Spontaneity

Malcolm Harris begins by suggesting that a changed class composition requires a changed form of struggle. He writes:

The same traits that the “knowledge economy” valorizes (spontaneity, ambition, self-organization, quick always-on communication, working in teams) are what have enabled the occupations to take hold in the particular form that they have. “Idle chatter” between workers was a threat on the Fordist production line, now it’s a site of capture. We’re trained to do it. Of course the revolutionary workers went to look for Lenin at the crucial moment – but would we?

The conclusion is that it is precisely those specific traits valorized by a given regime of accumulation that can be strategically turned against that regime. Capital, in other words, provides us with the raw materials that we can then use to destroy it. But having potential weapons to work with and actually overthrowing the capitalist mode of production are two very different things. There is a gap between these moments, and a great leap must be made to turn this potentiality into an actuality. One does not organically grow into the other; something must actually be done to materially transform these traits into points of disruption.

It’s easy to simply perform a theoretical magic trick: to assume that the movement from a potential army created by capital to an actual antagonistic subject confronting capital will just happen on its own. The theoretical hole is thereby plugged by recourse to the conceptual stopgap known as spontaneity. There is no need for a program, for an organization – for anything, really. The masses, especially today, with our particular class composition, marked as they are by “spontaneity, ambition, self-organization, quick always-on communication, working in teams,” will naturally become that political subject since they are already implicitly that very subject.

It is at this point that Todd Chretien makes a decisive contribution to the debate. Looking back on the history of the Bolsheviks, he observes that in 1917, the process that Malcolm describes did not take place spontaneously at all:

As Alexander Rabinowitch demonstrates exhaustively, the Party cannot be reduced simply “leaders” and “masses.” Rather, hundreds, and thousands, of local leaders, workplace militants, soldier and sailor activists, intellectuals and a network of newspapers and shop and trench papers bound the central committee organically to the influx of new members.

In other words, the masses did not naturally come together as an army; nor were they blindly led by a leader. They turned themselves into such an army only by way of innumerable overlapping layers of organization. Some were quite visible, like the Central Committee, while others, like some of the affinity groups, went by entirely unnoticed.

Some of these organizational connections were forged after February, others during the great experiment of 1905, and still others stretched as far back as the 1890s. To use Sergio Bologna’s expression, we can say that “microsystems of struggle,” involving generations of politically mature militants, had already been formed through a series of accumulating cycles of struggles. While we may in retrospect see this whole process – the building of an army against capital – as spontaneous, this is only because the intricate levels of organization that worked to build that army have now been forgotten. This is why careful historical analysis should not be dismissed as pedantry. If we ignore these exacting historical details, we end up forgetting what actually happened, reaching for illusory concepts like spontaneity that misrepresent how a very complex historical process unfolded.

Articulation

Every cycle of struggle invents, or at least attempts to invent, a set of historically appropriate forms of proletarian self-activity. After a messy process of collective experimentation, one of these forms usually emerges as dominant, and thereby provides the framework within which the others develop. In 1917 this was the soviet – nested councils of organized workers, peasants, and soldiers pushing for the self-management of the means of production.

At the most elementary level, the soviet, as the dominant form of proletarian self-activity at that specific historical conjuncture, was essentially a gathering point. In providing a space where different sectors of the working class could come together, it ultimately allowed that class to develop its interests autonomously. The class could discuss, and act upon, its own unique needs, concerns, and desires, transforming the soviet into an alternative space, the prefiguration of a different way of living, and, consequently, the opening through which the proletariat could undertake its exodus from the capital relation itself.

But even all this was insufficient to make a revolution, since the simple appearance of the soviets did not in itself guarantee that the proletariat would confront capital in a directly antagonistic way. The soviets were spaces where the entirety of the working class, from its most advanced elements to its most backwards, could be brought into dialogue. This meant that all workers, regardless of their political positions, could express themselves democratically. This did not mean that they would therefore all be in favor of overthrowing the capitalist mode of production. Many months after February, in fact, most soviets remained opposed to directly taking power from the hands of the Provisional Government. They certainly possessed their fair share of radical elements, but they were also composed of moderates, and even conservatives. Their Executive Committees, really up until the October Revolution itself, were largely dominated by Mensheviks and SRs who represented great sectors of the working masses that were still adamantly opposed to making any kind of revolution against capital.

There is, in other words, a great difference between gathering the working class together and forging that heterogeneous mass into what Malcolm has called an army. Soviets can in fact coexist with capital for a time; they are not, in and of themselves, against capital. Eventually, if the soviets fail to overthrow it, capital will simply incorporate them into its own processes of reordering. This is, in part, what happened in Germany in 1918. Councils appeared all over the country, but despite their emphasis on proletarian autonomy, and the need for self-management of production, they never put the capital relation itself into question.  Failing to directly confront capital, they ended up just managing it better, and with it, their own exploitation.

“Workers’ struggles,” Mario Tronti has written, “determine the course of capitalist development; but capitalist development will use those struggles for its own ends if no organized revolutionary process opens up, capable of changing that balance of forces. It is easy to see this in the case of social struggles in which the entire systemic apparatus of domination repositions itself, reforms, democratizes and stabilizes itself anew.”  So some other element, beyond that of autonomous struggles, had to be present in order to build that army, turn this aggregate mass into a fully antagonistic subject, and directly assault the capitalist mode of production. Without this element, whatever it may be, these struggles would simply end up helping capital improve itself.

At the risk of being grossly misunderstood, I will call this element the party. I take the party to mean that historically appropriate form of communist organization which grows out of a corresponding form of proletarian self-activity in order to help this latter form directly confront the capitalist mode of production. In 1917 this was the Bolshevik Party. While the soviet was the form which allowed the raw material which capital had produced to become a potential army by building its autonomous power, the party was, at least in 1917, the element which allowed this potential army to become an actual, effective, fighting force directed against a clear enemy.

The party accomplished this through what I have called “articulation.” On the one hand, to articulate is to communicate, formulate, or express a given content by moving it to a different register. On the other hand, to articulate is to join separate elements together, and the articulator, in this sense, can be understood as the joint itself. This term describes the activity of the party in at least two ways: the party articulated a content and it articulated a bloc.

The party “articulated” in this first way by expressing, or giving voice to, the perspective of the Russian proletariat. The soviet, as we saw, was the form that the autonomous activity of the proletariat assumed at that specific historical conjuncture. But precisely because of this, because it was just a form, the soviet did not necessarily carry its own specific content. That content had to be developed, “worked up,” through the intervention of some other element. It was the party, as that other element, that developed the content of the revolutionary project in 1917.

The party “articulated” in a second way by joining the heterogeneous, and often hostile, elements that made up the broad working classes into a single antagonistic subject. The soviets might have brought these masses together, but there was no guarantee of this interaction becoming a fusion, and without a joining element these workers might have remained separate even in their unity. It is the party that bonded them together by articulating them into a bloc. In Russia, in 1917, this meant linking the proletariat to the other classes of Russian society – most importantly, the poor peasantry. Let’s not forget that the peasants and workers actually had their own separate soviets, their own interests, and their own needs. Their “coming-together” could never have been a spontaneous act. It was the crucial intervention of the party that allowed this alliance to come about by acting as a binding element. It was the Bolsheviks who tried to help the class overcome divisions within itself as well as between it and other potentially revolutionary laboring classes.

It should be apparent that these two aspects, articulation as formulation and articulation as joining, were actually closely related. Clarifying the content of the most militant layer of the working masses actually helped draw this mass together into a single subject; and drawing this mass together actually helped clarify the content of its most radical elements. The party, at least in Russia 1917, was that element indispensable to creating an antagonistic subject with a clear content directly opposed to capital.

Theory

One of the principal ways in which the party advanced a revolutionary content was through the theorization of programs. The party writes a program in order to clarify the content of the struggles of the working class; and it is this program that the party can use to unify the different segments of the working masses. There are at least two different kinds of program. There are those carefully detailed pieces of theoretical writing that few will ever see but which actually work to clarify matters within the party itself; and there are those broad slogans that work to amalgamate different social layers into a single revolutionary bloc. State and Revolution was a program of the first type; “Land, Bread, and Peace” was a program of the second. In between these two primary categories were moments of mediation. All were products of theory.

Indeed, among other things, the party, or at least a specific layer within it, did theory, of which there were at least two principal functions. The first function was to allow the party to articulate the communist content that could not, as I have already argued above, emerge spontaneously from the soviets. It is crucial to emphasize the actual source of this content. The party did not, as Lenin once seemed to suggest, impose its content onto the proletariat from without; it actually found the outlines of this content already present in the autonomous struggles of the proletariat itself, which were themselves already endowed with political knowledge. This content, then, was not discovered through sequestered scholarship but through a careful observation of the political behaviour of the class. It was the working class itself, and especially its most advanced elements, that produced the rudiments of some system of political content in its struggles. The task of the Bolshevik party was to access the viewpoint of that class in order to extract that implicit content. Theory worked to render this content explicit, to clarify it, deepen it, and then return it to the working class itself in a way that could advance its struggles. The working class, through its continued struggles, developed this content further, which was then rearticulated by the party, and once more returned to the class. Theory was therefore not a plan that somehow preceded the activity of the working class in order to make it better; it did not solve problems, it did not engineer answers, and it did not guide the working class to some predetermined telos.

The second function of theory was to help the Russian proletariat break with the capitalist state by combatting it at the level of ideology. The autonomous struggles of the proletariat may coexist with the capitalist state for a period of time, which happened in 1917 between the soviets the Provisional Government. This highly unstable situation, at one point called “dual power,” would have likely ended with the capitalist state successfully restructuring workers’ struggles, had those struggles not taken the initiative by violently breaking with the state. This break, as I have already tried to argue, was not a natural consequence of those struggles, since there was nothing ineluctably driving the soviet towards such a decisive rupture. It had to be made.

This rupture had to occur at several points because the capitalist state itself operated – and continues to operate – at the intersection of a number of levels. One of these, and often the most primary, was the ideological terrain, even in 1917. Since the capitalist state operated in large part within ideological apparatuses, the rupture with the state also had to be, at least in part, a consequence of a protracted struggle on the field of ideology. Theory was the form that class struggle assumed on this terrain. Its task was to assist the proletariat in breaking with the ideological apparatuses that worked to reproduce the capitalist state, which it did by elaborating clear “lines of demarcation,” separating the proletariat from capitalist ideology, and giving it an open space within which to develop. The ultimate aim, of course, was to take self-activity out of the world of “dual power,” the coexistence of state and soviet, and into antagonistic subjectivity.

These twin functions of theory – elaborating a content and fighting the state – should be seen as two aspects of the same process. That is, there can be no struggle against the capitalist state – and the ideological struggle is an element of this – except insofar as it is constituted by the autonomous struggles of the proletariat. So the articulation of these struggles is a struggle against the state: an autonomous struggle takes shape as a struggle against the state when it is articulated with the ideological struggle. If that autonomous struggle is not articulated with the ideological struggle, or does not bind with the elaboration of theory, then it will neither develop an explicitly communist content nor directly confront the state as an antagonistic subject. It will remain within the context of “dual power,” without ever pushing beyond it, eventually being consumed by the state. Theory must intervene to assist the proletariat in making this break.

Part of the importance of State and Revolution is that it serves as an example of this kind of intervention. Lenin’s piece was a product of theory in both senses. On the one hand, it tried to articulate the political content implicit in the proletarian struggles that culminated in the July Days in a way that deepened this content; on the other hand, it tried to struggle against the ideological apparatuses within which the Russian state operated by drawing a clear “dividing-line,” the phrase Lenin himself used to understand the object of theoretical work, within the broader terrain of ideology. This line could never have been drawn had it not first been informed by the political content thrown up by the autonomous struggles of the proletariat; and this implicit content would have remained merely rudimentary had it not been articulated with an ideological struggle capable of producing such a sharp break. The anti-state program set out in State and Revolution was itself a joining element.

Division of Labor

Pham Binh raises an important question when he reviews the history of the Russian Revolution:

The notion that Lenin articulated at the level of theory the “actuality of revolution” and made explicit what was implicit in the struggles of the day smacks of the division between mental and manual labor, between philosophy and action, between theory and practice, between intellectuals and workers, between thinking and doing.

In a certain sense, Binh is correct to note that this division is inherent to my understanding of Lenin’s role, and by implication, in my understanding of the Russian Revolutionary process itself. I must admit that I do believe there was some division of labor within the movement. But I think this was precisely because capital itself – the productive process and its accompanying system of social classification – necessarily generates such a division of labor. Capital always divides the working class into various layers, promotes different skills, and places unequal emphasis on different sectors of production. This is no less true today than during Lenin’s time.

If we follow Malcolm’s observation that we fight capital by using it against itself, but turning its attributes into weaknesses, then it must follow that our army will bear the marks of the enemy who bequeathed it to us in the first place. This means that the division of labor will still be with us. So although one of our principal aims will be to definitively abolish the division of labor, it is clear that our struggles against it will nonetheless have to take place through it, since our only option is to use this division of labor against capitalism. To simply wish it away all at once would be utterly utopian.

All this means is that workers will work differently, struggle differently, and participate in any kind of movement differently; they will play different roles in the totality of the revolutionary process. It is only natural that some, perhaps those employed more predominantly in the “knowledge economy” of which Malcolm speaks, will be more involved in the writing of theory, while others, employed in different sectors, will be involved in different kinds of equally important subversive activities. To turn all workers into theorists would not only be poor strategy, it would frankly be impossible. Each layer of the working class should autonomously develop strategies that will work to amplify their own particular strengths. In 1917, it was up to the Bolshevik party, which was quickly being supported by a number of different layers, to coordinate these struggles at different levels.

In 1917 the party was composed of multiple proletarian layers; it included both “intellectual workers,” or “intellectuals,” who principally wrote theory, as well as other “non-intellectual workers,” who principally engaged in other activities. But just because one group of workers happened to write theory, or attempted to articulate the general interests of their entire class, did not necessarily mean that this layer would have inevitably dominated all the others by elevating its own tasks to the summit of some formal hierarchy. On the contrary, while these different layers certainly pursued different tasks, the party, as the site of the encounter between different segments of working masses, was precisely that which provided the structure within which these different layers can pursue their specialized activities in a way that progressively destroys the very division of labor that undergirds them, thereby attacking the hierarchy at its roots. Even Lenin, who argued so forcefully for a specialization of tasks, saw as early as 1902 that one of the primary functions of the party was to serve as the place where “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession in both categories, must be effaced.” The party was to be a machine where intellectuals were to abolish themselves.

One of the ways the division of labor is subverted is the explicit transformation of theory into a process, rather than the privileged activity of some sequestered social group. Although it was certainly “knowledge workers,” or the former “intelligentsia” that actually wrote theory in 1917, the party made theory a collective process in which these intellectuals were submitted to the initiative of the working class. During the Revolution the party became something of a transmission belt, a kind of “hyphen” between those who wrote theory and those who did not: proletarian experiences would go to the militant theorists, militant theories based on those experiences would go back to the broader working class through the party, these newly enriched proletarian experiences would return once again to the militant theorists, and so on. Cornelius Castoriadis, who would later try to rethink such a process for his own time, put it this way: “a revolutionary puts before workers ideas that allow them to organize and clarify their experience – and, when these workers use these ideas to go further, to give rise to new, positive contents of the struggle, and eventually to ‘educate the educator.’”

So while it may appear that  theory originated with the intelligentsia, it was actually constituted by the workers themselves. Or better yet, it was really a set of practices collectively advanced by different layers of the party. The party, which was composed of both “intellectuals” and “workers,” was what allowed these various layers to encounter each other in the first place, and therefore stood as that circuit linking the different sectors of the militant working class together. It is only when that fluid circuit slowly eating away at the division of labor becomes ossified, or just breaks down altogether, that the communication within the class became unilateral rather than reciprocal. This took place after 1917; once this happens, the party either becomes a bureaucratized institution, as it did later in Russia, or these different workers, and especially “intellectual workers” and “non-intellectual workers,” just split off and go their own way. Intellectual workers would just pursue their own goals, producing isolated fragments of “knowledge” after lengthy rumination; and non-intellectual workers would be left without a theoretical language to articulate the political content of their struggle, thereby making it impossible for them to turn the traits of capital into weaknesses, and to abolish it altogether.

This division of labor, then, cannot be hurriedly tossed out just because we object to it at the level of moral principles. Nor can we just ignore it, since that would actually lead it to totally dominate our struggles, ultimately producing a very destructive kind of vanguardism. We can already observe this risk in Malcolm’s argument. By suggesting that the necessary form of political struggle today is based in the sensibilities of “knowledge work,” Malcolm ends up excluding other kinds of workers from politics. Knowledge workers like Malcolm are a very small percentage of the world’s population; and while processes of production across industries and countries are affected by new technologies, there are still many workers with dramatically different forms of life. The American working class, for instance, includes janitors from El Salvador and auto workers in Tennessee; and the toiling masses of the world include farmers and slum-dwellers. They have their own demands and they will put forth their own forms of struggle; just because we’re knowledge workers doesn’t mean we should know what they should do.

Lenin

Malcolm asks if we, like the revolutionary workers of the July Days, would go look for Lenin “at the crucial moment.” He implies that we would not. But we should first ask what the Russian workers were looking for when they went looking for Lenin. In the history I traced in my article, Lenin must be understood as a kind of metonym for the party – which is, as I have argued above, that binding element which simultaneously articulates a content and a bloc. Our task will be to invent our own historically appropriate Lenin; not as an individual, but as an articulating function, as an historically appropriate form of organization capable of building our technical class composition into a political one in direct confrontation with capital. So I agree with Malcolm that we do not have a party; but I disagree that we will not need one. The function that a party realizes is still needed today: we still need, despite all the differences between now and 1917, to find some form to bind the various layers of today’s proletariat into an antagonistic subject directly opposed to the capitalist mode of production.

While Todd also argues for the necessity of the party, I part ways with him on this question. If I understand Todd correctly, his analysis turns the binding element into something of an historical invariant. He seems to suggest that the binding element today must still be some kind of variation on the one first developed by Lenin in 1902. So there are two diametrically opposed positions in play. Malcolm thinks we have no need for a binding element, and that everything will come about organically because the present is totally disconnected from the past; hence the value of blissful ignorance regarding past works. Todd feels that we don’t need to reinvent a new binding element, and because our moment is still very similar to the past, we only need to modify a form of organization that has been handed down to us; as a direct consequence, there is great value in sticking as closely as possible to the works of the past.

This is precisely why he continues to insist that Lenin did not distort Marx and Engels. But Lenin, to be sure, distorted both facts and interpretations. On the one hand, he implies in the first chapter that Engels himself coined the crucial concept “special bodies of armed men.” But as Todd himself noted during his talk, there is no mention of this term in either Marx or Engels. I would characterize this as a distortion of facts. On the other hand, Lenin reads Engels’ famous passage on the “withering away of the state,” for example, as an affirmation of his own belief in the absolute necessity of violent revolution. He writes, “As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution ‘abolishing’ the bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois state does not ‘wither away’, but is ‘abolished’ by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state.” This is clearly a distortion of interpretation. Engels may not have meant what the revisionists had thought, but he certainly did not mean what Lenin asserts here. As Rustam Singh has remarked, “A careful reading of Engels’ argument as quoted by Lenin reveals that even this is not an exactly correct interpretation of what Engels says.”

So on the one hand Lenin distorted Marx and Engels, and on the other he used this distortion to transform the theory in response to specific historical conditions. The first is a question for scholars; to show that Lenin was not simply repeating invariant doctrine, I underlined this in my article. The second is a question for revolutionaries; our understanding of Lenin’s relation to Marx and Engels directly informs how we in the present might engage with the past. I think it’s clear that far from undertaking an objective exegesis, Lenin was trying to extract out of Marx and Engels that which would be most relevant to making the revolution in his own present. This is why he reads Engel’s famous passage in a way that strongly advocates revolution. I have little problem with this kind of distortion. In fact, all of us are always distorting the theorists of the past in this way, Lenin included, because this is precisely what we must do in order to make them speak to the conditions of the present.

The danger in Todd’s position is that it risks freezing historical texts in a way that would actually cut them off from the present. To read them by the letter, which in any case is close to impossible since the mere fact that we are reading past texts from a new vantage point means that we will distort them, would be to reduce their usefulness today. Insisting on purity prevents us from thinking historically. We have to embrace Lenin’s distortions of Marx, just as we must embrace our distortions of every other thinker that came before us, since this is the only way to adapt them to our own needs.

Binh adds some clarity to the historical situation but great confusion to the contemporary one. On the one hand he compares Occupy to the “‘Leninist’ vision of a vanguard party.” On the other hand he writes that “the soviets were profoundly horizontal and far more democratic and inclusive than our General Assemblies.” In other words, if I understand Binh correctly, Occupy is simultaneously the party and the soviet; it is therefore both the form of proletarian self-activity appropriate for our own time as well as the form of communist organization necessary for overthrowing capitalism. If this is the case, a rather convoluted course of reasoning has caused time and space to unravel. Malcolm suggested that the rise of knowledge workers, marked as they are by spontaneity, ambition, and “quick always-on communication,” has actually fused the party and the soviet into the unitary form of Occupy. Binh now seems to suggest, by way of some unclear analogies, that this was always the case, even in 1917, thereby collapsing Malcolm’s historical argument about class composition into an invariant model – a model which impossibly assumes that the characteristics of knowledge work were hegemonic nearly a century ago. Now all we are left with is a vague model that hasn’t changed from the Russian Revolution to Occupy.

In my reading of the present situation, Occupy, broadly defined, is not at all a kind of party, vanguardist or otherwise, but autonomous proletarian activity in search of a more stable form. It has thus far experimented with the occupation of public spaces, then private ones, and is now considering other possible forms. It is, if anything, the embryo of some form of soviet power for our own time. But as for a party – defined broadly as an articulator – we have yet to invent one. Some, like Malcolm, seem to suggest that our historical conjuncture is so different that we no longer have a need for such a mediating moment, and therefore ignore this problem altogether; others, like Todd, suggest that organizational form is needed, and it should in many ways pattern itself on the one invented in a prior cycle of struggle; still others, like Binh, are very unclear about the whole question.

What form this mediating organization will take, I do not know, and in fact cannot know. It will only be discovered through collective experimentation, not through careful rumination. But looking at the past, and specifically at 1917, can help us understand what the party really was in a previous conjuncture, why it was called into being in the first place, and what it set out to do. It seems to me that there are a great many differences between our moment and Lenin’s – we are no longer dealing, for example, with a traditional intelligentsia, a newly emerging industrial working class, a large peasantry, or a Provisional Government – but many of the circumstances that forced those communists to make a party continue to persist. We still need some element to help bind the disparate layers of the working class together into a single bloc; anyone who has been to any major Occupy event knows how quickly our encounters fade away. We still need some element to help elaborate an explicit anti-capitalist content; anyone who has been around Occupy knows that it will never spontaneously do this on its own, since the movement is composed of everyone from liberals to libertarians, communists to conservatives. We don’t have to call it a party. In fact, once we have invented a new form for this articulating function, perhaps we can leave the whole debate on the party behind.

Salar Mohandesi is an editor of Viewpoint.

Illustration by Millen Belay.

“Young people will have to get used to the idea of not having a fixed job for life… what monotony! It is much nicer to change and accept new challenges.”
– Mario Monti, Italian Prime Minister

“The Future is already here; It’s just unevenly distributed.”
– William Gibson

I

After the defeat and seeming disappearance of the student movement in the UK, the developing counter-revolution in North Africa, and the continued absence of a mass movement with any political traction in Europe, the future is looking less inviting than it did a year ago. The articles and communiqués written then have already acquired a bittersweet air of nostalgia. Yet just as we struggle to come to terms with our political slippage, so to do the administrators of capital. Although austerity politics are clearly failing to impress the credit ratings agencies, let alone kick-start a new round of growth, the ideas of the host of analysts, commentators, and academics lining up to plug some kind of “Plan B” to the crisis sound equally hollow. A quiet terror appears to be slipping over a Europe of financial administrators and technocrats haunted by visions of  riot and stagnation. It is hard for anyone to believe that an economic recovery might entail even a return to the living standards we once knew, let alone beyond that. We may look back on the living standards of the global North in the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s – maintained, unevenly, via access to debt, into the 2000s – as an historic blip or anomaly, rather than a minimum standard to be surpassed. The decoupling, during the neoliberal era, of the accumulation of capital and the living standards of the majority of the society that produces this accumulation, appears to be accelerating, and increasingly feels irreversible. The view from the global North is a bleak one.

The future is over. This is the central, bold, and stark claim that Franco “Bifo” Berardi makes in his latest book After the Future. Time will continue onwards, but our collective and personal belief in a better future appears to have collapsed. This is a claim made all the more terrifying by its instinctual resonance. After several more years of austerity and crisis, the Invisible Committee’s rather grandiose claim that “everyone agrees that things can only get worse” appears to be meeting history and moving from the realm of polemical theory to common sense. The modernist dream of unending development has shattered. While the markets remain uncertain of future growth prospects and state administrators vacillate between austerity and neo-Keynesianism, the rest of society seems to be in a state of paralysis,  punctuated by outbursts of disorganized rage, such as the riots witnessed in various British cities last summer. Bifo claims we are experiencing the rapid decomposition of the European working class through the intensification of precarity, widespread unemployment, and widespread depression. Hyper-exploitation, hyper-tension and the receding hope of a modest pension are the only things left for those still working in the Prozac and caffeine-fuelled economy of the twenty-first century.

II

Bifo’s argument traces the mutating forms that the idea of the future has taken throughout the twentieth century. In order to outline the forms which collective visions of the future have taken one must interrogate the material conditions of the groups producing them. The rise of modernity, Berardi argues, represents a historic break, one where Christian conceptions of progress and time become inverted; rather than living in the ruins of Eve waiting for the rapture, modernity promised the possibility of perpetual improvement in the here and now. Communists, Social-Democrats and Fascists could all agree that heaven could, and would, be built on Earth with human hands. The politics of the future, Bifo is keen to argue, are a distinctly material phenomenon; political struggles, cultural currents and technological developments all influence our ideas of what a future society might look like. These visions reflect the hopes, fears and desires of those developing them. Bifo sets out to trace a path through the twentieth century idea of the future via an analysis of some of its key cultural movements.

For the Italian futurists, where Bifo’s analysis begins, this fusion of politics and technology saw its apex in mechanised “workshops beneath… violent electric moons”. The violence of modernity was glorified and the spread of new technologies such as the auto-mobile and machine tools was seen as the necessary harbinger of a better, more liberated world. This link between technologies and political imaginaries is echoed by what Bifo sees as the last utopian philosophy of the century, the “Wired ideology”. This ideology saw a potential emancipation of humanity via the new technologies and potentials of the internet. This philosophy argued that the horizontal, open and collaborative potential of the internet was destined to unlock the potential of humanity and usher in a new phase of wealth and prosperity. Although not an explicitly antagonistic philosophy, echoes of the Wired analysis of the internet can be seen in the work of Paul Mason and the politics of groups such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous as well as journalists, academics and activists infatuated with the power of Twitter and Facebook as catalyst for revolution.

However, Bifo is not an optimist when it comes to technology. The intertwined tale that is being told is that of the integration of these new technologies within the processes of discipline and production. Whilst the motor engine and the internet both promised a world of reduced work hours and increasing luxury the opposite has been the case. New technologies and organisational techniques have been used in turn to discipline people into the rhythm of the factory and then to fracture this collective body into the manageable fragments needed in today’s ‘flexible and innovative’ economy. The technologies discussed are revealed as intrinsically social, capable of being put to work by various different sections of society. Bifo’s analysis traces the links between artistic and cultural movements such as the proto-fascist futurists and the liberal dreamers of the internet that saw a brighter future ushered in through human ingenuity embodied in technological developments and the implementation of these technologies within the framework of capitalist development.

III

After tracing the history of the idea of the future, Bifo devotes another chapter to the present conjuncture, returning to a core concern within his work: the interplay between technology and subjectivity within capitalism. The role of information technology is central to the analysis put forward. Compared to the optimistic immanence of Hardt and Negri, or the liberatory affirmation of Paul Mason, Bifo’s analysis of the impact of IT systems on the social body is far less cheerful. Bifo sees these technologies as deeply invested within processes of capital accumulation and state discipline; a specific form of capitalism which Bifo labels “semio-capital” has emerged that puts our “neurophysical energies to work and submits them to the speed of electronic machinery.” IT technology has helped spread precarious work conditions, and mobilizes our thoughts, dreams and desires (Marx’s “general intellect”) for capital accumulation. Widespread depression is the response to this mismatch between cyberspace and cybertime, as the social body struggles to cope with the flows of information and emotional affects we encounter in our daily lives.

This fracturing of the social body has had an effect on our ability to organise politically. The potential for solidarity in the workplace and the rest of our lives has been radically reduced. Semiocapital produces subjects incapable of solidarity, or of composing into a class for itself. Outbursts of social rage such as the London riots or the student protests of winter 2010-2011 are more likely than long-term antagonistic movements. Indeed, we only need to look at the difficulty faced by those involved in the Occupy moment, as they attempt to cohere into a political movement capable of confronting the state and capital. These developments within contemporary capitalism, Bifo argues, are starting to foreclose the possibility of collective politics with traction in the world.

Bifo’s vision is bleak. Many economists are now willing to admit that austerity politics are failing, while Keynesianism or the continued belief in the promises of the information economy seem equally dysfunctional. Instead of the return of growth and steadily improving living conditions, Bifo foresees an economic recovery in which growth resumes with no concurrent social distribution. A future of increasingly predatory finance capital, repressed surplus populations, militarised green zones, universal precarity, and widespread depression is already here. “Recovery,” for most of us, means “a new round of social devastation.” The crisis of political legitimacy is also the universalizing of a bitter cynicism: only 42% of people in the UK say they are interested in politics. The political is dead, the post-political appears as permanent.

IV

What does the end of the future mean for radical politics? It is at this point that Bifo’s argument becomes problematic. In an argument that intersects with groups such as Tiqqun, Bifo argues that we must see “Communism as a necessity in the collapse of capital.” Distant from the voluntarism of previous forms of Communist politics, this “post-growth Communism” will be best understood as a necessary response to capital’s refusal of labour. Cut adrift from the “opportunity” to work, with welfare systems dismantled, Bifo argues that we will witness the proliferation of zones of autonomy responding to the needs of an increasingly precarious and superfluous social body. Communist politics will emerge from an exodus, both voluntary and compulsory, from a stagnating and increasingly predatory state-capital nexus. This exodus is both social, in the development of an alternative infrastructure, and personal, in the withdrawal from the hyper-stimulation of the semiotic economy. Bifo abandons hope in collective contestation at the level of the political.

Bifo’s politics could be described as a kind of “lifeboat communism.” As the crisis ripples, mutates, and deepens, Bifo sees the role of communism as the creation of spaces of solidarity to blunt the worst effects of the crisis of social reproduction. Gone is the demand for a better world for all, the liberation of our collective social wealth, or the unlocking of the social potentials of technology. Rather, Bifo’s politics are based around insulating a necessarily small portion of society from the dictates of capital. By withdrawing from the political sphere, we accept the likelihood of losing the final scraps of the welfare state and concede the terrain of the political to zombie politics and predatory capital. Rather than seeking new forms of organization to re-enter the political stage, Bifo seems to suggest that we seek shelter beneath it as best we can.

This shying away from the political stage is the weakness at the heart of the book. Recent eruptions of political struggle have captured the collectiveimagination because they demonstrate that political contestation is still possible today, in spite of the obstacles Bifo has described. The Occupy movement and the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have resonated with all those who still have hope in collective struggle. Although these movements have encountered varying problems, to which we must develop solutions, they dispel the idea of an unchangeable present. The current blockages to successful organising have been shown to be strategic and tactical, not terminal. Misdiagnosing the current inertia of post-political public life as a terminal condition leads the left towards an evacuation of the political, while we should instead reassert its primacy.  If we abandon any hope of fighting in, against, and beyond the existing architecture of the state and capital, and instead seek refuge in small communes, and go-slow practices, we abandon all real hope of a generalized, or generalizable, emancipatory politics. Although Bifo’s analysis of the difficulties of collective action resonates with all of us who have attempted to organize struggles in the past few decades, the proposal for a simple withdrawal from capitalism is a bleak politics indeed – which, at its most optimistic, calls for an orderly default by portions of the proletariat. The horizons of communist politics appear much narrower when capitalism is no longer seen as the repository of a vast store of social wealth awaiting collective redistribution, but rather redefined as an unassailable site of universal and permanent austerity combined with widening social redundancy.

It is hard to imagine a network of self-organized projects and systems supporting the majority of the population in the context of an increasingly predatory capitalism. Emerging from the and isolated leftist scenes, this lifeboat communism will by its very nature have a limited carrying capacity, as the anarchist experience in post-Katrina New Orleans attests. The lifeboats that Bifo calls for will undoubtedly be too small and makeshift to harbor us all.

The crisis is twofold. It is a crisis of capitalist profitability, and of an increasingly precarious and surplus global proletariat whose reproduction (as both labour and body) is under threat. It is unlikely that the proliferation of communes, squats, food co-ops, file sharers, urban gardeners, and voluntary health services will bring forth a new, better world. But while the current seemingly post-political situation throws up massive obstacles to organizing, there is still a potential for collective contestation. The capitalist state, racked by its own legitimacy crisis and weekly political scandals, is more vulnerable than it appears. We need only recall the period of unexpected hope built by students in Britain, occupiers in Oakland, and vast swathes of North Africa and the Middle East during the past two years. These movements were mobilised through the betrayal of a vision of the future – but alongside their rage, they put forth a hope which can guide our politics.

The task at hand is to unlearn old behaviour and to forge new tactical and organisational weapons for struggle. Bifo’s contribution is a timely and challenging one, but it ultimately leads us back towards a DIY culture and “outreach” politics. As our movements come to terms with these limits, we must also hold onto the belief that luxury for all is possible. The social potential of unfilled blocks of flats, emerging technologies like 3D-printing, and the desires of the millions of underemployed, should remind us of this. This will not be possible without a collective struggle against the state and the demands of capital, one which simultaneously defends what we have and attempts to move beyond it.

A retreat to lifeboat politics is both premature and a self-fulfilling prophecy. While Bifo correctly analyses the current conjuncture – clearly identifying the post-political state, the weakness of the Left, the crisis of profitability and new forms of labour, and their impact on the subject – his political prescriptions lead us in the wrong direction. Just as Bifo does, we place the struggle against work at the center; but we can also seek to liberate social wealth, rather than insulate a lucky few from the ravages of capital. Rather than “No Future,” we must raise a different banner: “The future’s here, it just needs reorganizing.”

Ben Lear is an underemployed researcher living in Manchester, UK. He is an editor of Shift Magazine, and has recently co-authored an article in Occupy Everything! Reflections on Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. He is a member of Plan C.

May Day was a gamble for Occupy Wall Street, and a necessary one. Instead of heralding a national renewal, springtime has found Occupy short of ideas and running on vapors. Life after the encampments has not led to a generalization of occupations, and the prospect of reestablishing them in their initial form is remote. The 1^st of May was logical timing for a revival – or at the very least, a lifeline, a confirmation of vitality, an open door. Bolstered by the call for an expanded general strike, May Day 2012 smelled of hope, but also desperation. Our sense at the outset was that failure in the streets – whether the result of low turnout, police out-maneuvering, or flat repetition of gesture – would radiate far beyond New York, effectively bringing the movement to an impasse. Although our fears ultimately proved unwarranted, there was little in our experience of May Day that augured an escalation of struggle; no spark to set the summer ablaze.

Our May Day begins at a morning gathering in Bryant Park, the staging ground for flying pickets in and around Midtown. En route from the subway, we see nothing out of the ordinary above or below ground, nothing to suggest that OWS’s ambitious agitprop campaign – which called for a ban on housework, school, wage labor, the use of money, and even “data” – had been heard among the broader public. We arrive at the park shortly after noon, where a crowd of several hundred is milling about, flanked by a cadre of guitarists rehearsing for the “guitarmy,” all under the watch of a heavy police presence. Though we’ve been expecting something more than the usual festive tedium of standing and ambulating in proximity of the police, the vibe here disappoints; we decide to move along.

In search of livelier action, we catch the F train to 2^nd and Houston, where a group of marchers from Brooklyn had stalled out at Sara D. Roosevelt Park after successfully crossing the Williamsburg Bridge. In anticipation of a “wildcat march” (code word for black bloc) scheduled for 1pm, police have hemmed in the crowd, numbering about 200, on three sides, leaving the park itself as our only egress. As we wait – again, for something to happen – a bike bloc rides circles around the park, drawing a flotilla of scooter cops in its wake. (A diversionary tactic? We think so.) Against this backdrop, a group of local dudes continue to play hoops as the crowd gathers, serenely oblivious to the masks and banners and the tense rat-a-tatting of drums.

Just as we’re about to lapse into despair at the lethargy of it all, the march lurches into gear, throwing itself in the direction of the police line. What ensues in the next few minutes is a confused scrum of blue- and white-shirted cops, media, and demonstrators, during which the head of at least one occupier emerges bloodied from the fracas. Then, as if by collective reflex, the back end of the march breaks into a headlong dash through the park, accelerating past basketball and tennis courts, easily outpacing the cops. As we spill into the streets, we begin chanting: “From Oakland to Greece, fuck the police,” and the like. The march holds formation as it veers into Chinatown; petty black bloc gestures commence, some graffiti here and there, newspaper boxes dragged into the intersection, but the overriding priority is evasion. The presence of cops at our rear sends us hurtling past befuddled vendors and shoppers. Scuffles break out as several scooter cops try to force us onto the sidewalk, but to little avail. Half an hour later, the march has run its course at Washington Square Park, where wildcats and cops alike disperse into the verdant milieu.

After gathering our breath for a moment, we learn that an unpermitted march has departed from Bryant Park en route to Union Square. We set off uptown, reaching the pop-up “Free University” at Madison Square Park on 23^rd St., the most forthrightly affirmative expression of OWS’s ethos so far this May Day. A comrade who has been there since the morning describes a scene of earnest discussion and co-education, students and workers rubbing shoulders with academic types, including Occupy’s preeminent Davids, Harvey and Graeber. We’ve only just settled in when the march from Bryant Park arrives along 5^th Ave., sweeping us up in the slow slide downtown. The police are an anodyne presence; they seem content with letting the march proceed in the streets since its destination is the permitted and heavily controlled rally at Union Square.

The Union Square rally strikes us as a necessary compromise with labor organizers and community groups, providing a safe staging ground for an afternoon march to the financial district. Slowly filling through the afternoon, the park plays host to a crowd of several thousands by 4pm. From our perch in the shade, the amplified sound system seems out of place here, as do the range of speakers, a hodgepodge of the usual boosters and exhorters. The scheduled entertainment, including Tom Morello, Dan Deacon, and Das Racist, strikes us as redundant; more significant than this dutiful, and frankly pitiful, sampling of contemporary spectacle is the palpable liveness of our gathering. Contrary to our earlier pessimism, the march is shaping up to be a gargantuan affair. And so, at around 5:30pm, we set off in a circuitous route out of the park, channeled through a labyrinth of metal barricades on our way towards Broadway, our yellow brick road to Wall Street.

Along the first several blocks of the march, police presence is so thick as to give one pause. But doubt about our sovereignty in the street fades as the extent of our numbers becomes clear; according to some reports, the march comprises around 30,000 occupiers, activists, rank-and-filers, and allies, encompassing over 30 blocks at any given time. The walk down Broadway is slow, festive, and congenial. We find ourselves near the head of the march, wedged between an immigrants’ rights bloc, the musicians’ union marching band, and the OWS Arts & Labor subgroup. The union presence is sizable, but the banners and slogans that punctuate the crowd clearly reflect the voice and concerns of OWS. No one misses the point: this march is more a vigil for the evicted encampment than a celebration of working-class power. Onlookers seem mostly stunned, documenting the procession with iPhones held reverently aloft, as if unsure how to interact with the sudden appearance of history in their midst.

It takes several hours for us to reach the financial district, where night has fallen and the police presence is even more overwhelming. A vast army of cops has blocked off Wall Street and Zuccotti Park, ruling out any prospect of our storming capitalism’s stony fortress. As we reach Bowling Green, an amplified voice informs us that our permit has expired. The OWS “after-party” scheduled for 8pm seems to have been thwarted. Meanwhile, the bulk of the march is still stretched out along Broadway. It is a strange scene: with a litany of union speechifying echoing over the now-unpermitted sound system (a disembodied reminder of our compromise with the establishment Left), the march fizzles into the darkness and into the subway stations. The only exhortation to elicit cheers from the crowd is the Transit Workers’ Union’s pledge not to transport arrestees, or rather, as the spokesperson puts it, “political prisoners.”

Eventually a segment of the march finds its way to 55 Water Street. Here, in a postmodern amphitheater lodged between glass-framed skyscrapers, we join a thousand or so occupiers in a surreal people’s assembly, the culmination of the day’s planned agenda. Arrayed before a massive reflecting pool, speakers take turns praising the day’s successes and pledge to hold the park indefinitely, their voices carried by a three-tiered people’s mic. The situation is precarious: several hundred police in riot gear stand along the perimeter of the park, poised to enforce the 10pm closing time. As the rhythm of a drum circle accelerates into Dionysian frenzy, and as speakers intone odes and epithets worthy of Attic drama – one woman strikes the reflecting pool with her fist in a gesture intended to shatter illusion – our affinity group takes a decision to leave before the real tragedy arrives. The following day, we learn that a handful of occupiers were able to maneuver from 55 Water back to Zuccotti Park, a terrain with more and better exits and fewer restrictions on overnight use, at which point the crowd dwindled to several dozen and was mostly left alone by the police.

On the way back to Philly, our thoughts quickly turned to the future of OWS: what will come of the movement’s first public holiday, May Day 2012, and its attempt at collaboration with organized labor? How, if at all, will the lessons of springtime be integrated in the months ahead? Though it would be wrong to say that our experience on Tuesday wholly confirmed our initial disappointment, we cannot avoid sounding a note of concern. However one spins it, this year’s May Day did not fulfill its organizers’ aims – or at least, it did not satisfy the aims outlined in the call for a general strike, a day “without the 99%.” Unlike the labor unions, Occupy has no power over the sphere of production; its call to strike is only efficacious as an invitation to direct action outside the workplace, not as a prohibition on wage labor, schoolwork, housework, and so on. On this score, OWS might have looked to Occupy Oakland, which, along with other West Coast occupiers, executed major port shutdowns this past fall and winter. One way or another, OWS will have to address its offensive game in the coming months. This year’s May Day was a test of the movement’s strength, but it passed only narrowly, by the force of numbers alone. We hope next year’s march will be not a test but a demonstration.

Ben Webster works part-time in the education sector. He volunteers at Wooden Shoe Books, and writes occasionally on cinema at macchina-ammazzacattivi.blogspot.com. Daniel Marcus is a graduate student at UC Berkeley. His writings on the Occupy movement have been published in the n+1 Occupy! Gazette.

May Day 2012 was another kind of transition – to what, nobody knows. We have witnessed dramatic shifts in the Occupy movement, fragmentation into factions, and confusion and constant debate about tactics. Yesterday permitted marches took place alongside street confrontations, as though both were in separate worlds. The Mission in San Francisco saw a peak in property destruction the night before, and Seattle partied like it was 1999.

The state, unsure of the nature of this movement and puzzled by the popular disgust at police brutality, has managed to respond with an unusual combination of incompetence and efficiency. Emergency orders in Seattle allowed police to confiscate any item they deemed to be a weapon. In Oakland, some of the most dedicated militants of the movement were targeted for violent arrest throughout the day. The crowd managed to “de-arrest” their comrades on one or two occasions, but this victory was short-lived. The police must have been disappointed to find that the rhetoric is true: their captives were not leaders, and didn’t have the battle plans in their pockets.

We walked up to 14th and Broadway yesterday afternoon, to see the army of cops that had driven Occupy Oakland out of the plaza. What we saw behind this army was clearly a tank – though an anarchist medic, a former Marine, explained that it was technically an armored personnel carrier. Meanwhile, an FBI agent provocateur has entrapped anarchists in Cleveland, and this morning police raided the San Francisco building occupation, which, against all odds, held 888 Turk for the night.

The polarization of the movement has a material basis. Intellectuals go back and forth on Twitter about the police, the black bloc, the best procedure for an illegal building occupation (as though any of us knew!). These debates have very little real content, but they work very well to displace our anxiety: nobody actually knows how a movement can grow and develop today. The classical patterns are out of reach: we don’t have mass left-wing parties, our unions have little influence, and most of our factories have more machines than workers – they remain untouched by general strikes.

I did not see major signs of union participation in the streets of Oakland yesterday, though some did participate in the permitted march. This should not be misinterpreted as a facile opposition between reformist labor unions and radical Occupy activists. The proposal to occupy the Golden Gate Bridge originated with a picket planned by the Golden Gate Labor Coalition. This union group received sanction to strike from the San Francisco Labor Council and the San Francisco Building Trades Council, largely over healthcare costs for bridge, bus, and ferry workers. In the days leading up to May 1st, they withdrew this plan, opting instead to picket the ferry in Larkspur, CA.

The relationship between unions and confrontational anti-capitalists should not be oversimplified. My mind turns to another May, another general strike, and others are surely turning with me. In May 1968 a spirit of wildcat refusal started in Paris and spread throughout France, shutting down the economy and nearly toppling the government. It is sectarian to criticize today’s general strikes as betrayals of tradition, as though past general strikes unfolded according to an angelic pattern framed by union procedures and regulations. The French May was activated by a new conception of political struggle. Student activists had invented new forms and alliances, with their spontaneous action committees and aesthetic insurrections. They opened the language of politics to social groups – women, gays, immigrants, youth – whose demands had so often been excluded from the workers’ movement.

This reinvention of revolution took a paradoxical course. When student occupations of the Universities of Paris were attacked by police, the powerful bureaucracies of the French Communist Party (PCF), and its union, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), were forced to recognize that rank-and-file sympathies were with the students; they permitted an initial mobilization in protest of police repression, sending 800,000 workers on a one-day strike. The CGT was unable to contain the avalanche that resulted from this encounter. As May continued, ten million workers went on strike, without permission from the union, sometimes occupying their workplaces and kidnapping their bosses.

In June the union’s reluctant acquiescence gave way to an open alliance with the bosses; it would do its best to turn workers against students, and assist the state in returning France to work. In spite of their disgraceful conduct, the role of the PCF and the CGT was contradictory. They did everything they could to block the development of a real class struggle – but against their own intentions, they provided an institutional basis for class solidarity and mass political activity.

In Italy, 1968 lasted for an entire decade. It was again this linking of new social actors, who introduced new demands and political practices, that spurred the traditional workers’ movement – struggling to break free from its own reformist bureaucracies, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the General Confederation of Italian Labor (CGIL) – into action. When the factory worker Alfonso Natella was invited to meet with student activists, in Nanni Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything, he said: “what the fuck, I’ve got nothing to lose, I’ll go and see what these turds have to say.”

Perhaps he was prepared to go because he knew that the students themselves had gone through a dramatic evolution, which is traced in Paolo Pietrangeli’s song “Valle Giulia.” It recounts the student clash with the police during the occupation of the architecture department of the Sapienza University of Rome – the same street battle that Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote about in his poem “The PCI to the Young,” siding with the police.

The students start by chanting – loosely translated – “No to the school of the bosses, throw out the government!” But after fighting with the police, they realize that “something new” happened during the skirmish: “we didn’t run anymore.” By the end of the song, their slogan has changed: “No to the class of the bosses! No conditions!”

A revolutionary sentiment was spreading, across different sectors of the class, as Andrea Righi recounts:

In 1968, on a chilly December night, after the police opened fire on farm laborers in Avola in Sicily, Milan students stormed the La Scala theater shouting, “the farm laborers of Avola hope you enjoy the show,” and threw rotten eggs against the wealthy audience.

This change in consciousness was only realized when the students struck their match in the auto factories, and the “Hot Autumn” was ignited – an enormous wave of mass strikes attacking bosses and union bureaucracies alike, giving way to a new kind of social movement in the 1970s. One participant, Sergio Bologna, who had urged “the whole of the students’ movement to measure itself with workers’ struggles,” recalled: “It was in 1969 when the whole movement found itself in front of the gates of FIAT that we had won.” And it was this initial explosion that laid the ground for the famous experiments in social centers and autoreduction often invoked by contemporary activists, peaking in the creative revolt of the autonomous movements in 1977.

But it is hard to find the gates of FIAT today. Where are the massive factories, with workers grounded in the traditions of solidarity, strike, and sabotage? A defection from the workplace at the scale of France and Italy seems utterly unimaginable today, with our marginalized labor movement. We can’t ignore the fact that the decline of reformist social democracy has made it difficult for us to expand beyond a militant minority. However, we also can’t just take the easy way out by ignoring everything that’s changed.

After all, these struggles were firmly situated within cycles of crisis and restructuring – changes in the regime of accumulation that both heightened class antagonisms and reacted against them. One of the crucial theoretical premises of the student movement was that the line between students and workers was getting more and more blurry. The university was becoming a business that generated human capital, rather than a monastery for traditional intellectuals; it shaped a labor-power appropriate for an increasingly technological production process. The classical conditions of full employment, so conducive to strikes, were in decline, giving way to heavily automated factories and creeping joblessness. Social movements had to extend outside the factory, and in Italy they did with some success. But as capital shifted from the Keynesian compromise to neoliberalism, laying off workers, financializing itself, and moving labor-intensive production out of the country, it also imposed new forms of control on workers who were still tied to manufacturing.

This is exactly what happened to the Italian struggles in 1980, after a bitter 35-day strike at FIAT was finally defeated. The state had already violently destroyed the movement and arrested its militants – 5,000 in jail or driven abroad. A hundred workers committed suicide; after mass layoffs, the employers, in alliance with the managerial staff, broke the residual power of the mass worker. The student movement had tried to bring technicians and white-collar workers into the struggle, but now they betrayed the dream of proletarian unity and opted for competition over solidarity. Their ideology of a “right to work” was a justification of managerial power over manual laborers, whose control of the production process was compromised by the introduction of a computerized chain of command. The story is repeated everywhere: subcontracting, multi-tasking, job rotation, temporary and part-time work, stagnant wages – and the decimation of the protection that workers did get from unions and the welfare state.

Now while students look forward to waiting tables to pay off their loans, manufacturing workers – and the service workers who facilitate the “logistics” of manufacturing, like transportation and telecommunications – are still subjected to this labor regime, with severely compromised protection. This is a crucial political difference between our struggles and those of the 1960s and 1970s. While students and workers entered that crisis within the framework of the postwar compromise, we’ve entered our crisis after that framework and its material conditions have been mostly dismantled.

So we have to turn our attention to the conditions, sometimes paradoxical, for the expansion of a genuinely radical struggle to a mass scale capable of a total social disruption. In the past, these conditions were themselves established by struggles before they ossified into reformism – the PCI, after all, came into being after the biennio rosso, the two “red years” of worker-organized factory occupations from 1919-1920. There is no reason to exclude the possibility that pressure from the streets will force institutions like unions to loosen their grip, and get out of the way of an autonomous rank and file. My own graduate student union, UAW 2865, was the site of an electoral battle against the incumbent bureaucratic slate; the winning reform caucus, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, has gone on to play a vital organizational role in every radical action on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

But a strategic engagement with these contradictory existing institutions can only succeed if we also put forward new ideas, which take the restructuring of the global economy into account, and construct new political practices that can force capital into ceding the historically specific space in which a contemporary movement can explode. These ideas can’t be abstract; they must be actively generated by the real activity of the exploited, as they take the lead and organize themselves. We may have organized ourselves in the public squares, in the tents, but if we simply impose this form on those who are not yet with us, we prevent them from acting.

May Day 2006 saw over a million undocumented workers withdrawing their labor and participation. Starting as demonstrations against the racist bill HR 4437, it built into an immigrant’s strike, what some have called the largest strike in US history. Truckers completely shut down the logistical hub of the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex. I remember seeing truckers cheering in Oakland during the November 2011 general strike; I saw less enthusiasm during the second port shutdown a month later.

But in 2006, immigrant workers had acted within independent organizations. The troqueros who shut down the port – independent contractors who have to buy their own gas and can’t be unionized by the Teamsters – had started illegally striking and shutting down traffic in late April. The North Carolina meatpacking factory Smithfield had been shut down by workers who organized in Latino “workers’ centers,” outside of the unions, adapting the model of community centers to workplace organizing. Their call for a May Day walkout spread to meatpacking plants across the state. If mass strikes once rolled from factory to factory, can we imagine a chain of actions today that links one sector of the proletariat to the next, waves of self-activity articulated in radically different organizational forms?

It means taking risks. But that’s the only way that our movement can begin to discover the possibilities of emerging forms of struggle – like the bums of the Industrial Workers of the World who jumped on a moving train, to see where it would take them.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz and an editor of Viewpoint.

First entry in an exchange with Jacobin, by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi: “Is there a Future for Socialism?“

We all wondered, as we watched Back to the Future, how alternative futures could change the whole universe while Marty McFly stayed the same. Those movies amounted to a Reaganite philosophy of history: the short-circuit between the Fifties and the Eighties which converts every contingent encounter into one reactionary loop, centered on the white man who secretly invents rock n’ roll, seduces his mother, and conquers the space-time continuum.

Against this philosophy, we say there’s no point in historical counterfactuals. History is that which is the case; while we start with the premise that history could have happened differently, we can’t escape the fact that the vantage point of our analysis is history that happened the way it did. The twentieth century as we know it might not have taken place; but our world is constituted by its explosions, tragic and ecstatic.

This is why we’re pleased to enter into an exchange with Jacobin, whose logo recalls that we live in the world made by Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Black Jacobins. The reverberations of their confrontation with the colonialist universalism of the so-called “bourgeois revolutions” would be felt throughout the 19th century – just as, in 1848, the Jacobinism of Blanqui would be challenged by the growth of working-class neighborhood clubs.

To talk about the future of socialism, we’ll have to begin with its past. We’ll have to look at the future that past socialists projected – a future that was “guaranteed” by the lingering ideology of the bourgeois revolution – and measure it carefully against the reality.

Read more…

Be sure to check back at Jacobin for the rest of the dialogue.

Mohandesi‘s picture of a vacillating, conservative, confused Lenin straining to hold together a divided Bolshevik leadership caught off guard by the mature revolutionary upsurge by St. Petersburg’s workers and soldiers during what came to be known as “the July Days” in 1917 is inconsistent with the historical record. Based on his sketch, Mohandesi concludes that Lenin had to catch up theoretically with where the masses were moving practically by “articulating” the “actuality of revolution,” that is, making explicit what was implicit in the angry mass protests that nearly toppled the Provisional Government. Both he and Chretien lead us to believe that Lenin’s book, State and Revolution, and the Bolshevik-led insurrection that overthrew the Provisional Government were the results of Lenin’s reconsideration of the Marxist theory of the state.

Mohandesi argues that the enduring relevance of Lenin for activists today is not his words or deeds but the method underlying them, his theorizing and articulating of the actualities created by the rebellious masses. This echoes neatly Viewpoint Magazine’s “About Us” mission statement.

There are three components of this debate: (1) the history of the July Days; (2) the immediate context in which State and Revolution was produced (Lenin was hiding underground after the July Days when he wrote it); and (3) whether Lenin’s role was primarily that of an articulator or theorist. Harris’s piece is a welcome reality check that avoids the main pitfall of historical debates: pedantry.

A detailed, line-for-line dissection of Mohandesi’s historical account would require a lengthy essay and a necessarily narrow focus that would not be useful for discussing (2) and (3). Instead, I will confine myself to this observation: if Mohandesi’s account is accurate, it would contradict first-hand accounts written by July Days participants such as Fyodor Raskolnikov (Kronstadt and Petrograd) and Nikolai Sukhanov (The Russian Revolution, 1917), Alexander Rabinowitch’s detailed study The Bolsheviks Come to Power, and Lenin’s writings and speeches in which he shifts on the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power at least three times throughout 1917. Those who are interested in figuring out the rights and wrongs of (1) should read the aforementioned books.

Lenin’s shifts – open to a peaceful transfer of power before the July Days, for an insurrection after the July Days, back to the possibility of a peaceful power transfer in the aftermath of the Kornilov coup’s defeat, and finally to a Bolshevik-led insurrection as the Bolsheviks gained majorities in workers’ and soldiers’ councils (soviets) throughout Russia in fall of 1917 – did not reflect vacillation or lack of theoretical clarity on Lenin’s part and certainly had nothing to do with the writing of State and Revolution. As Lenin wrote shortly after completing the introduction to State of Revolution,

Now, and only now, perhaps during only a few days or a week or two, such a government could be set up and consolidated in a perfectly peaceful way. In all probability it could secure the peaceful advance of the whole Russian revolution, and provide exceptionally good chances for great strides in the world movement towards peace and the victory of socialism.¹

Here, I have to disagree with Harris that “we should be careful not to be too careful.” Whether leading a demonstration or looking for lessons in the past, a revolutionary should be careful but not pedantic.

Lenin did not believe the class nature of the Provisional Government changed after the Kornilov coup’s defeat when he discussed the prospect of a peaceful transfer of power to the soviets with their Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) majorities. Lenin’s seeming flip-flops on insurrection were tactical shifts in a strategy aimed at making the soviets the sole government power that came in response to a rapidly changing situation which produced original and transient political and class alignments. Lenin’s shifts on the question of insurrection also prove that he did not believe that the Mensheviks and SRs were doomed in advance to play a counter-revolutionary role.

In other words, Lenin was careful but not pedantic.

No one who reads State and Revolution would guess based on the text that the author might countenance the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power to the soviets. The notion that the book reflects the “summing up” of the experiences of the 1917 Russian revolution fails to account for the fact that Lenin never completed the chapters dealing with the Russian experience. State and Revolution is best understood as a general guide to the Marxist approach to the state rather than a guide useful for practical on-the-ground policy (try to smash the capitalist state machine with your fist at a demonstration and you’ll understand what I mean).

Lenin felt that State and Revolution was necessary to set the record straight on Marxism and the state (the original title of the manuscript) since the distortions perpetuated by the Second International became commonly accepted as Marx’s and Engels’ actual positions by socialists and anarchists alike. Lenin himself accepted these distortions and only through his 1916 debate with Nikolai Bukharin did he uncover and reject them.

The odd thing is that Mohandesi tells us that “we must try to read Lenin the way Lenin read Marx” and yet, a few pages prior, claims that Lenin “distort[ed] Marx and Engels almost as much as Bernstein or Kautsky.” Should we distort Marx, Engels, or Lenin? Is there any value in distorting anyone, even if their name is Eduard Bernstein or Karl Kautsky? My answer is definitive: no. Revolutionaries cannot strawman, misrepresent, or distort our way to a post-capitalist order. If we could, we would have done it by now because these tactics have become commonplace in the socialist movement’s debates.

The notion that Lenin articulated at the level of theory the “actuality of revolution” and made explicit what was implicit in the struggles of the day smacks of the division between mental and manual labor, between philosophy and action, between theory and practice, between intellectuals and workers, between thinking and doing. The masses fight, Lenin thinks and devises the program they must get with (as in, “get with the program”). This is probably not what Mohandesi meant, but it is the logical implication of his heavy emphasis on Lenin the theorist/articulator in the conclusion of his essay.

Harris’s response to the question “is Lenin still relevant?” and the July Days debate is refreshingly honest – he does not know much or care to know about Lenin or Russian history, given the vastly different era we are living in. He contrasts Occupy’s horizontal, self-organized nature (“spontaneity, ambition, self-organization, quick always-on communication, working in teams”) to that of the Russia’s revolutionary workers and says, “Of course the revolutionary workers went to look for Lenin at the crucial moment – but would we?”

This false dichotomy probably stems from a combination of understandable ignorance² about the Russian revolution in 1917 (the soviets were profoundly horizontal and far more democratic and inclusive than our General Assemblies), and a misunderstanding of what a vanguard party is.

As I argued in “Lenin and Occupy,” Occupy functioned in practice like the “Leninist” vision of a vanguard party in two respects: (1) it brought mass numbers of people onto the field of battle, into the process of self-organization, and (2) it fought all forms of oppression and exploitation.³

The third element that Occupy and a vanguard party have in common that I neglected to discuss in “Lenin and Occupy” is the role of cadres: seasoned, experienced, battle-tested political organizers were central both to the success of the Bolsheviks (people like Raskolnikov) and Occupy Wall Street (people like Harris). Of course I am not putting an equal sign between Raskolnikov and Harris; Raskolnikov’s writing is far easier to follow than Harris’s, and leading tens of thousands of heavily armed sailors to smash a state is not the same as setting up an encampment that initiates an uprising of sorts. However, there is an undeniable underlying similarity if we understand the term cadre broadly rather than narrowly. Every organization and struggle has cadres, whether we are referring to the Industrial Workers of the World, the CNT in Spain, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Nation of Islam, or the Syrian revolution.

Occupy’s claim to be leaderless is both true and false; it is true in the sense that there is no central committee controlling it and false in the sense that everyone in Occupy is a leader. Far from being leaderless, Occupy is leader-full – full of new ideas, initiatives, forms of organization, and collaborative projects,⁴ some daring, others prosaic, all initiated by occupiers themselves without direction from above or anyone’s permission (meaning autonomously).

Since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, the Marxist left has continually bemoaned the prevalence of anarchist ideas and methods within Occupy while completely failing to provide a better, more credible, and popular alternative, as Harris correctly points out. Instead of seizing on the progressive elements in Occupy’s small-A anarchism and the tremendous freedom of action⁵ that came with it to help Occupy organically outgrow the restrictive and Byzantine modified consensus process, precious resources have been wasted writing polemics for a tiny audience conflating⁶ utopian communes, prefigurationism, and the (sound) strategic arguments against creating a list of demands, falsely⁷ accusing fellow radicals of being anti-union, and attacking⁸ Occupy’s un-Marxist vision of a general strike in a way reminiscent of the old Marxist dictum: “general strike is general nonsense.”⁹

Given this, is it any wonder the Harrises of Occupy look askance at us as we continually debate the excellent ideas of ancient Russian white men and tout the achievements of revolutions our grandparents are too young to remember, while revolutionaries today are being killed in the streets Homs and being brutalized by police in the streets of New York?

Rather than asking “is Lenin still relevant?” we ought to focus on making him relevant by showing everyone in practice that the people inspired by his ideas are better, more creative, more effective occupiers. Once we earn some credibility on that front people might begin to listen to what we have to say on the big questions – reform, revolution, what to do with (or rather to) the Democratic Party, running in elections – but not before. 1917 is rich with lessons, the main one being how a mass socialist party can smash a state that protects capital, but we have yet to learn how to become a mass force, a force to be reckoned with on the local, state, and national levels, a force more popular than the Obamas and the Romneys we are up against.

Occupy should be a learning experience for us all concerning these tasks, but as Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, “there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.”¹⁰

Pham Binh has published articles in the Occupied Wall Street Journal and thenorthstar.info, the first national collaborative blog by and for occupiers.

1.V.I. Lenin, “On Compromises,” Collected Works.

2. I am referring to the fact that no one outside a tiny segment of the left studies the 1917 Russian revolution in any great detail, so ignorance of the July Days and the revolution generally is understandable.

3. Pham Binh, “Lenin and Occupy,” Socialist Bullet, April 13, 2012. 

4. Occupy Wall Street Project List, Issue 2.

5. Arun Gupta, “The Wonderful, Unpredictable Life of the Occupy Movement,” Truthout, April 11, 2012.

6. Doug Singsen, “Autonomous Zone on Wall Street?,” The Indypendent, October 15, 2011.

7. A documented overview of the charges and debate can be found at the Black Orchid Collective.

8. Dan Trocolli, “A strike call that won’t call a strike,” Socialist Worker, February 29, 2011.

9. Generalstreik ist generalunsinn was a common saying among socialists in debates with anarchists over the general strike in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

10. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution.

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” – Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution

“Asked afterwards about whether the Russian circus was going to kill the tiger involved, the trainer responded with honesty. ‘If we were to shoot every tiger that attacks us, there wouldn’t be any remaining.’” – Jason Hribal, Fear of The Animal Planet

Comrade Lenin is just one in a long line of heroes I don’t know a lot about. He’s the kind of historical character engineered to model, made for a time when revolutionaries pinned up newspaper headshots over their beds and went to bed vowing to wake up and be more like Che or Mao or Gaddafhi or Carlos or Ulrike or Huey or even masked Marcos. The 20th Century saw Communist Parties and partying communists, but both had their icons. We are, however, iconoclasts; some bold sans-serif lulz-text in place of a black line.

This will then be a series of somewhat disjointed thoughts about organizational and strategy in the short-medium term.

I begin with an observation: we do not have a party. Whether we ought coalesce into a party to maintain and grow the Occupy sequence is beside the point; what is clear is that we have not and do not appear to intend it any time soon. The inquiry should then be along these lines: why don’t we have a party, and why won’t we be making one?

The August 2 General Assembly in New York marked a shift away from the tongue-biting tolerance the hard-left has offered socialist parties. We went into the plaza with a party and came out with a strategy instead. For all the grousing about a minority of anarchists who screw everything up, no one has put forward an alternative organizational program to loose consensus that doesn’t get them laughed out of the trust circle. Remember when the OWS “Demands Working Group” was a thing? Neither does anyone else. Throughout the whole process I’ve heard a lot of calls for some kind of restrained decision-making hierarchy, but I’ve not once heard anyone put themselves forward to lead.  And with good reason: we’d assume they were a cop or a con, a co-opter or a crazy.

Salar calls in his remarks for “an historically specific program” and then ends, for that’s the limit. To actually prescribe the program would be to misunderstand his relationship as a scholar and theorist to the actions in the street. These days no one is expected to command the army, conquer the dialectic, and conduct the marching band at the same time.

Todd’s pedantic article is a perfect example of why we should be careful not to be too careful. Revolution is not a genie lying dormant since 1917 in the right underused library book. By the end of his statements, he has reduced the goal of the discussion to sparking another sustained examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the Russian Revolution. If this is accomplished “then we will have done our jobs.” As a scholar, perhaps this is the case – I wouldn’t know, I’m not a specialist in the field  – but no revolutionary’s job is done with the raising of awareness or debate.

It seems worth noting that the badge-check gate at Left Forum, where Salar and Todd gave their remarks, was stormed by marchers under an “Occupy” banner, who went around the conference beseeching participants to join them at Zuccotti Park only a couple blocks away rather than deliberate about the future of the occupation inside an expensive event. Some joined, most did not.

Revolutionary theory should inform our behavior in the streets, but certainly no more than our experiences in the streets should inform our theory. It has been astonishing to see how disciplined, creative, but most importantly, intelligent, I’ve seen crowds be during this sequence. Much has been made of Twitter’s role in aiding in the coordination of demonstrations, but there’s been less said about the amount of capital invested in making these activists strong post-Fordist workers. The same traits that the “knowledge economy” valorizes (spontaneity, ambition, self-organization, quick always-on communication, working in teams) are what have enabled the occupations to take hold in the particular form that they have. “Idle chatter” between workers was a threat on the Fordist production line, now it’s a site of capture. We’re trained to do it. Of course the revolutionary workers went to look for Lenin at the crucial moment – but would we?

A historicized analysis has to take capital’s role in the production of subjectivity seriously, not as a spell to be undone or a veil to be lifted, but as a material element of a revolutionary situation. Capital births its own very specific gravediggers; or, to do some violence to a couple of sage koans: you don’t go to war with the army you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you go to war with the army you need.

If capital really wanted to cripple Occupy, it could stop producing Adderall. But it can’t.

The juxtaposition of the above images raises a couple questions I want to address. First: its relation to the Lenin quote that begins both this piece and State and Revolution, and second: what it has to do with a party. These are the same question.

1.

Lenin is writing of Marx, but a better contemporary example might be Cornel West’s description of anti-apartheid militant Nelson Mandela’s rehabilitation in Occidental eyes as “Santa-Clausification.” And he’s not even dead.

Capital must grow to survive – we all agree on this. That means subsuming new spaces of human activity, a literal and figurative colonialism. Over time, there are fewer and fewer spaces left to invade, but the need for growth doesn’t diminish. There are a few options, one of which is to colonize and extract value from the future through the innovation of financial products and the growth of student debt. But capital inevitably faces what Alberto Toscano describes as a double bind, having to encourage thought and behavior that is not yet necessarily in its interest. The Matrix popularized this line of thought when the writers had to find a way to explain why revolution was still possible in a reality completely manufactured by malevolent machines: if it weren’t, the whole program wouldn’t work. A circus needs tigers.

The recuperation Lenin describes definitely still happens – most notably in Apple’s “Think Different” series, an almost comically textbook application of the theory – but methods must develop with the growth. While Marx could be exclusively “hounded” in his lifetime, today’s capitalists don’t have that luxury. But revolutionary affect is a dangerous space for a capitalist to tread – if it weren’t, the program wouldn’t work. No risk, no reward. Unleash the chaos.

His own subsumption didn’t have to come into Lenin’s decision calculus as a leader. He could reasonably believe his political program could advance faster than its appropriation. We no longer have that luxury; instead, we wonder what’s going to be in Ben and Jerry’s Occupy flavor. And I’m not just talking about the formal subsumption of revolution either – using at-hand pitchforks and buying guns and relying on rentiers like Twitter, Livestream, and Kickstarter are three different things. I’m talking your-face-on-a-t-shirt-while-you’re-still-alive shit. Appropriate or be appropriated. We don’t need more icons, we need more black lines.

2.

Passive voice is nearly always a hint to look closer, to find the subject. Who is the subject in “Anarchy Symbol Updated To Appeal To Today’s Teens?” The answer to the joke about the limits of capital’s ability to subsume its own antagonists is repetition in a flat voice: Sell anarchy! Sell anarchy. And by who else but a brand that had hit the limit of sexploitation advertising, accidentally associating themselves with the desperation that underlies the appeal. Who updates the anarchy logo? The market does.

Witness Levi’s having to pull this ad because of the Tottenham riots. It ended up coming off in context as a really strong propaganda short-film in favor of generalizing the unrest. One of the arguments against partyless organization and spontaneous action is that there is no time to craft a message in advance. But here it was, off the air but in the YouTube bloodstream, perfectly calibrated. After all, you can’t just sell people jeans any more. That no video editor took the five minutes necessary to cut out the Levi’s branding and paste in “solidarity means attack” is a crime.

Of course, the Axe marketing campaign leaves something to be desired when it comes to revolutionary instigation. But who says we can’t all be guerrilla marketers for Anarchy? It would be easy to make official-looking Axe Anarchy t-shirts because the logo is a graffiti stencil. The fake shirts would be realer than the real thing. Unilever has already spent millions making Anarchy a trusted brand; capital doesn’t just birth its grave diggers, it equips us with machinery.

If we have a party, we have the only party that finds a way to include everyone in its operation, the party that works whether members believe in it or not, the only one that’s structurally invulnerable to any single member being killed or discredited.

Who turned the occupations into Occupy?

Tiqqun has attempted to theorize such an organization in the form of the “Imaginary Party,” which “composes itself to this day of the negative multitude of those who do not have a class, and do not want to have one, of the solitary crowd of those who have re-appropriated their fundamental non-appearance in commodity society under the form of a voluntary non-participation in it.” Here membership in the party is based on a kind of awareness and a corresponding refusal: “there are in this society but two parties: the party of those who pretend that there is but one party, and the party of those who know that there are in truth two. Already from this observation, one will know to recognize our party.”

The negation of the negation.

One part Bartleby, one part Fight Club, this “voluntary non-participation” deserves some more scrutiny. Participation and party have the same root, but I have to assume the Imaginary Party does not just include the very few people in the West totally self-excluded from commodity society. When Tiqqun describes the conservative segments of the Party (“libertarian militias, right-wing anarchists, insurrectionary fascists, Qurbist jihadists, ruralist militias”), the list includes groups that could hardly be said to be non-participants. American Renaissance held their last national conference at an Olive Garden. To break a window is to employ a glazier. Your books have barcodes too. If membership in the Imaginary Party is determined by style of life, then as a revolutionary organization it will remain decidedly imaginary.

So we’re talking about some sort of non-compliance of the will, of the spirit, if not of the hands and stomach. There are two parties: those who get something fundamental about this reality and those who don’t. The awake and the asleep.

That the Imaginary Party is apparently constituted in large part by organized and violent misogynists doesn’t come up.

But in Sanford, Florida, is it the armed Nazi patrolling the streets or whoever put six shots in an empty cop car that’s a member of the Party? In the event that the two come in contact, would that be what Tiqqun calls the intra-Party civil war? The process they call “party building?” Which of the two parties was Trayvon Martin, forever associated with Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea, in? I believe any conceptual apparatus or political map that can’t at very least address this conjunction of actors will be irrelevant in the time-frame I’m attempting to think.

In Tiqqun’s formulation then, I’m a member of the first of one party. There is indeed one party, and we’re all participants.

#34 in “Government > Public Policy”

I once met an Italian at a conference who told me over beers about how he and his comrades used EU grants designed to facilitate cross-border youth cultural exchange to convene groups of revolutionary communists. He must have sensed some hesitation on my part because he pulled up his sleeves and thrust his arms toward me as if the words were no longer in his throat but in his palms: “These hands are not clean! There are no clean hands!”

To return to my original question: we won’t be having a party because, like a goldfish looking for a glass of water, we already have one – we are a party to the capitalist state. The CP is organized but riddled with contradiction, always trying to run and untie its own shoes at the same time. Within the party of capital, the Left is just one of dozens of esoteric millenarian sects devoted to the wider organization’s self-destruction. Not predetermined, but foretold in a great many languages and codes.

Sabotage occurs from the inside, with and to the equipment at hand. To put down our tools – either in search of the perfect working class organizational “sword” or to wedge our hands in the gears – would be to put down our tools. A militant policy of stopping capital’s flows leaves you standing in the middle of the street hugging a truck’s bumper. But grab a few reflecting vests and a few signs and suddenly you’re directing a column of speeding steel.

In Hribal’s book about animal resistance, he details the difference between refusal and sabotage. Apparently, performing animals about to go on rampages are very good at pretending nothing is wrong, and going along with the show as planned before snapping at the crucial moment. The story of the tiger who attacks his trainer is always already part of the show, or it wouldn’t be much of a show at all. So why refuse to go on when you can practice that bit where they put their head in your mouth?

What will be the importance of Lenin in the next two years of anti-capitalist revolutionary struggle? I don’t know, but I expect it will be minor on an absolute scale. If it’s as large as the temporary interest in Marx that preoccupied The Economist for a few weeks during the height of the housing crisis, I would be surprised, and that’s still relatively minor. The problem isn’t that Lenin is an empty symbol of revolution, but that the Left has a lot invested in his symbolic meaning, while our enemies have almost nothing. We have little to gain and a lot of time to lose – it’s a sucker bet. But things change; maybe they’ll do a biopic. Leo DiCaprio with a furrowed brow, a sharp goatee. Let them print the posters.

Levi’s Berlin Print Shop

May 1 General Strike

Malcolm Harris is a managing editor of The New Inquiry and a writer based in Brooklyn. He has recently written about generational politics and the feminization of labor.

Petrograd Military Committee of the Bolsheviks, July 1917.

This exchange grew out of a panel that Salar and I took part in at the Left Forum in New York in March 2012 called “State and Revolution: Is Lenin Still Relevant?”¹ Salar happened to speak first at the panel and put forward such a thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between theory and practice, using Lenin’s writing of State and Revolution as an example, that I largely set aside my prepared remarks and decided to address some of the points he raised. What follows is a version of those responses.² I will present brief summaries of Salar’s case and then offer some critical responses in numbered paragraphs.

Part One of Salar’s Case: In early July 1917, workers, soldiers, and sailors in Petrograd organized an uprising aimed at overthrowing the Provisional Government. Lenin was caught by surprise for several reasons: he underestimated the revolutionary potential of the moment, he was too concerned with maintaining unity inside the Bolshevik leadership, and he believed that a peaceful transfer of power to the soviets, even with a Menshevik/Socialist Revolutionary majority, was possible. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of new working class recruits who flooded into the Bolshevik Party understood the need for a violent revolution against the Provisional Government. Therefore, they acted autonomously from Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership. Lenin’s failure to act as a “binding element” doomed the semi-spontaneous uprising to failure. Only after the suppression of the July Days did Lenin realize that he was trailing behind working class consciousness. He thus launched a campaign within the Party leadership to overthrow the Provisional Government by force.

1. I agree entirely with Salar’s emphasis on the ability of large sections of the working class to draw revolutionary conclusions based on their own experience in struggle. The heart of Marxism is the idea that socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class. That is, workers must make their own revolution, not receive it from on high from a self-appointed revolutionary minority (this was Marx’s disagreement with Auguste Blanqui).

2. Salar also demonstrates that a genuinely revolutionary party must be composed of tens or hundreds of thousands of workers (as well as a minority of students and other supporters). But in order for a party like this to be effective, it must also have a leadership who can act as a “binding element” (to use Salar’s phrase). Or, as Trotsky put it, “It is not enough to possess the sword, one must give it an edge; it is not enough to give the sword an edge, one must know how to wield it” (Material for a Report on French Communism, March 2, 1922). Salar contends that Lenin did not know how to wield the sword in early July.

3. Here is where I think Salar is wrong on several historical points. First, he underestimates the cohesion of the Bolshevik Party. This is not to say that the Bolsheviks resembled the top-down, bureaucratic apparatus powered by a cult of personality around “the leader” that Stalin would later champion. Yes, there were fights, confusion, miscommunications, and many examples of new members of the Party marching off to do their own thing. But by simply counterposing the Central Committee (essentially just Lenin) to the “base… acting autonomously,” Salar distorts the Party’s structure and capacity for action. As Alexander Rabinowitch demonstrates exhaustively, the Party cannot be reduced simply “leaders” and “masses.” Rather, hundreds, and thousands, of local leaders, workplace militants, soldier and sailor activists, intellectuals and a network of newspapers and shop and trench papers bound the central committee organically to the influx of new members. This cohesion (and a vibrant internal party democracy) explains the mechanism by which Lenin succeeded in convincing the Party to adopt the bulk of his April Theses, centrally the call for “All Power to the Soviets.” Likewise, the Bolshevik capacity for pushing forward and pulling back stemmed from their cohesion. For instance, the Party pushed in mid-June for a militant protest against a new offensive planned on the German front, but pulled back when it became clear the Provisional Government would treat the protest as an excuse for repression.

4. Second, I do not see July as an instance of Lenin’s failure as a leader (or indeed the Bolshevik leadership as a whole), but as, perhaps, the moment when he/they performed the greatest service for the revolution. As Salar describes, sections of the Bolshevik base alongside other radical workers launched the July Days. But this was not simply the “base… acting autonomously,” as Salar claims. Rather, elements of the Bolshevik leadership supported the uprising, many local Bolshevik leaders organized it, and, because revolutions are messy, it was not really clear what the point of it was at first. An armed protest? A continuation of the June demonstrations? The beginning of a national uprising? In the midst of this confusion, the Bolshevik leadership worked furiously to gather reports, to assess the Party’s strength, reconnoiter the mood of the troops that did not join the protests (they attempted to count up the guns on each side), analyze the situation at the front, in Moscow and other key cities, etc. After several days of intense debate (and the waning of the protests), Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership decided that the revolution, while it might have been able to depose Kerensky from Petrograd, was not sufficiently organized at a national level and therefore, the entire key to the situation was a tactical retreat in Petrograd. They acted to avoid a repeat of Paris 1871, when the workers in the capital city were isolated and quickly exterminated by superior military force. This was precisely the kind of retreat that the German Communists (Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht among them) failed to make in January of 1919 and they paid for it with their own heads.

5. Third, this retreat did lead to some demoralization and repression as Salar documents; however, as Rabinowitch shows, the Party weathered the storm remarkably well and was back on the offensive within weeks. Now with the advantage that tens of thousands of workers knew, not by Bolshevik propaganda alone, but by their own experience, that the Mensheviks and SR leaderships would refuse to overthrow the Provisional Government under any circumstances, that Kerensky’s ascension to Prime Minister marked the beginning of a split within those parties and the war and economic crisis would continue to drive workers to the left, towards the Bolsheviks. Having avoided the premature, local uprising, Lenin now turned to the practical question of how and when to overthrow the Provisional Government.

Part Two of Salar’s Case: Salar rightly identifies Lenin’s State and Revolution as the theoretical framework for the overthrow of the bourgeois state while stressing the defeat of the Kornilov coup as the practical experience that made its realization possible. Yet, he contends that in order to advocate for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and fulfill the demand of “All Power to the Soviets,” Lenin had to “distort” Marx and Engels’ views of the state. Salar condones this because Lenin aimed to address the particular context of the Russian Revolution. In essence, Salar argues, Lenin created a whole new theory of the state that was inspired by Marx and Engels, but should not be seen as a faithful reproduction of their views. Lenin’s theory of the state and revolution did not precede July, it came after. Salar stresses that for Lenin theory is not a set of logical deductions that dictate practice, rather theory is a summing up of practice, an after the fact generalization that can only guide practice within strictly limited historical circumstances, in this case, from August to October. Thus, we should read Lenin to understand his method, but we cannot use State and Revolution as a guide to our understanding of the contemporary capitalist state because too much has changed.

6. I think Salar is absolutely right to situate State and Revolution in the context, and see it as a product, of the Russian Revolution. The whole book vibrates with urgency and inspiration and is clearly designed as a polemic aimed at provoking action. On the other hand, Salar wants to so thoroughly restrict the role of theory as a guide to practice, make it so contingent on specific historical circumstances, that he is the one who ends up forced to “distort” Lenin’s ideas and the actual history of how the book came to be written. Salar notes that Lenin started gathering material for State and Revolution in the winter of 1916 as part of a bitter dispute with his close collaborator Nikolai Bukharin (who was, as a matter of fact, advocating the ideas that Lenin would soon adopt). Lenin completed most of the research before the February Revolution. It was on the basis of his reading of Marx and Engels and his new understanding of their emphasis on the need to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with a workers state that he developed his attitude towards the Provisional Government as we can see, for instance, in his Letters From Afar or his April Theses. Before he started the research for his argument with Bukharin, Lenin had not made this leap. In the first few years of World War I, Lenin even advocated the Bolsheviks joining a multi-class government provided all the parties were agreed on, to use his paraphrase, turning the imperialist war into a civil war against Czarism. Only after the (re)formation of the Soviets in February 1917 and his reading of Marx and Engels in December 1916 does Lenin explicitly advocate the formation of a workers government. The point is that, as Salar rightly notes, Lenin, like Marx, based his theoretical views on a careful study of real conditions and developments in workers struggles. However, Lenin also looked to Marxist theory as a guide to foresee developments that did not yet fully manifest in reality.

7. Here, Salar’s emphasis on theory as an after-the-fact summary distorts the development of Lenin’s ideas and practice. I would contend that, precisely because Lenin read Marx and Engels on the need to smash the state before the revolution started, he entered the process looking for ways in which this might be possible and the Soviets presented themselves as the leading candidate. In this way, Lenin’s theoretical views were in advance of material reality (in the sense of what was knowable from the specific conjuncture), and, under the right conditions, those ideas were able to help shape that reality, not merely reflect it. Thus, I would argue that Salar too narrowly constricts the utility of theory in social practice. It is true that he allows for this method to operate between August and October when Lenin uses State and Revolution to prod the Party into overthrowing the Provisional Government, but Salar has to sever almost all theoretical continuity between Paris 1871 (see Marx on The Civil War in France) and October 1917. Even more problematical, he comes dangerously close to arguing that the only lessons we can learn from State and Revolution today are on the level of Lenin’s method of thinking, or his “understanding of the relationship between theory and practice.”

8. If the only thing theory can do is, as Salar states, articulate “the political project already implicit” in workers struggles today, what does that mean about the bourgeois state? Do we really have to deduce from the current level of struggle our theoretical view of the bourgeois state? Of course, today the American state is gargantuan, terrifying. It is “special bodies of armed men” run amuck. Racism drips from every pore and it is an unparalleled war machine. But it is also social services and libraries and public education and health. So we must certainly study the state today and begin with a recognition that we, the social movements, the working class, remain very weak compared to its power. This is where theory, Lenin’s theory of the state – which he constructed on Marx and Engels’ views, and they all built on the basis of the high points of workers revolutionary struggle – can act as a guide, a starting point, for us to see farther than the front row of riot police and their tear gas today. Lenin didn’t just develop a method, he also laid out a theoretical framework which describes the origins of the state, its purpose and what must be done to overcome it. Salar’s charge that Lenin “distorted” Marx and Engels means he doesn’t comment on whether or not Lenin’s key insights remain valid: Can the state be taken over ready made for revolutionary purposes? If not, can it be smashed? What will replace it? Lenin (following Marx and Engels) has very definite opinions about these questions. Salar is free to argue that Lenin did, in fact, distort Marx and Engels, but, in this piece at any rate, does offers no evidence to back up his claim that Lenin did anything of the kind. He simply asserts it. I would submit that Lenin did just the opposite and, in fact, did rescue Marx and Engels’ genuine thinking on this subject.³

9. In sum, while taking issue with some of Salar’s formulations, I think we have a common understanding of the need to use history and theoretical work as a guide to practice, even if we differ slightly over how. We agree on that socialism must be the self-emancipation of the working class and that mass revolutionary parties must be built if workers are to achieve that aim. That is a very good place from which to continue this discussion. We live in a country where the history of our own workers and social movements – from the 1930s sit-downs to the rise of DRUM in the late 1960s to the 2006 mass immigrants’ marches – is suppressed, to say nothing of our knowledge of international struggles and revolutions. Certainly the Russian Revolution is not the only event from which we can extract critical lessons, but it remains one of the highpoints, if not the highpoint, of working class struggle. If this exchange helps spark a sustained discussion of its strengths and weaknesses, then we will have done our jobs.

Todd Chretien is a contributor to SocialistWorker.org and the International Socialist Review and is the editor of annotated edition of Lenin’s State and Revolution (Haymarket Books, Fall 2012). He is currently a graduate student in history at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Ivan Puni, "Armed workers in a motorcar"

By the first days of July 1917, tensions in the Russian capital were the highest they had been since the February Revolution that deposed the Tsar, announced a Provisional Government, and gave birth to a new wave of soviets. On the third of July, this tension finally exploded as postal workers suddenly went on strike, the workers in the Vyborg Factory District began to stir, and the militant First Machine Gun Regiment launched a plot to overthrow the Provisional Government. The uprising, which was entirely unknown to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, reached its peak the next day. Demonstrators were now joined by sailors from Kronstadt, nearly thirty thousand workers from the Putilov Plant, and soldiers from a number of rebellious regiments. All told, over half a million insurgents were now marching against the Provisional Government.

The Government, for its part, was perhaps in its most hopeless state since its formation. The Kadets, or the Constitutional Democrats, had walked out just two days prior over policy disagreements on the Ukraine; the historically loyal Petrograd Garrison could no longer be relied upon for assistance; and the Baltic Fleet flatly refused orders to block off Kronstadt. In sum, the state found itself suffering its most serious legitimacy crisis at the precise moment when the largest uprising since February was calling for its immediate overthrow.

But while most historians agree that the vast majority of those who took to the streets that day had in mind nothing short of overthrowing the Provisional Government, arresting its ministers, and immediately transferring all power to the soviets, it was also clear that they were uncertain as to precisely how this should be done. Their uncertainty led them to invade the Soviet Executive Committees, force this body to deliberate the transfer of power, and wait for some kind of solution. But the Executive Committees, moderate, indecisive, and increasingly unreliable, could not decide whether to call for a new Provisional Government or hand power directly to the Soviets, and argued until the early hours of the morning. The masses grew weary, workers began to trickle away, and a heavy downpour finally decomposed the crowd back into its constituent elements. The uprising had already undermined itself before loyal reinforcements began making it back to the city from the frontlines.

The reason for this defeat, as many of those who participated that day themselves recognized, was the absence of a binding element. All of a sudden, distinct layers of the working masses had spontaneously come together, taken to the streets, and voiced their united opposition to the Provisional Government, but some political form had to be found in order to make that encounter “take hold.” The masses themselves knew this, which is precisely why the Kronstadt sailors made an important detour before regrouping with the main demonstration in front of the Taurida Palace. They went to find Lenin.

Lenin, who had been in Finland recovering from another one of his famous bursts of overwork when the uprising began, returned to the city only hours before the sailors arrived at the Bolshevik headquarters. Unprepared, undecided, and still unsure about supporting the whole affair, Lenin at first refused to speak to the ten thousand or so insurgents gathering outside. He eventually relented, made his way to the balcony, and delivered his last public speech until after October. It was ambiguous, desultory, and, by all accounts, a great disappointment. The sailors had come to hear a clear program for action and left with nothing but vague warnings about self-restraint, vigilance, and discipline.

Lenin himself was uncertain. Mikhail Kalinin recalls how he asked Lenin that day whether the uprising could grow into a seizure of power. Lenin responded: “we shall see – right now it is impossible to say!”¹ This was no doubt a curious answer for the leader of the proletarian vanguard. It was Lenin’s duty to know what his forces were up to. Instead, he had been caught off-guard. The sore truth is that the party, with Lenin at its head, had misread the capabilities, intentions, and political composition of the working class. It had failed to grasp what Georg Lukács would later call, “the actuality of the revolution,” which is to say, the realization that revolution had already been forced onto the table as an imminent reality by the class struggle itself.²

There may be several reasons why Lenin was unable to anticipate the truly revolutionary project implicit in the struggles of the working class at that moment. First, and perhaps most simply, Lenin had underestimated the militancy, readiness, and political maturity of the masses in the weeks leading up to the July days. The period extending from the tenth of June to the third of July was in fact marked by the highest level of discontent since the fall of the Tsar in February: strikes, walkouts, and shutdowns became regular occurrences in the cities; mutinies, desertions, and a general sense of insubordination characterized the front; and peasants were starting to directly socialize the land in the countryside. “The real mistake of our Party on July 3-4, as events now reveal,” Lenin later wrote in a retrospective analysis, was “that the Party considered the general situation in the country less revolutionary than it proved to be, that the Party still considered a peaceful development of political changes possible through alteration in the Soviets’ policies, whereas in reality the Mensheviks and S.R.’s had become so much entangled and bound by compromising with the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie had become so counter-revolutionary, that peaceful development was no longer possible.”³

Second, it is likely that Lenin that had been unable to properly account for the rapidly changing class composition of his own party. Petrograd party membership increased from two thousand in February to over thirty-two thousand in late June; in just a matter of months the Bolsheviks went from being a small, professional, clandestine organization of committed revolutionaries to a veritable mass party of factory workers and newly-recruited soldiers drawn from the peasantry. Most of these new members were militant, undisciplined, and impatient, oftentimes striking out on their own, acting autonomously, and flagrantly disregarding orders from the Central Committee in a way that produced a sharp rift between the base and the leadership. While the more conservative party leaders were busily trying to decide whether to support the demonstrations, for instance, much of the rank and file was already in the streets fighting battles, storming the Peter and Paul fortress, and autonomously reconnecting with other segments of the working class, all while calling for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government.

Lastly, it seems that Lenin had been far too concerned with keeping the party leadership together, instead of seriously contemplating a revolutionary seizure of power. In April, in fact on the very day he returned to Petrograd, the Bolsheviks were seriously considering reunification with the Mensheviks. In other words, the very existence of the Bolsheviks, as the distinct vanguard of the proletariat, was under threat. Lenin was able to keep the party together only at the cost of sacrificing the clarity and concreteness of the party program, intentionally leaving the question of the revolution, of the direct seizure of power, ambiguous so as to appease both the left and right factions within his party. But when the time finally came for the party to act in a clear, concrete, and determined manner, to make a resolute decision on the possibilities of directly seizing power and making the revolution, the party leadership found itself unprepared and divided.

The result was a crippling blow to the Bolsheviks. Though we might be led, here in the present, to downplay the seriousness of this defeat, since we all know that the Bolsheviks would recover their forces for a victory some four months later, for contemporaries the July days represented an unmitigated disaster. The Bolsheviks were crushed, much of the leadership was imprisoned, Lenin fled into hiding, the militant soldiers who led the uprising were all dispatched to the front, and a horrible period of reaction began to set it. For all intents and purposes, the Bolsheviks had missed their chance, and the opportunity to make a communist revolution would be closed forever. No one then could foresee any of the turbulent events, like the Kornilov affair, that would eventually transpire to give the Bolsheviks another chance.

Historians have certainly debated whether the July days could have actually produced a sustainable revolution if the party leadership had unreservedly taken the initiative instead of vacillating as they did. My argument, however, is not that victory would have been certain had the Bolsheviks properly anticipated the revolutionary potential of the masses in the weeks leading up to July – though it should be noted in passing that the chances were quite good, as some ranking Bolsheviks would themselves admit after the fact – but rather that the party leadership, with Lenin at the top, by insufficiently grasping the viewpoint of the proletariat, had misdiagnosed the situation, underestimated the potential of the class, and therefore found itself unprepared when the masses themselves thrust the reality, in fact the absolute necessity, of violent revolution onto the agenda.

Lenin, who was one of the first to admit the seriousness of this defeat, immediately drew the proper lessons from the catastrophe. The class had forced the actuality of the revolution; now it was up to the party to draft a new program that could realize the project proposed by those whose interests it purported to advance. In a set of theses prepared for an emergency strategy session of the Central Committee on July 10, Lenin adumbrated the rudiments of a new program, boldly announcing that the transfer of power from the Provisional Government to the soviets could no longer be a peaceful one, that violent revolution was now not only a possibility but in fact a necessity, and that the party had to immediately begin preparing itself for a decisive struggle. It was a clear break from his position before July, startling many of the other Bolsheviks, and opening up a fierce debate within the party. As historian Alexander Rabinowitch puts it: “In effect, this may have been Lenin’s first open affirmation of the absolute necessity of a direct seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, to be executed at the first suitable moment in the not-too-distant future.”⁴ Lenin, presently in hiding, now set himself the task of formalizing this new position into a new program for a new conjuncture. And since the experience of July had turned the question of state power into the central problem, both in practice and in theory, it is no surprise that Lenin’s program would take the form of a disquisition on the state. The result, of course, was State and Revolution.

Although the bulk of the pamphlet that would be eventually published as State and Revolution was written in August and September of 1917, as Lenin later remarked in his postscript to the first edition, it should be noted that he began collecting notes as early as the second half of 1916, and actually started writing an essay called “Marxism and the State,” by January 1917. The blue-covered copybook, which was left behind in Stockholm when Lenin made the trip back to Russia in April of 1917, did not actually make it back into his hands until July. There is a temptation, then, to see State and Revolution as simply the culmination of the project first outlined in 1916, which would therefore imply that the text is not so much a product of the revolutionary period, but rather, a project from the pre-revolutionary days, whose collation, revision, and completion was simply delayed by the course of history.

But just as we should avoid mistake of reading the history of the Russian Revolution teleogically, so too should we be on guard against such a reading of State and Revolution. Just as we cannot deceive ourselves into believing that defeat in July would inevitably lead to victory in October, so too must we avoid the idea that State and Revolution was the text Lenin intended to write in 1916. Indeed, in between these moments, the winter of 1916 on the one hand and August of 1917 on the other, lay an entire revolution. When Lenin sat down to write State and Revolution in August of 1917 he had something entirely different in mind than when he started drafting “Marxism and the State” in the winter of 1916. Although some of the raw materials were collected before the revolution, the text we now know as State and Revolution was entirely a product of the conjuncture that came into being after the revolution, and more specifically, after the July Days. Its intentions, objectives, and problematic were a product of the cycle of struggle that emerged after the defeat in July. As Lenin wrote soon after that defeat:

The cycle of development of the class and party struggle in Russia from February 27 to July 4 is complete. A new cycle is beginning, one that involves not the old classes, not the old parties, not the old Soviets, but classes, parties and Soviets rejuvenated in the fire of struggle, tempered, schooled and refashioned by the process of the struggle. We must look forward, not backward. We must operate not with the old, but with the new, post-July, class and party categories.⁵

State and Revolution is in large part an attempt to refashion these new categories, rethink the changed political composition of the proletariat, and reexamine the possibility of a seizure of state power.

So although State and Revolution deals in large part with the state, it is actually about the necessity, character, and form of the proletarian revolution. As I have shown above, the greatest lesson Lenin learned from July was that the proletariat was actually more politically developed than he had expected; it had already put the question of the revolution on the table and concretely demanded the seizure of power – in fact, it had already put forth the actuality of the revolution. State and Revolution represents Lenin’s attempt to articulate that actuality at the level of theory, advance a program that would resonate with the changed political composition of the proletariat, and anticipate the future contours of the class struggle in a way that would allow the party to take the initiative by decisively intervening in the class struggle, rather than sitting by as events simply unfolded, as they did in July. He wanted to be prepared in case another opportunity presented itself. So in October, when the party was given “another chance,” there was no longer any hesitation. Lenin would not think to himself, “right now it is impossible to say”; instead, we would be armed with a clear program, a plan, a line of action.

Realizing that project, however, necessarily involved, at that historical moment, an attempt to develop a concrete theory of the state, precisely because July had already made the question of the state paramount. State and Revolution would be the attempt to definitively show, by way of an investigation into the state form, that only a violent revolution could replace the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. The final line of the preface, which Lenin penned in August of 1917, expresses the objective of the entire booklet: “The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.”⁶

Consequently, despite its form of presentation, the primary objective of State and Revolution is not the scholarly exegesis of the works of Marx and Engels on the state but the production of the proletarian revolution. Given that much of the text is a long commentary on Marx and Engels, there is the danger of reading the text as Lenin’s attempt to provide the definitive Marxist account of the state by sticking as faithfully as possible to the essential teachings of the masters. But if we look closely, it’s clear that Lenin does not at all compose a faithful, disinterested, or objective intellectual history. Lenin gives a rather biased reading, picking phrases from here and there, offering very liberal interpretations of certain passages, and, to put it bluntly, distorting Marx and Engels almost as much as Bernstein or Kautsky, the figures he attacks in State and Revolution precisely for their own distortions of the pure teachings of Marx and Engels. Far from offering a loyal presentation of the Marxist theory of the state, Lenin is carefully extracting out of Marx and Engels those elements necessary for properly theorizing the actuality of the revolution in his own time.

As he put it earlier in 1917: “For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognizance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”⁷ Instead of fidelity to a theory of yesterday, Lenin aims for the concreteness of the present situation, a task which may at times call a deliberate transgression of those past theories. The fundamentally historical, and therefore provisional, character of all these theories includes that of State and Revolution itself. It is ultimately a program hurriedly thrown together in order to prepare Lenin for the task of making a revolution in case another opportunity were to present itself. It is temporary, conditional, intentionally left open.

Indeed, it is no wonder that Lenin actually never finished the text. As he wrote in the famous Postface: “I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis – the eve of the October Revolution of 1917.”⁸ The humor cannot be lost on us: practice did not interrupt theory; the theory found its fitting conclusion in the practice of revolution. With its purpose served, Lenin saw no reason to go back and finish off that which was always intended to be provisional anyway. The pamphlet kept its unfinished form, finally appearing in print in 1918, in a changed historical conjuncture marked by changed needs.

Given this provisional character, then, and recognizing its historically conditional purpose, how relevant is State and Revolution to us today? On the one hand, not a great deal, since historical conditions have changed so much as to render that text largely inadequate to our needs in the present. State and Revolution, as I have tried to show, should not be read as the definitive Marxist theory of the state, applicable anywhere and at all times, but rather as a historical program for a historical class that happened to take the form of an exegetical, at times polemical, disquisition on the state; just as, for instance, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is not the definitive Marxist theory of history, but rather another historical program for another historical class that happened to take the form of an historical, at times polemical, narrative of the class struggle.

But if this is the case, then do those texts, whose projects have been clearly obviated by the subsequent course of history, no longer hold any value for us in present? Not quite; indeed, they can be invaluable, but their value can only be unlocked after we have first learned how to read them. Unsurprisingly, it is none other than Lenin himself, in State and Revolution, who provides us the key to such a reading. When Lenin read Marx, he did so not under the impression that Marx had bequeathed a number of invariant theories to posterity, but rather that he had written a congeries of programs all tied to concrete historical moments in the class struggle. Speaking of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, for instance, Lenin comments in State and Revolution that such a work was not the product of “logical reasoning,” but of “actual developments, the actual experience of 1848-1851.”⁹ For Lenin, all of Marx’s work was a theoretical “summing up”¹⁰ of the most recent concrete proletarian experiences in a way that would prepare him for a decisive intervention in future struggles.

And so we must try to read Lenin the way Lenin read Marx. We must use State and Revolution as an entry point into Lenin’s mode of operating, his understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, his estimation of the role of communist theory. Lenin always looked to accessing, articulating, and advancing the proletarian viewpoint at the level of theory. This meant closely reading the composition of the proletariat in order to discover the political project already implicit in its struggles, using that inquiry to fashion a political program capable of making that project explicit, and then concretizing that program in a way that would allow him to anticipate the next moves in the struggle. This is the real meaning of practicing the art of politics: matching an historically specific program to an historically specific class. This is what we must relearn from Lenin today.

Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at UPenn and an editor of Viewpoint.

1. Quoted in Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1968), 184.

2. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), 9-13.

3. V. I. Lenin, “Draft Resolution on the Present Political Situation,” Collected Works, Volume 25: June-September 1917 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 313.

4. Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1968, 216).

5. Lenin, “On Slogans,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 190.

6. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 384.

7. Lenin, “Letters on Tactics, First Letter: Assessment of the Present Situation,” Collected Works, Volume 24: April-June 1917 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 45.

8. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 492.

9. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 409.

10. Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, Volume 25, 405.

Many people may be aware of your appearance on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. You’ve been subjected to lengthy searches by ICE officials and have been told you are on a “list,” and this intrusive behavior by the authorities is now routine for you. Has this past year fared any better for you going back and forth between assignments in other countries? Have you and other journalists linked up to fight these developments under the supposedly progressive Obama administration? 

My experiences at the US border have been less than pleasant and certainly haven’t gotten any easier.

In the Netherlands, where I live, I am usually “interviewed” at the gate by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement before I even get on the plane (on US bound flights). Upon arrival in the United States, my name is announced on the intercom and I’m taken to a homeland security office, where I’m held for several hours. I usually call a lawyer right away and record my experiences on paper right after arriving.

Routinely, I have to plan any trips to the US in regards to what I carry with me. My notes are always copied and any electronic data is also copied, so I don’t carry a journal, any hard drives, business cards or any written phone numbers, video cassettes, USB sticks, SD cards, or anything that I do not want to be copied. At the border, one has very little rights. If one were to bring an encrypted hard drive, they can  seize it, so you are better off avoiding carrying sensitive material. It takes biopower to ridiculous levels.

It’s a huge ordeal, but I have not found a solution to it. I’ve talked to lawyers, including the ACLU, but the only way that one can challenge this is by challenging the entire US border apparatus. I have not found a lawyer that will file a lawsuit. It would be wonderful to find others that are going through similar situations, so that we can challenge this type of harassment.

During and after “Occupy,” many independent journalists have been targets of harassment and intimidation, and they are discovering this kind of retaliation by the state is routine. Do you have any advice for other young journalists, who are now just starting out to observe, record and report on direct actions and mass movements? 

They should be careful with material that they record in general. Especially video journalists have to be cognizant of the fact that the state can use your material as evidence. I’ve had to deal with this over and over again. For instance, I had to do a three hour deposition with the Attorney General’s office for a case in Washington, DC. Since it was against an officer who assaulted a protester, I agreed to do it and was encouraged to do the deposition by an activist lawyer who was present for the deposition. In the end, the officer was fired and there was even an attempt to charge him with assault. In this case, the footage was helpful, but I realized that the state pays very close attention to video. Another example of how the state can use footage is what is happening with the Oakland police, and its use of forensic video enhancement software to identify what they view as wrongdoers.

While one should be careful, it is still true that video is a valuable tool for creating narratives and showing history in the making. It is important to give people tools for explaining historical events. Filmmakers or independent journalists should take the time to do a good job. Make sure to capture elements that add to the story. Show location scenery and make sure to do steady interviews with good audio. Shots of police brutality may go viral and help build a case against police, but it is also good to provide context and often times playing people as victims just makes people feel afraid. Making films or news documentaries requires the ability to compose a good shot, manipulate lighting, pay close attention to audio, and the ability to tell a good story. When you edit, make sure to actually look at it as writing a story, not narrowing down clips. It should not be a collage of events; it should be a story, a slice of history.

The media’s attention to the occupations last year was rather novel – for the first time in almost a decade, mainstream journalism was taking a look at a “left” movement. There were some dismissive and downright false soundbites, but sympathetic analysts also sometimes seemed to suggest that the movement “came out of nowhere.” Given your previous attention not only to the California student movement in 2009 but also Greece, how do you, as a journalist, think about and communicate the nature of mass action – when it comes to portraying the spectacular, “explosive” spontaneity of events, versus the kind of work and activism that goes into creating “ripe” conditions, so to speak?

The occupation movement developed due to historical conditions and how social elements came together as a material force in the midst of these historic conditions. I’m not sure that it was purely individuals or even small groups that merely created “ripe” conditions and that there was then an explosion of spectacular events. This is not to say that many did not seize upon historical events to create situations, but that it has to be contextualized. This is often the case, though not always. Most journalists are simply following the philosophy of journalism, which is formulaic and reductionist in nature. Also, news cycles very rarely allow time for research and journalists always want to make stories which are character driven. They often miss the big picture.

For me the narrative of the US occupation movement starts before Adbusters’ call to occupy Wall Street and even before California’s wave of university occupations. In my opinion, it goes like this. Firstly, some people in the US worked overboard to elect Obama and naively believed that he would fulfill his duties as the guarantor of some sort of social contract with the middle class. He had already supported the Bush’s first round of quantitative easing, which basically created massive amounts of money out of thin air with the hope of getting the economy back on track. He even left his campaign trail to vote on it. The first round of quantitative easing was seen as bailout and provoked the first Wall Street protest in September of 2008. This is something that should be noted, as many people joined the Occupy Wall Street because of a feeling of betrayal, which didn’t actually occur. Obama knew his constituency from the beginning.

Other notable early reactions to crisis were families refusing to leave foreclosed properties throughout the US, including organized foreclosure defense such as Take Back the Land in Florida, and the occupation of the Chicago Republic Window and Door factory in December 2008.

Then, the language of “Occupy” started in the US with the occupation at the New School in December 2008, which I covered. Many of the signs on the walls of the cafeteria, included slogans that were very much supportive of the waves of riots and occupations in Greece that resulted following the police murder of a young anarchist in the Athen’s neighborhood of Exarchia. So the New School occupation immediately connected itself to the occupation movement that was in Europe. After the end of the 3 day occupation in December, several pamphlets were published that were disseminated and widely read. Much of the writing was influenced by the Situationists, writings by Tiqqun, Théorie Communiste, and other left communist thought coming mainly from Europe. In the months following this occupation, there was an occupation of NYU and a second occupation of the New School. The actual first time that I saw the expression “occupy everything” was at the re-occupation of the New School during April 2009.

The April New School occupation had a more anti-capitalist sentiment, even ultra-leftist, which appealed to some organizers in California. California had been hit by a wave of foreclosures and was in a severe budget crisis. There was also a social crisis. There were the riots in January 2009 following the death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American who was shot by a white police officer, which seemed to tap into this underlying social crisis. Many involved in the Oscar Grant riots were already seasoned organizers, who had been both involved in anti-war organizing and involved earlier in the alter-globalization movement. Many were also inspired by the December riots in Greece, the anti-CPE demonstrations in 2006 in France, and the Oaxaca uprising that had occurred in 2006 as well. Some were students in the University of California school system.

In July 2009, UC President Mark Yudof declared a state of a state of “extreme fiscal emergency” within the UC system and used this as a pretext for cuts and tuition hikes. This occurred following moves during the past years to securitize UC bonds using student tuition as collateral and while large construction projects were happening across the UC system. In the midst of this Yudof proposed a 32 percent fee increase for the UC. Some of the more radical students at the University of California Santa Cruz decided to occupy a building during September, while a walkout occurred at University of California at Berkeley, where there was a failed occupation. During the midst of this, an influential text called “Communiqué From an Absent Future” was released.

Over the fall, a series of occupations occurred throughout California. A three day student strike of UC from November 18-20 saw a wave of occupations on multiple campuses. I had the opportunity to be inside one of those occupations at Wheeler Hall in UC Berkeley on November 20th. Thousands of people gathered around to defend the occupation. This was a pretty interesting period and I believe the notion of occupying space was popularized, at least amongst students in the United States.  I’ve even heard that an editor at at Adbuster’s magazine, Micah White, was at the Wheeler Hall occupation.

Following the November events, there were more building occupations and a mini-riot in Berkeley. A newspaper called “After the Fall’ was released which included communiques from all of the Fall occupations throughout California. Then there was a national mobilization against cuts to education on March 4th 2010. I managed to get arrested following a march that shut down a freeway in Oakland that was organized as part of this national mobilization.

Then the national student movement slowed down, but in California there was another riot following the verdict of Oscar Grant’s murderer in July 2010. Meanwhile, New York’s scene at that time was fairly messy and slightly dysfunctional. There were some union actions against cuts and some protests inside banks, but much of the student occupation movement had died down.

During the end of 2010 and early 2011, the European crisis kicked in full gear and there was the Arab Spring. There were large student riots against tuition hikes in the London starting in November 2010. In Tunisia and Egypt, there were revolutions and rebellions happened throughout the Arab world. In Greece, there were more riots and general strikes and the popularization of the “I Won’t Pay Movement,” a civil disobedience movement that encouraged people to refuse to pay for highway tolls, public transport, and even hospital treatment. Spain had a general strike in September 2010 and there were other major actions against austerity all over Europe.

During February and March of 2011, there were major protests in Wisconsin and the occupation of the Madison, Wisconsin state capitol building fighting against Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, which was a budget balancing bill that would limit collective bargaining rights. This was after Governor Scott Walker gave major tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations. Despite large protests and calls by some for a general strike, the bill ultimately passed and protests declined.

In late spring, a majorly influential action in regards to the US Occupy movement occurred with the May 15th movement in Spain and the movement of assemblies in Greece. Starting in May, people throughout Greece and Spain occupied public squares, set up general assemblies, and managed to politicize people who were not the usual suspects. By September 2011, these movements voluntarily dispersed or were crushed by the state. Most of the assemblies left the squares and moved into the neighborhoods, where they continue.

In the US, Adbusters proposed that people use the May 15 “Movement of the Assemblies” tactic while using some of the language from the original “Occupy” movement. Local anarchists held assemblies and organized a date of action for September 17, 2011. So then there was Zuccotti Park and the occupations that spread throughout the world. I’m not going to talk about this much, because it was widely covered.

One note that I would like to include is that the US Occupy movement is built upon the work of local groups protesting in the midst of capitalism’s latest crisis. Each local “Occupy” has had a character that is shaped by historic conditions and varies in political content. For instance Occupy Oakland, or the Oakland Commune is a bit rowdier than other cities, because it has a recent history that is consistent and more politically developed in my opinion. I feel that going back to this notion of a social contract that Obama was supposed to fulfill is important when drawing distinctions within the Occupy movement. In Oakland, there have been decades of high unemployment, so there are less people feeling included in any social contract. There is also the lack of respect for the police, due to recent high profile police shootings, and it’s easier to push back since there are only 650 OPD. In some parts of the country, Occupy is connecting largely to a middle class that is feeling neglected and wants to return to some sort of contract where they will have employment and security, but in the age of lower profit rates, this is not going to happen anytime soon. Once people understand this, then it will get interesting.

Your videography of Greece, a country perpetually in the news cycle these days, is especially interesting to me. I felt something deeply changed after the Greek insurrections of December 2008, even here in the United States, where there was very much an idea that it wouldn’t be enough to just sit and watch “history,” that it was necessary to join in, participate, and fight back; it seemed like things had fundamentally changed. The austerity programs threatening the lives of everyday people in Europe are just one facet of this new urgency or politicization, but as someone who’s been covering developments since the days of “alterglobalization” and the anti-war movement, does this dovetail with your observations?

The Greek insurrection was interesting because it showed a deeper legitimation crisis within Greece. It was also a major event, because it happened following the beginning of a global economic crisis. Young radicals around the world looked at the youth insurrection and were inspired because there were two crises that were becoming more apparent; the crisis of capitalist accumulation and the legitimation crisis. The economic crisis only helped to highlight deeper problems in a concrete manner. More people were proletarianized in the Western world.

Globalization was abstract to most Westerners.  The wars in the Middle East had become normalized. The economic crisis shows where capital’s priorities lie and that is the accumulation of profits for a very small amount of people which we call capitalists. There will not be a return to “normality” unless this is profitable for the wealthy. The real struggle now is not pushing for a return to some sort of social peace, but rather moving forward.

Your films on Greece, Egypt, and Oakland make a point of giving activists, organizers, and “regular” people a voice. How do you, as someone determined to report on major social upheavals, communicate your task as an independent journalist to people on the ground?

Most of my connections internationally have been made through years of working with or knowing local groups of organizers. I look at what is occurring in the news or through websites and find what areas I feel should be expanded on. Most organizers trust that I am not going to burn them in an interview and understand that I’m trying to expand on under-reported stories and that this is not something that I am doing just to make money. Many people are happy to share contacts or go on camera, because often times journalists do poorly researched reports, write from the state perspective, or simply lie. This is not some indictment of the mainstream media, because often times independent reports are bad and occasionally mainstream reporters do great work.

Do you find people are more forthcoming or more reticent in tense, highly-politicized spaces such as Syntagma or Tahrir Square? What in your experience has changed about how you get subjects on camera, how you engage them, or has it changed at all?

Reporting in places like Greece is pretty stressful, due to a hatred of the media and the spectacle. There in particular, I’ve had to build trust and still have to be careful in the midst of sometimes violent rioting. Building trust is hard. It’s important to not have some sanctimonious feeling about being a journalist and having certain rights. That’s a very bourgeois notion. Sometimes people do not like their images taken and one should respect that right.

Just as Seattle ’99, Quebec, Genoa and then the Iraq War placed a new enthusiasm for independent media in the public sphere, the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt as well the Occupy movement have ignited enthusiasm for “citizen-journalism” once again – I myself took part in an independent journalist training workshop once in New York. I understand you were involved with Independent Media Center, a very admirable project that is still thriving, but also has been subject to police trolling, deliberate misinformation, and harassment from the FBI. How can independent journalists, open source media, radical bloggers and others can do to counter the constant closing of the commons of the Internet? Do committed journalists have any other choice but to fight back? It doesn’t seem like they have any cushy newspaper jobs waiting for them anytime soon…

While there are attempts to control the internet, for the most part independent journalists still have many resources at their disposal. People have to work constantly and find as many outlets as possible. Since the Indymedia days, I’ve put out material through other outlets like Counterpunch, Democracy Now!, and other left-leaning sites, but I’ve also contributed footage to mainstream outlets, which is rare. I regularly post videos and Vimeo and YouTube and try to push these shorts out through Twitter, Facebook, and get as many blogs to republish them as well. Recently, with my collaborator Marianne Maeckelbergh, I also started a blog called www.globaluprisings.org.

In places like Egypt, where many people don’t have access to computers, groups are organizing outdoor screenings of human right’s violations by the military and police. This is another way of disseminating information and is effective because it allows one to engage in dialogue with people directly. It’s more rewarding for me to meet people at screenings than to get a “like” on Facebook.

Paid media jobs are becoming more precarious, so you are right that journalists will not have security and will have to fight for their on survival. One interesting thing in Greece is that journalists are joining the general strikes. This will become more interesting once they aren’t striking as journalists.

You spent some time in Haiti, a country that has practically been forgotten. The corporate press rushed to cover Haiti with all the canned humanitarian intervention stories they could muster, while your work covered the autonomous, bottom-up organizing of everyday people working together. Even the more benevolent NGOs often paint a picture of people as helpless victims who require aid, money, American assistance, etc. What was your experience in these matters when you were there?

Haiti is a rather interesting place. It’s unbelievably impoverished and the population has been punished ever since they rose up against the French. Now, it’s occupied by the United Nations, whose forces have occasionally raped people, given them cholera, and fire tear gas into densely populated tent cities where children and elderly people live. Lots of the money going there for reconstruction has went into foreign NGOs who use the funds to pay stipends to individuals who are flown in from abroad. Once there, these individuals have to be housed and many have to have private security and translators. So lots of reconstruction aid is not going into building local infrastructure, where Haitians can help themselves. I was only there once for a couple weeks, so I am no expert. This is just my two cents.

Even more than the “fate of the Eurozone” under austerity, Haiti has been subjected to ceaseless destruction and exploitation. But as Rebecca Solnit describes in A Paradise Built in Hell, people have a tendency toward cooperation and altruism, tendencies that emerges following the anarchistic aftermath of a catastrophe, natural or otherwise, but are quickly suppressed. Your videography of the Oakland Commune draws a parallel here – how important is it not only to keep building this narrative of cooperative resistance and assembly, but to link its international implications and connections?

Well in the midst of the crisis, people have to find ways to make sure that people’s material needs are met. During a period of lower profit rates, states are not very generous. Capitalism functions to produce profits and while the super rich are still gaining profits, it’s because they have restructured economies to benefit them and this we can expect. In Europe, we are now officially in a recession. Peripheral states like Greece and Spain have negative growth rates and high unemployment rates and it’s going to get worse. In countries that are doing fairly well like for instance the Netherlands, austerity measures are still being implemented, while some right-wing leaders argue whether or not to leave the Euro completely (which shows that there is little unity above). The crisis is far from over and its those at the bottom that will have to pay. People would do best to squat housing units in areas where people do not have housing (while avoiding self-marginalized autonomous scenes), mobilize people to materially fight austerity through social strikes such as “I Won’t Pay” in Greece and now Portugal, organize wildcat strikes, get basic necessities like food, continue occupying spaces, and take whatever they need. I do want to stress that these actions in themselves cannot be fetishized as purely prefigurative developments, since they are dependent on capitalism (existence of housing, reactions to austerity, agricultural production), but they do show people ways of living that aren’t dependent on exchange relationships or profits and that can possibly challenge the rule of property. At the same time, people have to fight harder and grow faster. The right is gaining throughout Europe and will take advantage of the crisis and deteriorating social conditions to gain power. Any movement now needs to grow a set of teeth.

As for the US, the economy maybe seem like it’s improving now, but the Euro crisis will have effects there as well. Not to mention that the US economy is dependent on Chinese growth and the insane growth rate there is not at all sustainable. Also, overall unemployment in the US has not improved dramatically and there are still lots of people who are upset and will continue to be unemployed as the government cuts benefits for the poor.

There is potential that exists and it’s a moment that should not be taken for granted. It is in these moments that new ideas are born. As for a coherent ideology, we’ll see what happens.

Your journalism hasn’t shied away from the worldwide reverberations of crisis, revolt, strike, state brutality, and spiraling conflict. I wanted to underscore your attention to Paul Mattick, Jr. who highlights in his book Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism precisely that: the worldwide, systemic collapse of capitalism. Mattick has made a special point of mentioning Rebecca Solnit’s work as inspiration for some of his thought in the book, but there is a bit of political prescription in its conclusion. I want to pose the controversial question as to whether people’s autonomous power in response to the rather grim unfolding of the 21st century needs to be defended at the level of organization. If we know that disaster is looming – and Mattick himself is particularly dire on this note – and we know that state power is going to squash whatever expression of solidarity comes up about spontaneously in the rubble and ruin of things, is it not unreasonable to ask why an organization shouldn’t preemptively position itself to strategically exercise power? Not only to help people, not only to network together in effort of mutual aid, but really at the level of power, to keep things in check away from capital, from reactionary groups or even military powers?

I’m not positive what strategy is best for dealing with the current situation or a large scale. I’ve seen a lot of interesting tactics, but strategically we have not thought it out and it is difficult because we are unsure where the future will take us. For the short term, there are material needs that have to be filled. Globally, capitalism is being restructured and more people are being exposed to poverty and misery. It is important that we come together, find out ways that we can get all of our needs met, and confront that which is destroying our lives. There is very little security right now and we have to find the ability to function while being involved in what is a great historic moment. The stronger and more together we are, the better we will be when confronting capitalism. We have to be able to feed ourselves, while simultaneously not dropping our combative aspect and fetishizing small Band-Aid remedies as some solution. If we are able to strengthen ourselves, our networks, then we might eventually start to see another way of living. This has to be on a mass scale.

Trevor Owen Jones is a librarian and a writer.