The Challenges of Revolutionary Mutual Aid
In my last post I explained some strategies for building underground community networks. The contemporary left, particularly those leftists residing in the belly of the imperialist beast (the “first world”), suffer from a severe case of learned helplessness. Our so-called democracies are, in reality, single party systems plastered with the illusion of a choice between two or, for some lucky bastards, three parties! Now, as we nosedive into a charred, burning, post-industrial, post-computational, sunset capitalist hell, we either rejoice because we believe this society may soon end or we panic because we don’t know how long and painful its death will be. Will capitalism collapse in the near (or near enough) future? Leftists have always tried to outpace the shadow of Christian salvation, supposing that our analysis is scientific rather than religious. And yet, the acceleration of the replacement of people with machine within industries was predicted by Marx and does indeed seem to be an existential threat to capitalism. People are having a difficult time finding work, and difficult is an understatement. It is not uncommon to hear of people applying to hundreds of jobs without so much as a response. Whispers of a recession of ominous proportions are uncertainly exchanged online. What most are certain of is that right now, the economy is cruel to the working class and our governments are too. In a world where our future career prospects may be aborted for political ones, what is the function of mutual aid networks?
The alternative economies structured around collective ownership and cooperative management can act as a way to whether the impending storm but can they become the arms of a revolution too?
Local organizing can be useful and effective but can we really hope to produce structural change with it? It is true that permanent change is often quiet, gradual until it isn’t. The federal government, however, still holds tremendous power but for how long? How do you plan a revolution when capitalism is already changing, when the political structures that wield authority are in flux? I
I don’t want there to be any confusion about the fact that my goal is international, permanent socialism. I believe that capitalism is a dead end, and ill equipped to support humanity (particularly in the near future). The world that is emerging, one in which the wonderful human mind and spirit is useful for nothing more than manual labor (until that becomes replaced by robots too) is the logical conclusion of the capitalist system. All there needs to be is a product, it doesn’t matter how it is made. This soulless landfill of shit is what humanity has reaped for our continued adherence to this system. What on Earth did anybody expect? Clearly, we cannot rely on the intellect of the so-called rational animal to fix our problems, instead we must act and organize across the world so that we can build a united, interconnected front.
The point I am trying to make is that merely creating mutual aid networks will not be enough to bring about the changes that we need. These networks need to be created with the purpose of revolution in mind. They must build unity among the working class so that direct action can be orchestrated on large scales and sustained for extended periods of time. Strikes, sabotage, riots, and the actual seizing of the means of production cannot be sustained without independent supply chains to ensure that the people involved do not starve or lose housing. This is the tactical advantage of this method, it is not merely that it materially eases us but that it is a necessary part of direct action. It is my hope that these networks should eventually exist across the world and that the labor force will shrink as capitalism nears its collapse.
We need to focus not immediately on the offensive, but rather on developing the social infrastructure that can. We need to establish organizations that can act as main, connecting arteries, organizations that anyone can contact in order to join the movement. From these main arteries we have secondary ones, ones that cannot be accessed directly but indirectly through the main channels. Finally, we need to create countless ancillary networks, these ones are typically unnamed, informal, easily created and disbursed, and only accessible through the establishment of trust between a potential member and existing ones.
The point, at this moment, is not to organize strikes, protests, or any other forms of direct action (yet). The goal right now, at least in parts of the world where the working class is unorganized, is to to build a strong network capable of changing the status quo. This requires guile in how we approach organizing. Main channels should know a bit about secondary ones but not in too much and main channels should know virtually nothing about ancillary networks other than perhaps their “theoretical” existence.
There should be ancillary groups upon ancillary groups, the more levels there are the stronger the organization becomes. Many leftist organizations would take issue with such groups because they cannot be controlled or monitored when the “party” wants to enforce ideological attitudes. This mindset is one we should completely abandon. It is true that these networks would not follow a single ideology, dogma, or “science” and would likely be fairly varied in exact position but this is fine, even beneficial for anonymity. These groups are anonymous networks of friends and allies brought together by affinity, location, and necessity. The one agreed upon goal would be socialism/communism, and the same goes for the main and secondary channels.
What are these groups? What am I talking about here? These groups, at every level as I have described are merely gatherings of people with the goal of bringing about international communism. They may have varying opinions about many things but they must hold this goal. These organizations can be among workers in similar industries (unions), academics, communities, and political parties. There can be groups that run publications or news websites. It is important that there be organizations with mass appeal, that make themselves known in the media, that are easily accessed by anyone who thinks “I want socialist communism.” These are the main channels, the main arteries of the movement. They exist to introduce people to organizing and our ideas.
Secondary organizations take on more specific tasks, they act as mediators between the main and ancillary channels in that they act as spaces in which those ancillary groups can be made and introduced to members in secret. Secondary channels, depending on how large, may know some thing about ancillary ones but in larger organizations they should keep their knowledge of who exactly is organizing together and for what purpose to a minimum. This is to protect the members. What the ancillary channels do should not be easily traced back to any specific organization or individual. Ideally, we do not have three layers but an unknown number of them. That is to say, we should not merely have the main, secondary, and ancillary but instead main, secondary, and ancillary upon ancillary upon ancillary etc. There should be more levels within the ancillary channel(s) than the main and secondary combined. Only when they compose the majority of the organizational breadth of a communist movement is it ready to fight the system.
Because this is a blog post and I do not want it to get too long, I will end this here and in the next post I will elaborate on the channels.
