(en) Anarkismo.net: US, Fighting for the Future - The Necessity and Possibility of National Political Organization for Our Time by Adam Weaver and SN Nappaloss ~ CookingFood.Org

This essay is an argument for moving towards national organization in the United States.
It explores the limitations of political organization today, recent positive experiences,
and possible ways to build on the present to push forward. ---- In the midst of the worst
economic crisis in decades, the left stands at a crossroads. Despite widespread anxiety,
restructuring, stirrings, and disruptions, the left has been unable to respond or develop
bases for movements and revolutionary organization in any meaningful sense. In many ways
the eruption of the Occupy movement onto the center stage with all of its weaknesses in
politics, structure, and dynamics, was a reflection of this. The events of Wisconsin,
Occupy, the Oakland General Strike, and the May 1st mobilizations have brought to the fore
the nature and potential of combative movements from below as well as the limits of
present politics.

At the very least since the financial crisis of 2008, social activists are looking for
clearer paths towards anti-capitalist alternatives. Many are realizing that something more
is needed beyond endless activism, protest politics, and vertical-style union and NGO
mobilization. The base level of political education on the left, provided largely by
non-profits and liberal university campuses, suddenly seem to have even fewer answers than
before. This has left many turning towards political study to deepen their analysis as
well as taking up questions around the need for political organization.

We need to ask ourselves, in this time of crisis how can movements be built in an
atmosphere of ruling class assaults, disorganization of the popular classes, and sporadic
resistance efforts? What are the roles of revolutionaries within movements? What are the
strategies to keep ourselves going for the long haul work that radical social change
requires? What are the lessons of the past decades in social movements and revolutionary
organizations? How do we politically develop the existing revolutionaries and help shape
new ones to build a larger milieu of revolutionary organizers, thinkers, and supporters
based in popular struggle? How would this milieu and potential political organization
relate to broader social movements, other forces on the left, those we share perspectives
with, and with those we do not?

The necessity of political organization

Our starting point for this is recognizing, as others have pointed out, that many, if not
most, of those active on the left do not believe in political organization.1 There are
many reasons for this, but the reason voiced most frequently is that they do not see a
need for organization. Beyond broad social movements, they view many of today?s groups as
being disorganized and irrelevant. Others are put off by the poor internal culture of
today?s organizations with their tendencies for personalizing conflicts, being unable to
have constructive debates, and the culture of battles in meetings that seems to isolate
rather than integrate members into broader society. The closest experience with left
political organization is commonly that of the lone leftist selling strange newspapers at
rallies. Frequently political organization as a whole is solely viewed through the prism
of negative experiences with members of the worst of Leninist organizations with sectarian
approaches to debate and relating to other political forces within organizing spaces,
attempts to dominate and control leadership of struggles, and a ?newspaper as transmission
belt of political line? approach to politics. Those on the left broadly adhering to
anarchism fare only somewhat better, in our experience mostly falling into the previous
three objections or alternatively the turn away from political organization is based on a
reaction to the weakness, political immaturity, and lack of experience observed in
existing political organization efforts. These experiences though valid, involve a failure
to think beyond the present; a failure to consider the possibilities of the future.

We believe that political organization, rather than being a distraction or worse
destructive, addresses problems in struggle today. The need for the political organization
of militants roughly falls into two categories: immediate and practical needs, and broader
political vision and strategy. First we must start with why political organization can
address the practical and immediate needs of movement. As resources become more scarce,
people are displaced, unemployment takes it?s toll, and communities are dispossessed of
their long standing resources, the need for a united and coordinated means of organizing
and fighting grows more crucial. Not having political organization means relying on the
winds of chance when organizing efforts emerge, to bring together militants under various
banners and projects, cobbling together resources for each fight, and then scattering to
the wind again once the fight subsides, often leaving behind little analysis of strengths
and weakness of the fight that occurred. Further, the relationships and politicization
that arise out of fights are often not furthered and maintained in order to continue to
build future fights.

This isn?t to say that we can?t try to outlive struggles without capital ?P? political
organization. We can and should. But a political organization, in one form or another, is
a tool, which can help us do that work more systematically. While not a panacea or even
the deciding factor necessarily, it does expand what we can do over time. Political
organization provides a space for reflection, and deepening of the lessons of struggle
amongst like-minded people that wouldn?t otherwise meet together. It can be a place to
weave disparate experiences into a coherent whole. Work is divided by issue, location, and
the necessary political mix that movement work needs. While it?s possible to try and
institutionalize sharing experiences and strategizing across projects, sustaining this
systematically is difficult. Similarly, different and higher level conversations are
possible amongst militants who share fundamental aims and analysis. Since struggles ebb
and flow, gain or lose their libertarian character, political organization can give us
extra tools to understand and work in changing conditions. Extrapolating from this, a
national political organization creates the widest level of discussion across a broad
range of experiences of like-minded militants. With smaller regional or localized groups
conversations are often limited to a smaller pool of individuals, with more limited
resources, and less experience.

A useful concept is that of the ?political home?, in which political organization acts as
a ?home base? creating ?a place for discussion and creation of a vision to guide the
organizing efforts of revolutionaries, and a place for reflection, development, and
growth? of similarly minded militants.2 The idea of the political home is useful to newly
developing anarchists, in providing them with a community they can identify with, and grow
their political development with. While for experienced militants, the political home is
useful in creating a community of ?co-thinkers? to reflect, engage, carry them through the
long haul of highs and lows of struggles, and to develop theory with.

Beyond practical issues of coordination and a home base of militants there are more
systemic level issues such as: the often uneven levels of political development within
movements, incipient small group mentalities, excessive inward focuses that often relies
on the social glue of key militants and thereby stymies growth beyond an immediate circle,
and the lack of a healthy culture of internal criticism. Unaddressed, these issues
together hinder the emergence of a vision around what we call ?the anarchist project?,
which we will speak more on in the discussion around vision and strategy.

The issue of political development and popular education is crucial. Whether we grow as a
movement, build and retain individuals, reflect the makeup of the working class, have a
movement where people can articulate an anarchist perspective, defines whether or not
anarchism is a growing and meaningful force that is rooted in struggle or whether it is a
marginal philosophy. Individuals, or sometimes layers of individuals working together,
often begin their process of politicization and involvement in social struggles when they
begin to question the ?common sense? assumptions of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and
other power relations. These questions then can give way to deeper systemic questions of
how do we understand the system at a deeper level, what we can create beyond the current
social order, where does our work fit into the larger picture of reaching a new society,
and what language and tools are helpful in describing and thinking about all of the above?
Individuals are generally left on their own devices to grapple with these burning
questions and reflect on their experience.

Informal mentorship and individual study are currently the norm for political development
on the left. Isolation is the default practice. Despite all the emphases on acting
collectively on the left, individuals are largely left on their own, to work through the
deepest issues. We must ask though: Who receives the mentorship from whom, if at all? Who
is able to successfully navigate individual study and the political minefield of facebook
posts, blogs, political forums, and websites that are so important in shaping the
narrative of radical politics? The answer is that this process is often gendered towards
men, and reflects existing class, race, education, and geographical hierarchies. The
political isolation of thinking alone reproduces existing negative social relationships.
All of these contribute to the entrenchment of activist dynamics, lopsided development,
and holds back the building of a rooted, diverse, and more representative left.

Working in isolation, or within frameworks that do not share goals of popular education,
collective empowerment, and libertarian values, radicals find themselves struggling both
for their own education and to understand how to intervene in their work and lives.
Dolores from Miami Autonomy & Solidarity in her piece ?Why Women Should Join Political
Organizations? puts it this way:

?I know so many women that have so much to contribute ? their ideas, organizing
experience, parenting experience, etc.? and have talked with them about many of their
frustrations with nonprofits or with individual activism, and yet they continue to work
alone. If we continue like this and don?t come together around a common ideological
framework then there will never be an end to patriarchy or oppression.?3

Here Dolores identifies specifically the isolation related to grappling with work. It
isn?t that there aren?t lessons, critiques, or ideas being developed by militants. It is
that they have not found a framework for uniting with others to work through political
questions and proposals (either those developed by the broader left or by building them
themselves). This is where political development and broader popular education efforts can
intervene. While the efforts of localized or informal groups can do some of this work, it
is far more effectively done drawing from the collective experience, skills, and resources
at the national level. Organization is a method for building a common set of references
and conversations among wider layers about theory, practices, and methods of organization.

This leads us to the broader issues of vision, strategy and what we call the ?anarchist
project.? The anarchist project is what we use to describe the cumulative efforts- whether
at the level of action, organization, culture or consciousness- that give birth to
revolutionary social change and bring the vision of anarchism into reality. No doubt this
is a huge endeavor that requires the efforts of many; millions in fact. But this compels
us to ask the question: What advances the anarchist project and what hinders it? How do we
begin the discussion of a new society with the tens of thousands active in changing the
world and then perhaps the millions who are not (yet) active? How do we make the ideas and
values of anarchism not just a part of those conversations but a tangible proposal?
Certainly political organization is no complete answer for these questions, but it gives
us an important tool to put forward our ideas and vision in an amplified way. This is true
whether through propaganda and literature, social media content, popular education and
political development activities, and importantly through the coordinated organizing work
we do and the discussions that are inevitably raised in that work. Political organization
can give us additional tools to begin addressing these issues.

One example of this that we can look to is within the anarchists of the Frente de
Estudiantes Libertarios (Libertarian Student Front or FEL) involved in the Chilean
students movement. Over the last several years in response towards moves to further
privatize the education system, students in both higher education and at the high school
level have led massive street demonstrations and campus takeovers. Felipe Ramirez, the
elected 2011 General Secratary of the Federaci?n de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile
(University of Chile Student Federation or FECH) and member of the FeL, elaborates in an
interview how the organization became a meaningful force within the student movement:

?The most crucial thing for the growth of FeL and for the strengthening of the national
organization was its political maturity. At first, the FeL was an organization that had
very few policy plans. ? Faced with these situations [attacks on education and mass
mobilizations in opposition], the FeL begins to slowly start building the framework for
its political line, its proposal to education and the funding issue and all that somehow
congeals in 2011. The mobilization catches us with an organization that is starting to
grow along the heightening of the student movement and we see high school students go onto
college, and these students come with a history of struggle and mobilization already, and
they?re interested in the left and that also allows us to accumulate part of the whole
process. The year 2011 forces the organization to throw the muddle, to understand that
anarchism can not remain a sum of values, a sum of words of good upbringing or books that
were written 140 years ago, nor moral principles, nor ethical ones. Anarchism has to be a
policy, and without it being a political policy, it dies. And faced with this dilemma,
luckily the organization opted for political discussion, for the creation of concrete
proposals to give to the movement, understanding that we are not fighting for the
revolution but for the specific conditions that accumulate towards a project of the
working class, and that has allowed us to grow and consolidate as a national structure and
also carve out a place among the leftist organizations.?4

Here Ramirez, an anarchist militant of the FeL, is answering how the FeL shifted from a
largely ideological political group that numbered in the dozens to a political force in
the hundreds at the center of society-wide ruptures. Key to this was not simply their
demands nor the time period, but also the framework for developing their struggles and
deepening them through ongoing practice and assessment.

Objections to political organizations

Common concerns and objections, raised by the most active and intelligent militants,
within our organizations focus on our local strength and our relationship to social
movements. If we are too weak locally to function in an effective capacity, how will we
build a national organization? If our commitment is to struggle in and to build social
movements, and our capacity is limited locally, won?t a national organization take away
from those efforts? Perhaps we need such an organization, but with the state of the left
and the poverty of our forces is it not a better use of our time to focus on building up
the movements and small circles of affinity that will at some point down the road make
political organization possible? Is it possible to build an organization that relates to
movements and ?everyday people? and not just the usual suspects on the left? Moreover,
political organizations don?t have much to show for their efforts, so wouldn?t our time be
better spent just building up social movements?

To these objections, we would like to state the case that a national organization in our
time, in this moment, will not deter from our movement, but in fact is necessary to
overcome many of our present limitations and problems. We believe a national organization
with a meaningful and thoughtfully built unity and praxis can play a key role in making
our desire to move beyond retreat and reform possible. This may not happen right away, and
it may be a protracted process of striving towards a goal with steps forward and steps
backwards, but we believe this is necessary to become a meaningful political force.

For example, there is a concern that time would be better spent simply building up
movement work. This is largely right. There is scarcely enough energy invested in
struggle, and often the left squanders its time on self-absorbed activities more than
struggles that impact people outside of left subcultures. Yet there?s a problem here too.
Mass struggles do not exist nor arise in vacuums. When they do emerge, other political
forces intervene. Many times, we are the same ones initiating projects as well as working
within them. This is done typically through linking with others and trying to forge a
united vision of doing that work. Such projects rely on informal and tacit political
links; informality that often reproduces all the problematic behavior and isolation of the
left but without clear mechanisms to address it. Moreover, if we allow our work to be
defined by personality types and charismatic individuals who tend to begin or seize these
projects, our trajectory will tend to reflect those individuals and their passing
interests. Organization can allow us to experiment, learn, work together and actually work
towards the collectivity so many of us as radicals speak of.

Very often, in our movement work, we work together with others, who do not share our
values. Inevitably some of these forces relate to struggles in unprincipled,
authoritarian, and co-optive ways. We have seen from experience they do so in organized
systematic manners. The organization of anarchists as a political force within struggles
is thus a strategic question. In trying to build the world we want to see, we will
encounter organized forces that seek to either maintain the status quo or work towards
contradictory aims from our own. All the would be vanguards and those pushing to channel
movements into institutional and electoral directions will always exist, but can an
organized voice of those pushing for horizontal approaches, militancy in tactics, and
radicalism in practice be present? An organized anarchist presence is necessary to move us
forward and present a libertarian alternative.

Beyond the problems raised above concerning the life cycle of struggles, there are more
factors that make going-it-alone a bad option. It is difficult to work inside movements
and struggles in a fragmented and often isolated manner. The political environment both
within those struggles and all the forces bearing down on us make sustaining struggle in
the long run unlikely without some form of unity. History is filled with libertarians
failing to organize a coherent opposition until whole periods were torn out from under
them. Part of this is taking a longer-term view. We need to begin anticipating problems of
our work years in advance so as not to have them crushed by foreseeable political
opposition.5 Political organization provides a field for advancing libertarian
alternatives in an otherwise hostile environment, while lack of political organization
removes tools that might soften the forces scattering us and causing us only to be
reactive to the circumstances of the moment.

Another objection raised is that the work we want to see isn?t happening within the
organized anarchist movement, but outside of it. The organizations we happen to have
aren?t up to snuff. On the face of this critique it is partially true. It should be noted
that groups often don?t talk about what they do, since many long-term campaigns
(particularly with workplace organizing) are not easily presented in public without
endangering the participants or doing so in a way that distorts the relationship between
the organization and the movement. Still, it is correct that the present movement on the
whole isn?t doing the work we all want to see. Too often there is comfort amongst the
radical left, some of the organized anarchist movement included, to exist as an offshoot
of the broader activist subculture or as a historical and political hobby, disconnected
from the daily experiences and struggles of the working class. But there is a lot of
innovative work being done in the US right now: autonomous workplace organizing
independent from the unions and antagonistic to the contractual-NLRB organizing methods,
neighborhood organizing seizing homes and defending against foreclosures, collective
direct actions against employers, landlords, and state assaults, direct actions against
deportation, and countless other examples. Much of this work is carried out by other
groups, with different libertarian ideologies (rarely by party oriented Leninists, though
broad social changes could make them adopt different methods) and by unorganized radicals
in these movements. This isn?t to say there aren?t groups doing great work right now, but
those working outside dwarf the organized anarchist milieu.

Where we can work together, we should in general. There should be systematic attempts to
unify with people based on shared strategy and objectives wherever this can be done. One
tool that allows for this is building networks of tendency within our organizing that has
strategy, tactics and broad values as the basis. This is different from political
organizations because of the purpose (to build libertarian practice up within struggles)
and the degree or level of unity. Members of MAS have written about this in a series of
documents that discuss the concept of intermediate level analysis and as well the
Federa??o Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro or FARJ) in
Brazil has described this as the concentric circle model.6 Not enough is being done to
build those networks of practice, and in many ways that is the primary task for
libertarian revolutionaries, especially in a time when militant reformism, recuperation,
and forms of neo-fascism are being put back on the table by a system chewing on a crisis.7

Still, we should look further. The divisions that exist in the broad libertarian milieu
are drawn for the wrong reasons. We can?t believe today that people doing the solid work
we aspire to are politically divided based on the validity of today?s divisions. In too
many ways we have inherited the politics of other time periods that consistently shows
itself to be inadequate in our daily practice. Given our historic task of the anarchist
project, and creating a politics for our time, we cannot ignore a key responsibility we
have? which is to become a pole, that attracts and unifies the forces that seek
libertarian revolution, and pushes struggle further, going beyond the walls and limits
thrown up by reformism, authoritarians, and the weight of the system on us all. With
whatever forces we have, we need to strengthen the work we do, and find a unification that
brings together those working outside of organizations and those outside of our milieu
behind projects that redefine politics in our time. In other words, we should look
skeptically at the existing perceived political divisions, not be held to the limitations
of existing projects, and we should refuse the idea that it is not possible to bring
together the best of what exists today to transform the current political alignments into
a better and higher quality struggle tomorrow.

It should be noted that many of these objections raised about political organization
reflect fears, latent or overt, rather than positive proposals. People often are hesitant
to build because of their fear that things will go sour or they will look bad. It is not
that these fears and reluctances are not based on anything concrete- there are no
well-paved roads in the journey of revolutionary work- rather it is that these manifest
and hold back our work in a number of ways. Resistance to Occupy, ?turfism?, and an
unwillingness to engage and build with new militants, are examples of fears getting the
better of otherwise solid and experienced militants. Yet we can?t shape our politics
around our own fears, reluctance, and sideline criticisms. This is only a recipe for
stasis and in the long term these tendencies act as counterweights to the anarchist
project. The assumption that doing nothing is better than the potential pitfalls should be
questioned. Similarly, experience in failure can make militants scared to take risks, so
scared they end up missing opportunities. From a negative politics that is based around
fear, waiting and seeing, and trying to tackle collective problems in isolation, we should
instead be constructing a positive vision, supported by a thoughtful program of how to
begin from where we stand today.

The pitfalls of localized groups and collectives

Now we move to discussing the dynamics of where most of the organized and class struggle
oriented Anarchist movement, along with those with sympathetic and similar politics, are
at currently. Small city-based organizations that function as collectives based out of one
city or regional organizations that grow out of larger social, mass organizational, and
political networks should be seen as organic and practical starting points. Navigating the
dynamics of doing good work on a local level is easier and keeps the scope small enough so
that it?s easy for people to see the need and feel that it is possible. From what
experience shows though, there are a number of recurring problems that these types of
groups pose: they are weaker and more likely to fail, they tend to reproduce local and
small-group dynamics, and they fail to develop the skills necessary to intervene on a
wider basis.

Local collectives tend to face enormous pressures. Relocation of people creates real
problems, especially in highly mobile societies like the US. Having a tiny core as the
center of organizations make normal life events that change people?s activity level
(illness, family, career changes) into political problems. Replicating infrastructure and
administration at a local level places a larger burden on groups, which might otherwise
use the same energy in order to organize and do public work that sustains people. Small
in-group dynamics, isolation, and social pressures all chip away at these formations, and
they face these issues generally alone (often with the same failures repeated every few
years by new individuals). This is especially true outside the activist urban centers
where there is not enough left presence to tread water by swimming within the existing
activist scene. In large sections of the country where little activist infrastructure
exists, such groups often have to create everything from nothing, while facing the
countercurrent of life under capitalism. Most often these groups fail within a few years.

Though this is true of local or regional groups, the same dynamics exist for national
groups that fail to move beyond functioning at a similar level. It?s a natural response to
try and perfect one?s work in a single local before tackling further issues. Typically
this does not work. In part the thinking is that with will and good organization, you can
overcome common problems. While part of the problem is conscious organization, these are
lessons that are difficult to confront again in isolation. While organizations tends to
correspond to the broader forces of struggle in the time they exist, by limiting attempts
to collectivize the problems of our time we end up putting too much time into recycling
administrative problems and lose out on collaborative political approaches that we might
move forward and grow from; or at least better identify our limitations and weaknesses.

It is sometimes said that national organization would take away from local organizing
which often stands on shaky ground. This is an understandable concern given the limited
resources, time, and problems we face. Historically though, we have seen the opposite:
left to our own devices there can be a steep decline of local work. In the past few
decades, a number of local and regional anarchist and not explicitly anarchist
organizations have been formed and dissolved in quick succession. While obvious factors
might be the shaky political foundations that many groups began with coupled with lack of
experience, this also follows a natural trajectory of strain from being isolated locally.
Indeed most radical mass organizing projects have similar fates and trajectories. By only
drawing locally, we put ourselves into a position where, as we stated previously, members
moving, changing careers, having family obligations, etc., strain already limited
organizations. A national organization is able to offset this both by absorbing the loss
of militants to other areas, as well as building more local contacts through a visible
public presence.

Further, having a national organization creates a pole to attract the sharpest militants
from around the country that may otherwise be isolated or, as does happens, drift in other
directions politically. Allowing developing members to benefit from, dialogue, and work
with a larger pool, or in other words a wider milieu, of experienced militants and talent.
Numerous times we?ve read of repeated lessons learned by disparate groups. Rather than
seeing these pitfalls continue, we are heartened to believe there are perhaps, some trends
towards the repetition of advances, that forces are moving closer to one another despite
working in parallel.

There is no magic formula to overcoming the real issues both national and local efforts
face. National level organizations present their own sets of problems, but we believe that
they are better problems to struggle around, than the lower level problems that localized
groups face on their own: attrition, stagnation, lack of resources, lower levels of
discussion and less political coherence. A more fruitful way to look at these issues is
that we ultimately can?t avoid investing in both national and local efforts. The real
question though is how based on our needs today?

Organization today, organizations of the immediate past

In this segment we will first offer commentary on the current class struggle Anarchist
milieu that the authors have been participants in and three other influential groups
related to the milieu. The segment within anarchism, in the US, that has dedicated
meaningful effort to building political organization over the last decade has been the
class struggle anarchist milieu. The groups emerging out of this milieu, while certainly
taking steps both forwards and backwards, have in the last decade made strides towards
being rooted in and based around organizing activity. Still though, they have been largely
localized or regionalized, and fallen victim to many of the issues discussed in the
section on small organizations and collectives.

There are some pressures that seem most prevalent within the milieu. First, it?s difficult
to solve problems of a changing world, especially in light of the crisis and new struggles
in the working class, in isolation. Organizations are running in parallel trying to solve
big problems with limited resources. Second, small group dynamics dominate and hold back
moving forward. When organizations are centered on personal relationships, often as
cliques of sorts, it?s easy for personal tensions to overwhelm the capacity of these
groups. Third, there?s excessive administrative effort relative to the amount of people
involved, simply by reduplicating things like web maintenance, correspondence,
publications, etc. Lastly, if larger structures are not developed for political action,
the skills and methods necessary for them will not develop either. Creating a national
delegated structure of locals, navigating different ideas, strategies, and methods to
implement work is necessary to build capacity to respond and construct alternatives to
national issues. Meaningful action needs to be taken towards addressing these issues and
not merely delaying them.

There are two more pressing issues that need to be taken up. Existing organization across
the revolutionary left has been unable to produce solid popular and political
organization, and coordinated strategic work has been limited in implementation. While in
general for the anarchist milieu, the past ten years have seen moves towards social
struggles as the primary front for radical activity, existing organizations have not been
able to integrate and implement a coherent revolutionary approach to this work. Work
centers around individuals, projects, and often driven by the winds of change without a
coherent anarchist alternative being evident in practice. There is a combination of
tailing business unions and NGOs, intellectual tinkering outside of struggle, highly
uneven political development, and sloppy issue chasing. This again is a reflection of our
time, however it is not inevitable. It is well within our reach to begin thinking and
working on how the anarchist movement could have an organized and coherent expression of a
movement that confronts capital, the state, and oppression through the struggles of the
popular classes. We cannot change the objective situation, invent struggles, or proceed as
if we have the militants we need, but we can take strive towards solutions over the long haul.

Similarly, organizations have fought to build conscious political education and to a
lesser extent popular education through their mass work. On both fronts, an independent
and revolutionary approach to this work has fallen short. If the lessons of the 90s and
2000s were about the central role of mass struggle rather than activism, perhaps the need
for a revolutionary alternative and educational work is becoming the lesson of this
moment. It is the ability to facilitate creative militants, who can think and act in real
time, that is the lifeblood of movements. Perhaps it is an organization?s main task to
improve the ability to work through these issues, put heads together, and strategize the
best path forward.

There are three helpful reference points that, we believe, are useful to draw upon from
political organizations of the immediate past within the libertarian left. The first would
be the role of the publication Love and Rage by the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist
Federation (1993-1998), which emerged out of the protest politics of the 1990s. With a
final press run reported at 9,000 their well-produced monthly publication featured a range
of debate and was read and respected outside the anarchist milieu. While Love and Rage as
an organization had a number of tendencies and practices that coexisted together, their
publication stands out as an example of the creation of a visible pole of anarchism within
the larger left. With the maturing of the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists
(2000-Present, now Common Struggle ? Libertarian Communist Federation/ Lucha Com?n ?
Federaci?n Comunista Libertaria), originally as a bi-national organization in the US and
Canada, we saw a concrete reorientation away from the protest politics and summit hopping
of the 1990s and early 2000s towards engagement with and commitment to building mass
oriented social movements as opposed to activist mobilization. Finally, the organization
Bring the Ruckus (2002-2012), in part founded by former members of Love and Rage that
included anarchist and non-anarchist members, left a legacy (among many other ideas) of a
collective strategy built around a common analysis. What this meant in practice was a set
of criteria for their organizing work and regular evaluation of how their local level
organizing met or fell short of their political goals. These three examples present
starting points which we can build on to create new examples for the current political moment.

Towards a vision of political organization for today

The organization of today is not that of 1917, 1936, or even 2001. Our moment in history
has its own needs, its own challenges, and potentials. Given the state of the left and of
the working class, we can?t expect nor aim to create political organization modeled on
previous upheavals. A political organization today is not the vehicle of social
revolution. Struggle changes everything, including organization, and we can only try to
anticipate and prepare for transformations that we cannot fully understand or control.
Part of taking this into account is acknowledging that we cannot lay out the ideal picture
of what a political organization should look and act like and expect all the good people
to simply ?get on board.? This simply won?t happen. Rather than an idealized endpoint,
political organization should be seen as a process that must be built conscientiously
through on the ground work, the creation of a pole of ideas, meaningful relationships, and
political struggle over time.

In this article we?ve attempted to give brief comments on the current political terrain,
state the case for a national political organization both on levels of practical needs and
that of vision and strategy in relation to the anarchist project. We?ve also attempted to
spell out our criticisms of the current state of the organized Anarchist movement that
exists as local and regional based collectives. Now, drawing from our discussions above,
we now hope to present our vision of political organization that speaks to the needs of
here and now. Some of this may repeat previous point of other sections, but we feel the
need to present the vision in full and more expanded terms here.

We need a different kind of political organization. Political organization today needs to
speak to the needs of drawing out of isolation the current regional and city based groups
and taking our efforts to a higher level with national organization. First and foremost is
the need to create a common set of reference points, a healthy culture of discussion and
debate and political development in all members so as to address the current uneven levels
of development across our milieu. This should become an expectation for all incoming
members as the political education and development of new militants will be the key site
of growing, raising the quality of, and transforming our milieu. In sum these are the key
areas for political work: developing militants and creating a healthy culture of debate,
building a pole for deepening a libertarian praxis, expanding a coherent libertarian voice
within struggle, and working in social struggles at the intermediate level.

The primary work of political organizing right now is developing committed militants who
can act with creativity and initiative, rather than the military model of soldiers
carrying out orders. The building blocks of this work begins with one on one contact and
relationship building, and moves towards integrating militants into collective study and
organizing efforts. Any national formation should be working to pool resources,
systematize, and develop work aimed at maximizing the potential of building committed
revolutionary militants rooted in struggle. Developing internal process and curricula is
one part of this. Reading groups and workshops are traditional, however not enough thought
has been spent looking at how people actually learn; through practice, reflection, and
taking initiative in working through problems that confront them in their work. Beyond the
development of the ability to do this work, larger questions confront us.

If we hope to break out of the dynamics of much of the present left where demographics and
development are skewed around race, gender, class, formal education, and those from major
coastal urban centers, then we need to be committed to, as members of the Furious Five
Revolutionary Anarchist Collective called it, ?building the new base of anarchism? which
is cultivated from and draws from our base within organizing.8 A developed practice of
political education will be one aspect of building a new base and two other useful
concepts in our political organization tool kit should be the concept of creating
concentric circles and the political home.

Taken from the tradition of the Latin American especifista anarchists, the concept of
concentric circles is a recognition of differences in the role and trajectory of struggle
in the activity of militants.9 A concentric circle model involves organized overlapping
circles grouped by levels of commitment and activity with their own respective decision
making. In MAS this has been reflected by what is called the MAS compas10 circle, which
involves organizing a social space for reflection on struggles, exploration of politics,
and collaboration in building social struggle on a broad libertarian basis. Within MAS,
there is a circle of integrating militants in the process of building common practice,
understanding, and relationships with the organization. The process of integration is one
of defining one?s role, but also one?s level of commitment and capacity. Members of the
organization are people who have the capacity and initiative to act, understanding of the
group?s political analysis and objectives, and are active in social struggles as a
militant. Concentric circles gives a model where we can start at the present
underdevelopment of left practice, political development and levels of commitment and over
time develop and grow and deepen our relationships, ideas, and practice in tandem.

The political home is a concept drawn from Amanecer, who define it as part of making
political organization ?a place for discussion and creation of a vision to guide the
organizing efforts of revolutionaries, and a place for reflection, development, and
growth.?11 In a time in which the left is largely alienated from practice, and often
reflects the social ills of isolation and broader society, the political home attempts to
build a nurturing environment for experimentation and creating solutions in our
communities. At this time, fostering exploration is more important than winning over
people to one or another line. We need militants capable of intervening and formulating
their own creative approach to their situation. The political home is a place where this
growth can occur.

Beyond the relationship of the organization to the militant, a national organization needs
to work towards becoming a pole of attraction for libertarian ideas within society. As we
said, today a rigid, narrow framework of a tight organization does not fit our capacity or
challenges. To believe that the positions we?ve inherited are comprehensively correct is
naive and dangerous. Largely our task is to build a politics for our time. Yet, to do so
we still need to have an orientation as libertarian revolutionaries. It is not the case
that, just putting everyone in the same room will yield anything beneficial. The paralysis
that occurs when people declare unity, though an artificial unity without any way to agree
on how to proceed, is an unfortunately frequent occurrence of a left that both seeks unity
and yet has little experience creating real lived unity.

Against this, we propose that we should build specific projects that put our energy into
concrete proposals. We live in a period where experimentation is crucial, and likewise a
plurality of experiments is necessary. Organizations then should be organizing around
trying out their own conception and ideas. The goal of such efforts should be to provide
poles of attraction to their politics, and likewise should be looking at how their
experiences play out. Rather than dissolving ourselves into an amorphous mass, the pole of
attraction model argues for building our politics through struggle and praxis on the
political and social movement terrain, while seeking to draw in energy and individual
militants through those experiences.

Realizing these goals requires exerting energy and having the means to work through our
thinking, express ourselves, and enter into dialogue with others. Traditional media
models, those of the left included, see media as centered around the transmission of
ideas. Yet media is as much about social relationships as what we express. The work of
creating media draws us into political relationships with the struggles we?re interacting
with and in the process of distributing our ideas. Looking at media as a political process
of social relationships, organizations should be building a libertarian voice within
social struggles.

There are a number of pieces to this. First popular education (understood as a political
process of praxis between revolutionaries and people in struggle, yet centered on working
through the immediate experiences of those struggles by their protagonists) needs to drive
our efforts of media. On top of this we do need libertarian thought and work around
developing our analysis of social conditions and struggles. Libertarian thought has been
become prominent, perhaps even hegemonic in some aspects, over the past two decades within
the US left and many parts of the global left, though it remains a scattered, amorphous,
and often incoherent in its content. Recognizing this, there is a need to take up the role
of articulating relevant libertarian ideas and building it into a coherent voice
throughout society. One part of this may be publications, radio and video programs, and
studies. In Latin America, the Colombian based Centro de Investigaci?n Libertaria y
Educaci?n Popular (Center for Libertarian Investigation and Popular Education or CILEP)
and in Spain the Instituto de Ciencias Econ?micas y de la Autogesti?n (Institute of
Economics Sciences and Self-Management or ICEA) are possible examples of how broad
sections of libertarians can build spaces of collective thinking and dialogue in a
non-sectarian manner. In the US the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) is perhaps the
closest step in that direction, though one that libertarians have unfortunately not yet
taken up on a broad collective level.12

In terms of social struggles, we stand in a difficult place. There are limited elements of
movements, but these experiences are largely too isolated, fragmented, and insufficient.
For these reasons, today an intermediate approach to struggle is the primary method we
believe militants should be utilizing. An intermediate approach involves working at the
level of militants in struggle united around a practical orientation to their work (unlike
the mass or political orientations who target everyone or those united by specific
politics respectively). The intermediate approach seeks to build autonomous power through
struggle, by those reflecting on their work, taking a libertarian methodology within, and
over time creating a force capable of responding to the ups and downs that occur within
struggles. Further, it is united by strategic objectives built through experiences and not
merely imposed ideologically. Such an intermediate force could be able to push the
potential of struggles further in situations where established power breaks down. Yet our
experiences in workplaces, communities, and schools has suggested that this kind of work
can also give us tools in our time that are not otherwise available. An intermediate
approach gives us clear work when we cannot force mass organizations that aren?t in
immediate reach, nor political organization where there are no militants.

Political organization: We build as we walk

We began this piece with questions speaking to the current political period and stating
our case for both the need for a national political organization and our criticisms of the
localized and small group dynamic that exists for much of the class struggle Anarchist
milieu. But in a broader sense these points could in many ways apply just the same to much
of the non-party radical left as well, whether they explicitly identify with anarchism,
broad anti-authoritarianism or not. In the preceding section, based largely on our own
experiences as well as examples by similarly minded anarchist militants in Latin America,
we outlined a sketch of what we feel are the most useful tools and practices which speak
to the practical needs of political militants and the broader goals of what we call the
the anarchist project.

Overall our main stresses are that if we wish to work towards and become the movement we
profess to believe in, then we need to think in broader terms fighting not just for today
but also for the future. We cannot limit ourselves to being the proverbial frog at the
bottom of the well, convinced that the sky is only as wide as the opening of the well.13
Neither can we wait till social explosions arrive on our doorstep to build the skills and
infrastructure we need ? it will already be too late. We hope that the criticism and
points that we?ve outlined can be a starting point towards this. But importantly we want
to be clear that by stating the case for national political organization it does not mean
we believe that this is automatically possible or even something immediately desired.
Political cohesiveness, development and praxis14 are not end goals declared that we can
find ready made formulas to create, but rather processes that are built qualitatively over
time. Examples that we may be able to draw from are the Especifist current within
Brazilian anarchism that has spent well over a decade linking together local and regional
groups and attempting to develop a coordinated praxis under the network of the Forum of
Anarchist Organizations, and most recently in consolidated into the Brazilian Anarchist
Coordination. While class struggle Anarchists in North America have spent already more
than five years building links and exchanges, this is not to say that ten years of work is
the required prerequisite either. Likely a range of experimentation, with pitfalls and
disappointments along the path, and perhaps even under various organizational banners,
will provide the necessary trial and error. But the journey only begins with a firm
understanding of our present limitations coupled with a vision of what we are attempting
to create; after this there is only one foot in front of the other.

????

The authors would like to acknowledge Shambhu Shunya for editorial contributions to this
article.

1. ?The Crisis Within the Left: Theory, Program, Organization? by BJ for the Party
Building Commission of Freedom Road Socialist Organization / Organizaci?n Socialista del
Camino para la Libertad. http://freedomroad.org/2004/12/the-crisis-within-the-le...on-2/

2. ?Mission Statement? by members of Amanecer: For a Popular Anarchism, a California based
political organization that existed 2005-2012. The concept of the ?political home? is
taken from the especifista tradition in Latin America and first put into use in the US by
members of Amanecer at their founding conference in 2005. One of the authors was a
founding member.

3. ?Why Women Should Join Political Organizations? by Dolores of Miami Autonomy and
Solidarity.http://miamiautonomyandsolidarity.wordpress.com/2010/09...ions/

4. ?Interview with Felipe Ramirez of FEL-Chile? Interview by Scott Nappolas, translation
by M?nica Kostas. http://www.anarkismo.net/article/24144

5That isn't to overestimate our powers of prediction. Speculative politics typically is a
lottery. With foreseeable problems however we can both practice and prepare. This is
different from believe that we can anticipate or build revolution step-by-step, a model
which can exacerbate conservative tendencies in politics.

6. See ?Defining Practice: The Intermediate Level of Organization and Struggle? by Scott
Nappalos. http://libcom.org/library/defining-practice-intermediat...uggle. A follow up
commentary piece is ?The Intermediate Level and Trajectories of Struggle? by Nate
Hawthorne http://recomposition.info/2011/04/27/the-intermediate-l...ggle/. A helpful
collection of documents can also available which includes ?Social Anarchism and
Organisation: Concentric Circles? by FARJ and ?The Problems Pose by the Concrete Class
Struggle and the Popular Organization? By Jos? Antonio Guti?rrez
http://zinelibrary.info/files/intermediate%20level%20re...s.pdf .

7. The term was first coined in a December 2004 statement. Members of the Furious Five
later dissolved the collective to found what became Amanecer. For more on the Furious Five
see: http://machete408.wordpress.com/writings-of-the-furious...tive/

8 The term was first coined in a December 2004 statement. Members of the Furious Five
later dissolved the collective to found what became Amanecer. For more on the Furious Five
see http://machete408.wordpress.com/writings-of-the-furious...tive/

9. The best overviews of the concept which should serve as starting points are ?Social
Anarchism and Organization: Concentric Circles? which is a translated excerpt from
?Anarquismo Social e Organiza??o? by the Federa??o Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ)
http://libcom.org/library/social-anarchism-organisation...rcles and ?How to Participate in
the FARJ?? an organizational document of the FARJ translated by Jonathan of the Zabalaza
Anarchist Communist Front of South Africa.

10Compa is short for compa?ero in spanish, which has a political connotation to it beyond
friend.

11. Amanecer Mission Statement http://especifista.wordpress.com/about/

12Websites with further information on each of the groups are as follows: CELIP ; ICEA
http://iceautogestion.org ; IAS www.anarchist-studies.org.

13This political parable is often attributed within the left to Chinese revolutionary Mao
Zedong, but the origins actually lie in 4th century BCE Daoist writings by Zhuangzi,
Section 17, ?Autumn Floods.? For a brief discussion see:
http://www.froginawell.net/china/2005/06/site-launch/

14?Brazil: Elements for a Historical Reconstruction of Our Current? by Coordena??o
Anarquista Brasileira (Brazilian Anarchist Coordination or CAB), translation by Jonathan
P. http://www.anarkismo.net/article/24671

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(en) Anarkismo.net: US, Fighting for the Future - The Necessity and Possibility of National Political Organization for Our Time by Adam Weaver and SN Nappaloss

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