I think this is an extremely important discussion, and i want to share my excitement that we seem to be off to a good, initial engagement on a number of issues. I want to say that we (here on Kasama) will do our best to host this discussion -- openly and fairly, and give "a hundred flowers" room to bloom and contend.

We will disagree in this discussion from many sides, but we will also (hopefully) find basis for agreement (including through mutual transformation and change).

Let's take some time with this.

Let's imagine this as a discussion that will unfold over the next few weeks (if not longer) -- which means I'm hoping people take some time to study positions carefully, and read over some history and theory related to these matters.

Taking some time to listen and think

Speaking for myself, I am going to take some time to give the statements so far (by Will, Jed, Ish, NPC and more) some repeated reads.... before I jump to answer with more specific arguments.

In the meanwhile I would like to make some brief points in hopes of deepening our exchange:

What is the plan? How do we get to liberation on this road?

1) The discussion opened over a FNT leaflet . And that leaflet remains a handy and available concentration of a certain kind of thinking.

But I'm hoping we can shift our engagement more and more to the larger questions of strategy and tactics that are embodied in such an initiative.

By that I mean, discussing what we do in terms of "where are we going?"

We can all see that the leaflet intends to encourage militancy, that it seeks to speak broadly to the workers while proposing particular plans (rank and file networks etc.) And it seeks to encourage a kind of working class identity (where people would see themselves in social life and conflict more consciously as members of a specific class with, presumably, specific interests.)

But I would like to ask to hear (in more detail):

What is the strategy here?

How does intervening with a call for more militancy and rank-and-file networking connect (us and the workers themselves) with the moment when we have a large conscious movement for socialist change that can confront and defeat capitalist forces?

In other words, what is the connection between here and there, between now and later?

How does this approach mesh with a plan to build consciously communist cores (if that is part of the plan)?

How would revolutionary, communist, internationalist and militantly anti-racist consciousness (and organization) emerge from such a plan (within which this kind of intervention would be a part)?

To be explicit: I understand how someone might imagine how this intervention might relate to a larger strike-and-solidarity-fightback movement in NYC in a year or two. Sure. That is not a big leap.

But I'm asking something else: how do our plans and actions connect to revolution and building a liberated society?

And specifically: how would such an imagined bigger fightback in a year or two connect with that larger goal?

I don't assume they are automatically or obviously connected. Lots of "bigger fightbacks" in U.S. history have NOT been connected to radical politics -- the tradeunion victories of the auto sit-downs politically slid (within a very few years) to the Marine beachlandings of World War 2, and to a 1950s generation relatively conservative, patriotic and unalienated workers.

So if we plan to support, encourage, initiate, lead, co-organize mass movements of resistance (to austerity, cutbacks, etc.), and we do (!) we still have a much harder responsibility of envisioning how a radical political movement emerges from that.

There is no direct and automatic linkage between "fight back" and radical politics (between militancy and communism) -- and American history is full of proof.

That dilemma is why I wrote my own personal "lessons from a thirty year old strike" -- discussing the coalfield wildcat of 1973, the shootout at Keystone #1 and some political lessons for revolutionary possibilities. And it is why I believe that the method of "extracting lessons" of 1979 (in the FNT leaflet) is a bit... uh... simplistic. For some witers, the "lesson" of any past event turns out to be "we workers need to unite and fight" -- but the history of REAL working class history is rarely so schematic. And in fact, the real lessons of our past struggles are (ironically) very different from "we are workers, let's unite and fight." In fact such "lessons" (repeated in hundreds of leaflets and articles by previous leftists) are generally ideological pre-verdicts of the writers, imposed backwards onto historical events -- often distorting the realities they claim to sum up.

(For example: what does it mean to sum up "lessons" of the 1979 NYC strike -- without discussing the Black liberation struggles and urban rebellions and antiwar movements -- that were the context and igniter of the rank-and-file outbreaks of the 1970s? What does it mean to discuss sporadic working class strikes of the 1970s, without touching on the role that race and Black liberation had in all radical working class activity of those days? What are our supposed "lessons" without such real politics and history? And in those days, the AFT teachers union had played a notoriously racist role in NYC politics -- can we talk of "lessons" of cross-union solidarity without dealing with such experiences like grown ups?)

I don't want to make assumptions about what others are thinking and acting on. I don't want to assume I know what the larger plan of FNT is (and then run the risk of mischaracterization).

So please, fill it in the blanks.

Local conditions? Or general problems of strategy

2) I see that the question of "local conditions" comes up a lot. And I will deal with it in more depth.

In general, in the U.S. left there are often assumptions that "without direct experiences you can't know anything" -- in ways that absolutizes local or personal experiences. (So that it is assumed that a white woman can't write perceptively about African American liberation and its contradictions or history, etc.)

And there are (of course) local conditions... and sometimes they are quite peculiar or unique. (I.e. my own experience in the coal fields was not something reproduced anywhere else, and the trade union militancy of the miners coexisted with a rural isolation and religiosity that didn't crop up in other sections of workers.)

But really, there are also some general conditions (including the relative lack of political radicalism and organization at this moment among workers nationally). And there are some *general* points we can make about larger countrywide strategy and tactics.

Should we speak mainly to the broad mass of workers -- and mainly focus on their questions? Should we mainly be seeking to identify, congeal and fuse with the politically more advanced workers (so that we and they can act together as a pole for reaching the broad mass)? And what would that difference look like?

Without denying "local conditions" -- I would just like to say that the local conditions are not that radically different in most cases.

I have argued that we should seek out, investigate, and focus on those *local* conditions were the advanced workers are (for peculiar and distinctive reason) particularly advanced and open to revolutionary politics -- and that we should not (by contrast) simply disperse to wherever we happen to find movement. (The old 60's phrase was "if it moves fondle it.)

So yes, there are local conditioins, and there are generalized national conditions (that influence our strategy for both communist organization and mass work). How do we evaluate them?

3) A revolutionary mass line not "Fire your ideas, hire mine"

I am not surprised that some people read my remarks and can only see a legacy of wooden, "interventions" by self-important and dogmatic leftists who say "fire your ideas and hire mine." We have all seen pedantic and patronizing "interventions" where some organizations mainly are arguing for their own personal jargon ("Can you say cap-it-al-ism? How about soc-ial-ism?") -- as if the people are braindamaged "blank sheets" needing pedagogical instruction. And we have all seen interventions where the main point was "Sure your struggle is fine, but mainly you should get with us...."

And i don't blame people for thinking that any discussion of socialist agitation, or revolutionary politics "from without" etc, must be a call for that kind of sterile lecturing. (Who didn't see sections of the "organized left" go from hating Occupy Wall Street ("petty bourgeois," "anarchist influenced," "disconnected from the oppressed," not "correct" in its formulations), from realizing they wanted to be inside OWS (where they would lecture people in detached and mechanical ways about what to think and do--i.e. just show their hostility and cluelessness in a new way). We have all seen this.

But....

The argument that communist agitation is (inherently) dogmatic and outdated -- quickly can become an argument against organizing the most radical forces in society to spread the most radical ideas within society.

We need to spread ideas that are not widely known. There is an evangelical side to communist work -- not just an "organizing" side.

For that we need "all-around communist work" -- in other words, there is room for agitation broadly among the people, and for the work of organizing in specific struggles (of course). But there are needs to identify and fuse with the more advanced and revolutionary workers (and that requires a public work of a particular kind). And there are other forms of work needed. In other words, the "model" of a communist is not simply "workplace organizer" or agitator within the movements of the moment -- but part of a larger division of labor, carrying out work of many kinds.

We need to do it creatively (learning from the past) -- in ways that fuse with (and learn from) advanced sections among the people.

But if the rightous argument against dogmatic posturing becomes a mistaken argument for a focus on trade union militancy... then we will not ever have revolutionary cores, or a movement consciously aiming for socialist changes.

I am not arguing for clueless, patronizing lectures written in obscure jargon. I am arguing for a mass line (where we identify the language and issues among the most advanced of the people) and formulate plans and presentations that can connect (and help them connect to each other). We need a process of doing work for a revolutionary movement. That is not some mechanical listing of "what we believe, what you should do." But it does involve bringing ideas of revolution, socialism and communism forward in creative ways and in accessible language, in the context of real life and modern political conditions.

None of that is obvious... but I will try (as i consider what to write in reply) to elaborate what I believe a more radical sense of "intervention" would look like (in contrast to the idea of focusing mainly on moving the center of spontaneous movements toward more imediate militancy and more specific kinds of working class identity.

(And in the interests of clarity: I don't assume that revolutionary class consciousness means something like "I am a worker, and my working class has common interests."

Consciousness of class (which everyone has in Britain, for example) is not class consciousness.

Having a self-conscious working class identity doesn't make anyone inherently more radical, or make a movement necessarily more revolutionary. On the contrary: in the U.S. historically, the most revolutionary movements among the oppressed have not had working class identity (for real and objective reasons). And the movements with the most European-style working class identity have generally been socialdemocratic (at best) in U.S. history but often racist and patriotic in even less radical ways.)

4) "Break with past! Rush to repeat its errors!"

I understand that Will sees this leaflet as a break with the old "New Communist Movement" -- and as an expression of discontent with previous forms of Marxism-Leninism and communist sect life.

For me that is (however) ironic: Since the whole New Communist Movement (in the 1970s) started precisely handing out trade union leaflets promising "lessons of our struggle" and urging more "rank-and-file unity", worker identity, and militiancy.

That is precisely a template that existed in hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar leaflets. (I have myself written or handed out dozens of leaflets -- exactly like the FNT leaflet, so close in tone, content, program and look that it is eerie.)

In other words, this is not a break from the politics of the New Communist Movement -- it is a very very close approximation of the thinking and expectations of that (earlier) generations of revolutionaries as they moved out of campuses into workplaces and communities.

(And it is a politics of "what to do" that is very close and parallel to the trade unionism of the very old left -- the Comintern parties and the trotskyist grouplets in the 1930s.)

In my own mind, I have opened a file for arguments that say "I don't want to study or sum up the NCM, I hate them. I just want to rush to reproduce what they did."

There are, in other words, not new questions. They are very very old questions. You may think this politics arises from "local conditions" ("we talked to NYC bus drivers, and this is what is on their mind...") But it really is not that much different from when an earlier generation hung out at auto plants or steel mills or strawberry fields in the early 1970s -- and applied very similar assumptions about how to move the mass toward militancy (and from there toward more radical political consciousness and action).

It is common (in my discussions with people) to hear that people intend a very serious and determined break with the "sects" of the previous left movements, while they very energetically take up the assumptions and strategies that formed those sects.

The solution to this is to get explicit: Let's make our strategies transparent. If you think we should do XXX, then explain how XXX connects to our larger goals. How is XXX part of a road that leads to a liberated world, to the end of classes and the oppression of women and nations? Connect the dots.

There is an approach call "tactics as process" -- where people do "what makes sense now", and then (at some future point) shifts to doing "what makes sense then." I.e. there is not an overall plan, but a series of practical decisions based on each moment (with the assumptions often masked).

But lets have an approach of "tactics as plan" -- where we connect our language, "central tasks," interventions and proposals to a plan.... and then lets dig into practice (i.e. how such things worked in the past, how they are working now, and how they connect to our assumptions about how consciousness, organization and revolutions actually develop).