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(en) Spaine, LISA, Regeneracion: Revolutionary Judo - Reflections on Understanding the Especifist Strategy, the Construction of Popular Power, and Revolutionary Gymnastics (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Date
Thu, 10 Apr 2025 09:34:54 +0300
Warning: This text is NOT directed at the libertarian movement in its
loosest sense. Those who have not made a deep and honest assessment or,
after some analysis, have concluded that nothing in their strategy
should be revised, WILL NOT FIND ANY MESSAGE FOR THEM HERE. ---- For
those who profess such unwavering faith based on the most fundamentalist
interpretations of The Idea, or for those whose "particular" experience
has not brought them the bitter taste of another defeat and who feel
complete, satiated, and confirmed by the impact of their political
action, THIS ARTICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
Here I write for my comrades, those who question themselves to the core,
those who feel that anarchism is committed to the most radical
self-criticism and who wholeheartedly pursue it, eschewing imposture,
because they want to change the world. I write for those I've been
fortunate enough to meet, with whom I advance in the goal of building a
strategic Anarchism for a mass socialist revolution.
Specifism and Platformism are part of a current of anarchism that, in
its most basic expression, represents a significant advance in the
libertarian tradition compared to other strategic currents. Refusing to
accept the typical appeal to supposedly unequivocal and unquestionable
libertarian principles, which is nothing more than the threat of a
withdrawal of the "card," the comrades who gather around this tendency,
which we will call revolutionary organized anarchism , have discussed
several tendentious dogmas.
My comrades have refused to accept that the only libertarian militant
practice compatible with anarchist values is that carried out
individually and at the mass level. In response to this imposition, they
have asserted that the creation of ideological organizations to
intervene in social processes and build strategic and action unity is
not only more practical and useful for a mass emancipatory project, but
is also more consistent with libertarian principles because it
facilitates processes of joint reflection and self-criticism.
What seems obvious, in the libertarian movement, represents a true leap
forward. In my opinion, my comrades in Madrid, Catalonia, the rest of
the Spanish regions, and internationally have been and are very brave to
face their contradictions and pursue them to the end. When breaking with
common sense and tradition, in its worst sense, means putting your
social spaces and your closest environment at risk, the courage is doubled.
Now, once that first question has been established and it has been
established that the Specific Organization and Dual Militancy are
coherent and strategically more effective than other forms of militancy,
it is time to begin answering the key question: What is the objective or
task that such an organization seeks to accomplish? In other words: what
do concepts such as Popular Power, Insurrectional General Strike , or
the accumulation of social force really mean? These questions are
essential because their answers determine both the way in which the
specific organization is constructed and its relationship with the
different spaces of tendencies and masses.
Obviously, we cannot and do not intend to answer all of these questions
unequivocally in this article, but I will try to put in writing some
questions that I think are important not to forget or put off for too long.
Revolutionary Specific Gymnastics?
The concept of "revolutionary gymnastics," attributed to García Oliver
during the pistolero era, can be understood as the implementation of a
tactic whose main objective is to generate different situations in which
revolutionaries could learn, in and through practice, lessons that would
serve them once a broader revolutionary process began.
The goal was to create groups capable of arming themselves, combating
the enemy, fostering self-organization processes for the working class,
and developing political developments. It should be noted that it was
not only intended to serve as a training ground for the working class
and its most militant members; it also sought to advance the
construction of self-defense structures. As I will use this concept only
for its illustrative potential, in the most explicit sense of the term,
I apologize in advance for having simplified and summarized it in this way.
For the purpose of this article, we aim to consider what the
Revolutionary Gymnastics of Especifista Organizations might be today and
in our immediate context, and compare it with their objectives to
determine whether or not they are fulfilling their function, or even
whether their function is clear. My hypothesis, as will be revealed, is
that there are disparate interpretations of key concepts and ideas given
that the development of Especifista strategy is still, at least in
Spain, very young. The organizational tactic, Especifismo, has taken
center stage and, for the moment, has obscured the comprehensive
development of a revolutionary mass strategy.
In many texts we have said, in various ways, that the tasks of Specific
Organizations in mass movements and social struggles were to combat
bureaucracies, strengthen spaces for class self-organization, provide
strategic vision and systemic analysis or, in a much more poetic and
also vaguer way, to accumulate Social Force , in a cumulative process
that we call People's Power and that, hypothetically, would lead us to
build the conditions that make it possible to confront the bourgeoisie
in a process of Insurrectional General Strike , among others.
These interventions can be understood as an end in themselves, but we
can and should undoubtedly also conceive them as part of a Revolutionary
Gymnastics project that allows us to develop the necessary experiences
to address an acute process of class struggle. We would be talking about
two subjects who would be trained in these processes: the masses and the
revolutionary militants of the Specific Organizations. We must reinforce
and point out immediately that this "social intervention" has as one of
its main objectives to serve the libertarian revolutionary organization
and its militants as a space for training and growth. This connection
with social reality, beyond all theorization and our ghettos, is what
allows us to grow alongside the broader spaces of struggle.
Revolutionary fitness: the limits of stage-based and cumulative thinking
We have been saying that Specific Revolutionary Organizations intervene
in social processes to promote the accumulation of social power in a
project of People's Power . However, the problem is that this statement
is highly ambiguous and can be understood in various ways or lead us to
significant conceptual errors with disastrous political consequences.
The most basic and also most common way of thinking about the
accumulation of social force ( represented in graph 1 ) is to think that
through participation in different struggles, we can achieve a
progressive growth in the strength of the working class as a whole,
until we equal or surpass the forces of our class enemies: the
bourgeoisie and its repressive forces.
This way of imagining the process of People's Power has several risks
that I will address below:
The possibility of growth is directly related to the revolutionary or
conciliatory character of the mass grouping.
The enemy will not allow a force whose objective is to confront and
subdue it to grow. We have seen on a thousand and one occasions, and we
will see it again if we do not take measures, that the projects allowed
to develop and grow within this system are the harmless ones, and that
any project with a certain capacity to challenge is quickly repressed or
diverted. This does not mean in the least that we cannot and should not
fight for the growth of mass organizations. What is firmly stated is
that quantitative growth does not necessarily imply qualitative growth
in terms of Social Strength or Popular Power .
Historically, we have clear examples of the growth of workers'
organizations that were either permitted by the bourgeoisie due to their
conciliatory and reformist nature, or that, at a crucial moment, lacking
a developed plan, decided to try to conserve their accumulated strength.
As we can see in Figure 2 , it's of no use to accumulate forces to build
a unit that is unwilling to fight or doesn't know how to do so.
We must challenge the stage-based and evolutionary approaches. Simple
cumulative thinking and growth metaphors can prevent us from
constructing precise analyses and producing truly effective plans.
Obviously, organizations lack a natural essence, and their
projection-conservative, conciliatory, or revolutionary-will depend on
their composition and internal balance of forces.
Growth is rarely cumulative in a unidirectional sense.
Anarchism has tended to be moved and deeply involved in various social
struggles and protest movements, but an endemic lack of a strategic plan
and an adequate Theory of Social Reproduction has led us to experience
ebbs and flows as genuine personal tragedies and unexpected accidents.
Militant depression and burnout are constant, and, as we see in Figure
3, it's quite normal for a temporary rise to be followed by a decline.
If we don't have a well-developed definition of our strategy, People's
Power won't be able to save us from falling into the swamp of sadness
when we see much of what we've built crumble and much of what we've
mobilized go astray.
We must develop a holistic Revolutionary Theory that attempts to
anticipate , as far as possible, all possible scenarios. This doesn't
mean clinging to an unquestionable and rigid model, but rather equipping
ourselves with tools for focus. In the heat of battle, profound
reflection cannot be constructed, and history cannot find us once again
disarmed of theory.
Not all social bodies are identical.
Lacking a well-developed Theory of Social Reproduction , it's easy to
construct simplistic characterizations and be dominated by quantitative
thinking. A revolutionary organization capable of detecting bureaucratic
agents seeking to divert social power and authoritarian projects aiming
to build a base of operations based on class conflicts must be able to
differentiate between the different active subjects within the class as
a whole. Who are the most revolutionary and combative? Who are the most
involved? Who can we rely on and who should we rely on?
As we see in Figure 4, somewhat grotesquely, it is not about promoting
generalized growth, but rather those parts of the working class that are
most advanced, most involved, and have the greatest revolutionary potential.
We need to equip ourselves with the most developed Theory of Social
Reproduction possible and activate a fractionalist filter . A
paternalistic and prudish conception of society is as little useful to
emancipatory goals as sectarianism and purism.
Factionalism should also be applied to oneself
If we truly believe that the Libertarian Revolutionary Organization is
necessary to support and defend mass revolutionary processes, we must
accept that its qualitative and quantitative growth is a priority. It
should be at least as important as the growth of spaces for class
self-organization and its most advanced fractions.
Let's break with our complexes and assume that times of low social
conflict are the appropriate framework for developing Specific
Organization, the Theory of Social Reproduction, and Revolutionary
Theory. Around us, we have examples of organizations that confuse
organizational growth with the growth of broader spaces and end up
building themselves without unity and losing militants along the way,
who abandon the organization to focus on broader spaces of struggle
because they don't have this point clearly in mind.
As we see in graph 5 , if class spaces grow and the organization
stagnates, its relative size becomes more acute, turning the Specific
Organization into an insignificant force when acute processes of class
struggle open up.
The enemy must be included in our analysis
I am concerned to see that many theoretical articulations of Popular
Power are not supported by a Theory of Social Reproduction that places
periods of capitalist crisis at the center of analysis . This is a
mistake that can lead us to construct ourselves in an unstrategic way.
Failing to consider the problem of the forces in conflict in a radically
relational or dialectical way is one of the worst flaws a strategy that
claims to be revolutionary can have. The possibility of attacking the
enemy, as shown in Figure 6 , is not provided by the growth of our mass,
but also, and primarily, by the weakening of rival forces.
From a Gramscian perspective, " organic crises " involve understanding
the possibility of the working class's strength growing through the
fragmentation of the bourgeoisie's forces. The loss of legitimacy of the
capitalist system and bourgeois democracy, the inability to integrate
broad masses of workers into a welfare system, and the impossibility of
fulfilling the promises of the capitalist dream mean that thousands of
people can abruptly change sides if the right intervention is made. This
is where one of the fundamental tasks of any revolutionary project comes
in: building class hegemony involves integrating the demands of the
working classes into those of the class fractions that truly constitute
us as a power.
The Theory of Social Reproduction we must adopt must be capable of
producing the most accurate characterizations of social cycles possible
. The terminology coined by Lazzarato, "terminal crisis," very much in
vogue within the libertarian movement, has the major problem that it can
lead us to believe that we will simply have to wait for capitalism to
collapse on its own. On the contrary, concepts such as the "Era of
Crisis, Wars, and Revolutions" help us understand that we may be
entering a period where capitalist crises will become increasingly
acute, affect larger sectors of the population, last longer, be more
frequent, and prevent a full recovery of economic systems.
A linear and traditional temporal thought is a thought incapable of
addressing revolutionary processes
All biographical accounts of revolutionaries and witnesses to major
historical conflicts emphasize how time is distorted and accelerated
during periods of social upheaval. Social time is a relative time
conditioned by the density of social phenomena. In times of social
peace, everything seems static, change seems so distant that it begins
to seem utopian, history slows down, and prophets of defeat proclaim the
end of history (and the consequent death of the proletariat). But when
the first conflicts begin to occur, time changes, it accelerates, and
the Mad Hatter enters the scene. So much happens in such a short time;
there are so many inputs, so much life, so much energy, that the
perception of time is logically altered. This necessarily implies three
things:
Windows of opportunity: revolutionary processes open and close.
Thinking based on cumulative growth can lead to conservative attitudes.
Any revolutionary organization that does not include this issue in its
Revolutionary Theory is doomed to be unable to react quickly when time
accelerates .
In Figure 7, I attempt to illustrate these issues. The revolutionary
organization (indicated in red) fails to seize the moment, especially if
it lacks the strength and scale to be able to have an impact on the
entire working class (represented in green). Meanwhile, comrades who
pursue strategies with a unidirectional, cumulative vision (represented
in black) tend to be conservative and try to halt or avoid the struggle
because they fear that everything they have built will collapse if they
are defeated. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie has time to regroup, and once
it regains power, it will soon go on the offensive and dismantle any
project of class organization.
Revolutionary Judo
At this point, it might seem that all these dangers pointed out in the
approaches that place the growth of Social Force at the center of the
revolutionary mass strategy can be counteracted by implementing a
certain level of attention to possible deviations. If this has been
understood, I have explained myself quite poorly. The Revolutionary
Organization is built in a certain way, and in order to assume certain
tasks, all "revolutionary gymnastics" must be aimed at preparing us for
a specific type of situation. Long-distance athletes, gymnasts, and
boxers do not train in the same way, because the activity they face is
not the same.
I don't know if this is the best possible example, but to follow the
metaphor to the end, I thought perhaps judo and its modern variants are
the martial arts that best serve to explain the proposal we are
defending here. This Japanese martial art and its various contemporary
variations focus their training and development on a comprehensive
understanding of the body (one's own and one's opponent's), strength,
and timing . The inevitable contact between the two contenders has the
main objective of detecting our opponent's intentions through the
different pressure changes in the grips, with the goal of being able to
take advantage of, enhance, and apply our own and the opponent's
strength in a specific direction. Throws, locks, strikes, and
strangulations are only possible through the precise application of
force at specific times, in specific areas, and in specific directions.
End of metaphor.
The Revolutionary Gymnastics of Libertarian Revolutionary Organizations
that wish to play a productive role in supporting, developing, and
defending revolutionary processes must be built to detect the slightest
shifts in social forces and tensions and immediately redirect all their
forces toward them. This approach is incompatible with a closed,
cumulative idea of class-building processes.
As part of the social body of the working class, Specific Organizations
must support processes of popular struggle and self-defense,
self-management, and direct action, and enhance analytical and strategic
capacities by supporting the most advanced sectors and confronting
bureaucratic and authoritarian deviations. Strengthen the working class
as a whole while strengthening the revolutionary organization without
expecting the mechanical conclusion of victory from this process of
accumulation of forces, but always keeping our eyes on the certainty
that the constitution of a Dual Power , of a class power capable of
confronting the power of the bourgeoisie, will inevitably open a
conflict that cannot remain unresolved.
We must build ourselves to detect energy flows, tensions, and forces in
growth or decline. We must work to be able to detect the accumulation of
antagonistic capital, social tension, the growth of class consciousness,
and the resulting acceleration of social time. We must prepare ourselves
to be able to identify forces, characterize the different agents, and
direct our own strength and that of the class as a whole toward actions
that allow us to win. We must become aware of the changing rhythms and
speeds inherent in social dynamics and be prepared to accelerate when
our analyses suggest it and not be blocked when we need to go all out.
We must educate ourselves and grow in the art of insurrection.
Miguel Brea, Liza activist
https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/03/12/judo-revolucionario/
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