This text has been republished via Puget Sound Anarchists. Though a couple paragraphs are specific to that region, the dynamics described exist within the progressive & radical left in colonial cities elsewhere. Some links included in the article have been redirected to a mirror.
“In any case, a system which springs up spontaneously, under stress of immediate need, will be infinitely preferable to anything invented between four walls by hide-bound theorists sitting on any number of committees.”
– Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
““Spontaniety organizes”. That is something few political leaders and students of politics recognize. They don’t see that because organization is foremost in their heads; or better, the type of organization they are accustomed to is their only conception of organization. To them organization is something fixed, permanent, and holy. It is structured with an identifiable leadership separate from the rank-and-file. And the most concrete form organization takes in political leaders’ minds is a political party.”
– Kimathi Mohammed, Organization and Spontaniety
As more and more of the formal organizations that have had a stranglehold over struggle show themselves for what they are – opportunists, power hungry and in many cases active counter-insurgents – I see the some of the critiques of large formal organizations becoming more widespread. I couldn’t be happier about individuals refusing to be unwitting foot soldiers or cannon fodder for projects that aren’t theirs, that they are refusing to have their rage and desire to fight doused by the socialist realism of the wasteland – that realism that says forever that we must wait, that any individual expression of rage and desire isn’t just unimportant but an active hindrance to the struggle.
I want to, for newer people, expand and deepen this critique of the formal organizations and maybe for comrades who have been around for a bit to refresh this critique. Then I want to offer a proposal for individuals to consider, discuss, and take up or leave behind as they see fit.
Probably the issue with large, formal organizations and political parties that people have run into the most right now is that they have an internal logic outside of the struggle – first and foremost they are trying to assure their own reproduction. Recruit more members, put their name and logo in the front of demonstrations to gain more political capital and project themselves as a “leadership” over a movement. This is obviously in oppositions to autonomous movements which are trying to develop on their own terms and win particular fights and at best can be an annoyance but at worse can actively sap energy from movements.
To see this, we can look at the actions of the Party for Suckers and Losers (PSL) across the country over the years, but particularly a few days ago at anti-ice demonstrations in Seattle where they chose to platform a candidate who was running for some kind of office over autonomous undocumented individuals who had to physically snatch the mic from PSL. To an even worse end, we can look at the airport occupations in 2017 against the muslim ban where at SeaTac airport people were occupying the airport stopping people from being deported. Socialist Alternative and their figure head at the time Kshama Sawant prematurely declared victory, told people to go home and come to the Socialist Alternative rally in Seattle the next day, entirely against the asks of the lawyers for the people to be deported. SAlt left and took with them a large amount of the crowd and those who stayed no longer had overwhelming numbers and so the police attacked and cleared them.
To reiterate, large formal organizations have a logic of their own that is often contrary and actively opposed to autonomous struggle, where they will try to co-opt movements to make themselves look better, stronger, more important than they actually are as they vie for a seat at the table of power.
In a similar way, large organizations will mistake themselves for the struggle. They try their best to shift discourse and popular ideas away from ‘what can we do?’, away from thinking for ourselves, discussing, planning and acting together towards the need to join an organization – their organization. They will call people undisciplined, unstrategic, unorganized to kill the development of autonomous self organization in the cradle – the kind of organization that threatens their power. On the other hand, being a large visible organization with easily identifiable leaders puts pressure on them to not get too radical lest they face the repressive apparatus of the state, so they have to try to reel in, control and diffuse the combative energy of the autonomous movements they are trying to position themselves in front of. They confuse their own safety and chains with that of the movement and in trying to hold back the destructive energy of the exploited and dispossessed they play the role of the faithful controlled opposition for the play put on by our enemies.
I want to add a caveat here that while it’s easy and important to point to these large socialist organizations anarchists certainly haven’t been free of these dynamics. We, too, have at times confused ourselves for the whole of the struggle or have engaged in politicking in one form of another. And we too in the past have built large, formal organizations. Not to bring up an old history but it’s a lesson worth repeating – that of the betrayal of the CNT during the spanish civil war, who became an organ of the republican state and helped it crush the pro-revolutionary sections of the anarchists and the autonomous self organization of peasants and workers who didn’t want to give up what they had won. To paraphrase old Malatesta – we don’t want to emancipate the people, we want the people to emancipate themselves. But just as much we must remember that – if “the people” exist – we are not outside of them but are just as much are them.
There’s more I could go into in this critique – how these organizations entrench the division of labor, how they get individuals to identify with the organization rather than their own struggle, how they create a false separation between individuals and movements, how organizations with mass appeal will water down ideas, discourses and goals, how they train people out of initiative taking, etc. Others have written more in depth about this and I will leave links at the bottom.
A Proposal of Coordination
“If the question moves away from how to organize people for the struggle, it becomes how to organize the struggle. We think that archipelagos of affinity groups, independent one from the other, that can associate according to their shared perspectives and concrete projects of struggle, constitute the best way to directly pass to the offensive. This conceptions offers the biggest autonomy and the widest field of action possible. In the sphere of insurrectional projects it is necessary and possible to find ways of informally organizing that allow the encounter between anarchists and other rebels, forms of organization not intended to perpetuate themselves, but geared towards a specific and insurrectional purpose.”
– Anonymous, Archipelago: Affinity, Informal Organization and Insurrectional Projects
So then, if not large formal organizations, what do I suggest? On the base level, the development of individual initiative, the practice of discussion and reflection, and the formation of fluid and agile affinity groups.
Individual initiative is easy to explain, but hard to practice especially for a people who have been largely trained into submission. But in every revolt, the current included, it comes back to the forefront as people see things that need to be done and do them. This simply needs to be encouraged and cultivated.
But along with that, we need to encourage and cultivate discussion and reflection. Even in riots there is downtime were people can discuss, even in high intensity situations there are a few moments where people can get together, look around, discuss plans and possibilities. Then, in the aftermath, we take time to reflect. What went well? What went poorly? Knowing and having experienced what we did, what would we do differently next time? This should be a reflexive practice of individual-collective self-reflection, analysis and decision making.
Then the last bit – fluid and agile affinity groups. Small groups of comrades who come together on the basis of trust and shared analysis to intentionally intervene in struggle. Maybe in a particular time and place they come as fighters with extra tools and masks and defensive supplies to share with people, maybe they come as medics, maybe they focus on producing and sharing analysis in the forms of posters and fliers, maybe while the forces of order are concentrated in one place they decide to be somewhere else. Maybe they do all of this or none of this. I say fluid because affinity is fluid and individuals will and should move between different groupings as the network of affinity grows and shifts.
Then we must talk about larger coordination across time and territory. Many people are currently experiencing this already in different ways and forms and I think these should be recognized for what they are – the chats where people discuss and coordinate, the autonomous calls to actions that individuals, crews and networks of affinity choose to respond to. I want to add a few more tools to the arsenal.
The tools I’m about to discuss are oriented to the development of multiple free federations of individuals and affinity groups which come together and split apart as necessary for struggle.
To this end we can talk about intentional closed meeting between people and groups that have some knowledge of each other – whether direct relations or relations in networks. These are good for discussing more specific plans and coordination and sharing resources.
There are more or less public assemblies which are best used for doing larger strategic discussions, people coming with already in the works plans and projects for people to plug into, and sharing information between groups and individuals. Assemblies that try to form consensus, make specific plans or decisions will end up with nothing getting done.
There are spokescouncils where individuals and groups come together around coordinating various plans around a goal – like maybe shutting down a particular federal building. Usually only one person from each group speaks, they share what support is available, generally what they are going to be doing, and any supply requests. It’s very logistical oriented, but also for making sure that fighters and pacifists don’t step on each others toes.
Then, of course, there is the sharing of analysis and debates in counter-information sites – like this one! – or offline papers circulated through spaces and movements. A really interesting example of this was during the 2016 railway blockade in Olympia a struggle-specific paper called The Olympia Communard was circulated and people contributed their thoughts and ideas to it. Similarly in a lot of forest occupations they’ll usually release zines during it.
Well, to close, I want to reiterate that the formal organizations are a dead end and will sell us out and to the formal organizations I say we should on one hand encourage the continued development of autonomous self organization based on the building of direct relationships in struggle; encouraging the development of individual initiative, continuous discussion, analysis and reflection for the development of affinity groups aimed to the larger coordination of horizontal federations of affinity groups.
Let a thousand affinity groups bloom and bring the fire to I.C.E!
Further Reading
Affinity
Individual Projectuality and Affinity
Autonomous Course and Permanent Discussion
A Project of Liberation
No More Organizers
The Insurrectionary Act and the Self Organization of Struggle
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