Runs on Sundays at 1pm Eastern time for ten weeks. Discounted early bird registration open through November 30!
Few subjects are so hopelessly caricatured as anarchist ideas about organization. One story—oft repeated by anarchists and anarchism’s detractors alike—is that anarchists hold the absolute autonomy of the individual paramount, not even to be infringed by their own organizations to achieve anarchist goals. Though not wholly false, this story obscures what is more useful and relevant to us today: the actual debates among anarchists all around the world about how revolutionaries ought to be organized.
In this class, we’ll revisit the history of anarchist thought about organization with a slant towards challenging such assumptions. Those familiar with recent radical movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter will have some notion of affinity groups and spokescouncils and decentralized networks—all of anarchist inspiration. Others closer to today’s anarchist scene will know of autonomous social centers, anarchist federations, and anarcho-syndicalist unions. But what of anarchist cadre organizations, anarchist political parties, anarchist vanguards? To contemporary radicals, these sound like contradictions in terms; they would not have, however, to our predecessors of a century ago.
In terms of focus, we will be bending the stick towards these robustly structured forms of revolutionary organization. In part, this is because these have been least emphasized in popular accounts. But more importantly, in the whole history of anarchism the only movements that ever seriously contended for power against the state were those who fused their libertarian politics with a liberatory form of leadership and with disciplined organization. We will trace this thread from the organizational ideas of 19th century anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin into the present, where ultimately it will carry us to the very edge of anarchism into the communalism of Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish freedom movement.
Come expecting vigorous debate about the challenges of organizing revolutionary movements today! Our intentions for this course are not to dally in radical intellectual history but to raise to the fore pivotal questions of organization that still face contemporary movements and their most revolutionary currents.
We will explore, among others:
• How should specifically anarchist organizations interface with pluralistic mass organizations like unions and popular assemblies?
• When we organize wider society, such as through unions and popular assemblies, we attempt to prefigure the free society to come through principles of non-hierarchy, self-management, and an inclusive pluralism. Should we also attempt to prefigure these principles within organizations of the revolutionary minority?
• What kinds of organizations are required to cultivate us into the sorts of people able to carry out a revolutionary transformation of society?
No one is turned away from ISE course offerings for lack of funds. If you need a reduced class fee in order to attend, please fill out this form.
Course Outline
Week 1. Introduction: Anarchist Methods and Theory of Practice
Week 2. The Alliance and the International: Bakunin’s Prototype
Week 3. The Organization of Workers Is Organization Enough!: The Rise of Syndicalism
Week 4. The Organizational Dualism of Errico Malatesta
Week 5. Bolshevizing Anarchism: The Debate on the Platform
Week 6. The Spanish Experiment: Anarchist Vanguards and Anarchist Revolution
Week 7. Especifismo, Part 1: Origins
Week 8. Especifismo, Part 2: Theory and Practice
Week 9. The Communalist Party: Non-Substitutionist Vanguardism in Bookchin and Ocalan
Week 10. Conclusion and Closing Discussion
