We do well to know when to take pause. Even more so if we have the initiative, which anarchism alone does. The world is bearing witness to the end of an empire, the latest in a series of bizarre experiments in reducing entire populations to cogs in machinery preceded by the British, Dutch, Spanish, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Japanese, just to name a few. When everything is all over the shop, no better time to just stop.
I mean, is it testament to how cooked world capitalism is that it doesn’t just stop when it’s having trouble not disappearing up its own *whistles* entirely, so as to not make things worse by doubling down on obvious error, or is it. Of course we can have endless growth on a finite planet, what could go wrong. Of course it is right and proper that the Elect dominate all life, do subhumans even know how it offensive it is to meet with independent thought and an ethical core, who would do that.
This is hardly the first time anyone has watched an empire fall. Empires fall, it happens. Megalomania and collective paranoia just aren’t the same thing as a solid grip on causality, and never the twain shall meet
Nevertheless, we live the apocryphal ‘way you live in interesting times’ curse in newly bizarre contortions daily:
Oh they’re dipping into navy payroll funds to pay for the war on a Tuesday, why wouldn’t you?? If big knobs in the big chairs are calling the normality tune, just play along and hope not too many more people get massacred in cold blood before this nightmare is over. That two years of straight daily killing that hasn’t ever actually just fucking stopped, that’s just part of the background noise now, peasants, nothing you need concern yourself with just like the sound of traffic, as you were. Think of that background noise the same way we choose not to notice that gnarly coronavirus that people are getting sick from in ways that don’t spark citywide shutdowns in the same way we used to respond to pandemics. Heavens to Betsy the Stalinist bolsheviks are coming to take over our elections because only your commie rat Reds wouldn’t want to vote MAGA at this juncture. Purity of Essence / Essence of Purity / POE / Precious Bodily Fluids.
Etc etc etc
Are we still running around trying to explain to anyone that authority is corrupt and power is perncious? Power and authority seem to be doing a pretty good job of explaining that themselves already:
On that note, have you ever noticed how China sits back and lets the United States run itself a mischief rather than confront them openly? Does it take a lettered analyst to work that one out? Not really. No more than it does China might be antagonistic in the shadow of the historical crimes of European colonialism, where crimes against humanity feature in the structural violence attendant to conquest and plunder. It seems a bit like they’re biding their time.
What do they know that anarchists don’t is my question I guess.
As class-conscious workers, we know our value to the capitalist class can be measured by the lengths it goes to to brainwash us into believing we need an unproductive class of parasites to protect us from ourselves, while they hoard surplus value in offshore tax havens. In reality, they need us; we don’t need them. This is why anarchist cooperativism is a lot more aligned to our natural desire for freedom and self-actualisation than structural pacification, arguably.
“If we don’t raise survival of the fittest to organising principle of the hegemonic mode of production, heinous anarchy will transpire and it will be every motherfucker for themselves like it’s the end of days.” That’s weird, why is the end of days on the news today? Why would the news lie? etc etc
The traditional syndicalist strategy of the general strike is based on developing class struggle praxis as a “practical school of socialism,” “revolutionary gymnastics” purposed to encouraging individual and collective self-efficacy. The revolutionary union becomes the vehicle for reorganising production cooperatively, at the scale of industrial and regional federations and confederations of producers. When the organised workers rise in the revolutionary general strike and seize control of the means of production, administation of things replaces the management of people and the global economy becomes (hopefully sustainable) in becoming responsive to social need through democratisation.
The plan (and acutely painful) fact of the matter is that is strategy has failed; syndicalism has been repeatedly smashed and persecuted since its first global peak a century ago. Two World Wars in a century are not good for the cause of class struggle internationalism somehow. The working class that didn’t kill each other was left permanently traumatised as an intergenerational gift to explain to everyone how we won–also why wars are always worth it when what H.L. Mencken called Imaginary Hobgoblins are menacing the national security blanket.
The equally plain fact then is that Wall St will shit the bed long before the working class organises itself to overthrow it. Which is actually pretty helpful in a roundabout way, but we would need to be able to find the humility to face up to and accept that strategy has failed to keep up with historical conditions. We would need to be able to pivot accordingly with a view to evolving ideas and adapting, and to agree to do it cooperatively.
Maybe China knows that crisis and opportunity are the same thing.
If syndicalism is not encouraging worker self-organisation and worker self-activity towards a general strike, what are we doing other than the same thing every milieu past its best before does when it runs out of ideas i.e. running purges and purification rituals to cleanse the exceptionalist ingroup of impurities and weakness? We’re not doing much besides that really are we, but Trotskyist authoritarianism and persecution of apostates from the proletarian dictatorship, the workers’ commodity-form and the workers’ and peasants’ bureaucracy are still heinous.
A crisis in syndicalist praxis is an opportunity for reflection and introspection. We have not achieved our goal; the system will collapse before we can defeat it. Maybe we should try and be halfway ready.
We can build solidarity networks with our friends and family today, community disaster relief groups and community defense unions with people around the neighbourhood, unions of single mothers organised against patriarchal neoliberal welfare regimes and family violence.
We can do all of these things because the working class keeps world capitalism lurching over from one moment to the next. Are we not organising ourselves to run things because the class of imperialist big knobs, busying itself with all the more important things it has to do than making sure it doesn’t run itself a mischief like conspicuously running the world into the ground, has convinced is we need them to maintain order amidst chaos? Is being brainwashed worth it, especially if the price is debt slavery?
We can answer that one now, or after Wall St shits the bed. We might as well answer it now, like the secret to regaining the initiative is humility.
No one who isn’t an anarchist will ever tell an anarchist to believe in ourselves and the justice of our cause, no more than a cultist will encourage people to leave. Every solid anarchist knows with Ghandi that we need to be the change we want to see in the world; the whole point of anarchism is to change within ourselves to be the facts of a historically- and socially- responsible future. No tradition other than anarchism argues for responsibilities to go with rights because anarchism is the only branch of libertarianism apparently that can conceive of individual freedom as a social concept, and, as one framed by the social relations associated with the prevailing mode of production, a class concept.
There are a lot of anarchists in the world. If there weren’t as many of us as there are, and if antiauthoritarian class struggle and apostasy from the state didn’t have that much free rent in the heads of the money cult as it does, there would be no moral panic over Antifa. In this moment of Gramsci’s Interregnum, where the new cannot be born, the old cannot die and monsters roam in the toxic neoliberal swamp of Necessity, we can incubate. And get ready.
The General Strike has been cancelled, but the class struggle is not over. We need to be ready the day the event everyone knows is coming shows up to say “Howdy-do.” It is hardly as though anyone needs to reinvent the wheel. We just need to be ready. If history wasn’t on our side for the General Strike, it sure as shit is for continuing to keep the world running for the working class as we have always done for the capitalist class.
Two cents.
BD
