Organizational cadre school ramblings
Jul. 29th, 2005 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Well. I haven't updated in ten days. Once, in the life of this blog, that would have been quite normal. It may become quite normal again, if I get into a classroom by September. That's not a job that has room for daytime journalling. Even in terms of e-mail, my old pattern was to get up early enough to check messages, and quite often get sucked into writing people early in the morning before leaving for work, and then to do whatever I could in the evening. Over the last few months, I've had enough laxity that I've definitely been drawn into internet-dependency. It's not that I feel exactly guilty about that, or annoyed with myself... just that I doubt it will remain as possible. Maybe not, though. People are always telling me they can't ever find time to read, and I have never in my life managed not to find time to read. The one circumstance I can imagine limiting that is parenthood. From all I observe, I would imagine that parents almost never get a chance to start a book, much less finish one.
Otherwise, I've had almost a week of intensely enjoyable and energizing and hopeful interactions with comrades of mine in my socialist organization, Solidarity. The cadre school I got to participate in from last Friday night until Wednesday afternoon was the same sort of touchstone for me as our Socialist-Feminist Queer Liberation retreat more than two years ago. The experience of this cadre school was made up of both the formally structured parts and the informal connections made and reforged, of course. And the formally structured parts were quite excellent: I think this is the first time that the feminist process that Solidarity has struggled with WORKED, and worked almost seamlessly, and worked to undergird and make more accessible the actually quite rigorous theoretical and political discussions. It worked at the aforementioned SFQL retreat, too, in fact, but possibly it wasn't as self-conscious. Also, the task being undertaken was different in each case, I think. The conscious attempt to grapple with generational transformation and building cadre is a strange and different goal.
Cheers, Comrade I. I thought of titling the above photo "You don't HAVE to drink to be a revolutionary... but it helps", sort of along the lines of the Emma Goldman quote. There WAS a conspicuous lack of dancing at this thing, and that needs to be rectified next time. It's really the only kind of rectification I am into.
Some things I kind of wanted to note: the Fourth International was in some senses much more present than I expected, in terms of interest in it (also many misconceptions about it); and it is a fascinating thing to try to draw out the political lessons of this period and of socialist history without caving to the desire to use well-worn and familiar theoretical language. I KNOW that language, though some newer comrades don't, and in the past I've been afraid that because activists who come to socialism these days (from student work, from antiwar work, from antiracist work, from LGBT and feminist struggles, from the anarchist movement) don't have that specific vocabulary (and are sometimes extremely reluctant to engage with it or learn it, unless they are fairly sectarian and infatuated with organizational history/trivia) -- that they therefore do not have the politics expressed by that language. By the end of this cadre school, I was not worried about that. The same politics -- even, dare I say it, the same Trotskyist politics, in their most important essence -- are there, and are developing through these comrades' engagement with different areas of work as well as through engagement with events like this and internal education -- even if the jargon is not all there, and is mistrusted.
I think part of my worry about younger comrades rejecting theory and theoretical language was about the flurry of academic and quasi-leftist calls to abandon the term "socialism" around the time of the end of the Soviet Union. All that end of history bullshit. All that "end of class" nonsense. The idea that we need a completely new vocabulary because the old one was organically linked to the revolutionary tradition of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd internationals and the Russian Revolution, especially. Solidarity has always been a little more complicated than that, in its founding understanding that the rigid hammering out of positions and "lines" and then the exactly as rigid carrying out of those "lines" does not match the period we are in, but that those politics:
-- politics that act to show the impossibility of capitalism's reforming itself ;
-- politics that understand that the only social layer with the weight and the reason and potentially the will to transform this society is the working class, taken broadly;
-- and politics that refuse to perpetuate the illusion that any bourgeois/capitalist political party can represent interests that are opposed to capital or the bourgeoisie
are the hard won lessons of the 19th and 20th centuries' struggles. We want the content, but are not so fussy about the exact words. And we can agree to disagree on things other than those three central notions.
As for the informal connections forged and reforged... hmmm. Well, I did a sex survey, for one thing, and I have to say that Soli has (from my perspective, anyway) far too few single members, even in its younger layers. Lots of het partnerings, lots of marriages, lots of monogamy. Which means, I think, that there wasn't much hooking up. I always wonder how that sort of thing works at International Socialist Organization conferences and conventions, for example, or in other political arenas. Any ISOers or former ISOers who stumble across this blog, man, feel free to comment. From the outside, it LOOKS like anarchists are getting it on like bunny rabbits among themselves, all the time and at any moment. But perhaps that is my wild, unbridled imagination (and projection)? Any current anarchists who think this is completely silly, go on ahead and correct my misapprehensions. One enjoyable thing about that, though: just as we tend to attract ex-ISOers, we also tend to attract people whose first political involvements were in anarchist organizations or movements. We started the cadre school with a viewing of Land and Freedom, last Friday evening (and, yes, I know there are critiques of that movie) and at various points during the week, there were allusions to revisiting some of the main sites of anarchist/socialist tension and theory. Reading a wider array of "the classics" was the way one person put it. Murray Bookchin came in for some discussion, for example. As well as the perennial interest in Emma Goldman, of course.
On the ISO, I have to say that we unintentionally played a party game of sorts where, at one evening gathering, just in one room, there were six or seven people who, taken together, represented more than a decade of membership in the ISO, prior to joining Solidarity. And those were just the people who were there that evening; I can think of plenty who could have extended that timeline who weren't there right then. It was an interesting conversation, collectivizing their experiences. I know that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dobrovolets and nihilistic_kid are former members who (from all I can gather reading their comments) think my organization is loose and not sufficiently hardcore, politically. But I feel like we treat each other in a comradely enough fashion that if they take me up on this question, they won't be bashing Soli too hard.
Right. I am rambling. It's been a while, and it's hard to know what I want to write about. Partly, too, a friend is setting up a domain/website (don't ask me to untangle these things; I just about understand them, that's all) and I'm going to be doing some different writing on that, and sort of welcome the chance to write more anonymously than I have here. I think, in part, I want to write the messy, venty, relationship and sex stuff that I don't feel perfectly comfortable doing here. I won't be capable of doing that without rewriting humor into a lot of it, but I also want to feel free to write about more recent sexual and emotional interactions that could be problematic here. It's one thing to write about shit from twenty years ago -- and I enjoy that -- but it's different to write about what I perceive of male behaviors and patterns in my life and painful realizations and blazing angers and difficult regrets and simple amazement. I know I could do some of it via locked and filtered posts, and possibly there will be that kind of overlap. Prossibly.
So that's all sort of germinating in my head, also.
As a result of a week of intense education and conversation, starting around 8:30 AM and ending between midnight and 2 AM most nights, and then of a fair amount of babysitting of my nieces, I am absolutely wiped out right now. I have a number of things I want to be working on politically, some of which overlap with LJ, actually -- in terms of annotating various lists of novels with utopian aspirations or visions, and of making that list of Books the Christian Right Aren't Banning But Would If They Had Any Brains.
And I have a job interview on Monday, from out of the blue. I don't know what my chances are, but I feel much better about getting OTHER interviews on the basis of my applications (all those annoying fucking papers and forms I have been juggling in frustration, and cover letters and resumes, etc.), having gotten one, you know?
Otherwise, I've had almost a week of intensely enjoyable and energizing and hopeful interactions with comrades of mine in my socialist organization, Solidarity. The cadre school I got to participate in from last Friday night until Wednesday afternoon was the same sort of touchstone for me as our Socialist-Feminist Queer Liberation retreat more than two years ago. The experience of this cadre school was made up of both the formally structured parts and the informal connections made and reforged, of course. And the formally structured parts were quite excellent: I think this is the first time that the feminist process that Solidarity has struggled with WORKED, and worked almost seamlessly, and worked to undergird and make more accessible the actually quite rigorous theoretical and political discussions. It worked at the aforementioned SFQL retreat, too, in fact, but possibly it wasn't as self-conscious. Also, the task being undertaken was different in each case, I think. The conscious attempt to grapple with generational transformation and building cadre is a strange and different goal.
Cheers, Comrade I. I thought of titling the above photo "You don't HAVE to drink to be a revolutionary... but it helps", sort of along the lines of the Emma Goldman quote. There WAS a conspicuous lack of dancing at this thing, and that needs to be rectified next time. It's really the only kind of rectification I am into.
Some things I kind of wanted to note: the Fourth International was in some senses much more present than I expected, in terms of interest in it (also many misconceptions about it); and it is a fascinating thing to try to draw out the political lessons of this period and of socialist history without caving to the desire to use well-worn and familiar theoretical language. I KNOW that language, though some newer comrades don't, and in the past I've been afraid that because activists who come to socialism these days (from student work, from antiwar work, from antiracist work, from LGBT and feminist struggles, from the anarchist movement) don't have that specific vocabulary (and are sometimes extremely reluctant to engage with it or learn it, unless they are fairly sectarian and infatuated with organizational history/trivia) -- that they therefore do not have the politics expressed by that language. By the end of this cadre school, I was not worried about that. The same politics -- even, dare I say it, the same Trotskyist politics, in their most important essence -- are there, and are developing through these comrades' engagement with different areas of work as well as through engagement with events like this and internal education -- even if the jargon is not all there, and is mistrusted.
I think part of my worry about younger comrades rejecting theory and theoretical language was about the flurry of academic and quasi-leftist calls to abandon the term "socialism" around the time of the end of the Soviet Union. All that end of history bullshit. All that "end of class" nonsense. The idea that we need a completely new vocabulary because the old one was organically linked to the revolutionary tradition of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd internationals and the Russian Revolution, especially. Solidarity has always been a little more complicated than that, in its founding understanding that the rigid hammering out of positions and "lines" and then the exactly as rigid carrying out of those "lines" does not match the period we are in, but that those politics:
-- politics that act to show the impossibility of capitalism's reforming itself ;
-- politics that understand that the only social layer with the weight and the reason and potentially the will to transform this society is the working class, taken broadly;
-- and politics that refuse to perpetuate the illusion that any bourgeois/capitalist political party can represent interests that are opposed to capital or the bourgeoisie
are the hard won lessons of the 19th and 20th centuries' struggles. We want the content, but are not so fussy about the exact words. And we can agree to disagree on things other than those three central notions.
As for the informal connections forged and reforged... hmmm. Well, I did a sex survey, for one thing, and I have to say that Soli has (from my perspective, anyway) far too few single members, even in its younger layers. Lots of het partnerings, lots of marriages, lots of monogamy. Which means, I think, that there wasn't much hooking up. I always wonder how that sort of thing works at International Socialist Organization conferences and conventions, for example, or in other political arenas. Any ISOers or former ISOers who stumble across this blog, man, feel free to comment. From the outside, it LOOKS like anarchists are getting it on like bunny rabbits among themselves, all the time and at any moment. But perhaps that is my wild, unbridled imagination (and projection)? Any current anarchists who think this is completely silly, go on ahead and correct my misapprehensions. One enjoyable thing about that, though: just as we tend to attract ex-ISOers, we also tend to attract people whose first political involvements were in anarchist organizations or movements. We started the cadre school with a viewing of Land and Freedom, last Friday evening (and, yes, I know there are critiques of that movie) and at various points during the week, there were allusions to revisiting some of the main sites of anarchist/socialist tension and theory. Reading a wider array of "the classics" was the way one person put it. Murray Bookchin came in for some discussion, for example. As well as the perennial interest in Emma Goldman, of course.
On the ISO, I have to say that we unintentionally played a party game of sorts where, at one evening gathering, just in one room, there were six or seven people who, taken together, represented more than a decade of membership in the ISO, prior to joining Solidarity. And those were just the people who were there that evening; I can think of plenty who could have extended that timeline who weren't there right then. It was an interesting conversation, collectivizing their experiences. I know that
dobrovolets and nihilistic_kid are former members who (from all I can gather reading their comments) think my organization is loose and not sufficiently hardcore, politically. But I feel like we treat each other in a comradely enough fashion that if they take me up on this question, they won't be bashing Soli too hard.Right. I am rambling. It's been a while, and it's hard to know what I want to write about. Partly, too, a friend is setting up a domain/website (don't ask me to untangle these things; I just about understand them, that's all) and I'm going to be doing some different writing on that, and sort of welcome the chance to write more anonymously than I have here. I think, in part, I want to write the messy, venty, relationship and sex stuff that I don't feel perfectly comfortable doing here. I won't be capable of doing that without rewriting humor into a lot of it, but I also want to feel free to write about more recent sexual and emotional interactions that could be problematic here. It's one thing to write about shit from twenty years ago -- and I enjoy that -- but it's different to write about what I perceive of male behaviors and patterns in my life and painful realizations and blazing angers and difficult regrets and simple amazement. I know I could do some of it via locked and filtered posts, and possibly there will be that kind of overlap. Prossibly.
So that's all sort of germinating in my head, also.
As a result of a week of intense education and conversation, starting around 8:30 AM and ending between midnight and 2 AM most nights, and then of a fair amount of babysitting of my nieces, I am absolutely wiped out right now. I have a number of things I want to be working on politically, some of which overlap with LJ, actually -- in terms of annotating various lists of novels with utopian aspirations or visions, and of making that list of Books the Christian Right Aren't Banning But Would If They Had Any Brains.
And I have a job interview on Monday, from out of the blue. I don't know what my chances are, but I feel much better about getting OTHER interviews on the basis of my applications (all those annoying fucking papers and forms I have been juggling in frustration, and cover letters and resumes, etc.), having gotten one, you know?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 09:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 11:13 pm (UTC)That may be relatively close to my ideal. I think I'm kidding. Maybe. Maybe not. The British International Group seemed quite similar in its approach, but then, I was 20 at the time, and "breeding" per se, wasn't exactly on my mind. Still, many socialist groups exhibit lots o' generational lineages and sibling groups.
Photo title contest
Date: 2005-07-30 02:22 am (UTC)Re: Photo title contest
Date: 2005-07-30 07:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-30 05:25 pm (UTC)Absolutely. I was sending out resumes all summer even though there was no way anyone was going to talk to me about a job 7 weeks in advance, because it gave me a little extra peace of mind to get some response. Do you ever have an irrational feeling of unemployability, as I do? It is helped only by responses to resume...
no subject
Date: 2005-07-30 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-30 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-30 08:22 pm (UTC)