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Title: What We Do Author: Christopher Day Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, anarchist organization, Zapatistas Source: Love and Rage Federation Bulletin, April 1998. From *A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation* edited by Roy San Filippo.
In this paper I attempt to stake out some of the questions that are
going to confront Love and Rage after we resolve the immediate crisis
precipitated by āWhat We Believe.ā I look critically at the ten-year
long project of building a serious revolutionary anarchist organization
and try to identify the elements in anarchist theory and our initial
conception of this project that might be responsible for our failure to
achieve that objective. I then argue that in order to move forward, we
need to stop identifying ourselves as within the anarchist tradition but
rather view ourselves as something new that takes significant things ā
like anti-authoritarianism and anti-statism ā from anarchism. I then
look at the Zapatistas as a model of an organization that was able to
conceive of itself as something new, while taking things of value from
older traditions that have failed. I also look at several principles of
revolutionary organization that I see in the theory and practice of the
EZLN. These include a level of commitment that involves being willing to
make serious sacrifices, rooting ourselves in oppressed communities, and
the construction of revolutionary culture. I then briefly discuss the
importance of maintaining our commitment to becoming a cadre
organization in opposition to the idea that we retreat to a looser
network structure. Finally, I make a number of practical suggestions for
things we need to do as an organization to get out of our current
predicament including a collective, public self-criticism in the pages
of the newspaper and organized political discussions with other groups
and individuals.
Ten years ago a handful of mainly young anarchist activists set out to
build a serious revolutionary anarchist organization by establishing a
continental anarchist newspaper. We understood that it would take time
to build the kind of organization we wanted: a politically coherent and
disciplined organization of organizers, what I would call a
revolutionary anarchist cadre organization. We understood that there was
little in the way of anarchist theory or historical practice to guide us
in this project and that we would have to struggle with people against
the powerful anti-organizational tendencies that exist within anarchism
to make it happen. We believed that people could be won to the need for
such an organization in a step-by-step fashion and that is how we
proceeded. First, we won people to the value of having a continental
newspaper. Then we won people to the idea of cohering the various people
involved in writing, producing and distributing that newspaper into a
loose network. Then we won people to the need for formalizing that
network into an organization with a defined structure and politics. Then
we won people to raising the expectations of membership.
After ten years of work on the project of building a revolutionary
anarchist cadre organization, we still donāt really have one. We have
accomplished many things which we should be proud of, but we have not
built the organization we set out to build. We need to honestly confront
the reasons why. As I see it, there are three main ways we can explain
this failure. First, we can blame the people involved and their
individual failings. Second, we can blame the times and the adverse
political conditions under which we have attempted to build the
organization. Third and finally, we can examine the philosophical
foundations of our original project.
There is enough truth in each explanation that we should take them all
seriously. As the main original advocate of this project, and as a
person who pushed for many of the twists and turns we have taken over
the years, I feel a high level of personal responsibility for many of
the errors the organization has made. I think we would all benefit from
self-critically evaluating our personal roles in the successes and
failures of Love and Rage. The conscious incorporation of a process of
criticism and self-criticism into the political life of the organization
would also do a lot to make us a healthier organization. It is also true
that the period in which Love and Rage has sought to establish itself
has been a bad one. Love and Rage was founded with the expectation that
the 1990s would be a period of heightened activity for the social
movements that most of the founding members of the project came out of.
Instead, we have witnessed the almost complete decimation of the pale
shadow of a radical movement that existed in the US at the end of the
1980s.
At the same time, there is a real danger that in emphasizing either of
these things, we will avoid confronting some of the deeper causes of our
failure. Any attempt to build a revolutionary organization must deal
with the personal limitations of the people involved and errors in
judgment. We are all damaged goods, products of a fucked-up society. A
conception of a revolutionary organization that canāt accommodate that
fact and figure out how to confront it is no conception at all.
Similarly all revolutionary organizations have to figure out how to get
through bad times as well as good, if they hope to succeed. On the
whole, the ā90s have seen the decimation of the left in the US, but some
groups have adapted to the actual conditions of the times and figured
out how to grow. We may not want to model ourselves directly on any one
of those groups but we should seriously look into what it is about their
perspectives and approaches that enabled them to thrive where everyone
else has shriveled up or just hung on to what they already had. In other
words, taking seriously the limitations of individuals and the nature of
the period weāve been in should still force us to examine the
philosophical foundations of our original project.
Love and Rage is the child of a critique of Leninism and a critique of
the prevailing politics of anarchism. When the people who founded Love
and Rage began to coalesce as a group in the late 1980s, it was on the
basis of a limited set of common notions. First, we were
revolutionaries. Based on our experiences in the social move. ments of
the 1980s or earlier, we had come to the conclusion that the changes
this society needs to see can only be achieved by revolutionary means.
Second, we saw the importance of building a revolutionary political
organization as one part of the larger revolutionary process. Third, we
rejected the two key concepts of Leninism: the vanguard party and the
revolutionary state. Fourth, we identified, critically to be sure: with
the revolutionary libertarian tradition in general and anarchism in
particular, Fifth, we also saw ourselves as drawing insight and
inspiration from anti-colonial struggles, womenās liberation, queer
liberation, Black liberation, and radical ecological struggles. We
patched these general ideas together and called them ārevolutionary
anarchism.ā This was a term that was deliberately conceived of as
enabling us to distinguish ourselves from reformist (or āevolutionaryā),
individualist, and anti-organizational tendencies within anarchism
without aligning ourselves with any of the other already historically
defined tendencies in anarchism (collectivism, anarcho-communism,
syndicalism, the Platformists, etc.), We did not view any of these
tendencies as offering an adequate basis for our politics and conceived
of ourselves as charting our own course and redefining what anarchism
meant in important ways in the process.
Underlying this whole project then, was a fundamental faith that an
effective organization could redefine anarchism and give it a
theoretical coherence and contemporary relevance that we all knew it
didnāt have in the late 1980s. WWBās attempt to inscribe in stone some
sort of anarchist orthodoxy to guard against outside influ ences is
therefore a repudiation of the spirit that originally animated Love and
Rage. In many respects, Love and Rage has succeeded in redefining
anarchism in the US ā at the very least, by carving out more space for
ideas that were previously very mar ginal within the anarchist movement.
This is clearest on the question of race. Love and Rage aggressively
challenged the prevailing class reductionism and liberalism in the
anarchist movement on the question of race in US society and completely
shifted the center of debate on questions of race to the point that
people entering the anarchist movement in 1998 take for granted a whole
series of things about the existence of and the nature of white
supremacy in the US that were quite literally the views of only a
handful of people in the anarchist movement in 1988. It would be
possible to point to a number of other issues on which Love and Rage has
dramatically shifted the terms of debate within anarchism, and we should
be proud of these accomplishments. But for every point on which we have
had such success, there is another on which not only have we not made
headway with the rest of the anarchist movement but where we have been
bogged down by our anarchism.
The areas where we have had the most success in reshaping anarchism have
been largely limited to the critique of this society. This has been a
historical strength of anarchism ā its ability to a) adopt critiques of
various features of this society from sources outside of anarchism and
b) integrate them into a larger anti-authoritarian framework. From
Bakuninās embrace of Marxās critique of capitalism to the willingness of
many anarchists today to integrate an analysis of white skin privilege
into their politics, the search for a deeper and more radical analysis
of the existing society has been a hallmark of anarchism. This is in
keeping with the deeply moral character of anarchism. Where anarchism
has not been able to integrate ideas from outside the tradition has been
precisely on questions of organizational methods, strategy, and tactics
ā on a positive program or plan of action for getting from this society
to where we want to go. And it has been on these sorts of questions that
Love and Rage has completely failed to redefine anarchism. Instead we
have had to fight tooth and nail just to establish on paper the most
elementary organizational norms which have in practice been largely
ignored.
The question that confronts us is not whether it might be possible to
develop a serious and coherent organizational theory and practice while
remaining within the anarchist idiom. I think it is possible. While
there are only a few of them, and while none of them achieved lasting
success, there are some historical examples of revolutionary anarchist
cadre organizations: the PLM in Mexico, the Platformists, to some extent
the FAI, and even more the Friends of Durruti in Spain. One can patch
together some lessons and analyses of these experiences and say one has
an anarchist theory of revolutionary organization. But the question is:
Is this the best way to construct a theory that speaks to our needs on
the eve of the 21^(st) century? What the WWB document has made clear to
me is that by defining ourselves as an organization within anarchism,
rather than as an organization that takes significant things from
anarchism, we have found ourselves constantly having to re-argue the
most elementary questions of organization. By defining ourselves as
within anarchism we sabotage any serious study of the positive as well
as the negative lessons of revolutionary experiences outside of
anarchism (which means the vast majority of the revolutionary
experiences of the 20^(th) century).
Love and Rage has always occupied a somewhat heretical place in the
anarchist movement. We discuss issues that other anarchists ignore and
we take positions that other anarchists view as beyond the pale. If we
have succeeded in redefining anarchism in the US on certain questions
the inherent contradiction in our project is probably most clearly
reflected in the absence of any similar project that defines itself as
anarchist outside of North America.
I want to be part of a serious and effective revolutionary organization
that is committed to an anti-authoritarian vision of the new society we
are fighting for, and that clearly understands the historical failure of
āstate socialismā in its myriad forms in the 20^(th) century. For ten
years, we have sought to build such an organization and have defined
that project within the anarchist tradition. It seems clear to me now
that we overestimated our ability to redefine that tradition and
underestimated the amount of baggage that comes with it. At the same
time, I think the anarchist critiques of other traditions (particularly
Leninism) remain fundamentally correct, and I have no interest in
embracing any other existing historical trend. Basically, I think all
existing revolutionary theory is out of touch with the world we live in.
This has to do both with weaknesses in the theory that have been there
from the start, as well as important changes in the world itself that
the theory has failed to keep up with.
The role of the dead weight of orthodoxy in the recent debates in Love
and Rage convinces me that we have to make some sort of radical break
with how weāve conceived ourselves. The last thing we or the embryonic
revolutionary movement of the 21^(st) century needs now is a dose of
that āolā time anything, whether it is anarchism, Leninism,
Presbyterianism, or whatever. We need fresh blood, not formaldehyde,
coursing through our veins. If there is going to be a coherent
anti-authoritarian revolutionary theory and practice in the coming
period, it must be made anew by people participating in real social
struggles on the new terrain of the post-colonial, post-industrial,
post-modern, Post Raisin Bran world we actually live in,
I believe that the Zapatistas currently represent the most significant
attempt to construct a new revolutionary politics that sums up the
failures of the past century and moves on. I donāt think the Zapatistas
have all the answers and, to their credit, neither do they. Confronted
with the historical failure of the old formulas of the left, they were
willing to break new ground. That didnāt mean that they lost contact
with the things that had originally animated them or the historical
traditions from which they came (Marxism-Leninism, traditions of
indigenous autonomy and resistance, the Mexican Revolution, etc.) but
rather that the content of those traditions would have to be transformed
in light of new conditions if it was to remain of any value. The EZLN
was founded by a dozen members of one of the many guerrilla groups that
sprung up in Mexico in the late ā60s and early ā70s that mainly took
their inspiration from Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. They found
themselves in a situation in which their ideology could not answer the
problems of the indigenous people of Chiapas but where their
increasingly desperate situation was driving them to increasingly
revolutionary conclusions. Not knowing exactly where it would lead them,
the Zapatistas decided to put their faith in the struggles of the people
rather than in the pre-fabricated ideology they had brought with them to
the jungle. While they have rejected both the pursuit of state power and
the idea of the vanguard party, the Zapatistas did not choose to define
themselves as anarchists (even though anarchism has a much richer
history in Mexico than in the US).
Without falling into the trap of blindly aping the Zapatistas, I think
we should take a similar attitude towards our own project. Anarchism has
a different complex of strengths and weaknesses than the Guevarism of
the founders of the EZLN. But in the broadest sense, there is an
important similarity ā both ideologies are largely the products of an
earlier period and both have failed to recapture the imagination of new
generations because they are inadequate for new circumstances. If
anything, these features are more pronounced in anarchism. The point is
not to opportunistically abandon everything we have stood for in the
hope of latching onto something more popular, the point is that it is
only in the actual lives and struggles of the people themselves, under
new conditions, that we can hope to find the answers to the problems
that established ideologies have proven unable to answer. If we want to
develop a coherent revolutionary politics that speaks to those new
conditions we canāt chain them to a political tradition that has
effectively been in a coma for half a century.
Based on our experiences as an organization over the past ten years and
on our knowledge of the historical accomplishments of the anarchist
movement around the world since the Second World War, on what foundation
can we base the hope that a significant number of people in the US, let
alone the millions of people it will actually take to win, are going to
be won to a revolutionary politics that calls itself anarchist? I would
suggest that there is exactly no evidence to support this hope and that
it is, for all intents and purposes, an act of religious faith. Iāll go
even further. Revolutions are life and death struggles. People are right
not to put their life on the line in the name of an ideology that canāt
answer some of the most basic questions that people know they will face
in such a struggle.
I believe that Love and Rage should be a revolutionary cadre
organization that remains committed to a fundamentally libertarian
perspective without narrowly defining itself within the anarchist
tradition. It should be an organization that is theoretically open and
flexible enough to take the lessons there are to be learned from other
traditions and, more importantly, to develop new theory and practice in
response to new conditions. For the moment, the best model of such an
organization we have is the Zapatistas and I think we should look much
more closely at their expe rience to see what it has to teach us. (Iāve
been reading a lot about the Zapatistas but most of the information I
use here can be found in El SueƱo Zapatista and La Rebelian de las
CaƱadas.)
I would suggest that there are a handful of basic principles that can be
derived from what we know about the history and development of the
Zapatistas. Some of these are particular to the Zapatistas in that they
are advances on the theory and practice of other revolutionary trends.
Others are elementary lessons that have been learned over and over again
by every even moderately successful revolutionary movement.
The first principle is that to be a revolutionary and to build a
revolutionary organization can not be a hobby or a part-time thing. All
of the conditions for building a revolutionary movement in the mountains
and jungles of Chiapas existed in the 1980s, but the struggle would
never have gone beyond the interminable fights over this and that piece
of land that had been going on for decades and centuries if a hard core
of a dozen determined individuals hadnāt decided to give up everything
in order to found the EZLN in a remote corner of the Lacandon Jungle in
1983. The hard core must have some common politics but much more
important than total ideological uniformity is a commitment to
collective participation in the struggle. The founding members of the
EZLN included people with a variety of political backgrounds: Guevarists
from the armed organizations of the 1970s, veterans of Maoist initiated
campesino organizations, catechists versed in liberation theology, and
those who identified primarily with the long traditions of indigenous
resistance to the European conquest. What united them was a high level
of commitment to a common project ā building the EZLN ā and an
acknowledgment that not one of them had all the answers and that they
would have to learn from each other and from the process of carrying out
their work collectively.
A second principle that the experience of the Zapatistas has to teach us
is the central importance of rooting ourselves among the oppressed. For
the middle-class members of the group that founded the EZLN, this meant
patiently winning the trust of the people, learning their languages and
customs, placing real faith in the people, and not pretending to know
what was best for them. It also meant giving up undoubtedly promising
professional careers in academia and medicine and elsewhere in order to
spend long years going hungry, getting sick, being bitten by bugs, and
feeling completely cut off from the comforts and pleasures of the life
they had left behind. It meant immersing themselves in the lives of
largely illiterate peasants.
A genuine revolutionary organization must be an organization of people
who live, work, study, and play among the oppressed who are most likely
to be won to the need for revolution. In the US, I would argue, this
means poor and mainly people of color communities. For an organization
like Love and Rage that is overwhelmingly white, disproportionately
middle class, and whose members are closely tied to either white youth
subcultures or academia, this means some big changes. We can not hope to
really make revolution if we are not willing to live and work in the
ghettos, barrios, housing projects, and poor rural communities of the
US. People are going to be understandably reluctant to make those kinds
of changes without some assurance that others are doing it with them,
and that assurance can only come from a group that has the high level of
commitment to a collectively formulated common project. But no
revolutionary project can promise success and that means that there must
be a certain amount of individual will to do whatever it takes to build
a revolutionary movement. Individually, some of us have already gone
further down this road than others. But so far ALL OF US have failed to
turn this into a collective process. The personal decisions we have been
making about where we live, where we work, whether or not to go to
college or graduate school, have all had political consequences for the
organization but have all been made as personal decisions without even a
shred of collective accountability to the people we are working with.
This individualist approach reinforces existing class inequalities in
the organization and turns what should be political discussions of where
we live and work into moralistic arguments. The result of this is that
collective bonds that are needed to hold a revolutionary organization
together are corroded and theoretical rigor and coherence are sacrificed
on the altar of an anti-intellectual caricature of the working class.
Finally, I want to mention the importance of culture in the success of
the Zapatistas. The founders of the EZLN understood the importance both
of respecting the traditions and customs of the communities they were
seeking to root themselves in and of creating a new revolutionary
culture. A revolutionary movement cannot simply be built around a
political line. It is not sufficient to have the correct analysis of
imperialism or the class struggle or whatever. A revolutionary movement
stands in a particular relationship to the culture of the people it
seeks to organize. A revolutionary movement that doesnāt sing, dance,
eat, and write poetry with the people cannot hope to win them to
revolutionary politics. But beyond this purely instrumental view of
culture, a revolutionary movement that is not immersed in the culture of
the people cannot hope to understand their actual conditions and what it
will take to win. Culture is a vehicle for the accumulated experiences
of a people. Subcommandante Marcos talks about the importance for the
EZLN, not just in learning how to speak the languages of the indigenous
peoples, but in learning their folk tales and what they symbolized and
how in this process of translation, their politics were transformed and
given new meaning. At the same time that the culture of the indigenous
communities was transforming the politics of the EZLN, they were
transforming the culture of those communities by introducing new
practices and customs, revolutionary songs and celebrations that
injected new ideas and values into the lives of the people. In other
words, it is not sufficient to just adopt the culture of the people as
if it is in itself revolutionary. It is necessary to draw out the
revolutionary aspects, to strengthen them, and to consciously create a
revolutionary culture.
Love and Rage is culturally tied to the white middle-class and academic
origins of most of its membership. It is a culture that values rigorous
and rational argunent (which is good) but that puts little value on the
things that actually hold communities together. So we are really good at
arguing with each other but really bad at doing the things that express
our love for each other and that remind us that we have o hang together,
It should hardly bÄ a surprise then, that we have such difficulties
aolding our organization together let alone broadening its appeal. If we
are going to immerse ourselves in oppressed communities, we need to
commit ourselves to creating revolutionary culture. Every successful
radical social movement in US history has done so. Whether it was the
songs of the IWW or of the Civil Rights movement or the creation of new
holidays like Mayday or Juneteenth, the conscious deliberate creation of
a new culture (often employing many existing cultural elements) has
always been present. Without such a culture as a counterweight, the
often heated arguments that nevitably characterize any genuine
revolutionary movement will tear the thing apart before it can even get
off the ground,
It is tempting to reconsider the value of a looser, less demanding
network structure in light of the difficulties involved in making Love
and Rage a tighter, more disciplined organization. It probably seems to
many that the only way we can hope to survive at all is by reverting to
the network structure and that since weāve never really been able to put
into practice the vision of Love and Rage as a cadre organization, we
arenāt really giving up anything by abandoning that conception.
A network implies an organization that doesnāt demand as high a level of
theoretical unity because it isnāt attempting to establish a high level
of practical unity. A network implies that the primary function of the
organization is to share information rather than to coordinate action,
because once you try to coordinate action the theoretical differences
that can coexist in a loose network become practical differences over
which course of action to follow.
The idea of retreating to a network structure is based on the belief
that a network can keep people in touch even if it is not currently
possible to carry out coordinated activity and that the structures for
such coordinated activity will emerge out of a network when they are
appropriate. There are some truths in all this. Some of Love and Rageās
greatest contributions to the movement have been carrying out precisely
these sorts of network functions by publishing the newspaper, organizing
conferences, maintaining the listserv, and publishing the Fed Bull.
These are all things that need to continue. But the idea of a cadre
organization is not hostile to these things. On the contrary, it says
that the network functions will be carried out more consis tently and
that the contacts between people that are maintained by these functions
will be stronger if there is an organization of the most serious and
dedicated activists committed to doing that work. The history of the
anarchist movement in the US is littered with networks and federations
that have come and gone precisely because they did not understand this
elementary fact.
If Love and Rage is to survive and flourish, it must become a cadre
organization even if that means we end up being only a few dozen strong.
This does not mean we should become a sect nor that we should cut off
the relations we have with people who canāt or donāt want to be in a
cadre organization. On the contrary, by making a clearer distinction
between those who have committed themselves to the work of building Love
and Rage and those who are sympathetic with our political outlook we
enable ourselves to relate to those people in a more principled way and
to carry out the work of expanding the network that exists around the
organization by doing ou work more consistently, more deliberately, and
more strategically.
So far, I have argued for certain general principles that I think need
to inform Love and Rageās future work. The current crisis in Love and
Rage means we cannot continue functioning as we have in the past, that
we need to make a radical break and reconceive our project. But what
does this mean concretely? We should not imagine that there is some sort
of quick fix that can make Love and Rage the organization we want it to
be overnight. We need to be much more serious about the collective
development of both our theory and practice. This will take time. But
there are several things we can do now.
One, we need to carry out a collective and public self-criticism in
which we analyze our history as an organization, acknowledge our errors,
and attempt to identify why they happened. The special issue of Class
War that appeared last summer is a good model for the kind of thing we
need to do. There are two reasons to do this. First, it is important to
clarify these things for ourselves so that we can move forward without
repeating the same mistakes or feeling responsible for defending things
we did that were mistaken. Second, it is an important step in initiating
discussions with groups and individuals outside Love and Rage. It
enables us to acknowledge specific criticisms others may have of us and,
more importantly, establishes that we are open to hearing criticism,
Two, we need to initiate organized political discussions broadly with
the various groups and individuals we work with and respect. The
membership of Love and Rage alone is too narrow a group for us to
satisfactorily carry out the important discussions that have emerged
within the organization. This needs to happen on all levels. We need to
use the newspaper to draw people from outside of the organization into
these discussions. We need to use conferences and other public events.
And we need to sit down face-to-face with other groups. There are two
main reasons to do this. First, there are too damn few of us and we need
to cast our nets wider if we want to be part of a broader revolutionary
movement and not just an isolated sect. Second, organized political
discussion will force us to clarify our own politics in a way that we
have manifestly failed to do in the past ten years. There are a lot of
groups and individuals we should be talking to. There are other
explicitly anarchist formations like the Anarchist Communist Federation
and the ABC-Federation. There are a number of revolutionary collectives
that include anarchists like Fireworks in the Bay Area and RānāB in
Brooklyn. There are collectives like STORM and FIST that donāt include
anarchists but that seem to be oriented towards developing a new
revolutionary politics. There are the various non-sectarian (though
often reformist) Marxist groups that have opened up to criticism in
response to the ācrisis in socialismā like Freedom Road, Solidarity, and
even the Committees of Correspondence. I would expect discussions with
different groups to fulfill different functions for us ā in some cases
opening the way for closer collaboration and in others clarifying our
differences. The important thing is that we understand the value in both
developments and that we have things to learn from everybody even if we
find we have fundamental philosophical differences.
Three, we need to be engaged in organized collective study and
discussion. The New York local has begun to meet again to study and
discuss the political questions that have been raised by the current
crisis in the organization. But we need to be engaged in this kind of
study and discussion across the organization so that we donāt talk past
each other when we use terms and references that have different meanings
for different people or that just arenāt understood. The Fed Bull should
become a vehicle for Federation-wide collective study and the
Coordinating Committee (CC) should be delegated to develop a study
program to appear in installments in the Fed Bull to broaden the base of
common knowledge of revolutionary theory and history within the
organization.
Four, everybody in the organization should write a thorough political
report on the work they are doing. The most important thing that Love
and Rage has is a few dozen good activists. This is not always apparent
because a lot of the activism that Love and Rage members are engaged in
never gets reported either in the pages of the newspaper nor in reports
to the Fed Bull. One only finds out about it if one is able to talk with
lots of members one-on-one. Yet the fact remains that Love and Rage
members are active participants in a wide range of social struggles in
three countries. There are Love and Rage members involved in workplace
struggles among university adjuncts, at UPS, and in organizing service
workers. One Love and Rage member is involved in a workplace safety
struggle involving Black women workers who are routinely exposed to
dangerous chemicals on the factory floor. There are Love and Rage
members involved in the defense of old growth forests. Several Love and
Rage members are involved in Zapatista solidarity work in several
cities. One Love and Rage member is interning at the Puerto Rican
Cultural Center. Another is organizing to throw the DARE program out of
the school she teaches at. Love and Rage members are involved in an
ongoing way in the fight to free Mumia and in organizing for the Jericho
ā98 March on Washington. Love and Rage members are involved in welfare
rights struggles in three different states. There is one Love and Rage
member active in anti-police brutality work. Several members are working
in Anti-Racist Action. Love and Rage members continue to play an
important role in the struggles at CUNY in defense of open admissions.
Two Love and Rage members are working on organizing a winter seminar on
revolutionary theory. Two local groups have study groups going.
If the few dozen activists who are keeping Love and Rage alive were each
to write a thorough, reflective, critical report on the work theyāve
been doing, the problems theyāve encountered, and the lessons theyāve
drawn from those experiences the whole character of the organization
would change. Debates that seem stupid or overly abstract that have
dominated some recent discussions would be drowned in a discussion of
our real problems. The false but demoralizing sense that nobody is doing
anything real would evaporate. This is not to say that some of the
questions that currently divide the organization would disappear but
rather that they would be cast in a whole new light and their practical
importance in our actual work would be much
clearer than is currently the case. By a political report I donāt mean
just an account of all the meetings and demonstrations a person has
attended, but rather an attempt to critically analyze the work for the
benefit of the whole organization. The theoretical issues that really
matter would push aside those that donāt.
All of these suggestions are focused in some sense on the development of
our politics and yet none of them are suggestions directed at our mass
work. This is not because I donāt see that as important. Obviously I do.
I believe that we need to be engaged in some sort of common mass work,
if only some sort of campaign that we can carry out in the different
places where we are already working. I think we also need to be
discussing much more seriously what it means to truly root ourselves in
oppressed communities and take some collective steps in that direction.
But both of these things must come out of the sort of collective process
of reassessing our politics that Iāve described above. We canāt
seriously discuss where we need to go if we donāt know where we are and
where weāve been. The process of collective self-criticism is about
figuring out where weāve been and the process of writing thorough
individual political reports is about determining where we actually are
right now.
In this paper Iāve tried to raise a number of the deeper issues that I
think underlie the current crisis in Love and Rage beyond the immediate
questions raised by āWhat We Believe.ā Iāve put forward some principles
of revolutionary organization that Iāve seen modeled by the Zapatistas
and some concrete suggestions for rectifying some of the weaknesses of
our own organization. I intend to flesh some of these ideas out into
more concrete proposals before the upcoming conference, but Iām eager to
know what people think of the ideas put forward here before I do so.
Iāve found the current crisis in Love and Rage personally painful and
profoundly challenging to some of my longest held convictions. But none
of this has shaken my commitment to building a serious
anti-authoritarian revolutionary organization no matter what it takes.