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Title: Defining Practice Author: Scott Nappalos Date: April 17, 2010 Language: en Topics: practice, organization, struggle Source: Retrieved on 14th October 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/16350 Notes: This article is about levels of organization, and a strategic thesis that the intermediate level is the strategic point of intervention for the libertarian left in our time. The intermediate level is where groupings of conscious workers unify around some basic unity for coordination and struggle in the mass organization.
There is a left tradition of thinking about and taking action within two
realms of activity: the mass level and the revolutionary political
level. There are different ways to cash out these concepts, but they are
distinguished basically by levels of unity and content. The mass level
is where people come together based on common interests to take action
in some form, with unions being the most obvious and traditional
example. A higher level of unity is the revolutionary political level
where people take action based on common ideas and practices. These
concepts are tools or instruments that can help us make sense of the
world, and better act to change it. In so far as they do that, they
work. If they don’t, we get new ones. At the level of reality, this
division is not so clear and in fact we see mixtures of unity and action
everywhere. That being said, these concepts help us parse out how as
revolutionaries we can relate to social groupings, and how we can
intervene.
There is an additional level though that can help us in this manner, the
intermediate level. As opposed to the political level, which is defined
by attempted unity of ideas, and the mass level, which is defined by
common practices with diversity of ideas, the intermediate level shares
some features of both. The intermediate level is where people organize
based on some basic level of unity of ideas to develop and coordinate
their activity at the mass level.
Taking the example of the workers movement, we see unions at the mass
level grouped together by common workplace issues, and a political level
of revolutionary militants with unified ideology acting within the
unions in some way or another. Within the unions there can be a
plurality of political organizations, and even of individual militants
who lack organizations. An intermediate level organization could come to
unite class conscious workers around a strategy within their industry,
workplace, etc. The intermediate level organization would not have the
unity of a political organization, since its basis is bringing together
militants for a common practice that doesn’t require everyone having the
same ideology and political program. Likewise, if we required every
member in a mass organization to share a high level of class
consciousness and militancy (independently of the ebb and flow of
struggles), we would be doomed either to fractions or paper tigers.
There is also a distinction between levels and organizations. That is
there’s a mass level before the mass organization. The mass organization
is made up of people who come together around common interests. That
means there are people with common interests who exist before they come
together in the mass organization. Often there is mass level activity
and organizing (like spontaneous struggles, informal work groups, etc),
before there is mass organization. There’s also a revolutionary (or at
least leftist) level before the revolutionary organization – there are
people with ideas and actions who exist before they come together into a
conscious revolutionary body.
Likewise with the intermediate level, there are individuals and
activities that precede organization. Presently there are organizations
that sometimes play the role of intermediate organization
(unconsciously), and there is prefigurative organizing and tendencies of
potential future intermediate organizations. I want to hazard a thesis;
in the United States today the intermediate level is the most important
site for revolutionaries. In fact, I think this is true beyond the
United States, but I lack the space here to prove it, and will leave it
up to others in other places.
The intermediate level is strategic at this time is due to the state of
political and mass organizations. The revolutionary left has been
isolated from the working class (as well as other oppressed classes) for
at least decades. The left is largely derived from the student and
sub-cultural movements which serve as a training ground for the various
institutional left bureaucracies (NGOs, unions, lobbying groups,
political parties, sections of academia, etc), or at the least these
institutions remain dominant within the left. The left reflects a
particular section of society, one that sets it apart from the working
class in its activity, vision, and makeup. There’s an inertia of
dyspraxia; the ideas the left espouses do not reflect the activity of
the left. Whether this is from the black block to the so-revolutionaries
working to elect the left wing of capital, the left is characterized at
this time by an alienation from the working class rather than an ability
to “act in its interest”.
On the other side the mass movements are dominated by those same forces
that the left breeds in, the institutionalized bureaucracies which are
integrated into capitalism. Few if any mass movements exist where the
working class has collective engagement and leadership, and bring
collective activity to bare down on capital. The mass movements alone
don’t have any guarantees. Workers have their own ideas and logic, some
of which can be liberatory and others of which can be reactionary (and
everything in between). Both spontaneity and vanguardism are
fundamentally flawed ways of looking at the world. While the mass
movements ultimately have the power to transform society, the opposite
may be true as well (they can become reactionary defenders of
capitalism, or worse put forward reactionary radical politics). Nor is
the left is immune from all same forces that threaten the mass
movements, in fact the official or institutional left’s track record is
worse. Generally the left has been behind the masses in times of
upheaval, and often in the role of repressing these movements.
Historically, there’s a syllogism on the libertarian left about unions
that reflects the division between the mass and political levels. The
syllogism is some variant of this:
bring together large enough groups to be effective.
join then either:
a. It would be unnecessary since the workers are already revolutionary,
and could just launch a revolution. The union would just be a duplicate
of a political organization. (or)
b. The members would merely be anarchists/revolutionaries/communists on
paper.
Another variant:
organized capitalists class
bureaucracy with interests separated from the workers
becomes reactionary.
The conclusions of these lines of thought vary, but they share some
things in common. This orientation puts forward an ahistorical and
overly schematic conception of the mass and political level. The
implications of these theories are that either this is how things are or
how they should be. The conclusion is that we should either try to
convince mass movements to avoid politicization or that we should
recognize their inability to do so and diverge from them. The upshot of
this these lines of thought tend to orient us towards the mass and
political level in ways that make us unprepared for the ways in which
movements change across time and constitute themselves.
The history of the workers movement is quite different from the
arguments above. Rather than seeing very clear cut divisions either
between revolutionary political organizations and very general mass
unions (or between collaborationist and militant unions), we see every
possible permutation. That is to be expected, however the above
arguments try to argue against mixing mass and political, saying it’s a
witches brew that will yield only failure. It’s an argument about the
nature or essence of mass and political, which then tries to change real
mass organizations and political organizations in relation to their
supposed nature.
The problem is that these organizations are not static, they change.
They also do not change on a whim, but there are distinct ebbs and flows
of struggle. When the struggle is pitched and society (or at least some
section of it) erupts into resistance, we can see mass organizations
become politicized, and workers can be radicalized (or become
radicalized towards fascistic tendencies). Likewise political
organization can take on mass characteristics. In low points of struggle
however politicized workers organization have a difficult time acting as
a mass organization (though they try!), and mass organizations can tend
towards domination by class collaborationism and bureaucratic
parasitism.
While too general to say anything systematic, this is a fundamental
insight. The nature of struggle is not static, but changes with the rise
and fall of resistance. Now, this doesn’t negate that you can see
militant radical mass movements in times when other struggles are absent
(perhaps the MST in Brazil during some periods is a good example, or the
underground CNT under Franco), but we should expect that the scope of
these struggles will be limited, and that we need another orientation
other than expecting them to grow step-by-step linearly. How people
organize themselves changes alongside this. That being said, I will
mention only in passing that I don’t think either the mass organization
alone or the political organization are sufficient to bring down
capitalism and create a new society. Both the experiences of party
dictatorship in the soviet states, and the failures of syndicalism in
Spain and elsewhere provide some data about the limitations of rigidly
adhering to organizational forms as vehicles of liberation.
Struggle itself can be transformative, both of people and of levels and
organizations. People at the mass level come together in organization to
fight, and can transform their consciousness through those struggles.
The mass organization itself may change then, and intermediate and
political organizations may evolve from those struggles. The political
level may build mass organization, or intermediate organization
consolidates into political organization. Ultimately the mass level is
the lifeblood of all struggles. Without the mass level, the intermediate
and political levels are merely chasing winds. If we recognize this
dynamic, that people are transformed in struggle and organizations can
be built through these transformations, it helps rupture these rigid
conceptions of the separations of the political and mass organization,
the dominance of the political organization, or fetishized forms of the
mass revolutionary organization.
In our time, the alienation of the left from struggle has created a kind
of abstract obsession with either structures or ideas. An intellectual
and often political sect driven tendency focuses solely on political
content, in terms of trying to convince, debate, win, or propagate
revolutionary ideas irrespective of the form they take, their embodiment
in struggle, etc. An activist tendency tends towards an obsession with
form and structure (assemblies, councils, unions, etc), and usually
merely formal democracy, as being inherently revolutionary irrespective
of the content and ideas of the people inside the structure, or even its
direction. The content of struggles is however crucial. Formal democracy
with a racist working class could yield a radical democratic fascism for
example. We want to see a lived democracy, which can’t be guaranteed by
structures alone, and ultimately we need a democracy with a certain
content, anarchist communist content. This means we should seek out and
strengthen struggles that develop that content in the struggle, which is
different from getting people to verbalize radical ideas.
Synthesizing these two features of organization in society brings into
focus the role of the intermediate level. At the present time, we live
in a low point of struggle in the United States. Today mass organization
is either spread out and localized, repressed, or co-opted. Political
organization is generally isolated and deformed, while capital is
unleashing massive restructuring, discipline, and rationalization. The
two options usually presented have been to unreflectively build mass
movements, or to build political organizations (sometimes to build them
alongside or within the mass movements). At the level of mass struggle,
it’s worth saying that organizing is incredibly difficult, and the
strength and repression of capital alone is the greatest threat. However
the potential of capital to incorporate and utilize repressive measures
on struggle through the mass movements is poorly understood and
unappreciated on the left (especially since the level of struggle is low
anyhow). On the revolutionary political side we have isolation
manifested in its spontaneist, insurrectionary, or intellectual forms.
More secondarily there are attempts to build political organization out
of the mass movements which generally don’t exist or are organized
against political organization. It becomes a chicken or the egg sort of
game, we lack the struggle to rupture the stasis of the mass movements,
but we lack the mass movements to generate the struggle. It is not
possible to will into existence militant class conscious mass movements,
nor is it responsible to sit on one’s hands waiting for it to occur.
During low points of struggle then, the intermediate level presents an
alternative. While we may not be able to sustain radical mass
organization at all times, we can bring together the most conscious
elements of the mass movements together with the most active and
grounded elements of the revolutionary movements to provide continuity,
organization, coordination, and education between struggles. The
intermediate level organization then is the memory, training ground, and
nursery of developing consciousness in struggle, which is not possible
within the ebb and flows with the mass movements, and which has
different activity and unity from the political level. Unlike the mass
movements, the intermediate level does not seek to become the vehicle
for mediation between capital and the working class, and because of this
it has space for activity and development that the mass movement can
not. That said, in practice the intermediate level should arise from and
remain directly bound to the mass level. The intermediate level gets its
vitality and strength from the lessons, challenges, and strength of the
struggle, and maintains its unity through that fight. Abstract
coalitions of self-identified leftists wanting to do things at the mass
level is a recipe for dead end reading groups more than anything else.
Concretely this alternative already presents itself in practice for
those who are organizing. For example take struggles within the unions
for greater militancy and democracy. Often these struggles take the form
of union elections, coordinated activity in union meetings, and
sometimes actions. For the workers organizing these actions (whatever
their merits), there are a number of challenges to overcome. First there
is the space to hold meetings where strategy and tactics can be
discussed, assessments of the organizing, and also space to bring
contacts for one-on-one discussions, or even larger mass meetings. While
this is true of physical space, it is also true in terms of skills,
abilities, and materials. Workers need some level of pooling of
resources to train each other, maintain systematic organization, pass on
lessons of struggle, and develop their vision of direction. This
requires a level of organization that the boss will be hostile to, and
the union being challenged is also likely to oppose. There are other
points to consider. If the group wins the struggle, often the
organization leading up to the fight is incorporated into the existing
bureaucracy, dissolves itself, or is attacked. Yet all the same problems
resurface down the line as the winds change, and the rank and file find
themselves embattled again. The intermediate level organization is that
space that allows militants the coordination, resources, education, and
continuity to provide ongoing resistance and the development of new
militants across these ups and downs.
Given the marginality of unions in the US at this point, a more general
experience in the workplace is with a non-unionized environment,
especially a precarious one. Three examples from the current IWW
illuminate the potential of the intermediate level organization. While
somewhat arbitrary I use these examples, because I was involved in all
of them so am able to bring forward these reflections with more
intimacy, and they provide symmetrical analogies and contradictions.
In the restaurant industry there is a high level of turnover, and
generally speaking precarious work. Benefits are non-existent, loyalty
to particular shops fairly low, and staff is dependent on tips for basic
income while often divided amongst themselves. In a variety of contexts
the IWW organized in the restaurant sector. Most shops are in units of
less than 20 workers, which are not financially sustainable for any
traditional union (run by paid staff) to organize contracts in. It is
extremely unlikely that a union would be able to leverage enough power
to win a contract, sustain membership and activity needed to maintain
the contract, and keep a union in anything but name under these
conditions. Consequently a strategy developed in some local branches of
the IWW organizing in restaurants and food service. The organizing was
oriented to fighting around particular grievances using direct action,
and generally through clandestine organizing without the boss knowing a
union is involved. A number of successes arose from this approach, in
contrast to experiments with rank and file contract-based approaches in
small shops. The trajectory of this organizing however was limited. Hot
shops produced one or two politicized leaders, but once the grievance
passed the shop cooled, and business went back to normal. Often workers
would quit anyway, and the leadership did too on a number of occasions.
Where the union could recruit and develop the leadership, and convince
them to carry the struggle to other shops, the beginning of an
industrial network of militants developed. In one city this developed
into a permanent organization outside the IWW, though organized with IWW
militants, and won a number of successes, integrating more workers into
their organization as militants. The IWW in this case began to shift
from being a mass organization proper, to being an intermediate
organization of class conscious revolutionary militants building a
tendency within an industry, and eventually even a separate mass
organization while retaining its autonomy. The intermediate organization
grew out of mass level struggles and organization, and eventually
reproduced mass level organization.
During the early 2000s the IWW in Portland had a series of victories in
non-profit social service shops, ultimately winning contracts for a hand
full of workers in small shops. While the shops remained organized in
name, the social service industrial union branch that was built out of
these shops swelled with unorganized social workers. Effectively the
industrial union began to function as a network of social service worker
militants rather than a representative body of employees (except for the
handful of workers under contract). Membership peaked at around 200 for
a period. With the strategy oriented primarily towards gaining contracts
in small shops in an era of budget cuts, the project was to fail.
However, during the peak one of the contract shops was threatened with a
massive budget cut by the county, threatening the services provided and
the workers deeply. Because this industrial network existed, the
industrial union branch was able to organize a section of the social
service industry to take action at county budget hearings. The hearing
was picketed, and the county backed down. Social service workers from
across the industry uniting for a public display of the contradictions
of capital in it’s mangled approach to trying to serve society. This was
press that the county was not in the mood to deal with. The county
instantly restored full funding. While this was merely a transitory
experience, it demonstrated an alternative to the contractual model of
building unions. Ultimately the contract shop was not able to move
beyond this activity as a defensive move, and expand their gains and
reach, but it served as an example for organizers who participated and
took the lessons of that struggle to a different approach. In this case
the inability to see beyond the union building project was to be the
death of the intermediate network, which otherwise may have been able to
expand, clarify itself, and presented a rallying point and challenge to
austerity and capitalism.
In the summer of 2004 wildcat strikes swept the ports of the US,
bringing the transit of goods to a halt on a massive scale. The strikes
were organized by a huge number of small groupings of truckers across
the country, tenuously linked, and communicating via text, Nextel
phones, community radio, and the internet. The workers were often
hostile to the unions trying to organize them, due to bad blood over
sweetheart deals for the employer and failed attempts decades earlier.
The struggle was actually merely a particular intense flare up of
similar fights happening over the 15+ years since the deunionization and
deregulation of the ports, and the subsequent shifts in working
conditions and class recomposition of the drivers. During that time,
drivers had learned how to fight and win directly without
intermediaries, and could for periods overcome interethnic competition
to present a class-wide front for organization. The problem they faced
was constantly that of coordination across the grouplets, sustaining the
gains they made, and systematizing their often patched together
organizing. The strike wave of 2004 was to fade away on account of these
problems. At the time, a mass based militant organization was possible,
though the foundation for that transition had not been laid. Both before
and after the intermediate level organization could have served to build
up to those fights, and sustain the victories through building the
needed leadership, connections, and organization.
To conclude there are a few clear avenues I see open for the building of
intermediate organization. I will borrow here from a recent Miami
Autonomy and Solidarity organization strategy, and present that
collective work as an addition to my individual arguments here. At its
most general, our task is two-fold. Revolutionaries active in the mass
level need to prioritize work that facilitates the radicalization of
militants at the mass level. Miami Autonomy and Solidarity call this M-I
(mass to intermediate). At the same time, though of lesser priority
given the lower quality of the left, we need to work to engage
revolutionaries at the mass level. Given the low level of activity at
the mass level by revolutionaries this would be I-M. M-I and I-M gives
us a broad perspective for our work with M-I as primary. These strategic
priorities are those developed by MAS which I am drawing from and
borrowing.
Within existing practice however the intermediate level shows promise
with the potential for intermediate organization a close possibility.
Within the workers movement, there’s a libertarian tendency which could
organize collectively to intervene as a force based on common practices
irrespective of the site of struggle. This would require struggle,
working out the strategy through practice, debate and even rupture with
elements (especially those tied to the institutionalized workers
movement) in the milieu, such an intermediate organization would be a
potential force for presenting alternatives where the organization
doesn’t exist, and unions are unwilling. The massive budget cuts,
layoffs, and austerity measures are glaring examples where the unions
have so far generally chosen to lobby or collaborate, and new forms of
struggles have not magically arisen.
The student movement has seen the rise of student-interests based
organizing, which has the potential to become mass organization. At this
point this work is largely driven by libertarian elements, and an
intermediary classist organization could prepare the groundwork for
these struggles. In the southern cone of South America similar
libertarian or revolutionary student fronts exist presently. With huge
cuts and people flooding into colleges to find respite from severe
unemployment, a wide crisis is developing in education. There is
potential likewise for this work to produce militants who can carry
their lessons and organization onto their workplaces following
graduation, assuming they don’t integrate with capital.
Within housing and transit organizing likewise there is organizing
(generally dominated by NGOs unfortunately) that has linked and
developed militants with often libertarian methods. The fare strike
movements and increasing militancy of transit workers, and the uncertain
nature of transit costs, has created potentially explosive situations.
The housing crisis and the relative success of direct action against
capital has gained momentum and developed self-conscious militants.
Intermediate organization could draw out and develop the anti-capitalist
logic and tendencies within these struggles, and consolidate gains.
While this summary is too schematic and brief to serve as anything but a
raw canvas (an analysis would require another article all together), it
illuminates the direction struggle has already taken us, and the
possibilities for activity if we are to take them.