Being Relevant

“The anarchist movement is filled with people who are less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive social order than with washing their hands of it. This concern with ensuring the passage of ones soul to anarchist heaven can range from the obsessive efforts to purify ones personal habits to the sectarian refusal to join any group or organization that shows any sign of being a product of this society.” - Chris Day,The Historic Failure of Anarchism

If you call yourself an “anarchist”, or a “marxist”, or a “socialist” or a “communist” in the United States today, you will likely get some very strange looks. Many people, quite reasonably, will assume you are joking. Upon finding out that you are quite serious, all manner of unkind thoughts will come to the forefront of people’s minds: chaos, dictatorship, anarchy, terror, gulags.

Putting aside the behavior of American anarchists in particular, as epitimized in Chris Day’s quote above, the fact that few leftists have moved beyond these marginal labels, to more general ones such as “revolutionary”, signifies a profound lack of strategic thinking within the self-proclaimed “radical left”. As I’ve written about before, this very (individualistic) commitment to personal political identity over movement victory, provides strong weight to the argument that most of the people call themselves by such labels simply aren’t interested in winning. The dress, language, and habits of such individuals often only further prove the point.

Critical leftists have often pointed out that the collective sanity of a leftist group is often proportionate to the social power that that groups actually holds (their numbers, the size of their periphery, their place in the movement and society, etc…). It is far easier to value the “perfect line” on the Bolshevik or Chinese revolutions (rather than attempt to pull out strategic and useable lessons), or on the issue of “state power”, or this or that political question if your group is small compared to in the thousands and quickly growing.

And yet this purity of politics seems to be what many radicals still focus on. As one example, the Russian, German, Spanish, Nepalese, and Bolivarian revolutions have shown that the issue of state power is more complicated than anarchist or marxist theory would admit. Sometimes states are rendered irrelevant by widespread non-cooperation and the rise of popular institutions; sometimes they are taken through force; and sometimes they are taken through elections. Anarchists have dismissed potential strategies and routes to political power out of hand, as if to accept viable paths which use the state apparatus would some how make them immoral or corrupt. While they are right to be cautious over the propensity of leftist governments to slip into undesirable regimes, often ruled by a new class of coordinators, managers, planners and party bosses, they are irresponsible to believe (and especially to spread the belief), that victory is always possible without taking state power / using a state- whether through force, the creation of a new revolutionary state, or parliamentary means. Marxists on the other hand - every time they have ever gained political power - have systematically failed to focus on the need to build up the ability of the people to self-manage their own affairs, through council democracy in workers’ and consumers’ councils. Often they’ve actually done the opposite. To deny that this comes from their theory of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, would be foolish. The history of revolutions show that commitment to purity of politics, compared to constantly challenging our assumptions, biases and dogma, will cloud our ability to successfully wage a revolutionary struggle for power.

Another example where leftists remain trapped in a dogmatic mental prison is the issue of which oppression is “central” or which is the “base” of society. Marxists, and some anarchists, say that class and economics is central, and that all other oppressions stem from this “material cause”. Many anarchists believe that relations of authority are central, and that combating authoritarianism and dismantling the state will do away with our collective problems. Likewise, radical feminists think gender is central, and revolutionary nationalists think culture and nation are central. All of these tendencies have failed to push their theories further and realize that our society is a complex totality whereby class, gender/sexuality, culture, and authority relations are all centrally important to human existence, as well as to the reproduction of oppression. Without taking all of these areas seriously - in theory and practice - we will fail to successfully win freedom.

So to end, I’d challenge all leftists, if they are committed to rebuilding the left, to abandon self-marginalizing labels and to free their minds from unuseful and uncritical dogma, both of which hold us back and limit our potential as revolutionaries. Its the only way to win.