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.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Bad Ideas Part 1: Don’t be a Jerk about Bad Ideas
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.
(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.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Dealing With Leadership
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?
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?
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Luxemburg and the Unorganized
"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.
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.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Luxemburg and Organizational Centralism
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.
"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.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Getting Reorganized
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!
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!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The O Word
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.
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