goal and strategy for anarchy

A Goal and Strategy for Anarchy – (2008) james herod via 11 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-herod-a-goal-and-strategy-for-anarchy]

notes/quotes:

5

The idea of self-government implies assemblies, and always has: workers’ councils, town meetings, household cooperatives. We can summarize and synthesize this as follows:

Neighborhood Assemblies

Workplace Assemblies

Household Assemblies

An Association of Neighborhood Assemblies

oi.. why not yet ness.. oi.. need to let go of any form of m\a\p.. invited vs invented ness et al

6

That’s it. That’s how we do it. This is a simple and elegant *vision of how we can reorder our social lives. These social forms, in varying mixes and degrees, have been present in just about every revolt against oppressing classes from the dawn of hierarchical society.

*oi.. not a legit re order.. not new/diff.. need to org around legit needs

The goal implies the strategy. We must establish these assemblies, in every neighborhood, workplace, and household (much extended households though). There is great power in social organization. Revolution means rearranging ourselves socially. The beauty of this plan is that the social forms which will enable us to defeat capitalists are the very same forms that we will need to establish the society we want. In the process of gutting capitalism we will be creating anarchy at the same time. These social forms will enable us to escape wage-slavery and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor. They will enable us to get out of commodity markets and build a world based on mutual aid and gift giving. They will enable us to become a self-governing people, free and autonomous in our local communities, and to establish an association of such communities. This is a plausible, realistic strategy.

plausible/realistic.. but not new/diff.. need unjustifiable strategy ness.. oi

You see, it is not enough to seize the means of production. We must take all decision making away from the capitalist ruling class and relocate it into our assemblies. To do so we must shift the focus of our attention to these three strategic sites, and away from protest politics, identity politics, labor unions, and single issue campaigns, which are not getting us very far toward defeating capitalists and establishing anarchy.

enough would be letting go of any form of m\a\p.. all else.. cancerous distractions

Maybe a note is in order as to why household assemblies are included in the list, which is not often done. First of all, it simply makes sense. Humans have always organized themselves into households, regardless of their societal type, even in tribal societies. It is a well-nigh universal and “natural” social form. Most of us spend a great deal of our lives in our households. Secondly, women in the autonomous movement in Italy in the 1970s proved that housework is an integral part of wage-slavery. That’s why they launched the Wages for Housework campaign. Finally, some of the keenest contemporary students of capitalism, those associated with Immanuel Wallerstein at the Fernand Braudel Center, include households as a key unit of analysis. These are some of the reasons why I think households must be included along with workplaces and neighborhoods as an essential arena for directly democratic decision making, and thus of self-government. But the households I’m talking about would be expanded households, not nuclear families or even extended families, but a new social form, harking back to the larger household structures in medieval manors or the ancient world, consisting of 50-200 people.

need: oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space

not another same song time/energy suck

8

Coming now to the Individualists – Primitivism, Ontological Anarchism, Crimethinc, and so-called Post-Left Anarchism – none have advanced, and all deny the need for, a *concrete description of the kind of society we are trying to establish in the here and now. Since they tend to think of society as an aggregate of autonomous individuals, they resist any effort to define, in concrete terms, the social forms that anarchy will take. They don’t even believe in social forms. Consequently, in terms of strategy, they are limited to attacking the existing order. That’s their strategy: **resist, subvert hierarchy, get off the grid and live free (defined in a very superficial way, however – like, quit your job), and attack, attack, attack. And that’s what they do – protest and disrupt.

*oi.. need unjustifiable strategy ness

**cancerous distraction

9

The Global Justice Movement is infused with anarchist themes and practices, but, contrary to its claim that ‘There Is An Alternative,’ it has not yet been able to *clearly articulate this alternative and build a strategy based on it, or so it seems.

*oi

There is an international journal, the International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, which has articulated, in concrete detail, a clear image of the liberated society we so ardently desire, as well as a strategy for achieving it. But there are only a few individuals in the United States who are associated with this intellectual current. And, sad to say, it is very far from becoming a living current within the contemporary anarchist movement.

oi

So that’s it — a very grim picture indeed as regards a goal and strategy for anarchy among contemporary anarchists.

The Actual Practices Prevailing in the Present Day Anarchist Movement

If we look now at the actual practices which prevail in the present day anarchist movement in USAmerica we can notice a curious fact. The strategies described above have almost no bearing on contemporary practices. Even for class-struggle anarchists who are oriented toward the working class and believe in workers councils, like those associated with the Wobblies, Nefac, or the WSA, the drive for such councils is almost nonexistent. Instead, they engage in standard labor practices: campaigns for the right to organize, union organizing drives, fights for better wages, hours, and benefits, or in defense of fired workers.

What else? By participating in Food Not Bombs, *we anarchists take on the task of feeding the hungry, whereas we should be devoting our time and energy to destroying a system that creates hungry people. We cannot stop all the crimes of capitalists, one crime at a time. **Their crimes are endless. We must stop capitalists. Bikes Not Bombs perhaps highlights an alternative to the car culture, but it doesn’t hurt capitalists in the least. No number of Critical Mass bike rides will defeat the oil/car oligarchy. Anarchist Black Cross is certainly a decent, humane project, but no amount of letter writing to prisoners, or packets of books, will bring down the prison-industrial complex. Single-issue campaigns, like shutting down animal testing labs, in defense of animal rights, are eminently worthy. But we could close every lab in the world and capitalists will not be much fazed.

*any form of m\a\p does that.. for (blank)’s sake

**need to try gershenfeld something else law.. for (blank)’s sake

And why these? Why focus on hungry people, cars, prisoners, or animals? *Why not war, a stupendously destructive crime, or torture, an absolute abomination? Or why not agri-business and the food processing industry? Processed foods, and the resulting obesity and malnutrition, are killing more people now than most major diseases. This is a crime of enormous impact, as is the neoliberal destruction of food security the world over, which has now placed about two billion people at risk from starvation.

*all still cancerous distractions

What about all the time, energy, and resources we devote to running bookstores and organizing anarchist book fairs? These projects are a tiny hedge against capitalist cultural hegemony, and help keep an opposition movement alive, but how serious a threat are they, really, to capitalists?

And what about all the effort going into race, gender, and sex issues, hardly any of which is linked to class analysis or class struggle? Has forty years of identity politics moved us any closer to defeating the capitalist ruling class?

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Then there are the endless marches and rallies, which have virtually no effect on capitalists. The ruling class is laughing at us. If all we can do is rally and march and protest in the streets, they have nothing at all to worry about.

yep.. everything to date.. same song.. need to try something legit diff.. ie: a nother way

It seems that a much more critical evaluation of our projects is called for. We need to seriously and persistently ask whether our projects are hurting capitalists in significant and permanent ways, and more particularly, whether they are taking any decision making away from the ruling class.

The Way Forward

It is time for a new tack. The two-stage strategy of seizing the state, used by both Leninists and Social Democrats, as a way of getting out of capitalism and then to communism (defined as a stateless society, that is, anarchy), is a proven failure. Similarly, the strict focus on workplaces and workers’ control has also proved inadequate to the task. *We need to seize everything, by establishing direct democracy everywhere, through face-to-face assemblies, in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and households. This is our best hope.

cancerous distractions

*Our immediate problem is how we can get to the point of being able to set up these assemblies. It certainly seems more or less impossible at present, at least in the United States. But we’re not even working on it, not even trying. **It’s not even on the agenda. We first of all have to get the idea into the air. Then maybe we could begin to see how it would be possible.

*oi.. taleb center of problem law et al.. need a deeper – problem deep enough

need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs

imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)

**no agenda ness et al

It might also help us to move in this direction if we get rid of the idea that it is the job of anarchists to organize other people (for example, workers) to make the revolution. In fact, we can assert an opposing idea, as the first principle of an anarchist revolutionary strategy: Fight First for Your Own Liberation. Not you individually, of course, but you with neighbors and co-workers. Get together with friends, wherever you are, *and start a fight with the ruling class. Stop trying to assist others to get free, no matter whom – workers, women, blacks, gays, natives, immigrants – and fight to get free yourself, within your own immediate social setting.

*cancerous distraction

What we most urgently need to do is shift the location of the anti-capitalist fight to the three strategic sites described above. We also need to scour the world for existing struggles on these sites, then study and publicize them. Only in this way will we start winning, and start destroying the world we hate and creating the world we want.

oi

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