Thoughts on the Struggle

A Review: Socialist Organizing Attempts at Pizza Hut

2012-01-24T13:12:00.006-06:00

The IWW is hardly the first organization to attempt to take on the terrible conditions that rule today in the food and retail industry in North America. In the heyday of industrial unionism, restaurants were frequently organized as part of larger drives by unions to organize basic industry. In some places, like Detroit, workers wanted to organize and unions were so effective in organizing food and retail industries that large union federations had competing food and retail affiliates that routinely raided each others memberships. Imagining such a high level of union density in contemporary food and retail industries seems preposterous today. But even in the current moment of anti-worker legislation and dwindling union membership, other unions and left organizations have attempted to organize in this important sector of the service economy.

In late 2003, organizers with the Trotskyist political group Socialist Alternative initiated a campaign amongst Pizza Hut workers in western Washington state. Their organizing began at a franchise that initially had 61 stores. The record of their organizing, their approach and their analysis of the industry is contained on their website as a pamphlet “Manifesto of the Fast Food Worker.” Along with that text, the analysis below comes from a few articles posted on Socialist Alternative’s website relating to the drive and an interview with one of the authors of the “Manifesto”. The campaign collapsed after a vicious anti-union response from management but the organizer I spoke with suggests that the pamphlet represents the most complete picture of the drive. Reading the “Manifesto” and the various news pieces from the campaign’s “underground newspaper” shows a picture of a drive with many similarities with IWW organizing in the fast food industry and but also points towards some key differences.

An important feature of the “Manifesto” is a long section detailing the economic conditions which have brought the rise of fast food and its prevailing low-wage, no-benefits trend. This analysis discusses the ways in which fast food owners as a whole, Pizza Hut and even specifically the franchise where they campaign was undertaken, have structured work in a way that gives the in-shop employees and drivers few options. The authors also do an excellent job critiquing the way the industry has consistently lobbied for a lowering of the minimum wage and against any attempts to raise it. The “Manifesto” itself also raises important ideas about how surplus value is extracted from workers during the production process and explains it in easy language that applies directly to the food production and service industry. They also mention the importance of organizing all pizza shops so as to bring industrial strength to the campaign. As a piece of educational material, the “Manifesto” shows that the authors were deeply committed to connecting their struggle with an industrial outlook and a socialist analysis.

The authors also provide important ideas on how to organize at the workplace for interested workers. Some of their advice, like organizing a committee and staying low-key until the time is right to strike, is classic labor organizing advice and speaks of their ability to organize effectively. The pamphlet also touches directly on the question of labor law, encouraging workers to avoid the NLRB election process and instead to rely on voluntary recognition from the employer. This approach is interesting because it highlights the important weaknesses of the NLRB election approach. It does not explain how exactly one would achieve voluntary recognition, other than through sheer numbers, a situation which is much easier to imagine than create. The “Manifesto” also suggests that interested fast food workers should organize and then affiliate with a left-leaning union in their area, pointing to the ILWU in the case of workers in western Washington. The organizer told me that the campaign was initially organized with a union that claims jurisdiction over fast food workers but that organizers felt the ILWU would have served the drive more effectively.

The pamphlet’s organizing advice seems mostly useful, but it is interesting to see a lack of emphasis on direct action. The tone of the piece is quite militant and promotes a rank-and-file approach to organizing, yet the main focus seems to be on slow building and going public in a large way with overwhelming support and then immediately demanding recognition. Experience has shown many IWW organizers that direct action taken on the shopfloor before going public is an important way for union members to build their confidence and up their dedication to the organization, as well as bringing about concrete gains before publicly attempting to negotiate with the boss. By encouraging coworkers to walk through struggle before standing openly to the world as union members, our organizers have often found success in building workers’ experiences over time. The campaign organizer I spoke to mentioned that the campaign was not able to go public on its own terms, but was discovered by management after they got ahold of the underground news bulletin. In new articles associated with the campaign, a member mentions that the campaign only had support in 15 out of 61 franchise stores and the organizer I spoke with stated that there were only a handful of stores with lead organizers. While this is certainly no small number, it brings up questions of capacity and the need to build underground in a way that engages workers for as long as possible before going public on our own terms.

Fast food is an important sector of the food and retail industry as along with sweatshop production facilities it sets the lowest bar against which employers can measure conditions. As Wobblies working in food and retail, we should familiarize ourselves with other campaigns to organize workers in our industry and see what kind of approaches have been successful and where campaigns have fought hard but encountered roadblocks they have been unable to get past. If conditions will ever change in our economy, those of us who struggle at the bottom of the economy will have to be those who organize the most effectively.

Sources: http://www.socialistalternative.org/publications/fastfood/
http://socialistalternative.org/news/article22.php?id=299
http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article14.php?id=1304
http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article14.php?id=229
http://socialistalternative.org/news/article14.php?id=230
Author interview with T.W., organizer with Tacoma Socialist Alternative (1/27/12)

Raising the Flag Right

2011-12-04T13:32:00.002-06:00

As a big fan of public demonstrations of group strength, mostly because I think they are a really good time for people, I cannot help but think about them as important somehow. The Left is famous for ritualizing things that don't really matter and then telling everything that they do matter so that's what we must do them, but I do think there is a valid purpose to putting on and participating in big public actions, symbolic or otherwise. It creates a sense of shared identity, it allows people to take small actions in violation of the normal order, which in turn allows people to imagine taking those actions to over parts of their lives. It can demonstrate to witnesses who we are and what we stand for, and sometimes even splashes on the media a bit.

I like to call public demonstrations episodes in a "flag raising," a catchall kind of activity that takes place when we rep ourselves. Flag raising can happen in lots of different situations, but is basically a time when we say "we're here, we believe in ourselves, watch out." Flag raising isn't necessarily antagonistic, though it might be in the context of a union campaign for example, but could for example be a dinner where we celebrate our experiences. The goal of flag raising is then both internal, as a strengthening of our bonds to each other and our ideas, and can be external, as a drawing of a line in the sand to separate us from the enemy.

How do we build flag-raising public demonstrations of power that appeal to people? If we establish that demonstrations are important to moving forward our message and provide a good space for people to encounter our ideas and discuss them in a supportive environment, we need to figure out how to make them successful.

One thing that I'm really tired of is the rally. I know this seems obvious but to so many people on the Left, the rally is the stock tactic used to raise the flag and it's not that effective. I've seen this particularly in the Occupy movement recently, but I would guess that instinct comes from the participation of folks already well schooled on left behavior as well as any organic movement towards throwing rallies. I think the rally falls short as a useful tactic for a bunch of reasons. Primarily, it becomes just another lecture to nod off to. I know this sounds like I'm way more into the insurrectionist stuff than I normally am, but the depersonalization of the rally is what makes me think it isn't that useful. Someone speaking about their issues, even if they deliver a rousing speech, goes on way too long way too quickly.

If we could do one thing to make rallies better, it would be to keep them tight. This hardly ever works in coalition work though, because if every group isn't represented in the rally than the various organizations see each other as trying to edge the other out (which, while cynical, is probably what's happening!) Therefore rallies almost always devolve into a string of lowest-common denominator speeches designed every constituency to feel involved but no one in charge. Coalition rallies don't frequently change people, usually they are an unwanted addition to another action that may have been exciting, just thrown in to sop the various parties participating in the planning or execution of the action that their voices are heard.

The rally is exclusive, boring and turns people away. How do we build public demonstrations that excite people and make people feel valued and more attached to our ideas? I'm open to new ideas. I've been struck over the past few weeks by the new vision statement of FW EF's new blog, Cultural Front, that the goal is to remake "common sense" of working people. We need to do this on the Left as well. We need to create a culture of the Left that's based on good ideas, not just ideas that have been used before, regardless of their effectiveness. We need to do flag raising in a way that works for us. Here's a few ideas:

1. Everything should have motion
The lamest march beats the best rally because it gets people moving. Moving our bodies around gives us the experience of living, of doing something, which connects the ideas we are discussing with some kind of action. I'm no psychologist, but I can't help but feel if there's not a connection here. Marches and pickets give people an opportunity to do something beyond just passively standing around and that gives us an opportunity to get people excited and have fun. I propose that if you are planning a public demonstration, people should be moving for 75% or more of the time they are at the action. Otherwise people just want to go home.

2. Voices are important but they are not the most important thing
Sometimes organizers deal with the problem created when rally speakers are already organizational leaders by doing the "speak out," where anyone can come forward to speak. This deals with the problem of the lowest common denominator by allowing militants to speak for more radical visions and it allows more voices to enter the discussion and do agitation. But what we gain by including more voices we lose by giving up our certainty of having good speakers perform. We've all been to speak outs that drag on and become a confusing mess as every wingnut gets up to the mic to move their weirdness. I think the lesson here is that voices are important because they spell our what our flag means and what we propose to do with it, but they are not the most important thing. No matter how they get deployed, voices cannot be the whole thing or even most of the thing, because they always fall back to the weaknesses of the speakers. We can't allow our flag raising to be effective or not based on how well we speak.

3. Militancy can always be upped
The power of crowds is amazing. At a recent home defense demo in Minneapolis, over 80 people stood outside a foreclosed house as the cops locked it and tried to board it. Only about 20 people had made plans to prepare for arrest and these plans involved passive civil disobedience. When the moment came though, about 70 people spontaneously locked arms and surrounded the house, forcing the police and firefighters to work around us and ultimately discouraging them (about 8 people) from going forward. We ultimately got back into the house and held it for the night. If you asked most of the 70 arm-locked protesters if they were willing to get arrested, most (including this author) would have said no. But it was clear that they were actively defying police orders and were risking arrest. So how do we square this? People make decisions in the moment based on their feelings and their confidence. We need to make people feel better about militancy, not present it as Advanced Activism, some kind of special sphere that one needs to strike out on one's own to participate in.

Often organizers frame the question of militancy in terms of "willing to get arrested vs not willing." This is a false dichotomy that only hurts our ability to act in unity. A better question might be "who cannot for reasons of parole, immigration status, or dependents cannot be arrested?" We then build actions in such a way as those "unarrestables" (notably different from "don't-wanna-get-arresteds") are as protected by the rest of the group as possible. We build militancy into our actions as a positive thing that we all believe in, not an individual choice that must me made in a vacuum. Given that choice, most individuals will weigh the benefits and drawbacks and conclude that getting arrested isn't worth it for them. As an individual, they are correct, and this promotes the thinking that militancy is just for those willing to engage in symbolic actions that might get some press attention but aren't going to actually do direct action. Militancy at flag raising events cannot be pushed as an either-or, it needs to be presented as value.

More thoughts?

Occupy Moves Onwards

2011-11-17T16:08:00.002-06:00

This will probably be dated as soon as I finish writing it, but I'm trying to get back to writing more and I think there's plenty to think about the Occupy movement that needs to get put down and discussed.

When the Occupy movement initially made its way out of New York, many of us were deeply skeptical of it. New York City, we argued, has such a distinctive economic and political landscape that the tactic of occupying a major piece of land will not be as effective elsewhere. In this, we have been shown to be correct and incorrect. Correct in that no other occupation has had the same vigor and strength that NYC's has. In a city where whole industries are created based on the fact that real estate is expensive and everyone is crowded together, it's no surprise that occupying a park near the financial nerve center of the the country would bring more people out and be more dangerous and disruptive to the ruling classes than in other places. Friends and comrades have consistently challenged of the tactic and fetishization of occupations, rightly. But where we were wrong is that the movement associated with the tactic has continued despite its obvious weaknesses.

The occupy movement has sent out waves throughout the working class, completely unexpected to skeptics like me. The battle to determine the meaning and content of the occupy movement continues, with opportunistic elements of the socialist left, the business unions, and the political-motivated non-profit sector entering the fray early on. Because of the ambivalence that radicals have felt towards the Occupy movement, we've largely ceded the leadership of local occupations to people associated with these groups, or at least allowed existing leadership to be moved by these groups. All is not lost though.

Radicals have been able to enter the Occupy movement, at least locally and I would guess nationally, to push specific ideas and themes to a wider audience. This operates on two levels: within the movement and within the working class. Inside the movement, radicals and IWWs have been consistently complimented and gravitated towards based on our seriousness towards doing work and our sense of fun and creativity. The main critique of the Occupy movement from the right-wing has been its lack of demands, and the big secret is that people inside the movement, or at least inside the wing of the class that finds the movement inspirational, share this criticism. Ask the leadership of any occupation movement about the demands issue and they're likely to wax poetic about the importance of the consensus and the General Assembly. Easy for them, the actual occupiers are a shock team of students and young unemployed people not actively looking for work. The majority of the section of the class that takes inspiration from the 99% theme and the idea of resistance has to work every day or is out looking for it.

Here radicals and the IWW have had a tremendous amount of success by pushing our ideas inside the movement. Our members are well-trained on how to organize workers, so it is no surprise that we approach the occupations with the same approach - get shit done. The leadership, which cares more for media strategy and "proper" practice than revolutionary change, is easily pushed aside by Wobbly organizers whose ideas and actions are easy to come around towards. Our sense of fun has also been powerfully felt, at least locally. When we mobilize our members to a demonstration, we are noisy, clever, and fun. People respond to this well, as most people at any given demonstration either feel confused by the ritualistic speechifying and chanting of the liberal left or dulled through years of dealing with it. Our physical involvement also allows us to push radical messages in positive, affirming ways. Last week an IWW contingent got a 400+ march at OccupyMN to chant "Oakland workers got it right, we need a general strike!" and brought a level of militancy and smiles to peoples' faces. One IWW comrade took the boring and off-putting "We are the 99%" chant and started pushing the message "We are the workers of the world" to the same cadence, which many responded to favorably. Obviously just pushing radical slogans is not enough to radicalize the struggle, but by pushing ideas and bringing people around to them through proving ourselves, we can push the struggle in a more radical, practical direction by showing a path away from the vague anti-banks and politicians ideology of the movement and towards an explicit revolutionary vision that shows how direct action can improve things for working people.

The Occupy movement continues to be small, partially because of its incoherence and its insistence on the tactic of occupying a space 24 hours a day. Yet its resonance is wide, and this is the milieu that radicals should especially seek to target. Many working people find the demands and ideas of the occupiers to be powerful and their ideas resonant, but are culturally alienated from the occupations because of the tactic. Here, we need to continue to target and push our ideas through mass outreach and through connecting the slogans and concerns of the movement to our ideas through projects that excite people. The slogan and rallying cry "Occupy Your Job" has been floated by some IWWs, and we will see if this slogan holds. Regardless, picking up on the energy created by the Occupy movement and moving it towards more clear, concert tasks and projects that can actually get things done is a critical task for revolutionaries in the current moment.

In this, we have been unintentionally aided by the police. The massive, coordinated expulsion of the occupations across the country this week was a clear attempt by the security forces to end the movement through forcing the conflict to be about whether or not we can camp or not and away from the issues it raises. This has prompted many forces within the movement, notably the more forward-thinking business unions, to push away from the ritualization of the occupation tactic. They are right in doing so, and its our opportunity to lose if we don't pick up on this chance to reframe the debate away from the tactic of occupations and towards a strategy of class conflict. We have a moment in front of us where the discussion no longer has to be about whether or not to support or participate in the occupations (and if so, how) but rather how we can take the energy created by the media events and publicity stunts the movement has pulled and use it towards building more organizers in shops, a more organized class (for how many people was this their first experience of meetings outside of church or work?) and ultimately a stronger, more diverse IWW. We need to make it so that soon Occupy doesn't mean a physical takeover of a public space, but an idea that evokes militancy, a social space for people to meet, change each other, and be changed, and a spot from which we can launch our next campaigns and attacks on the bosses' power.

Outside the House of Labor

2011-11-17T15:11:00.002-06:00

I've been thinking recently about the way that the labor movement sees itself and talks about itself. Labor movement activists often talk about labor as a kind of community, a place where individuals can reach across differences and speak to each other based on a shared connection to their unions and unionism more generally. There are big, well-funded internal publications that the large unions produce which help move this discourse. But there are also independent voices which participate in this discourse. I can think of Labor Notes as an example that I'm most familiar with.

Labor Notes and magazines, blogs, or other publications like it have this particular way of speaking about the labor movement and the changes that it needs to implement that I've always had a lot of trouble connecting with. I like Labor Notes, I think its a useful piece that praises rank-and-file struggles and shows how the bosses and the business unions are strong and powerful but also have weaknesses. It's the kind of publication that shows that working people can have independent publications that highlight our stories of success and explain why and when we fail with a good analysis (usually).

But I've always had trouble connecting with the language that LN and similar publications use to talk about the labor movement. There's a positioning of "inside and against" that I've always been unable to connect with. The discourse often goes "we are the labor movement, we need to do better, we need to get better leadership and democratize our unions, we need to organize the unorganized." I like all the reclaiming of the labor movement narrative, that's a great step I think. Saying that "we," being rank-and-file workers, are the labor movement and that unions are not just the union leaders, is really important. But to me as an IWW organizer, I've never felt part of some community of labor.

I think this could be partially because we're a union so influenced by the left but I don't think that's all of it. I think its also because our shops don't have stable contracts that allow us to engage in fights against a bureaucratic leadership. Most of us don't have good union jobs and therefore some allegiance to the successes of the movement and a desire for it to change. We have crappy jobs that we are trying to organize because we need to and believe in a better life for ourselves on a very direct basis. We don't feel the pressures of the capitalists trying to use the unorganized to undermine our higher wages, because we work in the unorganized section of the class and spend all our time trying to organize it.

In short, and I'm not sure if I'm making much sense with this, I feel like there's a disconnect in how we as the IWW articulate our membership in the labor movement. Other unionists are able to engage in a critique of the labor movement by testifying to their presence as part of that movement and therefore their investment in it. I can't do that because I always feel like any time we're in the room with other labor unionists they treat us variously like idiots, children, or opponents to be watched behind crocodile smiles. It's far easier to identify with the left's critique of labor as something that's outside me then the union movement's critique from this perspective. And not because I agree with the left's positioning; I'm a labor organizer goddammit! It's just that through the state of my lived experience and that of my fellow organizers, we often do not have much in common with those unionists who seek to reform their unions and get a better contract. I just want some bread and roses and a revolution.

Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism part 4: Three Big Unions: The IWW and Revolution

2011-07-20T16:44:00.000-05:00

by Nate Hawthorne and John O’Reilly

This is the fourth and last in a series of articles on Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism. In this piece we talk more about the One Big Union and revolutionary change. We suggest that we should not think about One Big Union as the IWW coming to include the entire working class. Instead we think that this is a three-part metaphor or three big unions. The One Big Union is a metaphor and name for our hope and vision of a unified working class acting together – acting in union – in a revolutionary situation. The One Big Union is also a formal organization, the IWW. Finally, One Big Union is the name for the relationship between the IWW as an organization and the rest of the working class. In our view, this understanding orients us toward questions about what we think revolutionary change looks like.

We believe, with the IWW preamble, that it is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. Only the working class can end capitalism, and in certain moments the working class has a greater chance to move closer to carrying out this important task. That kind of moment is a revolutionary situation. We need to have a serious IWW-wide discussion about what a revolutionary situation looks like. We should also talk about what we think is the IWW's role in preparing for and acting within a revolutionary situation. This not an exercise in fantasy but as part of being serious about believing in a revolutionary future.

Think a moment about the size of what we're talking about. A genuinely revolutionary situation where we could end capitalism, even if it happened in one U.S. state or even in just one major metropolitan area would involve millions of people. (And really, this is actually too small of a scale: a working class revolution that ends capitalism must be truly global.) This means we need to be thinking in huge numbers of people. This is not something anyone can control, but we need to figure out ways to make our struggles self-reinforcing and self-expanding. As an organization and as a class we need to see struggles that expand to involve hundreds of thousands people.

In this series of articles we have been discussion revolutionary unionism through the concepts of Industrial Unionism and One Big Union. The meaning of “One Big Union” is closely related to the role of the IWW in the working class’s historic mission. Here are a few scenarios:
1. The IWW grows to become the One Big Union that all members of the working class are members of. This kicks off major social upheaval.
2. The IWW grows to become One Big Union in the sense that it is very large and includes a whole lot of workers, and this creates major social upheaval.
3. The IWW grows to become One Union Which Is Very Big, including a whole lot of workers. Other groups wage important fights as well. The IWW and other groups cooperate and have good relationships. This combination is One Big Union, metaphorically speaking, and makes for major social upheaval.

We can see different versions of the idea of One Big Union in each of these scenarios. In the first scenario the IWW literally becomes the One Big Union for all workers. In the second scenario the IWW becomes One Big Union that's really big but we're not literally all the workers.

The third scenario seems more likely to us than the other two. In this scenario, One Big Union means three different things. We somewhat jokingly call this “three big unions.” One Big Union is the name for the IWW and expresses our commitment to revolution. One Big Union is also a metaphor for the working class as a whole - that is, for millions of workers around the world, acting together in solidarity - in action against capitalism and for a better world. That's not an organization, really, though it is an organized class-wide process. One Big Union is also a metaphor for how the IWW should act within the working class. We should act in a way that is open to struggles outside our organization and we should wage our own organizing drives, trying to both support our fellow workers in their struggles and building our own struggles where we are -- acting in a way that both builds organization and fights the capitalists.

A revolutionary situation in our day (or, within our lifetime) will involve millions of people in a complex ensemble across the class. No single organization will lead or control this. The working class can have more than one organization working on aspects of its interests. Given the divisions in our class it’s good to have multiple types of organization (such as unions of waged workers, committees of unemployed people, tenants' organizations, etc), and multiple organizations of each type. In all likelihood the IWW will be one working class organization among many who make an important contribution to working class revolution. As the working class takes action in a revolutionary situation there will have to be different practices developed than those that the IWW practices, and different kinds of organization - including both formal organizations and informal organizations.

These issues open onto a few key questions which apply both to the ‘normal’ operations of the capitalist system and to revolutionary situations that will develop. How can the IWW become an organization that exerts a strong and revolutionary pull within the working class? How should the IWW relate to other organizations and struggles of the working class? How should we relate to other revolutionary anticapitalists now? How can our orientation to other struggles and organizations help or hurt the IWW and the historic mission of our class? In our view there was a good start to answering these in Alex Erikson’s recent article “For A Union Of 10,000 Wobblies” in the June issue of the Industrial Worker and in Juan Conatz’s “What Wobblies Can Learn From Direct Unionism” in the July/August issue. We don’t have clear answers to these questions. We pose them questions for discussion. The two of us have written as much on all this as we’re currently able to say. We hope the principles and concepts we’ve sketched help contribute to a discussion of these questions of the direction of the IWW as a revolutionary union.

The IWW and the sorts of activities that the IWW currently carries out will not be the only things that go on during a revolutionary situation and are not the only things that will contribute to a revolutionary situation taking place. We have to do our part, but everything does not rest on our shoulders.

We believe the IWW will make a major contribution, however. The IWW will make a contribution by radicalizing workers, and by giving those radicalized workers skills and confidence and relationships that they will use to contribute to the movement of our class as a whole. That's currently what we're doing and have done. We’re helping make more working class revolutionaries. As we grow, we will periodically gather together and re-assess our course in order to refine the specifics of how we contribute to the historic mission of our class. Completing that mission is not in the cards for the relatively near future. Getting the project onto the agenda as a real possibility is not the same thing as actually carrying out that project once and for all. Our tasks for now are preparing ways to get that mission onto the agenda in a real and winnable way.

Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism part 3: What Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism Mean Today

2011-07-20T16:42:00.002-05:00

By John O’Reilly and Nate Hawthorne

In this series we’ve discussed One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism as ideas and activities within the IWW. In this article, we turn our attention to how carefully balancing our emphasis on One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism allows us to build the IWW in the short term. While none of us has a magic bullet answer that will make organizing easy, we can think out and discuss possible solutions to ongoing issues that we face as a way of approaching our work more strategically. How can One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism guide us towards better practices? They do so by pushing us to both build members up and build members out.

When we talk about building members outwards we mean developing practical units of struggle within the industries where we are organizing that most effectively share the message of our union and get more people involved in our work. That is: more members, organized to fight more effectively. Building out is like laying railroad tracks into the vast, unorganized working class; the act of laying the tracks means placing one railroad tie after another, each of which advances the line out farther and each of which is an individual task that can be completed. Yet each tie allows us to lay another tie and we are unable to lay the next tie until we’ve completed the one we’re working on. Even as we lay tie after tie, we continue to find that there’s further to go and more ties to be laid. After all, if the destination for our rail line is Industrial Democracy, we have a long way to go!

Concretely, building outwards means several things. Using the social networks that we find in our jobs and our industries and finding ways to tie them together are important aspects of building out. This plays on the importance of Industrial Unionism in our organizing. When a group of fast food workers organizes in their restaurant chain, they may find that they have contact with workers who transport food and supplies to their stores. These delivery workers may work for a different company but likely have grievances of their own. Good organizers can take these contacts and begin a campaign with the delivery workers. By using the relationships that form during work itself, we can grow our membership out across the industries we work in as well as up and down the supply chains within our industries and amplify the union’s power.

Industrial links aren’t the only way that we can build our membership out. During an organizing campaign, we seek to understand social groups in the workplace as way to identify and win over key social leaders – that is, people respected by their co-workers and whose opinions carry a lot of weight – in order to move groups of workers to support the union. These same social groups can be useful outside of organizing in one shop. For instance, if an active part of a campaign is made up of members of a certain church, we can use those cultural connections to meet and link up with other workers in the same church. Perhaps the church members in the union could speak about the importance of their campaign and the vision of the IWW during a service. Or members could convince a social justice committee of the congregation to put pressure on their boss in a way that involves church members and allows organizers to have conversations with different workers and agitate them about conditions on their jobs. Using our members’ access and participation in social networks and cultural groups is a great way for us to build our membership outwards in ways in addition to organizing shop by shop and reflects our ideas about One Big Unionism.

While organizing outwards, we cannot neglect another lesson of One Big Unionism: just because our fellow workers leave a job or an industry does not mean that they become less important as a Wobbly. To move our organization forward in the short term, we need to focus more strongly on retention of members who switch jobs. Finding ways for these members to plug in to campaigns in a new industry or job is integral to keeping them in the union. If one considers how much time organizers spend building relationship with each of their coworkers, agitating and educating them into becoming an IWW member, and helping them acquire the skills necessary for organizing successfully, its clear that washing our hands of members so that they leave the union when they leave a job is a huge waste of our limited energies.

While we build members out, we must also focus on building our existing membership up. In fact, by doing one thing we also do the other. As members become more involved in the IWW, participate and learn, they increase their ability to do the work of the union, and so they help bring in more members, and begin to build others up. At this point in time, we would argue that it’s more important to focus on building members up than out because it allows us to win more fights and improve our organizing strategy, which will lead us to reap the greater rewards further down the line. In any case, by educating members into the IWW – getting them to take part in the democratic process, meeting and sharing ideas about our directions and goals, taking on tasks at different levels of the union including local, regional, craft, industrial, administrative, and international – we amplify our ability as organizers by producing more organizers who can do more work. These new organizers in turn help produce more organizers.

One crucial way that we can build our members up is by training them to organize. This work, undertaken by the Organizer Training Committee of the Organizing Department, constitutes the most important work of the union right now outside of shopfloor organizing. It highlights one of the most important values of One Big Unionism: organizing is an interchangeable skill, regardless of industry or craft, and is something that workers can and should do for themselves instead of leaving these skills to specialized professionals. While there are some concrete legal and structural differences between industries, the work of organizing is basically the same. Organizing means the work of creating relationships with fellow workers, building organization, and fighting bosses together to improve our lives. Whether in an eight worker café with one boss or a giant factory with thousands of employees, organizing is the same basic skill set. When we give our members the confidence they need to organize in their shops, we teach them skills that they can use anywhere they work. This fundamental insight of One Big Unionism cannot be overstated in our approach to organizing in the short term.

Currently, more of our campaigns are going public and need support to push to the next level. Here, we find many opportunities for building our members up. We can create connections between workers in different industries as a way of sharing ideas and experiences about organizing and to create networks that support our organizing work. Starting solidarity committees for public campaigns, providing food or childcare for campaign meetings, discussing important IWW campaigns with coworkers, raising funds or organizing pickets: these and many more are ways that we can give our members tasks that deepen their relationship with the IWW and build new bonds across industries. This builds members up and allows them to grow as Wobblies and push themselves to further heights.

Like a staircase, the IWW can grow both outwards and upwards at the same time. When we stand on the top step of a staircase we are not just standing on that step, we are standing on all the steps below as well. Depending on the moment, we may emphasize growing out or building up, but the two factors develop together. Each step is built on top of the last one and creates the basis for the next one. As we walk up the staircase, we have to step carefully, the two feet of Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism guiding us, always in balance and working together.

Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism part 2: In the History of the IWW

2011-07-20T16:41:00.002-05:00

By John O’Reilly and Nate Hawthorne

We in the IWW, like many others, have long tried to link two types of struggle - struggles for short-term improvements under capitalism, and the struggle to replace capitalism with a better society. For years now the IWW has used two ideas to think about the connections between these types of struggles. These ideas are Industrial Unionism and the One Big Union. These ideas have meant many different things but they have always been related to the IWW's revolutionary vision. These ideas relate to our vision of a future revolution that ends capitalism and to our vision of our organization under capitalism before such a revolution.

In this piece, we discuss some of the ideas in the early IWW about the IWW, One Big Unionism, and Industrial Unionism. The IWW's preamble famously states that "by organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." For the early IWW, the idea of building the new within the shell of the old had two facets. Both were all about revolution. One was a matter of organizational design and the other was a matter of preparing the working class. In its organizational design, the IWW's structures were supposed to be set up to form the basis for running a future society democratically. The idea was for the working class to be able to run the economy as quickly as possible after a revolutionary change, to get the post-capitalist economy going again after the tremendous disruption caused by the revolution. In terms of preparing the class, the IWW was intended to radicalize workers by making them want revolution and make them more capable in acting on their urge to end capitalism.

We can see the notion of structure in some documents from just before the IWW's founding. A letter that helped bring about the IWW's founding convention described the need for a new type of union. The letter called for "a labor organization builded as the structure of Socialist society, embracing within itself the working class in approximately the same groups and departments and industries that the workers would assume in the working class administration of the Co-Operative Commonwealth.” In the words of another letter, this union should “represent class conscious revolutionary principles." A manifesto issued in January 1905 described the goal as an organization which would “build up within itself the structure of an Industrial Democracy - a Workers’ Co-Operative Republic - which must finally burst the shell of capitalist government, and be the agency by which the working people will operate the industries, and appropriate the products to themselves.” In the words of the people who created the IWW initially, that's what the IWW was supposed to be.

An article called “How the IWW is Organized” published in an IWW magazine later tried to sum up the IWW’s aims in three points. “(1) To organize the workers in such a way that they can successfully fight their battles and advance their interests in their every-day struggles with capitalists. (2) To overthrow capitalism and establish in its place a system of Industrial Democracy. (3) To carry on production after capitalism has been overthrown.”

In addition to structure, the IWW's activity was supposed to prepare workers for revolution. One issue of the Industrial Worker newspaper said that conflict under capitalism helped get the working class ready to end capitalism. This conflict was "training" of a sort "most necessary to prepare the masses for the final ‘catastrophe,’ the
general strike, which will complete the expropriation of the employers.” The Industrial Union Bulletin wrote that "the very fights themselves, like the drill of an army, prepare the worker for ever greater tasks and victories.” An early IWW leader named Daniel DeLeon wrote that one function of the union is “to drill the membership of the working class in the habit of self-imposed discipline” - or, to train the class to use its capacities for self-organization. The idea was that workers would learn how to run society through running their own organization -- specifically, the class conscious and revolutionary industrial union, in struggle against the capitalist class.

An Industrial Union Bulletin article called “Industrial Unionism" stated that the IWW “teaches its members that each dispute in which they are involved is merely an incident in the great struggle between capital and labor - a struggle which can only be brought to an end by the overthrow of capital” and “this supreme end must be ever kept in view.” As a result “every incident in the life of the union, every skirmish with the employers is made the text for proletarian education.”

Sophie Cohen was a child during a major strike in 1913 in Paterson, New Jersey, in which the IWW played an important role. Cohen said that “the IWW left people with a taste for organization. Every time workers win a strike, it helps straighten out their backs a little bit more and lifts their heads a bit higher. Even though the big strike was lost in Paterson, there was a feeling of togetherness among the workers. (…) From then on, there were a series of strikes and every shop had to be reorganized. Every shop refought the eight hour day all down the line.”

The education of individual members occurred through direct action, defined by James Kennedy as “use of their economic power by the workers themselves." Jack Terrill, the secretary of a Montana IWW branch put it this way: “If something should happen tomorrow so that the workers would have to run industry when they go to work tomorrow, there would be chaos. They are not educated up to that point, but the IWW is trying to organize them into one big union and educate them so that they can run industry when the time comes.” This education could not happen without the day to day and month to month struggles against bosses.

“[T]he revolutionary character of the working class is best developed while the workers are engaged in actual struggle against the masters,” stated an article from the IWW magazine the Industrial Pioneer. The article said that a “well conducted strike will do more towards developing class-consciousness and radical sentiment than ten tons of
revolutionary propaganda of a general nature.” The idea here is straightforward: struggle changes people. Being involved in struggle, instead of delegating one’s power to another, makes that struggle more meaningful to the worker

Readers may have noticed that we have spent more time on one facet than the other. We agree strongly with the idea of struggles preparing the working class for revolution. While we respect the idea of early IWW members that the organizational design of the IWW should be the structure for a post-capitalist society, we don’t find it very compelling. Particularly in today’s economy, so many workers labor on products or services that are irrelevant or unnecessary for our society if we free ourselves from the bosses’ rule. For many people in the early IWW, however, these facets were not separable.

The article "Industrial Unionism" argued that the IWW's organizational structure was linked to both functions. Under capitalism, the structure was meant to coordinate effective struggle and to maximize the preparatory role -- to make the IWW radicalize as many workers as possible as effectively as possible. After capitalism ended, the same
structure would take on a new role. The article stated: “Under capitalism, the functions of the union are militant and aggressive; under the Socialist Republic they will be administrative only. This change of function will involve no internal transformation of the union, as it is precisely those powers whereby it can inflict injury upon the capitalist that will enable it to take up the work of production. It is precisely its control over production (…) that give[s] its power for militant action.” The idea was that after militant action ended capitalism, the IWW and the working class would immediately deploy its power for cooperative production.

We can see the idea of the One Big Union as having three different roles: a vision of a future society, an idea of revolutionary change, and a structure for coordinating struggles under capitalism. As a vision of a future society, the One Big Union meant a democratic society where workers cooperated freely. As an idea of revolutionary change, the idea was that workers would form one big union and then that union would end capitalism. This could mean a few things concretely. It could mean that the IWW literally became an organization that included the entire working class. Or it could mean the IWW had enough workers in it that it kicked off some major social upheaval. In those two scenarios, the IWW would be the One Big Union. The idea could also be more metaphorical - the working class united together, but without any single organization. In that case, the IWW would be one organization among many who makes a contribution.

The One Big Union was also the name for an organizational form for workers to coordinate activities against specific bosses and the capitalist class before the revolution. In that sense, the One Big meant a structure to work under capitalism. The One Big Union was made up of Industrial Unions, which were meant to be the fighting divisions of the IWW. The Industrial Unions were supposed to concentrate workers in particular industries in order to maximize the power they could exert. The IWW's One Big Unionist administrative structure was supposed to join struggles across Industrial Unions in order to make them more effective. The organization as a whole was also intended to spread the idea of One Big Union as a revolutionary vision. This was supposed to help keep the Industrial Unions from focusing simply and entirely on the day-to-day and month-to-month struggles.

In 1913 Paul Brissenden described the IWW's doctrine as Revolutionary Industrial Unionism. He noted that the IWW didn't invent the idea of industrial unionism or of revolution. “The Industrial Workers of the World is not the first organization of workingmen built upon the industrial form. Even its revolutionary character can be traced back through other organizations." He named other organizations that had helped influence the IWW and that held one or both of these ideas: the Knights of Labor, the Western Federation of Miners, the American Labor Union, the United Metal Workers International Union, the Brewery Workers, and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Still, Brissenden argued that the IWW was part of "the most modern phase of the
revolutionary movement." For the early IWW, the One Big Union served to keep the organization aimed at revolution while Industrial Unionism helped make this revolutionary vision practical instead of just wishful thinking.

Industrial Unionism and One Big Unionism part 1: Two Concepts for IWW Organizing

2011-07-20T16:40:00.002-05:00

By John O’Reilly and Nate Hawthorne

This is article is the first in a series discussing the themes of the One Big Union and Industrial Unionism. We believe these themes are relevant to the future of our organization and our organization’s vision and values Through these articles, we hope to push for a discussion about possible ways forward for the IWW and how we can get from where we are to where we need to be to build a new society. We welcome replies, whether in print or sent to us in private at crashcourse666@gmail.com.

The question “how do we best organize the working class?” has been on the minds of many of our members recently. Our organization is small, but we have made great strides towards creating a model that actually builds power for working people. We have one of the best member training programs in any union in North America and Europe, we are building solidarity with working people's organizations in our communities and around the world, and we are continually raising our own bar by taking on and winning bigger fights with bosses. As we continue to build the IWW, sometimes the ideas we have about how our organization ought to function come into conflict with the way that our organization actually functions. These conflicts require us to develop our ideas about revolutionary unionism in the long-term and in our day-to-day activity.

In this article, we reflect on ideas that have been around in our organization for a long time: One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism. Reflecting on the relationship between these ideas and how they relate to our organizing can help clarify both our thoughts and our actions. By understanding how these ideas both overlap and conflict, we want to set the stage for a larger discussion about our organization.

One Big Unionism is the idea that guides us in the work of building the IWW as a revolutionary organization. It is a way to think about the organizing work that we do and the reasons we do this work. The One Big Union is the idea that we want the entire working class to be united to act in our interests as a class and against capitalism. The united working class must cross geographic, cultural, and industrial boundaries, be democratic, and be able to coordinate and marshal the forces of us workers against the united power of the bosses and their rule over our lives and communities.

We in the IWW believe that the working class needs to be unified to fight the battle for economic democracy. We are One Big Unionists because we are committed to uniting all workers across industries and crafts and because we believe all work under capitalism share basic, fundamental similarities. While we do different kinds of work, we have the same basic role in the economy: we’re the people that make our society run but who have no power over how it is run. One of the most important lessons that we have learned in the last few years in our organizing is that because we all occupy the same place in the class system, the basic framework for organizing workers does not change depending on what kind of work they do. Regardless of craft or industry, the basic skills and tools and techniques of organizing are more or less the same. We organize by talking with workers, asking questions, building relationships with them, getting them to build relationships with each other, having frank discussions about the problems they and we all face under capitalism, building solidarity as a group, and taking action to fight the boss. These basic elements of our approach to organizing, based on our commitment to the revolutionary principle of One Big Unionism, come from the fact that all workplace organizing uses basically the same set of skills and practices that any working person can learn and do.

Industrial Unionism, on the other hand, is the idea that we need to build labor organizations connected to each other logically based on the way that the modern economy runs. By organizing unions in this way, we can strengthen our power across connected industrial chains. While One Big Unionism is a set of principles that guides our work, Industrial Unionism gives us practical suggestions about how to best implement our ideas about how to fight the bosses and win.

Industrial Unionism is understanding how we carry out our principles in action. Industrial Unionism is fundamentally about how to build and exert power in the most effective way possible in the near future. Organizing along the supply chain amplifies our power: a union of agricultural workers, food processing workers, truckers, and fast food workers in one chain has more power against the employer or employers on that chain than organizing all the fast food workers in one city. Industrial Unionism builds upon the strength of workers whose jobs are related as way to win fights. We use these fights to win membership to our union and use our membership to win these fights.

If we de-link One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism and only pursue one of them, we become lopsided. If a branch or a group of organizers focus too much on One Big Unionism, they build bodies and activities that only work to build class consciousness, or worse, only gather together people who have already become class conscious through experiences outside the IWW. Class consciousness is important, but consciousness alone does not fight or build organization. By thinking only in the One Big Unionist model, we are unable to shape our world and build industrial democracy because we have no power. There’s no way to stage and win fights in specific shops if we are everywhere at once; leaflet a Starbucks on Monday, talk to truckers on Tuesday, a hospital workers’ forum on Wednesday, etc. By the end of the week, we have not made progress in building shopfloor organizing in any one of those workplaces. Plus, if we overstress the idea that all workers are fundamentally the same, we will miss the concrete differences that do exist right now between shops, crafts, and industries and make them distinct: demographics, legal rights, concentration, forms of oppression, etc.

The other side of the coin is equally or perhaps even more important. If we focus too narrowly on Industrial Unionism, we get cut off from the revolutionary idea that forms the basis of the IWW: all workers, as workers, are fundamentally in the same place in relation to the capitalist class and therefore can and should organize together to make improvements today and end capitalism tomorrow. When branches or groups of organizers focus only on one industry without seeing how all workers need to participate in the work of building the IWW, we lose our ability to learn from workers in different industries, from their successes and failures, tactics and ideas. Many of the best lessons implemented in our most active campaigns were learned from other IWW campaigns across a variety of industries. Additionally, turnover and firings associated with our union drives mean that if we only look at one industry, we will lose our members who change jobs. In the low-wage sector where many of our current campaigns are taking off, many workers move between different industries very quickly. Finally, if we only focus on Industrial Unionism, we lose our ability to turn workers into Wobblies and miss the big picture of our organization, a united working class movement fighting to not only for a better life for ourselves under capitalism but also fighting to end capitalism and replace it with a better society.

Within the IWW as a living organization, One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism should be linked together as ways of thinking about our organizing. The balance of the two allows us to build our organization and move our class forward. One Big Unionism allows us to visualize a united working class and sets our sights on organizing all workers. It’s a vision of association which thinks about how more workers can be organized and work together for our class, as a class. It is the idea that all workers have interests in common as workers, have interests opposed to employers, and includes a commitment to building a new society to replace capitalism. Industrial Unionism is a vision of short-term conflict, expressing our commitment to creating the most effective organization possible for accomplishing goals. Industrial Unionism is about building an effective means to challenge the bosses’ power under capitalism.

Only by carefully balancing the perspectives of One Big Unionism and Industrial Unionism can we push forward the work that needs to be done. Our organization has great ideas about how to organize and why, it’s up to us to implement them and build up our class.

Bad Ideas Part 2: Average Wobbly Time

2011-07-20T15:19:00.001-05:00

By John O'Reilly

In my last column I discussed how to respond to bad ideas. Sometimes organizers behave like jerks towards members with bad ideas, which as we discussed last time, is counterproductive. Just as often or more so people hesitate and look the other way in response to bad ideas. This response is a mistake because it misses the importance of what I call Average Wobbly Time.

Every Wobbly decides somewhere along the line to commit to the IWW. Often members make that decision on many different occasions at different levels of commitment. For many of us it started with an organizer inviting us to a one-on-one, before we even knew anything about the IWW. Making a commitment to follow through and sit down with the organizer is the beginning of a long process of making more commitments to the organization: taking out a union card, attending meetings, taking on responsibilities in our campaign and branch, spending hours and hours completing the tasks that those responsibilities entail, talking with other workers and encouraging them to get more committed, etc. These tasks come from our commitment and build our commitment to the IWW. It’s this intense attachment to the union, its members, and its ideas that makes IWW members so remarkable and so exciting to be around.

At some point, we become committed to such a degree that we regularly put big amounts of time into the IWW on a regular basis. Early on, that may be one hour every two weeks, meaning the time that we have a one-on-one with an organizer or go to an organizing committee meeting. Over time, that amount of time fluctuates, hopefully upwards. But as long as we are being pushed by our fellow members and are pushing ourselves to move the work of the union forward, we tend to have an average number of hours that we spend on the union every week. At some point, and its hard to tell exactly when, many members absorb the union into their lives and it becomes a given that they will allocate a certain amount of time each month or week or day to thinking about and doing work for the union. We may not realize it explicitly, but if we stop and really think about it, each of us has a certain average that we tend towards. That average may go up when we get really excited about a struggle or project and may go down when we’re feeling burned out, but as long as we’re committed to the union, there is some kind of average. That’s Average Wobbly Time.

Sometimes there are members who committed to the union and want to put time in but are unable to find projects to fill that time. To put it another way, what happens when a passionate, committed Wobbly wants to do work for the union but has no good ideas about what to do? In some cases, it means that the member in question seeks out their fellow workers and asks them for suggestions on how to participate more. Sometimes it means that the member gets less excited about the union and allocates less time to it. Sometimes the result is that the member in question starts spending a chunk of the hours of their Average Wobbly Time pursuing bad ideas.

So how do we deal with this dilemma? Committed members are going to spend a certain amount of time on the union every week and if no one gives them good ideas, they may go off and pursue bad ones. Our task is to provide leadership. It may be as simple as suggesting good ideas to someone who is hungry for more. “Fellow Worker, I notice that you have a lot of energy and have been coming to all these meetings recently. Some of us have been talking about starting a new organizing campaign, would you like to sit down and talk about that?” By directing someone’s attention towards a task that’s clearly focused on organizing, we can simultaneously fulfill that member’s desire to spend more hours on the union and build up the forces dedicated to an organizing goal. By building a culture of good, organizing-directed tasks, we provide leadership and make it easy for excited members to plug into them.

As I said above, other Wobblies often look the other way when some of our fellow workers pursue bad ideas. Often, experienced wobbly organizers do not want to crowd newer, inexperienced but excited members by telling them how to spend their time. Part of why people look the other way is because it’s intimidating to be honest with people. As a result, Wobblies often stand by and watch other people go off in a direction that does not make any sense and is from the outset doomed to fail. Telling someone that their energy is being misspent is difficult, but ignoring the conversation disrespects our fellow workers, because true respect means being honest with them about their ideas and not just standing by while they pursue what we think is an obvious failure. Hesitation to step in means that sometimes individuals or groups spend hours and hours working on a project when they clearly had other options that were much more useful, a result that we should seek to avoid.

At the heart of this question is a call for organizers to be aware that if they are not active in providing perspectives and building relationships with members then they will allow conditions to pop up where time and resources are wasted on bad projects that could easily be avoided and redirected towards useful ones. If we push for what we think are good ideas and are honest about bad ideas, we treat our fellow workers with respect, we get people to work on better projects, and we prevent wasting time and other resources. It’s intimidating to be honest, but it’s the right thing to do. We need to do what’s right, not simply what’s easy or comfortable. Understanding how Average Wobbly Time works is one small part of this larger struggle towards an organizing-based culture that fosters truly democratic and revolutionary unionism, one that respects each member by being truthful and supportive.

Bad Ideas Part 1: Don’t be a Jerk about Bad Ideas

2011-07-20T15:17:00.002-05:00

By John O'Reilly

(with much thanks for ideas and suggestions from A. Vargas, Nate Hawthorne, and the Wob Writing Group)

It would be great if we lived in a world where all ideas about organizing were right, but the blunt fact is that sometimes people with really good intentions do things that waste their time or, worse yet, actually hurt the organization that they are trying to build. We have all at some point looked back and said, “Wow, I cannot believe I put so much time into that project that was so clearly going to fail.” Granted, hindsight is 20/20 but often when we say this about failed projects, we also say, “Wow, Fellow Worker X is really smart and experienced and should have told me that was going to fail.” Unfortunately, there are two common and dysfunctional ways that experienced Wobblies allow this kind of situation to happen. Being a jerk and being hesitant are two mistakes in dealing with these problems that we often do by mistake.

Often, experienced Wobbly organizers do not want to crowd newer, inexperienced but excited members by telling them how to spend their time. As a result, Wobblies often stand by and watch other people go off in a direction that does not make any sense and is from the outset doomed to fail. Hesitation to step in means that sometimes individuals or groups spend hours and hours working on a project when they clearly had other options that were much more useful. This hesitation is a natural response to many of us because we would rather allow someone to step off in a direction that is ineffective and sometimes wildly negative than do the harder work of mentoring a fellow worker through the prickly but important situation of recognizing one’s own bad ideas. Stepping beyond that hesitation is an important task for organizers to train ourselves to do.

That said, sometimes we find ourselves indulging in the opposite impulse: organizers can criticize bad ideas by acting like a jerk. Sometimes, someone may have already gone off with a bad idea and started pushing it around the union. As experienced organizers, we can see a few steps down the road and imagine how the bad idea will lead to disaster. That knowledge can make it more tempting to act like a jerk. But acting like a jerk is just as obviously a failing strategy to deal with bad ideas. It might embolden a member’s dedication to the project (“FW X said this is a crappy idea and that we’re stupid. Screw them, let’s do it!”) or disempower and discourage the member (“FW X said this is a crappy idea; I guess I’m a crappy unionist.”) While it might be easy to act like a jerk and dismiss peoples’ ideas out of hand, we can also easily see how this response is a negative one and does nothing to build the union. Instead, we need to imagine alternative ways of dealing with bad ideas.

In some instances, we just have to let people try something and have it fail so that they learn it is not a great idea. We can be there in a critical but supportive stance. If the member wants to have the IWW host a debate about Daniel DeLeon’s ideas as a way of bringing in more workers, we could offer to help flier for it. That wastes some of our time, but in the long run it could be a gain because it allows us to build a relationship with the member in question and when nobody comes to the debate who has not already been involved in the branch for years, we can have a conversation with that member about other projects that might be better next time. Other times, we may have to find ways of redirecting the worker’s attention towards better projects. Perhaps a crew of members is pushing the branch to spend an hour at next month’s business meeting discussing how the class struggle can be pushed forward via do-it-yourself clothing and dumpster diving (which can be cool if people are into them, but don’t implicitly have much to do with the class struggle). We could intervene there by asking the members why they want to discuss it at the meeting and perhaps suggest that we have a separate discussion outside of the meeting, participate in that discussion and use it as a space to talk about good ideas instead. When folks with bad ideas start pushing them, it’s often better to step closer to them than it is to step back and criticize from a distance.

Imagine an alternate scenario. When organizers are jerks about bad ideas, they turn people off of the important participatory aspect of our union. By straight out telling an excited member that their idea to leaflet for the union at the factory gates at a shop of 500 workers while waving a red and black flag is a crappy idea, you do nothing more than turn people off from the IWW. It makes it easier for the member to ignore good advice because of the way in which that advice is raised, which in turn leads them to embrace more bad ideas and less good advice in the future. Bad ideas will never simply disappear from the organization; we constantly try new things and attempt to build a culture of organizers who can recognize past bad ideas when they see them. Acting like a jerk about them is often more damaging to the organization than doing the bad ideas in question.

Our approach with bad ideas has got to be one that builds from our role as organizers. As organizers, we are used to identifying leaders in campaigns and trying to use that leadership to develop the worker and workers who look up to them. Inside the union, we need to apply the same skills. Figuring out who a member respects and using that relationship to provide good ideas builds stronger relationships between members rather than tearing people down who have a bad idea and it can redirect the time the member was going to spend on a bad idea towards a good one. At the heart of this question is a call for organizers to be aware that if they voice criticisms in a way that makes those criticisms not be taken seriously then they are not doing any good. It’s not enough to be right. People have to be right in the right way.

Dealing With Leadership

2011-05-31T12:07:00.003-05:00

Lots of people who operate in the milieu that I'm down with nowawadays, which I guess could be called the organized anarchist scene, are interested in the idea of leadership. Differing from recent anarchist common sense which sees "leadership" as a static concept that can't be separated from its deployment in hierarchical organizations, I'd say our sense of leadership is more about the actual fact that some people take positions of social leadership in an organization (be it at work, a union, a political organization) through the esteem of their fellow participants. They may be good leaders or bad leaders, or more likely somewhere in between, and its our job as organizers to bring those people over to our cause, work on the bad qualities that they exhibit, and work with them to build up the leadership qualities of their followers. In short, we see leadership as the ultimate goal for every worker, and building the leadership qualities in every worker as a key part of our work.

Okay, so that's what we set out to do. But dealing with leadership once when finds oneself in the position of having it is an interesting problem contend with. I'm finding myself in two positions in my life where I'm now a social leader (work and my IWW local) and am having to think through the next steps of how I carry myself forward. I feel like I have a pretty good idea of how to build other people up to take on leadership positions, I'm less clear about where they/I should go from there, once they have social leadership positions and are organized. How do I act in a way that's accountable to the people who look up to me and see me as a leader? How do I bring them up and focus my work on building their leadership abilities while still carrying out the tasks that I need to do as part of the life of the organization?

Also, on an emotional level, how do we deal with other people looking up to us and looking to us for answers? In some ways, this is a smaller version of a problem that I bring up in a rather confusingly written post from two years ago (Jesus, has it been that long since I've been writing on this thing?) about Lenin and being a leader of a powerful organization. Even at a smaller level though, this still operates. I feel a good bit of apprehension when people in the IWW ask me questions about how they should run their campaigns, as frequently happens to me now from newer members. My first instinct is to go "shit, I don't know, don't ask me!" because I don't want people to make mistakes on my account and then lose their campaigns or their jobs. But fighting through that instinct, which is hard to do, is important to actually providing people ideas they hadn't thought of, usually through asking questions, and pushing the work forwards.

I think there's a quality of dealing with leadership that has to do with confidence. Leaders with too much self-confidence always have the answer, even if that answer is wrong, and will quickly communicate the answer to their followers as soon as they are asked. Leaders with not enough confidence quickly stop providing leadership because they can't help people with the problems that they're confronted with. There seems to be some line in the middle where a leader can both provide ideas and be reflective about the nature of those ideas. How do we walk that line carefully? And maybe even more importantly, how do we foster conversations about leadership with social leaders in our organizations without making those conversations a way of excluding people who don't have access to them?

Luxemburg and the Unorganized

2011-05-17T21:49:00.003-05:00

"On the other hand, it is said that we would be acting prematurely were we to propagate the mass strike in Germany, for we are less ripe for it than the proletariat of other countries. We in Germany have the strongest organizations, the fullest coffers, the largest parliamentary party, and yet we, alone among the whole international proletariat, are not supposed to be ripe? It is said that, despite its strength, our organization is only a minority of the proletariat. According to this notion, we would be ripe only when the last man and the last woman had paid their dues to their constituency associations. This is one wondrous moment for which we need not wait. Whenever we instigate an important action, not only do we count upon those who are organized, but we also assume that they will sweep the unorganized masses along with them. What would be the state of the proletarian straggle if we counted only on the organized!

During the ten-day general strike in Belgium, at least two-thirds of the strikers were not organized. Of course one must not conclude from this that the organization was of no significance. The organization’s power lies in its understanding of how to draw the unorganized into the action at the right time. The exploitation of such situations is a method of bringing about a huge growth in the organizations of the party and trade unions. Recruitment to the strong organizations must be based on a large-scale and forward-looking policy; otherwise the organizations will quietly decay. The history of the party and the trade unions demonstrates that our organizations thrive only on the attack. For then the unorganized flock to our banner. The type of organization that calculates in advance and to the nearest penny the costs necessary for action is worthless; it cannot weather the storm. All this must be made clear, and the dividing line must not be drawn so nicely between the organized and the unorganized."
Rosa Luxemburg, "The Political Mass Strike," speech 1913.

I don't have much to say about this just yet, mostly posting it here so that I can think about it and return to it. One thing that strikes me right away is I'm finding myself really able to access Luxemburg's writings in a way that I have more trouble with from other folks from the "party activist" tradition of Marxism. I think particularly here of Lenin. I know he's an important thinker but when his only reference point to a shared orientation is the party, taken to mean a party of cadre, I don't have a really easily comparable political label. Anarchist political organization? Okay, but they shouldn't really organize like Leninists (as discussed in my centralism entry the other day.)

But Luxemburg frequently speaks about "the party and the trade unions" in one breath, as she does here. This is great for me because what is the IWW if not a party (here read: non-electoral political organization) and a trade union (read: small one!) So placing myself there as a starting point, I can read her analysis a lot more coherently, or at least it relates to my work a lot more coherently.

Also the last sentence here is I think really great: "All this must be made clear, and the dividing line must not be drawn so nicely between the organized and the unorganized." Here Luxemburg is posing a powerful critique that plenty of modern day organizers and radicals should really think on. Who are the unorganized? Outside of the unions, the social movements, the political organizations? How do the unorganized become organized? Often we say they do when they join a party or a union. But what I draw from Luxemburg's arguments here, and maybe to push them a bit further, is that organized, as a state of being, is less about your card and more about who you are and even more importantly what you do.

But as she says, it's not that the organization isn't important because its members represent a minority within the movement. This is the mistake of the anti-organizationalist tendency in modern day anarchism and I strongly believe it continues to be one of the biggest mistakes that anarchists make. But Luxemburg suggests that we need to think about how the organization moves and deliberates in a sea of unorganized workers who move forward and backwards on their own (though not wholly on their own, even a small organization can shape the way that the unorganized think and act). Her suggestion, attack, is I think a solid one, though it also carries the concern that we might resemble the squawking activist yelling for revolution through his bullhorn without anyone listen. Sometimes people take "attack" to mean "suggest that we attack," I think this is an ongoing problem in the Trotskyist milieu today. The organization matters because we debate and organize "to draw the unorganized into the action at the right time" and outside organization we can't.

Luxemburg and Organizational Centralism

2011-05-09T21:28:00.002-05:00

I read this tonight and it's really gotten me thinking and I'm trying to respond to it here because it's an issue that I often talk about in the context of the IWW.

"Centralism in the socialist sense is not an absolute thing applicable to any phase whatsoever of the labor movement. It is a tendency, which becomes real in proportion to the development and political training acquired by the working masses in the course of their struggle." -Rosa Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," 1904

Luxemburg here is responding to Lenin and the Iskra group's ideas about centralism as a way of dealing with the ineffectiveness and lack of organization of the Russian Marxist movement of the time. Lenin proposes a kind of centralism which makes all the parts of the party subservient to a Central Committee in all the decisions that it makes. As history shows, he ended up achieving his aim and the bloody story of Stalinism is part of that legacy. But this isn't just an "I told you so" prediction by Luxemburg that later-day radicals can cheer about, as we so often do about Bakunin's similarly prescient statements about Marx and his party-form organization. Luxemburg is responding to a real concern and she's doing so in a way that I think is really smart.

As I understand it, the revolutionary movement in Russia at the time was very divided and tiny, much of it underground and completely autonomous from other branches within the same party. Since the failure of substitutionist terror campaigns of the Narodniks in the 1870s, the political wing of the revolutionary movement was weak, while economic actions by workers and peasants were on the upswing. Likely, though I can't prove it, the Social Democrats in a certain city or region had more contact with other revolutionaries in other groups within their area than with the party across the country. I think this is likely due to the underground nature of their organizations due to the repressive atmosphere of the Tsarist regime at the time. I'd also guess that part of that isolation came with a lack of an idea of how a national party could act, which is what Lenin was trying to answer with his proposal of ultra-centralism.

In this way, though the analogy is a bit clunky, the situation resembles our own a bit. Since the substitutionism of the New Left failed in the 1970s, we have been divided and tiny, mostly speaking with people in our own cities, often across different radical movements, with limited national or international coordination. Repression is not our primary issue for English-speaking North America at this time (though we shouldn't pretend it doesn't happen to us and our comrades) but we also lack a sense of how a national or international organization could work. Like the Russian Social Democrats, we have a formal organization that connects us, the IWW, but only in limited ways do we actually use that organization. Or said better, the IWW sometimes has weak organizational ties across branches, leading us to pursue localism instead of internationalism.

What Luxemburg proposes as centralism is very different from Lenin's proposal and I think it's really interesting to see centralism as a tendency instead of a policy. Tendencies expand and contract, they provide a pole to think around and about, made up of different individuals at different times for different reasons. Favorably comparing her German party to the Russians later in the article, she comments upon how the German organization can be "supple, yet firm." A centralist tendency, not used like a capitalized Tendency in a party, but in the sense of "I tend to like waking up early on weekends but not on week days" is a movement, in the sense of walking, towards a kind of decision-making within an organization. I've long joked that I'm an anarcho-centralist in the IWW, without really knowing what that means, but I'm pleased to hear that one hundred years earlier, Luxemburg was seriously proposing centralism as something like it.

I also like that she says that it becomes real in proportion to the nature of struggle and the participants in struggle. For Luxemburg here centralism, which is itself a complicated word with lots of bad connotations there days, becomes useful when the participants in class struggle find it useful, not when it is decided by leadership that it is useful. Here again, the "development and political training" that makes centralism useful to the working class movement does not come from intellectuals in the party, but from lived experience of struggle.

I've been thinking and talking a lot recently with my fellow workers about ways to improve our local branch's administration and organizational culture. We may not agree on many details of that yet, but I definitely think that we are moving towards a shared idea of what Luxemburg might call centralism, though I doubt calling it that in our union would be a popular move. Still, what I think she does well and what I hope to incorporate into my thinking is explaining a level upon which centralism, and more broadly the question of organization itself, depends on the kinds of experiences of struggle that workers have and the kinds of organs they create based on those struggles. Rather than looking to ideology to pick an organizational form that suits us, we should look to our experiences and draw from them conclusions about the ways that we can move forward and build up our organizations.

Getting Reorganized

2011-04-04T19:59:00.002-05:00

Friends and fellow workers!

I'm excited to get back to writing, something I haven't been doing for a long time. Hope to get this blog off the ground a bit with this and post some of the work that I'm doing. Stay tuned!

The O Word

2009-12-09T00:20:00.003-06:00

A Wordle of the last draft of my senior capstone. I'll repost it when I submit my final version next week. (This idea was stolen from ED who did the same with his dissertation.) Details will be posted about the talk I'm going to give based on my research as soon as I set it up.

Doing Revolution

2009-11-01T18:01:00.004-06:00

Seeing Erik's post at Rethinking Anarchism and Nate's at What in the Hell about Lenin and reading some of the pieces he linked to got me thinking about the man a bit and about his situation. I think I'm more critical of Lenin than some of the folks whose writings Nate links, but I also have an impulse towards criticism of him due to my own ideological baggage.

These articles do really interesting things to discuss the work that Lenin did and the way he thought. That's not what I have, 'cause I can't write good critique, sadly. I've just been thinking about stuff that Lenin's life suggests to me in terms of the possibility and reality of revolution.

Most of us have very little power individually. Radicals in concert tend to have more power based simply on the combination of their individual abilities. Successful organizations have some kind of "force multiplier" that comes from the combination of their individual abilities with action that works. I'm better at charts than writing, so it looks like this to me:

Units of Power (ability/potencia) in society
Individual: 1
Collection of Individuals: 1xN (where N is number of participants)
Organization: 1xNxQ (where N is number of participants and Q is an action that fits the situation)

I'm not really sure what Q is, but I'm certain it exists. I'm using Q because maybe it corresponds to "quality," but I haven't worked that out. (Some social science student I am!) But Q is there, right? Imagine the times when you've participated in an action of some sort that was totally ill-adapted to the situation, and the outcome and amount of power that you exerted. Now imagine a situation where you've done an action that "fit" the situation. Certain actions just work better, and the ability [power/potencia] that the organization has when it fits the situation is much more.

So Q is what gets me back to Lenin. Clearly the man and his contemporaries had a particular kind of organizational model, strategy, and tactics that worked well. Their Q value was really high and that amplified their ability to exert their power. Their Q and their N increased to the point where they were able to "win" if we may simplify, by exerting an QN that was higher than the ruling class's NQ.

[Rather than turning this post into an intelligent political analysis, this is where I will suddenly change directions!]

What's interesting to me, and it's part of the reason why I probably have more sympathy for the historical Lenin (and Mao for that matter) than I should, is that Q frightens me. Most of us have never participated in organizations that had a sustained high Q level. I've done work in groups where we've had moments of great Q where all of a sudden it was as if we "understood" what was happening and were able to intervene in really effective ways. But these have never been really long. Before long we lose our way and end up doing things that are really ineffective. I've been in other groups that have had reasonably high N values representing lots of participation, but rather low Q. Sometimes this has happened in the same organization at different times (for me both my experiences in SDS and the IWW reflect this).

(Somewhere in this discussion it's important to note that we can't fetishize Q over QN. My recent research into the Partido Comunista Mexicano has highlighted for me that the "right line" means absolutely nothing if you can't relate that through numbers and application with the world.)

So how does it feel to be in an organization, much less in the leadership of an organization with a high QN? I imagine it's rather terrifying. It's quite something different to talk about a social revolution when you have no serious way of making it happen than to actually be in a situation where you could concievably carry it out. The pressure to continue to keep your effectiveness high amidst repression and competing groups is difficult enough when you're relatively small, but what about when everyone in the world is watching you?

Further, my concern with Lenin is that he and his comrades were simply the first to ever do this. Modern revolutionaries should think about the same thing. Since we're not interested in re-doing the Soviet Union this time around, we're basically standing on very little well-trod ground. Catalonia, Korea, Ukraine, there's a few examples, but they were all completely crushed. It's almost a tautology, but part of the reason why a revolution is so hard to think about is because there hasn't been the kind of revolution we seek and if there had been that revolution, we wouldn't be thinking about a revolution because it would have happened. How do we know that we're not going to zig when we should zag and produce our own NEP? Or our own Weather Underground? Or whatever? Part of the difficulty in doing revolutionary work and thinking of a revolution is that we have so many examples of failure and none of true success. (I think this may be part of why so many revolutionaries become reformists at some point in their lives.)

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that reading all this stuff about Lenin, particularly folks who seek to interrogate his political method to draw something from it, makes me doubt more than it makes me feel confident. Lenin failed at bringing communism to life, and if we accept that he teaches a great deal about how to do that project today, or perhaps the opposite, that his failure teaches us more than his thoughts do, I feel like we also have to grapple with the strong personal and emotional problems that these political lessons provide us. Do we have the strength, as individuals as well as together, to make a revolution? This question bugs me because there's no political way out, it's simply a question that gets at issues of personality and, above all, self-confidence. It's easy to be confident of the need for revolution when it is still on the horizon, but could I, or any other would-be Lenin, actually stand up to the task of creating communism? I fear that I couldn't deal with the pressure, the history of so many failed revolutions and dead revolutionaries that call out for a successful change, the need to reimagine the world completely. How did he? How can we?

Sidenote

2009-10-05T00:24:00.004-05:00

A question for you all, loyal readers:

So I was surprised and angered that one of my favorite bands from when I was growing up has a new record that is complete crap and terrible and a host of other negative adjectives. This triggered a frenzied rush to drink enough beer to forget the garbage I'd just heard and listen to older records by the band to remember why I loved them so. This led me to listen to one of their songs that prompts this question:

What not-explicitly-political songs do you love that express great class politics? I think there's a lot of these, of varying levels of popularity and meaningfulness (if that's a word). I know a classic submission is the Stones sweet Street Fighting Man, but that song never really resonated strongly with me, I suspect because of its remote place to me in time.

My nomination is a song by the band in question, my now-no-longer-beloved Big D and the Kids' Table, a Boston third-wave ska group, with their track L.A.X. If you've never listened to it, and you don't totally hate ska (which I would understand, but I have a historic personal affinity for it) you should immediately check it out.

Any other suggestions?

Non-Profits and Class Forces

2009-09-01T11:48:00.003-05:00

Because I'm still bourgie scum, I read Harper's when I can get a copy of it, having grown up stealing that magazine from my father as soon as he put it down. While it is a capital Left publication, its analysis is sometimes really illuminating and it frequently has great contributors. This month Naomi Klein has a fascinating article titled Minority Death Match: Jews, blacks and the "post-racial" presidency (which of course you gotta pay for to see online; guess Harper's hasn't caught up with the EFF yet).

While Klein's fundamental point is that the U.N. Conference on Racism functioned as a way of pitting Jewish concerns, primarily those of Israelis, against Africa and African-Americans by emphasizing the tiny minority of participants who are anti-Semitic instead of the massive ground-swelling of support for reparations for slavery, the article for me was an instructive point about the uselessness of NGOs. In the flap after the Durban conference and the Israeli lobby's subsequent rebranding of the conference as a "hate fest" instead of what it was, an attempt by third world governments and civil society to make the global North account for slavery by reinvesting money in large projects to close the gap between the African diaspora and the North, NGOs who initially supported the reparations project had to bow out. The article indicates that these NGOs, many of them U.S.-based, feared being tarred with the anti-Semitic brush by being affiliated with Durban or another conference and as such had to move backwards, further allowing anti-Semitic elements to step forward, as Iranian president Ahmadinejad proved when he took the stage at the second conference to denounce Israeli.

Klein illustrated how once an issue became controversial, these NGOs were forced to step back because those who remained close to the issue lost their funding. In an ironic twist, NGOs instrumental in the distortion of the conference's point, like the Anti-Defamation League, actually received a tremendous amount of funding from foundations like Ford which had been taken directly from those black NGOs who were too close to the repartions issue!

What's fascinating about all this is that it really has nothing to do with reparations on the surface. It looks just like one group forcing their issues which results in the distracting from another groups'. Clearly the first group is considerably smaller and more powerful than the second, but the point generally stands. What Klein makes clear, and what I think is instructive for radicals organizing (you knew I'd get there eventually!) is that it still was really about reparations. The U.S. government, under Bush as well as Obama, was basically searching for any excuse to not participate in a conference that would give it anything more than a moral obligation to apologize for slavery. When the Israel issue popped up, it was a smart move to please Jewish and right-wing constituents by stepping back from Durban and it allowed the U.S. to never have to face the possibility of being sued by blacks foreign or domestic for damages and reparations.

The point being that the NGO-industrial complex serves its purpose by being involved in this surface level politics. ACORN has become the whipping boy of the Right in this election, anti-union "public interest organizations" are increasingly being outed by labor and its allies as the corporate shills that they are. But this ideological level where they exist is just that. There certainly are material benefits in this superstructural plane, where certain ideologies can be given control over the discourse and governmental/non-profit resources. No one can deny that the fact that the Center for Union Facts has had a role in shaping workers' thoughts about unionism.

But these top-level operations ultimately only exist at the pleasure of larger, more complicated and deeper interests. When the U.S government did not want to have to deal with the potentially expensive reparations issue, it allowed NGOs and their foundation-based masters to fight amongst each other and quietly departed the fray. We should keep this in mind when we work with NGOs, even the most "critical" or radical of them. It's not just that as that old chestnut runs, that NGOs function as a recuperative wing of capitalism. While they often do that, they also function as a distraction from the real contradictions in society. By placing serious value in our connections with NGOs, we leave ourselves open for the inevitable betrayal that they will be forced to commit when our issue becomes too powerful to the forces that oppose it. NGOs, with no rank-and-file that make them self-sustaining, can never be as useful on the long-term as genuinely self-organized organs of working class power.

Though long-term relationships with them are tempting because of their access to funding, resources in-kind, and expertise, all these must be taken with a grain of salt. When NGOs leave us, and they will, our organizations will be forced into a position where we haven't developed these elements to a strong enough position and we will be open to attack. When the capitalists and state force our hand, NGOs will and must fall away. The story of Durban makes that abundantly clear: NGOs are meaningless when stronger forces move. If we're serious about revolution, we need to make our organizations into ones that can stand up directly and without their assistance.

There's clearly more to be said on this topic, particularly thinking about the theoretical implications of analysis of superstructure and structure and how they interact. I think there's also lots to be said about the interactions with these two levels and with the infrastructure of society, since so many NGOs focus on environmental issues. But that's for another day.

On A Roll

2009-08-16T16:32:00.001-05:00

As a friend of mine recently decided, the clique that he and I fit into in our college can only be described as the "haters." With that in mind, this blog rules:

(A) Hataz: http://ahataz.blogspot.com/

Fuckin' anarchists, man.

A Quick Explosion of Anger

2009-06-15T16:56:00.003-05:00

Fuck the anarchist movement, or at least a chunk of it. My latest proof?

Just fucking read this. Also another version here.

I must admit that I'm more interested in the comments than the initial piece. They express what I've come to hate about the movement, a bullshit game of "who's more radical" that lacks a basis in reality and uses not-so-sneaky techniques to shut down dissenting viewpoints. What's great is that there are whole conversations that basically consist of someone going "You've gotta check your privilege and here's why" and someone else replying "No, you've gotta check yours and here's why." With all this privilege-checking (a masturbatory game that basically boils down to a hip new PC version of the prolier-than-thou of the Marxists) is anyone actually out there doing anything? With all this internal discussion about whether or not we should put newspaper boxes in the street or take them out, I'm wondering what exactly it is that any of this shit means.

Autonomous cells in affinity with a points of unity? Anarcho-liberals? ? What the fuck does any of this shit mean? Literally, every other response on BashBack.org and Infoshop are telling people to fuck off because whatever their opinion is, it is "oppressive" or "authoritarian" or "patriarchical." I'll take one quote verbatim: Someone made a point that this poster had correllated "rowdyness" with masculinity and passivity with femininity. To which the reply went "Thanks for your critiques. That's a good point...However, I hold that my experience of machismo and being othered and womaned as a female-bodied genderqueer is valid. Please do not try to negate my experience, because that’s patriarchal." I basically agree that there is more to it than just pointing out the constructedness of machismo, it's still a functioning social structure that educates women and men to act differently. But what a sneaky rhetorical trick. This person's argument basically boils down to "I don't agree with the point you are making and because it is something involving my feelings, you telling me that I am wrong is authoritarian." I can't see any escape from this trap of self-indulgent argumentative method, and it's what I see all over this milleu. Instead of discussion based on furthering our understandings and strategies, we see a bunch of cheap tricks to avoid debate and a few well-worn cliches ("diversity of tactics" immediately springs to mind as the most flagarent example.)

On Infoshop, someone says "But let's face it-- Bash Back! as we once knew it is dead." I can't help but not be surprised. While it's disappointing when an anarchist project that so many people have spent so much time working on is heading towards irrelevance or collapse, but the way that BB! has operated makes me pretty neutral towards its end. For a group (or whatever, since I guess I can't call it a group) that spends so much time talking about privilege and identity, I'm pretty impressed with how little work I've seen them do. Was BB! working in queer communities to help fight internal problems like substance abuse and racism? Was BB! organizing for rights and benefits for sex workers? What exactly were they doing besides throwing protests at churches and at the Human Rights Campaign? Of course those douches deserve it, but I don't think that stuff is the same as organizing for the concrete liberation of LGBTQ folks. Maybe I just missed the real work because it didn't show up on the 5 o'clock news. Still, my impression is that on the whole BB! has not really done anything concrete to fix this broken society besides a couple of interventions and protests. But who am I to say so? I guess I'm just being authoritarian and patriachical.

Housecleaning

2009-05-21T13:59:00.002-05:00

So!

It's been awhile since I've put anything up, but I promise that I have more stuff coming eventually. A couple of things have happened since I posted last, including my unexpected early departure from Mexico and return to the United States, where I have been without a stable living situation or job and need to write my finals.

Also, I've decided to spend more time *gasp* editing my writings instead of the normal throwing out whatever I think of. Hopefully this will lead to slightly stronger pieces.

Anyway, I will get back to things eventually, probably within a month or so.

Class War is No Joke

2009-04-15T20:44:00.002-05:00

So I've just been turned on to the various "Tea Party" protests that are going on around the United States. Clearly these are examples of so-called Astroturfing, using various front groups to appear to be a popular movement. But I don't doubt that there are genuine middle and upper class people who have joined these marches, likely because of the enormous amount of press that they're receiving on Fox News and other television news channels.

It's easy for anarchists to dismiss these protests as irrelevant and yet another example of right-wing advocacy groups. After all, we all know that the Center for Union Facts is way more well-funded than we are and that a few days in real struggle will wake even the most reactionary worker up to the contradictions in the workplace. Well, probably.

But there's a huge difference between advocacy by conservative sectors of the bourgeoisie in the political arena and street protests by that same group. Advocacy, while probably more important in terms of actually enforcing policy decisions, occurs secretly and behind closed doors. The whole purpose of advocacy is blown when a group becomes publicly well-known for what it does. Hence the continued promotion of the nature of the Center for Union Facts by the AFL-CIO and other labor groups. Protest operates by the opposite mechanism, a public theatrical spectacle which invites controversy. Which is of course why leftists are so used to using it.

But as any student of history should know, when the Right does turn to protest and street-level actions, it is always incredibly dangerous for leftists, particularly though counter-intuitively radicals. On one hand, on a purely political level, right-wing protest and direct action is dangerous to what we believe in and to ourselves. Obviously various fascist groups and parties come to mind to illustrate this point. Right-wing opposition to abortion took its most powerful and dangerous form in the Operation Rescue movement of the 80s, which used civil rights era tactics to disrupt women's clinics.

The danger exists for radicals specifically beyond these concrete results and on the level discourse. When the right-wing places itself as the "protagonist" of a social struggle against a marginally left or centrist government, it squeezes our voices off the table entirely. Consider Chavez's Venezuela. In similar media-powered protest spectacles, the organized right-wing parties have thrown giant protests, funded powerful opposition, and even thrown a coup. This opposition has made it to criticize Chavez in Venezuela is immediately equated with being a reactionary. There is little room for nuance and internal disagreement when faced with deadly right-wing force, and it is those things that radicals need to expand. The fact that North American anarchists swear by El Libertario as the "authentic voice of freedom" in Venezuela continues to make me laugh, after being assured by numerous revolutionaries familiar with the country that literally no one reads the group's publications in-country because of their virulently anti-Chavez stance. That's not to say that Chavez isn't a power-hungry would-be dictator. He is. But "speaking truth to power" when "power" is the only thing giving you bread and protecting you from fascist groups is understandably a difficult position.

In the United States, these protests seem small right now and will hopefully stay that way, simply a passing political fad. But radicals should not let them grow and do anything in our power to combat them. Simply letting them off the hook because we agree that taxes are bad is a view that completely ignores the political complexities of the situation. Barack Obama may not be our leader, but if we allow him to become the "bad guy" in the media, we lose more than he does. This doesn't mean we should support Obama, but that we should attack the right-wing with our tools and ideas before they grow too large. Anti-fascist activism in Britian and the continent is a reasonable comparison.

There are chilling examples of what happens when right-wingers organize large public presences against left-leaning or moderate governments and radicals sit back. Though they couldn't be considered as "sitting back," the uncritical support of the Chilean Left of Allende and, outside of the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario's occasional scuffle with participants, lack of willingness to engage publicly and clearly with the right-wing middle class "March of the Empty Pots" movement when it began directly paved the way for Pinochet's coup to happen. Certainly it was a different time and revolutionaries then had different perspectives on change, so we can't fault them entirely. But the fact remains that allowing right-wingers a free hand at organizing is a game we play with no possibility of winning.

The Danger of Bourgeois Politics

2009-04-14T00:54:00.002-05:00

The personal is political? Maybe so, but in bourgeois politics, the political is personalized. And that means that sometimes leftist get hit with shit like this. Err, sorry dudes. The "left-wing revolution" sweeping Latin America is, with the probable exception of Bolivia, extremely concentrated power-wise at the top of the political system. When your main man turns out to have had a kid while a bishop, well there goes all your "popular power."

*sigh*

Towards a Critique of Actually-Existing Identity Politics, Parts 1&2

2009-04-10T01:22:00.006-05:00

In the last few months, I've been in Mexico, working with the left and anarchist movements here and there when I get the chance. While doing this, I've come to realize that the Mexican and U.S. radical movements are extremely different, not just the work that they do and how they see themselves, but the internal culture and theory that promotes day-to-day functioning of organs of struggle. One giant difference in the internal cultures is the role of identity politics. I have become attentive to the way in which identity politics functions, or rather doesn't, in the Mexican movement. Yet somehow, despite the apparent lack in many situations of identity politics, the movement continues to have very high levels of participation and leadership by marginalized groups, some (women and queer folks) more than others (indigenous folks), in a culture considered both internally and externally to be quite "machista" and sexist. So how did this happen?

I'm going to set out in the next couple of weeks to write an account, rambling and undoubtedly full of occasional errors, of how identity politics functions in the United States anticapitalist movement and the ways in which it, at times, derails our work. I do not predict this project will be popular nor do I predict that I will change anyone's mind one way or another. More than anything, I want to set down in writing my thoughts on how identity politics work can hurt our organizing. Corresponding with friends, I have recently heard about several different problems created or exacerbated by identity politics in the movements I'm involved in at home. I am not interested in banishing identity politics or stop talking about oppression within movements, but rather showing how they function and ways that they at times hurt us, in order to build a more inclusive and successful revolutionary movement. I am not arguing against the use or function of identity politics as a whole, but instead pointing out particular uses or incarnations of identity politics with which I see problems.

1. Where I'm At

At the outset, I feel I should state several "proclamations of the faith." One of the first problems that one challenges dogma, as I believe I am about to do, is that one gets discredited for one's faith and I do not want that to be what turns people off from this project. Obviously, if the reader sees beliefs that they do not share, this may make the rest of this project irrelevant to them.

I believe that we need to make a revolutionary change to form anarchist socialist societies, immediately and globally, and will do what I can to help that revolution in any way.
I believe that to make those societies a reality, we need to struggle not just against an economic system, but a wide range of oppressions.
I believe that fighting prejudice inside movements is almost or as important as struggling against oppressors.
I believe in the right of free speech and open, respectful critique within the movement.
I believe that the anarchist movement should strive to make strategic decisions based on empirical facts, not common sense or habit
I recognize that I come from a specific background that gives me, in the United States, a series of privileges based on my race, gender, and sexual identity. I do not believe that disqualifies me from having a voice in the conversation about identity.
I believe in the right and importance of my comrades who do come from oppressed communities to assert their control over their lives and to defeat intra-, inter-, and extra-movement oppression.
I reject claims that logic is completely culturally conditioned.

That last bit is a whole other story and debate already taken up by people far smarter than myself. But what it means here is that I reject the "hard postmodernist" position that logic, science, and rationality in general are equally as valid as any number of irrational schemes. I don't plan on arguing that position here, but briefly, my defense of this rejection is that to embrace this "hard" position is to embrace a worldview of extreme theoretical eclecticism and nihilism, to accept a world that is fundamentally unknowable, even in its smallest mechanisms. Which is something I refuse to do and which I believe is fundamentally irreconcilable with the project of human liberation.

A final warning before I proceed with my actual critiques: I am familiar with identity politics almost exclusively through its use in the circles I have been involved in, ranging from affinity groups to national and international anticapitalist organizations. I am only slightly familiar with the vast body of theory regarding identity and politics, through a few classes in Black Studies and Women's Studies that I have taken in college. Hence the name of this project. I will likely not be quoting a lot of theoretical texts, but may use pamphlets and zines that discuss questions of identity politics within the movement. I will mostly be referring to the general zeitgeist of the logic and practices of identity politics because that is what actually forms our practice, not something that a scholar wrote about identity politics. What matters to me is what we do, not what we think we do.

2. Defining Identity Politics

One problem with identity politics and their use in radical circles is that we have unclear and conflicting definitions of what the term and associated ones mean. The idea of identity politics comes from a variety of different radical and bourgeois traditions and from a variety of different times periods and social contexts. I will only be talking about identity politics in the U.S. setting, because those of the ones I am familiar with.

A few terms we define to start with:

Identity refers to the way that one sees oneself or the way that one is seen in society, and the various cultural and social beliefs, practices, and relationships that develop because of the interactions between and within identity.
Politics refers to the interactions between people with varying degrees of power in society.
Identity politics then refers to the interactions between people with varying degrees of power as seen the through the lens of identity. Taken to a practical level, it has come to mean the promotion of certain identities which are disadvantaged in relations of power, through the use of both internal and external activism.
Anti-oppression politics is a similar term which I would argue is a subset of identity politics. It is used almost exclusively by radicals and I think probably represents a particular incarnation of identity politics that is uniquely radical. Anti-oppression politics posits that identity politics, as popularly conceived, does not connect the dots and that rather than individual identity groups struggling against dominant ones, that identities and struggles intersect and that intersection produces unique social locations and hardships, as well as possibilities for struggle. I will use basically use the term interchangeably in this essay, as it is not bourgeois identity politics that I am discussing, but radical ones.
Feminism is 1. a theory and practice that takes up the fight against patriarchy with the ultimate goal of liberating people of all genders from oppression and 2. a theoretical critique which deconstructs and analyzes the way identity is used.

Already it becomes clear that identity politics can mean a wide range of practices at a wide range of levels. In my discussion of identity politics, I will be focusing on their function and use at the intra-movement level. Mostly, this is because I have not participated broadly in identity political movements that are focused externally, that is to say, those that struggle against oppressors outside of the movement (capitalists, governments, religions, etc). So my critique will be focused on these practices, which function within the movement and whose goal is to struggle against oppression and prejudice that is exhibited within the movement.

Historical Evolution and Resistances

2009-03-28T14:40:00.003-05:00

Crossposted from RevLeft, where I have grudgingly taken up residence again. I'm not saying anything particularly novel here, I just figured I'd put it up because it's an error that I often see committed, particularly by orthodox Marxists. The long quote at the beginning is from one such person.

"What you said above is true to a certain extent but doesn't take into account the fact that, other than in the most 'primitive' societies, exploitation of man by man tends always to exist, and often, if not almost always, exists on a grand scale. Capitalism produces the conditions for the evolution of a society without exploitation and the rule of minorities. In this sense it is 'progressive'. But American Capitalism didn't require the extermination of it's Native population anymore than Japanese Capitalism did. By which I mean, for Capitalism to become the mode of production in America, it didn't neccesarily require the vast genocides of Indigenous peoples, and so there can be no defense for that, even allowing for Capitalism being progressive."

I think you're accidentally committing a kind of idealist error here. Capitalism is not an ideal Platonic Form, which exists out there in the ether as an idea unconnected from reality, and then we humans have gone about and created versions of it that, regrettably, involve massive violence and oppression. Capitalism is a system, complex and contradictory, that presents itself in a variety of different forms in different times and locations. All but the most orthodox leftists would consider China to be functionally capitalist today, but its form of capitalism differs tremendously from that of, say, the United States.

So first, let's take apart the idea the capitalism naturally "progresses" from the past and that it could do without things like genocide.

Some really important works that have emerged from the Marxist milieu in the last 50 years have been precisely the texts which challenge the idea that capitalism is natural and progressive. Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch points out the way that primitive accumulation not only brought about the conditions that allowed modern capitalism to come into being, but that these conditions need to be continually replicated. Primitive accumulation, she argues, isn't an event which happened back in England a couple centuries ago, it's something that is constantly occurring. Primitive accumulation, like that of the land theft and destruction of Native peoples in the Americas, is both the antecendent and the perpetual feature of capitalism. As Marx and basically everyone else has argued, capitalism must expand to stay alive. Primitive accumulation, as a concept, must continually occur for capitalism to create more value. As many in the school of Marxist thought that Federici is usually grouped with, the autonomists, have argued, this primitive accumulation has been expanded to include concepts that we wouldn't normally consider able to be "accumulated," like time and history.

So I would argue that capitalism is indeed impossible, or at least considerably more difficult, in North America had the genocide of Native peoples not occurred.

Second, the idea that capitalism creates the "conditions for the evolution of a society without exploitation and the rule of minorities" is another oft-quoted Marxist truism, but one that is increasingly coming under attack from evidence that resistance to the imposition of capitalism was not simply reactionary, but in some sectors, genuinely progressive. Again, Federici points out that those who organized against the imposition of wage labor were not just artisans or nobles, but those who would become part of the nascent proletariat and/or urban working class. Linebaugh and Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra talks in depth about the struggles of sailors, soldiers and slaves to globalization in the maritime age. These resistances against capitalist work ethic and conditions were not simply a desire to return to a guild-run economy, but were expressed in utopian and millenarian demands for an end to the capitalist economy (centuries before Marx put pen to paper, no less.) A favorite topic in recent years is of course the Diggers, who were certainly anti-capitalist but not pro-feudal.

So I think it's dangerous to say that capitalism is progressive. Yes, under capitalism certain technologies have been developed that can/have made life easier and production more efficient. But it's fallicious to say that these technologies had to occur or only occurred under capitalism and could not occur any other way because there are no other models of society to judge them against (some could argue that socialism does exist or did exist on a widespread level in the 20th century, and I will politely but firmly disagree. Even so, if socialism did exist in the USSR, it only helps my argument.) Did Einstein need to live in a capitalist society to develop his theory of special relativity? Did any other scientist or inventor need to live under the murderous capitalist system to develop what they did? Sure, those who devoted their life's work to destructive technologies like guns and bombs. But I think we can all agree that those aren't the kind of technologies that a communist society would be interested in developing anyway.

What it gets down to is the problem of the error of evolutionist models of history. Positing that the stage of civilization that we're at is the "highest" one or more progressive one currently available is interesting but untestable. Furthermore, it tries to simplify the actual details of human history into small boxes that fit into a model that always points towards the future, thus discarding the complexities of history that don't fit into that box. Like Linebaugh and Rediker's rebellious sailors or Federici's witches. Drawing history as a straight line, or even a not-straight-but-always-ending-in-the-same-place series of lines, is an error because it judges human history as a teleology instead of a series of complex events that led us to where we are today, but could have lead us elsewhere if things had gone differently.

Blah blah blah

2009-03-17T23:19:00.005-05:00

Okay, let's get real here.

I'm totally tired of reading communiques/statements/expositions about short actions that run on for four paragraphs. There's this tendency to write these great pieces and delivery them during the course of a direct action, or even a symbolic but danger-zone actions. But no one is listening to you talk about the war in Iraq or political prisoners or whatever, while all your nearby buddies are locking down the building or tossing agitational pamphlets from a third story balcony. They are watching people do cool/weird shit. I respect well-worded statements and I think they can be powerful and affect people. But I've been in discussions which drag on for hours about the precise wording of a specific phrase for a statement during an action which assures that no one will ever listen to the speaker.

It's not a big deal ya'll, just read a few sentences and let everybody dig the cool shit you're doing.

Additionally, writing a three paragraph manifesto for some sneaky late night DA is equally lame. The most egregious recent example is a video called "19 segundos de guerra social" that's swirling around the anarchosphere. It breaks all my rules of things I like (smashing banks and thinking you're super-revolutionary, using the phrase "social war," being the same group that attacks people at the bullfights here in Mexico City.) Seriously gang. Go ahead, fuck up a bank if you feel like it. But post a long release about how hard you are and how you're fighting the system? And then get it translated? Self-important much? Sheesh...

Decentralization in Theory and Practice

2009-03-12T18:35:00.002-05:00

I've been pondering this question for awhile now and have only been pushed to consider it even more strongly since I've been here in Mexico.

What is it exactly that anarchists mean when they talk about a society based on "decentralization"? What is being decentralized?

My experiences here in Mexico City have taught me that, if nothing else, decentralization of institutions is incredibly frustrating and inefficient. Decentralized capitalist institutions like immigration have provided me with a great deal of irritation, but that's understandable, as they are premised on a giant bureaucracy that makes things difficult to accomplish. Surely in an anarchist society, we wouldn't need the extensive decentralized bureaucracy that say, the Mexican or U.S. migration process provides.

But decentralization in our daily lives of institutions would mean a whole host of different problems. Take decentralization in institutions of learning. I'm familiar with the critique of schooling, but I'm still a firm believer that we can radically restructure education in order to produce institutions that educate without indoctrinating. Here, at my university in Mexico though, decentralization is already the rule of the day. There are literally dozens of autonomous bodies that make decisions which affect themselves but which carry consequences for the whole university. This means that inscription, application, class schedules, as well as more "institutional" tasks like maintenance of facilities require a knowledge of a Byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth to navigate.

This is obviously just one example, but I want to apply it to the theory of decentralizing all of our economic and social activities. What exactly does decentralization imply in terms of the daily lives of people and their well-being? The effects of decentralization in capitalist society reflect in some bizarre manner the so-called centralization of the economy in state socialist societies, where the centralization of power with the state resulted in a profuse diffusion of bureaucracy.

Am I just suffering the irritations of the infamous Mexican impulse towards bureaucracy? How can we decentralize our activities and institutions without creating shortages that could be potentially fatal? That is to say, moving beyond my rather silly example of an educational institution, what potential dangers would a decentralized agricultural system bring? How can anarchist theory account for, and plan to deal with, for these issues?

Today's Quote

2009-03-02T20:42:00.004-06:00

"Normally, Wobbly bluster far outdistanced performance but it is undeniable that they sometimes acted upon, or intended to carry out, their wild schemes."

-Lowell Blaisdale, The Desert Revolution - Baja California 1911

Aleatory Modes

2009-02-18T21:38:00.002-06:00

Ah ha! Now I remember why I used to be so passionate about surrealism.

Sorry, nothing here but a link dump. Check it out.

Context and Internationalism

2009-02-04T22:32:00.003-06:00

So, on a personal note, I should say that I am now in Mexico City, where I will be situated for the next four months, studying at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. With that in mind, I figured I'd drop a note about something that I've been considering since I arrived last week.

As revolutionaries, we're often pegged as defining ourselves negatively, against the forces that currently control social life. We're anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, anti-racist, etc etc. Some PR-savvy radicals attempt to turn that language backwards and use phrases like pro-feminist (or pro-woman, in a particularly post-feminist articulation) or queer-positive. Despite the twisting of the language, these phrases still boil down to the same idea, that being that we're against a specific kind of social oppression, and that we're pro-whoever is being oppressed and ending that oppression against them. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with being focused on negation. After all, there's a lot to fight. Obviously we also have to articulate alternatives and other models, which is something that we do quite well but doesn't make the 5 o'clock news as well as "Anarchists make total destroy" does. We do both, to a greater or lesser degree, and I could make critiques about the levels that we're engaging with, but that's not what I want to write about here.

What has been making me think a lot this week has been about how the situation wherein one is placed has a lot to do with how this negative articulation gets expressed. In the United States, we often define ourselves, in an anti-statist context, as being against police brutality and was, but also against cooptation by the government utilizing more "soft power." The actions of radicals in movements for welfare rights and ACORN are examples of fighting this soft power that exerts itself through social services and government bureaucracy.

But the state doesn't use the same play book in every situation. Obviously, there are a lot of shared tricks, but the varying levels, balances, and relationships of soft and hard power vary not only horizontally from nation-state to nation-state (here in Mexico the government will kill you a lot faster than it will in the U.S.) but also vertically, from nation-state (or even higher, if one brings in international governmental organizations) to microstates at the smallest levels. Some parents keep their kids in line through hitting them, some through psychological control, and some through a combination of the two. Each different division of power brings in varieties of different tactics to keep us under control.

We can expand this beyond simply the lens of the state to consider a variety of different styles of oppression and domination. The way that people of color are oppressed in the U.S. is different from that of Europe, but also within the U.S.'s various divisions, conditions vary. Workplaces can have friendly bosses who pay next to nothing but have their workers love getting screwed or have tyrannical Carnegies who use fear to make the employees toe the line.

Obviously, I'm not making a particularly novel claim here. Actually, it's an observation basically stemming from Machiavelli, and to an extent, Sun Tsu. But thinking about this has led me to reexamine the values and importance not only of the old strategy/tactics model, but also what internationalism means. Internationalism is an old buzzword, but many of us still hold on to it as an ideal. In order to produce more effective movement(s), perhaps we should analyze more the context under which power, hard and soft, exists across boundaries, but in a vertical way.

That is to say, we should consider not only the well-worn common sense about the struggles in various states (ex: the State in Western Europe will buy off natives with welfare to pit them against immigrants but rarely uses physical violence, the State in Latin America will use patronage and corruption to keep the working class in line, but will repress anyone who steps out of the box) but also the articulation of power up and down the various levels of state and non-state power. This could lead to a more profound understanding of struggles, both at home and abroad, and how to be usefully in solidarity with them. A ton of examples jump to mind, particularly in states that bring up strong controversies on the left. How, on a micro level, does the state in Cuba express itself? How do the improved racial conditions after of the Revolution affect local power? How does the regional conditions of industry affect the local centralization of power by elites? Does the state deploy soft power at the nation-state level and soft power and the local level? Is race soft or hard? Is gender soft or hard? At what levels? In what ways does power-from-above have a vacuum, which is to ask, in what locations, physical or social, is struggle being won? This list could go on and on. Venezuela, Palestine, etc.

Ultimately, I think that an investigation of international struggles from a vertical perspectives as well as a horizontal one can be expressed as looking at struggles through the lens of anthropological investigation as well as a political one. Context, an important tool that often gets left out of political science, is a key part of the radical investigative toolbox. If we do engage in negatively defined struggles, we must be sure to understand what the balance of forces in the enemy camp is.

Pondering

2008-12-16T14:22:00.002-06:00

So I think that it's probably the biggest waste of time for me to criticize an action by an anonymous underground cell of a radical organization, because 1. who cares what I have to say and 2. what they're doing is pretty radical and I should try to support it.

But I'm going to do it anyway, because I think that it's important to constantly be critical of ourselves and our comrades, otherwise we develop a kind of groupthink that only leads to our own ineffectiveness.

I saw this reportback from an underground cell of Bash Back! who trashed a Mormon church the other day. I've been really excited by BB!, they're the only long-standing network that has emerged out of the RNC/DNC organizing. For those like me who thought that was part of the reason for organizing against the conventions, the fact that BB! is a post-convention network is really important. I like their sexy actions and their aggressive rhetoric. They target oppressive institutions who don't expect to be targeted and then they fuck with them in a very media-friendly way. They also just straight up confront evil, homophobic jerk-offs, which is also great.

But I'm still not sure how I feel about this recent action. On one hand, the Mormon church is a really fucked-up organization that lots of queer people are feeling a lot of rage against since the passage of Prop 8. On the other, I don't know how I feel about anarchists attacking mainstream churches.

This is a paradoxical situation, because I am a Bakuninist atheist and believe that religion is inherently and at its core oppressive. However, I have no problem working with religious folk or even religious organizations if they are fighting for liberation. I tend to see the God contradiction as considerably less pressing than the class contradiction or the state contradiction. So I do think that fighting religious orthodoxy is great. But I'm not sure if trashing a church is exactly doing that. I think it's revenge. Revenge which is perfectly justifiable after the passage of Prop 8.

But confusing revenge and politics is a recipe for disaster.

Needless to say, I'm still not convinced about this action. And obviously, one action doesn't mean much in the larger scheme of things, but I guess what I'm pondering about more generally is the tactic of anarchists/radicals attacking churches. Is this a good idea, because it strikes against oppression and might possibly (though I highly doubt it) open up the flock's minds? Or does it accomplish nearly nothing and simultaneously make us look like absolute jackasses? Thoughts?

Meta Shit

2008-12-15T00:55:00.004-06:00

I'm always intrigued by what people are paying attention to, thinking about, and writing about. This last week has been great because there have been two parallel events with really important consequences. What has been fascinating is how, for the most part, constituencies seem to only be paying attention to one, totally ignoring the other. It's difficult to discern exactly why folks are ignoring the other, since they're obviously not saying anything about, but I'll do my best to conjecture based on previous experience.

U.S. leftists that I know have been incredibly interested in the Republic factory occupation in Chicago. Obviously, this is an event with far-reaching consequences. Workers from a rank-and-file union occupied a factory and demanded that not just their company, but the entire financial system give them their legally-obligated wages. What's more, it got front-page press in the mainstream media, with pretty positive vibes.

Anarchists have largely ignored this event, focusing on the week-long rioting in Greece, prompted by the murder of a youth by cops. These riots, incited primarily but not exclusively anarchists, have spread throughout the working class, particularly youth, and the "movement," such that it is, is beginning to take on characteristics of decision-making and strategic planning. The cops have been basically beaten back, the Stalinist party has predictably turned against the movement, and the government is in incredibly shaky straits. All good stuff.

But there's been a great deal of exclusivity to the conversations and interest about these things in the U.S. Very few leftists I know are as excited as anarchists about Greece, and anarchists are pretty passive in their interest about Republic.

So what's going on? I think that the silence I'm hearing indicates some important things about ideology and goals.

On one hand, for many post-left anarchos, rioting forms the majority of their praxis. (If I hear one more goddamn thing out of Milwaukee about "social war" I'm gonna puke.) Since politicized rioting does not happen a whole lot in the U.S., and when it does happen its mostly in PoC neighborhoods, which let's face it, have little cross-over with insurrectionist anarchist circles, this kind of thing is great to focus attention on. Lots of the things that we're hearing from Greece are playing directly into the kind of things that their theory plays up. There is little to no organization of the movement, it's violently anti-cop, and based in the lumpenproletariat. This whole thing makes leftists really bored because they don't see it in their framework of class struggle.

On the other hand, a success by a left union in the mainstream is what the U.S. workerist left has been searching for for some time now. UE is inspiring to a lot of folks, and not least of which Wobblies, to which UE looks like a bigger but more bureaucratic version of us. The union movement has been in decline (as everyone keeps going on about) for decades, and this kind of return to 30's-era tactics has all the good feelings of a working class fighting for itself attached to it that we've lost in the last couple of decades. Many anarchists, convinced that unions are firmly a tool of cooption, choose to ignore the Republic victory because they don't want to see workers conciously embracing unions as their tool to fight capitalism. Also, anarchists have yet to offer firm strategies to fight the economic crisis and the left has now appeared on the front page of the New York Times doing just that.

But not so fast. Both of these events are incredibly important but simultaneously overplayed in the respective milleu in which they are celebrated.

First, Greece is not a social revolution. At least not yet. And it appears that exactly the reason it is not is because the movement lacks (*shudder*) organization. It appears that without some kind of mechanism to change the course of the struggle from primarily negative (destroying the old world) into primary productive (building the new) the riots are just serving as a tool of the official capital-L Left to manuever for power. I can't figure out exactly what is going on on the ground (it's sad but true that this whole thing would be taken much more seriously by Americans if it had happened in an English/French/Spanish-speaking country. Nobody fucking speaks Greek.) What I am piecing together though is that despite all the awesome assemblies and burning barricades that are going down, there's still a serious lack of coordination and cohesion. With no way to organize a conscious and public series of proposals, the rioters are in serious danger of becoming just another point on a political scoreboard for the liberal parties.

Second, Republic was a victory, but it does not go as far as its supporters claim it does. Republic was a defensive action that did not nearly go far enough and the reason it didn't is because UE is not a revolutionary union. It's time for leftists to start being critical, even of our limited successes. The workers occupied the plant, they put their hands on the means of production and claimed them for themselves and then...decided to give them back in return for a measly 70 days pay. What we saw in Chicago last weekend was a failure of the imagination. It is exactly the imagination that workerists have not been inspiring, buried with our noses in the day to day of "the struggle," without engaging the utopian desire to actually "demand the impossible." Without a doubt, the return of the factory occupation is a fantastic move and will hopefully inspire others. But it is not the revolution; it is a tactic workers use when the going gets tougher. Unless it takes on a revolutionary aspect, capital is perfectly able to co-opt it and, with Barack Obama publicly supporting the workers, it already has.

So the situation is that both of these consticuencies are right about the other one, even though they are in bad faith. For my money, this means returning to one of my old themes: the cross-pollination of struggles and of ideas. The post-leftists who write beautiful poetry about molotov cocktails and vegan kitchens need to get into the factories and organize. The leftists need to support and aid the rebellious lumpens, even if they may not always see eye-to-eye. It's like, solidarity and stuff, ya know?

Winning the Battle to Lose the War

2008-11-17T00:54:00.002-06:00

It seems sometimes (sometimes?) that the Left has everything upside-down. I've been thinking recently specifically of abortion rights, but these thoughts could apply to a variety of other issues.

Since Roe v. Wade was first passed down, the Left has been single-minded in its quest to save it. Note the difference between saving Roe v. Wade and pursuing abortion rights. Saving Roe v. Wade is a matter of electing presidents who will appoint Supreme Court justices who will continue to uphold abortion rights and putting pressure on right-wing presidents not to appoint anti-choice justices. Pursuing an abortion rights agenda is a far wider platform, embracing legal tactics as well as building structures to support abortion rights and consciousness building.

Everyone left of Dick Cheney believes, or pretends to believe, that power flows from "the people," or "the workers," or some variation of that old leftist cliche. So why is it that the Left, in fighting one of the most important battles in defense of women's rights in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond, has chosen to fight that battle on the terrain of 9 people? If power truly flows from below, why not spend all that money that they're lobbying and campaigning on encouraging pro-choice consciousness.?

Now, I can already hear the criticisms: "Brendan, this is ultraleftist and impossible." But is it? I think the example of the Civil Rights Movement which immediately preceded it is a powerful counterexample to the so-called Pro-Choice Movement. Black Americans used a variety of tactics, from, yes, lobbying the president, to direct action and armed self-defense to protect themselves from violence and to demand equal rights. Thousands probably died, but what was produced was a powerful black consciousness that threatened, and at times still does, to actually stand up to the racist power structure of our country. Every white leftist and his cousin fell all over themselves to fight that battle in the streets, yet after 1972, they simply forgot what they'd been doing in '68.

I'm not sure exactly why this happened, but I can think of a couple of reasons. One good one is plain old sexism. Sure, white straight men (TM) were willing to think that the descendants of slaves could constitute a force that could be radical and stand up to the system, but women? Good Lord, they should stay in the kitchen. (See the subsequent white leftist valorization of black men in the Civil Rights Movement and ignorance of women, except the cleaned-up, sanitized "tired, old" Rosa Parks)

Another is the fact that abortion rights aren't included in the Constitution and everybody knows it. Roe v. Wade is the most preposterous legal fiction that the Supreme Court has ever ruled on (okay, maybe not, there are some doozies) and it just happens to be the only one that's been ruled in favor of the Left. So all this energy has to be spent on convincing us that this ridiculous ruling is legitimate, instead of convincing us that abortion rights are essential regardless of what some fucking piece of paper says. The problem facing the Left after the end of the 60's was one that I've written on before, that we'd basically achieved the welfare state, (more or less, although Prop 8 stands as a pretty solid challenge) but we realized it wasn't good enough. Suddenly, every Harvard liberal and Popular Front commie realized, without saying it of course, that we dirty anarchists were right all along and that the problem wasn't that the state and capital weren't good enough, it was that they weren't good at all. Of course, we all know what happened next: the eventual decline of the Left into the intellectual abyss of postmodernism and the rise of neoliberalism and subsequent neoconservatism.

So why haven't we picked up on this? Is it because it's too hard to convince "stupid working class people" that a women's body is her own? I think underlying the rationale of the Left's abandonment of the issues of abortion rights on a mass scale is an indication of a strong elitist perspective that's also a tragic remnant of the New Left.

The fact is, we're going to lose Roe v. Wade one day. It's inevitable. In some places, it's already de facto happened. When that happens, we'll have to rebuild the abortion rights movement from below, with a populace largely hostile to it, because of what they see as government intervention. We don't have much time to refashion the debate about abortion rights, but I fear it's already too late.

Drifting through Industry

2008-11-11T03:29:00.002-06:00

Considering recently the image of the hobo in the early IWW. The hobo sticks out in my mind from this period as possible the most important figure in the struggles of early 20th century American workers. The figure of the hobo, as a type of working class archetype, offers a lot of important lessons for contemporary Wobblies, I think. A couple reasons:

1. Networks. The Wobbly hobo became one of the key organizers. Taking out a red card and riding the rails from job to job, he (and I use the gender pronoun intentionally) was the perfect type of organizer for workers in industries that depended on changing conditions and temporary work. Timber workers in particular seem associated in the histories with hobo organizers. Jumping from job to job as needed, hobo organizers represented organic working class militants, who followed the conditions of industry and kept up with the pace of technological and economic transition. He knew his fellow workers, mostly because he shared their condition and perhaps their relatives from a previous job. The image of the boxcar orator may be quaint, but it represents one type of important power: while illegally traveling through the circuits of capital, the hobo organizer spoke with his fellow workers and created resistance to workplace exploitation outside/before jobs as well as on them.

What we can learn: These jobs were, like the post-Fordist ones we work today, short-term and without longer commitments. Also like today, they tended to involve the same groups of people over and over again. If you were a lumberjack, you were one in Ontario, Minnesota, and Oregon. Today, if you're a service workers, you're one at Starbucks, McDonalds, and a call center. In our economy, the conditions and style of labor change from job to job, but the basic character remains the same. We must build upon the already existing networks that exist within the class to mobilize resistance. As we circulate through capital, we can reach out to the myriad contacts that our labor necessarily creates and turn them into revolutionaries struggling around the clock.

2. Mobility. The travels of the hobo were many and he would pop up in different places depending on both fancy and the requirements of industry. He could weave in and out of bourgeois society as necessary, if always at the margins. This marginality, along with the aforementioned seasonal and temporary style of work, necessitated constant motion and the creation of a working class counter-culture. Yet the hobo organizer took this mobility as a strength. If he was needed to fill the jails at a free speech fight, he would jump on the rails with his friends and end up in a different state. He joined together in mutual aid in the hobo jungles with his comrades.

What we can learn: Struggles on the job move beyond the job when we connect them to the larger conditions of industry and the relationships of workers to bosses. What is less important is this specific strike or that specific action, but rather the constant strategic growth of working class power in the way most appropriate to the situation. So sometimes mobility means not fighting a battle when you cannot win, but rather looking for a different terrain upon which to engage. Additionally, mobility could mean the ability to follow the currents to where the action is. The wretched SWP is actively encouraging its cadres to work in the meat-packing industry. Not a bad idea, just done for foolish reasons. In fact, the struggle of migrant laborers today has some of the most obvious parallels with the historical work of the IWW.

Two important considerations:

1. The hobo is male. That is to say, he is unattached to anything or anyone and need only look after himself. Throwing ourselves over to replicating this is definitely anti-feminist. But we should also keep in mind that culture and society have changed a great deal since the days when the nuclear family was the only model. With the rise of the women's movement, more women are self-sufficient, in the workplace and outside of the home. So capital has created conditions where women too can be this type of organizers. Further, the hobo is not the figure to organize all of industry, as this point brings up. There are industries and social locations that he cannot break into, and people whose identification he rejects, so he cannot be the model for all of our organizing.

2. Networks and mobility bring to mind the vision of the modern city. I think that hearkening back to the Situationist legacy of psychogeography is important for us. How does the city relate to itself and to its denizens? How is industry organized geographically and psychogeographically? How can modern hobos tread through the paths, both clear and hidden, while constantly transforming those paths and being simultaneously transformed by them?

Sites of Struggle?

2008-11-09T14:20:00.002-06:00

Been considering the location of the university in society. I've heard lots of different arguments about its centrality in conflict, class or otherwise, and I'm interested to hear what others think about it.

Here are two perspectives that I've heard:

Higher education is not a central location for struggle, it just seems that way because so many academics write about it and desperately want it to be a site, so that they can participate. I think this is a pretty valid criticism of a lot of things. (I contend that the popularity of post-modernism is similar.) There's kind of a feedback loop where academics want the university to be an important strategic location, so they find evidence that says it is, everyone sees these papers about the importance of the university and then everyone in the university begins to struggle because they have told themselves it's important.

The University is centrally important because it involves so many other sectors of the economy, while also producing a kind of value that doesn't appear in other settings. This seems pretty popular with the kind of post-workerist set, Negri and such. I think its got some solid ideas. Students often live in basically ghettos, contending with the same kind of landlords as in poor neighborhoods. There's an immense number of people on campuses who do work, from all different sorts of trades. It takes an enormous amount of energy, physical and environmental, to make a university function. Plus, there's something to be said about the value produced by the university itself. This perspective made most sense to me after I helped with the U of M strike last year. I realized exactly how many pressure points and connections existed in the university and beyond it. I remember hearing that the U is one of the largest employers in the state.

So maybe these represent the two extreme arguments, but they're both worth considering. As I do my best to get the hell out of academia as soon as possible, I keep hearing arguments that suck me back in and keep me hooked in with groups like SDS. So what is the role of the university in terms of struggle? Is it central, secondary, merely peripheral? And once we answer that question, we can only begin to ask the next one, which is "So how do we organize it?" I'll leave that one for another day.

On Mass Movements

2008-10-17T17:03:00.005-05:00

SDS members have spoken a great deal over the last few years about how we want a "mass movement" or a "student movement." I'd like to take a few moments to reflect on these ideas and perhaps offer some analysis and suggestion of where we're going and what we're doing wrong.

First, a mass student movement means something very different from what we have now. Right now, we have a several-thousand person organizing body. My impression, based on attending two national conventions and speaking with dozens of SDSers, is that we are overwhelmingly an organizer-based organization. My copy of Rubin and Rubin's Community Organizing and Development (4th ed.) defines an organizer as "the salaried staff of social action organizations" and contrasts it with an activist, who is someone who voluntarily contributes a great deal of time, energy, and money to a task. All SDSers currently fall under the definition of "activist" then. If we compare this to a different kind of axis, which posits activism as advocacy through protest and public confrontation and organizing as advocacy through community work and alternative institution-building, SDSers often fall in a comfortable middle position that is able to use both styles of advocacy.

Regardless of what we call SDSers, we are an organizer-based insofar as we follow usually follow the model of planned events in support of an issue. Often, these fall into the less strategic model of event-rebuilding-unrelated event, where SDSers jump at whatever issue makes us excited and do not build upon our successes and failures. Increasingly, SDSers are considering the model of strategic campaign building as a method to go forward. This model, event-rebuilding-related event, makes the rebuilding section the most important, where the other makes it the least important. In my "perfect SDS," we would figure out what rebuilding means, and we would use it as a moment to grow and expand our organizing basis and our logistical capability.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to figure out and identify is the tension that exists, certainly in my chapter, and in others that I've observed between being an organizer model vs. mass model. Organizer-based model organizations include(d) SNCC, UFW, and some of the Change to Win unions. Mass-based model organizations include most political parties, and rank-and-file unions like the IWW. Both models can be used for good or ill. The question that must inform our decision to adopt one of these models is "what do we want?"

This becomes kind of a logical loop with no answer, because many SDSers say "we want a mass movement!" to that question. But when we look for specific things we want, beyond our broad slogans, we turn to things like student/worker/faculty control of the university, worker-control of society (and thus the end of capitalism), an end to all social oppressions, a system that doesn't destroy our Earth.

How do we accomplish these things? Personally, I don't think we do it through organizer-based models. Why? Here's a preface:

Recently, Tom Hayden of the old SDS spoke at my college. He was incredibly disappointing, basically a cheerleaders for Obama (like so many ostensible leftists become at this time of the year). One of the things that I started to understand was that he, and the earliest parts of the old SDS, were operating under an incredibly different understanding of social struggle in their day than we encounter today. Back then, the fight was to expand the welfare state to include those it should. The organizations that represent this ideological perspective still exist and are still powerful (and needed!) Mainstream unions, the left-wing of the Democratic Party, the Greens, NAACP, NOW, etc. These organizations try to extend the promises of a society where all are included. So the old SDS, it its earliest days, operated. They were a mostly white student group that worked in solidarity with these other social struggles.

We are not in the same social moment. With the notable exceptions of queers and undocumented immigrants, the promises of social democracy have been extended to all. Certainly, they aren't distributed equally nor fairly. Racism and sexism represent some of the most important pillars that keep our society functioning the way it does. Social democracy hasn't lived up to all of its promises, but the difference from 1964 and 2008 is that we see now that it could if it wanted to. If all the skilled organizers of the world got together and organized a movement of the people, we could make social democracy come true. Whereas 50 years ago, that seemed like a distant dream, we can see today that social democracy is a possibility, in fact, a probability. (None of this is to diminish the work of those who brought us here, or who continue to be excluded from this social promise. Their struggles are very real and very immediate.)

As social democracy approaches us, we start to see it better. And there are those in the working class who realize that we don't want it. Social democracy is the left-wing of capitalism, where our desires and beliefs are still packaged up, sold, and consumed. It is a soulless system with a kind face, where one day one is riding high and the next one is (as the last few weeks have shown us) out in the cold. Of course, as radicals see today something that we didn't fully understand before, capitalism is still capitalism. It is still part of the same system that necessitates ups and downs, changes and struggle. Even if we're a multicultural society (still a few decades off) without a glass ceiling, there are still workers and still bosses.

So we return to the question at hand: How can SDS achieve its goals?

This new movement, this nebulous idea of a 21st century working class in revolt, must understand that, as our struggles are diverse, so are our beliefs. One of the triumphs of anarchist organization has been its appreciation for multiplicity and different voices. Our struggles are multiple and interconnected, but also distinct and localized. This understanding is key to the development of a revolutionary organization. What's right for you isn't necessarily right for me, but we must work together where we agree and respect each other where we disagree. This freely associative model challenges traditional notions of organizing. Organizer-models reflect a kind of vanguardist thinking, where we plan events and campaigns, and you come to them. Mass-models often show a more explicit version of this, where directives come from the top and must be obeyed by the rank-and-file.

As I see it, SDS, in order to become a revolutionary movement, must take the wisdom of anarchism and apply it to the mass-based model of organization. We must force ourselves away from the top-down thinking of the old SDS and the similarly insidious logic of the organizer model. We are no vanguard. But we won't be led by a self-proclaimed one either. Rather, we must imagine an organization where people who've never attended an SDS organizer meeting consider themselves SDSers. Where SDSers can be regular students, who have never huddled over a press release for hours, trying to get one word right before day breaks and time comes to send it out. SDS must, in short, "go to the people." We must make SDS an activity as well as an organization.

Alright Brendan, that sounds real groovy, but what the fuck does it mean and how do we get theret? Not simple, I'll admit, but here's some suggestions.

Syndicalism. Popular in the old days, this is an important idea. But we must build upon previous notions of student syndicalism and fight for total worker/student/faculty control, administered through mass councils and department-level control. In short, we must target the administration, while building allies in faculty and worker constituencies, in order to completely change what it means to be a university. This may become easier as the economy deteriorates and students find it harder to pay, faculty and workers find less to earn. But if we do not move quickly, we will lose the advantage and universities will return to their pre-WWII role as incubators of the bourgeoisie.
Community work. The old Russian Nihilists invented "going to the people" and failed spectacularly. They were, like us, students, and went to the peasants to "help" them. Hopefully, we've learned from these mistakes. We must go to the people and use our social position to highlight their struggles. The most elitist thing that SDS can do is refuse to work with communities because we are too privileged to understand or our involvement would reflect us putting our agendas on others. This is elitist on two accounts. The first is that it assumes that working people somehow lack the ability to struggle for their own reasons and that our "big college brains" will somehow overpower them. Bullshit. If SDSers can simply shut their mouths when they need to and stop thinking that working people are idiots or myths, we can work with them. Second, it denies the precious knowledge and logistics that we've gained, often off the backs of these communities. We must go to communities and help in their struggles. Whether this means physically moving (while remaining conscious of impulses towards gentrification) or simply attending meetings, we must work to assist and also extend the lines of struggle.
Fight the reactionaries where they appear. Many SDSers have already begun this struggle, and its commendable. As the economy worsens, fascist ideologies become more popular. In its latest incarnation, this means anti-immigrant attacks on the street level and increasing militarization of society at the metalevel. SDSers must join communities in this struggle. But we must also use our unique position in society and our logistical capability to go futher than communities are able. We must fight the Minutemen, we must draw attention to their activities, we must resist the police in our neighborhoods and the military in our schools. We must outflank these dangers before we are outflanked. Even if the economy improves, revolutionaries often forget that when state power breaks down, as it would in a revolutionary situation, cultural "outsiders" are the first ones to be targeted. We must be prepared to build institutions that can protect us and our allies from fascism.

In all these struggles, we must attempt to go beyond the welfare state. We must confront where we can to get from it what we can, but we must keep our eyes fixed on a cooperative commonwealth that lies beyond its boundaries. If get ourselves mixed up in the ideologies of Tom Hayden and his ilk, we will tear ourselves apart, with Mass Liners and Food Not Bombers fighting in the aisles (which I wouldn't mind too much, but I've also been told the Maoists have guns, so that could end poorly.) SDS must remain a revolutionary organization, fighting with one hand to become nothing out of the ordinary, while with the other changing what ordinary means. In short, we must become a mass movement that has nothing to do with other mass movements.

no more RNC reportbacks

2008-09-28T23:57:00.001-05:00

Whatever I could say is ten million times less informed and less incisive than what Will's got to say about it.

Lessons from the RNC #1 - The Building Bloc(k)s

2008-09-17T16:29:00.005-05:00

So what have we learned?

I think a lot of things are still falling into place. I feel like no one really knows how to characterize the protests yet, there's sort of a collective lull in judgment. In the past few days, I've seen the first couple of critiques and assessments, mostly positive. But even these perspectives don't tell us where we are. In this 3-part piece, I want to examine what happened, what it means, and where we're going.

What went down? A few things.

1. We got on TV. The traditional media story ("there was a large peaceful march and a handful of trouble-makers") went up with nary a comma moved. So not really a success there. Even the most creative and innovative anarchist tactics (like Funk the War) got lumped in with the black bloc (and this is something that, for once, we can't actually blame on the media.) The bloc took over the protest and started pushing it the wrong way, away from the Xcel. Not exactly solidarity within the movement.

2. The blockades didn't work. A couple of delegates got attacked and had some harmless chemicals thrown on them. I honestly don't know if they were ever a good idea, but I think they could have succeeded. The problem was there just wasn't enough people to hold the space. How more people could have gotten involved is a whole different question, one which is sort of a waste of time to ponder. But there should be something to be said for the work, both positive and negative, of the Welcoming Committee here.

3. A couple windows got smashed. Yay? I dunno. The defense of window-smashing that I always here is "oh, well we cost them money!" Compared to the damage the financial system is wreaking on capitalism right now, this claim seems laughable.

4. Police went batshit insane. This was the most surprising part of the whole thing. While of course everyone expected repression, the response was much more than I think most people did. Particularly since our protests weren't particularly that effective. If we'd had an organized army of anarchists ready to tear down that fence, I would have expected all the gestapo tactics that the Ramsey County Sheriff and SPPD took. But we weren't even that effective, and with all their undercovers, they should have known that.

5. Solidarity forever between anarchists and poor people's campaign. I don't know how the hell this happened, but it was incredibly rad and exciting to see. Anti-Cap Bloc marching side-by-side with the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign.

6. A Freedom Road rally somehow ended up with as many arrests as the 4 days combined. A huge failure from the anarchist perspective. A nearly undirected march ended up being totally a waste of time and energy. Woulda coulda shoulda, I know. But if we'd been organized and prepared to take over that march, we could have made it closer to the Xcel, maybe even right down to it. We would have felt pretty good and gotten on TV as some scary and sweet motherfuckers.

In short, it was a failed plan that ended up with a lot of people getting arrested. There were some moments of beauty and some moments of terror. I got the shit sprayed out of me and was also bored out of my mind at other times.

Parts 2 and 3 will build more on what these events mean and where we need to take things from here.

Something for the Moment

2008-09-08T02:10:00.002-05:00

Soon: heaps of critique about the RNC protests, hopefully full of on-the-ground knowledge and insight. Likely to get lost in mounds of school work, but still a possibility.

Now: Quotes from Turbulence, a new favorite out of the autonomist Marxist milieu in Britian:

Re climate change: "...[T]he radical left is so academic and steeped in the tradition of ‘critical theory’ and ‘deconstruction’ that the main response to the challenge posed by climate change is to engage in a ‘critique’ of the ‘dominant climate change discourse’ and the ‘hegemonic role of scientific knowledge’ in constructing climate change as a crisis... It feels a bit like throwing copies of Adorno and Foucault at a coming flood and hoping that it’ll just go away."

More fun at their site.

An Organizationalist's Defense of the RNC Protests

2008-08-15T10:53:00.003-05:00

In the last couple of days, I've noticed there's a current amongst many of the folks that I'd call the "organizationalists" in SDS to consider the protests at the RNC and DNC as distractions from the real work we have to do. Well, I've long considered myself an organizationalist and I'm heavily involved in anti-RNC organizing, so I think it's about time that someone responded to this murmurings.

I will admit that I involved myself in this organizing very reluctantly, as many anarchists I know did. First, those of us in the TC would probably much rather be in Denver. Everyone hates the Republicans already. The harder and more useful work is setting working people against the Democrats. Second, I feared that by focusing on this one-off event with no future campaign element, I'd be falling into exactly the type of organizing that I criticize other anarchists for.

But, upon reflection, and as the RNC approaches, I think that my time has been well-spent and that we've done important work that hasn't been going on. The primary thing that we've done is raise the consciousness of lots of people.

Lots of what I consider the "important" work of anarchists is invisible. While the occasional protest may make us feel militant, they are mostly small and marginalized by the media and society. The invisible work we do (be it labor organizing, alternative institution-making, or simply creating networks of affinity between people) sets the stage for the kind of future society we'd like to see by building it today. The invisibility of this work is often discouraging, because we'd love it if someone was watching us and encouraging us, instead of ignoring us. But for the people we work with, this work is incredibly important. What's more, it takes interested people, of whatever political stripe, and builds their organizing abilities and analysis. (For me, this was more experienced organizers taking me from ineffective anti-war actions and introducing me to labor organizing as practical work.)

The protests around the RNC are just the opposite of this work, and that's what makes them important. If we could chart a line of actions, in terms of visibility, I would start at important but invisible work, trace it through militant but marginalized direct action, and end with massive but ineffective protest. It becomes immediately clear that the more "acceptable" types of protest attract more numbers and publicity. This doesn't mean that they're more useful. Here (and at about a zillion other points) is where I part from the "organizationalist" vanguardists, who see taking the energy from these large public energy and turning it into large public resistance as the goal. I think this is impossible, as Popular Fronts throughout history teach us.

What is clear to me though is that we can channel people back up across that line. Marching down the street, some of the liberal protesters may see something they don't expect: themselves or their friends breaking free-speech laws or running from the cops. They may begin to challenge the rules of both the state and their own ideology. This process, what many of us call "radicalization," seems to me to be a useful way of encouraging massive numbers of people to go back up our line of publicity, towards the most useful work.

Only as we build our capacity by accomplishing concrete but simple goals can we turn our movement into one of large public resistance. We cannot, like the vanguardists claim, simply magically transfer energy from pacifistic actions to large-scale militancy. We cannot, like the anarchyists promote, magically inspire mass direct-action by utilizing small-scale resistance. But by linking the two, by forcing the pacifists to walk next to the "scary anarchists," by forcing the direct-actionists to politely but persistently challenge the hegemony of would-be bureaucrats of the Left, hopefully we can inspire a whole lot of people to rethink politics and their position in society. Organizationalist anarchists need not toss the RNC out the window because its a four day event with no concrete results. Precisely because it is this, we should carve out a piece of the protests and start talking to people in the street about our ideals. Once the symbolic value of the state and capital starts to fall apart, as it often does one's first time in the street, we can be there to provide ideas for how to go forward and build a mass movement from below.

Post-script: As I've been saying to every single reporter we talk to, "The real work begins on September 5th."

Following Up

2008-08-11T14:30:00.003-05:00

So remember when I had beautiful ideas of writing a lot more in here? Well, suddenly this thing called the Ar-En-Cee showed up, and all of a sudden all I was doing was working to make it a success. But I've found a few moments (at work, typically) to write something.

Last night, around 2 am (I couldn't get to sleep, thanks to a combination of the dark liquid of the imperialist lords [Coca-Cola] and too many naps during the day) I heard a man in the street yelling profanities for about an hour. He was disturbed, or under the influence of drugs, or something, but he was definitely in need of assistance and didn't feel good.

The problem with anarchist theory is that its far too often separated from anarchist reality. I couldn't decide what to do to help this man. The logic of the state encouraged me to call the police, who could potentially give him the help he needed. But we all know the track record of the cops with mentally ill/confused people is pretty dismal and all-too-often ends with shots fired and a note on page B5.

The platitudes about "community" that we hear (and say) often in the anarchist movement would encourage me to go out and talk to the man, as part of the community. But my neighbors were clearly not doing anything and I'm a pretty small guy. Hearing stories from my father, who has worked with the mentally ill for many years, makes me pretty reluctant to simply venture out onto a dark street and jump into a potentially dangerous situation.

So what's an anarchist to do?

I've been trying to figure out what kind of social mechanisms would be most effective to deal with these kind of situations. After all, for most of the world, it is these bread-and-butter issues that matter most. Ostensibly, the practicality and common sense of anarchism is supposed to be most effective at solving these problems, in a way that Marxism or liberalism are ineffective and too conceptual to do.

My last post discussed the Provos and their penchant for the absurd. They also had a penchant for the absolutely practical. Their "White Plans" could serve as real models of utopian plans that could really work. The White Bicycle plan, which has been co-opted in a few cities and functions less effectively than if under popular direction, was for the center of Amsterdam to be closed to cars and for 20,000 white bicycles to be given out for public use.

One White Plan, the White Chicken plan, has been obsessing me in the last few weeks, as I imagine how it would work. After their happenings and gatherings began to create a police backlash with tremendous brutality, Provo suggested that the role of the police would be redesigned ("chicken" is the Dutch equivalent of our epithet "pig," with the cops being popularly known as "blue chickens") to fit the needs of an egalitarian society. The cops would be disarmed, given chocolate bars, chicken drumsticks, and condoms, and have friendly white uniforms. The police would be elected.

Obviously, the idea of suddenly switching our cops, addicted to power and violence as most of them are, to become anarcho-social workers is silly. But the model of the White Chicken is ultimately one I find quite compelling. What if, rather than tossing and turning with guilt for not assisting my fellow man, I could call up the White Chickens (or whatever we'd call them) who could come and actually help him? Rather than the liberal reaction of trusting the armed and dangerous cops to "help" people who they're trained to control, what if a society could actually help people?

All this gets me thinking, and actually returns me to James Herod's Getting Free and the idea of creating anarchist projects that transform our communities and make them democratic, anarchist communities. Where Provo failed was its inability to transcend its subculture (avant-garde hipsters and the odd angry youth) and become effective in implementing its programs. It also didn't help that they decided to run for city council in order to put their plans in motion. Anarchists certainly do a lot of programs that offer direct mutual aid to people (Food Not Bombs, etc). But maybe it's time for us to think about new programs we could implement to build anarchist communities. I feel like our ideological commitment to those projects may be blinding us to the fact that free food is not the end-all of mutual aid. Let's imagine what our ideal community would look like and start building ways to make it happen.

White Bicycles

2008-07-14T13:01:00.002-05:00

Just finished Richard Kempton's really cool Provo: Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt. Fascinating. I'd only heard about the Provo's in passing, mostly in Rosemont and Radcliffe's fucking sweet Dancin' In The Streets!: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos In The 1960's. (Despite the title, the Provos are mentioned in only one short piece.)

Important observations about the role of creativity and joy in movements. I continue to read about these fantastic creative protests in the '60s, and I can't help but wonder where are their contemporaries today? The Provos and their allies threatened the power of the Dutch state while engaging in absurd antics. Today, absurdity is dismissed as being "out of touch". Instead, radicals seem to try to emulate the bourgeois "professionalism" of the politicians or fulfill media stereotypes of subcultural ghettos haunted by the déclassé.

Anyone have any ideas? Where is the socially conscious avante-garde? Where are the working class poets? 'Cause inspired as I am by the joyful resistance of the Provos and their contemporaries, I can't find their traces present in our movement these days.

Bonus point: In a true anarcho-fanboy moment, I emailed David Graeber a question today and I'm excited to hear back from him. I've gotta start realizing that our movement is too small for me to be nervous reaching out to people who've written good books.

South of the Border

2008-07-07T15:09:00.004-05:00

I'm tired of just doing round-ups of things I find interesting, but I'm also too depressed at the state of the world to do any in-depth analysis right now. I promise to actually think about things and not just link dump one of these days, but not today.

1. NACLA, whose analysis I always find worthwhile, has a piece about Obama and his refusal to agree to close down the School of the Americas if elected. As if we needed more evidence that Obama doesn't even begin to actually articulate anything approaching a leftist position. My favorite quote: "To put this in all in perspective then, on this issue Obama has staked out a position to the right of Ron Paul, many members of Congress, and mainstream labor and Church organizations." Ouch.

2. Anarchists need to make sure we are careful about how we articulate the word "autonomy," particularly when we start entertaining ideas like bioregionalism. For reasons, check out Bolivia recently. Evo Morales, probably the best leader (yes, I know, I'm an evil leftist) in Latin America since Allende, is facing down the bourgeois regionalists but things are still developing. The fourth and final of the eastern departments voted for autonomy from the federal government at the end of June. While the U.S. media celebrates this "victory for federalism," the actual conditions of working class Bolivians threaten to dramatically decrease. Charting a "third way," an authentic anti-state analysis for Bolivia could be a worthwhile exercise for First World anarchists. What can our analysis offer Bolivia, or Nicaragua, or Chile?

Present, Future, and Past

2008-07-01T09:41:00.005-05:00

1. The Marxist's answer to Bob Black: "May the ruling powers call us fools because we risk the break with their irrational compulsory system! We have nothing to lose but the prospect of a catastrophe that humanity is currently heading for with the executives of the prevailing order at the helm. We can win a world beyond labour...Workers of all countries, call it a day!"
-Gruppe Krisis, Manifesto Against Labour (From Letters Journal)

2. Only the cities can save us. Check out the Vertical Farm Project, and let's get sustainable!

3. I've been listening to David Harvey's lectures on Capital. I just finished the first one, and am about to move on. Just find something mindless to do while you listen. They're pretty fascinating, I think I'm learning a lot. I've always said that I'd read Capital if I could do it in a class (I missed an EXCO class doing just that, sadly) because it's just too thick for me to tackle alone. I've never been able to sit down and chew through big texts without someone helping me out. So thanks, David Harvey!

I finally finished my paper, so I no longer have any homework for the rest of the summer. Expect way more updates and analysis. I'm planning on checking out some recent journals this afternoon and breaking them down here.

Yuck

2008-06-27T14:16:00.003-05:00

So I'm listening to a podcast from a member of the Workers World Party (our good friends who founded FIST) about the Chinese earthquake and the response to it.

It basically amounts to a confused love letter to the Chinese government. I don't know if you can sit through the whole 45 minutes (I didn't), because it's really horrible, but the speaker loves the Chinese response to the disaster (yay China!) but hates the fact that China has a lot of capitalists (boo China!) but points out that the private companies in China produce half of China's GDP, even though they employ way less than half the workers (yay capitalism!) But the Chinese revolution was a worker's revolution (yay China!)

Ugh. I can't stand these people. They are not only confused, but they are just not on our side.

The Poverty of Secrecy

2008-06-24T09:17:00.004-05:00

Interesting article about strategic organizing. Definitely very "lefty," but I can dig most of it. It's a troublesome analysis at times, particularly the over-valorization of the Civil Rights movement's more pacifistic elements at the expense of its more confrontational pieces like Deacons for Defense and Justice. (This seems to be a common disease that anti-racist white people on the Left contend with.)

My favorite part though, discusses the failure of security culture to accomplish anything other than scare us.

Adopting a discipline of secrecy may at some times and places be useful, but it is a choice that needs careful thought, especially when we consider that it is often not necessary even in police states.In the US., which as Otpur [anti-Milosovic youth group that helped bring him down] can tell you is far from a police state, security culture hurts the movement in several ways.
...
However, because security culture generates trustlessness, protesters have a hard time trusting allies. They sometimes enter a confrontation with authority politically isolated, having failed to reach out and open up the communication channels with people busy on other projects. Where all this comes crashing down is at the moment of state repression, which is when allies are often most needed and also when there is most confusion in the air. That’s when some radicals, who refused to reach out and trust their potential allies, say to the allies: “Trust us and do X, Y, and Z!” When the allies don’t immediately come to attention and salute, the beleaguered protesters become disappointed and even angry!

Worthwhile observations and overall a solid read. Much suggested for those interested in building a larger movement. (Not, of course, the be-all and end-all of anarchist practice, but it's still pretty important, as anarchists seem to forget sometimes.)

The Day in Work (while avoiding work)

2008-06-16T12:57:00.010-05:00

Round-up from my attempts to read magazines and escape from writing my research paper:

1. The Nation reports on the rise of militancy in the white-collar communications trades. Interesting article, particularly because it highlights the mobility of skilled temp workers. Precarity isn't only a condition for the educated bohemians or the unskilled marginals, but Republicans too!

All kidding aside, I'd like to know more about the organizing drives that WashTech, a CWA subsidiary, undertakes. Apparently they have a lot of at-large members. Which makes me wonder: what do these at-large members do? Are they ideological unionists in hostile workplaces, or perhaps activists salting in disparate areas? Or, more encouragingly, are they the mobile-yet-militant high-tech hobos that I dream about when I hear folks talking about "organizing the worker before the workplace," organic organizers from within the industry?

Either way, this whole sector should be something that Wobblies should think more seriously about trying to enter into. Obviously red-baiting would be more of a problem than with our organizing drives with immigrant and/or youth workers. But our ability to think outside of the NLRB box could give us a leg up with these deregularized workers.

2. Fascinating, but problematic, perspectives from the pseudo-Trot journal New Politics. The first, an article explaining Latin America's Third Left, a concept I like very much. While the article says nothing new, it helps make clear the fissures and relationships between this (our) Third Left and the other Lefts, particularly the old Communist Party-style organizations.

Embodying these dangerous liaisons, the article repeats the very disconcerting idea that the way forward for this Third Left is to try and manage the state apparatus. Odd, since the authors point out how the neoliberal state in Latin America makes control of the state less important than its ever been before. Manage it? Why not continue what they've been doing, trying to stay as far away from it as possible?

The second article, a really interesting interview with a leading dissident Chavista unionist breaks open a little more ground in the fertile territory that I've been calling "Chavismo sin Chávez." The scary labels show up again: the interviewee, Orlando Chirino, describes himself as a Trotskyist, he is struggling for reform within the party, etc. He kind of struck me at first like the leftists who suggest that we should jump on to Obama's train until it runs off the tracks, then pick up the pieces. The similarities to the two men are pretty striking: populist "outsiders" who mobilize in non-traditional political constituencies. But the clear difference is that Chávez is actually some weird kind of socialist, sort of a Eurocommunist actually, where Obama is obviously nowhere near that position.

I think that left-Chavismo (which unfortunately refers to a variety of tendencies, so I prefer my term) has a palpably better strategy than the left-Obamaites, because Chávez has already illustrated his inability to inspire an authentic revolutionary alternative to capitalism. (Not like this surprises my fellow anarchists in the crowd, of course.)

What's most interesting about this article is the strong language in which Chirino denounces Chávez: "But if this [expropriation] doesn't happen we will not be moving towards socialism, but only towards some kind of state capitalism with a developmentalist perspective." Between the lines, Chirino is basically calling el Presidente a counter-revolutionary. Again, nothing new for anarchists, but for Latin American leftists from within his own party to be engaging in this type of name-calling is an example of the gulf between official Chavismo and Chavista workers. While Chirino is ultimately a labor bureaucrat, albeit one with a good analysis, the people he represents may yet turn against the rising behemoth of the party's state capitalism.

3. This summer's issue of New Labor Forum has a bunch of cool-looking articles, which I will delve into (and maybe critique?) in the coming days.

4. Remembering a conversation with an FW, I had a brief conversation with a coworker and SDSer today about the role of coffeeshops in the reproduction and speed-up of labor. Particularly interesting was what my friend suggested about how corporate coffee, with its regular practices, is perfectly adapted for this speed-up process. I'm sure my brothers and sisters in the Sbux Union have spent a lot of time considering this during the morning rush. I can attest that at the coffeeshop in my hometown, independent and quaint as it was, regularity was increasingly stressed during the course of my year and a half there. We served mostly commuters to the Twin Cities from our bedroom community. Obviously, things move slower to rural areas, so this process of speeding-up no doubt occured earlier in other places.

But it gets me thinking about reproducing labor. What other services industries have changed as they become monopolized by corporate chains? Obviously, the whole price/wage issue, but I mean more qualitatively. How has the service industry adapted to serve the needs of an increasingly speed-up workforce? Fast food and restaurants stick out as a great example, but they're old-school. What industries are changing as we speak?

5. From the people who brought you Processed World, comes Nowtopia, which is a badass book I've been reading recently. It records the struggles of workers outside of work, creating non-capitalist means of communication. Obviously, it doesn't represent everyone (notably absent so far are anyone who is not a white person or white-collar worker) but it doesn't aim to. It highlights the resistances of a specific section of the population and places them in a really great analytic context. Also, it makes me wanna learn way more about permaculture, which sounds so awesome. I love gardens and hate capitalism, so it seems like a good combination. The book will be in the Macalester Infoshop in the fall, or is available now by contacting me, caretaker of the Infoshop-in-Exile in my basement.

The Worst Laid Plans

2008-06-02T14:26:00.005-05:00

I've found myself calling people "adventurists" way more often recently. I sound like a Leninist, I know. But I'm becoming further convinced that about 75% of anarchist practice is totally counter-productive.

Actions that seek to "block" or "disrupt" capital's day-to-day operation without a systematic follow-up are mostly what I'm considering here. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the whole of society now produces value, including people who are not normally considered workers, and that therefore, any break or refusal constitutes a valid attack against capital. Following this logic, it appears that anything we do to fight capital is a good idea.

While of course any attack is legitimate, insofar as capitalism is the most destructive system the world has ever seen, not all attacks are equally valid in building an alternative. This is the place where I start to get aggravated at my comrades. Just because doing something is morally acceptable does not mean its strategically sound.

This does not negate the idea of all refusals being equally legitimate. If, say, a neighborhood organization worked to organize a cop watch (and push out drug dealers), I'd say it would constitute a valid assault on capital. Likewise, if protesters blocked the shipments of military vehicles to Iraq, that would be fantastic. What unites these two scenarios, however, and divides them from what I see a lot of anarchists doing, is that they are sustained campaigns.

Capitalism can withstand the slings and arrows of activists. What I suspect it will have a harder time with is ongoing struggles and crises. Consider the well-known revolutionary situations of the 20th century: '39, '56, '68, '94. None of these scenarios were small, pinprick actions against capital. They may have begun that way (Mexico in '68 is a great example) but only when united with larger constituencies of the oppressed.

I don't think I'm saying anything particularly novel. It basically boils down to the idea that morality is not a justification for all things. Or, rather, pure morality. Morality separated from the day-to-day struggles of humanity reproduces the same kind of mind/body dualism that the bourgeoisie has always used to repress liberation. If liberation is moral and our morality is enacted through our actions, than liberation must be our goal. Strategy is necessary for liberation.

You are what you eat

2008-05-06T16:47:00.004-05:00

Peter Gelderloos, anarchist revolutionary currently being held on bullshit charges in Barcelona. Still has time to speak truth to power. It's pretty sweet.

There is no coherent morality or ethics rooted in nature that can view the killing and eating of animals as wrong. In nature, killing and eating something is a respectful, intimate activity, and a necessary part of natural cycles. Viewing this as wrong is nothing but a shockingly alienated, civilized view that domesticates animals at a metaphysical level by reducing them to quasi-citizens in need of rights. Fuck that shit. Humans and all other animals are much more free and full outside of legal frameworks, without rights, only needs and desires.

Here's the article.

Last on my List

2008-04-25T10:42:00.004-05:00

Okay, last post before I dig in for finals. A round-up of things I am considering:

1. Congratulations to the newest bourgeois revolution in the world: Nepal! Thanks to the Maoists, Nepal can finally move beyond the backwards monarchy and into industrial capitalism.

Oh I'm sorry, what did you say? "Communism"? No, we wouldn't want that. The Maoists have encourage foreign investment and want to work with the other bourgeois politicians. It's like that great prole.info pamphlet said: the best way for a third-world country to reach capitalism is to have a Communist Party takeover.

2. Props to CrimethInc on the clever detournment of Elle magazine's article about Anna, the FBI snitch. Great work, ya'll. Now, with all your clever graphic design knowledge and seemingly bottomless budget, could you go out and, ya know, get better politics?

3. Must. Use. College. Funds. To. Buy.

4. "We refute the reality of a communist movement because we require a purer form of communism, and that in itself seeks to retrieve the idea of such a movement but now preserved from its more obvious and embarrassing absurdities. Nothing of what we have achieved is as negative as the behavior and opinions of those who say yes to the world we live in, those who accept it without question and shove as much of it as they can down their gob without a thought about it – that's true nihilism. And we are very pale imitators by contrast."
-"FD", considering an article from '39 by a long-lost council communist. His original piece. I can't decide if this new "nihilist communism" thing is the cynical other side of the autonomist's coin or just masturbation. Either way, it's enjoyable.

Discovered through this awesome journal, Letters, that I hope comes out with a second issue soon.

Alright, that's the short list for right now. See you when the struggle gets hot. Err, or when I finish all my papers.

Welcome to the Terrordome

2008-04-20T12:23:00.001-05:00

Via Al Jazeera:
"Food riots have erupted in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid food being seized from fields and warehouses"

Wake up, First World, the global South is knocking at the door. And it's got a bone to pick with you.

Going in Circles

2008-04-19T13:43:00.002-05:00

A message to my fellow revolutionaries, brought to you by common sense:

Obama will not do anything to help the Left. If he gets elected, he will not "open space" for us to organize. He will not create discursive locations where we can begin enacting our agenda. If anything, history shows us the opposite is true; it is the ruling class's fear of the radical left that permits liberals to get elected.

Obama's comments this week where he repudiated Bill Ayers is a clear indication of how he will treat us. What's ironic is that when I met Bill in January, he sounded like he would be voting Obama. Barack's attempt to out-McCarthy Hillary will become old news to excited "revolutionaries" if he gets elected.

I've seen many people, including a big crew in SDS, foretelling the coming of a new age when we can "project" our agenda upon Obama. These folks believe that Obama's "Everyman" personality will allow us to try and push authentic leftist demands through him. We can demand change and when he doesn't give it to us, we can say "See, he's not the Obama you thought he was!" and gain the moral edge.

This, of course, is patently stupid. Obama is not just an easel. He is a human being, who can say "Fuck off, radicals." He has done so. He will continue to do so.

We already have the moral edge. We're fucking revolutionaries! We're fighting the worst, most detestable empire the world has ever known. And it's people like Barack Obama that make it so. If we only had to deal with straight-up evil fucks like Bush all the time, we would already have blown the roof of this farcical democracy. Obama comes from a long line of contemptible co-opters, the Democratic Party. He will change nothing, he will be nothing new, you cannot use him, he will use you. Yet somehow, every 4 years we somehow think things have changed. No, and they never will.

The Democrats are the enemy. Play with fire and you're going to get burned.

Reproletarianization and Consciousness

2008-03-22T13:17:00.004-05:00

I was reading a collection of documents from the Love and Rage Federation the other day and came across a brilliant theory piece discussing the role of white youth in revolutionary struggle. It pointed out that white working class youth are "reproles," insofar as they are they children of a generation of workers that sold out to the capitalist state. Today, the white working class has been thrust back into the working world, the promises of their alliance with the capitalist class turned sour. (This isn't to argue against a white privilege analysis of racism, which is one I stand by. White privilege is still a powerful system, but the welfare state and its attendant ideologies have failed the white working class's attempt to escape from capitalist oppression. This also isn't to diminish the continuing struggles of white working class people who were never allowed into the "middle class." They never escaped and continue to fight capitalist exploitation.)

This concept of reproletarianization really grabbed me. It describes so perfectly what I have seen in my own life and in the lives of my friends and age cohort out of high school. Many of my close friends and classmates have become reproles. Their parents were raised to aspire to middle class ambitions and raised them to do the same, but the changing economy has not allowed them to take the same routes. This isn't to ignore the agency involved in these decisions. Many folks I know have left college, the traditional path to skilled worker positions, because they couldn't stand it any more. (This is something worthy of way more analysis, perhaps by someone with a stronger psychoanalytic knowledge than myself.)

My interest is how these reproles have proven so difficult to organize with. While I help out in the IWW, my role as a student means that I only have so much energy to spend on that project. But I have taken my training as a Wob and applied it. I routinely offer workplace advice to my friends and high school classmates. Nearly everyone I know gets screwed at work, inevitably in the service industry. (My friends in direct production roles, like in factories, actually seem to do better. I have no substantial proof of why, but my gut tells me that this is the remnant memories of class resistance by the old labor movement.) They don't get paid the right amount, no overtime/too much overtime, they have shitty bosses, etc. These complaints are nothing new to any young person working.

But my comments and suggestions go completely ignored by my friends and classmates. It's not that they don't have problems with the work, or that they're Mr. Block either. They hate their bosses, they know what they want changed, and I've helped them understand how easily they can bring about that change. The problem, I think, is consciousness and despair.

The reproles of my generation have no concept of class struggle or class consciousness. Thrust back into the working class, they have no models or history of struggle to look to and get inspired by. The white reproletarianized youth of today is divided by the historical barrier of race from workers of color, from whose history there is a lot to be inspired by. They seem to have no concept of what it means to be "working class," but also have not completely bought into the bootstrap myth. They remain ambivalent towards the welfare system, progressive on social issues, but confused about their historical role as workers. In fact, I think that one of the first bridges that I have to cross with these reproles is getting them to accept the word "worker" as a descriptor for their work.

I think that these reproles will play an important role in class struggle in the United States, particularly as the country's economic future becomes more and more clouded by China and the European Union. I accept Martin Glaberman's suggestion that action proceeds consciousness, so my concern is not in radicalizing these folks via ideology. Rather, I think what the revolutionary movement can do for these reproles is to continue the work started by the Autonomists for the Italian working class in the seventies: we must explore and valorize the kinds of resistances that these workers are already participating in. We must show these workers that their actions are already representative of class struggle, and that the next step must be to organize these individual actions that refuse work into collective refusal and creation of alternatives.

How we go about doing this is a big question, but I see it as one that I need to struggle with. I think my job as an anarchist revolutionary in the next few years is going to be focused on reproles and the process of action and radicalization amongst them. We'll see where that goes.

Things I Am Currently Grooving On

2008-03-20T13:03:00.002-05:00

1. Three-Sided Soccer. Seriously, what will those crazy Situationists think of next? I like the idea, I like the transcendence of what is most problematic about sports: the referee-state. Much as I love American Football, I can only love it as I love to watch shitty television. Brett Favre is a great athlete and a hero to many of us Wisconsinites, but his game has no liberatory potential. American Football is a complex web of rules that are irrational and unchangeable, interpretable only by referees. Perhaps that's why the working class in the U.S. loves it so much: it corresponds to the morass of rules and laws that the capitalist system places over us, but we feel as though we have no agency over.

It brings to mind Bakunin's statement in God and the State about Protestantism: "In this respect Protestantism is much more advantageous. It is the bourgeois religion par excellence. It accords just as much liberty as is necessary to the bourgeois, and finds a way of reconciling celestial aspirations with the respect which terrestrial conditions demand." Catholicism is, by the other token, the perfect religion of the working class because it gives no liberty, subsumes all worship under the watchful eye of the official Church. Which is why it has been such a popular faith, traditionally. (Note that this has changed remarkably around the world in the last few decades. There's something important about evangelical Christianity and the working class imagination. I wonder if Marx's words about religion in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right may be worth considering: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.")

Three-sided soccer, and other liberatory sports, aim to transcend these traditional roles. American Football, like traditional Catholicism, is rooted in confusing tradition, not freedom. Soccer, like traditional Protestantism, is based on what appears to be freedom, but is in fact simply a new form of control.

This is not to denigrate either sport, because I love them dearly. But in our search for the creation of new modes of organizing, an exploration into new modes of play is integral. If we wish to create a better society, we must place play in a key role. As someone (Breton, I think? Or Franklin Rosemont maybe?) said, and my friend Joe is fond of reminding me, "You can't fight alienation with alienated means."

2. Did you know that Rimbaud basically stopped writing poetry by the time he was twenty-one? But in the few years that he did so, he wrote some of the finest poetry that I've ever read. No wonder the Surrealists were so inspired by him. He's the quintessential bohemian poet. Ambiguous sexuality, anti-social behavior, aimless traveler: he's about as cool as they come.

His early poem about the French Revolution, "The Blacksmith" is so laden with righteous violence that you can't help but cackle. The blacksmith torments the captured King with descriptions of the oppressed people, ready to rise up and rend him limb from limb. A few particularly great lines:

To fake laws, and stick bills out of jars
Full of pretty pink decrees and sugar-coated pills,
To amuse themselves by cutting down a few sizes,
Then holding their noses when we walk near them,
-Our kind representatives who find us dirty!-
In order to fear nothing, nothing, save bayonets...
That is fine. Let's get ride of their humbug speeches!
We have had enough of these flat-heads
And these belly-gods. Ah! Those are the dishes
You bourgeois serve us, when we are in a frenzy,
When we are already breaking sceptres and croziers!...

Yeah, it's sweet.

Uprisings in Lhasa

2008-03-18T13:41:00.002-05:00

So things are getting pretty hot in Tibet. The situation there merits a moment of analysis, I think.

First: China is the perfect embodiment of authoritarian capitalism. I say this first to dissuade any confused "anti-imperialists" who think that everything that challenges the United States is somehow progressive. Nothing of the sort. China has flipped communism on its head, and is paying the consequences. An impoverished and swelling working class is beginning to put its feet down. The situation is nothing if not reminiscent of the U.S. in the late 19th/early twentieth centuries. An active but entirely unorganized working class which is trying to establish forms to resist capitalist exploitation. China is the most important country in the next decade, and not because it's economy is "booming" but because its class struggle is.

Second: The Dalai Lama should be the first one against the wall. For all his equivocation and pacifist language, he is a rank opportunist and theocrat. Much as I am loathe to give them their due, the Maoists and their lackeys have pointed out what a scumbag he is and how horrible feudal Tibet was for the underclasses. Michael Parenti's oft-cited essay is of use here. A choice quote:

"Keep in mind that it took a Chinese occupation and almost forty years of exile for him to propose democracy for Tibet and to criticize the oppressive feudal autocracy of which he himself was the apotheosis. But his criticism of the old order comes far too late for ordinary Tibetans. Many of them want him back in their country, but it appears that relatively few want a return to the social order he represented."

The Dalai Lama is anti-choice and anti-gay. He's not even pro-independence. His leadership would be a giant step backwards for Tibet. He is enormously popular in the West because his pacifist style makes liberals feel at ease and also as if they're doing something while they're not. If Tibet does somehow break off or achieve a measure of autonomy, the former serfs will not likely welcome back the feudal theocracy that he represents.

Taking this two as premises, we can see that neither the CCP nor the Dalai Lama has the interests of working people in Tibet in mind. And what's more, they know it. We must examine these recent disturbances as moments of class struggle. The struggle in Tibet is not being led by the "Dalai clique" as Beijing would have us believe. In fact, the pacifist-king-in-exile has threatened to resign if violence continues. Hardly the words of someone supporting the conflict on the streets of Lhasa! But the Lama is not supporting the actions: they challenge his role as legitimate leader, because they are autonomous and decentralized.

The ethnic Han in Tibet can be seen as analogous to the Protestants in Northern Ireland. Ethnic Tibetans acting against the Chinese government occasionally (and incredibly regrettably) spills over to ordinary Hans because they are part of that occupation, even if they are not the ones doing the actual crimes.

Of course, the Western media is doing its best to downplay the revolutionary energy of this authentic anti-imperialist struggle. The rioters are portrayed as hooligans that are "over-reacting" and not following the proscribed path toward liberal democracy. We've got to be careful that we don't fall into cheer-leading for either the U.S.-backed Lama or the CCP. Neither are progressive and neither are revolutionary. The working class in Tibet is testing out the waters and we must watch and critically support their actions.

Absentia

2008-03-11T00:44:00.003-05:00

Hey out there in internet-land.

I've wanted to post more up ye olde blogge here but my involvement in "the struggle" has upped a lot in the last couple of weeks. I've been reading a lot recently, particularly stuff outside of my normal narrowly radical political lens, thanks to my fantastic "Politics of Memory in Latin America" class. I'm seeking to synthesize my knowledge and learning about class struggle with theory and study of memory and forgetting. I fear Walter Benjamin may have beat me by about 70 years, but what can say, I'm only in undergraduate school!

While you're bored, go over and give the folks at Prol-Position a look-see. They've got all you need to know about class recomposition globally. (Well, not everything, but close.)

Current Events, Ya'll

2008-02-22T00:56:00.005-06:00

I've been pondering again the project that Will suggested a couple of months ago, the idea of some sort of collective blog run by anarchists that analyzes geopolitics. Sorta like the Center for Strategic Anarchy, only more analytical. I think this is a really good idea. If you'd wanna participate, get in touch with me, maybe between you, fair reader, Will, and I, we could actually start this.

Of course, this is prompted by the current Kosovo situation, and by what I see as the lack of a coherent analysis of it by the ultra-left. I see Leninists jumping up and down (on both sides, actually) but anarchists don't seem to be paying much attention.

Just before the act of independence, Andrej Grubacic, Balkan-born anarchist historian wrote this, which is at least something to ponder:

...My answer, the only one I can give, to the question if there is going to be another war, between NATO and Serbia, and between Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo minorities, is yes. There will be another war. If the "international community", with its army and its colonial apparatus, does not leave Albanians, Serbs and Roma to decide their future for themselves, the war, or, in the least, "localized" violence (and internationally supervised) and another wave of ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma, will be inevitable. The only chance for peace in the Balkans is the end of the occupation of the Balkans. In Kosovo as well as in Bosnia. European and American gentlemen, iternational "humanitarian" NGO's, dear concerned members of the international community, please leave. And don't forget to take the BBC journalists with you.

Worth considering. But I wish we had more serious, in depth analysis of these kind of events. Ultimately, an anarchist analysis is not only important to, ya know, anarchists, but also can highlight issues that other analyses of world events don't pay attention to (like power relations, class struggle, state structure, ideology.)

With that in mind, I wanna point fair readers to my new favorite pamphlet, Treason's Class Struggle in Iraq 1987-1991. Very much digging it.

Withdrawalist Strategies

2008-02-19T01:28:00.000-06:00

I've only been involved in the anarchist movement formally for about a year and a half now. Before I was in a rural area and had no other contacts.

But in my short time, I've become interested in what I see as the two "tensions" of anarchist praxis, which I brought up in the insurrectionary vs syndicalist/platformist thread, of "economic action" and "political action" line. I don't think they are mutually exclusive, of course, but they do reflect theoretical underpinnings.

In examining the "economic action" line, which I find more engaging and powerful, I've spent a lot of time hanging out with the Marxists. Unfortunately, modern anarchist theory just isn't developed with solid critiques of the economy (with the exception of the market anarchists, who have an advanced, if silly and incorrect one). Here some of the work of the extreme left-wing of the communist movement, particularly the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the U.S. (particularly Martin Glaberman) and the Autonomia movement in Italy have proved remarkably useful. But while their critique is powerful, they mostly analyzed capitalist society and class composition in their epoch. What they didn't do was spent a lot of time strategizing on where to go forward.

In searching for an anarchist strategy that privileges economic action, I've come to see an important line emerging. The two authors who present some of the most compelling critiques are the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and cranky working class intellectual James Herod. Herod's May 2007 book Getting Free takes some of the perspectives offered by Graeber (though he cities one of Graeber's lesser-known pieces instead of his hugely important Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, so it could be a coincidence) on how egalitarian societies have traditionally dealt with authority and turns them into specific suggestions for how to build an anarchist society.

Both of these thinkers' ideas boil down to what I'm calling "withdrawalism." In a few words, withdrawalism picks up on the Autonomist Marxists' notion of the "refusal of work" as a way to combat capitalism and applies it to all of social life. To me, this represents a qualitative advance on the Autonomists' position, which privileged economic struggles by marginal workers and ignored other parts of social life (at least in my limited reading of their works.) Herod calls this process "gutting capitalism," which I think is an apt description.

In the post-industrial societies of the West, anarchist strategy, I argue, cannot be constructed along traditional lines. Unions, and syndicalism broadly, have failed us. (The contradiction of being a dues-paying member of the IWW is not lost on me.) The "summit-hoping" of the white anarchist ghetto is not "breaking the spell," but rather reinscribing racist and classist dynamics and giving the primitivist and post-leftists a platform from which to speak for all anarchists.

To me, withdrawal from capitalist society reflects the newest and most important version of the historical slogan of "the new world inside the old". Organized communities of resistance, which organize along class lines in urban communities, could provide a new way forward for anarchist strategy.

(x-posted from RevLeft)

My newest cliché

2008-02-05T12:01:00.000-06:00

"The problem is our mode of civilization, not the civilization-mode!"

I'm lovin' it.

The Root of All Evil

2008-02-03T22:13:00.000-06:00

I recently ran across a piece of CrimethInc propaganda which discussed patriarchy. It placed the blame of things like "domestic violence, oppressive gender roles, low self esteem" and other effects of patriarchy on "an object that doesn't even exist," namely, the pursuit of female body perfection.

This isn't the first time I've run into this argument (otherwise I wouldn't bother discussing another inane CrimethInc propaganda poster.) Lots of feminist-minded people have told me the same thing.

For me, this account of patriarchy confuses the ends with the means. I'm pretty sure that preferred body images change quite frequently, if viewed from within a historical perspective. The "large chest, skinny waist" woman that this poster apparently refers to has only been an object of cultural adoration very recently, and only then due to the fact that the mass culture industry was developed first in the United States. Does that mean that patriarchal violence doesn't predate 1900? I don't think so.

The obsession with the perfect female body and all its attendant evils comes from a patriarchal system that institutionalizes differences in all social and personal situations between men and women, not the other way around. Putting the blame of all sexist violence narrowly on culture is a profoundly non-materialist misunderstanding of power and systems.

SDS Midwest Convention Reportback

2008-01-23T14:48:00.000-06:00

REPORTBACK FROM SDS MIDWEST CONVENTION
AND RECCOMENDATIONS FOR MAC-SDS
Brendan Rogers and Nick Huelster
1/20/08

************************************************************************

The weekend of January 12-13 in Milwaukee a well spent mix of sharing our stories and learning from others experiences. The Midwest region showed that we were doing serious work on a variety of pressing local and national issues, more than meeting the challenge of the high bar set by the so-called face of SDS, the better publicized chapters on the coasts. The convention had a non-deliberative role, which meant that the work done was skill sharing, reports of chapter-level work, communication building, and caucusing.

Friday

On Friday afternoon we drove through Wisconsin and, after a few stops along the way, ended up in Milwaukee. We were put up by the amazing Jay and Molly of Milwaukee-SDS who are some of the nicest people we’ve ever met. We started sharing about our chapters right away together, losing track of time and showing up to an SDS party just as it ended. We went out to a busy, greasy pizza joint, then hit the hay in preparation of the next day’s events.

Saturday Morning

When we arrived at the University of Milwaukee, we did a quick round of introductions. Chapters attended included: Milwaukee, Chicago, Macalester, U of Minnesota, U of N. Dakota/Grand Forks, Grand Rapids MI, Madison, and Detroit.

After intros we had an extended conversation that roughly centered on the topic of movement building, which was to be one of the themes of the weekend. Our talk was facilitated by Bill Ayers of old SDS and Weather Underground fame, who barely introduced himself for who he has been, only mentioning his past a few times. (When Nick got him to sign a copy of his memoir, he told Bill that he was only halfway through it. Bill said, "Then you haven’t gotten to the good part!" and Nick laughed, nervously.) He brought great vision and energy in facilitating our discussion. This talk reinforced the fundamental idea of SDS as an organization of chapters in federation: while we all were there for the same purpose and in solidarity with one another, our problems varied wildly. Some chapters had a difficult time getting new members, others retaining members, others had experienced the problem of rapid growth without the infrastructure to accommodate their new size. What was apparent, however, was that even the smallest of groups have had successful campaigns.

Saturday Afternoon

After lunch, when some members went to a benefit for a local alderperson who has been imprisoned on dubious grounds, we began chapter reportbacks. (The notes from the convention, including what was shared during chapter reportbacks, are being put together and distributed by members of Milwaukee and Detroit SDS, and will be mailed out to attendees and the Midwest list within two weeks). Suffice it to say that this was one of the most inspiring parts of the convention. Others were impressed with our strike, especially the structure of the mass meeting and our street takeover, as well as our tradition of the effigy-burning. One of the best moments was when the mild-mannered Grand Rapids chapter told of their march to their congressperson’s house, where they taped a giant proclamation saying he would no longer support war funding to his door, asking for him to sign it, despite a tremendous police presence. Their actions received press, and forced the congressperson to come clean about his war record. Inspiring and hilarious are two words that were used to describe SDSers frequently this weekend.

After chapter reports, we held a short presentation on gender by Sicily of Detroit SDS. We discussed how gender is constructed, cultural stereotypes about gender, and in what ways we can build struggles around gender. Sicily also introduced us to another metaphor, which would come up over and over throughout the convention: her "knitting" analogy for anti-oppression work. Like knitters, who must practice their craft until the day they die or begin to lose it, people practicing anti-oppression work are involved in a constant process and are never free of oppressive tendencies.

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning was caucus/auxiliary time. The caucus/auxiliary pairs were women/men, people of color/white, working class/class privilege. These conversations people a space to discuss oppression broadly, raise consciousness about it within SDS, and take back tips to their home chapters. Macalester SDS's "vibe-check" go-around at the end of every meeting proved a popular suggestion. There was a bit of tension when a group of men from one chapter did not attend any of the caucuses. We believe the issues raised in the caucuses are challenges that all privileged and oppressed people in SDS need to confront. We must assume "good faith" in SDS, which means that people should assume that criticisms made by their comrades are done not to hurt them or anger them, but out of desire for a stronger organization. This is especially important in the context of anti-oppression work, when tensions can run high for both the oppressed and privileged groups. Out of these talks, a strong message we meditated on was the concept that "You know that you need the movement when the movement doesn’t need you." This means that you’re speaking when you need to speak, not dominating leadership roles but sharing them with all group members and doing invisible roles as well.

Sunday Afternoon

We ended the convention with a series of break-out groups to discuss topics that had been brought up over the course of the weekend as requiring the attention of Midwest chapters. These included: movement-building/chapter alliances/Midwest communication, March 20 protests, RNC protests, counter-recruitment, and building non-hierarchical leadership. The notes from these conversations will come out with the official notes from the convention. Of immediate importance, however, is the creation of an internal Midwest SDS blog at midwestsds.blogspot.com, in order to better share information, speakers, and materials created by chapters across the Midwest.

Before concluding, we reaffirmed our need for more Midwest communication, another Midwest convention in 2008, and, as a convention, signed the SDS M20 call. Closing thoughts were altogether positive, and it was hard to drive back home and leave behind all our newfound friends and comrades.

Comments on SDS (Brendan)

While we at Macalester may get frustrated with our internal structure, it was received quite well by other chapters. This, like so many other things at convention, reminds me of Sicily from Detroit SDS's words about the "knitting" analogy: Where we have struggled, and continue to struggle, with issues of oppression in the past, it has made us stronger. Our formal rotating division of tasks would be impossible if we had not discussed and implemented changes about issues of (for instance) patriarchy in semesters past. Anti-oppression work is indeed a continual process, and because we have worked hard on some of those issues, we are able to come up with solutions for problems that other chapters have been unable to even begin dealing with. I couldn’t be more proud of how our chapter has worked on these issues.

I think that the continual growth of SDS is incredible, and the people I met at convention were incredible as well. Our decision-making processes, our work on sharing, and our actions have been inspiring. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I truly believe that we are one of the few activist groups who are modeling the kind of "participatory" society that we are seeking to create.

My one concern with opinions I heard voiced at the convention was the speed with which SDSers agreed to work to get politicians elected. Even as folks loudly declared their independence from the Democratic Party, they allowed themselves to be drawn into the discourse of state power as a goal of revolutionaries. Organizers stated that they wanted to force candidates to "come to us" as representatives of an authentic Left, and that we should only endorse them if they met all our criteria (anti-war, pro-universal healthcare, etc). To borrow the language of Hillary Clinton, SDSers sought to become the MLK to the Democrat's LBJ. This ignores a history of betrayal by politicians, from the U.S. to Russia and beyond, and an understanding of how the American Empire functions. If SDSers assert that power "comes from below," many are suspiciously quick to endorse the "power from above" of the politicians. A particularly astute comment came from one comrade about the "march to the right" of U.S. presidential elections, which begin with leftists supporting candidates like Nader or Kucinich and end with them supporting the likes of the incredibly pro-war John Kerry.

Rememberance

2008-01-23T14:35:00.002-06:00

Today is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Why is this important? Because it provides an example of oppressed people taking their lives into their own hands and resisting with violence.

I am sick and tired with the played out Gandhisms on the Left, particularly where nonviolence is concerned. Let's not forget that Gandhi suggested that the Jews commit mass suicide to protest the Nazi occupation. This kind of mystical thinking is exactly the type which pervades the fundamentalist pacifists today.

And while I'm trashing people, it is exactly the type of mystical thinking which pervades their tactical opposites, the fundamentalist black bloc-ers, who believe that any and every action taken against the State must be manifested in the maximum amount of violence possible. Both sides miss the nuances of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Where I'm From

2008-01-17T20:43:00.000-06:00

I just noticed that Will tagged me with the question: What motivated you to start looking into Anarchist/Libertarian thought?

I was raised by two Democrats, my mom rather moderate and my dad pretty left-wing. In '03, I helped organize a walk-out in my small town on the day the bombs started dropping on Iraq. (I've since consistently encouraged radicals to do organizing work in conservative rural areas. It was the best training for people disagreeing/hating/threatening you that I've ever encountered.) I volunteered for Russ Feingold and John Kerry in '04, that summer reading a biography of Clarence Darrow. The Darrow book mentioned, with some negativity, those "anarchists," incorrectly calling Bill "Comintern" Haywood one of them. That was my first touch with anarchism and with the IWW, the former which I promptly dismissed, with the predictable democratic socialist response of "it's totally unworkable!"

Humorously, I remember walking the hallways of my high school on the day after Kerry conceded the election to Bush in 2004, totally disgusted. I had twisted my principles tremendously just to support his run and even he had given up rather than fight. That was the last time I ever supported a candidate. I started doing more research on anarchism, particularly the summer before my senior year. By that fall, I was comfortable enough with the word and subsequently spent my last year in high school ruining the reputation of a "good boy" that I'd earned, working on a campaign to keep Wal-Mart out of town, spearheading an extremely unpopular campaign against Coca-Cola in our school (for which it was made clear to me that my mother could lose her job) and even entertaining such blasphemy as trying to get the recruiters and youth pastors out of school. My brother informs me that I am to this day pointed out by teachers as the "token radical" in town.

Meet me in the dollar bin

2008-01-17T20:23:00.002-06:00

Personal log:

The problem with getting more involved with organizing in the past couple of months is that I've had less time to reflect and find new sources of inspiration. These past two weeks of no school have been a nice time to sit back and recharge. I've been reading a lot more, as well as just wasting beautiful time on the computer. Which, while it sounds lame, is a great luxury to have.

This past weekend I went to the SDS Midwest Regional Convention. I'll post my "official" reportback to my chapter here when my comrade finishes editing it up. In the meantime, here's my current reading list:

1. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America by Daniel Taussig. An amazing reflection and analysis on anthropology, Marxism, politics, and semiotics (that's the first time I've ever been able to say, without being a pretentious Macalester student, that I vaguely understand something about semiotics). It's really redeemed the dialectic a bit for me, as it portrays the tension between precapitalist and capitalist forms of value in South America as constant and interwoven.
2. Spaces of Capital by David Harvey. I'm just starting this, but everyone tells me this cat is the foremost Marxist geographer, which is groovy. I've been thinking a lot more about urbanism, particularly in the context of post-Situationist explorations. I find myself still identifying strongly as a country boy, but the cityscape is growing on me.
3. Italy: Autonomia ed. semiotext(e). This shit is fucking sweet. Early Negri, Tronti, Debord, Guattari, Virno and a million other cool cats. How come nobody ever told me about Sergio Bologna? It's thick as hell with Marxist language, but I'm getting a lot from it. I find myself constantly evaluating relations between people in the language of the autonomists nowadays.
4. The Early Novels of Raymond Chandler. His language doesn't always jive with my serious commitment to anti-racism and anti-sexism, but Chandler is master of prose. And let's face it, who doesn't wanna be mysterious, drink a shit-ton of whiskey and periodically beat the shit out of bad guys?

Yikes, three books by Marxists and one by a former oil exec? If I'm not careful, Will will steal my anarchy club card while I'm sleeping!

The New Sectarianism

2008-01-14T12:16:00.001-06:00

I've always tried to avoid being sectarian, but I know that it's impossible. What I've discovered though, is that the ways in which I write people off for their beliefs are not based on who they follow, but what they do.

I frequently work with people from all over the spectrum of "the movement". From individualists and market anarchists to old school Leninists, the groups that I'm involved with, particularly SDS and the IWW, invite anyone who can work with us. We discourage the old sectarianism, where one cannot even consider someone else's beliefs as valid. In SDS, people often talk of "assuming good faith," that even if you think that those Maoists/anti-organizationalists/whatever have stupid politics, you should assume that they are here because they actually care about the group. Obviously, there are exceptions to this guideline, particularly old sectarian groups who seek to either co-opt something new or destroy it. But the vast majority of participants in these activist groups sincerely care more about the world and the organization than they do about getting their way all the time.

The new sectarianism, the good sectarianism, is one based on method rather than ideology. It divides up those who empower and those who control. Those who build democracy and autonomy and those who create hierarchies and party bosses. I encourage more people to practice this type of sectarianism, or more properly, methodism.

This may not sound like something new, but I think its important to distinguish between the two types of discrimination. The old sectarianism inevitably leads to tiny groups who fight each other more than the bosses. See the Sparts for proof.

However, the new sectarianism leads us to divide up the organizations which will do our movement well, even if our lines may differ, from those who will destroy it, even unintentionally.

For this reason, I may grumble when working with a Trot who talks slavishly of the "centralized economy" or roll my eyes when some crusty anarchist prattles on about veganism, but I will not for a moment let politics interfere with liberation. Likewise, if somebody warms me up a tale of "autonomous working class struggle," then goes back to secretly report minutes of our conversation to the central committee that puts them in a box somewhere (I'm looking at you here, Freedom Road) I will dismiss them as reactionary.

We must not be afraid to make decisions about what is the direction that our movement should move in. But we must be conscious that the decisions we make reflect what is best for the path of revolution, about which we may not know all the answers, impossible as it might seem to us at the time.

Look

2008-01-08T23:49:00.001-06:00

I know that I'm supposed to blindly support everything which gets done in the name of "the movement," but I have to draw the line somewhere.

Blowing up buildings to stop military research? Okay, likely to get caught, but power to ya if you can get away with it.
Blowing up buildings to stop "genetic engineering of plants"? (as a suspected ELFer facing jail time is alleged to have done in 2001) Ridiculous! Indefensible! Misanthropic!

Okay, if she didn't do it, than she's another in a long line of political prisoners. But that seems unlikely to me.

I've noticed that primmies speak out of both sides of their mouths about the destruction of science. On one hand, they'll claim this woman is innocent. Which she could very well be. Let's face it, the State doesn't exactly have a good track record for treating radicals fairly. But while the defenders of the Green Scare arrestees are ranting and raving about how those cute white kids with a weird affinity for nature and firebombs have never done anything wrong in their lives, they let little smirks go by when you ask if they thought it was a good idea.

I can understand a response like that in public. It's pretty standard radical procedure to pretend that an imprisoned radical is a harmless liberal when soliciting money from rich liberals. Everybody pretended Rosa Parks was just a tired old lady, even though of course she was strategic and had a plan. But everybody in the Birmingham NAACP knew who she was and exactly what she was doing.

I mean, come on guys, everybody knows what you're doing. The FBI knows, Homeland Security knows, we know. You're trying to drag humanity back into the mystical past and aren't afraid to use firebombs to prove it. So why are you surprised when you get locked up? Because you didn't think that middle class white people could get nabbed? As to the innocent ones: maybe if your politics weren't centered around basically making lots of people die, you wouldn't get confused with your friends, err, one of those dirty terrorists.

Is this the same as rightwingers telling a rape victim that she should have expected it because she was wearing "provocative" clothing? I don't know. What do you think?

Finally!

2007-12-20T01:49:00.001-06:00

An anonymous poster on the "anarchists" community on LiveJournal finally fucking says what I've been wanting to say for months:

Semantics is valuable, under certain circumstances. Colloquial language is too. When red anarchists here discuss "free trade" or "free market capitalism" or "laissez faire" or "privatization" in US economic policy, or in Euroimperial economic policy, or in WTO/GATT/NAFTA/LMNOP/QRSTUV... they're *almost never* discussing what you or [another anarcho-capitalist] refer to as market anarchy. They're referring, quite specifically, to a phenomenon in what you'd call mixed economies wherein clearly socialized (cost) states are manipulating a highly regulated, highly subsidized, highly protected market and calling it "free trade" by rewarding powerful private tyrannies (to borrow from Chomsky, since you cited him) with even greater power at the expense of the general public.

What drives me absolutely batty is *you fucking know* this is true. You know what's being discussed. There *are no valid semantic objections* because the words in use, while spelled and pronounced the same, are clearly different words with clearly different meanings. You don't like that these semirandom strings of vowels and consonants represent something other than what you'd want them to represent? Pick a new fucking set of vowels and consonants. You have a worse chance of reclaiming these terms than Buddhists in Europe have of reclaiming the swastika.

Thank you, anonymous wonder. Market anarchists shit a brick when we reds start railing against "capitalism," but of course they know exactly what we're talking about. We're not talking about their utopian "free market" without a government. We're talking about the very real, very oppressive market capitalist system of the present day. If they could get their heads out of their ideological asses for two seconds and acknowledge this, maybe we could start working together. But in the meantime, they'll just remain a pointless internet tendency.

History

2007-12-03T22:45:00.001-06:00

I love seeing this title on the IWW webpage:

"Industrial Worker - Issue #1701, November 2007"

And yet they remain the most relevant working class organization in the States.

On class reductionism

2007-11-21T01:37:00.001-06:00

I don't have any cohesive thoughts on this subject, but its something which has been playing on mind a lot after some discussion with a female comrade.

One of the irritating habits of the more Marxist-inclined anarchists (a group of which I am a member) is the ability to reduce all problems to problems of class. Clearly, this approach is outdated as other reductionist approaches, like petite-bourgeois anarchism (the State is the bad guy!) or jingoist workerism (the Foreigners are the bad guy!)

Noticing the development of the capitalist system, Marxist critics have far outweighed their anarchist comrades in their consideration of the system as scientific. The work of Negri, Tronti, and the autonomists has been particularly enlightening. But this is not enough.

Other thinkers, some of them Marxist, some of them not, have noticed that the oppressions present in capitalist society exist in non-capitalist society. The kneejerk reaction, that capitalism has imperialized its prejudices and internal contradictions, is simply not true. Non-capitalist societies are not paradises, they too have their problems (with gender in particular). Anthropology has been particularly helpful my understanding of the universalism of oppression.

So class reductionism is not enough. Clearly, as the autonomists have pointed out, the traditional role of women in capitalist society has functioned to reproduce labor. Likewise, as the Johnson-Forrest Tendency folks and their successors have indicated, the working class of color is the most revolutionary class in America. But these problems do not simply disappear when capitalism ends.

To build an authentically anti-capitalist movement of the working class, we cannot simply eschew personal and social racism, sexism, and heteronormativity as "liberal identity politics". To do so not only further oppresses already oppressed people, but discourages the development of people as people. If we seek to build an anarchist future, we must model the social relations we seek to create in our communities.

Nor can we fall into the trap of the liberals, who focus solely on personal and social oppression. But that is not my concern with class reductionists. They already know this part, but can't understand that the movement for workers' liberation must be lead by oppressed peoples, as they have the most to gain. Simply waiting for the OBU to organize them, or events to radicalize them, denies agency and is also poor strategy.

Fives sketches and five theses

2007-11-15T00:06:00.000-06:00

This will hopefully be in a forthcoming zine:

“The student struggle has now been left behind…The outcome of the present crisis is in the hands of the workers themselves, if they succeed in accomplishing in their factory occupations the goals that the university occupation was only able to hint at..”

- COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONS
Paris, May 19, 1968

Wind howls and echoes eerily through the empty shell of the new athletic facility, half built. The whole south side of campus is always singing this screechy, unearthly tune. It is the first snow of the year, just a couple of days after Halloween. My bike is cold to the touch, my gloves are busted through and don’t help much. I swear that I can see my breath in front of me. The Upper Midwest wastes no time in moving from one of our hottest, driest summers on record to plunging below freezing.

Thesis 1: Students have no revolutionary potential as a class. The student exists in a cocoon, a moment of stasis, between childhood and the workplace.

******

Sitting in my room, music is faintly playing. I am writing another paper. I don’t even remember what class this is for anymore, or what it means. They all just blend together. Was this one of the classes I picked because I liked it or to fulfill a requirement? It doesn’t really matter I suppose, I can’t stand it either way. Why is it that the only really good parts of school don’t involve homework? My mind wanders, I search the internet for something more exciting. I turn off my computer and pray to the god I know is a fiction, if only to break the monotony.

Thesis 2: The role of the student in bourgeois society is become the next generation of skilled workers. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is one created by capital to encourage workers to fight against each other. This dichotomy must be problematized primarily by the workers who benefit from it, i.e. students.

******

I took a sociology class one time. The professor had us read this bit by Max Weber. It was explained to us that basically the purpose of having a college degree was to legitimize our presence in the workplace, to illustrate that we can shut up and follow rules, that we are able to listen and repeat. All four years basically for a piece of paper, as the cliché goes. Seemed like a pretty radical thing for Weber to say, but the class came to agree pretty quick. And why wouldn’t they, witnessing what they have?

Thesis 3: Students can only become revolutionary when they align themselves with the interests of the working class. Students are workers-in-training. Attempts to theorize or organize revolution lead by students-as-students in the modern late-capitalist context are useless.

******

This time of year always gets me a little excited, but ultimately disappointed. I wish there was time to reflect on the seasons, but I don’t have it. I’ve gotta rush from place to place, meeting to work to class to meeting to homework to sleep. The couple of spare minutes I find each day get wasted because I can’t motivate myself to bike to the river or check out some book on anthropology or biology. Which is tragic. My father once told me that the truly wise man (sic) learns more outside of class than in it. The trees are just at the end of their leaves, the last yellows and reds are beginning to get ugly.

Thesis 4: Working class identity which remains theorized only classically is pure Stalinism. Rather, working class struggle must be built upon the struggles against whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexism. Without these oppressions, capital could not reproduce labor or divide the working class.

******

My brother and I are walking out of a punk show to take a break and grab some food. As we walk down the street, a homeless man asks us for coins, all we have are a couple bucks and are hungry. A red-faced man walking into the bar yells at the beggar to get a job. My little brother’s face burns with fury at this yuppie scum, but we plunge our hands into our pockets, walk on, and buy a spicy gyro from a bored young East African woman. I feel implicated, culpable, feel like I am in a stage production of a witty, post-modern farce.

Thesis 5: Alienation from school is related, but not identical to, alienation from work. Whereas worker alienation stems from the extraction of surplus and the commodification of all activities in capitalism, student alienation stems from the production of valueless commodities and the disconnect between presumed class identity and reality, past and future.

On Organization

2007-10-31T00:15:00.000-05:00

Organizing is the most efficient way of creating a world. Simply waiting for a moment of insurrection is insufficient strategically.

Creating highly organized programs and campaigns empowers people, it does not take away their power. Organized does not mean the same as proscribed. It means a plan of action, accountable to the participants (subjects) and the society on which it acts (objects).

Anarchists need to stop fearing organization. The only way to end capitalism is to confront it with a front of heterogenous elements which can work together in this task. Anarchy, as noted so long ago, is order.

I do not believe that anarchism is a project that a small number of people can carry out. A small number of people can carry out anarchism in a small place, in a small time. These fights are beautiful and I respect them utterly. But Rome wasn't built in a day and it won't be torn by an affinity group.

We simply cannot turn anarchism into a "small-a" idea, where our tactics pervade other groups (consensus, for example) but we lack our own organizations. Likewise, we cannot abandon the masses, as some of our contemporaries would suggest that we do. The working class, in its most complex understanding, a multifaceted group of people that includes people at the point of production, excluded from production, and those who reproduce the ability to produce, are still the most revolutionary class of people in the spectacular economy.

I write these things because they seem so logical and obvious that they need not be said. Yet anarchists still think that we can turn inwards to our own comrades, remove organizing others as a priority, and engage in political work without organization. These suggestions may be pleasing on a theoretical level, but they are pragmatically unimplementable. We may practice them, but we do so at the risk of accomplishing our goals. While I remain cognizant of the exhortation that one cannot fight alienation with alienated means, I recognize that there are unalienated means of organization. If not, then what is the point of organizing to change society in the first place?

From the mouths of babes (or rather, LibCom)

2007-10-17T16:17:00.000-05:00

"I mean, look at CrimethInc. They're essentially a bunch of badly dressed drop-outs with shit politics, but have a very high profile because they print sexy looking books and use loads of romantic sub-situationist beatnik imagery. Class struggle politics aren't as "boring as fuck" but a lot of class struggle media and publicity is. "

-John Stevens, LibCom.org Collective

On (not) being watched

2007-10-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

Surveillance is the assumption of our times. Every day, more and more things are viewed by state or corporate actors. We have lost all choice in the matter. I feel doubly effected by this. I know that the State has tapped my phone lines simply on account of who my roommates were at the time.

The initial fear of surveillance slowly gives way to gradual acceptance. These legitimizes the fear that the State wishes to instill by normalizing it. It is the sick logic of capital that we accept by accepting our pursuers. Activists should not simply roll over and allow surveillance to occur. Rather than assuming that the State knows everything about us, we should challenge its control over the content of our lives.

Behave in unorthodox or unexpected ways while engaging in non-illegal activity. Not in order to draw suspicion, but in order to throw off the scent of the authorities. If you do something which cannot be explained, you waste FBI time in trying to explain it. By littering your files with evidence which doesn't connect, you illustrate, if only to the Empire itself, that capitalism is not all controlling, that it has unexplainable gaps.

This also presents a challenge to the dictatorship of the so-called "everyday life". Acting outside of the few proscribed leisure activities that we have expands the horizons of anti-capitalist culture. To be able to honestly challenge the Empire, we must be able to hold up examples of how our society will be better. Finding fun outside of capital's boundaries is an important and difficult task.

This is one tiny facet of the total resistance that makes up anti-capitalist struggle. It is both internal and external. It is internal insofar as it refuses to accept the status quo and external insofar as it constitutes another tiny drain on the State's resources. If we are to be consistent in our refutation of bourgeois society, than a good place to start refuting it is the mechanization and boredom of acting as you are expected.

The Failure of Idealism, or Ron Paul and Barack Obama are Evil

2007-09-20T22:10:00.000-05:00

Okay, time to get a little self-righteous: Barack Obama is not going to save humanity. And Ron Paul is the Antichrist.

I'll explain.

Most of the liberals in this country, from spokespeople-for-oppressed-minority liberals to white-bourgeois-"radical" liberals, have jumped onto the Obama bandwagon, next stop Presidentville. Let's stop and consider for a moment. Even IF Obama gets elected, is he really gonna do anything? Aren't his hands tied by the financial interests that get him elected? Because, let's not mince words, everyone knows how dirty a game politics is. You simply can't get elected President of the United States unless you sell your soul to the Devil.

But why speculate? Let's review Obama's fantastic track record: 1. He's down with economic globalization, that horror of the global South. The Economist has him wanting to work to "deal with globalization," not "slow it down." Well, fuck that! Anyone who has ever heard or seen a damn thing about what globalized capitalism has done to our brothers and sisters in the "Third World" knows that it's sick shit. Globalization is only inevitable? Hah, tell that to the Zapatistas in Mexico!

2. He wants to invade the Sudan. In the Washington Post, he and Sam Brownback (yes, good ol' Creationism Sammy) wrote a piece where they say: "It has become clear that a U.N. or NATO-led force is required." Awesome! Just what I wanted for Christmas! Another invasion, another occupation, another bombing campaign. We'll call it Bosnia Part II: The Revenge of the Imperialists. Lemme say what you don't want to hear: The West invading Sudan to solve the Darfur genocide is EXACTLY THE SAME THING as the U.S. invading Iraq to solve the Saddam horror show. Sorry hippies, no difference at all. There's gotta be a better solution than blowing people up.

3. He voted to build a fucking wall on the Mexican border. I don't think we really need to say anything more about that. (True story: I've never been to Mexico, my folks don't have the money to travel much. But I've heard stories from people who've flown over the border and not a single one of them has seen a giant red line in the desert, demarcating "us" from "them." Fuck the border, says I.)

Now, let's move on the that patron saint of angry white men, Ron Paul. Ah yes, Senator Paul. He opposed the war right from the start, his rabid fanboys pronounce. Too true, but let's think a wee bit about what else he's said and done: 1. He was one of the first Republican senators to endorse Ronald "The Butcher" Reagan over Gerald "The Baker" Ford in '76. (In case you're wondering, Nixon is the Candlestick Maker.) Not that this is really such a big deal, since they were both evil. But whereas Ford was slimy-plotting-henchman evil, Reagan was full-blown straight-from-hell brimstone-smelling bat-head-eating evil. I mean, fuck, he was Ronald fucking Reagan!

2. He introduced and supports legislation (the tragi-comically titled "Sanctity of Life Bill") which would effectively overturn Roe vs. Wade (describing himself as "unshakably opposed to abortion." Yikes! The only thing I'm unshakably opposed to is Everybody Loves Raymond.) Now, this is already terrible, but it's part of his larger campaign to return things from federal control to state control. Ah, state's rights. The ever-so-common distraction of libertarians. Lemme say this loud and clear: Just because the boss/master/leader has the same accent as you, or the same skin color as you, or knows your neighborhood, doesn't make them not your boss/master/leader! "Same shit, different name," as the enlightened say. State's rights are not progressive, but a distraction from the real problem with goern'ment: government. "My" politicians in state congress are just as incurably bourgeois as "my" politicians in national congress.

3. He hearts capitalism. No, but seriously. At least Obama is a bureaucrat-lovin' AFL-CIO-ass-lickin' social democrat. Under all of Paul's rhetoric railing against the corporations, he thinks that capitalism is a fundamentally good thing. Bootstraps, rising to the top, poor getting what they deserve, the whole shebang! He's a libertarian insofar as he doesn't recognize that capitalism inherently oppresses workers and minorities, no further. He likes free trade, school prayer, hates amnesty for illegals and placing environmental concerns over business property rights. He's a Republican, fer chrissakes!

Idealism sucks. Idealism is the alienated line of thought which says that the world will magically work out if we believe hard enough: boom! Kim Jong Il becomes a Buddhist monk, poof! George Bush comes out, zap! white guilt goes away! Idealism is for hippies and rich kids. The sad truth is that society has rules which are not voted upon and cannot be changed no matter how hard you believe or how many verses of "We Shall Overcome" you sing. Now, we may not like that, but I think that the way to overcome these problems is not to wait for some superhero to save us from the clutches of peril.

This is the part where I exhort you to vote for someone else. Having listed all the qualities of these two gentlemen that I think you will find distasteful, I'm about to turn you on to someone who lacks these qualities. Well, tough luck there. But maybe, if you're feeling up to a challenge, you could try your hand at running your own life and solving your problems with the help your friends, family, coworkers and community, rather than waiting for some dude in a suit to do it for you. It's harder, I know, but it presents the only realistic way of getting rid of this messed up structure once and for all.

A poem

2007-09-19T00:11:00.000-05:00

Portrait of the author as a young anarchist
1917-18-19,
While things were going on in Europe,
Our most used term of scorn or abuse
Was “bushwa.” We employed it correctly,
But we thought it was French for “bullshit.”
I lived in Toledo, Ohio,
On Delaware Avenue, the line
Between the rich and poor neighborhoods.
We played in the jungles by Ten Mile Creek,
And along the golf course in Ottawa Park.
There were two classes of kids, and they
Had nothing in common: the rich kids
Who worked as caddies, and the poor kids
Who snitched golf balls. I belonged to the
Saving group of exceptionalists
Who, after dark, and on rainy days,
Stole out and shat in the golf holes.

-Kenneth Rexroth, 1956

Utopian Dance

2007-09-12T23:29:00.000-05:00

I just watched this music video by Feist, which reminded me about the point of art. Art pushes us to act out in fantasy what we cannot live out in our own lives. In her video, she was dancing on those little moving walkways at the airport. I thought, "Damn, that would be fun to do!"

Art inspires revolutions. This is old news. But I'd like to revise it. Normally, we think of a certain type of music as being revolutionary. Be it Dead Prez, Propagandhi, Woody Guthrie, Bikini Kill, or Rage Against the Machine, the implication behind these "revolutionary artists" is that their lyrics are explicitly anti-establishment and that they are therefore revolutionary. Which I won't dispute. But isn't Feist's video revolutionary?

Her desire to dance in a public place where that kind of thing is isn't allowed is a natural one. And a powerful statement. How many times have we considered doing similar things? Or imagined them? These desires speak to our desire for a new society with new rules. Artists act out our fantasies for us. So in some ways, they are stupefying. This is awfully clear, particularly in regards to the abuse of love songs in popular culture. So maybe art is reactionary?

I think it's neither. It is analogous to what Marx writes about religion. In his infamous passage on how religion is the opiate of the people, he follows with a sentence pointing out that religion is the natural response to the alienation we endure under capitalism. I'll expand his critique a little and suggest that it's more than just capitalist alienation which inspires religious fascination. Alienation exists at the heart of the human condition in hierarchial society.

Art in the capitalist (or hierarchial) epoch, then, is akin to religion. It allows us to act out our fantasies while remaining strapped with our metaphorical and literal chains. Religious ideology allows a spiritual escape from the horror of existence: being one with the Lord means a momentary lapse in alienation. Likewise, the intensity and imagination within art works to temporarily ease our lives. When you're in the circle pit, you are with your unknown comrades instantly. It's a feeling of safety and empowerment. When you listen to beautiful romantic tunes, love seems as though it can indeed conquer all. When you are held in the grasp of the powerful language of a master writer, you can pause and feel both unimportant and wiser.

And, when you watch a film about someone dancing where they shouldn't be, you smile and say to yourself, "I wanna do that." But of course, this is the limit of art. Art inspires, suspends, enlightens, but it doesn't actually make change.

The goal then, of any revolution, is to inspire a society of art. Not one defined or constrained by it. That is to say, the society we seek to build must be one where alienation does not exist: art must be our action, not our reaction. As it stands now, art is how we deal with the terror of not having an identity. Every revolutionary action should then be an aesthetic one. The ideology of the revolution must be Art, in its unalienated form. Isn't there something important to draw from the fact that music is such a part of the lives of traditional peoples, who are slightly less alienated than us, that in some indigenous languages, it's hard to distinguish what the word for "music" is? They live art.

So Feist's video must be deconstructed and reused as revolutionary propaganda: We will never be able to dance on moving walkways until we dismantle this capitalist machine and its minions. Only if we control our own lives will our dreams even begin to approach our realities. The everyday must be turned into art or else we will always remain slaves of our own minds.

The Anarchist Referee

2007-09-12T16:58:00.000-05:00

Reposted from my anarcho-pal Brian H:

I am a soccer referee. I ref little kids’ games where everyone crowds around the ball and more often than not end up just kicking each other, (more often) games between youth old enough to not understand why their parents won’t just shut up on the sideline, and occasionally adult games where the players are good enough not to crowd around the ball, but nonetheless more often than not end up kicking each other.

This last Saturday, I worked (notice the verb we referees have been trained to use, even though we mostly do it for love of the game) two matches in the first category – 3^rd and 4^th grade girls. These are not my favorite games to do – not because they are particularly challenging, of course, nor even because they don’t pay well, but because I also happen to be an anarchist[1].

This game was the first of the season for the teams involved. This also meant that for many of the players, it was their first experience playing with a referee on the field. In 2^nd grade and before, they had only played at recess, with friends and family, or at most in a league with parent or volunteer monitors without whistles and funny uniforms.

It did not take me long to realize on Saturday, between teaching the players (not to mention the coaches) how to properly (“properly” being a word I use in referee mode, not anarchist mode) take a kickoff or where to place the ball for a goal kick, that these players really didn’t want or need me to be there. Many hadn’t been trained yet to stop on a dime at the sound of a whistle, and after I got over the annoyance, I was envious. And I realized my presence was really doing more harm than good. I, their first referee, was but one in a long line of figures meant to foster respect for all authority, chronologically somewhere between first schoolteacher and first boss.

So – would I be better off quitting this gig? I’ve pondered it a lot. I really don’t enjoy one bit higher-level games where it’s necessary to exert a level of authority I’m not comfortable with in order to fulfill the job description.

The obvious argument in favor of referees is: didn’t everyone agree to have this setup? The players – presuming they’re old enough, and not the 3^rd graders of last weekend – all paid their dues and voluntarily associated themselves with this particular soccer association. Isn’t that consent?

I don’t think it’s any more real consent than entering the world of wage slavery is done by real consent. Who really wants to pay to play a game? Plus, the pickup games that take the field after my game (language check, again: no, even as a referee, I don’t own the game, much less the 22 players on the field) finishes seem so much more fun.

The argument I keep turning to against referees is this: when I played soccer in high school, the practices were almost always more fun than our (official) games. This may be partly because my team rarely won – but on those occasions, the joy was still delayed until after the game was over and we went to eat at McDonalds (the inextricable link between capitalist-organized sports and economic exploitation is an essay all its own). When I went to college, I immediately signed up for an intramural team, but quickly realized that it wasn’t as fun as it had been for me in high school. It wasn’t hard to realize why; now I wasn’t playing with the friends I had known for several years back home. A hard tackle was now an act of aggression, not a measure of respect, and it was assumed to come from hostility, not love.

The joy of the game comes only partly from the game itself. Like the rest of life, the best experiences come from living beings, not constructions. I prefer soccer to other sports largely because of the simplicity of the rules; the lawbook fits in my pocket whereas a pointy-football rulebook could easily squash a large rodent. But even though soccer has 17 “laws,” I can’t help but think that’s 17 too many. I think of the matches I used to play at recess – perhaps some of the most intense ever – and how none of us knew about the laws; we made our own on the fly and they changed frequently. I also think about how incredibly annoying it was when the two meanest, biggest third grade boys autonomously decided to play rubgy instead. But then I think about how the only real conflict resolution skills we had been taught involved violence and coercion, two ineffective strategies when facing rugby players with the power of the state, er, playground monitors behind them.

Why do I keep refereeing, then? I have many excuses. It’s pretty good money – not enough to live on, but more per hour than almost any other job I could get right now. And as long as not working isn’t a choice for me, this is a hell of a lot more fun than almost anything else I’d be doing to earn money. I do love soccer, after all, even if I hate what capitalists and other authority figures have turned it into. Also – and I know this from my playing experience – the character of a referee can be the difference between 90 minutes of fun and 90 minutes of frustration and anger. On the field, I try to let as much of my authority go as possible and make the players the focus; as long as my job has to exist, somebody doing it well will make a whole lot of difference. For the kid who is yelled at all day at school and yelled at all day at home, the last thing she needs is to be yelled at on the soccer pitch – if I can do my part to make the encounter more of a fun, friendly game and less of an exercise in dog-eat-dog capitalist-training, this might well be the part of a players’ day that enables her to stay sane, and enables her to retain a better vision of what this world could be. This is reformist, but potentially very important to the affected individuals; draw the appropriate analogies to a good teacher or prison activist.

Very rarely do my politics come out explicitly on the field. (I’ve scribbled some slogans on my shoes, but so far either nobody’s noticed or nobody’s said anything.[2]) Implicitly, they come out all the time. I encourage players to call me by my first name. (The first time I was called “sir” was by a librarian in fourth grade, and it has freaked me out ever since.) I try to chat, joke around, and generally lighten the mood as best I can. If I fuck up a call, as every referee does, I will usually admit it. I will not be a jerk and stop the play if you lift your foot three inches when taking a throw-in, and I won’t even mind if you take it a few yards downfield from where the ball went out. I will not be a jerk and make you go off the field to take off your wristband, because although the rules do say no jewelry, it really isn’t going to hurt anybody, and we all know it. I will not be the hard-ass referee who acts as if you’ve insulted my mother when you ask me a question.

In short, I’ll do what I can to subvert my job while still keeping it as long as it’s useful for me – which is what I’d be doing with any job, anyway. And I’m open to being convinced to quitting altogether, burning my badge and keeping solely to pickup games instead. That decision is still up in the air.

[1] On the field I get to wear all black! (Probably more often than the rest of the time, actually.)

[2] Perhaps they’re afraid I’ll be quick with the red card? OK, no more color puns.

On the line

2007-09-10T22:32:00.000-05:00

Okay, so here I am again. I long ago decided that blogs were too indulgent and were part of our culture of individualist consumerism (as opposed to individualist creativity). But I've reconciled my concerns with my need to a. write and develop my rhetorical skills and b. not use Facebook for this. So I hope to make sure I only tell stories and write analysis. I refuse to give up my personality to a machine. With that in mind, on to my experiences:

I was raised in a family that was sympathetic to labor. My folks are middle class workers. I should qualify that statement by suggesting that we're "middle class but if my dad got sick we'd be out on the street" as opposed to "middle class being a polite way of saying rich". There is a tremendous difference between those two positions, one which is not expressed in the term "middle class".

But they'd never felt that they wanted to improve their working conditions. Today I participated in my first picket and it was quite an experience. Standing on the line at the University of Minnesota, blocking trucks from delivering while AFSCME workers are out was pretty enlightening and empowering. I was at the lines with few deliveries so I didn't get into the real confrontational stuff that happened at other docks. But no deliveries passed our blockade. What's more is that the drivers who I talked to understood what we were doing and voluntarily turned around. The paper delivery guy who could have just walked by us decided he would rather turn around.

There's something powerful about meeting other people in a setting where you are not supposed to be doing something. Whether it is a protest against the war or a picket fighting the monster of global capitalism, there's a devious feeling that you're doing something sneaky and "bad" as the bourgeois call it, and the folks you are with are in it with you. A little conspiracy of regular folks.

So today on the line, I chatted with the most interesting people. When your average person thinks of "union workers" I suspect they think of an overweight white guy with a cap sitting on his ass. Which is unfortunate. On the line today we had quite a variety of characters. An old Teamster who told us horror stories of union bureaucracy and vote rigging and wished he wasn't retired or he'd join the IWW, a Ph.D. in geography who worked as a library tech because the accreditation system said he needed to have a Library Science degree to be a "real" librarian, a single mom, on strike, who rides Critical Mass and wore a shirt declaring "Cars R Coffins".

There's a lot of anti-worker rhetoric that flies around the anarchist movement these days. A lot of it comes from people who don't work because they don't want to, or don't work because they don't have to. And that ticks me off.

My buddy has a phrase: ABC. Anything But Class. Which seems to be a problem in our movement. We can recognize oppressions based on race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, ability, environmental destruction, etc. We even start talking about the inherent oppressiveness of language or speciesism and weirdo stuff like that. I feel like in overreaction to the terror of the Soviet Union, anarchists have forgotten the problem of class. Sure, some anarchists from working class backgrounds will recognize the fact that class is a problem, both in society and in our community, but they refuse to organize to DO anything about it. They just organize around empowering workers in the community. Well, sure, that's part of it. But we need a movement of workers at large to change society.

People like to shit on Marx these days, and sometimes with good reason. Nonetheless, his thinking on the nature of humanity as productive and creative continues to strike me as dangerously anarchistic (Bakunin: the urge to destroy is also a creative urge). And I've never been more pleased to call myself a human being than when I've been in places like today, doing what little I can to help improve the lives of my fellow humans. 5 am is pretty early to get up in the morning, but if the class war rages then, I guess I'll be there.