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Title: Especifismo Author: Adam Weaver Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: Especifismo, platform, platformism, South America, Latin America, Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Northeastern Anarchist Source: Retrieved on 17th October 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/especifismo-anarchist-praxis-building-popular-movements-revolutionary-organization-south Notes: This is the final version of the article. A slightly different copy, we regret, appears in the print version of The Northeastern Anarchist Issue #11, Spring 2006, and may also be in electronic circulation. Please refer to this final version in any citations.
Within the broad anarchist movement, we stand in the tradition
advocating the need for an organized and disciplined anarchist political
organization The “Alliance” in the First International was an early
example of this model, but it was one of many such forces. In 1926,
Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov and others restated this approach in the
classic “Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists,”*
perhaps the most important text of twentieth century anarchism. In South
America — a region with many similarities to southern Africa — this
tradition has been developed as Especifismo, and it is for this reason
that we carry this important piece.
Throughout the world, anarchist involvement within mass movements, as
well as the development of specifically anarchist organizations, is on
the upsurge. This trend is helping anarchism regain legitimacy as a
dynamic political force within movements and in this light, Especifismo,
a concept born out of nearly 50 years of anarchist experiences in South
America, is gaining currency world-wide. Though many anarchists may be
familiar with many of Especifismo’s ideas, it should be defined as an
original contribution to anarchist thought and practice.
The first organization to promote the concept of Especifismo — then more
a practice than a developed ideology — was the Federación Anarquista
Uruguaya (FAU), founded in 1956 by anarchist militants who embraced the
idea of an organization which was specifically anarchist. Surviving the
dictatorship in Uruguay, the FAU emerged in the mid-1980s to establish
contact with and influence other South American anarchist
revolutionaries. The FAU’s work helped support the founding of the
Federação Anarquista Gaúcha (FAG), the Federação Anarquista Cabocla
(FACA), and the Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) in their
respective regions of Brazil, and the Argentinean organization Auca
(Rebel).
While the key concepts of Especifismo will be expanded upon further in
this article, it can be summarized in three succinct points:
of ideas and praxis.
develop strategic political and organizing work.
movements, which is described as the process of “social insertion.”
While only coming onto the stage of Latin American anarchism within the
last few decades, the ideas inherent within Especifismo touch on a
historic thread running within the anarchist movement internationally.
The most well known would be the Platformist current, which began with
the publishing of the “Organizational Platform of the Libertarian
Communists.”* This document was written in 1926 by former peasant army
leader Nestor Makhno, Ida Mett and other militants of the Dielo Trouda
(Workers’ Cause) group, based around the newspaper of the same name
(Skirda, 192–213). Exiles of the Russian revolution, the Paris-based
Dielo Trouda criticized the anarchist movement for its lack of
organization, which prevented a concerted response to Bolshevik
machinations towards turning the workers’ soviets into instruments of
one-party rule. The alternative they proposed was a “General Union of
Anarchists” based on Anarchist-Communism, which would strive for
“theoretical and tactical unity” and focus on class struggle and labor
unions.
Other similar occurrences of ideas include “Organizational Dualism,”
which is mentioned in historical documents of the 1920’s Italian
anarchist movement. Italian anarchists used this term to describe the
involvement of anarchists both as members of an anarchist political
organization and as militants in the labor movement (FdCA). In Spain,
the Friends of Durruti group emerged to oppose the gradual reversal of
the Spanish Revolution of 1936 (Guillamon). In “Towards a Fresh
Revolution” they emulated some of the ideas of the Platform, critiquing
the CNT-FAI’s gradual reformism and collaboration with the Republican
government, which they argued contributed to the defeat of the
anti-fascist and revolutionary forces. Influential organizations in the
Chinese anarchist movement of the 1910’s, such as the Wuzhengfu-Gongchan
Zhuyi Tongshi Che (Society of Anarchist-Communist Comrades), advocated
similar ideas (Krebs). While these different currents all have specific
characteristics that developed from the movements and countries in which
they originated, they all share a common thread that crosses movements,
eras, and continents.
The Especifists put forward three main thrusts to their politics, the
first two being on the level of organization By raising the need for a
specifically anarchist organization built around a unity of ideas and
praxis, the Especifists inherently state their objection to the idea of
a synthesis organization of revolutionaries or multiple currents of
anarchists loosely united. They characterize this form of organization
as creating an exacerbated search for the needed unity of anarchists to
the point in which unity is preferred at any cost, in the fear of
risking positions, ideas and proposals sometimes irreconcilable. The
result of these types of union are libertarian collectives without much
more in common than considering themselves anarchists. (En La Calle)
While these critiques have been elaborated by the South American
Especifistas, North American anarchists have also offered their
experiences of synthesis organization as lacking any cohesiveness due to
multiple, contradictory political tendencies. Often the basic agreement
of the group boils down to a vague, “least-common-denominator” politics,
leaving little room for united action or developed political discussion
among comrades.
Without a strategy that stems from common political agreement,
revolutionary organizations are bound to be an affair of reactivism
against the continual manifestations of oppression and injustice and a
cycle of fruitless actions to be repeated over and over, with little
analysis or understanding of their consequences (Featherstone et al).
Further, the Especifists criticize these tendencies for being driven by
spontaneity and individualism and for not leading to the serious,
systematic work needed to build revolutionary movements. The Latin
American revolutionaries put forward that organizations which lack a
program which resists any discipline between militants, that refuses to
‘define itself’, or to ‘fit itself’, ... [are a] direct descendant of
bourgeois liberalism, [which] only reacts to strong stimulus, joins the
struggle only in its heightened moments, denying to work continuously,
especially in moments of relative rest between the struggles (En La
Calle).
A particular stress of the Especifismo praxis is the role of anarchist
organization, formed on the basis of shared politics, as a space for the
development of common strategy and reflection on the group’s organizing
work. Sustained by collective responsibility to the organizations’ plans
and work, a trust within the members and groups is built that allows for
a deep, high-level discussion of their action. This allows the
organization to create collective analysis, develop immediate and
long-term goals, and continually reflect on and change their work based
on the lessons gained and circumstances.
From these practices and from the basis of their ideological principles,
revolutionary organizations should seek to create a program that defines
their short — and intermediate — term goals and will work towards their
long-term objectives:
The program must come from a rigorous analysis of society and the
correlation of the forces that are part of it. It must have as a
foundation the experience of the struggle of the oppressed and their
aspirations, and from those elements it must set the goals and the tasks
to be followed by the revolutionary organization in order to succeed not
only in the final objective but also in the immediate ones. (En La
Calle)
The last point, but one that is key within the practice of Especifismo,
is the idea of “social insertion.” [1] It stems from the belief that the
oppressed are the most revolutionary sector of society, and that the
seed of the future revolutionary transformation of society lies already
in these classes and social groupings. Social insertion means anarchist
involvement in the daily fights of the oppressed and working classes. It
does not mean acting within single-issue advocacy campaigns based around
the involvement of expected traditional political activists, but rather
within movements of people struggling to better their own condition,
which come together not always out of exclusively materially based
needs, but also socially and historically rooted needs of resisting the
attacks of the state and capitalism. These would include
rank-and-file-led workers’ movements, immigrant communities’ movements
to demand legalized status, neighborhood organizations’ resistance to
the brutality and killings by police, working class students’ fights
against budget cuts, and poor and unemployed people’s opposition to
evictions and service cuts.
Through daily struggles, the oppressed become a conscious force. The
class-in-itself, or rather classes in-themselves (defined beyond the
class-reductionist vision of the urban industrial proletariat, to
include all oppressed groups within society that have a material stake
in a new society), are tempered, tested, and recreated through these
daily struggles over immediate needs into classes-for-themselves. That
is, they change from social classes and groups that exist objectively
and by the fact of social relations, to social forces. Brought together
by organic methods, and at many times by their own self organizational
cohesion, they become self-conscious actors aware of their power, voice
and their intrinsic nemeses: ruling elites who wield control over the
power structures of the modern social order.
Examples of social insertion that the FAG cites are their work with
neighborhood committees in urban villages and slums (called Popular
Resistance Committees), building alliances with rank-and-file members of
the rural landless workers’ movement of the MST, and among trash and
recyclables collectors. Due to high levels of temporary and contingent
employment, under-employment, and unemployment in Brazil, a significant
portion of the working class does not survive primarily through wage
labor, but rather by subsistence work and the informal economy, such as
casual construction work, street vending, or the collection of trash and
recyclables. Through several years of work, the FAG has built a strong
relationship with urban trash collectors, called catadores. Members of
the FAG have supported them in forming their own national organization
which is working to mobilize trash collectors around their interests
nationally and to raise money toward building a collectively operated
recycling operation. [2]
Especifismo’s conception of the relation of ideas to the popular
movement is that they should not be imposed through a leadership,
through “mass line”, or by intellectuals. Anarchist militants should not
attempt to move movements into proclaiming an “anarchist” position, but
should instead work to preserve their anarchist thrust; that is, their
natural tendency to be self-organized and to militantly fight for their
own interests. This assumes the perspective that social movements will
reach their own logic of creating revolution, not when they as a whole
necessarily reach the point of being self-identified “anarchists,” but
when as a whole (or at least an overwhelming majority) they reach the
consciousness of their own power and exercise this power in their daily
lives, in a way consciously adopting the ideas of anarchism. An
additional role of the anarchist militant within the social movements,
according to the Especifists, is to address the multiple political
currents that will exist within movements and to actively combat the
opportunistic elements of vanguardism and electoral politics.
Within the current strands of organized and revolutionary North American
and Western Anarchism, numerous indicators point to the inspiration and
influence of the Platform as having the greatest impact in the recent
blossoming of class struggle anarchist organizations worldwide. Many see
the Platform as a historical document that speaks to the previous
century’s organizational failures of anarchism within global
revolutionary movements, and are moved to define themselves as acting
within the “platformist tradition”. Given this, the currents of
Especifismo and Platformism are deserving of comparison and contrast.
The authors of the Platform were veteran partisans of the Russian
Revolution. They helped lead a peasant guerrilla war against Western
European armies and later the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, whose people
had a history independent of the Russian Empire. So the writers of the
Platform certainly spoke from a wealth of experience and to the
historical context of one of their era’s pivotal struggles. But the
document made little headway in its proposal of uniting class struggle
anarchists, and is markedly silent in analysis or understanding on
numerous key questions that faced revolutionaries at that time, such as
the oppression of women, and colonialism.
While most Anarchist-Communist oriented organizations claim influence by
the Platform today, in retrospect it can be looked at as a poignant
statement that rose from the morass that befell much of anarchism
following the Russian Revolution. As a historical project, the
Platform’s proposal and basic ideas were largely rejected by
individualistic tendencies in the Anarchist movement, were misunderstood
because of language barriers as some claim (Skirda, 186), or never
reached supportive elements or organizations that would have united
around the document. In 1927, the Dielo Trouda group did host a small
international conference of supporters in France, but it was quickly
disrupted by the authorities.
In comparison, the praxis of Especifismo is a living, developed
practice, and arguably a much more relevant and contemporary theory,
emerging as it does out of 50 years of anarchist organizing Arising from
the southern cone of Latin America, but its influence spreading
throughout, the ideas of Especifismo do not spring from any call-out or
single document, but have come organically out of the movements of the
global south that are leading the fight against international capitalism
and setting examples for movements worldwide. On organization, the
Especifists call for a far deeper basis of anarchist organization than
the Platform’s “theoretical and tactical unity,” but a strategic program
based on analysis that guides the actions of revolutionaries. They
provide us living examples of revolutionary organization based on the
needs for common analysis, shared theory, and firm roots within the
social movements.
I believe there is much to take inspiration from within the tradition of
Especifismo, not only on a global scale, but particularly for North
American class-struggle anarchists and for multi-racial revolutionaries
within the US. Whereas the Platform can be easily read as seeing
anarchists’ role as narrowly and most centrally within labor unions,
Especifismo gives us a living example that we can look towards and which
speaks more meaningfully to our work in building a revolutionary
movement today. Taking this all into consideration, I also hope that
this article can help us more concretely reflect on how we as a movement
define and shape our traditions and influences.
[1] While “social insertion” is a term coming directly out of the texts
of Especifismo influenced organizations, comrades of mine have taken
issue with it. So before there is a rush towards an uncritical embrace
of anything, perhaps there could be a discussion of this term.
[2] Eduardo, then Secretary of External Relations for Brazilian FAG.
“Saudacoes Libertarias dos E.U.A.” Email to Pedro Ribeiro. 25 Jun 2004