Originally published by Briarpatch Magazine.

“Be careful with each other” by Rushdia Mehreen and David Gray-Donald in the September-October issue of Briarpatch asks an important question: “Why are activists burning out, and what can be done to stop it?” There’s a lot I agree with in the thoughtful suggestions the article offers. Democratic decision-making processes, offering mentorship, distributing tasks and responsibilities while being aware of patterns rooted in oppression, encouraging involvement at whatever level of activity someone can put in, fostering the accountability of members to the group, “assessing what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve,” promoting accessibility, open communication – these are all valuable.

But I think the article also misses a big reason why activists burn out. Also, I believe some of what it recommends could be unhelpful or even lead to burnout. I hope this response contributes to discussion about how to build a stronger left.

Many people burn out or stop being active (these aren’t the same, though lots of burned out people do stop being active) because of mistakes in their political outlook. Some of us don’t realize we need to pace ourselves for the long haul. We may overestimate what relatively small groups can accomplish, or how likely they are to win victories. When we don’t see victories, sometimes we decide we just have to try harder. Or we start to blame each other. These mistakes are connected to weaknesses in our politics and how we understand the ground on which we fight. Mehreen and Gray-Donald’s important 2015 article about the anti-austerity movement in Quebec in the spring of that year gives us a great example: impatient radicals misread the situation and wrongly thought they could spark a student strike leading to a general strike by unionized workers. How many of them burned out?

A remedy here is political education. We need to equip ourselves with the most accurate possible understanding of the society we’re trying change, along with the best ideas we can find about strategy and tactics for fighting to change it. This kind of knowledge helps us to have realistic expectations and calibrate our level of activity to the context we’re in. Without it, the good advice in “Be Careful With Each Other” won’t do much to help people stay in the struggle.

That matters, since we need more organizers who’re in it for the long haul.

Political education isn’t enough, of course. This is where I see the value in many of the article’s recommendations. But I’d like to sound a note of caution too. The article says collective care means “seeing members’ well-being – particularly their emotional health – as a shared responsibility of the group rather than the lone task of an individual.” However, it doesn’t say anything about the limits of that responsibility. I realize Mehreen and Gray-Donald may agree with some of what follows, but their article doesn’t say anything about the limits on the care that groups can offer members.

Groups working for social change should exist primarily to do work that in some way contributes to their goals. If they’re not doing such work, they no longer have a good political reason to exist (in reality groups sometimes exist for other reasons, like giving like-minded people support in a hostile society). To do the work effectively, we should indeed be careful with each other.

But there are real limits on how much members should try to take responsibility for the emotional well-being of other members. Not recognizing limits can further burden women and other people who are already doing a lot of caregiving in their lives. Also, if we don’t recognize those limits, the group’s focus can drift away from the work that justifies its existence in the first place to a different purpose altogether.
How much a group can be responsible for its members’ emotional well-being will depend a lot on its size, resources, and context. To ask tiny activist groups operating in our context of a very weak infrastructure of dissent to take on more than a little responsibility for members’ emotional well-being is to saddle them with an impossible burden – something that makes burnout more likely.

Everyday life is hard for a lot of people – harder than it used to be even a couple of decades ago. Capitalism imposes more insecurity, a more hectic pace, and often more work (unpaid and paid) on us. We often have little or no support in dealing with our everyday challenges. This may push activists to look to their groups to meet more of their needs. I think this makes it really important to acknowledge the limits of what our groups can do.

More than that, a lot of what we need for our emotional well-being isn’t on offer from activist organizations. For example, when I suffered from depression in my early 20s one of the things I needed (but unwisely refused to seek out) was the help of someone trained in assisting people with that kind of mental distress. That’s just one example of something that activist groups can’t and shouldn’t try to offer members.

My last thought is about a distinction I don’t see in “Be careful with each other.” As I see it, there’s a difference between associating as members of an activist group because we think its project is worthwhile and we want to work together – which, when we’re serious about it, makes us comrades – and being friends. What we owe each other as comrades is different from how friends may choose to commit to each other. Of course, some activists are or will become friends. But if we want our organizing to be effective we need to bring together people who want to collaborate for a common cause, but who’ll never be friends.
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Thanks to Kate Doyle Griffiths, Sheila Wilmot and Teddy Zegeye-Gebrehiwot for comments on the first draft of this article.

by David Camfield
June 17, 2018
 
The radicalization in the US that’s led to the growth of left political groups (especially but not only the Democratic Socialists of America) hasn’t been replicated in Canada. But we could see more efforts to form radical political organizations here. My experience in Winnipeg in the last two and a half years has reminded me of two important things about launching such groups that I knew but failed to take seriously when they mattered most, at the beginning. First, clarity about what the group’s project is really matters. Second, it’s vital to assemble a committed core of people before launching a group. Both of these often matter in launching other kinds of groups too (and when relaunching an existing group), but they’re crucial for people trying to create new radical left political organizations. 
 
In November 2015, Matthew Brett and I invited a number of people we knew to launch a project to mobilize against the Progressive Conservatives “without cheerleading for the NDP” in the run-up to the April 2016 provincial election. Our letter of invitation said “If the PCs are elected, we will aim to build a broad coalition, network or group that will push for the mass mobilization to stop PC attacks instead of waiting for the next election. If the NDP are re-elected, we will aim to build a group that will start to challenge the NDP from the left.”
 
To my surprise, at the first meeting there was a sentiment for a group that would do more than organize against austerity, for some kind of radical left political organization. I was excited about the prospect that we might be able to build such a badly-needed group here. That’s how Solidarity Winnipeg (SW) was born. 
 
What I think of as SW 1.0 was a very loose group with little clarity about its politics, purpose or how to carry out its work. Members didn’t have to commit to do anything. There was no way to democratically decide if someone should be allowed to join or not. It was a frustrating experience for many people who were involved in it (me included). In December 2016 a number of members successfully argued for SW to raise the bar and become a “group of radical organizers that values and fosters clear politics and effective ways of working,” one whose members would be expected to participate actively in the group’s work and pay dues. SW 2.0, through until the end of the summer of 2017, tried to be a political organization of anti-capitalists active in community and union organizing. In September 2017, recognizing that we weren’t that kind of group, we scaled back and decided that the purpose of what I think of as SW 3.0 was to lay the basis for such a political organization.
 
With hindsight, I made two important mistakes at the very start [1]. First, I embraced the idea of building a left political organization instead of the anti-austerity community organizing group that the initial meeting was called to discuss. Second, I helped to launch the group very quickly, before a core of people with a shared understanding of the politics and purpose of the group who were willing and able to work together collectively to move it forward had been assembled (I remember Krystal Payne pointing out to me in May 2016 the difference between SW and the process leading up to the launch of Solidarity Halifax, described here. 
 
Why was it a mistake to take on building a radical political organization with the people who came together in Winnipeg in November 2015? Almost no one there other than me had been part of one, and few people understood the difference between 1) a radical political organization committed to social transformation that was choosing to make anti-austerity work its priority and 2) a broader anti-austerity community organizing effort. There wasn’t much political agreement to unite people. This led to a lot of confusion. I didn’t understand that the initial sentiment to form something other than an anti-austerity group came more from radicals wanting to have a home with like-minded people than it did from any understanding of what a very small radical political organization should do (including why its members should do community organizing with other people within broader coalitions or action-oriented groups, rather than on their own).
 
I knew it was risky to launch a group so quickly and with so little clarity. But it seemed like the need to pull something together before the PCs won the provincial election (as they did) made the risk worthwhile. I figured it’d be messy but that after the PCs won we’d be thrown into anti-austerity organizing and that experience would help the group sort itself out. The PCs won, but they didn’t immediately go on the offensive and SW didn’t start to sort itself out until the end of 2016. Not having a coherent core contributed to the confusion of SW 1.0 and made SW 2.0 unviable. It made the experience especially difficult for the most committed members.
 
The big lesson here is that taking short cuts leads to long delays. Forming what in some left traditions is called an organizing committee, with the objective of clarifying the political project and assembling a core of people committed to working together on it, might have gotten us further than rushing into launching an organization with little shared politics, an unclear project, and no core group [2].
 
 
 ****

[1]. Why did I make these mistakes? My desire to be part of a broader radical left political organization rather than a tiny socialist collective trumped my understanding that launching one would take clarity about some basic things that most leftists in Canada today lack. I also wrongly assumed that the initial enthusiasm meant that a core group would come together fairly easily over time.  
 
[2]. There’s more to forming a core group than understanding a common politics and project and being able to work collectively with some consistency. Who’s in the core (for example, what experiences are represented), and what political relationships they have with other people, also matter. 

David Camfield  
Published by Canadian Dimension May 11, 2018

Climate change is already happening. But the really bad news is that there’s very strong evidence that capitalism will deliver a future of catastrophic climate change that will have far-reaching effects around the world, especially in the imperialized countries of the Global South. There is a vast gap between the continuing growth of greenhouse gas emissions and the massive reductions of emissions needed to prevent widespread catastrophes.

In a thoughtful article, “Revolution in a Warming World: Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian Revolutions,” Andreas Malm writes, Lenin spoke of the catastrophe of his time as a ‘mighty accelerator’ bringing all contradictions to a head, ‘engendering world-wide crises of unparalleled intensity,’ driving nations ‘to the brink of doom’… Climate change is likely to be the accelerator of the twenty-first century, speeding up the contradictions of late capitalism – above all the growing chasm between the evergreen lawns of the rich and the precariousness of propertyless existence – and expedit[ing] one local catastrophe after another.

In advanced capitalist countries, we could see even more aggressive attacks on public health care, education and social services as states cut there while they spend more in response to floods, droughts and other effects of climate change. It’s easy to imagine mass international migration out of regions of the South hit hard by climate change leading to an intensification of racism and repression and the growth of fascist and other far right movements.

As more catastrophes happen and cause problems for capitalists and governments in advanced capitalist countries, ruling-class strategists will attempt to come up with responses to reduce the impact of climate change and manage these problems on their terms. Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright plausibly suggest in Climate Leviathan that this could involve the US or China leading an effort with other imperialist states to “save the planet” using geoengineering and other measures, backed up by military might. Supporters of such a move would present it as the only possible response to an emergency situation. People on the left would be under a lot of pressure to go along – worse than the pressure to support the “War on Terror” after September 11, 2001. Rulers wouldn’t let a serious crisis go to waste – they’d do their best to take advantage of the situation to boost their power and profits. Strikes and protests could be restricted even more than they are by “security” measures today. Capitalist democracy, already thinned out in the neoliberal era and especially since 2001, could be further limited or suspended.

What does this mean for radicals in the Canadian state? Obviously we should be working with other people to build the climate justice movement and other organizing efforts. But that’s not enough. We should orient towards building a new left, bearing in mind that climate change will likely accelerate social contradictions. Most of what I’ve written recently about building the radical left on Prairies applies in other regions too.

I’d like to stress two points.

First, as Matthew Brett argues we should “feel the scandal of our divisions.” “We ought to be ashamed of petty interpersonal or ideological divisions. At a time when the activist left is weak and divided, it’s vital to focus on common goals and principles, rather than obsessing over difference and division,” although “some differences cannot be overlooked.”

The situation we’re in – a stable capitalist society where the ruling class rules unchallenged, with the working class highly fragmented, divided and depoliticized and a feeble radical left – calls for us to unite on the basis of politics that can guide our activity in the current period. That’s different from organizing around a specific political tradition like Trotskyism or anarcho-communism (or as part of a narrower current within a tradition). It’s also different from adopting a basis of unity that claims to have answers to questions that we just don’t face in this moment of history, such as precisely what kind of society beyond capitalism we’re aiming for or exactly how a transition beyond capitalism could be started.

For us to advance struggles and start building a new left in this era we need anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, social-struggle ecological justice politics with a commitment to constructive involvement in broad workplace, community and campus organizing. Uniting on such a basis doesn’t mean forgetting about other political questions – it’s about putting the emphasis on what matters most now.

Second, talking about the urgent need to build a new left doesn’t take us very far. We need to get serious about learning how to build better in the circumstances in which we find ourselves and getting to work in whatever ways we can.

There’s been an almost complete break between cohorts in Canada, so that almost none of the lessons learned between the 1960s and the mid-1990s about how to build the radical left have been passed down to today’s activists. It’s not that everything we need to know merely awaits rediscovery. Far from it! But some methods have been tested and shown to be effective, while others have been shown to be ineffective. Let’s learn and use what works. And let’s learn from our experiences, like the failure of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly and, for a positive example, the process leading to the launch of Solidarity Halifax.
​
There are no short cuts to a new left. The best next step will be different in Toronto, where the radical left is larger than in other cities but also more divided, than in other places. Quebec Solidaire, a sizeable left-reformist party, makes the landscape of the left different in Quebec. But we can and must try to take a step towards a new left.

by David Camfield
originally published in Salvage

Too often people on the radical left find ourselves thinking with concepts we’ve inherited from the past that have become misleading because the realities to which the concepts refer have changed fundamentally. This happens a lot when we talk about the workers’ movement.

As New York City transit union activist Steve Downs put it,

"We speak about the labour movement and I think we tend to do it out of habit or maybe generosity or     maybe even embarrassment, but there is no labour movement in this city or in this country, frankly… there is no unifying vision, there are no widely- accepted goals, there certainly is no forward momentum."
 
In 2013 former members of the Italian revolutionary socialist group Sinistra Critica who went on to form the Communia Network put forward an argument about the “dissolution of what we called the ‘workers’ movement’.”  They argued that
 
"a historical era has ended in the wake of the crisis of    class culture and the dissolution of the network of relationships between trade unions, political parties, associative and cooperative structures. The synergy of those institutions of the workers’ movement has been down by a progressive loss of consciousness caused not only by the blows of capitalism in crisis, but also by the failure of so-called “communism” realized in several countries – whose ruins fell down on the same subjects who has to be liberated – and by the hegemony conquered by the social-democratic tendencies (then “social-liberal” ones) in that      movement itself, tendencies that delivered many institutions created by the movement to the logic of     profit and market that they claimed to fight.

That history is behind us, even if it still generates monsters in the present times. We are living today the        slow time of reconstruction, reconstruction of ideas      and material power of social subjects."

In 2015, the editors of the communization journal Endnotes offered an ambitious look at the “longue durée” of the global workers’ movement, “A History of Separation.” It argues for what its authors call “a periodising break.” Their goal is “to allow us to relate to the past as past, and the present as something else,” while recognizing important elements of continuity. The workers’ movement, they argue, “was not simply the proletariat in fighting form, as if any struggle today would have to replicate its essential features. It was a particular fighting form, which took shape in an era that is not our own.” The workers’ movement was “not the same thing as organised workers’ struggle.” Rather, for roughly one hundred years beginning in the late 1800s it was a mode of organizing, “an apparatus, an urban machine, which bound workers together and kept them so bound” in both certain kinds of paid workplaces and in neighbourhoods. To the extent that it succeeded, it relied on “an affirmable class identity” with which union and party activists could convince workers “to suspend their interests as isolated sellers in a competitive labour market, and, instead, to act out of a commitment to the collective project of the labour movement.”

The workers’ movement “embodied a certain idea” about how capitalism could be replaced. Consequently, it “made for a definite communist horizon, which imparted a certain dynamic to struggles and also established their limits.” At the heart of this was a “vision of their destiny, with five tenets”:

(1) Workers were building a new world with their own   hands.

(2) In this new world, workers were the only social  group that was expanding; whereas all other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie.

(3) Workers were not only becoming the majority of the population; they were also becoming a compact mass, the collective worker, who was being drilled in the factories to act in concert with the machines.

(4) They were thus the only ones capable of managing the new world in accordance with its innermost logic: neither a hierarchy of order-givers and order-takers, nor the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather, an ever more finely-grained division of labour.

(5) Workers were proving this vision to be true, since the class was realising what it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of which would make it possible to abolish class society, and and thus to bring man’s prehistory to a close.

It was this vision that motivated workers to struggle. Between 1875 and 1921, Endnotes argues, this vision had tremendous appeal to workers, which “explains the movement’s exponential growth” in that period. But “Today there is everywhere a commonly felt absence of the institutional forms of solidarity that formed the backbone of the workers’ movement.” In our era,
      
All that remains of the workers’ movement are unions that manage the slow bleed-out of stable employment; social democratic parties that implement austerity measures when conservative parties fail to do so; and communist and anarchist sects that wait (actively or passively) for their change to rush the stage…. none is likely to rejuvenate itself on the world scale. The workers’ movement is no longer a force with the potential to remake the world. That it was such a force was what gave life to these currents within the  workers’ movement: they no longer make sense; their coordinates have been scrambled. 
 
Class antagonism persists, and struggles still happen. However, “the diverse fractions of the working class no longer shape themselves into a workers’ movement.” When particular groups of workers struggle, they may identify as workers. But when broader struggles arise, workers do not identify as part of the working class but “as citizens, as participants in a ‘real democracy,’ as the 99 percent, and so on.” Such identities seems “to widen their capacity to struggle” in a way that identification with the working class does not.
 
The kind of arguments that Sinistra Critica and Endnotes propose, with their emphasis on discontinuity, are important. They have the merit of registering important changes that much of the far left ignores, denies or minimizes. Today most radicals have little sense of the present as a moment in history with distinctive features and how these differ from the contours of previous periods. Adherents of the revolutionary left are more likely to have definite views about such matters. However, on the far left the present is often understood in relation to whichever momentous historical events a political current treats as most important (the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, the Chinese Revolution…). The era in which we live is rarely recognized as a period that is profoundly discontinuous with the years c. 1840-1970 during which the traditions of the revolutionary left took shape. That’s one reason why absurdities like socialists in Texas reading about Lenin for guidance in building their organization are not uncommon today. With too much of the far left intellectually imprisoned in archaic thinking, there’s value in stressing that the workers’ movement and the political horizon linked with it are now truly in the past — but also that capitalism, the working class, class struggle, bureaucratic mass organizations born of the workers’ movement, and  the  potential for a self-governing society are still features of the crisis-ridden world we’re trying to change.
 
In order to help us orient ourselves, it’s worth addressing the question of how the workers’ movement came to an end. Although Endnotes‘ description of what remains of the movement is evocative, its explanation of the movement’s passing is inadequate – capital’s inexorable tendency to atomize the working class while simultaneously making individuals objectively more interdependent coexists with the historical investigation of class struggles and geopolitical forces in a way that isn’t synthesized convincingly. By “the workers’ movement” I don’t mean any and all mass organizations of the working class. Instead, I’m referring to something more specific: configurations of workers’ organizations with a strong relationship to at least a small but significant minority of the class that affirm a commitment to the creation by workers of a fundamentally different society.
 
The first world-historic blow to the movement came earlier than is often realized, and was delivered by Stalinism. The fact that this history is not well known today and that nostalgia for a stronger left in the past still leads some people to be insufficiently critical of “Communism” makes it important to recount how Stalinism damaged the workers’ movement. The belief that socialism was being built in the USSR and later elsewhere  undoubtedly bolstered the workers’ movement internationally in certain ways. But that was false hope. When council democracy ceased to function in Russia in 1918 social supremacy passed from the working class to the leadership of one segment of the class, suspending the possibility of transition to socialism. Trapped in an impossible situation, a substitutionist revolutionary leadership evolved into rulers committed to modernization rationalized as “socialism in one country.” The last flickers of the fires lit in 1917 were snuffed out in the late 1920s with the completion of what Gareth Dale has aptly called a “modernizing counter-revolution” that consolidated the rulers of the USSR as a class. Stalinism crushed the already-subordinated workers’ movement in the USSR, turning its organizations into appendages of the party-state as it launched its industrialization drive. Its emulators in China, Cuba and other countries did the same whenever they came to power.
 
Sadly, the connection in workers’ minds between the idea of socialism and the “Communist” regime was so strong that the workers’ movement was weakened as more people outside the USSR learned of the horrors wrought by Stalinism. The vigorous efforts of the anti-Stalinist radical left to challenge the equation of socialism with “Communism”  had little success. The eventual collapse of most of the “Communist” societies dealt a further blow to the idea that the working class could remake society for the better, an effect that was often underestimated by socialists who rightly recognized that counter-revolution had long ago triumphed in the USSR. The mutation of China and Vietnam into “market Stalinism” had a similar ideological impact.
 
The rulers of the USSR also did enormous damage to the workers’ movement in many other countries through the politics and organizational measures imposed through the Communist International. The most disastrous case was Germany, where “Third Period” sectarianism was a major obstacle to united working-class action against fascism. In China the Comintern’s directive to support the nationalist Guomindang left the urban workers’ movement unprepared when the nationalists turned on it in the late 1920s. But Stalinism’s political impact was much more pervasive. From the mid-1930s its politics of seeking popular front alliances with “progressive” wings of ruling classes damaged workers’ organizations around the world. In Spain the murderous and literally counter-revolutionary actions of Stalinist forces succeeded in  snuffing out workers’ and peasants’ power where it existed, as well as suppressing anti-Stalinist radicalism. Although this was not the only reason for Franco’s victory, it did weaken the effort to defeat fascism. Internationally, workers’ movements were weakened by the “Communist” promotion of politics whose horizons were now, rhetoric aside, firmly within the existing society.
 
Fascism, the Second World War and the Cold War dealt further blows. The workers’ organizations built in West Germany after 1945 did not share the commitment of their formidable pre-1933 ancestors to the creation by workers of a new society; in the East, workers were denied the right to organize independently of the party-state that claimed to rule in their name. In the US and Canada, unions emerged from wartime and post-war strike waves as more stable but also more bureaucratic organizations. In the US, a small opening for a left party independent of the Democrats was quickly lost. Wartime nationalism, for which in Mike Davis’s words “‘progressives and popular front leftists were among the most zealous missionaries,” swept through the white majority of the working class. This was then “redeployed in 1946-7 as a virulent anti-communism” that fuelled the successful ruling-class campaign that destroyed most workers’ organizations pledged to a vision of a different society and marginalized the weakened survivors. In Canada, the impact of wartime nationalism and Cold War anti-communism wasn’t as devastating as it was in the US. A minority of the working class continued to support the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, but the party’s “socialism” came to mean reforms within capitalism, not far-reaching social reconstruction.
 
As the post-war capitalism boomed, the working class underwent significant changes internationally. Yet it would be a mistake to make too much of how higher living standards, suburbanization, the growth of women’s participation in wage-labour, the expansion of “white collar” employment, and “Third World” immigration affected the remaining workers’ movements in the advanced capitalist countries. If some workers did not identify with the movement they encountered, dominated as it was by white men drawn from particular segments of the class, this was not an entirely new problem. The fact that these workers often pushed to be included in unions and/or organized autonomously within the orbit of the workers’ movement (as in the Indian Workers’ Association in the UK, self-organized groups of African-American workers, and initiatives by women workers in many countries) testifies to the movement’s enduring political magnetism. During the long post-war boom a workers’ movement in the specific sense of the term I’m using here also emerged for the first time in a few places, including Quebec; in a number of other countries, perhaps most notably India, the movement grew in strength. Nevertheless, in some parts of the world the movement became weaker in certain respects during these years, although this was often masked by robust working-class combativity and solidarity. For example, in Britain, as Duncan Hallas perceptively observed in 1971, “A new generation of capable and energetic workers exists but they are no longer part of a cohesive movement and they no longer work in a milieu where basic Marxist ideas are widespread… Not only has the vanguard, in the real sense of a considerable layer of organised revolutionary workers and intellectuals, been destroyed. So too has the environment, the tradition, that gave it influence.”
 
These developments in the half-century prior to the end of the post-war boom and the restructuring out of which neoliberal capitalism emerged are part of the decline of the workers’ movement; that decline does not begin only in the mid-1970s. Since then, we have seen the neoliberal reorganization of capitalism  followed by its crisis, which has now lasted a decade. The working class in most places has undergone significant decomposition, to use one of the useful concepts generated by the  operaismo current of Italian marxism[1]; elementary forms of unity and solidarity among waged and unwaged members of the class have been eroded both inside and outside the sphere of paid workplaces. Even more damaging, inherited “infrastructures of dissent” — the term Alan Sears offers in The Next New Left: A History of the Future for “the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together” — have often disintegrated and not been replaced.
 
Many social changes have led to these losses. These include the dramatic decline of strikes, the shrinking of union coverage, the loss of workers’ rights and cultures of workplace collectivism, the cultivation of insecurity, “negative solidarity” (the stance captured by the motto “if I don’t have it, they shouldn’t either”) and competitive individualism inside and outside the paid workplace, and the deepening of divisions rooted in racial oppression. The tendency to class decomposition was already underway before the collapse of “Communism” and the open embrace of neoliberalism by union officialdoms and social democratic party apparatuses in the 1990s. Since then, it has gone further, though not  without important bursts of self-activity that began to recompose the class in 21st century conditions, for example in France, Bolivia, Venezuela, and China. The result has been the dissipation almost everywhere of the remnants of the workers’ movement (Greece is perhaps an exception). This dynamic of decomposition has bedevilled efforts to renew class-struggle anti-capitalist politics since the fall of Stalinism, and it grounds the contemporary structure of feeling identified by Enzo Traverso in Left-Wing Melancholia.
 
Where does this leave those of us who remain convinced that a socialist politics for our times must be an internationalist politics of the self-emancipation of the working class, one that’s resolutely anti-racist, feminist and queer liberationist and that recognizes the importance of both autonomous organizing by members of oppressed groups and united workers’ struggles in the workplace and community spheres? To start, we should recognize that classical marxism was a product of conditions radically-dissimilar to our own (as was classical anarchism). Strategic concepts of the early Comintern like the revolutionary party, the united front and the workers’ government assume the existence of forms of class organization and consciousness that in most regions haven’t existed for a long time. This doesn’t necessarily make them unworthy of study (although anyone who still thinks socialist groups today should organize themselves along “Leninist” lines “as if” they were large organizations that could meaningfully be called revolutionary parties, “only smaller” — the micro-party model — hasn’t learned much from the history of the far left since 1945). But it does mean these concepts can’t be “applied” in today’s conditions.
 
As the Italian marxists quoted at the outset put it, ours is “the slow time of reconstruction, reconstruction of ideas and material power of social subjects.” The extent of working-class decomposition imposes this pace on efforts to foster workers’ self-organization and solidarity. This temporality is terrifyingly out of synch with the speeds at which the climate change crisis is worsening and political events are happening (Brexit, Trump’s win, the growth of right-wing populist and fascist forces…). Although bold political initiatives and surprising wins are possible (the obvious lesson of, for example, the ascent of Corbyn-led Labour as well as the Sanders campaign and the emergence of a new left in the US, and, on a smaller scale, of the $15 and Fairness campaign in the Canadian province of Ontario), the advance of class-struggle politics is constrained by the political condition of the social forces on which these politics depend — not union officials or even union and community activists but the layers of the working class open to taking collective action against employers, landlords, corporate polluters, governments, and other state authorities when it seems that fighting back makes sense.
 
Recognizing this powerful constraint should direct our attention to the “need to start where the working class is, rather than where [we] might like it to be,” as Sheila Cohen puts it. A good first move is to try to listen and watch attentively, using theoretical tools but trying to avoid imposing preconceptions. Most of us can contribute in at least some small way to fostering elementary forms of resistance where we work or live, and in these increasingly unpredictable times (who foresaw Corbynism, the influx of thousands of radicalizing people into the Democratic Socialists of America, or the hopeful “#MeToo moment”?) there are sometimes opportunities to do more. We can support and learn from promising instances of working-class self-activity wherever they happen, from neighbourhood anti-austerity campaigns to strikes to initiatives for change within unions to anti-racist protests. We can acknowledge and try to overcome the unhelpful tendency of radicals on the margins to huddle together rather than engage with people who are taking action but haven’t yet drawn the conclusions we have. Intellectuals working in academic institutions can, in addition to organizing where we are, develop relationships with, to quote Cohen, our “‘organic’ counterparts — as facilitators, researchers and educators in the cause of developing actually existing class organisation and resistance.”
 
Such an open and experimental approach is the most promising way to contribute to the possibility of reinventing a class movement through which people can effectively defend themselves within contemporary society and work for its supercession. Such a reinvention is what is called for by social struggles today, after the end of the movement that so profoundly shaped our traditions.
 
 
 
[1] I have addressed operaismo‘s contribution to theorizing class in “Reorienting Class Analysis: Working Classes as Historical Formations,” Science and Society 68.4 (2004-2005).
 

By David Camfield
December 28, 2017

Nick Montgomery and carla bergman have written a book with an appealing title: Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times (AK Press & Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2017). After seeing that it promised to discuss “rigid radicalism,” I hoped that the book might contain some useful insights about this phenomenon (one of the things I became aware of in 2017 was the growth on university campuses in the Canadian state of two small far left groups that certainly fit that description) and about fostering a left that’s more attractive and effective. At the same time I suspected its theoretical perspective wouldn’t fit well with any politics of class and anti-oppression struggle that aim for the kind of rupture with capitalism that would launch a transition towards a self-governing society.
 
Unfortunately, the book is a disappointment. It’s much more about the authors’ theory – whose influences include the 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, post-structuralism, autonomism, and the Canadian anarchist Richard Day – than about contemporary experiences of activism and organizing, which are only touched on in minimal and pretty superficial ways to support the book’s argument.
 
The book is a celebration of  joy in the very specific sense in which the authors use the term: “the growth of shared power to do, feel, and think more.” This is a process made up of “common notions”, “shared thinking-feeling-doings that support joyful transformation... processes through which people figure things out together and become active in joy’s unfolding, learning to participate in and sustain new capacities.” “Joyful militancy, then, is a fierce commitment to emergent forms of life in the cracks of Empire, and the values, responsibilities, and questions that sustain them.”
 
As that last line hints, the authors believe that new forms of life “are always in the making in the cracks of Empire.” Although they’re not explicit, they seem to think that these might, someday, somehow, replace “the organized catastrophe in which we live today.” They endorse a politics that refuses “trying to rationally direct the course of events” and instead “is about learning to participate more actively in the forces that compose the world and oneself.”
 
This is a kind of anarchism that rejects strategic politics altogether.[1] Participating in any campaign, struggle or movement inevitably throws up questions about what direction the organizing should go in. The politics of Joyful Militancy offer very little guidance about how to grapple with such questions because they refuse strategic thinking. From the authors’ perspective, what is to be done is completely a matter of what promotes joy in the specific context people are in. Their rejection of strategic thinking is part and parcel of their rejection of any and all radical politics of  “directed social transformation brought about by deliberate intent,” to use a phrase (not found in the book) of the historian Willie Thompson that I think grasps the heart of the matter. Strategic politics only appear in the book in the form of vague references to “vanguardist” (what I prefer to call substitutionist) groups and a brief discussion of one of the worst of these to come out of the turn to Maoism by much of the US New Left at the end of the 1960s, the Weather Underground, a discussion that fails to recognize what specifically led this organization to become the disaster that it was.

This refusal of strategy is connected to the book’s hostility to “ideology,” by which is meant “having a preexisting set of answers for political questions.” Because everything is a matter of flux and context, questions are seen as good but answers can only be provisional and specific. In spite of this stance, the book hovers above history and geography, talking of a generic Empire and saying almost nothing about contemporary Canadian society (where the authors live) or any other society. While the authors write that any perspective can become an ideology, their most frequent example is Marxism, as they point to a kind of theory that does exist but that isn’t the only Marxism.
 
Although societies are processes in time not everything is flux. Where we are in time and space is tremendously important but social relations like class, gender and race aren’t completely different in every local context. The answers to some questions (for example, can capitalism be changed so that maximizing profit is not the system’s priority? can the capitalist state be used to put an end to the rule of capital? what group in society has the potential power to uproot capital’s domination? can a struggle against oppression be led successfully by people who don’t face that oppression themselves?) are a lot less provisional than others. This means that it is possible to develop social theory that can give helpful guidance to collective action for change today and inform how we answer questions that are more specific to particular changing contexts (how to fight austerity in Winnipeg today, where I live, is a question that can only be answered through experiments, but a strong analysis of the settler-colonial capitalist society in which Winnipeg exists can be useful for people involved in those experiments).
 
Like Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead (which influences it), Joyful Militancy is premised on “Making Friends with Failure,” to use the title of a perceptive review of Day’s book. It rejects strategic liberatory politics because of past defeats, instead celebrating worker co-operatives, indigenous land defence, communal gardening, new ways of people relating to each other as friends, and other ways of trying to live better within capitalist society. I think all of these can be valuable, in different ways. But many of the activities the book mentions favourably don’t build power to resist attacks and win gains through struggles that transform people. And none can open the door to a transition towards a self-governing society that dramatically changes our relationship with the rest of nature. Failure “cannot be buried under good intentions or changed into its opposite by holding it up to the mirror of wishful thinking.”[2]
 
What makes this book so disappointing is that rigid radicalism, “hostile to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation,” which the authors rightly observe “often arises as a reaction to a decline of transformative and enabling movements” but that can also be a product of radicalization in a period when levels of social struggle are low and infrastructures of dissent that connect newly-radicalizing people with more experienced fighters are weak (as is the case in many places today), is a real problem.[3] This rigidity matters because it’s an obstacle to building a new left committed to militant struggle and social revolution. In spite of a few interesting observations about ethics and relationships, Joyful Militancy doesn’t offer much to those of us who’re committed to that urgent endeavour.

Notes
 
[1] Rodrigo Nunes recently described strategic political thinking this way: “taking into account the broader context of a complex ecology of struggles and agents in order to find the most transformative thing possible in that concrete situation: what can best exploit the political potentials opened up by the conjuncture so as to transform its present constraints the most, what will take it the farthest from what it is and the closest to where you want it to be.” “It Takes Organizers to Make a Revolution,” Viewpoint Magazine, Nov. 9, 2017.
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/11/09/takes-organizers-make-revolution/
 
[2] AK Thompson, “Making Friends with Failure: A Critical Response to Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements,” Upping the Anti 3
http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/03-making-friends-with-failure/


[3] On infrastructures of dissent, see Alan Sears, The Next New Left: A History of the Future.

by David Camfield, December 13, 2017

What’s a “political organization”?
A “political organization” is simply a group that promotes a broad vision of what society as a whole should be like and has at least some ideas about how to work towards that goal.
 
This is different from organizations that are focused on one or two issues, such as community groups that mobilize or organize around housing, public transit or climate change, for example. It’s also different from unions, and from social movements that arise around an issue or struggle (genuine movements are typically made up of a variety of organizations).

There are many different kinds of political organizations, such as
 

• parties that exist only or mostly to win elections within capitalist democracies, like the NDP and Quebec Solidaire
  
  
• parties that organize extensively outside official politics and also take part in elections, like the Party of Socialism and Freedom in Brazil
  
  
• groups that exist to exert pressure on government through official political channels, like LeadNow and the Council of Canadians
  
  
• large or small political groups of the left or right (which sometimes misleadingly call themselves parties) – Momentum (in the UK) and the Democratic Socialists of America are large ones, while Solidarity Halifax is a small one
  
  
• religious groups with a political vision, like the right-wing Muslim fundamentalist Hizb ut-Tahrir

 
Are political organizations needed?
Solidarity Winnipeg believes that powerful mass social movements are the key to transforming society to achieve social and ecological justice, including uprooting colonialism.
But we recognize that political organizations committed to that long-term goal and that perspective on how to achieve it are also needed.
We’re a very small group working to lay the basis for a specific kind of radical political organization: one with a vision of mass struggle to replace capitalism with a more democratic kind of society and uproot all forms of oppression, an organization that works in and with other groups to organize for social change.
 
Why do we need that kind of organization today?
Because there hasn’t been a small but serious and non-sectarian (sectarian groups treat their own particular interests as more important than advancing struggles and organizing) radical political organization in Winnipeg for a long time, few people realize what one could do.
The kind of small political organization we want to lay the basis for could do things that unions and broader groups devoted to community and campus organizing can’t do – and that individuals can’t do by themselves either.
It could unite people who share a common vision so we can

• educate ourselves in a common politics and analyze what’s going on around us
  
  
• promote those ideas to other people, arguing for an understanding of how
  society works and how it could be transformed
  
  
• train ourselves and other people to be radical organizers for change
  
  
• cooperate so we can learn from others and be more effective builders of the other groups and campaigns in which we’re active.
  
  

Groups that organize around specific issues often rise and fall along with the level of struggle. A political organization can provide continuity, sharing the lessons of past experiences with people today, to help make organizing and struggles stronger. As US socialist Chris Maisano notes, “While organizers can’t bring a mass movement into existence on their own, organized groups of radicals have played a key role in guiding and supporting these upsurges whenever they’ve occurred.”
 
Why isn’t there a group like that already?
In Canada today, the radical left is weak (if you want to understand why, Alan Sears’ book The Next New Left is a good place to start). There’s no multi-city political organization committed to the vision we support, only an assortment of very small radical left groups (including a couple with a vision similar to ours).
It’s not easy to build a radical political organization from scratch. That’s especially true for people like us who reject the dogmatic certainties of some anti-capitalists and who’re humbly aware of the limits of small political groups including our own. But we want to give it a try. Will you join or support us?

originally published on solidaritywinnipeg.ca

by DAVID CAMFIELD / October 16, 2017
 
People who are committed to radical social change and who are trying to work towards that goal, whether as community, union or campus activists or supporters of a left-wing candidate, are sometimes skeptical when people like me say that we need theory. If we’re building the fight for $15 and Fairness, organizing against the racist far right, campaigning against sexual assault, or supporting Niki Ashton’s bid to lead the federal NDP, do we really need social theory?
 
The first thing to recognize is that all of us already have social theory, whether we realize it or not. We all have ideas about how society works even if we’ve never read a book about it. Everyone who’s working for social change has ideas about making change. That’s what social theory is: explanations of how society works and how social change happens.
 
Most people’s ideas about these things are a mixture of what we’ve heard from people we know, been told by teachers or other persons whose views we pay attention to, picked up from the mainstream media, and learned from our own personal experiences. But often we don’t realize how we’ve come to believe what we do. Also, our thinking is often inconsistent – for example, someone might believe that capitalism and inequality exist because humans are naturally competitive. Yet at the same time this person is cooperating with some of their coworkers to unionize the place where they work because they’re fed up with how they’re being treated by management.
 
People know their own experience very well. Our personal experience is a valuable source of insights about how our society works, at least for the great majority of people who endure sexism, racism, and/or another form of oppression as well as spend hours working for pay in places where we have little or no control over what we do. Unfortunately, the forces that shape our everyday experiences – flows of capital investment, government policy decisions, and how gender and racial power are organized, for example – are harder to understand. Most people don’t have a good handle on such questions as what capitalism is, how it’s intertwined with different kinds of oppression, the relationship between the state and capitalism, and what the most effective ways of fighting for change are.
 
Does this really matter? It’s true that you don’t need to understand capitalism to unionize your workplace, and you don’t need to know what patriarchal gender relations are to force your student union executive to put resources into hard-hitting feminist education for students about sexual assault. You can want capitalism to be replaced with a better system even if you don’t understand very well how capitalism works.
 
But to grasp why it’s so damaging for union officials to buy into employers’ plans for competitiveness, why educational campaigns alone won’t put an end to rape, and what keeps capitalism going we need ways of thinking systematically about how society is organized. In other words, we need social theory. A good theory of how state power operates in a capitalist society helps people organizing for reforms to craft a strategy that can win. A good theory of what kind of party the NDP is will help us to understand why the party has never worked to build social movements. Without this kind of theory we’ll draw the wrong conclusions when governments headed by left-wing leaders who promise real change fail to deliver, and when the NDP tries to channel the energy of protest into preparing for the next election. It makes a big difference if we look at the low level of active support among non-indigenous working-class people for indigenous efforts to decolonize Canada and conclude that the working class here will never fight to transform society or if we reject that conclusion (as I do). We need a good theory of the working class and settler-colonial capitalism to help us here.
 
We also need theory to grapple with questions like “is it possible to replace capitalism with a better society?” and “if it is, what should we do in the here and now to work towards that goal?” Too many people give up fighting for radical change because their expectations – founded on faulty assumptions – turn out to be wrong. A better understanding of what we’re up against helps people to stay in the struggle.
If you’re convinced we do need theory, then you face another question: what kind? Most social theory today is written by academics for other academics or upper-level university students because their jobs require them to publish books or articles. Most of it has a far from radical outlook on the status quo. The questions it asks are often of little interest to radicals. This is why many activists are turned off by theory. Most of it is useless for efforts to change society for the better. Theory that is potentially more useful is often written in ways that are hard for most people who haven’t studied social theory in university to understand. But it’s a mistake to think all theory is like that, or to assume that theory has to be written in an academic way.
 
So what kind of theory do radicals need? For starters, it has to begin from a global recognition of all forms of oppression (gender, racial, imperialist, settler-colonial, sexual, of the disabled…) and of how everyone who directly produces goods and services — from impoverished peasants in the South to the highest-waged workers in the North – is subordinated to employers in various ways. Before thinking systematically about these things, it has to deeply appreciate that they’re real and harmful. It needs to be not just a theory of these realities but also a theory against them. It should also recognize that they happen simultaneously, so that even if we sometimes have to talk about, say, class exploitation we never lose sight of how in reality class never exists separately from different kinds of oppression.
 
The theory we need has to do more than analyze the exploitation and oppression we face. It also has to help us see where potential power to change society is and how it can be organized. It should allow us to identify weaknesses in the system we’re fighting so we can take advantage of them. Our theory has to be able to recognize the hidden potential for a society beyond capitalism that has come to exist under capitalism – a possible future in the present – and be useful for developing political strategy.
 
All this rules out most approaches to social theory. Most aren’t theories against oppression and exploitation. None of the most influential schools of thought in the social sciences fit the bill, from evolutionary psychology to neoclassical economics (and most of its critics). Nor do theories that are against class exploitation or one or two kinds of oppression but don’t try to provide an integrated theory of and against them all.
 
Another quality of the theory we need is that it should be materialist. This doesn’t have anything to do with being preoccupied with money or what money can buy. Materialist theory, in the words of the socialist writer George Novack, acknowledges that “Everything comes from matter and its movements and is based upon matter. This thought is expressed in the phrase: ‘Mother Nature’… nature is the ultimate source of everything in the universe from the galactic systems to the most intimate feelings and boldest thoughts of homo sapiens.” Materialism is the alternative to idealism. Idealism comes in many varieties, include theories that talk of “Western” and “Muslim” cultures with fixed essences and theories that treat ideas as the driving force of history.
 
 
The theory we need must also be historical. It has to be very sensitive to the ways societies have changed over time. So much of what most people today take for granted as “just the way things are” or think is natural isn’t natural at all and hasn’t always existed. Male domination and the division of society into exploiting and exploited classes have only existed since the late Neolithic Era (roughly 4500-3000 BCE). Capitalism only emerged in England in the 1400s and didn’t become dominant there for another two centuries. Racial oppression was spread around the world by Europeans’ capitalist colonialism. For people to live with a “heterosexual,” “homosexual” or “bisexual” “orientation” is even more recent.
 
To be most useful, the theory should be critical, not dogmatic. Some theory that has the positive qualities I’ve mentioned avoids some of the toughest questions facing those of us who yearn for social transformation or offers glib answers. This may be reassuring, but in the end such theory isn’t the most effective guide to action.
 
I think the strongest social theory with the necessary qualities is one that fuses the best ideas of Karl Marx and some of the people who have worked with Marx’s concepts with the best ideas developed by thinkers whose foremost concerns have been sexism, racism, heterosexism and other kinds of oppression. It’s not a new approach, but it’s usually overshadowed by other theories that have more academic or political backing (my name for this fusion is reconstructed historical materialism).
 
In my book We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society I’ve tried to introduce this approach and use it to answer some of the questions on the minds of activists today. I’ve tried to do this as clearly as I can, so that people who aren’t academic researchers can understand the ideas. Social theory is too important to be left to the academic publishing industry. Radicals need to read and use theory (which sometimes involves writing) to change the world.
 
David Camfield lives in Winnipeg and is a member of Solidarity Winnipeg.
 
Elements of this article appeared in a shorter piece published on the Briarpatch website