Michael’s Greek lesson
The problems I
am thinking of are those that revolutionaries cause by self-defeating behaviour
– things like sectarianism, irrationality and opportunism – all of which I fear
are very much a likely part of the future of the IOPS. If it is true that these
patterns of behaviour are caused by a mix of the subjective will of the people
involved and the effects of the institutionalised relationships they operate
within, then the IOPS is an experiment with laboratory-like controlled
conditions.
Some time before
September last year Michael Albert visited Greece and noticed a problem in the
Assemblies associated with the protests there: ideologically committed
activists, Marxists and anarchists alike, treated the people newly awakened to
activism by the current events with a certain disdain and even hostility. They
lectured at them, treated them with suspicion, and finally turned away from
these new activists with a bit of disgust at their lack of ideological
commitment and their impatience with the repetitive sermons so beloved by
ideologists. ‘What we can say,’ wrote Michael afterward, ‘in any event, is that
whenever this sort of hostility toward where the public is at strikes into the
hearts of organisers, and often it does, the organisers need to rethink what
they are doing, and why they are doing it. Dissing the public, much less
avoiding it, as a way of explaining less than stellar
success, is rarely if ever a path toward political and social progress.’[i]
Unfortunately
the success of this appeal is likely to be close to zero because the attitudes
and behaviour of the activists in question flow from the dominant type of
institution – the ideology based organisation
- through which anti-capitalist activism has been pursued since at least the
time of the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Most anti-capitalists
are well aware of the kind of problem Michael found in Greece. Usually they
talk about it under the heading of ‘sectarianism’, which is inadequate because
the word denotes small, inward looking groups outside of the mainstream,
whereas these problematic relations and behaviour patterns are associated with
any ideology-based organisation and in fact becomes more dangerous the bigger
and more mainstream such organisations become(as they have many times).
Every anti-capitalist group and activist has many times issued the same
heartfelt appeal against the left’s sectarianism, dogmatism, intolerance and
arrogant contempt for those not in the know. Where these appeals were not
integrated with insights into how typical leftist institutions caused these
problems, they failed as they were bound to, despite the best intentions and
despite the many genuinely emancipatory ideas the leftists inside such
institutions stood for. If the IOPS was a laboratory experiment, the experiment
question would be something like this: will the proven revolutionary
commitment, skills, wisdom, resources and connections of the people organising
the IOPS plus the undoubted emancipatory merits of the proposed vision be
enough to avoid the typical problems associated with ideology based organising?
Alternatively, to what extent will the former mitigate the latter?
What sets the
IOPS apart?
The desire for a
libertarian community is at the centre of the IOPS vision and programme, but
this in itself was not enough to safeguard other organisations from the
negative consequences of the ideology based model. Anarchists and libertarian
Marxists were motivated by the same desire and yet, to put it mildly, were not
at all exempt from the sectarianism, abstention from broad struggles and
doctrinaire elitism whose substance is the way the ideology based organising
model brings revolutionaries into conflict with the regular struggles of
oppressed people. In fact, there is a strong argument that this desire, however
incompletely expressed, is the motive for all human activities, which would
certainly mean that it is not enough to overcome oppressive patterns of
behaviour.
Among its ‘key
goals and priorities’[ii]
the IOPS is unique in the history of revolutionary internationals in only this:
‘It centrally addresses economics/class,
politics, culture/race, kinship/gender, ecology, and international relations
without privileging any one focus above the rest.’ Other internationals have
shared the rest of the IOPS priorities but have privileged one focus. I think
we can accept that this is not the only measure IOPS members will use to avoid
the kind of hostile disconnection from the broader public that Michael has
witnessed in Greece. The organization will undoubtedly spend a lot of energy on
sharing knowledge and cultivating attitudes aimed at making sure the members
stay respectful of the general public and where it’s at. Once again the thing
is that this is not unique. One of the most valued documents, for example, for
the 3
rd and 4
th Internationals were Vladimir Lenin’s book
‘Left-wing Communism – an infantile disorder’ where he passionately decries the
same tendency towards contempt for the broad public among the members of the
Communist International. And this is just one example among many others of this
kind of appeal to leftists to be more in tune with the people they are supposed
to be building movements with. We are therefore left with the question of
whether ‘holism’, the commitment to not privilege one of the mentioned focus
areas above the others, is enough to overcome the problem of hostile
disconnection between revolutionaries and the general public when the latter do
rebel against oppressive aspects of society.
I of
course think it is not, simply because it does not address the cause of the
disconnection. Avoidable, counter-productive conflicts about focus areas tend
to occur between self-declared activists. In South Africa right now these
arguments occur between Marxists and anarchists arguing for the primacy of
class, feminists
arguing for the primacy of sex and gender, and proponents of black
consciousness arguing for the primacy of race. I am saying that these debates
are not necessarily a problem, but where they do assume self-destructive forms
from an anti-capitalist perspective it is fueled by the same ideology based
organizing I am arguing against. In other words, it is not the mere fact that
people have conflicting views around focus areas that leads to destructive
divisions. It is because these differences play out within a framework of
ideology based organizing that it leads proponents of one focus area into a
perspective where they have to frustrate and demobilize the proponents of other
focus areas in order to be successful. If you believe that only with a Marxist
or anarchist ideology based organization will class oppression be ended, or
only with a black conscious ideology based organisation will racist oppression
be ended, you will be failing in your revolutionary duty if you do not attack
people trying to organize on the basis of a rival ideology. From this
perspective a ‘holist’ organization will be just another rival, and maybe a
more dangerous or at least more irritating
one
at that. Instead of lessening, the divisive conflict is likely to intensify.
The
point here is that not only does holism not address the problem of hostile
disconnection between self-declared activists as it could be imagined to be
doing, but it certainly does not address the general problem of hostile
disconnection, which does not occur through disputes around focus areas but
between ideologically committed revolutionaries and a broad public not so or
not at all committed. This is the problem Michael saw in the Greek assemblies.
Holism can contribute to overcoming it, but then it must be part of an approach
that opposes ideology based organizing.
An
organisation based on ideological agreement
What
makes IOPS an ideology based organisation? Hal Draper wrote, ‘
A sect presents itself as the embodiment of the socialist movement,
though it is a membership organization whose boundary is set more or less
rigidly by the points in its political program rather than by its relation to
the social struggle.’[iii]
According to this definition the IOPS would be regarded as a sect. It embodies
participatory socialism, it is a membership organisation, and you become a
member by agreeing with the points in its political programme and vision. At
this point, however, it would be perhaps more useful to focus less attention on
whether IOPS is a sect or not and more on whether and how these institutional
features cause the hostile disconnection we are worried about.
The simplest way
to understand this in my view is in terms of purpose and currency. A capitalist
firm is started to increase its capital and the currency through which this
purpose is achieved is money. Individuals active within the firm will have to
justify their activity in terms of this purpose and currency. You can do
anything you like, as long as it either makes or saves money. Both owners and
workers experience the need to make money for the firm as an imposed necessity,
not a daily choice. You either do it or you go under, therefore the way to get
ahead around here is to make money for the firm. Regardless of the countless
and often important differences between capitalist firms they all induce this
kind of thinking and behaviour in their members, even if Bertell Ollman is put
in charge.[iv]
The ideology
based organisation is established to expand the influence and power of a
particular set of ideas and the currency is the knowledge of those ideas. In
contrast to the capitalist firm, where expansion takes place through gathering
currency, here expansion depends on the spreading of the currency. However, the
effects of institutionalised purpose and currency operate in both cases. You
would not, even could not, start a capitalist firm and then refuse to make
money. In the same way it would not make sense to start an ideology based
organisation and then not make its central purpose the propagating of that
ideology. Of course we live in a capitalist society, which means that capital
is the dominant institution, meaning the effects of capital often overrides and
always modifies those of other institutions so that many a church becomes just
another capitalist firm. However, it would still have to spread its message,
and as anyone in the US with a television knows, perhaps even with more
enthusiasm and technological savvy than other more narrowly gospel focused
churches. Unfortunately just like when we act on behalf of capitalist firms and
we have to treat people as a possible means to achieve the purpose of the firm
- we have to ignore their humanity - when we act on behalf of ideology based
organisations we are driven to treat people as a possible means through which
the ideology could be propagated, even when this brings us into conflict with their
human needs and inclinations.
None of this
means one ideology based organisation is just like another. The effects of this
way of organising are either enhanced or softened by at least three factors.
The first is the specific content of the ideology the organising is based on.
Groups based on the idea that slave labour in the service of the cause is fine
are likely to have a different impact from groups that believe in balanced job
complexes and participatory planning. The second is the relative purity of the
approach. Groups that believe all people and organisations outside their own
can only play a negative role will obviously be more hostile in their
interactions with other leftists and the general public than those who think
their ideology based group is an essential part of a broader movement that is
needed for success. The third factor is the general social conditions or
historical situation, the spirit of the times so to speak. When an ideology
based organisation captures state power it is usually able to exert such a
massive pull on people’s imagination that both supporters and opponents adopt
ideology based organising. Hal Draper traces the reappearance of what he called
socialist sects and I call ideology based organising to the time of the
Communist International when the Bolsheviks had captured state power in Russia
and used it to impose this organising method on revolutionaries everywhere.[v]
(Interestingly anti-Communism in this time also assumed increasingly hardened
ideological forms culminating in Nazism.)
In the case of
the IOPS, in my opinion, these three factors all operate in the direction of
mitigation rather than aggravation. The first two are very clear, with
emancipatory stances around class, race, kinship and politics and a vision of
members participating loyally in other movements certainly acting to soften the
hostile disconnection that ideology based organising inevitably causes. The
third factor is less clear. The initiators of the IOPS are clearly not in awe
of the Bolsheviks as either friends or enemies in the same way the
revolutionaries that initiated other international organising efforts were and
still are. But there is something
going on with Venezuela. Has Hugo Chavez’ praiseworthy opposition to US
imperialism, his democratic reforms, his social welfare interventions and his
socialist rhetoric rehabilitated the idea of the ideological socialist party?
If it has I want to point out immediately that his influence is nowhere close,
I mean like not on the same planet, as the stranglehold Vladimir Lenin held on
the imaginations of revolutionaries for a very, very long nine decades. So,
compared to other internationals, this is also a mitigating factor.
Furthermore, ideology based organising is to my knowledge universally practised
by revolutionary organisations at present, which means that the consistently
emancipatory nature of its vision, the commitment to self-management and the
revolutionary integrity and capacities of its leaders will make IOPS the best servant
of universal emancipation among existing revolutionary groups. But in this case
being the best is not good enough. Over time the blockages ideology based
organising place upon the struggle for human emancipation will overwhelm these
favourable circumstances. Institutional dynamics win out in the end. All of the
soul-destroying familiar problems associated with revolutionary organisations
will reappear – sectarian disregard, dogmatic haughtiness and opportunist
manipulation will come to describe the attitudes of the revolutionaries to the
people outside.
A libertarian
and class critique of ideology based organising
This should be
Karl Marx’ most famous quote:
‘The social
character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share
of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective,
confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their
subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise
out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general
exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for
each individual – their mutual interconnection here appears as something alien
to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection
between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal
capacity into objective wealth. The less social power the medium of exchange
possesses (and at this stage it is still closely bound to the nature of the
direct product of labour and the direct needs of the partners in exchange) the
greater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals
together, the patriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and
the guild system. (See my Notebook XII, 34 B.)[19]
Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing.
Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise
over persons. Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the
outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops
only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal
independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second
great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal
relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first
time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and
on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social
wealth, is the third stage.’[vi]
Granted, it does
not have the amiable simple-mindedness of ‘the point is to change the world’,
or the impetuous flamboyance of ‘the history of all society is the history of class struggles’, or even the unselfconscious
adolescent arrogance of ‘communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows
itself to be this solution’, and neither does it establish a darkly delicious
identity between drug abuse and religious worship like ‘religion is the opium
of the people.’ It nevertheless summarises the essence of what is useful and
unique in the work of Karl Marx.
Karl here proposes that we understand humanity’s long and varied
history as divided into just three great stages. In the first, relationships
between people are characterised by personal dependence. When people speak of
‘my lord’, ‘my husband’ or ‘my king’ they mean it in the same way as a slave
saying ‘my owner’. Slavery, feudalism, classical patriarchy and despotism can
all be seen to belong to this great stage. Where it is not based on naked force
it depends on the idea that some people are by birth and nature superior to
others and therefore entitled to be served.
Capitalist society forms part of the second great stage. Personal
dependence has broken down, though not completely. People are not supposed to
own other people anymore. Power, privilege and entitlements to economic,
political and military service that includes being waited on hand and foot are
no longer understood to be the birthright of superior people. Personal
independence increasingly becomes written into the law and the other branches
of the governing ideology. Society is seen as independent individuals competing
for scarce resources and this is called freedom. Yet relationships are still based
on domination and submission, often in ways that, compared to earlier times,
horrifically increase the suffering of the dominated. Only the mechanism of
oppression has changed. The powers of domination previously associated with
persons now become associated with things. When a serf was hungry it was pretty
clear that the reason was that land, labour and food was under the power of his
or her lord. When an unemployed member of capitalist society is hungry it
appears as the lack of a thing called money. The capitalist is protected by
thick layers of ideology from being implicated in the suffering of dominated
groups in the way that the feudal lord was. People are not understood to be
choiceless servants of others; rather everyone is seen as serving supra-personal
imperatives. Both the capitalist and the worker must conform to the demands of
‘the market’ and serve ‘the economy’, which is capital’s apparent desire to
expand, or face severe consequences. Capitalist owners and managers are
understood to not be privileged by birth but to have earned their privileges
through rendering more valued services to the economy than other less
privileged groups.
This mechanism, of oppressing people through the appearance of joint
service by formally independent individuals to a greater cause that justifies
the sacrifice of human needs and capacities, operates in all spheres of
capitalist society. The lowliest citizen and the high and mighty president are
both just humble servants of ‘the country’. Men and women are simply joint
builders, with different roles of course, of ‘the family’ and ‘the future of
the children’. These days even the health, appearance and happiness of the
individual have been made into great imperatives to which we feel pressured to
conform to. Karl Marx called this dynamic alienation, where our own creations
confront us as hostile beings, and he viewed its intensity and universality as the
distinctive feature of a society dominated by capital.
All organisations of capitalist society are as a consequence of this
to some extent ideology based, and the specifically ideology based organisation
is typical when it comes to organised intellectual activity. The constraints
this places on thought is seen in widely practised censorship of unorthodox
views and rewarding of orthodox ones,
and it is unseen but very much present in how loyalty to group orthodoxy act as
an internal censor for most people. The latter is the most common way liberty
of thought is suppressed in relatively small left groups. In every situation
and with regard to every question the individual militant sees his or her task
as acting as a conduit for an already agreed set of orthodox ideas. The
relevance or truthfulness of those ideas is not questioned. In a situation of
competing ideologies this becomes more pronounced, as it is virtually
impossible to seriously entertain self-doubts when your task is to win an
ideological war. When this war comes to active persecution of the left, as it
invariably does, it adds another powerful impulse towards loyalty to your
group’s established orthodoxy. The temptation to give up your human capacity to
think to the service of the ideas of the party or the movement becomes
impossible to resist for all but the most unfortunately enquiring, bull-headed
and unpleasant individuals, who tend to become mere memories of heroes or
traitors quite quickly. Ideology based organising is the sworn enemy of full
free individuality for all supported by the sum total of social wealth and
co-operation, which alone can make up a libertarian community that includes all
humans. It is made up of alienated intellectual capacity in the same way that
the substance of capital is alienated labour power.
What are the class divisions within ideology based organising? Who
dominates, who submits? If we think on a society wide scale it is clear that
this way of being in the world supports the power of the state-capitalist elite
and therefore its dominating class can be said to be this very elite. However
it is when we move closer to examine the internal dynamics of ideology based
organising that it really gets interesting. For it is not exactly rich
capitalists and powerful statesmen that staff the dingy offices and bare living
rooms from where left ideologists set out to change the world.
To understand, from a class point of view, the people that directly
control and benefit from ideology based organising where must perhaps go back
to the beginning. Social class under capitalism is firstly a distinction
between people based on wealth. But Michael Albert among others has a put a lot
of effort into promoting the idea that class distinctions are about more than
wealth difference, that it is crucially also about the role individuals play in
the workplace.[vii]Yes, the owner of a capitalist business is in all probability richer
than the manager he employs, and both of them are almost certainly richer than
their workers, but that is not the only important thing that makes up the
three-way class differences between them. ‘Empowering work’ is monopolised by
the manager and his class while the workers are confined to boring and
burdensome tasks. Empowering work is here understood as tasks that stimulate
and develop the creative powersthat
set humans apart from other animals, as well as roles that put some in
positions to make decisions for others and confer status on the decision makers.
To this we could add the role of enforcement, pressuring people to conform to
desired patterns of behaviour and to subordinate to authority. The class that
lays claim to these tasks and the rewards that accompany them has been called
the coordinator class by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel and the
professional-managerial class by John and Barbara Ehrenreich.[viii]
Could it be that the professional revolutionaries in charge of left
ideology based organising are really members of the professional-managerial
class? I am not speaking of the state and party managers in the Soviet Union
and similar societies who undoubtedly were and are, nor about the fact that
many revolutionaries aspire to be like them, nor about the fact that in their
lives outside of revolutionary organising a good many revolutionary activists
have the qualifications and even jobs of members of this class. I am asking:
does the mere fact of being a leader or even just a member of an ideology based
organising project qualify you as a member of the professional-managerial
class? Even when you have no intention of becoming an official manager or
professional and you swear by self-management and classlessness?
Hesitation to replying yes I think concerns the issue of privilege.
Although the professional-managerial class is distinguished from the classes
below them by their roles in collective activity, the many profound privileges
they are awarded because they monopolise these roles constitute an equally
important a distinction; it is, after all, what motivates the members of this
class. Since the 1950s the wealth of the upper layers of this class has grown
exponentially, and in the current neo-liberal era it has positively exploded.[ix]Revolutionary organisers have of course
been left out of these gains. Working for the overthrow of capitalist society
remains as unprofitable as it has always been. So how can we think of the
people doing this as members of the privileged professional-managerial class?
As a rule, when it comes to revolutionaries, ideology based
organising do not confer economic privileges on its leaders; they do not get to satisfy, through
this relationship, their money-associated needs at the expense of or above
others. However, in my view they do
gain very important privileges from their role in this type of organising. In
terms of the way the psychologist Abraham Maslow described human needs[x], we could say the leaders in
revolutionary organising processes that are based on ideology get to satisfy
their higher needs for self-actualisation, esteem and often for love and
belonging at the expense of and from a position above the other people involved
in this social relationship. In fact ideology based organising could be seen as
turning Maslow’s hierarchy of needs upside down, with the need for
self-actualisation becoming primary. Arguably deliberately suppressing some of
your needs in favour of others is already oppressive, but it is in the
encounter with outsiders or insiders of lower rank that the true oppressive
nature of this form of organising comes to the fore most clearly. Outsiders pay
a heavy price in frustration, confusion, boredom and emotional distress when
they try to simply come together to discuss and act on the many problems
capitalist society causes them but are instead subjected to the repetitive
lectures, esoteric language, patronising dismissals, sectarian squabbles and
moralistic condemnations that are the stock in trade of ideologists. Clearly when the ideologists are making
history, serving the cause and doing their revolutionary duty, the nice
feelings that legitimately flow from these glorious activities come at the
expense of all the unfortunates who have ever innocently come to a meeting
where ideology based organising managed to get space for expression.
I therefore see the leftists in charge of ideology based organising
as a special section of the professional-managerial class. Their expertise, the
source of their influence and power, is the knowledge of their particular ideology
and their capacity to articulate it. They dissent from official capitalist
ideology but organise in ways that reproduce the class hierarchy of capitalist
society. This hierarchy that privileges them is hidden or justified by the idea
of joint submission to a higher power, in this case their preferred ideology,
where ideas seemingly transcend their annoyingly uncertain status as the rather
imperfect products of human minds, and become an independent force with the
power to determine human welfare. They are the carriers of certainty in an
uncertain world and thus feel entitled or actually obliged to impose.[xi]
The opposite of ideology based organising
Is it really possible to have a revolutionary organisation without
an ideology?
We all have a worldview. It might lack internal consistency and
explicit formulation, but it is there nevertheless. All our actions are
influenced by it, and when it becomes the deliberate basis for these actions
our worldview is an ideology like any other, which seemingly suggests that
revolutionaries should strive to base their organising on a correct ideology,
rather than on no ideology, the latter being impossible or unworkable. But this
is not true. Yes, we all have a worldview and even arguably an ideology, but
that does not mean our organisations have to have one. Ascribing human
characteristics to social institutions is precisely the typical workings of
oppressive relations in capitalist society; it is alienation, because an
organisation of thousandsof members with a single worldview can
only happen if those members give up bits and pieces of their individual
worldviews. In this process the members suppress their human needs and
characteristics in favour of the institution. They become less human! It is
entirely avoidable.
Let us take the example of two revolutionary organisations from the
Russian revolution – the factory committees and the Bolshevik party. The
Bolsheviks had a comprehensive ideology worked out over many years and codified
in programmatic documents.[xii] The factory committees had no such
thing. They were simply the assembled workers at a particular factory and what
they decided to do and delegate. Their politics did not express a codified
ideology; it expressed the will of whoever was at the assembly.[xiii] Of course the Bolsheviks had often acted
in ways that clashed with their ideology, and the factory committees (less
often) in ways that clashed with the will of the assembled workers, but this
did not negate the basic nature of the one or the other. Both were revolutionary,
but where the Bolshevik Party was an ideology based organisation, the factory
committees were decidedly the opposite. It did not seek to base itself on
ideological agreement; instead its base was a social group – the workers -
rebelling against their oppression. The opposition between these two types of
organising and the classes it serves played out in a zero-sum, one-must-die struggle
between the Bolshevik Party and the factory committees, which the latter, and
the workers who constituted them, lost very badly.[xiv]
The factory committees of the Russian Revolution were by no means
unique. Not in Russia of that time and not in general. The soviets were also
examples during the Russian Revolution. In South Africa in 1980s we saw the
appearance of street committees, civic movements and trade union locals that
were essentially the same kind of thing. In all revolutionary situations this
type of organs appeared – revolutionary organisations based on rebelling
oppressed groups. Lately the popular assemblies in Greece and Argentina that
sprang up during revolts against neo-liberalism reminded us of this. To get a clearer
picture of rebellion based organising I propose we look at the following
issues: historical occurrence, revolutionary effectiveness and practical
implications.
Historical occurrence
Historically, in revolutionary situations mass organs of rebellion
based organising inevitably appeared, but were either destroyed by the old
ruling classes, or mixed up, taken over and also ultimately destroyed by
ideology based organising. We can therefore say that rebellion based organising
have been universally present where large numbers of oppressed people have
risen against their oppressors, but have proved to be neither enduring, nor
pure. Based on this same history we can with confidence conclude that the
revolutionary professional-managerial class ideologists had acted to destroy
the character and leaders of rebellion based organising as soon as they were
strong enough to do so. The factory committees and soviet and Russia were
typical examples. After the Bolshevik party took over and destroyed these
rebellion based organisations, they gave their names to ideology based
formations that the party had created to subordinate the workers to the Russian
state.[xv]
During the Spanish Revolution of 1936 onwards the same hostility was
expressed when the Stalinist Communist Party backed by the Soviet state
destroyed all working class organisations not under their control whether
ideology or rebellion based.[xvi]But perhaps less known is the conflict
between anarchist ideologists and rebelling workers and peasants. Anarchist
leaders joined the capitalist government in 1936 thereby setting themselves
against the efforts of workers and peasant to seize factories and land from the
capitalists and landlords. In his book Workers
against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts,
Michael Seidman documents several authoritarian actions by anarchist leaders
clearly aimed at undermining and punishing worker and peasant rebelliousness. The
anarchist union CNT made a decision that workers could be dismissed for
‘laziness and immorality’ and that workers should 'have a file where the
details of their professional and social personalities will be registered,'
which was intended for monitoring and control. GarcÃa Oliver was the minister of justice and a CNT representative in the
government. He was also the initiator of labour camps. Even the Friends of
Durutti, who up to today has the reputation as the most principled of the
anarchists, advocated forced labour.[xvii]
The Spanish revolution was a turning point I think. It was the last
revolution whose leading ideology and activists were prepared outside of the
template imposed on revolutionaries by the leadership of the Russian
revolution, and it showed that this template was opposed to independent
organisations of the oppressed masses to the extent where its promoters would
rather hand victory to the fascists than accept the right of these masses to
rebel in their own name under their own control. Even the Cuban revolution
followed this template, despite the leadership not having direct links of
accountability to the Soviet Union. After Spain mass rebellion based organising
still appear in revolutions, but it is much weakened, more often mixed up with
and controlled by ideological organisations from the start. As a result the
conflict between the two is more hidden and often appears as factional fights
between different wings of the same movement. In Cuba, for example, the
subordination of the trade unions to the ruling party and state took place
through the Castro leadership replacing a democratically elected leadership
with their own appointees and changing the structure of the unions in
centralist, authoritarian directions. The union leaders that were removed were
also Fidelistas.[xviii]
One can argue that it was not ideology based organising that
inspired these actions by revolutionary leaders against oppressed people; that
they were responding to other pressures that would have induced the same
behaviour in leaders of rebellion based organisations. This obscures the
specific role of ideology based organising. Revolutionary leaders might have
faced the very same temptation towards authoritarian impositions even when they
were not part of ideology based organisations, but the fact that they were so
organised indeed facilitated authoritarianism because one the one hand they
were conveniently organised separately from and outside of the control of the
rebelling masses and on the other their ideology is what gave them the belief
that they knew better than these masses and were therefore entitled to impose.
In any case, in no way does this disprove the point I am making here: rebellion
based organising has appeared as revolutionary mass formations in every
revolution but has been defeated by either the old ruling classes or by
organisations based on ideologies serving a section of the
professional-managerial classes.
Two questions remain. If rebellion based organising that threatens
the power of the rulers is arguably what defines revolutionary times, what
happens in non-revolutionary times like ours? And, what can we learn about
rebellion based organising as a self-conscious approach from revolutionary
literature?
In my view the answer to the first question should start with the
observation that collective rebellions against oppression are not always
revolutionary. We can therefore say that rebellion based organising is very
common. Every oppressed group rebels periodically against at least some aspects
of their oppression, and in most cases they do not set ideological agreement as
a condition for joining their struggles and organisations. Workers fighting for
higher wages generally seek to organise other workers and supporters interested
in joining this fight without requiring them to agree on a particular ideology.
However, take the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) as
an example. No organiser in a Cosatu union would dream of insisting on
ideological agreement before allowing workers to join the union’s struggles for
better wages and working conditions. At the same time Cosatu is strongly
ideological and these same organisers would hardly dare to challenge the basic
ideology in public or even internally. The few that do inevitably are reprimanded,
disciplined and often dismissed or expelled by the leadership. The union’s
public pronouncements and engagements are controlled from the top to be always framed
in the terms and orientation of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR)
ideology that it shares with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the
African National Congress (ANC).[xix] Does this mean Cosatu is ideology based?
Indeed it does. It is obviously mixed, as its method of recruitment
and many of its activities is that of a rebellion based organisation, but the
fact is, in this mixture the characteristics of an ideology based organisation
is dominant. For many years the primary role of Cosatu has been to defend the
ideology and politics of the tripartite alliance that it is part of with the
SACP and the ANC, instead of focusing on organising worker rebellions.[xx]During the recent strike and police
massacre of mineworkers in Marikana this has become especially clear, with the
mineworkers needing to break from Cosatu in order to fight for the wage
increase they wanted, and the leaders of Cosatu affiliate clearly siding with
the employers against the workers.[xxi] Clearly the issue here is not that
Cosatu spends too much time promoting NDR ideology and too little on mobilising
workers. It is that its ideological basis undermines the mobilisation of
workers.
This has a lot to do with the specifics of Cosatu’s ideology, social
composition and organisational structure. The ideology commits it to support
black capital that in South Africa has no independence from white capital, the
social composition sees a minority of predominantly male union leaders who by
their income and role belong to the professional-managerial class dominate a
majority of workers in permanent jobs and exclude the unemployed and the
precariously employed, and the organisational structure is centralist in that
it subordinates members, workplace structures and lower level branches to the
top structures. These factors will undermine worker mobilisation even in a
relatively pure rebellion based organisation. However, we cannot get away from
the fact that Cosatu functions like an ideology based organisation in crucial
ways and that this is what gives its ideology, social composition and
organisational structure coherence, power and the capacity to reproduce. Also,
as I have already argued, even if the union had a more radical ideology as its
base, it will still have to use the same methods of propagating and enforcing ideological
conformity that undermine worker mobilisation as we have seen when more radical
Marxists or anarchists have tried to form ideologically pure unions.[xxii]
The point here is that although Cosatu started out of rebellion
based organising and still engage in it in some ways, it is in fact dominated
by ideology based organising. I think this is typical. Resistance tend to start
out as rebellion based organising, even when initiated by ideologists who tend
to put their ideology aside in the beginning, but when it consolidates it does
so as mixed organisations dominated by ideology. In my opinion this expresses
three closely intertwined factors. The first two I have mentioned already:
firstly organisations tend to be ideology based in capitalist society because
its members are conditioned to act in the service of ideological abstractions,
and secondly, the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution turned
out to be an epoch making victory for ideology based organising as far as capturing
the attention and imagination of revolutionaries are concerned. The third
factor is the absence of self-conscious, open opposition to ideology based
organising among revolutionaries.
My reading of revolutionary literature finds a complete absence of
any attempt to articulate an approach to revolutionary organising that breaks
from the ideology based model since at least 1872 when the International
Workingmen’s Association (First International) split at its congress in The Hague,
until 1969 when the New York Radical Feminists started the Stanton-Anthony
Brigade, their first consciousness-raising group. The outcome of the Russian
revolution intensified the domination of the ideology based model with the
force of an atomic explosion. With Stalinism it assumes the shape of a kind of
madness that infects its supporters and rivals alike. Ideologies are pushed
with the fanaticism driven by the vision that the only possible alternative to
the realisation of the ideology in question is the utter destruction of the
human race. Among the left there is an ever present awareness of sectarianism
and its dangers, there are searing critiques of totalitarianism and its evils,
but it is all done within the framework of ideology based organising. The task
is posed as finding the proper, the ‘correct’ ideology to base our
relationships on. Was it even possible to articulate the alternative in the
three decades after the end of the Spanish Civil War? In the countless articles
and books of the revolutionary mainstream, and to my knowledge even of the
fringes, it was never done.
Compared to this era of ‘darkness at noon’ the late 1960s/early
1970s represents a breaking dawn. In four places, independently of each other
as far as I can tell, the search for an alternative to organisations based
primarily on ideology is expressed in revolutionary writings. The new pioneers
are the second wave feminists around Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, who
proposes consciousness-raising groups as the main method of a process of
revolutionary organising open to all women regardless of their ideological
orientation as long as they are willing to question sexism in its many forms.[xxiii] Shortly after in Apartheid South Africa,
Steve Biko posits blackness, not ideology, as the basis for revolutionary
organising. ‘Black Consciousness,’ he writes,
‘is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together
with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness of their
skin - and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles
that bind them to perpetual servitude.’[xxiv]
At the same time the American Marxist Hal Draper come to the conclusion that
sectarianism among revolutionaries are not just the result of bad attitudes,
but of the institutional framework within which organising happens. He
therefore proposes his idea of a propaganda centre that is not only
subjectively opposed to leftist sects but also institutionally. And Jacques Camatte,
a French Marxist, leads a breakaway from the International Communist Party and
declares a complete disillusionment with revolutionary ‘groupuscles’ who try to
substitute themselves for the working class.[xxv]
Alas, the dawn was false. For a complex of reasons connected to the
retreat of the world wide mass rebellions of this time, none of these writers
complete their work or manage to find successors to carry it on. The feminists
of the second wave never give up consciousness raising groups as an organising
strategy, but they do not tie it to an open struggle against ideology based
organising and therefore end up succumbing to its attraction. Soon the
movement, having grown so explosively and raised such magnificent hopes,
flounders in soul-destroying internal conflicts around the proper ideology upon
which to based feminist organisations. Biko lies dead in a police cell, and his
colleagues either abandon black consciousness or incorporate it into an
ideology whose dominant elements are Marxism and nationalism. The black
consciousness movement becomes just another participant in the constant rivalry
between ideology based organisations. Hal Draper proposes as an alternative to
the sect another ideology based organisation – the propaganda centre. His
searching critique of the effects of the Communist International on left
consciousness and his quest for an institutional alternative to sects and
sectarianism are effectively ignored. Jacques Camatte goes through Marxism with
a fine tooth comb, sees its contradictions, and concludes that working class
revolution is impossible and revolutionary organising futile.
We have to wait 20 years through the time of triumphant
neo-liberalism and the breaking up of the Soviet Union before revolutionary
writers start grappling with the question of rebellion based organising again. Istvan
Meszaros, in a giant leap for Marxism, in 1994 writes that Vladimir Lenin’s
idea that ‘socialist consciousness had to be brought to the working class from
the outside proved to be historically unviable
in the course of twentieth century developments.’[xxvi]Instead of Lenin’s vanguard party, he recommends ‘Marx’s
original idea of producing “communist consciousness on a mass scale” – with its
necessary implication of an inherently open organisational structure’.[xxvii]
More than a decade later he adds constant ‘self-critique’ as a vital element of
the transition to emancipation.[xxviii]
Clearly Meszaros, in his rather ponderous Hegelian way, has turned against
ideology based towards rebellion based organising. But his ‘communist
consciousness’ lacks definition apart from including a commitment to
‘self-critique,’ which itself seem to be a subjective orientation of the
members of this ‘open organisational structure’. It is not clear at all how
exactly the latter will differ in structure from its opposite.
The next
occurrence is marked by the publication of Cyril Smith’s book Marx at the millennium in 1998. Smith
spent a lifetime in one of the most grotesque sects in the Trotskyist tradition
before embarking on the work of ‘rescuing Marx from the distortions of the
Marxists’. In a series of articles and books[xxix]
he excavated and explained Marx’ notion of communist consciousness comparing it
in turn to all its main rivals starting with Marxism-Leninism and including
classical philosophy, historical materialism, political economy, mysticism and
the main ideas of the Enlightenment. Smith left us with the most complete,
consistent
and accessible exposition of Karl Marx’ ideas on the kind of revolutionary
consciousness that makes universal human emancipation possible. He did not have
the opportunity to consider the organisational implications of this; although
he knew very well that ideology based organisations do not serve such a vision
of emancipation.
Revolutionary
effectiveness
The effectiveness I claim for rebellion based organising cannot be
that it always works or even that it is guaranteed to work at some point – it
often fails in fact, and, since the destruction of human society has become a
real possibility, no other outcome can claim certainty. What I do claim is firstly that it is the only
approach that has a chance of achieving a society where every individual is
free and all people work together to support and expand this freedom; and
secondly that all available evidence show that rebellion based organising has a
high to very high chance of successfully making this libertarian communist
revolution.
A society such as the one envisioned by libertarian communists – a
society of perfect liberty, equality and solidarity – is of course a splendid
idea. Even a philosopher of the calibre of Mitt Romney would hardly object to it in principle.
His reasons for rejecting the idea would be practical, like say ‘we can’t
afford it’ or ‘it would threaten the job security of the brave men and women of
America’s armed forces.’ But if this vision is just one idea
among others, why would it triumph? Why can we foresee a society where Romney’s
ideas, which might be more popular now, have died out, but we cannot foresee a
time where humans are living without this desire for expanding freedom and
deepening togetherness? The answer my friends is that this desire, like the
capacity to laugh and the need to eat, is part of human nature; we can study
humans in all the different situations they have had to face and we will never
find them without it. What we need to explain therefore is not really how a society
of unqualified freedom, equality and solidarity is possible, but how a society
based on institutionalised oppression is possible, given the desire and
capacityfor liberty and social support of every
individual member of society. How can beings that each want to be free constitute a social order that is
oppressive?
We are born into a society divided along the lines of class, sex,
race/culture and authority. Crucially these divisions are not simply
differences, but institutionalised relationships setting up the members of one
group against the members of the other. Men and women may or may not differ in
important ways, but that is not at issue here. The issue is that in sexual
cultures based on the patriarchal family, men can only advance their powers and
choices and their access to social resources and support at the cost of women,
and women can only liberate themselves at the cost of men because all of them,
including the few that sometimes support feminism, benefit from
institutionalised male privilege. Workers, managers and capitalists do not
simply play different roles in the workplace. They are trapped in relations of
mutual antagonism by the institution of capital. Workers have to risk blood and
nerves in fighting capitalists and managers for the slightest chance to meet
their needs and develop their creative powers. Outside the institution of
racism there are no black or white humans. But within the present society of
structural and ideological racism, black people will win freedom at the expense
of whites or they will not win it at all. Those at the bottom of the social
hierarchy mediated and guaranteed by the state will never see freedom and
equality if they do not overthrow the authority of those at the top. In this
situation, when we seek satisfaction for our desire for freedom and solidarity within the roles designated to us by
capitalism’s social institutions, we of course reproduce this oppressive order.
When we trace the history of the defining institutions of capitalist
society – which I cannot do here -we find the same principle at work. Human
beings are struggling to cooperate in meeting their needs and developing their
powers. They are doing so in social conditions they have inherited from the
past. Part of these conditions is the limits of the human creative capacities developed up to that point and the
institutional framework within which these capacities are used and developed.
This institutionalised inequality places similar constraints on individual
freedom and social solidarity as we see in capitalist society, although the
specific institutions, divisions and relationships are of course different. The
constraints are of two kinds. Firstly, increasing freedom and social support
for oppressor groups are only possible at the expense of oppressed groups, and
the other way around. Secondly, the relatively low level of creative capacity
means a society of equals is only possible through enforcing restraints on
liberty. The first scenario - of zero-sum conflicts between oppressors and
oppressed - is present everywhere in recorded history. The second one - of
attempts to establish societies based on equality, mutual aid, and more or less
strictly enforced limitations on consumption and obligatory participation in
socially valued activities–is common in the story of pre-historic societies,[xxx] and is an episodic outcome in the recorded
history of revolutions led by oppressed groups.[xxxi] Therefore we can understand the defining
institutions of capitalist society – capital, the state, the patriarchal family
and exclusive cultural communities – as outcomes of partially successful
struggles for fully developed individual liberty and social co-operation.
The history of capitalist society is a continuation of this history
of constant struggles between oppressors and oppressed and occasional
revolutions defined by attempts of the oppressed to remake society as an
all-inclusive libertarian co-operative, in other words a society of universal
emancipation. And although none of the great anti-capitalist revolutions has so
far done so for very long, this history reveals a clear basis for the belief
that rebellion based organising will probably succeed in achieving this ever
longed for universal emancipation.
The first and most important element of this basis is the fact that
rebellion inspired by the vision of the most radical versions of freedom, equality
and solidarity is not simply one good idea that some are trying to impose on
others. It is part of the make-up of human beings. As long as there is a human
society there will be this striving. And as long as people are striving for
such a society, there is a chance they will succeed, a chance that grows bigger
with time. If we view this from the standpoint of the entire future of
humanity, the chances must be excellent, even certain except for the
possibility of human extinction. In my view, admittedly intuitive to a large
extent, humanity in the past has had to overcome far greater difficulties to
just survive than the ones we have to overcome to be free.
The second element we get from history has to do with the nature of
capital. Under the power of this institution human capacity has developed to
levels that earlier could hardly be foreseen. Given this present productiveness
of human co-operation, we can now foresee the real possibility of a
revolutionary transition to a society of unpoliced equality. Here I think it is
important to say that this capacity should not be confused with the
productivity of the employees of a capitalist firm. Such productivity is profit
driven and often counter-productive for social well-being. The capacities I
have in mind is the sum total of resources, knowledge, skills and connections
we have developed to meet human needs. The mere existence of these and the
concentration of a critical mass of it in the direct control of the oppressed,
means that a post-capitalist society of equals can transition to a stage where
the enforcement of limitations and obligations around consumption and
participation in productive activity is no longer necessary.[xxxii] This will make the development of a new
ruling class and the relapse of society into oppressiveness finally
impossible.
Another element is the existence of a large and potentially strong
enough group of people whose fundamental interests are bound up with the
overthrow of capitalist society. The same mad greed of capital that is behind
the explosion of human productive capacity conditions the oppressed in
important ways. Capitalists can never be content with their levels of wealth
and profits. A never-ending scramble to expand both is institutionalised in the
structure of capital. The oppressed are continuously under attack and
continuously provoked into rebellion. Under capital therefore the oppressed are
always confronted with opportunities to become competent rebels.
Patriarchy, ethnic oppression and the state are all older than
capital, but have all been incorporated, transformed and subordinated by it to
serve its exploitative designs. The struggles of women against sexism, of
oppressed nationalities against racism and communal oppression, and of those of
no or low rank against state power have thus become struggles against capital,
in common with the struggles of the working class. More than this, the very
effect of capitalist patriarchy, racism and statism has been to push women,
blacks and the rankless into doing the most precarious, burdensome, boring and
unrewarded kinds of work. The worst off sections of the working class are
therefore overwhelmingly drawn from these groups. As a result there has never
been a sustained mass uprising of the working class against capitalism that was
not at the same time a mass rebellion against sexism, racism and state power.
The working class simply cannot liberate itself without overthrowing these
institutions. Any attempt to promote the interests of workers in collaboration
with sexism, racism and the state is therefore bound to have oppressive
results. The opposite also applies. Women, oppressed nationalities and the
victims of the state cannot abolish sexism, communal oppression and the
authority of the state, if their working class members do not liberate
themselves from the tentacles of capital. When women rebel against sexism and
blacks against racism, they threaten the male and white privilege of many
workers, but they do not threaten anti-capitalist revolution; they advance it. Capital
itself therefore creates a basis for a successful fight for revolutionary unity
and solidarity among all its oppressed groups.
A question that remains is that of subjective readiness. The factors
in favour of successful revolution are always at work in capitalist society,
yet revolutions are not everyday things. People might live in a state of
permanent rebellion, but mostly they confine themselves to individual actions
and organising for particular reforms. Only rarely do the oppressed masses feel
ready to overthrow capitalist society as such. What does this readiness consist
of? And how does it come about?
The essence of revolutionary readiness is an attitude that refuses
to be treated as a lesser human being. A black, woman worker that rejects all
the efforts of sexist, racist and classist society to condition and force her
to accept inferior social roles and status to that of whites, men, managers and
capitalists, is a revolutionary. It does not matter that she cannot read or
have never heard of Lenin, it does not matter that she does not understand the
meaning of the financialisation of the economy, it does not matter that she
believes in God and visits a sangoma, as long as she knows that she is entitled
to the same social resources to meet her needs and develop her talents as any
other member of society, and as longs as she is prepared to act on that
knowledge, she is a revolutionary. When this attitude comes to be shared by a
critical mass among the oppressed, the best of times, revolutionary times, have
arrived.
The important thing about this knowledge is that it is instantly
accessible to everyone and this makes possible a revolutionary movement of
equals that includes the vast majority. But is it enough? Does knowing their
full humanity and being prepared to fight for it put the oppressed in a
position to overthrow oppression? Yes and no. No, because the business of
overthrowing capitalist society and creating a society of free equals requires
that the revolutionary masses have a certain minimum level of knowledge and
skill in all fields including politics, economics, organising, psychology,
self-defence, healthcare, to name just a few. But fundamentally yes, because
this factual knowledge and technical skills are to a decisive degree already mastered
by the oppressed masses. The people making revolution are the same people doing
most of the productive work in capitalist society. They are the same people who
learn the political-economic-sexual-communal structure of capitalist society
through the pains of their hearts and bodies every day. They do not need
experts to tell them how to care for one another and who their enemies and
friends are. If they lack the habit of making decisions and the skills of
organisation they will pick it up in the natural course of the struggle. Yes,
the revolutionary attitude is enough because it will inspire them to use and
acquire all the other knowledge they need to free themselves.
The substance of revolutionary organising is therefore the
cultivation and acting out of an attitude among the oppressed of being willing,
and only being willing, to work together as free and equal individuals. There
are many facts and skills that are crucial and many more that are important for
revolutionaries to learn, but all of these are secondary to learning the
revolutionary spirit, which some seem to be born with fully developed, but the
rest of us carry in an undeveloped state and have to nurture to maturity
through appropriate experience and reflection. The goal of this reflection is
self-knowledge that is individual and social at the same time. To ‘know
thyself’ for a human being is to ‘know thy society and thy place in it,’ because
this is what we are – individuals both created by society and creating it.
Feminists understood this when they said, ‘The personal is political,’ meaning
that both the causes and solutions to the problems of individual women are to
be found in social institutions, in how we live together. What the oppressed
need to understand therefore is how social institutions produce them as both
oppressed people and potential liberators. With regards to both, the
communication of facts disconnected from personal experience is wholly
inadequate. More than this, attempts to organise revolutionary movements by
appealing to knowledge disconnected from personal experience of oppression and
by pressurising people into submission to revolutionary authority can only
result in the absurdities of sects and the monstrosities of totalitarianism. Revolutionary
movements wanting universal emancipation must be internally consistent with
this goal. To fully develop as liberators people need to experience themselves
as liberated. When they do come into touch with their oppression it must strike
them as abnormal, perverse and intolerable. Revolutionary organising of this
kind is primarily about creating times and places where people relate to each
other as free equals working together on fighting the people and institutions
that oppress them, with the overarching purpose of extending such free
relations to everyone all the time. The effectiveness of such an approach in
transforming large masses of docile, even servile victims into intractable
rebels has played a part in all historical progress towards emancipation.
Practical implications
I am not aware of any example of revolutionary rebellion based
organising being put into practice with consistency. The closest that any group
came to this was in some wings of Second Wave Feminism, which coincidentally
constituted the most revolutionary political tendency ever. But it should be
clear that all of the defining parts of this approach have been practised by
many people for a long time. The problem is that this approach is very
sensitive. Leaving out even one of these parts robs it of its effectiveness, if
we understand effectiveness as its capacity to promote and achieve universal
emancipation. Adding even one incompatible part has a similar effect. From the
start therefore it should be clear that rebellion based organising that is
effective and revolutionary need to incorporate all of its defining parts and
add nothing that conflicts with any of it.
The different parts have all been elaborated elsewhere, so I will
confine myself to brief descriptions. Obviously the starting point is the
rebellions of oppressed groups that give rise to organisations open to all
people similarly rebelling. Revolutionary organising should actually be seen as
nothing more than the efforts to give such rebellions the best possible chance
of the most comprehensive possible success. Revolutionaries are therefore first
of all members and supporters of community, worker and women based movements
who work to strengthen these movements in terms of organisational capacities
and revolutionary commitments. All the parts of rebellion based organising
happen within this context. Its ideal organisational base is an open, mass orientated
association engaged in fighting for the immediate interests of an oppressed
group against their oppressors. Where such associations do not exist, as is
often the case, the task is to work towards it, either from scratch or from
within the closest approximations of it that may exist. This work has the
following aspects: mental emancipation, propagate by doing, serving immediate
interests and direct action.
The activities specifically aimed at
emancipating the oppressed from mental slavery include what Marx and some of
his supporters call critique and are fulfilled in what feminists call
consciousness raising groups, because ‘none but ourselves can free our minds.’[xxxiii] Critique according to Marx, Smith and
Meszaros is not simply saying an idea is wrong, but also explaining why and how
a particular way of living produces that idea, and also explaining why and how
that way of life will pass away together with its attending idea and what will
replace it. Our ways of living are conditioned by the social system that gives
us only so many options to choose from, none of which is freedom. Therefore,
critique of capitalist ideology, which is also critique of the way we live, is
always also self-critique. Living as steely eyed revolutionaries might seem the
most sensible thing now, but this way of life is also destined to pass away. And
even the steeliest among us collaborate with the system in one way or another
to survive. The same fact – of our involvement in
reproducing the system that oppresses us – that makes us potential liberators
also necessitates constant self-critique. Of particular importance is the
critique of ideology based organising, for the simple reason that this aspect
of capitalist society has been almost completely neglected by revolutionaries
up to now. In this the written word has an important role to play, but carries
a danger that must be avoided if we want any chance of success.
The
great benefit of the written word is of course that it allows us to cooperate
with people who are not there. When we want to critique the ensemble of our
social relations that we call the state we can get help from Mikhail Bakunin.
This is great that we do not have to start from scratch all the time, that we
have bodies of helpful knowledge disconnected from living bodies. We may even
choose to identify with a specific tradition within these bodies of knowledge
like anarchism for example, but when we proceed to base our organisations on
this identification we are instituting an ideology based organisation with all
its associated problems. I would recommend revolutionary writers to work
together as loose networks and informal groups. If for practical reasons we
need to form an organisation separate from the membership based movements of
the oppressed to produce and disseminate revolutionary critiques, we of course
will tend to work with people close to us in their views, but we should not
make ideological agreement a condition for membership at all.
One
sign of the dominance of ideology based organising is that producing and
disseminating written material tend to be the main preoccupation of so many
revolutionaries. Yet writing can only take us so far. The best model for doing
the intellectual work of mental liberation is the consciousness raising group
pioneered by the New York Radical Feminists. From the guidelines issued by this
group[xxxiv] it is clear that the purpose of
consciousness raising is to encourage people to become revolutionaries without
requiring them to commit to a body of pre-existing writings that takes years to
master. It is based on the recognition that everybody has the experience of
oppression and the inclination to rebel, and that the exploration of these is
the only starting point for revolutionary education aimed at full liberation.
The way the consciousness raising group is instituted breaks down both the
hierarchical division between learners and teachers and the imagined separation
of social scientists from the social relations they are studying, both of which
reflect the alienation of people from their life activities under capitalism. It
is here that revolutionary critique finds its proper setting as self-knowledge
that is at once individual and social, that is always driven by the vision of
the most complete liberation possible, that is free, equal and solidaristic in
both its aims and methods, and that is the defining attribute of the humans gathered
there instead of a dead body of work.
The
importance of this task of making the internal relationships, structures and
tactics of the revolutionary movement accord as close as possible to its aim of
full emancipation goes beyond the special tasks of mental liberation. All of
the activities of the movement must incorporate this task or victory will not
be possible. The anarchist movement provides us with most of the historical
examples of revolutionaries trying to prefigure the society they want in their
day to day structures for organising and decision making.[xxxv]Such structures have included small, local,
autonomous groups as the basic unit of the movement trough which all decisions
are made and activities pursued. Where tasks require broader coordination it is
done through voluntary federation of these groups. The movement avoids
delegating authority and even tasks to individuals. When this is unavoidable
there are several measures to combat the rise of authoritarianism. Firstly,
delegates are given binding mandates. Their brief is to carry out these
mandates, not to make decisions on behalf of others. Secondly, delegates are made instantly
and easily recallable, so they cannot continue in their role at any time
without the consent of the group. Thirdly, standing delegated tasks are rotated
as much as possible to fight the rise of a distinct layer that monopolises
certain roles. Activists in the anti-globalisation movement have become known
for their determination to institute rules drawn from anarchism to ensure that
decision-making within autonomous groups are also supportive of individual
autonomy. They have therefore striven to make decisions and carry out tasks
through a combination of spokescouncils and affinity groups,[xxxvi] which for some reasons have become
associated with consensus decision making – its direct opposite in an important
way. With decision by consensus some in a group can stop others from carrying
out their own views, whereas spokescouncils are structured to ensure the full
expression of all views, and affinity groups to give those who have reached
sufficient consensus (in their own view) the chance to act on it.
In
revolutionary times especially, the mass rebellions of the oppressed have
tended to incorporate a good number of these practices in their organising,
often without the influence of anarchists or similarly orientated groups.
However, it is a rare thing for rebellion based organising to incorporate all
of them, particularly the ones designed to promote individual freedom. Where
workplace, community and women based organisations do so, upon examination we
are likely to find that they are really ideology based – open for joining by
any member of the oppressed, as long as they accept the domination of the
ideologists in control. The task of creating a rebellion based mass movement
that prefigures full emancipation is therefore a task of fighting for the
transformation of existing rebellion based organisations along these lines. This
implies revolutionaries will, more often than not, work as members of
organisations that only partially if at all incorporates revolutionary goals,
and will have to oppose the institutions and people that embody capitalist
society inside the organisations at the same time as organising rebellions
against those outside. A range of tactical questions now arise, which can only
be addressed in practise based on at least the following factors: Does the
organisation actually engage in rebellion against aspects of oppression, or is
its overriding purpose to incorporate that particular section of the oppressed
into capitalist society? Do the conditions of membership allow revolutionaries
to pursue their full programme even if unofficially, or does being a member
require that you give up revolutionary activity? Are better alternatives
available? The question of whether to work as a member of a particular business
union, docile community organisation or faith aligned women’s group becomes a
matter of estimating the practical possibilities of doing revolutionary work in
that setting, rather than estimating the revolutionary potential of its
leadership and politics. In most cases some of the activities involved in
building revolutionary movements that are rebellion based will require forming
separate organisations.
When
we do form such organisations it is of course an opportunity to institute the
full package of structures and rules that combine collective solidarity with
individual autonomy and equality. But this must not become an end in itself.
Revolutionary movement building must never separate itself from serving the
immediate interests of the oppressed, or it will run the risk of going the way
of ideology based organising. Even when we judge that the purpose of our
organisation should be to propagate our specific ideas, this has to be tied to
the immediate educational and media needs of the general rebellions of the
oppressed. In any event the most powerful way to promote the revolution happens
to be deeds not words. In my opinion, one example of
a libertarian collective engaging in militant actions to serve the immediate
needs of the oppressed will do more to spread the revolutionary mentality than
at least two websites, a newspaper and a blog added together. One of the
reasons why the Black Panther Party grew so explosively was the feeding,
educational and health programmes it ran as part of its ‘projects for
survival.’[xxxvii] When people then read the newspapers and
leaflets of the Panthers they already knew that these angry youngsters have
shown over and over how much they care and whose side they are on. Maybe in
movements fighting for ‘what they believe in’ it is possible to imagine
ignoring the day to day needs of the members and their communities, but when it
comes to movements of the oppressed fighting for their own liberation, the
struggle for survival must be incorporated into the task of building the
movement or the masses will or at least should dismiss such a movement with
contempt. There are many services that libertarian collectives could offer as
part of the broader movement building project. Feeding, health and education
services are almost always relevant, as are protection against male violence
and just general self-protection. People will of course pay much more attention
to our ideas if we are known as people fighting for and delivering these kinds
of services in our communities, but more importantly serving each other in this
way organised as libertarian collectives is
the essence of our ideas, simply the right thing to do, much better
communicated through words and action
rather than just words. Also important from the perspective of revolutionary
strategy is the effect of this kind of activity on the oppressed. An oppressive
system teaches its victims that their liberation is not really the issue, that
they are not really the people that deserve society’s resources and care, and
that they therefore would be smart not to care too much about their own pain
and happiness as there are more important things. This self-aversion becomes
part of the character structure of individuals and is difficult to break down
temporarily and probably impossible to exorcise completely within capitalist
society. Therefore even when people rebel against oppression it is often
accompanied by self-destructiveness. The revolutionaries that will create a
society of the fullest possible liberty, equality and solidarity will all have
the highest possible regard for themselves and their communities. They will
want nothing less than the absolute flourishing of their bodies, minds,
emotions and relationships. For the oppressed to break through the imposed
barrier of internalised self-aversion the experience of care is crucial. We
begin to care about ourselves and others like us when we experience being cared
about. The ‘projects for survival’ where the oppressed take care of each other
is therefore a central part of building revolutionary movements.
As
soon as a concept begins to be associated with positive things people will come
along who ascribe a meaning of their choice to that concept even if this
differs from the original way the concept was used. People that support the
death penalty and admire Christianity will often argue that the teachings of
Jesus Christ leave no room for opposition to the death penalty, despite the
difficulty of reconciling this act of retribution with the well known (although
much ignored) injunction to ‘turn the other cheek.’ Something similar is
happening to the concept ‘direct action’. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the
telling blows against the neo-liberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’
were struck by movements and actions led by direct actionists. The idea became
respectable far beyond the circles of notorious anarchists and ridiculed environmentalists
with whom it was associated up to then. Since then I have heard any number of
fuzzy meanings ascribed to the term, until finally even dictionaries started to
define it as something like protests that are more impatient with formal and
legal procedures than normal protests.[xxxviii] In its original sense direct action are
simply rebellious people doing things they want done, or stopping things they
do not want done, instead of relying on representatives or pressurising the
‘proper authorities’. A protest march - however big, angry and effective - to
pressurise the police to offer protective accompaniment to women that need to
walk somewhere late at night, is therefore not a direct action, even if it
happens to be the right thing to do. A direct action would be for activists to
rebel against male violence in ways that transcend the laws of the country as
well as the powers of the police and to themselves organise and offer such
protective accompaniment to women whose freedom are restricted by the threat of
male violence. Similarly, picketing the city council to stop the instillation
of pre-paid water meters is an indirect action. The direct action in this case
would be for affected people to remove or bypass the meters themselves in
defiance of the council.
I
feel the need to be very clear because in its original sense direct action is
the centre piece, if there is one, in the collection of activities that
constitute the building of revolutionary mass movements that are rebellion
based. It cannot stand alone. Without patient consciousness raising,
prefigurative organising and projects for survival and upliftment, direct
action cannot build the kind of movement that full emancipation demands. It can
only win short term changes and often it will not even do that but transform
into a kind of adventuring disconnected from a liberatory agenda. At the same
time, without direct action the oppressed will not ‘seize their own power’[xxxix] and
will neither get more than the stingy, miserable freedom allowed by capitalist
society nor will they become rebel-revolutionaries. Of course anything can be
misapplied, especially inherently risky things like direct action, which
require careful thought and judgement to be used successfully. However, nothing
fuses the means and ends of complete liberation, nothing revolutionises masses
of people as quickly and thoroughly like direct actions where the oppressed
defy all the toxic nonsense that power heaps upon them to become fully what
their humanity destines them to be – self-conscious beings that co-operate as
free equals in creating a society that mirrors who they are when they are at
their very best.
Conclusion
In my opinion there are many more revolutionaries that have broken
with ideology as the basis for organising than the literature reflects. They
simply get on with the anti-capitalist activities of consciousness raising,
prefigurative organising, mutual aid and direct action without making it a
priority to confront the left ideologists and oppose their influence. The reason
is easy to see: that old feeling of ‘every time I think I’m out, they pull me
back in!’ The rebel-revolutionaries have usually arrived at their perspective
through considerable experience of that soul destroying mix of viciousness and
futility that is so characteristic of inter- and especially intra-ideological
conflicts. Now they just want to get on with it. The last thing they want to
get involved in are the debates without borders with people whose minds are
clearly and truly made up about just about everything, and yet who want to do
nothing as much as debate all the time. The simplest thing to do is to stay out
of it and get on with your own thing.
However, I am arguing that ideology based organising and its
associated problems are not the result of confusion and bad faith on the part
of left-wing activists. It results from the dominant way left organising is instituted
as organisations based on ideological agreement, which itself results from the
failure of the left to break with the alienation of intellectual, emotional and
moral capacities typical of capitalist society. Problems whose causes are both
in our institutions and in what oppressive society ingrains in our psyches,
cannot be ignored or dodged out of existence. To overcome them we have to
deliberately imagine and then create the institutional framework that would
allow this – in this case, a revolutionary movement that is rebellion based. We
have to constantly renew our individual commitment and capacities to fight the
attraction of ideology, which requires regular self-examination among friends
of our multiple personal entanglements with this way of life. And we have to
give others the best possible opportunities to avoid or escape the clutches of
revolutionary ideology based organising, which require publicly critiquing it. If
we doubt the benefits of doing this, remember the liberated feeling, that sense
of weightlessness and infinite possibility, when for the first time we realised
we need not second guess ourselves and had no business trying to squeeze our
innermost feelings, thoughts and natures into the confines of an ideology.
October 2012
Select a topic; go around in a circle; always speak personally,
specifically and from your own experience; don’t interrupt; never challenge
anyone else’s experience; try not to give advice; sum up. See endnote xxxiv
[iii]Anatomy of the micro-sect by Hal Draper, 1973.http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1973/xx/microsect.htm
[iv]BALLBUSTER? True Confessions of a
Marxist Businessman by Bertell Ollman, 2002
[v]Toward
a new beginning – on another road by Hal Draper, 1971. http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1971/alt/alt.htm#CHAPTER5
[vi]The Grundrisse by Karl Marx, 1857. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm
[viii]Looking forward: participatory
economics for the twenty first century by Michael
Albert and Robin Hahnel, 1991, and The
professional and managerial class by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in
‘Radical America’, Vol. XI, No. 2, March-April 1977.
[ix]Talent
grab – why we pay our stars so much money by Malcolm Gladwell in ‘The New Yorker’, 11 October 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_gladwell
[x]A
theory of human motivation by
Abraham Maslow originally published in ‘Psychological Review’, no. 50, 1943. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
[xi]Lear,
Tolstoy and the fool by George
Orwell, 1947.http://www.strong-brain.com/Reading/Texts/orwell-lear-tolstoy-fool
[xiii]The Bolsheviks and workers’
control by Maurice Brinton, 1970.http://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/01.htm#h1
[xvi]Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, 1938.
[xviii]The Cuban Revolution –
minority resolution to the 1961 YSA convention by
Shane Mage first published in ‘Sparticist’ No. 2, July-August 1964. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/cuba/cuba-rev.html
[xix] See for example Consolidating working class power for quality
jobs – towards 2015: programme arising from the Cosatu 8th national
congress, 9 October 2003. http://www.cosatu.org.za/show.php?ID=1332
[xx]Impressions
of the Cosatu 10th national congress by Martin Jansen in Khanya Journal No. 23,
Winter School edition 2009.http://khanyacollege.org.za/sites/default/files/KJ%2023%20www.pdf
[xxii]Workers International
League distances itself from unprincipled actions of Ocgawu leadership by Workers International Vanguard League on www.labournet.de 27 February 2005. http://labournet.de/branchen/auto/vw/sa/wivl-ocgawu.html
[xxiii]An introduction to the New
York Radical Feminists a pamphlet by the New York
Radical Feminists in 1969.http://archive.org/details/Intro-newYorkRadicalFeminists1969
[xxiv]The definition of Black
Consciousness by Steve Biko, a paper produced for a
SASO Leadership Training Course in December 1971. http://www.azapo.org.za/links/bcc.htm
[xxv]On organisation by Jacques Camatte, first published in French in ‘Invariance’
Anne V, serie II, no. 2, 1972.http://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/capcom/on-org.htm
[xxvi]Beyond
capital: toward a theory of transition by Istvan Meszaros, 1994.
[xxviii]The
communal system and the principle of self-critique by Istvan Meszaros in ‘Monthly Review’ Vol.
59, issue 10, March 2008.
[xxix]The Cyril Smith Internet Archive at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/index.htm
[xxx]Primitive communism, barbarism and the origins of class society by
Lionel Sims, posted in libcom.org 15 February 2012. http://libcom.org/history/primitive-communism-barbarism-origins-class-society-lionel-sims
[xxxi]Mutual aid by Peter Kropotkin, 1902.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1902/mutual-aid/index.htm
[xxxii]The
political economy of participatory economics by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, 1991.
[xxxiii]From a speech by Marcus Garvey published in
Black Man
magazine, Vol. 3, no. 10, July 1938, paraphrased in Redemption Song by Bob Marley.
[xxxiv]Introduction to
consciousness raising by New York Radical
Feminists, a pamphlet published in 1976. http://archive.org/details/FeministConsciousness-raisingGroupGuideTopics
[xxxv]Anarchism as a theory of
organisation by Colin Ward, first published in ‘Patterns of Anarchy’. A
collection of writings on the anarchist tradition, edited by Leonard I.
Krimerman and Lewis Perry, Anchor Books, New York,
1966.http://www.panarchy.org/ward/organization.1966.html
[xxxvii] The 6 Panther P’s by
Willie Baptist and Phil Wider, published by the Annie Smart
Leadership Development Institute, undated. http://www.google.co.za/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.millcreekurbanfarm.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2FThe%25206%2520Panther%2520P's.doc&ei=W5iPUKzrCs6ZhQfqm4HABA&usg=AFQjCNHC7MjRJ7Gsl3W_NrRyxQp5QE0IWA&sig2=F4ejq7R8rufRb_-dwY9YTA
[xxxix] Paraphrased from an anonymous poem written by a participant in the
Mandela Park Anti-Eviction Campaign in 2002.