AUT: Re: Priviledging economics over psychology....

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael,

No one addressed this and it is important.  OCAP has one conception of doing
things, in no small part informed by the Trotskyism of the Militant Tendency
in England, which some of OCAP's leading militants used to be a part of.
The earlier post I made on 'unreformable reforms' relates to this question
and the answers to that should be taken as partial responses to your
question.

For my part, the totality of critique does not immediately translate into
the totality of action against capital.  Being principled in action (for
example, not starting front groups or participating in organizations which
do not express your politics fully and openly, a la the Situationist
International) does not always mean demanding the 'maximum program' all the
time.  One could argue that this is the tendency of much of anarchism,
though by no means all.  Then again, Marxism has been plagued by the flight
from openly expressing a total critique in favor of 'getting to the masses',
which has been clearly opportunistic.

I think that first of all we can understand capitalism as a totality without
trying to pretend to grasp that totality ourselves.  As such, our ideas and
actions are always partial and groping, a critique which nevertheless
aspires towards totality.  In practice, this means that defending immediate
struggles cannot be escaped, but that we find a principled way to do so, in
part through the refusal to renounce our critique in any way, while refusing
to abstain from concrete struggles.

Wildcat has expressed this as a refusal to participate in the uions or in
putting forward demands like 'a living wage', which supports the wage system
and capitalist labor, without renouncing participation in struggles. The
hard part in that involves grappling with the genuine social ostracation
faced by taking such a line because every institution devoted to capital,
including the ones supposedly defending the workers, becomes your immediate
enemy.  The social pressure is immense.  The problem in part is to try and
find practical ways to engage with particular struggles which help to bring
out the aspects which display the anti-capitalist character of every
workers' struggle, often in some combination of the forms of running a
struggle and the specific ways in which the struggle is carried out (in
relation to the work process, the institutional structures, intra-class
hierarchies, etc.)

This is very general, I know.  I would say that the problem with OCAP's
approach is not immediately the critique of Catholicism (though a critique
of the Catholic Church might be in order of the Church is involved), but of
the capitalist organization of housing and alternate ways of thinking about
housing.  That's why squatting is actually important and valuable in some
cases.

That's all.
Cheers Michael,
Chris

"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the
false." - Debord
>
> There is clearly a breaking oppressions down into neat
> little categories. Doesn't it reflect a reformist
> attitude to do this? We must understand capitalism as
> a totality first, shouldn't we?
>





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