Reflections on the RCP's "Legitimate Revolt Is Not a 'Conspiracy'"

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Just finished translating this text by the Revolutionary Communist Party - the Quebec-based Maoist organization, not the american avakian outfit - examining post-G20 fallout on the left: http://theredflag.ca/node/18

Legitimate Revolt Is Not a “Conspiracy” provides a pro-militancy critique of the "Trotskyist and revisionist" left and their shameful rush to spit on the Black Block and present themselves as "good protesters". It is a welcome voice of solidarity, and as such the RCP stands out from the morass of shameless sycophants on the left, who just couldn't wait to reassure the state that they were "good protesters".

What the RCP has to say is correct, and refreshing. And even amongst those of us who favor militant action, some of their observations bear repeating. For instance:

The protesters’ stated goal was to attack the fence. This action was about attacking a symbol of power, oppression and exploitation. If the police stopped them, then there were other targets – perhaps less significant, but still symbolic – and a segment of the protesters took them by force. The heavy deterrent force employed by the police was not enough to prevent this legitimate expression of those protesters who attacked other targets – mainly police vehicles, media vans, and big chain stores. Small businesses were not attacked, citizens were not hurt, there was no looting. In point of fact, there has been more carnage at certain Stanley Cup riots in Montreal. In 2008, when the Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins, there were 11 police cars that went up in flames.

It is easy to claim that an attack against the fence would have been more meaningful and would have enjoyed greater public support. The political meaning would have appeared more direct and obvious to the masses. We can’t know for sure. What we do know for sure is that the police and the public authorities understood these to be attacks against their power. They understood that this was a political action. No Stanley Cup riot was ever followed by 1,100 arrests!

 Or better yet:

Accusing the revolutionary masses of being agent provocateurs is a dishonest ploy to cover up one’s own refusal to play a vanguard role. It amounts to situating oneself as an elite that hopes to replace the current elite. One denies the role of the masses, their political positions. One denies their capacity to transform society. One denies the possibility that they can make mistakes or score successes, just as one refuses to admit that the bourgeoisie and its authorities can also make mistakes. The elite is supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful; the only logical response is to hope to join it, as the masses are supposedly stupid and easily manipulated. This is what the Trotskyists and revisionists are: wannabe bourgeois full of contempt for the masses.

The RCP's contribution is not surprising - this organization has consistently supported militant action and resistance. Despite political differences on a number of points, these are indeed comrades. So far as the anti-G20 events go, they're on the same page as we are.

That said, the RCP's document is thought-provoking for other reasons, too. Despite - or in fact, because - we are on the same page for the main story, it brings out other areas where we may disagree. Worth examining, perhaps, in the spirit of solidarity and respectful exchange.

As already noted, the RCP is almost the only organization from the "party-oriented" left to support militant resistance. This "party-oriented" tradition - which is entirely of Marxist descent, and which has organizational genealogies going back decades and in some cases much further than that - stands in contradistinction to what i call the movement-oriented left, which is of mixed descent, with Marxist influences for sure, but less consciously so. The movement-oriented left often seems to "have no past" organizational history beyond a few years, and of course is much more likely to want to wave the black flag of anarchism. (It of course suffers from some serious weaknesses too, but we can leave those til another day.)

The RCP text itself does not touch upon this distinction, and that gives it an odd feel. For instance, the torched cop cars and broken windows are not described as the work of political activists, but of "the radical wing of the protesters" or even simply "a section of the masses". To name the key political current behind this militancy would be to name anarchism, which the RCP's text does not do.

This leads to weaknesses.

First, this frames what happened in a much more "organic" light than warranted. It is true, of course, that political activists are not "outside of" society or various social classes, but it is equally true that their (or our) political attacks mean something different than spontaneous outbreaks of popular or working-class violence. As the comrades point out in their comparison with the Stanley Cup riots, in many ways politically premeditated activity is far more important and threatening - but by the same token, as a barometer of where things are at with the "Canadian population", our self-consciously organized activity has to be given less weight, not more.

The desire to blur premeditated political activity into "a revolt of a segment of the masses" leads to a distorted appraisal of capitalist hegemony, but just as importantly it makes one's texts and analyses seem disconnected from reality and propagandistic. With no disrespect intended to the comrades, who i know take seriously the injunction to tell no lies, when many people read this stuff with a dispassionate eye, they go away with the feeling that they have read something dishonest, or at least misleading.


While it is certainly true that many "regular people" joined in the fun on the 26th, it is just as true that some of the rank-and-file or "passive base" of the soc dem and socialist groups did, too. But to the degree that this was rebellion and rage - because for some, of course, it was curiosity and fun - the ideology that held hegemony, not only within the Black Block, but throughout the "radical wing of the protesters", was anarchism. i don't mean that most of the militants were anarchists, but that anarchism is the ideology that most informed the structure and strategy behind the BB in particular and militant anti-G20 resistance in general. To the degree that the 26th was a political defeat for the bourgeoisie, it is primarily anarchism which will take the credit and harvest (or fail to harvest) the bounty.

So what's behind this non-mention of anarchism?

i think it may say something about the division between the party-oriented (or vanguard-oriented) tradition, and the movement-oriented tradition. i say this because it does not seem to specific to the RCP - for instance, this desire to blur anarchist-dominated political activity into "a revolt of a segment of the masses" reminds me of the Sparts and other Trots who, when they want to be sympathetic about anarchist militancy, tend to describe it in terms of "angry" or "frustrated" "youth" or "young workers". (i recall the milquetoast american SWP went through a phase of referring patronisingly to "fighting youth".) Within the "party-oriented" left, there is a tendency to see everything outside of the "party-oriented" tradition in passive sociological terms, maybe more than a "class in itself" but somewhat less than a "class for itself", or at least without conscious political plans or strategies. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

This coyness does have consequences not entirely separate from those mentioned above. For instance, when the RCP states that "The proletariat is not really interested in debates on the evils of Stalin, or the quarrels between different Trotskyist sects," they are certainly correct. But if they are thinking specifically of "proletarians interested in revolution", then i think many of these people are in fact interested in what they've heard about Stalin. Not only is the Stalinist legacy one part - not the main part, but a factor - in why since the 1980s in Canada Trotskyism has enjoyed greater success that Maoism within the shrinking milieu of the party-oriented left, it is also a large factor in why anarchism and other non-Marxist ideas hold sway in the much larger and more dynamic movement-oriented left. (Plus, let's face it: that majority of "the proletariat" that does not care about debates between Trot sects, rarely cares about the GPCR or the Makhnovists either.)

Certainly, given the importance of anarchism within the "revolutionary segment of the masses" who were active on the 26th, i think for communists to dismiss the question of Stalin - by which people often really mean, "what went wrong with communism in the 20th century?" - is an error.

Which brings me to the final point - look at how the RCP ends its text:

To convince the masses in English Canada that communism and revolution go together will require a broad campaign of ideological decontamination to wipe out Trotskyist and revisionist ideology. Maoists in English Canada should take on this operation. While it is certainly true that the surrounding ideological scene is infectious, in deepening the ideological struggle it will be possible to free it from its opportunist tendencies.

Calling for "ideological decontamination" and "wiping out" ideologies is partly a matter of writing style, and i certainly know that anarchists and everyone else can be sectarian too. But this kind of metaphor - incorrect ideas being "contaminants" that must be "wiped out" - can lead to a qualitatively different political stance. One should deal with incorrect ideas differently than one deals with infection. The medical model is not conducive to democratic process. For those of us who cannot dismiss debates of the "evils of Stalin" as irrelevant, this kind of metaphor is not very appealing.

In all, though, i gotta repeat, the RCP's statement on the anti-G20 events is a welcome voice of solidarity. My criticisms are not criticisms of the document - which is overwhelmingly good - so much as questions and observations regarding the relationship between different traditions of struggle.

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Literate Frequencies

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i was chatting with an anarchist comrade at the recent bookfair in New York City, when he turned to my table and spotted one of my more in-your-face Marxist-Leninist books, a history of relations between white and Black revolutionary organizations in the united states, specifically of the mutually parasitic dynamics that can occur when people get lost in the forest of (false) nationalism/internationalism.

This comrade laughed when he spotted the book, shaking his head. "I love that book," he said. "Though you know I disagree with every single thing in it."

& i understood exactly what he meant, and didn't thing this was a silly statement.

While perhaps not as strongly, i have found myself feeling the same way about various books over the years, so i enjoyed the forthright manner in which the statement was made. It got me thinking: how can one love a book, while disagreeing with its arguments?

Books present arguments in a layered fashion. Normally the argument is couched in the form of a story, depending for its integrity on a number of facts spun together by the authors' words. There are honest and dishonest ways of weaving this web, and instructive and destructive ways of leading our minds to follow an argument.

Rather than thinking of this using the metaphor of layers - which in the material world we normally encounter one at a time - i think books actually reveal themselves to us more like sound, or perhaps music. Different instruments play at the same time in music, just as these different aspects of an author's message present themselves at the same time in a book.

Many of my favourite books became my favourites not because of the arguments made - which i often couldn't judge right away - but rather because of the author's implicit suppositions. It's as if behind the loudest noise there's another frequency, maybe one you can only pick up on slowly, more a method than a subtext, a way in which facts are chosen and related to each other.

An author shares not only what they think they see, but also how they see. You can end up disagreeing with the argument while learning a lot from the method, just as even a correct argument can be perverted by a dishonest method.

Authors tend to use the same method in their different works, which is probably why you can know you like or dislike a particular author without reading every one of their books. Method is more specific than genre (though i suppose the latter may form a grouping of a variety of related methods).

There is a point to this, that texts have these multiple aspects, that they communicate with us on multiple frequencies (to stay with the metaphor of sound) and that as such what we learn from them is... complex. Politically, i would say that normally the method by which an argument is presented is more important than the actual argument itself.

There is a disagreement i have had, again and again, over the years regarding what is and is not sectarian in terms of the literature i promote. i certainly won't promote just anything on the left, but there is no clear ideological guide to what arguments i will or will not be into. Two authors can make the same claim, and one will strike me as worth reading and the other one not. Multiple authors can make competing and disagreeing claims - take a look at the various leftist and anarchist newspapers for instance - and yet underlying these opposing views is often a unity of method - and more often that not, not a very good method at that!

So to identify a few aspects of method that i find useful, and that can occur (or be negated) in any kind (M-L or circle-A or left communist) of texts:

• that the oppressed (not their vanguards or organizations or liberators, though these may exist no sarcasm intended) are themselves central to the story - indeed, the oppressed are the story;
• that things look different with time, so to grasp what's really going on we need to unearth the commonalities while not descending into nowism;
• reality is not teleological, i.e. it does not unwind like a didactic morality play - there may be "good guys" and "bad guys" in retrospect, but you can't assign these roles a priori;
• that nothing and no one is perfect;
• better to tell the truth than to lie.

Telling a story is in and of itself an act for which we must take responsibility; our storytelling, our development of analysis, can be corrupt or it can be honest. The method in which a text is built can be authoritarian or antiauthoritarian - far more so than the argument which emerges from the same text.

Developing an antiauthoritarian method of telling our stories is a necessary part of developing a revolutionary praxis.

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Radical Principles vs. Poisonous Politics

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It would be nice to always see "the big picture", to be able to act fully informed, to see every angle. You could then act on a case by case basis, always sure that you were not being misled or manipulated, that you were not wasting your energy or working against your own interests.

In life, however, such happy circumstances rarely if ever present themselves. We often must act on partial information, on rumour or hunches. We risk being wrong, and having our own efforts prove to be detrimental to our own goals. We thought we were advancing, only to learn later that we were heading down a blind alley.

To the degree that this is so, that we cannot be sure that our next step is actually bringing us closer to our destination, principles, including but not limited to morals or ethics, become important. Principles establish a way of acting and relating, a methodology or stance, and by acting in a principled manner we become better at adopting this stance, one which will serve us well even if it was first developed in the service of some dead-end activity in the past.

This does not have to be some grand exercise with deep moral implications (though it can be). It may be as simple as taking ourselves seriously. For instance, if we are working on some campaign, just the fact of learning to be on time, to do the work we promise to do, to not dominate conversations or allow them to be dominated, will all serve us well in the longterm even if at some point we realize the campaign we were working on was ill-advised. That stance or principle of being a responsible comrade is worth developing regardless.

i normally don't write about the pissing contests and sectarian shit between activists, in part because it's demoralizing, and in part because it can often feed the noise, contributing to problems that i have found do some harm both to activists and to the radical scene in general. Plus, i myself have been involved in a fair number of squabbles, some of them intensely unpleasant, and i don't want to allow this blog to become a part of that.

Nevertheless, at times it's irresponsible not to say what you think. If you're wrong, speaking out gives others an opportunity to correct you and thus you have an opportunity to learn. And if you're right, then the responsibility is obvious.

So here it goes.

John Zerzan, an anarcho-primitivist intellectual, is coming to speak at Montreal's anarchist bookfair this weekend. Zerzan is not only against class society and the state (like all good anarchists) he also holds some beliefs most people find shocking, namely that the key technical advances people have made - literacy, music, metal-working, agriculture - were all bad things which led us to the oppressive society we live in today.

To be clear, i disagree with Zerzan. i'm not going to critique him here, because that's not the point of this post, but i find his ideas unconvincing, no matter how intriguing they might be on a science-fiction level.

Furthermore, i tend to have little in common with so-called "primitivists" and "post-leftists", those anarchists who find Zerzan most useful. Often these folks are amongst the most narrow minded when it comes to dealing with other currents of the left or learning from the real experiences of the oppressed. Their arrogance can be phenomenal, breath taking in fact. While i have friendly exchanges with some primitivists who i meet briefly in other cities, i think i'm probably on bad terms with every single primitivist in Montreal, and happy to stay that way.

It is because i disagree with Zerzan, and because i am less than chummy with "primitivists" locally, that i feel i have to publicly express how disgusted i am with the post-situationist "hors d'oeuvre" website, which has publicly posted threats to Zerzan, warning him not to come to Montreal because it's "primitivist season". The folks behind this website are doing the state's work with shit like this.

i am also concerned at the email circulating calling for a demonstration against Zerzan outside the bookfair. As i said at the beginning of this post, i do not know what everyone's angle is, and i don't know what connection this demo and the "Coalition for Progress in the Anarchist Milieu" which organized it have to the "hors d'oeuvre" website. However, the wording of the email in question (also posted to CMAQ), which calls for a "war" against Zerzan, manages to combine macho posturing with a very superficial critique.

Within the radical milieu, threats of violence or even just exclusion of those we disagree with have to be justified. In the case of people with coercive personal behaviour, or people who make the scene unsafe or unfriendly through their sexism, racism, or other shit, there is sometimes a place for threats or actual violence to get rid of them (although over the past ten years a number of groups have pioneered more interesting strategies). But that is not the case here.

As for the idea of demonstrating against Zerzan at the bookfair, with the view that he should not be allowed to speak, one has to wonder what will be gained. While such an action will certainly underscore the fact that not all anarchists are "primitivists", and that there may be unresolvable contradictions between the "primitivists" and the rest of us, don't most of us know that already? If the idea is to challenge Zerzan's ideas, couldn't that be done in the form of debate, which the workshop he is giving would seem to facilitate?

Like i said above, i'm not a Zerzanite, i'm not a primitivist. i don't have to be, in order to think that using threats to solve political disagreements within the radical left is reactionary. Similarly, if one is a part of a campaign in which others are making threats, one has a responsibility to denounce this behaviour. To not do so means one risks discrediting oneself.

Finally, on a strategic level, nothing could please the police more than this kind of setup, whereby a public call is made to demonstrate against an anarchist event, where public threats are made. Not only do such threats undermine solidarity and poison the political culture in which resistance is grounded, they can also serve as a pretext for surveillance, repression and suppression.

Living in an imperialist country, riddled with sexism and racism and a moribund culture, we certainly cannot prefigure a communist or anarchist society in the here and now. It's an uphill battle, and it's bound to fail. But in trying to do so, and persisting in these efforts despite inevitable failure, all the while taking up the necessary work as best we can, we develop a stance, a set of principles, which will serve us well.

If we stop trying to do so, one has to ask - what's the fucking point?

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