Assume for our hypothetical we have a situation where you are faced with an unbeatable, seemingly unbeatable enemy, and you have tried two different approaches.
A leaderless, horizontal approach, and a direct democratic centralist style leadership with a actual figurehead and leader. Both of these approaches have failed. What is the third approach?
This hypothetical is unproductive in my eyes cause it’s too reductive and possibly misleading about the importance of Democratic centralism. For it to be of any use you would have to flesh out a connection between the cause of the failure with the Democratic centralism, and the horizontal approach too actually, so this is a quite a pointless exercise otherwise, it is more honest and productive to ask if you have to organize a resistance and anarchy and Democratic centralism weren’t options how would you organize said resistance. But then again I fail to see the benefit of this exercise in speculation, specially given how hard it is to speculate about it.
By the nature of your question I imagine you might have some concerns about Democratic centralism, bring them up debate them let’s go straight to the issueshe.
My concerns about democratic centralism are really simple. They kill anyone who tries to do it. That’s why Occupy Wall Street failed because it was horizontally integrated. There was no true leadership, so it was very easy to co-op. But at the same time, the Civil Rights Movement, and then later in the 70s, the Rainbow Coalition, they both fell apart because they just took out the leadership. So in my mind, we’ve tried having leaders, public leaders and faces to the movement, and they’ll just kill them. And we’ve tried having horizontally integrated movements, you know, the anarchist approach, and they’ve just co-opted them. So I’m at a loss as to what can be done directly. I would assume that any current party that exists is Fed-based, and there is some evidence of this that’s true. So we don’t even have a true vanguard party in this country. Ergo, I don’t know. I feel like I’m just beating my head at the wall. Also, it was like 4am when I made that post, so it might not even have been a good question.
That’s because you’re using as examples movements based in the capital of the imperial core, the US. People have quite higher living standards and in general the gap between poor and rich (until very recently) wasn’t that huge when compared to the Global South where you’d literally have villas or favelas next to super rich neighborhoods for decades. That among other reasons such as the biggest police State impede the development of a revolutionary movement.
Furthermore, your conception of democratic centralism is flawed. Having a leader is not democratic centralism, but rather a more complex approach where the old capitalist beaurocracy and military are erradicated and you have people that can lose their position at any time by vote. None of the movements you mentioned are representative of a Marxist Leninist, dialectical, or democratic centralist organization.
Do you think that there is potential for a proper vanguard party to be formed within the United States? Do you think that any of the current parties, PSL, FSRO, APL, do you think that they have the potentiality to become that vanguard party? I would say no to the latter. I think they’re all feds. I mean, it’s kind of an open secret. It’s not that I don’t think you can’t do good work at the lower levels within these orgs, but I don’t think that they’re the ones that are going to deliver us a revolution. I don’t think there’s any current party that will, which means a new party needs to be formed. You can’t just have one dude come out and be like, we’re forming a vanguard party, guys. That’s not how it works. I don’t know. This is literally all I think about all day.
I think it would have to be a combination of the two. You see, I’m a firm believer in a mass line approach wherein you recruit and uplift the most disenfranchised people in society, thereby building dual power. We should be less focused on storming the BlackRock headquarters and chaining ourselves to the door, and more focused on securing trans people healthcare. More focused on helping people get GEDs if they need a GED. More focused on bailing people out, even.
This is why I use the term anarcho-communist, because I’ve worked with various anarchist organizations at a micro level. Whether it’s the local organization that helps put free food fridges in poor neighborhoods, or FoodNotBombs. I think these are great starting points for building that dual power, but they’re decentralized. They’re anarchists. They don’t have leadership. That’s okay, because I think the best way to take this is to do a Hydra approach, wherein you’ve got your vanguard party, but all these other little organizations are ideologically aligned with the vanguard party. They’re not part of the vanguard party, per se. Distance and plausible deniability help with that. But, if you have every FoodNotBomb sect, every free fridge organization, working towards a unified goal, and maybe they’re doing it in their own way, but it’s that unified goal, that could be powerful. You have the vanguard party establish this unified goal, and then you would need to disseminate this unified goal through all channels.
So that means a vanguard party forms, a unified goal is put out, a YouTuber like SecondThought, 2 million subscribers, makes a video about it. In fact, you would need basically every content creator to come out in support of this, because that would immediately give the unified goal and the vanguard party legitimacy among the people.
So the question on my mind is, what is that unified goal? For me, to me once you’ve build your network of dual power, it’s 400 days to basically a meeting with all of the groups, sending delegates, whether it be indigenous tribes, whether it be your FoodNotBombs, orgs, what have you. Send a delegate to a meeting, and then a new sort of constitution is drafted, right? And then, you say, hey look, we’ve come together to represent the people, the working class. We’ve drafted a new constitution, a list of demands. You send that up to the current regime, and I think after that point, assuming that everyone has scaled up their mutual aid, scaled up their dual power building in that 400 days, and assuming that before you even make the announcement, you’ve built up a good amount of dual power and a good base, you have the people on your side, a good enough amount of them.
So it would be hard for the current regime to flat out reject these proposals, because if they do, then it shows they don’t represent the people, they no longer have the will of the people. The vanguard party does. And then from there, well, that’s when things start party rockin.
So the issue is that you are thinking a bit ahead, the vanguard only prosper when they meet the masses, the theory needs to be put in contact with the reality of who suffers, while no groups of Marxist thought get in contact with the masses and live with them and understand their issues together we will never connect with people in a deeper way, so when we put our theories to the practice we can form the building blocks to create a vanguard and a revolutionary party. The part that’s missing from the equation is to engage the masses that’s the crux of the issue learn with them build it together, the revolution is not made with leaders but with people, so we need good core ideals and for people to embrace them, and only the people can tell us how to get close to them, so from our theorizing offices we have only part of the puzzle we need to put it in practice. I’m not saying that I know how to do it but that’s the direction it needs to go, we need to include the most oppressed in the debate for they have a lot of knowledge about how the oppression works
That’s my philosophy with my brand. I know the brand, as a superstructure, is a capitalist idea. But I think the entire ideology of a brand can be detourned, as per the situationalists, to create that outreach to the masses, right? Especially in the gig economy era. If you’re an artist, if you’re a creator, if you’re someone of that profession, you don’t have a boss. You know, if you’re taking art commissions, or if you’re doing OnlyFans, or if you’re if you’re DoorDashing, can you form a union, really? Because you have no boss.
The people who are pro-capitalist will say, Well, it’s empowering. The gig economy is great. But as someone who is working as a 1099 contractor, doing IT work, and has been laid off, has no benefits, no outlook, I can tell you that it’s not empowering. It’s not very good. Essentially, the gig economy has sent us back a hundred years. No longer do we have a 40-hour work week and guaranteed benefits, guaranteed weekends, guaranteed breaks. Now we just have free reign. Do what you want. But at the same time, I see many brands who offer a sort of release valve for the dissatisfaction people have with our current system. I would say my target audience is probably the same people who would be into, like, FTP. But the problem is, these brands don’t actually say anything. They exist to promote rebellion for rebellion’s sake. And in that case, they exist to promote apathy for apathy’s sake. I mean, it’s in my bio. It’s really what I believe. And so I hope that if I can get a bunch of artists, a bunch of creatives, a bunch of people, even if they’re not explicitly socialist, together, that’s a start. That’s something.
I also think that we need to be building dual power. I don’t really care if we storm and chain ourselves to the Black Rock headquarters. What I care about is the fact that 25% of trans people in America are currently without health care that they used to have because of these bigoted bans. I care about amount of people who are homeless, who live in food deserts. I think any proper vanguard party needs to be addressing those issues. We need to be building systems and networks that can assist people in those regards.
I’m not saying that I think unions are a dead end, but I’m just saying that there is a whole expansive world of labor and working class people who the traditional tactics no longer work for. And that is a challenge that we’re going to have to overcome. I’m not saying I have the best solution, but I’m doing what I can. With the means that I’ve been given, that’s all we can do.
So there is a lot to unpack here. First of all a way out is possible, I have no doubt about it, when I think things are hopeless I tend to think about the Chinese revolution, and how FUCKING DREADFUL their conditions were and they still prevail, we have the truth on our side and that is no small thing. Second that’s why we need to be with the people, for every person that does well on DoorDash or OnlgyFans, there are a hundred that are doing that as a last resort and that are hanging by a thread. And I do think there is some potential for a Union movement, if not union in the classical sense, some unionlike organization, the important part is to listen to the people in that condition, we are taken by generalized notions, that is what is amplified, the: Gig economy is awesome thing, but if you look at hard data, things are fucked, for most everyone, and those people, in the absence of a true class struggle revolutionary movement, they are often co-opted by pseudo revolutionary movements like fascism. That is why we need to be among the people with the people and listen to their struggles see the shape of their suffering, and fit our revolutionary ideas to their reality, tell it in their language, make them part of the talk. To think that the hegemonic discourse is lost, is both untrue and counter productive, we do not have the answers, and sometimes we not even got the questions right, we need to be with the people of our own nations, to see what are the questions for their reality that need answering, and show them that the only way to truly answer that, is together and fighting for everyone. Cause no scapegoat enemy, no temporary measure no individual success is gonna change anything, is only as a collective that things work. Our struggle is complicated and sometimes it the way forward is not clear until we get more experience, but the way to do it is trying, learn with the past and move to the future, we will triumph, of that I have no doubt, it’s only a matter of building the how and the when.
