Identifying Strategic Roads: The Tactics of Occupation & the Charge of “Outsider”
Posted by Mike E on April 15, 2010
This is part of our ongoing discussion of the March 4 incident at CUNY, and the emerging critiques of an “occupation only” strain among some anarchist students.
by Mike Ely
TNL sought to establish some of the core issues in the March 4 conflict:
While the competing narratives may make it difficult to sort out the exact series of events at Hunter on March 4, some investigation can produce a clear enough picture to undertake an analysis. I know people who were on both sides of this and am a former Hunter student. I feel quite confident that I am not just siding with my own friends, who in fact I think made some mistakes. Who pushed whom first, the exact wording of the epithet with the word “cunt” in it and so on are not the central political issues involved here.
What is beyond dispute is that members of the ultraleft:
- Spraypainted anti-ISO graffitti on the doors to the offices the ISO shares with several other campus groups.
- Sought to disrupt the outdoor rally in a manner that resulted in a melee.
- Hurled a vile sexist epithet at a woman with revolutionary politics who was the leader of a successful fight to preserve childcare on the campus.
- After the fact accused people of snitching to the police without any evidence.
Redthreadbris replies:
“Fine, those four acts sound like errors and are at least a bit crap. They do not however nullify the political stance of the ultraleft nor the attempt/desire to try to move towards occupying the building. I might be mangling Maoist terms but they are mistakes of tactics not strategy.”
What road are we on?
I think it might be valuable to ask: what precisely IS their strategy? What strategy are their tactics emerging out of?
If these are “errors of tactics” — what errors of STRATEGY do they serve?
And, i also think that is a fair question for their critics, when criticizing this approach and method (the spraypainting of opponents, the abuse of women political opponents, etc.) what strategy are those criticisms coming out of? What is the strategy of ISO? What is the strategy of people critiquing the “occupationists”?
I say this because far far too little discussion links tactics with long range goals.
People often run on tactical autopilot — without regularly (and self-criticially) asking whether their activity will help get us from here to there (and without making explicit what “their there” actually is).
We don’t want a treadmill. We don’t want tactics that just serve the short-term chops of events. We don’t want to be stuck in ruts, and unable to grasp that times require leaps and escalations in tactics. And the only way to be creative and flexible like that is to start with larger strategy (at the highest level: how do we help prepare for a seizure of power and transformation of society) and look at tactics in that light, in light of our longer-range strategy.
Some thoughts on this:
* I am always wary when someone has one tactical fixation — i.e. as if only occupation suits this moment or campus work, and anything else betrays a determination to capitulate to the system. As important as student occupations have been, occupation is not a universal good — applicable everywhere and at all times. It is true that a mechanical fixation on occupation departs from the mass line. Such a fixation can be oblivious to whether there is a mass basis for an action, and it can ignore “conditions, time, and place.” These are important tactical criticisms of an inappropriate tactic.
But (interestingly enough) the take the city blog make “occupy everything” into a slogan — which is a very revealing connection between tactical monomania for occupation and a strategic view of how people get free (by “occupying everything“).
There has long been an approach that believes liberation came from creating “free spaces” and “autonomous zones” — and growing them, and maturing them — until (in aggregate) humanity itself is free. A kind of inkblot effect. And (in that strategic view) merely “protesting” conditions without “occupying” anything (any specific space) is the essence of reformism.
THAT is (i suspect) a link between this tactic of occupation and a larger political strategy. And if we want to critique the mechanical insistence on “occupation” we should excavate and address such links.
When Did “Outsider” Become a Negative?
I was watching a video about Hunter and noticed that the chant was “Our School…” And it struck me how ambiguous that is.
Students need day care facilities and need to oppose tuition hikes. And it is just to fight for them. But if we narrow the struggle, if it is militantly about “us and our needs” — and if other people are pushed to the side (the larger community of poor people? students from other schools who are “outsiders”? more middle class people in NYC? Other sections of the university’s community like professors, staff workers, etc.)?
If it is not THEIR school, but is insistently “our school” — where does that lead (strategically!) ?
Isn’t our point that “the schools belong to the people” – in a much bigger sense than just serving the immediate students and their immediate need for education (which, again, is real and very important)?
Who are we fighting for? Isn’t that a key question of strategic outlook — what are we trying to accomplish here? What are our goals? How does each struggle serve our preparations for a revolutionary movement and future revolutionary movements?
We should not be about a narrow movement for “student power.” Nor should we view each campus as a bubble that just serves “its” students — and views others as “outsiders.” (Again what would the strategic implications of THAT be?) This is sometimes done in the name of “self-determination” — i.e. we have a right to decide for ourselves, what do you know about us and our conditions?
But again, what are the strategic implications of viewing society as a hive of small mini-insitutions, each of which has its own mini-process of self-determination?
And similarly, we should be wary of respectability, or too close a fixation with the “practical politics” of one institution. that too has a strategic component (which comes up when people speak about the “NGO outlook” that is often mentioned — where a question of how our struggles are “confined” and who confines them, in order to serve what?).
My question: Aren’t we about schools serving the people (the larger community? the oppressed generally? the struggle for liberation? the world?)
And if that is our orientation, who are “outsiders” here? And isn’t that orientation very different from seeing student movements as a question of “student power” and “we have come to get ours” etc.?
It may be that the particular people “coming from the outside” don’t know what the fuck they are doing — and should shut up and listen. They may be arrogant, ignorant, infantile…. ok. It happens.
But other times in life, people”coming in from the outside” bring important things to the struggle. And “outside agitator” should be a title of honor in our world.
The problem with the mechanical and rude intervention on March 4 was not that the folks were “outsiders” (or “downtown white kids from privileged schools) — it was that their politics were mechanical and divisive. It is not helpful to respond to divisive politics with another narrowing strain of divisive politics.
* I’m always against using the label “ultra-left” — perhaps because (like “outside agitator”) i have seen it so often used against positive and quite revolutionary forces.
(I’m tempted to paraphrase Eugene Debs and say “As long as there is an ultra-left I’m in it!”)
Why not be more descriptive in how we characterize people’s views?
Politics is not a spectrum where the extremes are wrong and the golden mean is good. Mao rose from the right wing of his party (opposing the left lines of Li Lisan and Wang Ming), and then went on to oppose those rightists who opposed seizing power and oppose those who opposed continuing the revolution. You can’t judge him as wrong in the beginning because he was so clearly “on the right,” or dismiss him later for being (obviously) on the far far left fringe.
I’m also not that happy with calling these folks “insurrectionists” — since it taints that great word insurrection. In fact, insurrection is a great uprising of the people for seizing power — it is an artform and a culmination. And the anarchist current we are discussing actually has little (strategic!) conception of insurrection — they really are into tactical militancy divorced from the people and from any strategic approach of preparing insurrection.
* Finally, I think we should not let all this seem so antagonistic. There was a dispute over tactics. There were competing plans. There were some thoughtless tactical moves. And some interpersonal antagonisms that were very wrong (one person calling another a “cunt” etc.) And there was a strategic approach of treating other left groups (ISO etc.) as enemies. Fine. Let’s discuss and expose the problems here.
But mixing all these things up indiscriminately, and carving deep lines in the sand, and pumping in a lot of worked up hatred…. none of that solves what we are trying to accomplish.
Instead we should tease things apart (rather than lump them all together)…. and (as I have been arguing for) we should carefully look at various parts of this strategically — does this action, tactic, plan, approach, outlook, behavior get us (i.e. get the oppressed in the largest sense) where we want to go? What road do different sets of tactics serve? Not approaching this from “the asshole hit one of my friends” but from a high plane of strategic debate.
redthreadbris said
Hi All.
Just a quick note before bed.
On the meaning/tactics/strategy of the slogan ‘Occupy Everything’. Well a wealth of theoretical writings have been produced by comrades in these struggles – especially in California and often referencing struggles globally. Yet none of the critiques ( that I have seen) engage with these writings at all, but rather just ascribe the actions of comrades to a straw man ideology labelled “insurrectionary anarchism”
Perhaps those wishing to understand this slogan can start by investigating these documents.
rebel love
Dave
redthreadbris said
A good place to start
n3wday said
[from We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement]
“To the extent that occupation offers, hypothetically, the opportunity to remove a building from the regime of property—in other words, to abolish its status as “capital” and to cancel one’s subordination to owners and ownership—it forms a tactic little different than “seizure of the means of production,” one with a venerable history and a wide extension beyond the university. In particular, one thinks of workplace occupations and expropriations and housing occupations. With unemployment reaching staggering proportions and with millions of bank-owned and foreclosed homes standing empty, occupation seems like a tactic that is itself a strategy – a form of militancy that is not a means to an end but an end in and of itself.”
and
[from mike]
“But (interestingly enough) the take the city blog make “occupy everything” into a slogan — which is a very revealing connection between tactical monomania for occupation and a strategic view of how people get free (by “occupying everything“).”
redthreadbris,
Can you perhaps tease out the distinction? Perhaps the use of “insurrectionary anarchism” was imprecise in covering all the ideologies advocating the occupation strategy… but, content wise is there a difference in the strategy identified and critiqued by mike and the one laid out in the document you linked to?
n3wday said
I just had an interesting thought…
Reading through “We are the Crisis: A Report on the California Occupation Movement” linked above, I can’t help but notice the set of values embodied in the work and how they line up remarkably well with values its been suggested (by many academics) that we have internalized through living in liberal democracies.
The article more or less argues for the pursuit of communist ends through the means of “enterprising” collectivities acting in autonomous concert (not actually a contradiction). This type of strategic outlook is highly entwined with the notion of the self that has emerged from liberal democratic (capitalist) society.
This is probably why the notion of democracy as a vote in a public meeting has been so thoroughly problematized by these autonomists.
Here are a couple of interesting quotes that popped out to me from Nikolas Rose’s book, “Inventing Our Selves”.
“Attempts to invent and exercise different types of political rule have been intimately linked to the conceptions of the natures of those who are to be ruled. The autonomous subjectivity of the modern self may seem the antithesis of political power. But, Foucault’s argument suggests an exploration of the ways in which this autonomization of the self is itself a central feature of contemporary governmentality.”
The point being that with liberal democracy came the necessity to regulate the self by authorities [i]through[/i] our choices and freedoms by establishing regimes of power based on the authority of “expert” opinions (psychologists for example).
“The second dimension suggested by Foucault’s writing is roughly “institutional”… institutions from the prison, through the asylum to the workplace, the school, and the home can be seen as practices that put in play certain assumptions and objectives concerning the human beings that inhabit them… They can be thought of as ‘technological’ in that they seek the calculated orchestration of the activities of humans under a practical rationality directed toward certain goals. They attempt to simultaneously maximize certain capacities of individuals and constrain others in accordance with particular knowledges.”
The notion of seizing back actual “spaces” and “institutions” becomes interesting here and actually speaks to a greater conception about how [i]our whole society[/i] is organized and our conduct is regulated.
“The third dimension for investigation of the modern self corresponds to a roughly “ethical” field, insofar as ethics is understood in a ‘practical’ way, as modes of evaluating and acting upon oneself that have obtained in different historical periods… “technologies of the self”… ethics are thus understood as means by which individuals come to construe, decipher, act upon themselves in relation to the true and the false, the permitted and the forbidden, the desirable and the undesirable. Along this dimension then we would consider the ways in which the contemporary cultures of autonomous subjectivity has been embodied in our techniques for understanding and improving ourselves in relation to that which is true, permitted, and desirable.”
So, what I’m suggesting here is that perhaps framing the issue as one of “occupation” and the underlying assumptions of that has some merit. But, perhaps it has been defined too narrowly by our autonomous friends. Maybe some of the strategic implications have merit, in the sense that they resonate with the way in which the modern self in our society is understood, which is really key in creating a movement that makes sense on a gut level to people [i]living in this society as they have known it[/i].
So, when I say perhaps occupation has been conceived too narrowly, I mean perhaps we should start using the ideas embodied in those three quotes to identify a broader range of tactics that resonate with this conception of the self as part of a strategy for revolution. If such a wider array of tactics was possible to develop, perhaps there wouldn’t be so much chasing of one’s own tail that comes with the fetishization of the single tactic of literal occupation (rather than the more abstract concepts I identify here).
This is highly abstract, and I’m having some difficulty working through the implications. But, maybe this will help complicate the discussion we’ve been having.
jrochkind said
Thanks for aside on “ultra-left”. I’m instantly put on guard when “what is beyond dispute” is presented as what “members of the ultraleft” did. Immediately I think, well, no, that whole statement can no longer be “beyond dispute”, because it’s hardly “beyond dispute” that such a thing as “the ultraleft” exists, that it has “members”, or that the particular people who did the things that are said (and be indeed) to have happened “beyond dispute” ARE such ‘members’.
I think the framework suggested in the post about “eco-systems” of revolutionary struggle can be usefully applied to thinking about these NY college/university activist disputes.
And I think that framework goes along with what you suggest, here, teasing apart the _actual_ strategic and tactical disagreements — and figuring out what strategic and tactical disagreements still allow people working together accross them, and which (if any) require outright oppositional antangonism — rather than just lumping people as “ultraleft” and being done with it.