Thoughts on Political Organization for Our Time: A Rejoinder to ‘Fighting for the Future’

By Adam Weaver

As to what this means on a practical level is that we cannot proceed with an attitude of rushing to merge and that the organization we strive for will materialize simply if we declare it. Politically we can’t rely either on the old lines in the sand. Terms such as anarchist-communism, libertarian socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, platformism, and especifismo  may represent distinct traditions that each bring important things to the table (I’d also include even some parts of libertarian Marxism), but more and more these terms bleed into one another and we find those who use these labels taking the same positions and on the same sides in struggles even if they use different terms to express their ideas. Texts such as Black Flame have been a great service in helping us rethink the history of class struggle anarchism more along these lines. Organizationally we need to create the spaces that allow us to have the higher level discussions that we could not ordinarily have and sometimes this buts up against the tendency to spend inordinate amounts of time on the formalities of process rather than the sustenance of our ideas, our debates, and most importantly our concrete projects and organizing efforts.

Having made several points about the effort to create an organization I’d like to move to discussing sets of problems and attitudes that exist within in our milieu and those in the orbit but whom are not part of the current process. And while these stances may seem pointed, they are aimed not to tear down but with the goal of challenging those whom I see as some of the best of comrades and highest quality militants that I’ve come to know.

The first I call “you build it and maybe I will come” and it is based on an individualistic approach to what are the collective political issues of organization that we face as a milieu.  What I mean by this is that there are many quality comrades that are for one reason or another outside of the current process that is based on existing organizations.  On one hand that is in large part structural but on the other hand there is a certain hedging of bets “Well, if everything works out and something good forms then I’ll consider joining or participating.” But going unstated is often a sentiment of “I’m not really sure if this going to work out so it’s better to sit on the sidelines and not put my energy into this just yet.”

In many ways this is a mirror of the same individualism that permeates the larger society and which asks “why struggle against the powers that be in my life? It’s more likely than not that I will loose, so it’s better to wait and see if such and such demand seems likely to win.” And given the influences of commercialism and media that permeates our society it’s easy to see why this is a common starting point of many working class people in the US. But to hear these sentiments from those who call themselves committed revolutionaries is troubling. Instead we need ask what we can do to build what we want to see and engage in the work of rolling up our sleeves and building rather than waiting for what we want to be built to arrive on our proverbial doorsteps. Too many revolutionaries are plowing the fields of every other political efforts- those of NGOs, of progressive reformism, those of business unions which act as the mobilization arm and institutional base of the Democratic Party- but the time is now for those who want to see Anarchism take root and become an actor within the struggles of the working class and oppressed to begin our own project and to begin the work of tilling our own field.

Another issue in the same vein is framed around those of needs. Either the building of political organization does not fit into ones political needs or the question that needs to be satisfied first is whether this meets one’s personal political needs. Since the fading of the 70’s party building Left that demanded that their members be “robots for the revolution” with no personal time and solely focused on the needs of the party, there has been a healthier turn in the left towards personal balance and the need to see involvement in activity as serving a role not just for the movement but for those who make up the movement. But perhaps now the pendulum now swings too far in the other direction.

When needs are raised as an objection I’m often taken aback. Speaking personally on my own involvement in political activity for most of my life and in efforts to build specifically anarchist political organization for a decade now, I do not see the vast majority of my political work as serving my own interests or development. Personally I could spend plenty of time talking with the usual suspects over the internet and feel like many of my own needs are being met. But that doesn’t build a movement.   What I spent most of my political work doing (and by ‘political’ I mean efforts around my political ideology as opposed to mass level organizing work) is one-on-one meet ups and mentoring, organizing discussion circles around basic texts and videos and mundane but practical organizational tasks. But suffice it to say that almost none of that work serves my own immediate political needs. Rather I see that work as building largely other people and serving their political needs because that’s what I think helps to build a movement in the long term. Rather than seeing our work centering around our own needs in an individualistic fashion, we instead need to think collectively about how we work towards our goals, political organization being one aspect, and how personal needs can combine with movement building goals. Often what we think of as personal needs are usually shared by others and in reality collective issue.

Lastly I want to say that the only way to reach political organization is to build towards it. Again, what we build today is not what we seek but rather a project or vehicle to allow us to struggle towards what we want to create. But there is a naysaying voice that says our work can’t be done—the level of consciousness is not there, our milieu too small and scattered and politically undeveloped, we are destined to replicate the pitfalls of the past, and that the current downturn in struggles doesn’t favor our project. All these are true to varying degrees but none of them need to stay the same.

The best example that I can give of this is the current IWW in the US. In the early 2000’s the organization was largely a collection of radical left activists with little to offer. Membership was a revolving door and most often workplace organizing efforts were simply a smaller scale copy of business union campaigns, just run by radical activists volunteering their time instead of by paid staff. But slow transformation occurred as several generations came and stuck to the IWW, engaged in the trials and errors of organizing, and congealed those lessons into a systematic training program that developed more workplace militants who moved to higher levels of organizing efforts. While still remaining small and not without weaknesses that have persisted, the IWW is now a force of sorts that was difficult to imagine possible only so many years ago.