I’m gonna say ahead of time that I’ve written a lot and I want you to read it in a spirit of good faith, I think you have some important points and they’re worth thinking through. I dont want you to become an anarchist again, but I do want you to seriously think through what I’m going to put forward and use the questions it poses to inform your leninism.
I’ve had this conversation a lot, where marxists (rightly) point out the need for unity in action, discipline to maintain that unity, and some level of centralization. The problem is that a lot of them swing from “no centralization ever” to “lets forget the anarchist critique of centralization and top down politics.” I think you can have both, and, MLs have created some of the best examples.
Israel has a central, legitimate body which does colonialism the legal way and uses vigilantes to expand its power while maintaining plausible deniability. This is a great framework for revolutionaries! Have a legitimate above ground organization “workers for a democratic economy” and a decentralized underground that can expand its mission without ever tarnishing the reputation of the above ground org. Many groups do this, with the Phillipine communist movement being the one that probably the most USians have organized with directly. Decentralization and centralization are tactics that make sense in different contexts.
What I’d argue is that how we do centralization is very important and needs to be informed by the anarchist critique. There’s a huge difference between a leadership body of elected, re-callable delegates and a leadership body which selects new members through an internal process. In the labor context, you can think about United Electrical vs UFCW for an example of each, respectively. They’re both centralized orgs that will punish their members for crossing picket lines and try to generate internal unity during the peaks of struggle, but one is deeply democratic and the other is a dictatorship.
But UE wasn’t founded by anarchists! Its most important early organizers were Communist Party members taking orders from the top down with almost 0 internal democracy! And yet they created the most democratic union in the CIO.
If the American labor movement had done what the Russian and Spanish labor movements did in the early 20th century and seized the economy, what kind of situation would have been produced by United Electrical seizing the economy vs What kind of situation would have been produced by UFCW or the Steelworkers doing the same?
If you think that matters, then you agree with the central argument of anarchism, you just have quibbles around implementation. Honestly, as our revolutionary movement matures anarchists will look more like MLs and MLs more like anarchists–the revolutionary movements of the future will not look like the revolutionary movements of the past.
I’m gonna say ahead of time that I’ve written a lot and I want you to read it in a spirit of good faith, I think you have some important points and they’re worth thinking through. I dont want you to become an anarchist again, but I do want you to seriously think through what I’m going to put forward and use the questions it poses to inform your leninism.
I’ve had this conversation a lot, where marxists (rightly) point out the need for unity in action, discipline to maintain that unity, and some level of centralization. The problem is that a lot of them swing from “no centralization ever” to “lets forget the anarchist critique of centralization and top down politics.” I think you can have both, and, MLs have created some of the best examples.
Israel has a central, legitimate body which does colonialism the legal way and uses vigilantes to expand its power while maintaining plausible deniability. This is a great framework for revolutionaries! Have a legitimate above ground organization “workers for a democratic economy” and a decentralized underground that can expand its mission without ever tarnishing the reputation of the above ground org. Many groups do this, with the Phillipine communist movement being the one that probably the most USians have organized with directly. Decentralization and centralization are tactics that make sense in different contexts.
What I’d argue is that how we do centralization is very important and needs to be informed by the anarchist critique. There’s a huge difference between a leadership body of elected, re-callable delegates and a leadership body which selects new members through an internal process. In the labor context, you can think about United Electrical vs UFCW for an example of each, respectively. They’re both centralized orgs that will punish their members for crossing picket lines and try to generate internal unity during the peaks of struggle, but one is deeply democratic and the other is a dictatorship.
But UE wasn’t founded by anarchists! Its most important early organizers were Communist Party members taking orders from the top down with almost 0 internal democracy! And yet they created the most democratic union in the CIO.
If the American labor movement had done what the Russian and Spanish labor movements did in the early 20th century and seized the economy, what kind of situation would have been produced by United Electrical seizing the economy vs What kind of situation would have been produced by UFCW or the Steelworkers doing the same?
If you think that matters, then you agree with the central argument of anarchism, you just have quibbles around implementation. Honestly, as our revolutionary movement matures anarchists will look more like MLs and MLs more like anarchists–the revolutionary movements of the future will not look like the revolutionary movements of the past.