What in the hell …

A blast from the recent past by friend and comrade Pete The whole piece is here. (Pete’s a member of Bring the Ruckus.) A few excerpts:
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There’s this type of conversation or maybe it’s posturing within conversation, I’ve been in SO many conversations like this. They’re SO tiresome. I hope I never have to be in another one, though I expect that I’ll continue to be in them for the foreseeable future. That sucks. Anyway, in this conversation/posture a person - who usually thinks they are expressing a political perspective - says something which amounts to more or less the following:

“You know what sucks? A lot of stuff, maybe even everything. You know what’d be good? If stuff stopped sucking so much, or maybe even if everything that sucks stopped sucking. Someone should do something about that, someone should make everything stop sucking. It sucks that no one is stopping everything from sucking. People may try to make things stop sucking but things still suck. That sucks. The attempts to make stuff not suck? Those attempts suck. It’d be awesome if someone would so something awesome but right now everything basically sucks.”

Aside from my flippant tone, I think people who say this are basically right in the content of what they say but their speech as an action is wrong, in a different sense of right and wrong. It’s a correct or at least partially correct analysis expressed in a way which makes the ostensible goal of that analysis less likely rather than more likely.

Here’s another way to put this. Things are imperfect, including efforts to make stuff closer to perfect. We can always emphasize the distance between anything that happens and the perfection that it fails to achieve and we’ll be right every time, but I think that emphasis does not get us any closer to perfect. It keeps us as far away as we are now. A better way to proceed in my opinion is to acknowledge imperfection (and yes, be angry about it) but to emphasize the small steps that have occurred and to emphasize concrete details about further potential steps. And I don’t mean possible steps or “someone ought to, it’d be cool if…” steps, I mean clear plans that one actually intends to work on. We can either live within the perpetual gap between present and perfect or we can try to draw inspiration between the occasional small - and sadly often temporary - step from present to just a bit more perfect, in the hope that this will help us continue to take steps. The first is not political. But it is stupid and masochistic and self-indulgent.

I often think that a fair bit of things related to this stuff is all bullshit, but I have to say, I find the category “non-antagonistic contradiction” in Mao’s writings to be really interesting. It makes me want to read more Mao. (And makes me wish I remember more of the stuff I know I’ve read but somehow didn’t retain.)

Anyhow, it seems to me quite reasonable to say that in any organization that wants to or objectively does contest the prevailing states of affairs in some way, there will likely be disagreement. Given the potential stakes for these organizations, disagreement can easily become conflict. This stuff happens, in my experience.

It seems to me it’s important to avoid treating the other side in a conflict as analogous to the organizations’ opponents. It’s also important to avoid becoming narrowly focused on getting one’s way in a conflict for the sake of getting one’s way. On a related note, it’s important to try hard to tell the difference between one’s own investments in the outcomes of a conflict and a more sober assessment of a conflicts’ implications for the organization (and the class). It is particularly important that one not get into the habit of treating all disagreement as always-already conflict. It’s is also particularly important that one understand how conflicts and disagreements link to larger matters, again as part of not simply seeking to have one’s way.

Some conflicts will be composed of multiple conflicts. It is important to see how conflicts link up (or how pursuit of one can be at cross purposes with pursuit of another). It is especially important to retain as much involvement as is feasible in other work in the organization beyond intra-organizational conflict, for the sake of one’s credibility and even more so for one’s happiness and effectiveness.

Hat tip to Tom Wetzel for this fine article. Check it out. Full disclosure and a little bragging, I know Tom, we’re both involved in the Workers Solidarity Alliance, so I’m biased. Anyhow, read his piece. (more…)

Back to the Future is not only the title of a great piece of cinematic art but also a way of thinking about the present politically. (more…)

They’re the title of two columns from the Industrial Worker newspaper. Minority Report was a column that ran a while back and isn’t running anymore. Workers Power started a few years later and is still running. I think both are good. I’ve helped on the Workers Power columns. The Workers Power columns page includes illustration from my friend Jefferson. You can see more of his artwork here. Definitely more relevant than my scattered IWW musings and all.

I circulated that draft of a thing I wrote on mass work to some comrades and got a few comments in response. Here are some of those comments and what they made me think of. Part of what I’ve got rattling around in my mind is a phrase Adam used when we talked recently about the Furious Five, “building a new base for anarchism.” Also rattling around in my mind are the various things in that diagram on organizational work that I sketched out on note cards to try and get clearer on stuff. (more…)

So I wrote this thing, partly putting down some of the thoughts that occurred to me as I was reading this stuff on social insertion. (more…)