Contents ---- Editorial: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better ---- Charted and Uncharted
Territories: Common Cause and the Role of the Anarchist Organization ---- Anarchism, the
Welfare State, and Social Assistance ---- Bourgeois Influence on Anarchism - Redux ----
Taking Account of our Politics: An Anarchist Perspective on Contending with Sexual
Violence --- With Allies Like These: Reflections on Privilege Reductionism --- Editorial:
Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better ---- This journal is the product of an arduous
collective process. It is the end result of hours of intense discussions, multi-city
meetings, collective research and writing, followed by more intense discussions and
late-night editing sessions. It is also, we hope, a contribution towards a broader
conversation amongst anarchists and anti-authoritarian revolutionaries ? particularly here
in Canada, but also amongst our international comrades ? on where we're at, and how we can
best move our struggles forward.
Many of the arguments and conclusions presented in this journal will be controversial.
While it is not our intention to offend, we have nonetheless sought to look at hard
questions, and to draw honest conclusions. In doing so, we are motivated by a sincere
desire to shift not only the discourse of the revolutionary Left, but also our praxis. We
find that our members are shaped and influenced by many of the problems that we identify
as existing within the broader activist culture, and we hold no illusions that we are
somehow exempt from the criticisms we outline in these pages. This journal was initially
conceived of, and continues to serve as a tool for sharpening our politics and our
members' individual and collective development. This is often a painful process, but one
that we believe is worth the effort. Many of these articles will be self-referential, and
sometimes the themes will overlap. In constructing our criticisms of what are often taboo
subjects within the anarchist and broader activist Left, we have opted to speak from our
own experiences. We believe that this is the only principled means of framing our
arguments, and also the most useful in terms of analyzing our own shortcomings. We hope to
elicit feedback from other organizations and individuals, both from those who agree with
the conclusions we have reached, and even more crucially, from those who don't.
We kick off this volume with an article that begins with an examination of
anti-organizationalist sentiment within the North American anarchist movement, then shifts
into a brief history of Common Cause's structural and political development over the past
six years. It concludes with some projections on the form and direction of future urban
struggles, and shares some of the concrete lessons we've learned from our study and recent
experiences with neighbourhood organizing in southern Ontario.
We then shift our sights to a critique of anarchist struggles against, and often
paradoxically in support of, the Welfare State. This article focuses on the reformist
strategies pursued by much of the activist Left around social assistance programs ?
strategies that are often uncritically adopted by many anarchists engaged in labour and
anti-poverty organizing. In contrast to these strategies, we examine alternative
approaches to welfare provision that centre around the anarchist principle of mutual aid,
and which can fit into part of a broader strategy of building revolutionary dual power.
The third article will continue this exploration of the so-called ?anarchist community?,
drawing inspiration from Luigi Fabbri's classical polemic text Bourgeois Influences on
Anarchism. In attempting to bring this analysis up to date, we focus on the influence of
conspiracy theorists, health and care mysticism, and academic obscurantism on both the
contemporary anarchist movement and the broader working class. We also explore how our own
response to these influences has often been insufficient, and can often lead to a crude
class reductionism and bitter denunciations. Both of which amount to unproductive, and
eminently negative reactions to what should be issues of grave concern to us.
Next, we explore our own often inadequate experiences of attempting to contend with sexual
violence ? both within our own organization and the broader Left, and as a structural
underpinning of patriarchal capitalist relations. We critique several problematic
tendencies that we see as common to contemporary community accountability processes, while
stressing the need to build a shared politics around sexual violence that incorporates a
more realistic understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression and structural
forces that give rise to rape culture. We end this article by looking at how organizing
against Men's Rights Activists (MRAs) and struggles around reproductive justice can be
catalytic in the development of a feminist movement that can more effectively contend with
sexual violence in society at large.
We conclude the journal with an examination of anti-oppression politics, as they have come
to be understood and practiced within much of the radical activist community. In this
article, we interrogate the role of academia and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex in
recuperating the dynamic struggles of the 1970s and1980s, leading to an increased focus on
discourse that often obscures the underlying structural conditions that reproduce systems
of privilege and oppression. We contrast these political approaches with examples of
struggles against racial and gender-based oppression that have achieved material
successes, while attempting to distill lessons that can be used to inform struggles waged
within our own context.
As we stated in the editorial for the first volume of Mortar, the conclusions drawn within
these pages should not be read as the definitive word of Common Cause. Though they are
conclusions that have been reached, to as great an extent as possible, collectively, they
are not set in stone, nor are they shared equally by all members of our organization. For
us, anarchism is a social and political process of development. We hope that readers will
see this journal as an invitation to honestly question their own analysis and practice,
and to share with us any misgivings or disagreements that our conclusions have provoked.
You can get in touch with us by emailing mortar@riseup.net.
In solidarity,
Common Cause
The second volume of Mortar, Common Cause's theoretical journal, is now available
online.linchpin.ca/?q=content/mortar-volume-2
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