like the

rest of us, they actually did the thing.

[3] I still remember a four-hour long conversation with an extremely

smart, auto-didactic train-hopping anti-capitalist hobo, named after a

certain starchy vegetable, who grew up working shit-jobs most of his

life, fervently explaining to my youthful and earnestly left-anarchist

self why he was absolutely not interested in “workers’ self-management”

and “democratizing industry.” Thank you for your patience, P.

[4] This article is primarily directed not at a specific organization or

its members but at an idea.In the majority of cases I’ve found

modern-day wobblies to be solid people who, though sometimes driven by a

strange nostalgia for a more radically “authentic” past, possess a

genuinely anti-authoritarian ethos and comradely nature.

[5] “Global Warming Must Not Exceed 1.5C Warns Landmark UN Report”, The

Guardian.

[6] “Restoring the Heartland and Rustbelt Through Clean Energy

Democracy,” IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus.

[7] “If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So much Toxic

Waste?”, Forbes Magazine.

[8] Adding to this specter of colonialism is the very real fact that the

soon-to-be-syndicated workplaces across North America all reside on

stolen land. I don’t know what native folks will want to do if the rev

pops off—I suspect they’ll have a lot of different ideas about it—but if

many of them want to remove large parts of their land from the

industrial and economic paradigm, it would be a colonialist and

counter-revolutionary act for a union to stand in their way,

self-management be damned.

[9] The ecologically disastrous paths of the USSR and China are also an

alarm bell worth ringing. Though rank and file workers hardly had (or

have) more power in these societies than in the US, the warning signs of

a bureaucratic and production-obsessessed economy ring true.

[10] That being said, won’t it be remarkable to live in a world where

industry hasn’t destroyed so much of the natural world that living by

hunting, fishing, and sustainable small-scale agriculture is possible

again? Shouldn’t that be a goal? If someone offered me a trade where I

could sit at a lake catching my dinner instead of checking fedbook every

ten minutes, I’d take that shit in a minute.

[11] Nevertheless, the imagination is a fun place to start! For an

exploration of this theme, check out Post-Civ!published by Strangers in

a Tangled Wilderness. I’d also suggest writings from the ZAD in France.

[12] “Long Term Resistance: Fighting Trump and Liberal Co-option”, Peter

Gelderloos.

[13] In my household, for instance, there are three kids and four

adults, three of whom are parents. Between the five oldest of us, we

work nine part or full-time jobs. Several of us are on some kind of

public assistance, and we still have it a lot better than some folks in

my neighborhood.

[14] Even in the heyday of syndicalism, Spain’s glorious CNT was largely

dependent on informal neighborhood networks run mostly by women, and

decentralized armed affinity groups operating clandestinely and outside

of formal union channels.

[15] “Amazon Just Opened a Human-Free Supermarket,” News Channel

5.https://www.newschannel5.com/simplemost/amazon-just-opened-human-free-supermarket

[16] For further discussion of this, check out Here at the Center of the

World in Revolt by Lev Zlodey& Jason Radegas.

[17] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/universal-basic-income-gets-nod-from-obama-bezos-should-fund-it.

It’s unclear if Bezos’ basic income will cover the three-fold increase

in rent costs you’ll face when he moves his Amazon headquarters to your

town.

[18] Some might argue that these prison strikes did in fact occur at

“workplaces”, but this is an awkward attempt to fit a square peg in a

round hole, as the next section will hopefully demonstrate.

[19] The IWW’s Incarcerated Organizing Committee (IWOC) was important to

both the 2016 and 2018 strikes, but its role has been exaggerated by

media, which latched onto the most apparent, legible organization it

could find to explain a movement it did not understand. The actual

organizing for the strike depended on IWOC agitation but also a wide

array of already existent prisoner study groups, gangs, prisoner

publications, and collectives and affinity groups on the outside. A look

at where strike participation popped off is illustrative: in many of the

“hottest” facilities, there were few if any IWOC members at all.

[20] For an excellent historical study, by a participant, of how

syndicalist structures can reproduce bureaucracy and betray workers’ own

initiatives, check out Carlos Semprun Maura’s Revolution and

Counter-Revolution in Catalonia.

[21] The Invisible Committee once wrote, “We just have to keep in mind

that nothing different can come out of an assembly than what is already

there.” So many times people join an organization because that is how

they think things happen. But no formation, regardless of how “perfect”

its structure, will prove powerful if the individuals present fail to

bring initiative, care, daring, creativity, and mutual trust.

[22] The 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike offered an inspiring

example of this, in particular in the massive networks of mutual aid

that emerged, and the willingness of at least some teachers to organize

in direct opposition to union bureaucrats. At the same time, the

extremely limited, political, and ultimately conservative scope of the

demands themselves speaks to this critique. Sometimes the exception

proves the rule.

[23] “Expanded Notes on the Police, their Predecessors, and the White

Hell of Civil Society,” Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley.

[24] A last note on civil society:A few years ago, during a daytime lull

in an anti-police uprising in a nearby city, me and my exhausted,

tear-gas-drenched friends were loading up cases of water in the trunk of

our car. A well-dressed woman exiting a Starbucks approached us with a

mix of fear and genuine concern, begging us, “Please, don’t do anything

unkind.”

[25] “The Prison-Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Frank Wilderson.

[26] This all feels particularly relevant given how IWOC has been

involved in both the 2016 and 2018 prison strikes. (Or tried to be—in

many areas, like my own, they have almost no members on either side of

the wall, and have ended up the spokespeople for other people’s

organizing or struggles). It’s a strange fit—I’m pretty sure the wobbly

comrades I know are aware that the prisoners they’re writing with are

not trying to “self-manage” the prison. This all feels like another

example of the activity having moved beyond the vision.

[27] Lose Your Mother. Saidiya Hartman, pg. 170. (My italics).

[28] For more on this aspect of the Freedmen’s Bureau, check out Eric

Foner’sA Short History of Reconstruction. By most accounts the majority

of these agents were earnest anti-racist reformers who thought that by

providing education and labor contracts they were helping end chattel

slavery, but this did not change their use-value to Northern capitalists

and politicians.

[29] I would encourage readers to check out histories of the Ogeechee

Insurrection as well as the Sea Island maroons, who, in addition to

refusing to grow cash crops for the Union, maintained their cultural

autonomy and a century later were still resisting yuppie development

projects like golf courses.

[30] “I think black people have always felt this about America, and

Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American

head, the shape of the wrath to come.” – James Baldwin, No Name in the

Street.

[31] Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman.

[32] For further inquiry, I would highly suggest the series of articles

From Democracy to Freedom by Crimethinc, as well as Uri Gordon’s writing

on anarchist decision-making in Anarchy Alive!.

[33] Worshipping Power, by Peter Gelderloos (AK Press), has some useful

information on this.

[34] One might respond that syndicalists are already organizing in a

variety of sectors, not just the workplace. This is admirably true, but

only more so begs the question why this dated strategy has not has not

updated itself for the 21^(st) century. So often the activity of the

militant speaks to a reality not yet explicitly recognized by our ideas,

which remain millstones around our necks.

[35] I don’t even bother to reply to the author’s really abhorrent

ignorance of Frank Wilderson’s work because it’s just so obscenely

wrong. No, your snide remarks don’t mask the fact that you haven’t put

an ounce of brainpower into thinking through the difference between the

concept of “irreconcilable positionality” and a revolutionary

subject/vanguard (as if the “One Big Union” isn’t a goddamn de facto

vanguard anyway). Read Frank Wilderson or any afro-pessimism honestly

for more than five minutes and hopefully you can figure this one out on

your own.

[36] For those of us who don’t believe in “after the revolution”, when

is the right time to abolish unions?

[37] This might read as a silly exaggeration to those without the

context, but the call for the 2016 prison strike originally came from

Alabama where Holman prison is located. Michael Kimble, an anarchist

prisoner at the facility, has even gone so far as to publicly criticize

groups like FAM, who helped call for the strike, for their lack of

support for militant prisoners.

[38] The author suggests the original article is reminiscent of “a

heated argument between Evasion-era Crimethinc and NEFACers.” Even such

phrasing reminds us that CrimethInc. has evolved significantly over the

past twenty years to keep pace with the shifting world around them.