What in the hell …

Today on the plane, El, and train I read The Abolition of the State: Anarchist & Marxist Perspectives, Wayne Price’s new book. I like it quite a bit, not least because so far I agree with pretty much all of it. I’ve got maybe 50 pages left. When I get a chance I want to read more of Wayne’s articles from anarkismo and from The Utopian.

I’ve got 25 pages left to go. Like I said, I like the book. It’s a bit of Wayne as preacher myself as choir-member, though. And it’s not my favorite sermon topic. I’m totally convinced and the point is well made, but so far there’s not as much as I’d like in terms of positive program and organizational form. That’s an unfair complaint, of course, as it’s basically wishing he’d written a different book. That unwritten book is the one I’d most like to read, though. For instance, I read the chapter on the Spanish Revolution and it’s exciting and compelling and sober in its criticisms of the anarchists’ mistakes, but it’s all a bit distant. At this point I’m less worried that an American analog to the CNT-FAI would make serious mistakes than I am daunted at the prospects of building an equivalent body to the CNT-FAI at the beginning of the 1930s.

I meant to address this when I wrote about the platform and organization earlier, another topic backburnered that I need to back to eventually. In a nutshell, I feel a disconnect from the platform stuff I’ve seen about the relationship between mass and political organization. This is not a disagreement so much as a feeling that there’s another problem that’s important and unaddressed, namely the need to build more mass working class organization. I don’t think mass and political work are absolutely opposed nor do I think mass and political organization are absolutely opposed, but given limited time one has to prioritize even if unconsciously and in prioritizing it’s likely that one or the other will take second place. At this point, I think political organization should prioritize making its members as effective as possible in mass work, which will help rebuild mass organizations as well as place the members of the political organization in positions of relative power in the organizations (I mean here influence based on relationships, ability to move people and to spread ideas and vision, not formal decision-making power, I’m not particularly concerned with the latter). I also think that mass work should prioritize radicalizing others, not by the propositional content of what we say, though of course that matters a lot too and we shouldn’t hide who we are, so much as by the experiential content and by reflection on experiences. Basically I think economic conflict is educational and radicalizing.

Similarly, in this book I take the point that revolutionists should study revolutions, but - and maybe this is mostly a failure of vision and imagination on my part - the idea of a revolutionary situation in the US feels quite distant to me. The book doesn’t talk about the IWW, but in terms of the IWW I think the historical analog to the present is not 1905 but earlier when the various unions that came together to form the IWW were first organizing themselves. Likewise, the analog to Spain is not the 1930s but much earlier, in the long slow process of building the organizations and the power that had so much influence (or potential) in the 30s. This links to my point about the mass/political thing in a more than analogous way I think. The transition that occurs in conflict is not only a transition for people who aren’t radical yet. People can get radicalized in struggles, particularly if there’s periodic/ongoing reflection on the struggle (individually or, preferably, collectively), and people also learn more practical skills, get better at doing things - more confident, better at moving their coworkers, better at formulating strategy and tactics, more effective in and less nervous about confrontation with management, better at collective decision-making, etc. The latter applies not only the non-radicalized folk but radicals too, just as much or more. (In my experience a lot of folk in radical circles are below average in their ability to make collective decisions, or perhaps more charitable, the collective decision-making I’ve seen in radical circles often goes worse than other collective decision-making I think in part because of the stakes of the decisions and the level of emotional investment of the participants.)

There’s a link here(pardon the pun) somewhere to my earlier posts about music and propositional content vs some other content (where the latter is really important too even or especially when the latter and former are in tension with each other), but I’m not sure how to put it into words. Appropriately enough, maybe.