bcbm
8th October 2010, 18:14
The Messianic Mission of RAAN
In their rhetoric we see the "RAANista" tendency emphasize the perceived singular importance of their organization, despite the admitted and seemingly deliberate lack of concretely defined parameters of their organization and its strategy.
At this specific juncture in our polemic we will refrain from judging this lack of concretely defined parameters as a specifically positive or negative attribute. Rather, we wish to highlight the obvious contradiction in a tendency that, on the one hand, boasts to be "not a fixed organization by any definition", "beyond ideological labels", "only be seen or analyzed as the totality of autonomous activity done in its name", etc. ("Culture of the Red & Anarchist Action Network", Aug. 22nd) and on the other upholds itself as the "only" path.
An example, from a recent denunciation of anti-IMF activists:
"The RAANista model is the only proposal on the table right now that would allow for anticapitalist actions - at any level of intensity - to noticeably build upon each other and accumulate into a consistent momentum. [... obstacles] will never be surmounted without the conscious and widespread implementation of RAAN as an organizing model." ("Less Plattitudes, More RAAN", Sept. 11th) [emp. added]
And another, from a gratuitous lionization of minor propaganda action in New Brunswick:
"those of you who still cling to the dead weight of the past—the activist scenes, the cliques, the authoritarian Left—have an important choice to make: abandon ship, die with the ship, or else swim to our island of refuge." ("East Coast Red & Anarchist Network Propaganda/Action", Sept. 2nd) [emp. added]
And a third, on a recruitment effort found on a web forum for discussion of underground heavy metal music:
"[RAAN] is the only group where anarchists and (anti-state) communists can work together under the same banner" (posted on the Red Anarchist Black Metal forums, Sept. 2 '10) [emp. added]
This, somewhat ironically(1), conjures to this author's mind, the extensive critique issued of the "new synthesis" ideology of Bob Avakian and his devotees, issued by dissident Maoist Mike Ely under the title Nine Letters to Our Comrades.
According to Ely's analysis, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, after a series of realistic setbacks, shifted its emphasis during the turn of the 21st century away from "charting the uncharted course" of forming "political base areas" among the "lower and deeper" ranks of working-class youth, and towards "appreciating, promoting and popularizing this rare, unique and special leader, [referring to Avakian] his body of work, method and approach."
This comparison is not offered as an insinuation that the 'RAANista' tendency has already achieved the comical levels of uncritical demagoguery and personality-cultism displayed by the Revolutionary Communist Party, but rather that they are currently engaging in the same mistake of confusing the goal of forming "political base areas" among the most marginalized and exploited sectors of the proletariat with the goal of "appreciating, promoting, and popularizing" the "rare, unique, and special leader[ship]" of RAAN's "body of work, method and approach".
Substituting the RAAN meme for the message of the international worker
An example can be found in the recent daring and heroic attack on the Democratic Party campaign headquarters in Modesto, California. The attack, while minor, must be commended as somewhat successful in drawing media attention. However, graffiti left at the site failed to connect the vandalism to any political statement, other than the promotion of RAAN.
With the nose-dive decline in popularity of "Obamania" and many disillusioned "Obama progressives" turning as a realistic possibility towards the radical left, the attack on the Democratic headquarters had somewhat of a significant potential in successfully serving as an act of instigation and consciousness-raising. A catchy or clever slogan connecting the rise of popular anti-DNC sentiment to the tradition of anti-capitalism and workers' struggle against the bourgeoisie would have been very effective. However, this potential was not maximized and was in fact squandered, as the only message of the vandalism was a cryptic and oblique (and somewhat prideful) reference to an obscure political sect. It is safe to assume that many were left confused and bewildered rather than galvanized by the attack.
This practice stands in stark contrast to the erudite words of RAAN's leadership, who assert correctly "there is no practical use in creating another 'revolutionary organization' just for the sake of having it" and claim that RAAN is "not throwing another acronym into the alphabet soup to watch it float."
The Alphabet Soup
The recent strategic orientation of RAAN is - simply put - to promote RAAN. For a faction that supposedly represents the anti-formalist, anti-party, and post-left ultra-extreme, there is little critical discussion of why RAAN exists, what purpose it exists for, what practical benefits RAAN grants to those who participate in the project, what its immediate and long-term goals are as an organization, when and if RAAN as a formal organization will no longer be necessary, etc.
Instead what we have is a quixotic attempt to gain "street cred" by advertising RAAN through fliers, petty hooliganism, and Internet trolling. What results is a cultural expression that resembles less and less a serious political project and more and more the "forced memes" of the 4chan subculture.
The informal network of friends and acquaintances that exists around this mission to 'promote RAAN' should instead focus their attentions towards coordinated efforts to address local issues and authentically and sincerely engage with like-minded individuals in their day-to-day lives as a starting point for building a coherent infrastructure to resist state power on a local level.
Instead we have a misplaced focus on utilizing the Internet to recruit teenagers who post on RevLeft(2) into the newer, better clique of RAAN. Embryonic anti-capitalist sentiment is not cultivated in a way that's meaningful and is instead squandered with arcane and irrelevant distractions.
Stalinist anti-Stalinism
An increasingly popular notion among anarchists, given so many past examples of positive social projects which squander their liberatory potential and cement new forms of bourgeois domination, is to reject entirely the sanctity of formal parties and hipster/activist cliques in favor of a reinvigorating affirmation of the liberatory potential of singular individual experiences and singular social relationships.
when freed not only from loyalty to the bourgeois establishment, but also from any loyalty to bureaucratic parties and activist/hipster milieus, one is left only to gasp a breath of pure and fresh, free air. (The author says this at the risk of being overly poetic)
In that moment before the breath of fresh air occurs, groups like RAAN butt in, co-opting this extreme egoist, anti-party, anti-clique sentiment, to promote the smog of a new party, a new clique, under the guise of, and as a substitute, for the nameless singularity of total non-servitude.
In The Coming Insurrection, which is now super-trendy among English-speaking anarchists, there is the following open-ended denunciation of "organizations":
"It’s not uncommon, in the course of a significant breaking of the social bond, to cross paths with organizations – political, labor, humanitarian, community associations, etc. Among their members, one may even find individuals who are sincere – if a little desperate – who are enthusiastic – if a little conniving. Organizations are attractive due to their apparent consistency – they have a history, a head office, a name, resources, a leader, a strategy and a discourse. They are nonetheless empty structures, which, in spite of their grand origins, can never be filled. In all their affairs, at every level, these organizations are concerned above all with their own survival as organizations, and little else. Their repeated betrayals have often alienated the commitment of their own rank and file. And this is why you can, on occasion, run into worthy beings within them. But the promise of the encounter can only be realized outside the organization and, unavoidably, at odds with it."
To which the RAANista will agree, and add that the only escape from the organizations is RAAN.
Our French comrades immediately go on to issue a doubly damning denunciation, (which could comfortably apply to RAAN) of "milieus":
"Far more dreadful are social milieus, with their supple texture, their gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is orientated towards the neutralization of some truth. Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writing. Anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of direct action. Scientific milieus to withhold the implications of their research from the majority of people today. Sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they should create. Particularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist circles. They are the old people’s homes where all revolutionary desires traditionally go to die. The task of cultural circles is to spot nascent intensities and to explain away the sense of whatever it is you’re doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your energy for doing it. Activist milieus spread their diffuse web throughout the French territory, and are encountered on the path of every revolutionary development. They offer nothing but the story of their many defeats and the bitterness these have produced. Their exhaustion has made them incapable of seizing the possibilities of the present. Besides, to nurture their wretched passivity they talk far too much and this makes them unreliable when it comes to the police. Just as it’s useless to expect anything from them, it’s stupid to be disappointed by their sclerosis. It’s best to just abandon this dead weight."
To which the RAANista may say, yes! And the only escape from the cliques is through RAAN!
The increased attention being given to these ideas is not used as an opportunity for a mature and critical-minded assessment of strategy but instead offered as a contorted pretense for slave-psychology.
We are reminded (and the author admits to extreme hyperbole) of the example of the Rengō Sekigun of early 70s Japan in which party dissidents were tortured to death as "Stalinists" after they admitted, under circumstances of forced confession, administered by party leaders Hiroko Nagata and Tsuneo Mori, to thinking about exploiting and attempting to control the party for personal gain. We are of course not comparing RAAN to this historical organization in terms of severity, what we are attempting to address is a parallel; the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism, and the impromptu trials of alleged "Stalinists" for supposedly attempting to control and exploit the party, was a distraction by the real efforts of Nagata and Mori to exploit and control the group. Similarly, trendy and ideological misinterpretations of autonomist and insurrectionist ideas may lead to the One Universal Party as the only salvation to an otherwise hopeless terrain of lesser parties and cliques
Thus, we believe RAAN is simply a new ghost in the head, distracting from the possibility of freedom on an pure conscious level.
Against the left?
The less popular A Call, issued by the same group that anonymously authored The Coming Insurrection, has this to say about "post-leftism"
"In these times this position is asserted as a double secession: secession first with the process of capitalist valorisation; then secession with all the sterility entailed by a mere opposition to empire, extra-parliamentary or otherwise; thus a secession with the left. Here 'secession' means less a practical refusal to communicate than a disposition to forms of communication so intense that, when put into practice, they snatch from the enemy most of its force." [emp. added]
This was written in a different spatial and temporal context, in which groups like ATTAC drew a great deal of social and political water in metropolitan France. Similarly, Bonnano's Armed Joy, authored decades earlier, was written in a time of a vibrant Marxist-Leninist left in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Other authors devoted to attacking the left, such as Kazcynski, were personally entrenched in economic and political subcultures such as academia, where such a critique would, at the very least, hold some sort of intimate and immediate significance.
In the US in 2010, with the self-proclaimed mission of building a red and anarchist "street presence" among the "hooligans" of the poorest rungs of working-class youth, one must question the tactical importance of attacking an almost non-existent "left" given the significant popularity of other distractions. (Television, alcohol, etc.)
What we're left with is a naked pretense for sectarianism and uncritical witch-hunts against "Leninists"...
We must tread carefully, while as it may be necessary to attack the capitalist left as it emerges in the US, it is also true that in the recent past the US "post-left" descended down the spectrum of third positionism towards reactionary tendencies such as national anarchism. (Hakim Bey, Bob Black, et. al)
Hooliganism
Among insurrectionist and post-left tendencies in the US, not just RAAN, there is an over-emphasis placed on the glorification and romanticism of hooliganism.
In Pacifism as Pathology, Churchill writes:
"An even more sophisticated approach was taken by West German counterterrorism expert Christian Ludtke in his advocacy of factoring a certain (containable) quantity of violence by the opposition into elite calculations of the costs of maintaining the status quo. His point was that the functioning of the modern state inherently generates such responses, and at least tacit support of them across a fairly wide spectrum of the public. By absorbing an 'acceptable' level of activity by small clandestine groups [...] without reacting in an overly repressive fashion, he argued, the state security apparatus could fashion a useful sociopolitical venting mechanism which serves to preempt more threatening forms or degrees of antistatist violence"
Hooliganism, (smashing parking meters, etc.) like shoplifting and dope-smoking, is a reasonable response by workers to the psychological stresses of capitalism. We must stand with our fellow workers when they are arrested for petty acts of property destruction, just as we must stand with them when they are arrested for possession of marijuana. But to confuse this sort of base, instinctual hooliganism for advanced political resistance is akin to the White Panther Party's call for "[t]otal assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets".
Instead we must uphold, not only the hooliganism of the broken window, but also the hooliganism of the underground soup kitchen.
------------
(1) The irony is that the RCPUSA is frequently held up as a strawman for "autoritarian Leftism" by spokesmen of the RAAN milieu.
(2) A political web-forum which is a haven for Hoxhaism, Dengism, Eurocommunism, National Bolshevism, etc.
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12357
In their rhetoric we see the "RAANista" tendency emphasize the perceived singular importance of their organization, despite the admitted and seemingly deliberate lack of concretely defined parameters of their organization and its strategy.
At this specific juncture in our polemic we will refrain from judging this lack of concretely defined parameters as a specifically positive or negative attribute. Rather, we wish to highlight the obvious contradiction in a tendency that, on the one hand, boasts to be "not a fixed organization by any definition", "beyond ideological labels", "only be seen or analyzed as the totality of autonomous activity done in its name", etc. ("Culture of the Red & Anarchist Action Network", Aug. 22nd) and on the other upholds itself as the "only" path.
An example, from a recent denunciation of anti-IMF activists:
"The RAANista model is the only proposal on the table right now that would allow for anticapitalist actions - at any level of intensity - to noticeably build upon each other and accumulate into a consistent momentum. [... obstacles] will never be surmounted without the conscious and widespread implementation of RAAN as an organizing model." ("Less Plattitudes, More RAAN", Sept. 11th) [emp. added]
And another, from a gratuitous lionization of minor propaganda action in New Brunswick:
"those of you who still cling to the dead weight of the past—the activist scenes, the cliques, the authoritarian Left—have an important choice to make: abandon ship, die with the ship, or else swim to our island of refuge." ("East Coast Red & Anarchist Network Propaganda/Action", Sept. 2nd) [emp. added]
And a third, on a recruitment effort found on a web forum for discussion of underground heavy metal music:
"[RAAN] is the only group where anarchists and (anti-state) communists can work together under the same banner" (posted on the Red Anarchist Black Metal forums, Sept. 2 '10) [emp. added]
This, somewhat ironically(1), conjures to this author's mind, the extensive critique issued of the "new synthesis" ideology of Bob Avakian and his devotees, issued by dissident Maoist Mike Ely under the title Nine Letters to Our Comrades.
According to Ely's analysis, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, after a series of realistic setbacks, shifted its emphasis during the turn of the 21st century away from "charting the uncharted course" of forming "political base areas" among the "lower and deeper" ranks of working-class youth, and towards "appreciating, promoting and popularizing this rare, unique and special leader, [referring to Avakian] his body of work, method and approach."
This comparison is not offered as an insinuation that the 'RAANista' tendency has already achieved the comical levels of uncritical demagoguery and personality-cultism displayed by the Revolutionary Communist Party, but rather that they are currently engaging in the same mistake of confusing the goal of forming "political base areas" among the most marginalized and exploited sectors of the proletariat with the goal of "appreciating, promoting, and popularizing" the "rare, unique, and special leader[ship]" of RAAN's "body of work, method and approach".
Substituting the RAAN meme for the message of the international worker
An example can be found in the recent daring and heroic attack on the Democratic Party campaign headquarters in Modesto, California. The attack, while minor, must be commended as somewhat successful in drawing media attention. However, graffiti left at the site failed to connect the vandalism to any political statement, other than the promotion of RAAN.
With the nose-dive decline in popularity of "Obamania" and many disillusioned "Obama progressives" turning as a realistic possibility towards the radical left, the attack on the Democratic headquarters had somewhat of a significant potential in successfully serving as an act of instigation and consciousness-raising. A catchy or clever slogan connecting the rise of popular anti-DNC sentiment to the tradition of anti-capitalism and workers' struggle against the bourgeoisie would have been very effective. However, this potential was not maximized and was in fact squandered, as the only message of the vandalism was a cryptic and oblique (and somewhat prideful) reference to an obscure political sect. It is safe to assume that many were left confused and bewildered rather than galvanized by the attack.
This practice stands in stark contrast to the erudite words of RAAN's leadership, who assert correctly "there is no practical use in creating another 'revolutionary organization' just for the sake of having it" and claim that RAAN is "not throwing another acronym into the alphabet soup to watch it float."
The Alphabet Soup
The recent strategic orientation of RAAN is - simply put - to promote RAAN. For a faction that supposedly represents the anti-formalist, anti-party, and post-left ultra-extreme, there is little critical discussion of why RAAN exists, what purpose it exists for, what practical benefits RAAN grants to those who participate in the project, what its immediate and long-term goals are as an organization, when and if RAAN as a formal organization will no longer be necessary, etc.
Instead what we have is a quixotic attempt to gain "street cred" by advertising RAAN through fliers, petty hooliganism, and Internet trolling. What results is a cultural expression that resembles less and less a serious political project and more and more the "forced memes" of the 4chan subculture.
The informal network of friends and acquaintances that exists around this mission to 'promote RAAN' should instead focus their attentions towards coordinated efforts to address local issues and authentically and sincerely engage with like-minded individuals in their day-to-day lives as a starting point for building a coherent infrastructure to resist state power on a local level.
Instead we have a misplaced focus on utilizing the Internet to recruit teenagers who post on RevLeft(2) into the newer, better clique of RAAN. Embryonic anti-capitalist sentiment is not cultivated in a way that's meaningful and is instead squandered with arcane and irrelevant distractions.
Stalinist anti-Stalinism
An increasingly popular notion among anarchists, given so many past examples of positive social projects which squander their liberatory potential and cement new forms of bourgeois domination, is to reject entirely the sanctity of formal parties and hipster/activist cliques in favor of a reinvigorating affirmation of the liberatory potential of singular individual experiences and singular social relationships.
when freed not only from loyalty to the bourgeois establishment, but also from any loyalty to bureaucratic parties and activist/hipster milieus, one is left only to gasp a breath of pure and fresh, free air. (The author says this at the risk of being overly poetic)
In that moment before the breath of fresh air occurs, groups like RAAN butt in, co-opting this extreme egoist, anti-party, anti-clique sentiment, to promote the smog of a new party, a new clique, under the guise of, and as a substitute, for the nameless singularity of total non-servitude.
In The Coming Insurrection, which is now super-trendy among English-speaking anarchists, there is the following open-ended denunciation of "organizations":
"It’s not uncommon, in the course of a significant breaking of the social bond, to cross paths with organizations – political, labor, humanitarian, community associations, etc. Among their members, one may even find individuals who are sincere – if a little desperate – who are enthusiastic – if a little conniving. Organizations are attractive due to their apparent consistency – they have a history, a head office, a name, resources, a leader, a strategy and a discourse. They are nonetheless empty structures, which, in spite of their grand origins, can never be filled. In all their affairs, at every level, these organizations are concerned above all with their own survival as organizations, and little else. Their repeated betrayals have often alienated the commitment of their own rank and file. And this is why you can, on occasion, run into worthy beings within them. But the promise of the encounter can only be realized outside the organization and, unavoidably, at odds with it."
To which the RAANista will agree, and add that the only escape from the organizations is RAAN.
Our French comrades immediately go on to issue a doubly damning denunciation, (which could comfortably apply to RAAN) of "milieus":
"Far more dreadful are social milieus, with their supple texture, their gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is orientated towards the neutralization of some truth. Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writing. Anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of direct action. Scientific milieus to withhold the implications of their research from the majority of people today. Sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they should create. Particularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist circles. They are the old people’s homes where all revolutionary desires traditionally go to die. The task of cultural circles is to spot nascent intensities and to explain away the sense of whatever it is you’re doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your energy for doing it. Activist milieus spread their diffuse web throughout the French territory, and are encountered on the path of every revolutionary development. They offer nothing but the story of their many defeats and the bitterness these have produced. Their exhaustion has made them incapable of seizing the possibilities of the present. Besides, to nurture their wretched passivity they talk far too much and this makes them unreliable when it comes to the police. Just as it’s useless to expect anything from them, it’s stupid to be disappointed by their sclerosis. It’s best to just abandon this dead weight."
To which the RAANista may say, yes! And the only escape from the cliques is through RAAN!
The increased attention being given to these ideas is not used as an opportunity for a mature and critical-minded assessment of strategy but instead offered as a contorted pretense for slave-psychology.
We are reminded (and the author admits to extreme hyperbole) of the example of the Rengō Sekigun of early 70s Japan in which party dissidents were tortured to death as "Stalinists" after they admitted, under circumstances of forced confession, administered by party leaders Hiroko Nagata and Tsuneo Mori, to thinking about exploiting and attempting to control the party for personal gain. We are of course not comparing RAAN to this historical organization in terms of severity, what we are attempting to address is a parallel; the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism, and the impromptu trials of alleged "Stalinists" for supposedly attempting to control and exploit the party, was a distraction by the real efforts of Nagata and Mori to exploit and control the group. Similarly, trendy and ideological misinterpretations of autonomist and insurrectionist ideas may lead to the One Universal Party as the only salvation to an otherwise hopeless terrain of lesser parties and cliques
Thus, we believe RAAN is simply a new ghost in the head, distracting from the possibility of freedom on an pure conscious level.
Against the left?
The less popular A Call, issued by the same group that anonymously authored The Coming Insurrection, has this to say about "post-leftism"
"In these times this position is asserted as a double secession: secession first with the process of capitalist valorisation; then secession with all the sterility entailed by a mere opposition to empire, extra-parliamentary or otherwise; thus a secession with the left. Here 'secession' means less a practical refusal to communicate than a disposition to forms of communication so intense that, when put into practice, they snatch from the enemy most of its force." [emp. added]
This was written in a different spatial and temporal context, in which groups like ATTAC drew a great deal of social and political water in metropolitan France. Similarly, Bonnano's Armed Joy, authored decades earlier, was written in a time of a vibrant Marxist-Leninist left in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Other authors devoted to attacking the left, such as Kazcynski, were personally entrenched in economic and political subcultures such as academia, where such a critique would, at the very least, hold some sort of intimate and immediate significance.
In the US in 2010, with the self-proclaimed mission of building a red and anarchist "street presence" among the "hooligans" of the poorest rungs of working-class youth, one must question the tactical importance of attacking an almost non-existent "left" given the significant popularity of other distractions. (Television, alcohol, etc.)
What we're left with is a naked pretense for sectarianism and uncritical witch-hunts against "Leninists"...
We must tread carefully, while as it may be necessary to attack the capitalist left as it emerges in the US, it is also true that in the recent past the US "post-left" descended down the spectrum of third positionism towards reactionary tendencies such as national anarchism. (Hakim Bey, Bob Black, et. al)
Hooliganism
Among insurrectionist and post-left tendencies in the US, not just RAAN, there is an over-emphasis placed on the glorification and romanticism of hooliganism.
In Pacifism as Pathology, Churchill writes:
"An even more sophisticated approach was taken by West German counterterrorism expert Christian Ludtke in his advocacy of factoring a certain (containable) quantity of violence by the opposition into elite calculations of the costs of maintaining the status quo. His point was that the functioning of the modern state inherently generates such responses, and at least tacit support of them across a fairly wide spectrum of the public. By absorbing an 'acceptable' level of activity by small clandestine groups [...] without reacting in an overly repressive fashion, he argued, the state security apparatus could fashion a useful sociopolitical venting mechanism which serves to preempt more threatening forms or degrees of antistatist violence"
Hooliganism, (smashing parking meters, etc.) like shoplifting and dope-smoking, is a reasonable response by workers to the psychological stresses of capitalism. We must stand with our fellow workers when they are arrested for petty acts of property destruction, just as we must stand with them when they are arrested for possession of marijuana. But to confuse this sort of base, instinctual hooliganism for advanced political resistance is akin to the White Panther Party's call for "[t]otal assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets".
Instead we must uphold, not only the hooliganism of the broken window, but also the hooliganism of the underground soup kitchen.
------------
(1) The irony is that the RCPUSA is frequently held up as a strawman for "autoritarian Leftism" by spokesmen of the RAAN milieu.
(2) A political web-forum which is a haven for Hoxhaism, Dengism, Eurocommunism, National Bolshevism, etc.
http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12357