I recently read a most likely apocryphal story about Hegel during
the period of the French Revolution. The story isn't terribly
complicated; Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling took the time from their
studies to plant a tree of liberty. Despite the very different
directions the three thinkers took, the fictional act gestured towards a
commitment to the radical possibilities embodied by the revolution. The act of planting a tree doesn't strike me as the
worst metaphor for a radical political project. It gestures towards three
substantial aspects of any political project committed to radical
and systemic transformation, the fact that any such project will take
time, the care that needs to be put into such a project, and finally,
the immense contingency implicit in such a project.
Time: The act of planting of tree implicitly has a fairly long
period of time in mind. It's going to take most trees at least twenty
of thirty years to develop any significant growth, and even fast growing
trees take a few years to take hold. Most radical or progressive
reformist groups work within a considerably shorter period of time,
often only thinking about the next rally or, if the group is
particularly ambitious, the next year long
campaign. Even NGOs tend to think within a shorter timeline,
developing, at most, five year plans. In this sense, we can think of
the
activities of most radical or reformist organizations as being
profoundly opportunist in their organizational practices, if not their
rhetoric, in the framework that is implicit in both the work of
Paulo Virno and V.I. Lenin . Within
both thinkers' frameworks, opportunism operates on the premise of
accepting the rules set of the existing system without challenging the
rules and structures of that system. By refusing to or perhaps more
significantly being unable to create long term goals and projects,
radical and reformist projects find themselves playing by the rules of
the systems that they ostensibly oppose. I think this opportunist
framework is an effect, rather than a cause of the profound destruction
of the counter-systemic movements of the second half of the twentieth
century. However, it's
difficult to imagine escaping this situation without having the
resources and foresight to begin the process of developing meaningfully
long future projects.
It's notable that the
thirty year time period that it takes for a tree to grow is remarkably
close the the medium time-frame that Immanuel Wallerstein posits as the
length of the medium term project that is largely ignored by the
counter-systemic movements of the present within the United States.
Wallerstein opposes this medium time frame to a set of long term goals,
which take the form of large, global projects that take the form of
abstract concepts such as communism, the end of exploitation, etc.
Short term goals take the form of an organizing campaign such as
organizing a workplace, a campaign to end a particular practice at an
institution such as using sweat shop labor, or often in the case of
subcultural activism, simply organizing a demonstration or an action.
This work involves immediate goals. How do we get people to the rally? Can
we get media attention? Can we disrupt the actions of decision makers
in a way that causes them to change their behavior? These are all
important questions, but they don't lead to giving any meaningful
thought to the larger goals that the movements ostensibly have.
Instead, their framework is largely negative. How can we disrupt? How
can we translate that disruption into policy makers changing their
actions? I'm not saying that these are irrelevant questions, but they
abandon the element of planning to the structures we ostensibly oppose.
They also abandon the question of how we form new forms of social
structure and create new modes of governance within those forms of
social structure, and what kinds of representation will define new forms
of democratic practice.
Care: To return to the
metaphor of the tree, it takes quite a bit of care to get a tree to take
root and adjust to the environment in which you have place it. This is
notably true for Southern California because of the lack of rain and
its poor soil. However, it's a metaphor that works elsewhere. At the
most obvious level, the creation of any social structure is dependent on
formal and informal structures of social reproduction. You need to not
only bring new people into an organization or movement, but you need to
create social spaces that cause those people to stay in those
structures, to allow them a sense of meaning and participation in those
organizations and movements, and to create structures of care. These
are questions that are taken quite seriously at the most immediate level
by anarchists, particularly the focus on self care. However, those
same organizations have difficulty imagining how you might participate
in these movements when you're thirty or forty, rather than twenty, or
how to be a part of a movement when you have children or you have a
disability. I don't think these are problems that can be solved through
a movement that continues to operate as a subculture, that is as a
community largely produced through voluntary and informal labor. It
should be additionally noted that those informal structures tend to
unduly burden women with the 'traditional' tasks of reproductive labor,
leaving them unpaid and undervalued. We need structures and
institutions that we can plug into, and that is going to involve getting
people money to do those jobs. There's a real question of how we do
this and continue to hold onto forms of democratic governance and
representation, but refusing to pose those questions by refusing to
create any kind of formal structure has clearly not translated into
either sustainability
or equality.
Contingency: There is quite a bit of
contingency implicit in the act of planting the tree. The most obvious
contingency is the fact that trees can die, even with all the care of
the world that is put into the project. Analogously, projects fail,
even with the best intentions and plans. However, at a more modest
level, even when a tree lives and grows, it doesn't grow in precisely
the way you plan it to grow. That is to say, there is a need to
recognize that as a plan develops and perhaps even progresses, the means
and even the ends of that plan are going to change. That doesn't mean
that you don't plan, but that you recognize that your plans are going to
change. We're good at dealing with that kind of contingency at the
level of the event, and
even the campaign, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking beyond
that. At the level of a lot of subcultural activism, we rarely even
spend much time discussing what succeeded or failed within an individual
event afterwards, often leaving events as isolated and unrelated
events. When criticism does occur, it often spirals out of control
becoming a circle of mutual incrimination. We lack the mechanisms for a
form of collective and individual assessment that operates
constructively, rather than disastrously destructively, a mechanism that
would teach organizers better practices and encourage them to engage in
those practices. At
some level, we need forms of self-criticism primarily for organizations,
but also for individuals, but in a manner that somehow escapes from the
logic of the confessional within which that mode was initially
created. Just as significantly, we need forms of institutional
knowledge that will preserve that knowledge to direct future campaigns
and future actions, and we need to be able to think about what the
successes and failures of those actions say about our longer term plans.
To
draw off the example of an old friend, we might look at the anarchist
project in Spain. We think about the high point of anarchism in the mid
to late 1930's, but in doing so, we miss out
on the fact that it took decades of organizing, starting withing the
middle part of the nineteenth century for this wave of militancy to
occur. It involved engaging in and creating institutional and
educational structures, and involved creating forms of engagement that
were not simply accessible to the young. When we simply look back
nostalgically at the height of a moment of struggle without recognizing
the conditions that produced that struggle, we're going to lack any
ability of how to advance our own goals of creating similar or more
successful movements. We have to see those movements with the context
of the long duree of time, and the day to day work that occurred in that
time frame. The question is how to return
to that form of longer term thinking.
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