Occupy Moves Onwards

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.

Doing Revolution

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?

On A Roll

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.

Class War is No Joke

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.

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

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.

Blah blah blah

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

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?

Context and Internationalism

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

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

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?

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

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.

An Organizationalist's Defense of the RNC Protests

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

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.

The Worst Laid Plans

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

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.

Current Events, Ya'll

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

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)

Rememberance

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.

The New Sectarianism

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

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?