Ignatiev’s piece is about CLR James and organization. Ignatiev begins by noting that James both rejected the idea of the vanguard party and retained a commitment to organization. What’s that organizations for, though? Ignatiev lays out a few answers to this question from James’ works:

- record positive developments that happen (presumably this recording involved the idea of presenting these developments back to people in the hope that doing so would aid those developments by deepening them or spreading them)
Ignatiev spends a lot of time on the views of Facing Reality, James’ organization, about race relations and black workers, and speculates that the left in the US might productively spend a lot of time working on prisoners’ right to vote. Aside from the historical particulars, Ignatiev notes that the specific organizational functions stressed here are to educate workers (mainly but not solely through its newspaper), and will maintain “a resolute determination to bring all aspects of the question into the open, within the context of the recognition that the new society exists and that it carries within itself much of the sores and diseases of the old.”

Ignatiev gives an example of a walkout at a workplace, and radicals responding to that by pushing for discussions on how the walkout could become “the starting point of a new shop-floor organization based on direct action.” I’m sympathetic to this. But do the radicals know how to build a new organization like this? I mean, do they have anything to contribute? If so, how did they learn it? By watching others? Or by participating? If they participated, is that recognizing and recording, or something else? And if they don’t have anything to contribute to the new organization, why should anyone listen to them anyway?

There’s a real disconnect from my experience with this example. I’ve got little experience with the sequence implied here, that sequence being the existence of a group of radicals, then the actions of a group of workers largely on their own initiative, then the radicals respond by trying to move the process a step further or to retain the positive developments. I’ve got much more experience in situations of radicals playing a large (but by no means exclusive) role in generating the initiative - or the tissues of relationships and emotional responses and ideas that lead to the initiative - to take the workplace action. After that the sequence proceeds basically the same and can eventually lead to situations of less politicized workers taking their own initiative without the conscious intervention of radicals. (And as noted in my notes on this other piece by Tom Wetzel and in my trying to get clearer on mass work, this stuff can also, I think, lead to more workers becoming radicals.)

About the anecdotes of workers bringing guns to work to kill foremen…. to some extent I appreciate the empathy expressed there, but only partially. And I can’t shake a strong negative reaction to the anecdotes. I mean, yeah, defending people and spreading the idea of defending people is great. But it’s also really really limited - the shooter’s life is still pretty messed up, for one thing. I think the League of Revolutionary Black Workers is an important organization that more people should know about and we should have more experiments in trying to build things like that today. I also think their work in defense of James Johnson for killing his foreman shows that they had their hearts in the right place and that they had a good lawyer, but it’s hardly the most inspiring thing they did. This hardly sounds to me like an inspiring example for radicals to aim for (”if we work really hard, we can see that workers who get desperate and shoot their bosses don’t executed but instead get committed!”) and the League did so much more, why just focus on this example. And what’s more, from what I’ve read about the League they were not a “recognize and record” group, they were a “let’s intervene!” group, as far as I know (I’m open to being challenged on the facts here, with evidence). So, it’s cool that the League used the Chicago group’s flyer and all, but surely what the League had built in Detroit - through active intervention, I think - helped make the effective use of that flyer possible. In that case, thinking about it, I’m not convinced that this is *really* an example of the political power of “recognize and record” so much as an example of the political power of “organize!”

I also don’t get what the stuff about Jimmy and Maurice is supposed to mean. Is this supposed to be like one of those “the workers know better” moments, where the revolutionary learns a lesson from the masses? I don’t know what else it’s supposed to mean here, but I don’t know what the lesson is. It seems to me that Jimmy’s attitude toward Maurice’s actions was a stupid one. Until he got laid off one of my brothers worked as a welder in some really lousey places, lots of racism against him and so on. Let’s say hypothetically my brother brought a gun to work, I’d want someone to stop him from killing the foreman. That’s so obvious that I don’t know what else to say. I also have a hard time seeing a new society in the event (with a 1% chance) that the other workers would defend the guy who kills the foreman. I see instead a laudable gesture of empathy that gets crushed and the guy still goes to prison or an institution. That Jimmy thought “Maurice’s life was already a prison that could be salvaged by one dramatic NO, regardless of the consequences” seems to me like an argument *against* the “recognize and record” line.

In case any communists who work with my brother are reading this, if a situation like this breaks out where y’all work, don’t record. Act. Tell my brother that the abuses he’s endured in his life as a working class latino in the US are *not* going to be salvaged by one dramatic no. Please don’t tell him that his life is already a prison so it’s okay if he goes to, you know, real prison, and if any of his co-workers say this please tell argue with them. Also please don’t tell him that if he kills the foreman there’s a chance his coworkers might defend him against the cops and in the process they might all help produce a new society. Tell him that if he really wants to change things at work there a few other things he could do which are constructive and might help produce a new society and which are less likely to get him killed, imprisoned, or committed. Or, if he really can’t take the job anymore, tell him to get himself fired and to try to collect unemployment benefits. Thanks.

I mean, let me try it this way:
It’s great that the League helped defend this guy, and their partial victory, that’s great too. But what would have been even greater still is if, instead of killing his foreman and getting committed, if someone from the League had been able to help the guy become an active participant in the Revolutionary Union Movement organizations based in each plant, to channel his anger and frustration into building something. Surely that would have been an even better outcome. In a way, then, this guy’s story could be taken as a sad example of what happens when revolutionaries don’t manage to get to people first, an example to say “we need to organize even more and even faster! if the RUMs had been bigger and badder and more widespread, maybe someone could have gotten to this guy and he’d have had a much better life!”

Ignatiev ends with this paragraph - “The task of revolutionaries is not to organize the workers but to organize themselves to discover those patterns of activity and forms of organization that have sprung up out of the struggle and that embody the new society, and to help them grow stronger, more confident, and more conscious of their direction.”

I disagree, as will be obvious I think. And I think there’s a bit of a logical slip or something here. I don’t see an argument here that the task of radical is not to organize, I just see an assertion. An assertion based largely on “James and his group saw it this way.” That doesn’t convince me. I suppose there are circumstances where this description of revolutinaries’ tasks is right. But I don’t see why this description should be right for all circumstances. Surely it stands to reason that there are instances when things would be better if workers organize, and yet workers don’t (leaving aside, of course, the moments of workers spontaneously fighting cops to defend coworkers who kill foremen). In that case, if there are radicals present who don’t even try to organize, well, that’s just got to be a failing on the part of those radicals.

And, there’s an implication here of a distinction between radicals and workers. Some radicals aren’t workers, and the reverse is certainly true (many workers aren’t radicals). What about radical workers, though? Some of us are working class people who are politically radical. Surely one of our tasks *is* to organize our fellow workers - to organize with them if they’re already organizing, but to get them organizing if they’re not already doing so; the long term goal being to get people to the point where we can genuinely organize with them as equals, and they have the capacity to really take on struggles on their own initiative. Put another way, “disciplined spontaneity,” as Ignatiev calls it, doesn’t always have to be left to produce itself or otherwise be produced without the conscious initiative of anyone.

Finally, about recognizing and recording vs organizing… there’s a weirdness here, I’m not sure how to put it. On the one hand, the argument pushes toward a strong version of the self-sufficiency of the working class: “workers don’t need the radical left to organize them, the workers are already in motion, they bear the seeds of a new society!” On the other hand, the argument pushes toward a strong version of the insufficiency of the working class: workers need radicals to discover the patterns and organizational forms inchoate within the workers’ activity. The workers do stuff, the radicals look at the stuff and see which bits of the stuff are the new society starting to emerge, and then the radicals point it out and say “these bits here! these are awesome! these are the emergent new society! well done! do more of that!” I’m not against this per se, I think this is one use of radicals, but I think workers are capable of that themselves (my own version of the sufficiency of the class) so I wouldn’t call it “an essential contribution” of radicals, and I also think that radicals who know how to organize have a responsibility to organize, and whats more, to make sure more workers learn how to organize (my own version of the insufficiency of the class).

One of the worst things about having a dog is having to walk the dog. It’s a pain, constantly having to take the dog out. (By ‘constantly’ I mean like a few times a day really.) One of the best things about having a dog is having to walk the dog. Walking the dog gets me out of the house a lot more than I would otherwise, gets me strolling and looking at the trees and the people and the sky, it’s good for me not just for the moving around piece of it.

One of the best things about walking my dog where I usually walk her is that it’s right by a lake that’s relatively close to my house. It’s beautiful. There are all kinds of water birds, and other birds nearby, and sometimes hawks. Lots of squirrels in the trees, the leaves right now are great, and the light on the lake is pretty consistently awesome regardless of time of day.

One of the worst things about walking my dog where I usually walk her is that it’s right by a lake that’s relatively close to my house. It’s beautiful so everybody and their brother wants to walk their dog near the damn lake and my damn dog is like 15 pounds of fury whenever another dog comes around, she’s little but strong enough to make my shoulders sore from all the pulling and lunging, and the high pitched yap is ear splitting.

One of the best things about my blog is the people I meet through it. One of the worst things about my blog is that it’s not as anonymous as it could be, as I’d make it if I had it to do over again. I know I could start over, but … I dunno, inertia.

Lack of anonymity limits some of what I write about. Case in point, a recent bit of interpersonal unpleasantry where I’m like one degree of separation from all parties, and like everyone very much and so sort of feel pushed into the middle of it. I’d write the shit out of this situation if the blog was totally anonymous. Instead, I write vague and barely readable allusions to it.

This stuff upsets me a lot as they’re people I’ve known for like my whole life and I love them and some of them sometimes come to be like “listen to my problems” which is kind of annoying sometimes but it’s an old pattern that’s hard to break. Now that some of them aren’t getting along I’m pulled in a few directions, incompatible requests and so on. Folk are being a bit unfair in my view but in an understandable way, if that makes sense - it sucks but it’s not surprising when intense problems engender intense reactions (sort of like, ordinary people do fucked up things when fucked up things are ordinary). As an aside - comfort in abstraction - I remember thinking this when I read Kant years ago and got really excited: that an action is the best action in a context does not make that action good. Bad contexts can be such that only bad actions are possible, though the least bad action is the best and perhaps over time the playing field of moral possibilities can improve, with the context.

So, in a bad mood, didn’t feel like walking the dog, had (have) tons of work to do that I’m not getting to, underslept, I thought I’d improve the situation by drinking a beer while walking the dog. This is easily in the best 25 decisions I ever made.

I walked down the sidewalk and over to the lake, took a bit and the beer was cold in my pocket (current temp 30 degrees F, feels like 25, according to weather.com). Got there and realized it was really, really light out. There was a gorgeous full moon and clear sky, neither of which I’d noticed until I was way from the street lights. The reason I noticed is that I was away from the street lights but it wasn’t any darker. Everything looked silvery, the light on the water was gorgeous. I strolled, sipped my beer, made a quick phone call to Matt about the upcoming training, talked briefly to Adam, drank my beer and just sorta looked at stuff. I felt much better.

Full moon plus drinks plus lake = … umm, something really good. I’m going to have to make a point to walk over by the lake more at night when the moon’s nice. I usually don’t bother to walk all that ways at night cuz it’s so dark, plus I just want to get the night time walk over with so I can sleep.

Added bonuses:
shortly after I got home the baby woke up and it was my turn to soothe her. I soothed the shit out of that baby, soothed her so good, damn. I’ve got big hands, so I was able to hold her w/ one arm to rock her and dance with her, rub her sore gums (she’s teething) with a finger on my other hand, and use another finger on that hand to brush her forehead from top to tip of her nose. That brushing trips a reflex to close her eyes (plus it’s relaxing) so when she’s tired it helps her fall asleep. I’m like a ninja, if ninjitsu was the art of soothing babies rather than the martial art, strategy, and tactics of unconventional warfare and guerrilla warfare as well as the art of espionage purportedly practiced by the shinobi (commonly known outside of Japan as ninja). Then I had a delicious bowl of the squash medley I cooked yesterday. Things are looking up. And now to bed.

http://sojournertruth.blogsome.com/2009/02/25/althusser/

My primary reaction personally is that a key task right now for those of us who can be called ‘younger’ (at least in an expansive sense of the term, I don’t feel young very often anymore, sadly) is to build up our skills. My hunch is that a lot of us young-ish leftist lack some knowhow that we will need regardless of our theoretical and strategic perspectives (I have a further hunch that this is tied to a breakdown in intergenerational transmission on the left today). I think finding a way to coordinate on this would be valuable in and of itself - because it’d make efforts more powerful - and might lay the groundwork for some common political projects that put those skills to use. I wish I had more concrete ideas than that to say on this.

While I’m tipping my hat to other blog posts re: politics and whatnot, folk should also see these blogs:
http://red-anti-state.blogspot.com/
http://swedishzine.wordpress.com/

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/

Edit:
DH’s recommendations of Lenin stuff to read, to come back to ASAP (thanks Don!). A lot of other stuff in v24 of the collected workes in particular looks interesting, just based on the titles.

Vol. 23 of the Collected Works contains the “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution” (p. 236-254), presented to a group of young Swiss workers a few weeks before the February, 1917 Revolution. Check it out; particularly the last paragraph. Then read the Letters from Afar and the April Theses in Vols 23 & 24. If possible pick up Sukhanov’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist to read an account of a left Menshevik of the various issues that were confronted. Then look at Badiou’s speech in New York last year; “Is the Word ‘Communism’ Forever Doomed?’ (Kasama) I think you will see where I find the relevance of Lenin in grasping the development of the ‘possibility of possibility’ and understanding that, “…the truth is not purely composed of facts…The truth is also the becoming of the new subject, the new collective subject.” (p.12). As well, on p. 16, note what Badiou presents as the limitations of the ‘second sequence’.

If you haven’t already done so, you should also go buy their other novels in translation, Q and 54.

Their work is some of the only material in book form that I can think of that I can seriously say about it “this is a cultural product with political uses.”

See here for reviews of the newest novel and news on their book tour (they’re coming to the US but only to New York, sadly).

Now go buy Manituana.

It didn’t help that I kept careening in various other directions (why the fuck can’t I fucking concentrate?! [it’s a problem I’ve had for a long time, one way to put it is that I work best at a tangent - when I try to go straight forward I usually list to the right or the left {the left, I hope}, I think it’s partly just that I’m a terrible procrastinator, or rather a really, really good procrastinator - the best way for me to do something is to have something else I ought to be working on {I wonder if this is part of why I like If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler so much, the continual breaking of and interrupting and digressing (by the way, I reread that book again [I’m trying a new thing, trying to read fiction on the bus to work], I didn’t read all of it, I just read the numbered chapters in second person, I skipped the interrupted novel beginnings, I meant to go back and read them at the end but I didn’t. Next time. Next time I’ll just read those.]) and it strikes me that part of what’s fun about that book is the fantasy that the mundane readerly act of buying a book in a bookshop can lead to this worldcrossing adventure full of intrigue and importance. Someone ought to rewrite it for reading online, or for buying a book via an online bookstore.}] and as a result of my lack of concentration I’m really behind on a lot of stuff. On the plus side, I’m further along on, umm, well, there must be something…. Mafia Wars, maybe? Finding cool music videos on youtube?)

I really meant to be working on the ch24 post, and really I meant to be working on the ch25 post, the post on ch24 and on ch23, those were supposed to be quick preliminaries then get right down to it! As it is, those were so involved and took so long that I’m going to need to re-read to even remember what the fuck I wrote. Argh.

Anyway, here’s the plan:
no more fucking around. Below is a start of a post on Hamerquist’s essay on Althusser. I’m going to finish these notes, finish this post. Then I’m going to slowly grind out the post on chapter 25 of v1 of Capital. I may allow myself in the meantime to write a post on some of Hamerquist’s other recent stuff and related stuff. Maybe. But I’m going to write this stupid ch25 post! Then I’m going to finally give Duncan and NP’s posts the proper replies they deserve, which will mean re-reading them. Then I’m going to print out and re-read my posts on chapters 23-25 and see if there’s any threads I want to tie together. From there it’s Marx on real subsumption, and finishing and writing about Hardt and Negri’s newest book Commonwealth. After that, I’m not sure. That’s plenty as it is. I may write a bit here and there about injury law and so on, as I’ve been supposed to be doing for a while now. I may also pick up this or that random bit of Marx, and there’s some Marx biographies I’ve been meaning to read. I also want to seriously read various pieces on left organization and the left in general, and to read documents from the WSM, FdCA, and others, but now I’m getting way too ahead. The main point is: I will finish the ch25 stuff! And I will not fuck around! I will be disciplined! I don’t care how many explanation points it takes! I will! I! in!sist!

Now then.

I actually had intend for this post to be a post of my notes in progress on Hamerquist’s Althusser piece, but now it seems like that’d be stupid. I’m gonna save them to put in their own post. They’re not done yet, I may post them unfinished and work on them over time as I’ve done w/ the post on ch24 (I’ve been working on these for a while, one of the things I’ve been dividing my attention among, reading bits of the article and taking notes) or I may wait until they’re all done then post them finished. I haven’t made up my mind yet.