A-Infos (en) NEA #6 - The Demise of Love & Rage: What Happened? - by WEB, Open City Collective (NEFAC-NYC)

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The following article is a revised version of an unpublished paper 
originally written in November 1998. Although two of the three 
groups mentioned are now defunct, the issues raised in the Love 
and Rage factional struggle are still quite relevant to the anarchist 
movement today.

The Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation dissolved 
into two groups at a brief final conference in May 1998. One group 
became Fire by Night; it also dissolved sometime later. The other 
group became the nucleus of The Utopian anarchist journal, which 
continues to publish. The purpose of this article is to draw out the 
lessons from the successes and failures of Love and Rage (L&R) 
during its nine years of existence.

Despite its ultimate dissolution, Love and Rage did have 
successes. The first is that it lasted as long as it did. Dozens of 
other anarchist organizations, some rather large, had much shorter 
lifespans. Second, L&R established a legitimate pole within the 
anarchist movement for supporting national liberation struggles. 
On this question L&R caused a lot of controversy in a movement 
which had been traditionally hostile or abstentionist. Third, Love 
and Rage re-established a pole within the movement for 
participating in mass struggles and raising revolutionary politics. 
This was in contrast to strategies which were popular at that time 
like building "Temporary Autonomous Zones". Finally, L&R also 
re-established the idea of building an international anarchist 
organization, as opposed to the cultural and localistic orientations 
of many groups of the 1980's. Here again L&R caused a lot of 
controversy, with its opponents labeling the group 'crypto-Leninist' 
and worse.

The members of Love and Rage agreed on the points listed above. 
But this agreement obscured deep differences. These differences 
were reflected in the fact that in its entire existence, Love and 
Rage never drafted a comprehensive statement of aims and 
principles.

The failures of Love and Rage were rooted in these differences. The 
latter in fact represented a split between those who wanted to 
address the problems of anarchism from within anarchism and 
those who wanted to adopt the methods and outlook of 
authoritarian ideologies; in particular, Marxism and Maoism. 
Stripping away the 'isms', the split in L&R also represents the 
difference between those who proceed from a vision of liberating 
humanity through its self-organization, and those who would 
re-enslave it in the name of freedom by building themselves into a 
'scientific' and 'revolutionary' elite.

It is this difference, between authoritarian Marxism, Maoism and 
Social Democracy on the one hand, and the self-organization of 
people into a self-governing society on the other, that ran through 
every aspect of the internal struggle in Love and Rage. The 
questions in that debate revolved around the nature of capitalism 
and its dynamics, the nature of the authoritarian oppression we 
face, and the attitudes we should take toward the state and 
reformism. They also revolved around national liberation, racism, 
authoritarian Left ideologies and organizing methods. And finally, 
it should be said that the debate over these topics was often murky 
and tangential because of a disdain for theory which ran through 
much of the membership of L&R. I shall take up each topic in turn.

NATURE OF CAPITALISM

Capitalism is the rule of capital and its agents over those who do 
the actual work to produce its wealth. Traditionally it has been 
organized through markets: Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' 
allocated the goods and services produced (and made the holders 
of capital wealthy). However, the allocation of the social product 
also could be, and has been, organized by the state. This difference 
is unimportant as to the nature of the system: a small number of 
people still control the means of production while the vast 
majority, who have no power, do the work.

Love and Rage had a tendency to identify capitalism with market 
capitalism. It did this by equating capitalism with 'neo-liberalism'. 
L&R newspaper ran numerous critiques of the latter. An article in 
the internal bulletin flatly defined neo-liberalism as modern 
capitalism. 'Neo-liberalism', however, is nothing more than 
old-fashioned market capitalism, an idea which regained popularity 
among capitalists as their statist economies stagnated in the 
1970's. All of L&R's articles described how neo-liberal 
privatization and cutbacks in social services have created twin 
poles of misery for many and wealth for a few all over the world. 
That is precisely what markets do.

The view that the ills of capitalism are represented by the market 
has also been the view of Marxists and social democrats for 
decades. Their remedy of state "planning" and control has been 
their program to gain power for just as long. These measures might 
sand off some rough edges from capitalism, even change its form, 
but they do not alter its substance. The ultimate expression of this 
program is state capitalism, in which the government owns all the 
means of production.

CAPITALIST DYNAMICS

State capitalism is a 20th century phenomenon. It has arisen in a 
period of capitalist decay. Prior to this capitalism had gone through 
a long epoch of expansion in which it raised the productive forces 
and gave rise to democratic institutions, at least for a few in 
Europe and North America. During this period capitalism 
expanded by subjugating the non-capitalist sectors outside Europe 
and the Europeanized parts of the Western Hemisphere.

By approximately the turn of the 20th century, however, capitalism 
had the entire world divided up, and for the first time a new 
dynamic became dominant. Now sectors of the capitalist world 
could expand only at the expense of other sectors. This is not to say 
that capitalism didn't continue growing by increasing the rate of 
exploitation of its workers, as it had done before. What was new 
was that it had no non-capitalist worlds to conquer. Thus, in the 
20th century capitalist wars became world wars; and for those 
periods when there was no war, capitalism for the first time 
brought a permanent war economy with nuclear weapons. This 
continues to waste vast resources today. And instead of democracy 
in the Europeanized sectors, capitalism in the 20th century brought 
fascism, state capitalism, and state-planned genocide. The 
non-Europeanized sectors fared even worse.

This is also not to say that capitalism cannot ever raise the 
productive forces and fulfill its democratic promises. What it does 
mean is that capitalism can only do this on a limited and episodic 
scale. For example, the market capitalist expansion of industry and 
democratic institutions outside Western Europe and North 
America in the last decade comes on the heels of the collapse of 
the state capitalist sector.

The observation that capitalism has gone through periods of 
expansion and decay caused controversy before Love and Rage 
broke up. Wayne Price, a member of the future Utopian nucleus, 
originally outlined the two epochs briefly in a response to a 
muddled article in the L&R internal bulletin by Chris Day ('Stakes 
is High'). Day was perhaps the principal theoretician and 
maneuverer of the future Fire by Nighters. He jumped on this idea 
in an internal bulletin article, 'Neither Trotsky nor Mao'. Day tried 
to paint Price as a Marxist: that for him to hold the idea that 
capitalism has epochs necessarily meant that he also had to 
believe the Marxist notion that all of human history is driven by 
class struggles; and that the capitalist class had a progressive 
mission in its time to raise the productive forces and push forward 
the idea of human freedom.

Day's argument, however, is false. Tracing the rise and fall of a 
social system does not make one a Marxist. Nor does it mean that 
capitalism had a 'mission' or played a progressive role in human 
history. No matter what its positive accomplishments, a system 
which was founded on slavery in the West and serfdom in the East 
cannot necessarily be called 'progressive'.

Moreover, the denial of an epoch of decay also characterizes Social 
Democracy. That is, if the social democrats are to sell their 
program of reform, they must also convince people that the reforms 
will last. Such a vision is increasingly illusory in this age when even 
U.S. Social Security, civil service protections, and the right to see a 
lawyer are under attack.

NATURE OF THE AUTHORITARIAN SYSTEM

For anarchists oppression comes from a single, multifaceted 
authoritarian system. Racism, sexism, class, agism and 
ethnocentrism, oppression by the state, and the destruction of 
nature are all inextricably tangled together. This does not mean, 
however, that they are conceptually indistinct. Nor does it mean 
that all the cracks in the system are the same size. But the idea of 
a single authoritarian system is quite different from Marxism, 
which views the class struggle as the primary one which also is the 
driving force of human history.

It is also quite different from that of Chris Day. Again replying to 
Wayne Price, he argued in the L&R internal bulletin ('More Than 
Apparent Privileges') that the different subsystems of oppression 
had their own 'semi-autonomous character and logic'. He conceded 
that they were related, but made it clear that his starting point was 
their independence.

This is also not a new idea for Day. It lay behind the argument in 
his 1994 'Reprole Document', which held that Love and Rage 
should abandon its outlook of speaking on behalf of all humanity 
and become instead an organization representing 
're-proletarianized youth'. That is, L&R should only base itself on 
the oppression falling on this narrow and overwhelmingly white 
group.

The idea that oppressions are separate is also characteristic of 
social democrats and Stalinists. They argue that 'socialism' can 
only be won in distinct stages. First, there must be a 
bourgeois-democratic (or 'advanced democracy') stage, and only 
later (that is, never) a revolutionary and socialist leap. The 
separation of oppressions is also a hallmark of nationalists. Many 
will hold, for example, that Black people can win their freedom 
while capitalism still stands. Or even that they can win their 
liberation through capitalism. The conception is ready-made for 
those who equate 'revolution' with maneuvering themselves into 
state power.

THE STATE AND REFORM

The idea of separate oppressions emerges most clearly in the 
future Fire by Nighters' attitude toward the state. For anarchists 
the oppression of the state is tied up in the whole tangle of racist, 
sexist and class chains which constitute the modern authoritarian 
system.

But if one holds to the idea of distinct oppressions, then the state 
becomes an independent annoyance. For example, Day argued in 
his 'Reprole Document' that the basic civil rights of women and gay 
and lesbian people can be won under capitalism. Aside from being 
nonsense in an epoch of decay, it implies that the state's 
'semi-autonomous' oppression might somehow stand aside while 
women and gays and lesbians achieved their liberation. It is 
unknown what Day was thinking when he wrote this, but the idea 
that the modern authoritarian state would tolerate the breakup of 
the enforced nuclear family, free access to contraception and 
abortion, full and open sexuality for all, and equal pay for all is 
something that even most liberals wouldn't assert.

Moreover, if capitalism is equated with 'neo-liberalism' - that is, 
market capitalism - then the state may not be oppressive at all! 
That is the view of social democrats and liberals, who have argued 
for decades that 'planning' and government regulation can soften 
the doleful effects of markets gone wild. (This is true to some 
extent, but only at a cost of causing still other and bigger problems; 
nor will government regulation eliminate the problems of capitalist 
markets altogether, let alone bring about human freedom). Future 
FbNer Brad Sigel brought this out most clearly when he wrote in 
'My Thoughts on the Debates in Love & Rage'.

And more so than other anarchists, Love & Rage members 
acknowledged that there are serious deficiencies in anarchist ideas 
on how to run a complex society like ours without having some sort 
of bureaucratic structures that are to some degree separated from 
or alienated from the people as a whole.

Sigel's statement represents an elitist point of view. Certainly 
anarchists (and everybody else) will face enormous problems in 
making a post-revolutionary society function. But Sigel -- together 
with the others who went on to form Fire by Night -- did not start 
from the point of promoting the self-organization of people. He 
concedes the 'necessity' of having 'alienated' and 'bureaucratic' 
structures from the beginning.

Day went one step further. In 'The Historical Failure of 
Anarchism', he described a revolution which occurred in one 
country and still faces the world market. In such a situation, Day 
argued that the 'replacement of the old state apparatus with a new 
ostensibly revolutionary state is necessary' to secure the 
'accomplishments' of his vision of a revolution (emphasis added). 
'Worse', Day elaborated, 'the administrative apparatus of the 
revolutionary regime, whether it is called a 'workers state' or a 
'federation of free collectives' is the body that must do the 
exploiting'.

Certainly an anarchist revolution in one country would face the 
same world market which Day described. But the self-organized 
people deciding for themselves to make sacrifices is an animal of a 
wholly different species.

Moreover, as an addendum to his 'Historical Failure of Anarchism', 
Day also called for the creation of a regular 'revolutionary army' 
implicitly modeled on the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The 
PLA, of course, had nothing to do with carrying out a directly 
democratic revolution in China, but instead was the military 
instrument establishing state capitalism.

In a revolutionary situation the capitalists and their allies will 
promise anything in order to hang on to power. The pressures on 
anarchists will be very great. In 1936 Spain, for example, the 
capitalist People's Front promised to free the thousands of 
anarchist prisoners who rotted in the old regime's jails. It is 
precisely at such moments that anarchists must have supreme 
confidence in the self-organization and power of the people and not 
take responsibility for the repressive measures that the state and 
the reformists inevitably will carry out.

Day gave a clear indication of where he and his co-thinkers will go 
when he wrote about the Spanish Revolution. He devoted hundreds 
of words over three separate articles to criticizing the Spanish 
anarchists for failing to build an army like the PLA. But 
coordinating the revolutionary militias was only a piece of the 
Spanish anarchists' overall lack of a revolutionary strategy. The 
central failure in that non-strategy was that in the midst of the 
workers and peasants seizing the land and the factories and 
forming their own militias to fight the fascists, the anarchists 
joined the government. On this point Day is silent.

For Love and Rage this question of reform vs. revolution, the state 
vs. the people, played itself out during the Detroit newspaper 
strike. In the summer of 1996 hundreds of strikers and their 
supporters fought cops, scabs and gun thugs in battles to shut down 
the papers. The union bureaucracy, naturally, was uncomfortable 
about this, preferring to rely for support on the courts, the National 
Labor Relations Board, and the Democratic Party. In this context 
Detroit Love and Rage issued a leaflet which, among other things, 
called for a general strike in Detroit to defend the newspaper 
strikers. Like the union bureaucrats, the future Fire by Nighters 
didn't like this leaflet. They tried to keep it from being reprinted 
in L&R newspaper, calling it 'sectarian', despite the fact that mass 
meetings of hundreds of strikers and supporters in Detroit had 
already voted for the same thing. As the song goes, 'Which Side 
Are You On?'

NATIONAL LIBERATION

National liberation is not only formal political independence from 
imperialism, but also economic independence. Carried out 
conscientiously, national liberation would raise the productive 
forces in the country, free the peasantry, and promote a flowering 
of democratic institutions. This is something which a traditional 
market capitalist class, tied as it is to international imperialism, is 
incapable of doing. Even in South Africa, which already had 
well-developed productive forces, the government, which was born 
out of a long struggle against imperialism and racism, has already 
junked even the reform program of its own Freedom Charter.

Most Marxist-Leninists would agree with this analysis. They hold 
that only the working class can carry through a program of national 
liberation. In particular, they aver that only their Marxist-Leninist 
party claiming to represent the working class can do the job.

This also is false. A Marxist-Leninist revolution may be able to win 
national independence and raise the productive forces, but no one 
is free. What the Marxist-Leninists really establish is a state 
capitalist regime in which the new ruling class rearranges its 
bargain with the people. Instead of the rule of the market and 
formal democracy, instead of wealth for a few and misery for the 
many, the state capitalists contract for a little less wealth (but no 
less, and probably more, power) for the few, a little less misery for 
the masses, and no freedom whatsoever.

This is not to say that anarchists should not support national 
liberation. As stated, L&R's support for such struggles represented 
a real advance in the anarchist movement. Only if oppressed 
peoples can throw off their imperialist bindings can they see 
clearly that they need to go on and do away with their own 
home-grown rulers, too.

But it came as a surprise when Marxist-Leninist ideas bubbled up 
like flatulence inside Love and Rage. Writing in 'Stakes is High' 
and 'The Historical Failure of Anarchism', Day went to great 
lengths to 'prove' that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 'of necessity' 
had to be state capitalist. That is, because of the economic 
backwardness of China, the huge numbers of peasants, the tiny size 
and 'immaturity' of the working class (the same class which carried 
out several years of general strikes and organized its own defense 
squads twenty years earlier), the Chinese Revolution had to stop at 
the capitalist stage. Or carrying the logic one step further: the 
Chinese Communist Party and People's Liberation Army had to 
stop the revolution at the state capitalist stage.

RACISM

>From the beginning Love and Rage was influenced by an analysis of 
racism and white supremacy based on the theory of white skin 
privilege. Noel Ignatiev, one of the originators of the theory, even 
joined the organization for a brief period in 1994. The final issue of 
L&R newspaper cites differences around the theory as one of the 
central reasons for the breakup of the group. In Day's words:

"Briefly stated, that analysis holds that a cornerstone of white 
supremacy (and therefore the whole edifice of authoritarian social 
relations) in the U.S. and elsewhere is the system of white racial 
privileges that gives to even the poorest or most oppressed white 
people certain concrete benefits or preferential treatment that tie 
them to the system as a whole." ('Thoughts on Multi-Racial 
Organization')

On its face there is nothing wrong with the statement. The present 
authoritarian system really does give all European-descended 
people certain real privileges, given the structure of the system as 
a whole. But the analysis is essentially ahistorical. Nowhere in any 
of the L&R writings on white skin privilege is there even a hint 
that the entire authoritarian system goes through periods of 
breakdown crises in which the privileges of ordinary white people 
are threatened also. The logic of this static analysis reached a 
ludicrous low point just before L&R disintegrated. At that time 
future FbN folks proposed that the standard of living of the white 
workers in the imperialist countries would have to be lowered 'big 
time'. That is, not only do the corporate bosses want to suck you 
workers dry -- we do too! And nowhere do they mention their 
attitude toward the standard of living of the enormous middle class 
of the imperialist countries.

When the system does break down, white workers can (but 
certainly not always) realize that their privileges are indeed 
insignificant. They can join with everybody else in building a united 
struggle for everyone's benefit. This happened in the '30's with the 
building of the CIO -- a mass, mixed organization -- and earlier with 
the United Mine Workers and the IWW. That those organizations 
did not directly confront racism as a system in itself did not help 
the struggle against it. The CIO's slogan was, in effect, 'Black and 
White, Unite and Fight!', and it sanctioned segregated locals in 
some of its unions. The IWW 'made no special demands'. The point 
here, however, is that the privileges of white workers are both real 
and insignificant when considered against the dynamics of the 
entire authoritarian system. And when laid out against the 
necessary alternative of a revolutionary, cooperative and 
democratic system, those privileges are insignificant indeed.

One further point: the future FbNers never considered that while 
all people of European descent may get certain privileges from the 
present system, that white workers are worse off than they would 
be without racism. If white workers can get the credit and buy the 
house in the neighborhood that Black people are denied, they can 
most certainly get more credit, and a better house in a better 
neighborhood, without the existence of racism. Many scores of 
years ago thousands of white workers and farmers in the U.S. 
opposed slavery in part because it was a threat to their own 
standard of living. There was a reason for that.

Day and others defend the theory of white skin privilege as central 
to building a multi- racial organization. In fact, if anything, it is an 
impediment to building such a group. This is not due to the fact 
that white people in the present system don't have the privileges 
that Day describes. Rather, it's the point of view of the theory, that 
it's addressed only to white people; it has nothing to say to anyone 
else.

What it says to white people desiring to build a multi-racial 
organization is that before you do anything else, you must first 
acknowledge your privileges and renounce them. OK, then what? 
Clearly, it implies that the next step is to try to get other white 
people to do the same.

There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but it doesn't go very far. 
As stated, it says nothing to anybody who isn't white. And carried 
to its logical conclusion, you get existential acts of individual 
resistance to white supremacy; or the 'whites organize only in the 
white community (whatever that is)' line which Prairie Fire used to 
advocate. Or it says nothing concrete at all. At the January 1995 
demonstration to free Mumia Abu-Jamal in Harrisburg, a couple of 
people brought by L&R carried signs reading "Abolish the White 
Race!' Fine sentiment, but almost no one understood it.

There is also an unintentional elitism in the logic of the theory. As 
Love and Rage disintegrated one of the foremost advocates of the 
theory proposed that members of the organization 'not interfere'; 
that is, not publicly comment on, issues within the Black 
community. But members of the community know that some of us 
who were in L&R in fact do have opinions about all kinds of things 
that interest them. If we remained silent, they would have rightly 
thought that either we were hiding something or that we 
considered them too ignorant to discuss such issues with them. Are 
Black people incapable of considering our views together with 
those of other forces in the community?

AUTHORITARIAN LEFT IDEOLOGIES

Both sides in the debate admitted that anarchism had problems 
with its theory and practice. But the group which became the 
nucleus of the Utopian believed that the problems could be solved 
within the framework of anarchism. The other side thought 
otherwise. They reached into Marxism, Leninism and Maoism for 
answers, and the problems started there.

Marxism is inherently authoritarian. It is a total 
philosophical-social-political-economic-historical system of 
thought. For Marxism, in what it calls 'science', the class struggle 
has been the driving force of human history. In its view, the 
historical task of history's latest phase, capitalism, has been to 
increase the productive forces and bring forth the idea of 
democracy. But since capitalism also is a class system, the working 
class would inevitably overthrow it and establish its own state, the 
dictatorship of the proletariat. The leaders of this state; that is, in 
modern times, the Leninist party, would rule armed with their 
supposedly superior scientific knowledge in the name of the 
workers. It is both this state-rule and the rulers' view that they 
embody the next stage of human history which makes Marxism 
authoritarian.

On the other side, some future FbNers agreed that Marxism is 
authoritarian. However, some were not sure, and others declared 
themselves in fact to be Marxists. Most thought the whole question 
to be irrelevant, but more on that later.

This jumble is not surprising because, despite Day's protestations, 
his writing on the subject itself is a model of mud. Day's point of 
view is clearly is outside anarchism. For example, in 'Stakes is 
High' he wrote that he is interested in 'infusing the anarchist 
movement with something like the standards of rigorous 
investigation and argument that exist fairly broadly within 
Marxism'. And later, 'Marxism is simply unrivaled in the depth and 
variety of critical analysis it has produced'. Finally, Day's view that 
the Chinese Revolution 'of necessity' had to be capitalist also 
reflects not an anarchist view of history, but a Marxist 
historical-deterministic one, and a crockeryheaded one at that.

In the European late Middle Ages those who argued that the earth 
was the center of the universe were confronted with an increasing 
array of evidence undermining their belief. In particular, those who 
held that the sun was the center of the solar system could better 
explain anomalies in the orbits of the planets and moons. But not 
to give up, the earth-centrists countered that what was really 
happening was that these heavenly bodies' orbits were going 
through 'epicycles' and even 'epicycles within epicycles'.

While the ideology of Marxism has a penetrating critique of the 
development of capitalism, it is wholly unable to come to grips 
with those countries in which societies have been established in its 
name. The anarchist critique of these state capitalist regimes is far 
more lucid than what Marxism has produced. For example, 
Trotskyism has for decades been driven by fights over which 
countries represented 'degenerated', 'deformed' or 'healthy' 
workers' states. Stalinism and Maoism have had years of struggles 
over 'revisionism' and 'capitalist roaders'. All of these epicycles 
obscure the real picture: in none of these societies do the organized 
people have power; in all of them the state has established an 
authoritarian capitalism under its control. (In many of the states 
there weren't even revolutions; the Red Army marched in 
establishing a 'workers' state' without the workers).

Anarchist theory too has problems. Its traditional wooden attitude 
toward national liberation has already been mentioned. Anarchism 
also has difficulty analyzing the development of capitalism (the 
'epoch question'). And like the social democrats, Stalinists and 
ossified Trotskyists, anarchism also has problems mapping a way 
between its minimum and maximum programs. Marxism doesn't 
distinguish itself on these questions, either. Therefore, it is the 
turn of anarchism to establish a framework within which to analyze 
these questions.

ORGANIZING METHODS

Different members of the FbN faction each at different times 
advocated 'mass-line' organizing methods. Derived from Maoism, 
'mass-line' attempts to mobilize large numbers of people behind 
the leadership of an authoritarian vanguard party. While at the 
time all the future FbNers disclaimed vanguardism, this is no 
longer the case. Then and now the point of view which comes 
through their mass-line articles is one of how can people who 
consider themselves revolutionaries orient themselves to get 
masses of people to follow them?

By itself this sounds innocuous enough. We are, after all, 
revolutionaries. We want to build as big a base as possible among 
people for our revolutionary democratic ideas. So naturally we 
should build and participate in the mass struggle of the people. But 
what we have to remember always is that our ideas come first.

There is nothing vanguardist or elitist about this. Since the 
consciousness of the majority of the people in motion at this time 
is reformist, we constitute a small minority telling the truth as 
best we know it about the nature of the system and how to defend 
against it. In meetings we will lose on a lot of votes. Still, we 
patiently explain and continue to participate.

'Mass-line', however, is a different horse altogether. It is elitist in 
the sense that it instructs revolutionaries to hide parts of their 
program in order to lead (presumably) a larger number of people on 
a reformist basis, because that's the level of present-day 
consciousness. The fact that one FbNer once told me that Mao 
always was out front in advocating the dictatorship of the 
proletariat changes nothing. Aside that I don't believe that it's 
true, even if it were, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' really 
hides the fact that the real dictatorship is and always has been that 
of the Chinese Communist Party.

Day implicitly admits this deception in his 'Multi-Racial 
Organization' article when he wrote that 'the development of 
people's ability to think and act for themselves is more important 
than the immediate triumph of our particular line on this or that 
question'. This sounds very nice and democratic, but does it really 
mean that 'our line' can be an obstacle to the development of 
peoples' ability to think and act for themselves? There should be 
no problem here: anarchists' 'line' should always foster the 
development of self-organization.

My own view of 'mass-line' is that it is essentially the old 
social-democratic minimum program of what is feasible within the 
system (not what is necessary for the defense of working class 
people). This in turn is tied to the Leninist notion of the vanguard 
party being the leadership of the masses. Further, the Maoist 
groups also have, on paper at least, the old social-democratic 
maximum program -- socialism, or the dictatorship of the 
proletariat (what Mao was supposedly upfront about). It is the lack 
of a connection between the minimum and maximum, except 
through the organizational form of the Maoist party itself, which 
has resulted in their veering - like China -between wooden 
sectarianism and outright reformism.

Rather than needing 'mass-line' to mobilize the masses, people will 
mobilize themselves for their own defense as the system breaks 
down and attacks them. At this stage they will likely follow 
reformist (or worse) leaderships because this is where their 
consciousness is. What anarchists need to do is participate in and 
build the defense while patiently explaining our program. That 
program must bridge the gap between the minimum and maximum 
programs. I believe it needs to be an anarchist transitional 
program.

THEORY

While people have pointed to anarchism's theoretical weaknesses, 
another serious problem exists in the anarchist movement, as it 
did in Love and Rage. This is a disdain for theory itself. In Love 
and Rage each side had a small core of people who wrote and 
argued about things. In the middle were a much larger number who 
didn't see the point of it at all. This was also true in 1994 when Day 
wrote his 'Reprole Document' and proposed to change the name of 
the organization. Although these were confused pieces beginning 
the move away from anarchism, only two people wrote replies

I believe anarchism's aversion to theory, however, is tied up with 
its positive traits. The first of these is direct action and activism in 
general. Anarchists frequently are on the front lines of struggles 
against authority. Even the more passive anarchists, who may 
prefer to build Temporary Autonomous Zones and such, are more 
concerned with 'getting the work done' than with discussing theory. 
The problem, which really is a good problem to have, is too much 
desire to do something without enough thought about where it's 
going.

Second is a fixation on 'process' to the impediment of discussing 
the underlying issues. But this also reflects something else positive 
about anarchism. In particular, and unlike the historical 
deterministic Marxists, anarchists see a direct relation between 
means and ends. Both process and the underlying issues are 
important.

If anarchism is weak on theory, the answer is not to jump into the 
seemingly inviting theoretical arms of Marxism. Rather it's to 
build up the theoretical side of anarchism. Both theory and 
practice are necessary.

================

The Northeastern Anarchist is the English-language theoretical 
magazine of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists 
(NEFAC), covering class struggle anarchist theory, history, 
strategy, debate and analysis in an effort to further develop 
anarcho-communist ideas and practice.

ORDERING INFORMATION:

Current issue is $5ppd ($6 international) per copy, back issues are 
$2ppd ($3 international) per copy. Subscriptions are $15ppd for 
four issues ($18 international). For distribution, bundle orders are 
$3 per copy for three or more copies, and $2.50 per copy for ten or 
more.

Checks or money orders can be made out to "Northeastern 
Anarchist" and sent to:

Northeastern Anarchist PO Box 230685 Boston, MA 02123, USA 
northeastern_anarchist@yahoo.com

Link: http://www.nefac.net

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