A World of Work #11

Revolutionary organising as a form of work

It’s always political

Questions of how to organise are always political questions. There can be a tendency amongst much of the movement to talk about organising as though it were a technical issue which can be solved by training each other in ‘best practices’. Whilst it is true that learning how to do things - and how to do them well - is a vital part of any serious revolutionary practice, the tendency to reduce ‘good organising’ to a technical problem reflects the rise of managerial thought within contemporary capitalist society rather than any kind of supposedly ‘clear-headed common sense’ or new left pragmatism.

Managerial thought is the kind of approach where an abstract ‘plan of action’ is constructed and proposed to a wider group of ‘workers’ who are then blamed for its failure when the plan doesn’t work. Comrades working in what we might loosely call ‘intellectual labour’ (ie: in offices) often fail to recognise quite how habituated they might have become to managerial practices that are so endemic as to be almost second nature. It’s therefore important to remember the key principle that questions of how we organise are always political questions, never simply technical or practical.

The potential of a positive form of organising work

Whilst it is our revolutionary ideals and dreams that might motivate us to get involved in revolutionary organisations, it is often also our desire to not be isolated or alone and to understand the world around us. A revolutionary organisation offers a community and a set of practices, a set of shared ideas and shared actions that work in so far as they enable its members to feel value in what they do.

A comrade may leave a group because they find themselves in political disagreement with it, but more often than not a comrade leaves because they no longer ‘know what they’re doing there’. The habit of attending regular meetings, doing or saying things a particular way, with people who become familiar - and with that familiarity bring irritation as well as joy - eventually collapses and a break will be made. The organisation remains, the comrade moves on and it feels closer to the end of a failed relationship than a political decision. In itself this feeling reveals the large degree of unconscious dynamics at play rather than any clear rational disagreement.

At the heart of this dynamic is a tension between levels of activity. On the everyday level there are ‘things to be done’. However the motivation for doing those things lies at another level, a much vaguer and more abstract ‘need for things to change’. The tension is between the way we use ‘things’ in these two sentences.

On the one hand the ‘things that need to be done’ refer to quite mundane and sometimes quite boring - or challenging - tasks such as talking to someone you don’t know, catching up on a group chat online, writing a leaflet or short text about a campaign, attending a demo or meeting, filling in a form or chasing up a payment. These tasks look a lot like office work.

On the other hand the ‘need for things to change’ that is the primary motivational force refers to large scale structural problems that seem only loosely connected to our own lives, in a world populated by ‘actors’ we watch - those with names and media presences and roles within institutions of power. Rarely is the revolutionary organisation an institution with power and so rarely is the role of being a member enough to connect the big dreams with the everyday tasks.

One way of beginning to deal with - not abolish - this tension is by recognising that political organising is a form of work. It’s not a hobby, not a game - nor is it, in practice, always joyful or fulfilling. Like any work it has the potential to be alienating, not least because what might be thought of as the product of the work (‘the revolution’) is not in our hands.

Whilst recognising political organising as work might remind us of the difficulties, it also points to the important political content of the activity. As communists and anarchists we not only have to think about power, domination and confrontation with the existing capitalist system, we also have to think about how to nurture the potential of a positive form of organising work. Learning how to work together, learning how to become a collective rather than an individual, must be thought of as itself a key element in revolutionary organising.

It might seem easier when you have a task

Let’s make a simple distinction between two ways of working as a revolutionary. In the first way of doing things, we begin by finding people we agree with and then we find something to do together. In the second way of doing things we find something we want to do and then we find the people who we do this with.

The first way will demand a shared agreement, to some degree or another, and people will leave or be excluded if they don’t abide by a set of explicit and implicit statements about the world - it often takes the form of people saying something like ‘we believe, etc etc’. This is still, perhaps, the dominant form of radical political organising for revolutionary organisations - programs and positions and opinions on everything in the news cycle, and occasionally in the culture cycle.

The second way of doing things is more common to campaigns, coalitions and task based politics. Here the task orientates everything. You find people talking about what ‘we need to do, etc etc’ and disagreement is often located here, in what people can agree ‘we need to do’. Generally speaking it’s much easier when you have a task for a couple of reasons - firstly, you’re only going to be working with the others in the campaign for a relatively short time, even if that’s measured in months, and secondly the conversations and disagreements seem to matter because they are tied to actions in the here and now. They deal with the ‘things that need to be done’.

The former can become a ghetto or echo chamber, the latter a movement without history or a capacity to learn and develop from previous mistakes and successes.

The role of working class institutions like the unions and political parties was, in large part, a pragmatic response to dealing with exactly this kind of tension between ghettoisation and sustainability. The general strategy of the institution has been to minimise the level of agreement needed in order to keep itself open to the wider working class and maximise the pragmatic everyday tasks that keep things moving within the sector they organise in.

This worked particularly well when the role of those institutions could be integrated, to some extent, within the state form. The rejection of such integration, or at least the rejection of the broad consensus that such integration was necessary, was one of the key features of neoliberalism. In the years that followed, the institutions of the working class have adapted various strategies to deal with no longer being a welcome partner in the state. None of those strategies, however, embrace the revolutionary overthrow of the state form, capitalist or otherwise. No answers to be found here.

Cultures of work

One of the most important shifts is to begin to think of a different understanding of work and move away from the idea that work is about a product or task. It’s not. The real reason that shorter working weeks aren’t common is not to do with work necessities but political necessities.

Work is a form of disciplinary practice within capitalism, whilst at the same time being a site of the production of value¹. Work is a kind of moral imperative, a way of forming subjects as good or bad. Our society does an awful lot of work that is completely unnecessary whilst failing at obvious tasks that need more people to help out. We live in a culture of fucked up work and so it’s no surprise that we find it hard to grapple with a positive sense of work. Work sucks because it’s bullshit - and even when we believe it’s not, that belief is fragile, vague and often delusional.

Work sucks because capitalist societies aren’t simply about the production of surplus value. Capitalism begins only when the ‘worker’ has been brought into the world, split off from their means of living, isolated from their environment as a wage slave. The ‘primitive accumulation’ of capitalism included the creation of the very category of ‘worker’, so work sucks in capitalism. But work in the broader, philosophical sense…activity, labour, doing things, transforming things…this is a human practice that is not confined to the capitalist mode of production and is a practice that will almost certainly continue as long as the human species exists.

Work is better understood as a culture of practice. This should begin to be the primary way we understand the work of revolutionary organising. Not as a task to be fulfilled or a mission to maintain, but rather as a culture of practice. Central to a culture is the community that sustains, reproduces and develops it. Culture is both vague and specific. We know it when we feel it. Welcoming, warm, supportive, experimental, open, exciting … or dull, methodical, regulated, restrictive, unchanging and oppressive. Cultures are the emergent forms of connections that are allowed or blocked.

The kind of culture that revolutionary organising needs is one that must negotiate the key tension between autonomy and collectivisation.

This is itself a huge difficulty precisely because none of us know what this really feels like. We can intellectually articulate it perhaps, we might even be able to artistically imagine it². The problem is that ideas without feelings are abstract and empty. The implicit knowledge (‘know how’) that underpins human activity far outweighs and determines a practice, over and above any professed ideals or goals. This, in many ways, was the point made by feminists within the revolutionary movement in the seventies. It was no good saying you were in favour of womens liberation if you acted as though women should be sexualised playthings of men or given priority in reproductive tasks defined as womens work. If you never noticed the sink full of dishes then your feminism was little more than a ploy, a social manipulation, unconscious or otherwise.

So the question must be, where is the implicit knowledge of being autonomous whilst also being collective? Where do we learn how to feel our way through this tension between doing our own thing and doing things together?

Abstract calls to ‘unite’ are too often used as a tactic of avoiding the actual work involved in bringing together the bodies that we are to produce the power of collectivity. Occasionally we might glimpse the power of collective bodies, on demonstrations when we lock arms for example, or dancing together towards a line of cops. We can also feel the collective body in a mass event like football or a festival. Yet the collective here is precisely this, the mass. We feel the weight of the collective, but little of its flows.

The reality, perhaps, is that for a large majority of people the ground of their feeling of a collective body is something like the familial unit. The idea of autonomy can also play a role here, in the form of people being encouraged to be or become themselves. Rarely does this work well however, and often the specifics of a persons particular experience bleeds into later work they will do in collectives. These hangovers from family experiences often lay down feeling memories that can play out all too easily in collective work.

There are other spaces where we encounter collectives but primary amongst them is, of course, our work spaces. This should tell us something important as the culture of work is plainly a culture, in many ways, of the enemy of the revolutionary. The whole concept of ‘work culture’ is code for ‘how to get the fucking workers to work harder and do as they’re told’. In other words, work culture is fundamentally disciplinary.

So the question arises of what should the culture of the collective work of revolutionary organisation look and feel like? One broad lesson is that there must be a reckoning with this sense of feeling, with how it feels to do the work as and in a collective. If the work is only ever a chore, a burden, a compulsion or a sacrifice then something seriously wrong is at play. This is not to say revolutionary organising should simply be fun and enjoyable - or even that it should always be fulfilling and enlivening, sometimes a task just is a repetetive grind - but that without a positive culture, one that builds our capacities both here, now, in this time and in the future we work towards, we will be spending long hours wasting our time.

1. “But the work ethic serves more than simply the classic ideological function of passing off the values and interests of one class as the values and interests of all. It also serves a more disciplinary function: beyond manufacturing common meanings, it constructs docile subjects. The work ethic thus possesses not just an epistemological force but an effectiveness that is properly ontological.” Kathi Weeks, The problem with work, p.53

2. An interesting example of this is the novel Everything for Everyone - an oral history of the New York commune 2052 - 2072, M.E.O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi, 2022. The ‘minor details’ of everyday lives that are foregrounded in this text, primarily through the form of the imagined oral histories, is a wonderful example of how it is possible to think about the actual experiences -ie: the feelings as well as the ideas and actions - of revolutionary change.

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