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Title: Bring the Ruckus Author: Ruckus Collective Date: 2001 Language: en Topics: anarchist organization, organization, Direct Democracy, anti-racism, strategy, Northeastern Anarchist, Bring the Ruckus Source: Retrieved on 2015-09-08 from https://web.archive.org/web/20150908093651/http://bringtheruckus.org/?q=about Notes: Re-published in The Northeastern Anarchist Issue #5, Fall/Winter 2002.
Over the last few years there has been a growing discussion among
revolutionaries of the need for a national or continental
anti-authoritarian revolutionary organization. This discussion has
emerged from several contexts, including the death of the Love and Rage
Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, the anti-globalization protests that
began in Seattle in 1999, and by criticisms of the whiteness of the
American left made primarily by revolutionaries of color. World and
national events also seem to justify such discussion: globalization, the
persistence of the American racial order, and the bankruptcy of
reformist movements from the left, right, and center. Yet if talk about
the need for a new organization is abundant, steps toward building it
have been awkward. Much talk is simply recycled debate over violence and
organizational structure, while other debates, such as over strategy,
have been largely overlooked.
It is with the intention of furthering debate about a new revolutionary
organization that this document was written. The Ruckus collective (no
relation to the Ruckus Society) formed in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1997 to
discuss revolutionary politics at a local and national level and to
develop a revolutionary praxis. Our main contribution locally has been
the creation of Phoenix Copwatch, which has been patrolling the streets
since early 1999. Several months ago we began talking about the need for
a national or continental revolutionary organization. This led us to
embark on a program of study with the goal of creating a proposal for a
membership-based national or continental revolutionary federation.
During this time we studied a number of past revolutionary groups,
focusing particularly on their politics, program, structure, and
strategy.
The principles outlined below express the conclusions we have reached so
far in our study. This is by no means a complete manifesto or political
statement. It is simply an outline of principles we believe should be
embraced by a new revolutionary organization. It is our hope that this
document will not only add to the debate on the structure and politics
of a new organization but help to push the development of such a group
to the next level.
A revolutionary organization for the 21^(st) century needs to forge a
path between the Leninist vanguard party favored by traditional Marxist
parties and the loose “network” model of organizing favored by many
anarchists and activists today. The purpose of a revolutionary
organization is to act as a cadre group that develops politics and
strategies that contribute to mass movements toward a free society.
It is not a vanguard group. It does not seek to control any organization
or movement, nor does it pretend that it is the most advanced section of
a struggle and thus has the right to act in the interests of the masses.
Instead, it assumes that the masses are typically the most advanced
section of a struggle and that the cadre perpetually strives to learn
from and identify with the masses. At the same time, a cadre
organization does not pretend it doesn’t provide leadership for larger
movements, nor does it pretend that leadership is inherently
authoritarian. A cadre organization does not seek to control any
organization or movement, it aims to help lead it by providing it with a
radical perspective and committed members dedicated to developing its
autonomous revolutionary potential. A cadre group should debate those
politics and strategies that best imagine and lead to a free society and
then fight to enact them in mass-oriented organizations and movements.
A cadre is not an umbrella organization. It does not participate in any
and all kinds of progressive social activism. Instead, a cadre group
seeks out, helps develop, and supports those forms of agitation that
undermine the rule of official society and that in some way prefigure
the new society. In other words, the organization would not actively
support any kind of activism but only those struggles that hold the
potential of building a dual power. We imagine that such a revolutionary
organization would be to contemporary movements what the FAI was to the
CNT in Spain or the First International was to the European working
class movements: a membership organization of like-minded persons
committed to developing and encouraging the autonomous revolutionary
tendencies in our present society.
In the proposed organization, all power and authority should be
transparent, accountable, distributed democratically, and effective. We
believe the structure for a new organization should be based on the
following principles:
affairs that affect the organization. Unlike democratic centralism, this
would include the right to freely express disagreements with decisions
made by the majority. This type of democracy doesn’t mean that a
minority faction can disrupt the decisions of the majority, which tends
to occur in loose network structures (i.e. consensus processes).
members ought to make decisions about and act on the behalf of the
organization. The organization should be controlled only by those who
commit themselves to it. Criteria for membership should be clearly
established, along with criteria for suspending or expelling members who
violate the organization’s principles. Membership criteria should
include both political and financial commitments to the organization.
criteria of membership would be to join a local branch or to form one if
one doesn’t exist.
decisions and carrying them out should be established. Members who do
not meet their responsibilities should be held accountable for failing
to do so.
The proposed organization’s priority should be to destroy white
supremacy. White supremacy is a system that grants those defined as
“white” special privileges in American society, such as preferred access
to the best schools, neighborhoods, jobs, and health care; greater
advantages in accumulating wealth; a lesser likelihood of imprisonment;
and better treatment by the police and the criminal justice system. In
exchange for these privileges, whites agree to police the rest of the
population through such means as slavery and segregation in the past and
through formally “colorblind” policies and practices today that still
serve to maintain white advantage. White supremacy, then, unites one
section of the working class with the ruling class against the rest of
the working class. This cross-class alliance represents the principle
obstacle, strategically speaking, to revolution in the United States.
Given the United States’ imperial power, this alliance has global
implications.
The central task of a new organization should be to break up this unholy
alliance between the ruling class and the white working class by
attacking the system of white privilege and the subordination of people
of color. This is not to say that white supremacy is the “worst” form of
oppression in this country, nor is it to imply that if white supremacy
disappears then all other forms of oppression will magically melt away.
Instead, it is a strategic argument, based on an analysis of U.S.
history, designed to attack the American death star at its weakest
point. The glue that has kept the American state together has been white
supremacy; melting that glue creates revolutionary possibilities.
The proposed organization should be anti-statist. The function of the
state is to 1) perpetuate the rule of the oppressing class and 2)
maintain its own power. It therefore has nothing to do with a free
society and should be abolished. A revolutionary strategy seeks to
undermine the state by developing a dual power strategy. A dual power
strategy is one that directly challenges institutions of power and at
the same time, in some way, prefigures the new institutions we envision.
A dual power strategy not only opposes the state, it also prepares us
for the difficult questions that will arise in a revolutionary
situation.
The organization should also support the principle of
self-determination, or the right for people to control their own life
and destiny. Movements for self-determination have often assumed the
politics of nationalism. Anarchists have traditionally rejected
nationalism as a tool of oppression. We recognize that anti-statism and
nationalism are often contradictory tendencies, since nationalism often
supports the creation of nation-states. However, nationalism has also
been a liberating force in world history, particularly in the struggle
against colonialism. Thus, despite its contradictions nationalist
struggles cannot be rejected out of hand by anti-authoritarian
revolutionaries. The task is to develop anti-statist tendencies within
nationalist movements, not to denounce the struggles of oppressed
peoples because they assume a nationalist form.
Any new organization should be explicitly feminist, in several ways.
First, a revolutionary organization should have a radical feminist
analysis of our society that challenges male dominance, compulsory
heterosexuality, and the bipolar gender system that forces humans into
“male” and “female” and “masculine” and “feminine” categories. Second,
its internal operations (organizing structure, allocation of positions
of leadership, meeting procedures, debating habits, etc.) should ensure
women’s participation and be strongly aware of practices that tend to
favor men’s voices over women’s. Third, it should be committed to
feminist political work, particularly those kinds of agitation that
connect struggles against sexism with struggles against white supremacy.
Finally, a revolutionary organization needs a feminist vision. It should
imagine a world not only without sexism or homophobia but one in which
gender relations are completely transformed. Toward this end, it should
encourage resistance to masculine/feminine gender borders and encourage
people to critique and explore their desires rather than repress them.
The proposed federation should recognize that political theory, no
matter how strong, can accomplish little if it is not combined with
effective strategy. The actions taken by the organization, its
involvement in mass movements, and its public statements should all be
determined on a strategic basis. The focus of our work should be
involving ourselves in movements and activism where there is the
potential to work toward the building of a dual power. Social reforms
won by progressive movements may be important, but if they do not work
toward a dual power they are not the concerns of a revolutionary
organization. For example, animal liberation is a worthy cause. However,
it is difficult to imagine how a campaign for animal liberation could
threaten state power and foreshadow a new society. Thus, while a
revolutionary organization may applaud animal liberation activities, it
would not devote energy toward animal rights. On the other hand, a
program to develop local Copwatch chapters could represent a dual power
strategy, since monitoring the police undermines state power by
disrupting the cops’ ability to enforce class and color lines and also
foreshadows a new society in which ordinary people take responsibility
for ensuring the safety of their communities.
Thus, campaigns developed by the organization that do not contribute
toward the building of a dual power should be abandoned. If a popular
protest movement has little hope of building a dual power, it is not one
we should be collectively involved in. We may morally and politically
approve of such movements but as a small group with limited resources,
we must reject the liberalism of reform activism and concern ourselves
with revolutionary strategy.
One of the great failings of modern radical organizations has been the
failure to provide a strong vision of a new society. We are able to say
what we are against but rarely what we are for. One purpose of a
revolutionary organization is to provide people with a vision of a world
worth fighting for. Lack of vision is one of the reasons why radicals
have historically failed to win the working class to their politics.
Unfortunately, the fascist right has not failed in this task; they offer
a clear vision of the world they want to create. If we continue to fail
to offer a vision of our own, we cannot expect to win people over to
revolutionary politics.
This proposal is the product of our readings and discussion on various
radical organizations and movements over the past year, ranging from
works produced by the Black liberation struggle, women’s liberation, the
abolitionists, and both classical and contemporary revolutionary
anarchism. The praxis addressed within is also based on our experience
with grassroots political work, particularly in Phoenix Copwatch.
If you are interested in the politics of this proposal and would like to
discuss it further, we encourage you to contact us.