From abusers, clout chasers, careerists, and grifters to people getting thrust into a dangerous visibility, dehumanized, and overworked, the role of ‘organizer’ is detrimental both to the people who claim it/it’s thrust upon as well as the movement for liberation as a whole.
Freedom doesn’t need organizers, it needs everyone to take an active role in the fight and to refuse to put eachother on dehumanizing pedestals in the process.
We can’t wait for others to fight for our freedom. As always, the secret is to begin.
Specialization and Spectatorship
The role of ‘organizer’ is a specialized position, that is it is never something someone can just do but only a certain kind of person can do. Even in an ‘informal movement, it is a position that separates a ‘leadership’ from the struggle. Like all specialized roles, it creates a dynamic of spectatorship — rather than encouraging people to just do the damn thing and be active participants in the struggle for their liberation, it tells them to wait for the organizers to do everything for them, all they have to do is show up.
Even the best intentioned and most aware organizers perpetrate this because the issue is with the very position of the organizer — always separated from everyone and everything else. For the organizer to exist there must be people to be organized, not active participants making shit happen themselves.
More intentionally, organizers will hoard access to resources — money, tools, social connections — that they simply will not share. If they are a part of particular organizations, they will make the barrier to access entry into said organization where you will most likely continue to remain a spectator. To protect their position of power they will create a hostile environment around organizing, or lie about needing to be a particular kind of person or have particular kinds of skills to do it.
The truth is, anything organizers can do everyone can do, and for the sake of us and our freedom, as well as the well being of the organizers, we must do it and in the process knock them off their pedestals and make the irrelevant.
Hierarchy, Personality, and Abuse
Organizers and leaders have a tendency to create both formal and informal hierarchies. No one person is so critically important to the struggle that without them it would all fall apart, but the culture built around organizers and organizing that puts them on a pedestal creates that illusion.
This creates a perfect set up for abuse of power (which is a constant when power is involved.) We’re sure most people have heard something similar to this before — Yeah what they did isn’t okay but they do such good work? When people are conflated with the struggle they are apart of accountability is nearly impossible.
The excuses are endless, ‘there’s too much going on right now, can we discuss this another time?/You’re just trying to delegitimize my work/this is COINTELPRO/ You’re an infiltrator.’ On top of that, the tendency to deify organizers creates a blind following that will defend them no matter what — it’s these dynamics that contribute to an entrenchment of racism and its apologism, of abuse and its apologism.
These positions are also a magnet for clout chasers, grifters, and wanna-be politicians building their resume on out backs. These sorts of people will put people in physical and legal danger to get that good instagram shot, or get donations to their fund, or they’ll disarm a situation so 5 years later when they are running for city council they can bring that point up.
Leadership and Dehumanization
Who gets to be an organizer? Much like ‘leadership, when the only way people know how to engage in struggle is by following, they will follow whoever steps up, politics or analysis be damned. This is seen most evidently whenever some random person shows up to a demo with a megaphone many people will instantly look to them because the megaphone (or the reflective vests, or the loudest voice) confers a level of legitimacy and before you know it you’re standing there being told well not all cops and that you need to go home and go vote.
The other side of this is people get thrust into organizer roles simply because they are doing something and with it comes a level of visibility, deification, overwork, looking to for answers and general dehumanization that is not asked for and people quickly burn out and disappear and people desperately search for a new sacrifice.
Who Claims What
Those who ‘organize’ never coordinate and make everything happen, but they’ll take the credit for it. This falls strongly along class, racial, and gendered lines. Where there’s a well off organizer, you can bet it was poorer people doing the grunt work. Where there is a seemingly down ass man, there’s 10 women and gender variant/non-conforming people doing the grunt work and a lot more doing the informal emotional and care work. Where there is a white organizer, there is the backs of multiple black people running themselves ragged that they are standing on.
Even outside of this, it takes a whole community to ‘organize’ anything. The friends you bounce your ideas off of the people that throw in for supplies, who coordinate their various crews to show up, everyone who spreads the word and shows up. That one person can take credit for the actions of so many people is both arrogant and an active hindrance to building a sense of collective power.
DON’T WAIT FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO FIGHT FOR YOUR LIBERATION
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My favorite insurrectionary force flag. Belongs to the anarchist Free Territory In Ukraine Translates to “death” “to all who stand in the way of freedom for working people”
from /r/vexillology
Top comment: Mother Anarchy loves all her children
The Question of Organization – From Insurrection #4 – MP3 – Imposed – Archive – Torrent – YouTube Originally published in the magazine Insurrection, a project wh…
"The Question of Organization", originally published by the magazine Insurrection, makes an argument in favor of informal, autonomous, affinity-based modes of organization.
"We think it is never possible to see the outcome of a struggle in advance. Even a limited struggle can have the most unexpected consequences. And in any case, the passage from the various insurrections-limited and circumscribed-to revolution can never be guaranteed in advance by any procedure. We go forward by trial and error, and say to whoever has a better method-carry on."
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Of course, some would have it that we never lost a revolutionary perspective at all, quite confident they had the solution all along. This comes in the form of workerism, a broad set of strategies – mainly Marxist or anarcho-syndicalist – that affirm the centrality of the working class for overthrowing capitalism. In the history of revolutionary struggle, few ideas have consistently held more sway; but surely that’s only the reason why this sorely outdated approach has proven so hard to get over. Things have changed more dramatically than ever in the last decades, shattering the material conditions that once granted workplace organisation such grandiose pretensions. It’s important to clarify why, or else the attempt to exceed activism risks being subsumed by yet another reformist method, this one all the more stagnant.
Only a few decades ago, the prospects of organised labour in the Global North were much more hopeful, with trade unions retaining a great deal of strength into the 1970s. Mainly during the ‘80s, however, capitalist production underwent some major alterations. Profound technological developments in the field of electronics – especially digitisation – caused the productive process to become much more automated, requiring significantly less human input. This combined with an increased ability on the part of employers to outsource employment to less economically developed countries, where labour was much cheaper. Fairly suddenly, therefore, the two biggest sectors of the economy – split mainly between industry and agriculture – were greatly reduced in size, resulting in massive layoffs. Yet those who lost their jobs were generally absorbed by steady growth in the services sector, thereby avoiding immediate social destabilisation. Whilst it was once the smallest economic sector by a long way, the services sector is now by far the largest in the Global North, even approaching 80% employment rates in the US, UK, and France.
The result has been a striking redefinition of the common notion of work. It’s lost its centre of gravity in the factory, having fragmented instead in the direction of various post-industrial workplaces – restaurants, shops, offices. Once a largely centralised mass, the working class has been dispersed across the social terrain, the new focus being on small, highly diverse productive units. Between these units, workers possess few common interests and interact little, leading to a significantly diminished potential for collective action. Of course, resistance in the workplace continues, but the internal avenues necessary for revolt to generalise have been majorly severed, the situation continuing to decline in light of ever greater technological advance.
Nobody can deny the profound identity crisis faced by the working class. Only a few decades ago, the factory was seen as the centre of everything, with workers offering the vital component in the functioning of society as a whole. Work was once a way of life, not so much in terms of the amount of time it took up, but instead because of the clear sense of existential grounding it offered. For generations, there had been a strong link between work and professionalism, with most workers committing to a single craft for the entirety of their lives. Career paths were passed down from father to son, who often remained in the same company; the families of different workers also maintained close ties with one another. Nowadays, however, everything has changed: employment is immensely uncertain, the relentless fluidity of the post-industrial economy forcing most to get by on a roster of precarious, low-skilled jobs. Far fewer people take pride in their work, especially given that employment only rarely has a convincing subtext of doing something socially important. Trade unions have also vanished as a historical force, having been defeated in the key battles of the ‘80s, their membership levels imploding in lock-step with the advance of neoliberalism. A residue of the old world still exists, but it continues to dissipate further every day, never to return. In the Global South, too, things are inevitably moving in the same direction.
These developments cast serious doubt on the validity of Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist strategies for revolution. It’s becoming increasingly meaningless to speak of “the workers” in reference to a cohesive entity. It isn’t as if the disintegration of the working class implies the absence of poverty, nor of the excluded – in no sense whatsoever. What it does mean is the end of the working class as a subject. One that was, as Marx put it, “disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself” (Capital, 1867). Over the last decades, the working class has been dismembered and demoralised by the very same mechanism: just as the mass application of steam and machinery into the productive process created the industrial proletariat two centuries ago, the invention of new, automated technologies has led to its dissolution. There’s no single project around which to unite the working class any more; it follows, as with identity politics, that gains in the workplace will almost always be limited to improving capitalism rather than destroying it. The Industrial Revolution has been superseded by the Digital Revolution, yet the revolutionary optimism of workerism remains ideologically trapped in a bygone era, fumbling for relevance in a century that won’t have it. Although, to be honest, this is hardly news: already for some time now, the nostalgic language of workerism has come across as stale and outdated to most, even if academics often struggle to keep up.
In any case, the collapse of workerism might be nothing to mourn. Another implication of the end of traditional employment is the predominance of a range of workplaces few would want to appropriate anyway. The factory has been replaced by the likes of call centres, supermarkets, service stations, fast food joints, and coffee shop chains. Yet surely no one can imagine themselves maintaining these workplaces after the revolution, as if anything resembling a collectively run Starbucks or factory farm is what we’re going for? When workerism first became popular, there was an obvious applicability of most work to the prospect of a free society. In the 21st century, however, the alienation of labour runs all the deeper: no longer is it the mere fact of lacking control over work, but instead its inherent function that’s usually the problem. To put it another way, it should come as no surprise that Marxists haven’t yet replaced their hammer and sickle with an office desk and espresso machine, as would be necessary to keep up with the times. The modern symbols of work are worthy only of scorn, not the kind of valorisation involved in putting them on a flag.
This is another big problem for the workerist theory of revolution, given its conception of revolution primarily or even exclusively in terms of the seizure of the means of production. Achieving reforms in the workplace is one thing, but only rarely can such exercises in confidence-building be taken as steps towards appropriating the workplace altogether. Surely the point isn’t to democratise the economy, but instead to pick it apart: those aspects of the economy genuinely worth collectivising, as opposed to converting or simply burning, are few and far between. Of course, they still exist, but they’re marginal. And that confirms the absurdity of expecting workplace organisation to offer the centrepiece of any future revolution.
This hardly implies doing away with the material aspects of revolutionary struggle, given that communising the conditions of existence remains necessary for living our lives – not just this or that activist campaign – in genuine conflict with the system. All the more, the moment in which these subterranean influences suddenly erupt, and mass communisation overturns the ordinary functioning of the capitalist machine, surely remains a defining feature of revolution itself. Yet such endeavours must be sharply distinguished from seizing the means of production – that is, appropriating the capitalist infrastructure more or less as it stands before us. Far from offering a vision of the world we want to see, the syndicalist proposal to reclaim the conditions of work – to assume control of very the system that’s destroying us – merely implies self-managing not only our own exploitation, but also that of the planet.
As an aside, it should be added that these issues undermine the contemporary relevance of Marxism altogether. It was previously suggested that Marxian class analysis no longer offers a credible account of oppression; the current discussion, meanwhile, suggests it cannot be used to frame the topic of revolution either. As a method for interpreting the world, as well as for changing it, Marxism has had its day. If we wanted to be a little diplomatic, we could say this isn’t so much a criticism of the theory itself, more a recognition of the fact that the world it was designed to engage with no longer exists. If we wanted to be a little less diplomatic, moreover, it should be added that what’s left of Marxism is utterly boring, reformist, and kept “alive” almost exclusively by academics. As the big guy declared back in 1852, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Yet in no case has this claim, offered in response to the lack of imagination amongst revolutionaries in the 19th century, been more relevant than with Marxism today. We should pay our respects, if indeed any respect is due, whilst refusing to be crippled by an outdated approach. The same goes for anarcho-syndicalism, its once unbridled potential decisively shut down by the combined victories of fascism and Bolshevism.
To offer a last word of clarification, none of this implies doing away with workplace organisation altogether. There’s still much to be said for confronting power on every front: the collectivisation of any remaining useful workplaces, as well as the fierce application of the general strike, surely remains vital for any effective revolutionary mosaic. Just as workplace organisation continues to prove effective for breaking down social barriers, as well as potentially improving our lives in the here and now. The core claim offered here is only that it cannot be considered the centrepiece of revolutionary struggle altogether – quite the minimal conclusion. Merely in terms of asking what the abolition of class might look like today, workerism has lost its way. And that doesn’t begin to consider the abolition of hierarchy as such. When taken in isolation, organised labour offers nothing more than a subtle variety of reformism, thinly cloaked in its stuffy revolutionary pretensions. Total liberation, by contrast, refuses to single out any focal points of the clash, be they workerist, activist, or otherwise.
Bonanno, Alfredo, From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an Anarchist Perspective Against Post Industrial Capitalism, London: Elephant Editions, 1988.
Newman, Saul, From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power Lanham: Lexington Books. 2001
Guerin, Daniel, No Gods No Masters Vol 1–2, San Fransisco: Ak Press, 1998.
Alliance, Learning, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Boston, Massachussets: South End Press,1991
Sheehan, M. Sean, Anarkisme: Sejarah Sebuah Gerakan Perlawanan, Jakarta: Marjin Kiri, 2007.
Whelehan, Niall, Political Violence and Anarchist Morality in Theory and Practice: Luigi Galleani and Peter Kropotkin in Comparative Perspective: Anarchist Studies vol 13. 2005
Weikart, Well, All Gods, All Masters: Immanence and Anarchy/Ontology: Fifth Estate. 2007
Footnotes
[1] Refers to an environmental disaster caused by the company PT Lapindo Brantas. There is a basic overview of it on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidoarjo_mud_flow
[2] Distinguishing inclusive strategies as ways to reach the masses with insurrectional strategies I do not do to say that one tends to be social and the other is not. Both, in my opinion, are based on social liberation. What needs to be considered is how we understand the potential of each of these ideas in reality, from here we can only map the characteristics of each movement. Points, including the divisions they make (individual versus social, social versus environmental, etc.), will greatly influence their practice and the direction in which social liberation will lead.
[3] The Motherfuckers formerly known as Black Mask, a Dadaism-inspired group formed by the painter Ben Morrea and the poet Dan Georgiakis. The group declares that art “is an integral part of life, as it was in primitive society, and not a means to wealth”. In the events of May 1968, the Group changed its name to ‘Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers’ and began going underground. Groups that describe themselves as ‘street gangs with analysis’ contributed a lot to the counterculture movement in New York City, especially the live actions on the Lower East Side. They set up shelters, provide free food, and help radicals connect with doctors and lawyers. The group is known for its reluctance to follow the rules at any political demonstration. Abbey Hoffman characterized them as “a middle-class nightmare…an anti-media phenomenon simply because their names cannot be printed.” – Provos was a countercultural movement in the Netherlands in the mid-1960s by provoking a violent response against the authorities through non-violent bait. The group was founded by two anarchists, Roel van Duyn and Rob Stolk.
[4] The era of ‘Propaganda By Action’ lasted from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Although acts of violence against the bourgeoisie were mostly carried out by individualist factions of the anarchist movement, the campaign was also carried out by figures such as Kropotkin and Malatesta, who in fact declared themselves communist anarchists. This era became a bloody conflict between the anarchist movement and the rulers of every country with the occurrence of various murders and terrors on kings, presidents, and the bourgeoisie. This is also the era in which journalists have begun to identify anarchism with violence. Many anarchists regret this era because the ideas they promote are distorted by the propaganda of journalists who take examples of certain random acts of violence.
The inclusive strategy is based on the possibility to achieve broad mass participation, and its general character is mass organization. Many mass-based organizations today, at least—although it must be admitted that they are still very rare, given the fairly thick and historical tradition of Marxism-Leninism as an example of a blueprint for social movements in Indonesia—have anti-authoritarian tendencies. But in many respects the logic of this kind of organization almost always resembles that of traditional political organizations.
Mass organizations always rely on the assumption that the ‘masses’ have not been awakened, therefore it is very important to bring awareness step by step through specific approaches and long-term programs. In other words, a good mass organization must use the normative language of the people in order to create a positive impression of struggle and can gain wider sympathy.
This is the reason why many social movements tend to take the line of political struggle. Political struggles usually try to focus on one issue. Issues that later become specific demands (such as an increase in labor wages, subsidies for the poor, or compensation funds for Lapindo mudflow victims) are expected to be resolved through political bargaining with those in power. As a result, the formal logic (the logic that is shared by the community) is that if those in power cannot fulfill these demands, they must be replaced. We all understand where this kind of political struggle for disassembly is headed.
Mass organizations also tend to create a separation between ‘who makes the idea’ and ‘who will carry it out’ . They tend to specialize in roles among the masses they pastor. Although social movement forums often involve the community to determine the direction of the struggle, on many occasions this kind of forum has determined where it will lead. Social movements that rely on efficiency will tend to make organizations and masses into separate entities. The masses who have not been awakened are represented by those who are awakened, so it is not surprising that the individuals involved in it also have social awareness in stages.
In many ways this kind of struggle is difficult to lead to a form of social movement that is autonomous and participatory. This kind of political struggle can only be fruitful if the goal is the seizure of state power. Because with this kind of political strategy the logic of the people has not changed: the most likely change according to them is to replace a more honest and just ruler – or the jargon of PRD (Papernas) activists, PRP or PRM ‘a government that favors the poor’. This kind of logic blatantly makes people accept their subordinate position in the class pyramid by making them believe in rules and laws that are completely foreign to them, and at the same time making them distrust their own potential.
Although inclusive strategies can appear quite heterogeneous, they are often very homogeneous in nature. Based on the ideology of ‘progress’, he tends to divide the levels of organization into different strata (students, urban poor, and workers), but leads to a similar strategy. Again, progress is closely related to efficiency, and both are born as a consequence of the capitalist mode of production. The dominance of this homogeneous strategy makes social liberation synonymous with capitalist production: emphasis on quantity, repetitive labour, divisions of labour/specialization, and restraint of individual initiative—automation. Many people’s negative reactions to social movements are caused by their rigid and homogeneous nature. As a result, many people feel discriminated against simply because social movements tend to classify certain social strata as worthy of fighting for their lives.
However, it would be more unfair to equate all tendencies of inclusive strategies as the points above. Classical anarchism does tend to adopt the same pattern, though not completely. What needs to be considered here is the situation (including history and geographic location-territory) will greatly affect the effectiveness and way of organizing. Taking advantage of the situation does not mean falling into it, but to understand what potentials can be provoked from the situation. Sometimes the potential is already there but hidden because of strong historical factors, in this case the language that is understood. Ideas such as cooperation, complementarity, direct participation, and self-management are not exclusive contributions of anarchism, but practices that can be found in people’s daily spaces as an inevitable consequence of social relations. Therefore, an inclusive organization should have the potential to take these ideas to a more general level by challenging people’s way of thinking, namely promoting new alternatives of social relations. An inclusive approach is a vital strategy for social movements to lead to more concrete situations.
