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Please read here if you're over the violence ruckus

  
 
Rosa dLuscious
07:29 / 19.06.01
This is an excerpt from a very loing article on nationalism and media that I just read. It's by a whole lot mof different people and is being dispersed through email lists: it originated in Western Europe.

It seems to say a lot, to me, about what people need to be doing in the wake of the events in Sweden (and everywhere.) Particularly relevant is the stuff on coping with dissent within our communities. Barbelith has surprised me lately by discussing issues that I've been hearing heaps of other (pretty crazy serious) activists talking about. I think that rocks, but I also feel slightly responsible for sometimes being overbearing and dismissing people's opinions without hearing them out. I think it's quite important that we try to engage in constructive debate.

Anyhow, here it is. Does this make sense to people? Can we work on developing better communication skills—not because we need to for the sake of doing actions together or whatever; just because I'm sick of getting angry at people every time I post, or feeling like I need to take a polarised view in an argument because the sympathies I have aren't being listened to.

Challenges ahead

In addition to these and other debates, many other challenges will have to be overcome before the processes of creation of free, autonomous and self-sustained spaces in Western Europe can become revolutionary.

First of all, we need to work hard on our communication skills, in order to come to collective understandings, at different levels, of what we want and how we want to get there. This is not a small challenge, as the last three years have amply demonstrated. We should also experiment and improve ways to eliminate all forms and systems of oppression, domination and discrimination within our own circles. Simultaneously we need to uphold the right to difference and take precautions against the formation of dominant collective identities. We need to deal with conflict and dissent constructively, so that they enrich what we do, instead of dividing us.

Furthermore, a lot more of knowledge and skill-sharing will be needed throughout the process, both on the level of analysis (through seminars, exchange with people from other parts of the world, etc) in exchanging tools for organisational and economic self-reliance (communication technologies, renewable energy, ecological agriculture, languages, etc).
This needs to be accomplished while avoiding the establishment of leaderships and hierarchies due to specialisation.

Finally, we need to continue the brilliant efforts to develop more efficient and imaginative ways of transmitting our message to the rest of society without depending on the mainstream media.
 
 
No star here laces
14:22 / 19.06.01
Hierarchy.

This is such a loaded word. We use it to imply dominance and unfairness.

But hierarchy, in the sense of coherent organisation, division of tasks and the adoption of goal-oriented activities is exactly what the activist movement needs to better acheive its goals.

May day in london was a complete farce due to lack of organisation. It would have been pitifully easy to outwit the police and have a decent, peaceful demonstration and make some coherent points about the movement. But it would require planning and organisation, and these things were conspicuously absent. The only people who were evidently making some sort of point were the execrable SWP, purely because they are an organised, hierarchical group. Contrast this with the plans afoot in Barcelona, and with the way Ya Basta work in Italy.

Having loose anarchist affiliations doesn't mean you have to operate chaotically. Unfortunately, operating non-chaotically must involve, at some stage, a definition of goals and a focus of action, something that many people in the movement see as being counter to their beliefs.

I don't know how this paradox can be resolved, and it is one of the things, personally, that makes me very disillusioned about the prospect of real change resulting from activism, at least in the western world.

Another thing that is significant here, is that people appear to have forgotten the meaning of 'direct action'. It doesn't just mean 'lack of involvement in the official political process', it means acting directly at the source of the problem. If people want to protest the IMF and world bank's effects on the third world, they should be doing it in the third world, not by attempting to get the complacent western media to pay attention.

So how do you get a bunch of anti-hierarchy individuals to adopt some organisation?
 
 
Jackie Susann
09:43 / 20.06.01
You're acting like heirarchy and organisation are the same thing, when obviously there are nonheirarchical ways to organise which are widely used by the more anarchistic tendencies among activists. The idea of affinity groups and spokescouncils (I'm assuming this is how London May Day was organised, maybe I'm wrong) is based on the idea that people should form small groups with their friends, people they trust and with the same short-term goals and intentions. Each affinity group nominates a representative or 'spoke' who can take part in broader decision making processes. Spokescouncils are run on concensus with efforts to make sure everyone can say what they need to. The division of tasks and adoption of specific goal oriented activities is volunteer based, and can work more effectively that way than through delegation. In Melbourne, the main group organising this way spontaneously developed affinity groups for legal aid, first aid, couriering, printing, logistics, etc., during both S11 and M1.

Now, saying London bodged it up isn't the same as saying they should have heirarchised. Like you say, the SWP did, and hoo-bloody-ray for them.

I'm saying this in the spirit of information sharing, not trying to start an argument.
 
 
01
09:43 / 20.06.01
quote: So how do you get a bunch of anti-hierarchy individuals to adopt some organisation?

To stress the importance of organisation. I agree the word "hierarchy" is loaded and that would essentially turn alot of people off. But it's just a word.
What needs to be stressed is the end result and the role(s) that everyone plays in attaining that result. The difference between a hiearchy in a cut throat multi-national corporation and a hierarchy in a protest movement, is that in the former, the top reaps vast rewards at the expense of the the bottom. In the latter, everyone is equal in the fact that they're all working for the same outcome. Workers at the "bottom" get just the same as those at the "top". Also, in continuing groups, rotating tasks might help alleviate the problems of adopting a hierarchy. Like in the Invisibles when Robin got the leathers.
 
 
Jackie Susann
09:43 / 20.06.01
So what makes them the top? If roles are taken on a volunteer basis and organised by small groups within larger movements, I don't see why we need a division into organisers and workers, regardless of how nicely the benefits are shared. Its collective organising, people have been doing it for years.
 
 
No star here laces
09:43 / 20.06.01
Well to me the problem is in the whole 'everybody have their say' type stuff. Ken Wilber posits a system of developmental stages, coded as colours, incorporating both the cognitive development of children and philosophical development of adults.

In brief, the fourth stage in his theory is 'blue' characterised by Order and absolutist principles. Blue is often religious or mythic and is characterised by rigid hierarchies. This is the kind of hierarchical organisation that activists primarily react against.

The sixth stage is 'green', which describes much activist thinking. Green says that the human spirit must be free from greed, dogma and divisiveness and that feelings and caring supersede cold rationality. Green reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus with the downside that there is interminable 'processing' and an incapacity to reach decisions.

Wilber's theory is that each of these first six stages including green and blue can conceive of no worldview other than their own having any validity and react violently against all other stages.

However he also posits that there is a stage beyond green where a more integrative standpoint is possible and where people in that stage can be in all prior stages simultaneously and use the best aspects from each. The word he uses for this is 'holarchy'.

Now a lot of this is cringingly new-agey, but I think he has a really good point about the 'greens' in that they do appear to hold correct process and everybody having their say above actual acheivement.

The system of spokescouncils described is excellent, but I would argue shows evidence of hierarchy, no matter which way you try to get around it, in that the 'spokes' are at a higher level in the decision-making process than the other members of their group, in much the same way that mps in a representative democracy are at a higher level than their constituents.

But I don't see that as a negative.

Anyways, enough of the hierarchies ish, it's a pretty minor point.

Communication skills? Yup they can always get better, I don't think anyone can argue with that.

But as I said before I think action skills need a lot of work too. ACtions shouldn't be contingent on media attention to work, and they shouldn't be solely focused on the decision makers. I think there is a real role for actions of a political nature which help to reverse the damage caused by the decision makers. That way the right aims are being acheived even if the media and the governments pay no attention.

Kind of like politicised charity. Whatcha think?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
12:44 / 21.06.01
Great topic, the excerpt's excellent, the kind of stuff that's blindingly obvious when you read it but difficult to articulate beforehand, and difficult to practice. (where'd it come from RosaD?)

Not to say it's not worthwhile, the oppposite in fact....

Think the point made about skill-sharing is a really useful one, and would further say that in any community it's worth remembering that members have all have proficiency in different skills which add to the mix, that valuing heterogeneity is vital in all communities.

which is alot of what causes frustration in contexts like this, i think, taht it's much easier/ more instinctive to take a stand against or feel you have to agree totally, rather than trying to validate/explore the difference of opinion...

This strategy opens up great possibilities for discussion to follow different lines than the me and you/me vs. you position we get alot round here.

Allowing and encouarging different personalites and getting them to mix constructively is difficult but makes for huge potential...

Much better in my opinion than a certain style of discourse/personality being validated as the 'right' one, and those who have this gaining status accordingly. Which is kinda what I see around here alot.

Waffling, am I just saying [woolly liberal]I validate your right to call me a twat
[/woolly liberal]!

As Jacky no doubt will
 
 
Disco is My Class War
08:29 / 22.06.01
Plum-bitch: it's anonymous and I got it from a friend who found it on the s11-awol (Autonomous Web of Liberation, groups based in Melbourne) email list. It comes from Western Europe, though, and it has the air of having been translated.

Anyhow....

Mecca (Tyrone?) I take yr point about organisation. But I don't think hierarchy, or even 'holarchy', is necessarily the way to go. When a small number of people at the top make decisions about organisation, people down the bottom are always going to feel resentful about the fact that they may be being asked to do something they don't want to do. I agree that sometimes in a collective decision-making process, things can take a long time. But I feel that people can act autonomously: that is, they need to have the power to decide for themselves what the best course of action is for them, as bodies/agents. Hierarchies simply don't work that way. Then again, working in autonomous collectivity takes skills, of listening and of 'organising', and maybe the more people who run affinity-group workshops and teach people how to get organised that way, the better we'll all be.

Also, I totally agree with you about doing actions at the site of domination. But maybe what you're missing here is that those actions are going on constantly. It's just that the Western media ignores them. Strikes happen in textile factories in Thailand and the Phillipines all the time. Land occupations are going on in Brazil as we speak. It *is* incredibly fucked that these don't get Western media attention -- and thus, attention from corporations, to a certain extent, and 'everyone' as witnesses -- but I feel at times like if the only way to make them pay attention is to agitate in Western countries, maybe that's what we need to do.
 
  
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