[This piece represents the views of the author and not those of Vine Maple as a whole. It is a response to this piece published on Abolitionist Common Library’s website.]
“The liberalist slogan ‘You can’t get ahead of the people’ is meaningless. From what other position can one lead? From the rear? Rearguard leadership?!! A typical yankee innovation. I think that most of these irresponsible excuse slogans are based on dread–a secret wish to avoid the discomfiture of people’s war. In all the success class struggles and colonial wars of liberation, the vanguard elements did get ahead of the people and pull. There is no other way in forward mass movement… I am not implying that the vangaurd party act out the people’s role. I am not implying a ‘society superior to society.’ We must never forget that it is the people who change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. ‘Going among the people, learning from the people, and serving the people’ is really stating that we must find out exactly what the people need and organize them around these needs.” -George Jackson, Blood in my Eye
To the Comrade who wrote “A Critique of Strategy”,
I was really impressed and excited to read a Marxist critique in a seemingly Anarchist magazine. I thought what you said was insightful, but my feeling was that you were trying to avoid offending anarchists, while completely critiquing anarchist strategy. From one Marxist to another, I urge that we must go further with this criticism to the point of calling out failed strategies blatantly in order to move past those failures.
Your claim that there is a common belief in the “false opposition between organization and spontaneity” is true, but is not most pressing contradiction that we are encountering at the present moment of organizing. Rather, it is the adversion to leadership and insistence on idealist notions of horizontalism that pose the greatest internal ideological obstacle to advancing our struggle. You briefly mention that it is commonly believed that spontaneity gives way to horizontalist organizing and creative action, while ‘organization’ leads to more top-down, authoritarian, and non-creative organizing. This is the ‘false opposition’ that deserves more discussion. If the principle line struggle our movement faced were between organization and unorganized spontaneity, then any organization would be a progressive step. But we do have plenty of organizations, spokecouncils, collectives, etc. Many of these organizations, however, bow to spontaneity and try to artificially import the principles of spontaneity into the movement through so-called “horizontalism.” First, we must admit that horizontalism, though appealing in an idealistic sense, in practice is not possible: there are always leaders steering the political movement and shot-calling on the ground. Second, we must admit that in order to use the spontaneity of an uprising and move it in a political direction we believe in, we do need leadership both in an organizational sense and on the ground. Thus the obstacle we face is not that the anarchists recoil from organization, but that they recoil undertaking the responsibility of leading movements.
If we can admit that leadership is necessary in our movement, then we have room to democratically choose leaders we trust and hold the leadership of the people’s movement to a higher standard. At the same time, these leaders must be embedded within the working masses of our community, earning their trust through struggle and action. Therefore, our strategy would necessarily come from not only other organizers who are able to attend meetings, but also the masses of working-class people that we are trying to mobilize and incorporate into our organizing. To achieve this level of democracy and accountability, we need more structured organizations that prioritize interacting with the masses. With this style of organization, perhaps the “collective planning” you mention may be possible. “Collective planning”, in other words, should not mean “horizontalism”, but rather the ability to collectively subordinate ourselves to a common goal, which comes from following and also criticising leadership. Natural leaders always emerge because there are disparities in capacity, commitment, and conviction on political lines. Thusfar, we haved trusted and hoped the leadership that we have been following are pursuing strategies and goals we believe in, but we can never know unless our leadership is accountable and holding a unified political line. In the worst case-scenario, denying the existence of leadership will enable strong-willed, “control freak” personalities to leverage social capital without accountability or recallability. When we entirely deny that there is leadership and call for horizontalism, we are also denying the ability of the people to criticize and hold leadership accountable, and we are precluding ourselves from being able to recruit and elevate leaders from the masses we are organizing with. Here, the “tyranny of structurelessness” rears its ugly face. We find then that the aversion to leadership is also an adversion to the masses. If we do not accept the task of building organizations that can lead movements and continue to deny that our organizations have leaders, then we will never be able to be accountable to and recruit leaders from the masses.
So here we are, moving into 2021, with the same lack of organization and direction as we found ourselves with pre-summer uprisings. We must now ask ourselves how we can organize ourselves locally to subordinate to a common goal, as you said, and more so a goal the masses can get behind and feel represented in. Looking past horizontalism and building organizations with strong political lines is the next essential step in our local organizing.
Thank you for starting this conversation, and I look forward to hearing back from you!
With love & solidarity,
Neda