💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › where-is-mass-organizing.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:45:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Where is the Mass Organizing?
Author: Adam Berkowicz
Date: 2017
Language: en
Topics: Anarchism, Modern, organizing

Adam Berkowicz

Where is the Mass Organizing?

Contrary to what many people think, anarchism is not allergic to

organization. On the contrary, organization is crucial to movement

building, and this is something that has been lost within our ranks for

many decades. Unions, once a bedrock of socialist thought, have been

co-opted across the world and decimated in the United States and the

U.K. Today, most workers reside in either retail or health care service

industries in an environment where there is no collective bargaining, no

options to strike, and very few choices in the number of hours one can

work for the day. In health care, the hours are absurdly long, while in

retail, the numbers are dwindling rapidly. In both cases, there doesn’t

seem to be any mass organization to speak of.

Let me step back and put forward what I believe to be the three realms

of anarchism: critique, tactics, and vision. The first, critiquing the

world as it is, is something anarchists have been doing since the

inception of the movement, and this is something that remains a

strength, though the field is crowded with other forms of socialism and

even the progressive left. One of the more promising ideas for critique

stems from intersectionality, and though this was hardly an anarchist

idea, it seems to fit in well with what anarchists practice. The

potential building blocks of mass organization, intersectionality is

still in battle among the left, and it is not clear if the common

threads of oppression will lead to anything more substantial. In my neck

of the woods, it has been primarily used as a springboard for

legislative action.

Anarchist tactics were once significant enough to have become part of

the mainstream historical narrative, though not for the reasons our

forebears may have thought. Propaganda by the deed did not rally

workers, and while direct action remains our primary means towards

emancipation, the ideas behind these actions remain ambiguous. In the

heyday of the IWW and other radical organizations, tactics were

performed with specific purposes, whether for short-term objectives or

propaganda, and while this is still the case among affinity groups, the

impact of these actions are comparatively minimal due strictly to

participating numbers. This is not to disparage modern actions, but only

to point out that we lack the internal infrastructure to deal with local

and regional problems; anarchism remains prevalent in metropolitan areas

or along the coasts of the United States, while there is little to no

presence across the midlands, rust-belt, or south that is connected to a

broader movement.

I also want to address the vision of anarchism as well, which is

necessarily a compendium of assorted views. From an organization point

of view, it seems like we are currently stuck intellectually between the

historically contextual views of long-dead anarchist thinkers and a

shallow conception of anarchism as “democracy-extreme” or “everything is

free” without much nuance. To be sure, there are plenty of anarchists

who have thought about these issues from the point of humility and

complexity of what we don’t know, but anarchism is only as potent as its

general message, which remains weighed down by charges of utopianism and

naivety. I am not sure what the answer is to these societal roadblocks,

but I do feel confident that it will take a larger organizational effort

to get more voices heard and reanimate some stale conversations (the

recently announced Channel Zero podcast initiative seems like a great

start, though I’m not sure if transcripts are available).

In each of these three areas, there remains a deficit of mass

organization. Anarchism cannot remain atomized and hope to inspire

revolutionary action; its tenets have always (outside of some Egoist

strains) relied on collective theory and practice, and this century

cannot be any different. Obviously, there have been moments of mass

movements (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the recent movement at

Standing Rock come to mind), but none of these are explicitly anarchist

or even anti-authoritarian. The internet has proven to be a boon for

connecting with others across the world, but there are clearly issues

concerning privacy and co-optation that may never be resolved.

So, I pose these questions to you all, hoping that we can continue to

demand the impossible:

Is mass organization a necessity for anarchy?

Do unions remain a viable possibility, or are they a relic of the

past?

With the embrace of intersectional thought, how do oppressed groups

focus on collaboration and not on competition with each other?

Where do ‘the workers’ fit into this scheme? Once the center of the

movement (and sadly focused on almost exclusively white male industrial

workers, at least in the U.S.), how do we define what the workers are,

if at all?

Must a new vision of mass organization be imagined, or does it already

exist and instead needs to be implemented at a larger scale?