Bedtime Theory

The Faridabad Majdoor Samichar now have a website with translated pieces of their paper, an explanation of their project, and links other groups in the same milieu such as Gurgaon Workers News, and groups I had never heard of such as Subcontinental Upheaval and China Study Group. The video project Faridabad Workers News looks impressive and promising. FMS in brief is a "workers library" without books in one of the main industrial suburbs of Delhi. The FMS has produced a workers newsletter distributed at major points of transit in the industrial district. The content is derived from the conversations in distribution and at the FMS itself, making the paper something of a proletarian community voice of working conditions, resistance, and experiences. This article, written by Shankur who I met at FMS a few years back and who was a solid and committed participant in these struggles, is the best description of FMS, and is unparalleled compared to Loren Goldner’s schewed and somewhat distorted description in Revolutionary termites of Faridabad or whatever it was.

I use Mobipocket now for reading articles and books online. E-readers, I learned, give you the ability to search entire texts (or your library), to highlight/make notes/etc in a form where you have a series of links you can then pull up the section of the text from, and copy and paste it all. It streamlines writing articles beautifully and may full replace my paper books in the future!

I recently re-read the FdCA’s position paper on the Mass Organization (which it should be said is only one tiny piece of their interlocking theoretical and strategic pieces).  Taken on its own the pieces main strengths are its critiques[i], it’s weaknesses I would say are its proposals for the role of revolutionaries and mass organizations. I have to preface this by saying that I am sure I’m getting some of this wrong translating from the Italian to American context, that this article is fairly schematic and connected to other pieces I don’t explore, and my reply is likewise schematic and a rough rough draft a serious response. (more…)

I was reading Ian McKay’s interview with Mark Leier, author of the new Bakunin biography Creative Passion, and found this nugget.

"This was an activist who fought on the losing side all of his life, yet did not lose his passionate hope, his understanding, that the struggle itself was meaningful, for without it, the world would certainly get worse. While some seem him as a quixotic figure, I see him as one who realistically assessed the opportunities for success and failure and decided to fight for an ideal even when he thought there was no immediate chance of victory. "

I needed that, really. 

There are different orientations towards the political left one can take while doing revolutionary work. Broadly speaking we can break up the left based on how people organize themselves ideologically, or we can find divisions in terms of the role various left actors have in proletarian movements. Seeing these different orientations helps to sort through some of the apparent by illusory differences, and where the real divisions and unity lies. (more…)

I’m going to hazard a historical thesis: that marxism and anarchism, the red and the black, have been superseded by history. (more…)

I’ve decided to try and draw together revolutionary theory about how consciousness develops, since I think there’s actually very little explicit ideas out there beyond people parroting the leninist conception or the spontaneist conception. One hugely overlooked area I’ve found is syndicalist ideas about consciousness. There appears to be debates in the early 20th century about syndicalist conceptions of the development of revolutionary consciousness, and in fact it seems to have represented a school of thought on how to bring about revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. This is in spite of the fact that syndicalists themselves rarely wrote about such matters. Below I try to gather together the historical lessons of the proletariat engaged in syndicalist struggle, as a research thread rather than a thesis. (more…)

The ultraleft, and particularly the ultraleft which draws from the French tendencies, has been extremely influential on my own thinking about revolution, class, history, and the left. Primarily Dauve has expressed for me processes latent in struggles I’ve participated in and intuitions I’ve had. Being a non-marxist critical of elements in the anarchist movement, I wanted to introduce anarchists to some of the concepts in the french ultraleft in hopes of broadening exposure and debate. I intended to be inclusive of a broader spectrum of thinkers (theorie communiste, Camatte, krisis, etc), but ended up only having the space and energy to touch of the tendency Dauve is a part of. (more…)

I’ve always meant to read Castoriadis, but never gotten around to it. For one thing he was a huge influence on other people I read and take from (Solidarity UK, CLR James, Facing Reality, Glaberman, etc). He also came to reject Marxism, and takes lots of heat from it from orthodox marxists, which to me says there could be something to him, like my friends from Faridabad Majdoor Samachar. Castoriadis came to ideas that seem obvious to many of us now, but were from Mars 30 years ago. The division between workers and management, autogestion, the notion of revolution as autonomy of society as a whole, rejection of ideas about the economy/superstructure, determinism, party dictatorship, etc.

Now I’ve discovered that Castoriadis presents a new theory of consciousness that abandoned the traditional marxist notions of false consciousness. I can’t find any of his writings I can quote (they’re in book form or on google books), however he rejects the seperation between theory and practice, and the idea that ideas are exclusively the products of economic classes. Castoriadis sought to refound our ideas about consciousness (though it seems like he only touches on this in his broader discussions of economic and social agency) on active rationality of people who come to ideas from any number of routes, and who are capable of transformation through active engagement in autonomous struggle and self-reflection. I have to do further research into his works to draw any conclusions.

I’ve also discovered Zero Work/Midnight Notes partly came to their understanding of the problems with traditional marxist economics and the role of self-organization in history via Castoriadis. See this link.

I just found out about Rawick, a member of Facing Reality and theorist of working class self-organization and black liberation struggles. Here  he discusses worker self activity in struggle, and the problem it posed for the traditional leftist ideas about struggle. I had never heard of any of the lesser players in Facing Reality so included him as a historical point for those interested in that.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rawick/1969/xx/self.html