todd

Someone sent me the link to this, and I wanted to give you some feedback. In case you didn’t know, I’m a revolutionary anarchist researching the history of STO. (I’m also a friend of Nate’s, and an occasional poster on ABC.)

To be honest, I think a lot of it is muddled, but I guess that’s just the nature of note-taking. Still, I think you need to be more clear about some things, and in other areas I think you misunderstand where STO was headed.

First, this piece was originally written in 1971, at the beginning of the group’s existence. You make a comment that you believe STO changed its views in the 80’s “under the influence of autonomia.” Assuming you mean the Italian autonomist Marxist tradition, you are correct to some extent, although the influence of this tradition was already felt within STO at the time TARP was written, not long after the Hot Autumn of 1969. That was one of the major reasons why STO’s analysis of what the “party” should look like was fundamentally different from the vision of almost every other Leninist organization that existed in the US at the time. That they clung to the language of “party” at all was more about their origins in the demise of the new left than it was an indicator of where they were headed politically. When I read this document, I generally tend to substitute the term “revolutionary organization” for “party,” and it has no real effect on the argument.

I think your assessment of the potential for spontaneous revolt is simply wrong. I don’t believe in the Leninist conception of “trade union consciousness,” but the examples you offer (Hungary and France) both erupted in part because of the well-documented participation of conscious revolutionaries. “Spontaneous” events only appear as such from a certain distance; up close, it is always clear that some groups and/or individuals pushed situations of generalized discontent in a particular direction. This is a very different argument from the traditional What-Is-To-Be-Done Leninist argument that the party is the exclusive source of all revolutions. In the end, STO’s position is really not far removed from the especifista view of social insertion, or from the FdCA’s idea of organizational dualism. To the extent that any anarchist revolutionary argues for maintaining specifically anarchist organizations and then engaging directly with social movements, they are replicating most of the organizational approach STO advocated in TARP. (The political content of that engagement is a different question, of course.)

You are correct that there is a contradiction in TARP between the WITBD approach and the dual consciousness analysis. This was reflective of a tension inside STO that led to the group’s first major split, when the traditionalist defenders of WITBD left en masse in 1973. But this contradiction is to a large extent one-sided: the positive references to WITBD come off almost as obligatory, while the analysis of dual consciousness and the “potential of the class to become a ruling class” is detailed and impassioned.

You quote the part about the “basic strategic function of the party,” and suggest this places them in line with the IWW in terms of developing a mass organization. The early years of the IWW were very influential on STO’s thinking, but it’s clear in TARP that the group did not foresee itself developing into a mass organization. They did, however, spend a lot of effort attempting to create what they called mass independent workplace organizations that looked an awful lot like worker’s councils. Founding member Don Hamerquist assess those efforts in the long paper “Trade Unions/Independent Organizations,” which can be read here:

http://www.sojournertruth.net/unionsorganizations.html

STO saw its own role as one of clarification, analysis, and strategic intervention. Again, not too different from the FAU or the FdCA, as far as I can tell. And not particularly Leninist, at least not in the WITBD sense. (I normally describe STO as having been “unorthodox Leninists.”)

You stretch things when you connect STO’s critique of other Marxist groups based on their size to apply to anarchist groups. Few anarchist groups accept the “common notions of the strategic functions of the party” that STO identified as the source of the problem. I also think you are wrong to say that the issue is the nature of the “institutions of power,” because this begs the question: Larger Marxist organizations become institutions of power because of the combination of size and their self-understanding. Anarchist groups, even larger ones, have a different self-understanding, and do not normally succumb to the same sort of opportunism. Perhaps as a result, your final sentence here about avoiding particular forms of engagement with mass organizations strikes me as a non-sequiter. (It also strikes me as profoundly wrong-headed: if we “avoid working in” “service organizations of the class that coopt autonomous movements” then we guarantee both our own isolation and very cooptation we are opposed to. I’m not a huge fan of radicals liquidating themselves into mainstream labor unions, but on the level of community organizations I think the equation is often very very different.)

I’m not getting your closing comments on centralization. What is wrong with their assertion that most Leninist party organizations have rejected “critical membership and a genuinely collective organization?” I don’t understand your distinction between issues of conception and those of form. Isn’t the difference between especifista organizations (for example) and Leninist parties one of conception?

Finally, I think you muddle the question of consciousness, which I have long taken to be the central insight of the TARP. Hegemony is to my mind an immensely powerful tool for understanding the disconnect between our desires and the reality of a capitalist world. (You also referenced Chomsky favorably earlier, and his analysis of manufactured consent is strongly reminiscent of Gramscian hegemony theory.) You ask “is he saying that workers follow ruling class ideas during normal times because we are subjugated?” But this is exactly backwards: according to Gramsci, and STO (and me!), workers are subjugated because we follow ruling class ideas. This is why militant struggles, which tend to bring revolutionary ideas to the fore, hold the potential for challenging our subjugation.

Also, you mischaracterize STO’s understanding of consciousness earlier on when you describe it as “false consciousness.” TARP deliberately avoided this formulation, and offered dual consciousness instead as a way of articulating the conflict internal to the self-understanding of the class. Of course ruling class ideas are also heterogeneous and contradictory, but you might replace “revolutionary consciousness” and “bourgeois consciousness” here with “correct ideas” and “incorrect ideas.” Yes it’s a standard imposed from outside, but all revolutionaries partake in that kind of assessment.

I don’t think there’s any difficulty in explaining fascism (a particularly awful sort of anti-bourgeois revolutionary consciousness), white supremacy (old-school bourgeois consciousness), or a multicultural bourgeoisie (new-era bourgeois consciousness) using this rough schematic. Of course it’s a bit wooden, but it’s far superior to the primary alternatives peddled by revolutionaries, including lots of anarchists. Of these, the two most common are, 1) the false consciousness analysis that argues workers have effectively been brainwashed by capitalism/religion/racism/the state, and 2) the idea that everyone already agrees on the broad desirability of freedom and liberation, but thinks of it as merely impractical or unworkable. Compared to this one-dimensional approaches to “why hasn’t the revolution happened yet?” sorts of questions, the dual consciousness idea is really quite sophisticated.

Okay, that’s enough for now. I’d be happy to hear what you think about my response, although I’m very busy with work and family and research and organizing, and I can’t guarantee that I’ll continue the conversation. Thanks for taking a serious look at an under-appreciated document.

Solidarity,
Mike