Re: AUT: RE: Re: imaginary communities

[Nate Holdren <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:32:20 +1000, _nIk_ <fragments@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> if someone wants to change the world in which they live, what are some paths to be taken or ideas to be used?  I
> think that the 'organiser' option as described, that is time spent
> "trying to create social structures and forms of organization that
> enable the embodiment of collective will and desire, whether in the
> workplace or the local community", is a good option.  In fact, I'd
> say that this is another limitation on the activist: a focus on one
> off events, or short lived single-issue campaigns. As Nate said, its
> still a problematic option, but I'd say that almost all options are
> (and perhaps this says something about the act of naming here). I
> can't imagine such a thing as a perfect way of ideology.  In fact
> I'll be honest and say such a thing would scare the hell out of me. I
> don't want a 'clean' category or ideology to inhabit. I'll take my
> waystations as unfinished and fuzzy.

Hi Nik-

Just to say a little more, I'm not anti- the term organizer, so much
as I'm ambivalent about it.

Part of this is because in the past I've had jobs as an organizer for
a union and for different community and campaign groups (a set of
experience which has made me much much more sympathetic to 'ultraleft'
accounts of unions and of 'the left' as being the left wing of
capital). Sorry, I'm rambling...

I'm in no way anti- organizing. I think that organizing, defined in
the quote that's been posted here about creating
liberatory/antagonistic organizational/social forms is crucially
important.

In the US context, though, or at least in my experience, the term
'organizer' frequently is used to refer to paid staff, something that
is at best ambivalent. Also, the work done by (at least) some of the
people are called organizers and get paid for the work is not building
new social forms. They might be agitating people and manipulating the
formation of relationships, but not always in the most radical of
ways. Speaking of which, I wonder about this in relation to some
rather schematic remarks by Virno: if immaterial labor increasinly
involves the production and manipulation of social relations, does it
make sense to have paid professional staff whose job it is is to
produce and manipulate social relations (ie, paid organizers working
for unions representing immaterial workers?) [There's also the
question is this model ever made sense, but that's another question,
and one for better read minds than mine.)

At least a few years ago there was a huge upsurge of interest in
community organizing in anarchist circles and other parts of the US
anti-global movements. Some of the organizing techniques and models
employed in this 'political work' were taken from sources with
interests far more limited than what many of us want, techniques that
are certainly in need of critique and overhaul before application.

The IWW uses the term 'organizer' and I don't have too much trouble
with the term there, partly because there aren't paid professional
staff the same way etc...

This whole discussion has put something in a new light for me.
Sebastian Touza and I have been translating some work by the Colectivo
Situaciones (slowly, especially me) and I've been reading more of
their work, on the Argentine context and so on. They use the term
'social protagonism', which is a mouthful of syllables and a little
awkward, but - stretching the concept somewhat - I think part of
what's at stake in the idea is directly relevant here. As I understand
it, social protagonism is the condition in which the process of trying
to create  social/organizational forms (as we've been discussion) is
diffused throughout the social fabric, such that the
activist/non-activist (or organizer/non-organizer) dichotomy makes
less sense. There's that great Zapatista slogan, "we are ordinary
people, which is to say, rebels." Of course, how all this plays out
more concretely is another matter...

Sorry if this is disjointed, I'm very tired...

take care,
Nate


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