Dana Barnett makes a case for more unified leftist political development (along the lines of of the above mentioned study groups and multi-tendency formations) in her review of Diana Block’s recent memoir “Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back.” See http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1768/1/

I’ve read Block’s book and found this review to be a really good look at the issues it brings up and how they connect to current developments on the radical left.

Peace,
L

The study group article I posted above interviews two different NYC groups, Another Politics is Possible and the NY Study Group. APIP seems more on the anti-authoritarian/anarchist side of things, and NYSG seems to be more connected to the socialist party left.

Bring the Ruckus is active in NYC. We would be glad to meet with you. you can email me at geert@bringtheruckus.org

cheers,
geert

Great blog…
Do you know of any anarchist/socialist study groups in the NYC area?

Thanks!

But to stay on the track of the Anarchist tip…. Anarchism became widely held after the collapse of Soviet Union. For obvious reasons this was a good development. There was a period of organizing mass organizations and revolutionary organizations by Anarchists in the 1990s. Then we had the heady years of the anti-globalization movement where protest hopping and affinity groups were the buzz word. In the context of this various organizations built by anarchists fell apart. It seems to me there is a general scratching of the heads going on about the way forward. What is different about this period is the nightmare of Stalinism and Soviet Russia does not hang over everyone. I am sure this has effected the conversations and ways of thinking about organization and politics which old timers might be able to give us an insight to. This might make for a period of a richer synthesis of Anarchism and Marxism then what has been ever done before.

Thanks for the link on the roundtable Andrew. I will look at their discussion in the upcoming days. Exciting stuff!

http://zapagringo.blogspot.com/2009/09/study-groups-roundtable.html

she kind of served as a bridge between the Old Left and the New. when Muhammad Ahmad was hanging around her during the early years of RAM he had some anti-communist sentiments. but because she was sincere about building the black liberation movement he shed these prejudices and began to explore the Marxist tradition.

that’s the importance of organic revolutionaries like Queen Mother Moore: as patriotic movement builders they are able to make the past relevant again.

Lenin was good at this as well. one month he advocated “What is to be done” and later he called for “opening up the party.” he understood that the growth and structure of the revolutionary organization was organically related to the height, velocity and form of the movement. Stalinist Bolshevization in the 30s, and a repeat of this by sectors of the movements in the 60s & 70s was a mechanical reading of organizational structure that was part and parcel of its vanguardist implications.

like Queen Mother Moore, Lenin saw one of his tasks as making old ideas new again. his “State & Revolution” arguably is an application of Marx’s “The Civil War in France” and “Critique of the Gotha Program”.

Queen Mother Moore, Black Power, the Chinese Revolution and the resistance in Vietnam — for all of their faults — was a generation renewing the relevance and giving new meaning to the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

i’ve been asking myself that same question for some time now. to what extant will past movements be seen as caricatures, and to what extant will they still hold sway?

to an extant it’s already happened. i’ve heard of old, Trotskyist remnants trying to argue why Russia was a degenerated workers state and not state capitalism to an 18 year old person of color whom had no bearings on the subject, and frankly didn’t give a shit.

there are a number of issues wrapped up in that scenario.

in the 60s & 70s the question of Russia held sway because of the importance of the Chinese Revolution to so many people of color in the US and around the world. that’s not so much the case today.

the material and ideological connections between Russia – and maybe even China – have not crystalized in any movements here.

this is not to say that – and i think Don H makes this point – there are not important lessons we can learn form Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Russian Revolution.

quite the opposite. as revolutionaries we must expect to revisit many of these historical questions but in different form. i want to emphasize both parts of this statement. we need to be prepared so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

BUT… they will most definitely take a different form. i think this latter point is related to the rise of new subjectivities in any movement, and the transformation of those subjectivities.

the lack of historical memory may very well lead to many young folks brushing off any serious engagement with the legacy of the Black Panther Party, for instance. but figures like Queen Mother Moore teach us that it is important for us, as revolutionaries, to be repositories of history and politics for the new generation of radicals while at the same time giving them the space and freedom to walk their own path and arrive at questions as they come up in the movement.

at other times leaps will be made. in my head i’m think about the leap from Civil Rights to Black Power. the velocity of the movement will accelerate, contradictions will crystalize, and a restructuring of the movement will take place. during these times we will have to balance our interventions against a volunteeristic pace.

i’m not sure if all this makes sense, but in my head they point to the tensions surrounding the emergence of new movements and subjectivities on the one hand, and the need to not repeat the same mistakes on the other…

mythoughts.

In response to Nate’s questions about perspectives on reform struggles, I would say that both points he laid out are dead on, and that there may be more to it as well. Every reform that is won means a tangible gain for oppressed people that has a true impact on our lives. And the experience of fighting, losing and winning, and building organizations is one that gives us the confidence to build broader movements with demands and politics going beyond reform. But these struggles are also important in developing the understandings that revolutionary organizations have of the particular moment, what is needed, what is possible, and what we should be demanding, and not just a way for us to increase our numbers.

This I think is related to Will’s question about the difference between tailing mass movements, being a vanguard, and having an organic relation to them. During movements, and we can see this example in the Bolshevik Party as well, sometimes the mass of people move far more quickly and beyond the revolutionary organization. Lessons are learned faster during these times, and for those who have spent the periods of low activity building organizations and political perspectives may lack the flexibility to move immediately, or to change positions radically. On the eve of the February Revolution in Russia, members of the Bolshevik party advised a group of women planning an International Womens Day march and rally to not go on strike, but they did it anyway and it kicked off a general strike. Members of the party were annoyed that their advice was not taken, and they didn’t put out flyers for a general strike until 200,000 workers had already struck. On the other hand, the committees of the Bolsheviks that were rooted in communities with more working people were much quicker to move with the mass activity, rather than tail it. The latter example I think is representative of what an organic relationship between revolutionary and mass organizations looks like.

I’d like to take a stab at Will’s question about confusing mass organizations with revolutionary organizations. In terms of the specific differences, I think revolutionary organizations are necessarily more politically cohesive, meaning there is a higher amount of political agreement than in mass organizations. As was mentioned by Mamos I believe, it is likely that the organizations that will lead the fight for oppressed people in a movement will not be a single revolutionary organization, but a large multi-tendency mass organization that agrees on a set of political points particular to the movement and within which revolutionaries can argue for militant orientations to struggles, not conceding to liberal cooptation, etc. I think the confusion might occur when the relationship between people in the rev org and people not in it is not clear. Hopefully the center model provides a way forward in laying out the relationship in a democratic framework, with clarity about the role of the rev org in the mass org, the independent validity of the work being carried out by the mass org, and a level of political agreement that is high enough to wage a militant struggle but not so high that only revolutionaries of a particular ilk can participate.

From what I can tell, if the answer isn’t “yes” quite yet, it certainly is “folks are thinking about it/giving it a shot.”

The numerous examples I can think of:

1. The wave of coastal revolutionary study groups (see the round-table on radical discussion groups published in the latest Upping the Anti): Activist Study Circle in the Bay Area, LA Crew, New York Study Group, Another Politics is Possible study group (NYC)

2. Bring the Ruckus (whose stated goal is combining anarchist organization with cadre models)

3. Miami Autonomy & Solidarity (a very young revolutionary organization that just put out a political statement; google it for reference)

4. Class struggle anarchist organizations are all engaging with Marxism in a lot of ways while playing with forms of organization that one might call “cadre” if “cadre” didn’t have the Leninist origins. Even older, more established organizations like Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists are engaging with what there is to learn in Marxism a lot, internally.

This need for something new, some new form of revolutionary practice and organization that isn’t wedded unnecessarily to this tradition/tendency or that, seems to be a nation-wide phenemenon. It could just be that I’m young and don’t pay attention enough, but it seems like a very new development to me.

Nate’s fine detective work has gotten me thinking if I am out to save the soul of JFTism. I will have to think about this.

And what about saving the souls of Malcolm, Fanon, Elma Francois, Walter Rodney, and the BPP among others?

Or are we at a historical moment that needs a new “ism” which sublates (think Hegel) the past contributions into something new? If that is the case, what is the significance of that? What does that say about the current period we are in? The past we have left behind?

Hope this makes sense…

You would make Inspector Gadget proud of your detective skillz.

I do draw upon the Anarchist and Platformist tradition, but it is part of a broader ideological, organizational, and political constellation of other traditions.

One of the things I observed about the Anarchists I ran into is that they only considered radical history where folks threw up the Red and Black or something of that sort. Meaning there was a narrow sense of what constituted important and radical history. More importantly, this implied what social struggles should look like. The Anarchists I was around failed to read the self-activity of social struggles. (This is vital because this touches on how some Anarchists see culture, politics, language etc—everything imaginable. Mamos explained this more regarding JFT’s Invading Socialist Society pamphlet.) While I studied the Spanish Revolution, dabbled a little in Italian Anarchism, Kropotkin etc, over the years I have spent more time studying the history of the Iraqi CP, the Iranian revolution and some of its less recognized thinkers among the contemporary left, struggles in the Caribbean, East Africa, among other places where the Red and Black flag rarely appeared. What to make of these histories? Are they part of world history, radical history? Have these people made contributions to the struggle? Are they worth studying? Are they important to people of color, women, and the American working class? My answers to all these questions are yes. (I am guessing yours are as well). Many of the Anarchists I ran into might say no or just ignore these histories.

I guess what I am getting at is that I moved away from the need to save the soul of Anarchism and/or Platformism. Instead, I think something new needs to come about. To the extent that I over-emphasize JFT in my post, it is a sign to the immense contributions I think that tradition has made. Dimensions of these contributions are powerful enough that they reshape how other “isms” are thought about. I do not know if I can say that about Platformism and maybe even Anarchism. (At the same time, JFT is not enough and needs to be overcome for its limitations. I guess I need to come up with a new “ism”. ☺ )

So I think your hunch is probably correct. While I think much can be learned from the Platformist tradition, my hunch (and certainly my practice) is that thinking through the paradigm of Platformism has to be overcome/ broken. I cannot say that I was ever a Platformist so cannot touch upon what it would mean for someone who shares affinities with Platformism to do such a thing. The only types of Anarchism I ever identified with were Revolutionary Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism.

What histories of the Platformist tradition would you recommend?