Reflections on rural electric cooperatives and socialist organizing

I’ve spent a lot of time recently (aka the past year and a half or so) thinking about rural electric cooperatives (RECs), electric utilities, energy democracy, and socialism. I’ve published two pieces so far on this: “Parliaments of the Earth” in Logic Magazine, and “Co-ops, Climate, and Capital” in Science for the People Magazine.

The first piece gives a general introduction on RECs, and gives a pitch to support them as a progressive alternative to the dominant investor-owned utility (IOU) model, based on their democratic and non-profit status. The piece also gives a few examples of grassroots movements making use of RECs’ democratic structures to push governance reforms and decarbonization initiatives. But this piece ultimately acts as a simple introductory text, and probably gives an overly rosy and one-dimensional portrait of the world of RECs.

The second piece thus serves as a sequel to the first piece, by focusing more on the limitations of RECs, as seen in the context of their origins in the 1930s, as well as in the nature of the reform movements that have sprung up around them in recent years. Special shout-out to Abby Spinak and her 2014 PhD dissertation, which is the single best thing I’ve read about RECs. If you’re gonna spend a few hours reading about these matters, read her dissertation, or at least the introduction and conclusion.

Parliaments of the Earth is fairly straightforward and goes over the obvious benefits of the cooperative form for electric grids, so I’ll summarize here the more nuanced arguments of Co-ops, Climate, and Capital. RECS seem like a radical and potent institution, but in practice they largely function as boring, technocratic institutions that are run by a small, insulated group of experts and managers, and have done so from their very beginnings. This is a result of how they were designed by the Roosevelt administration and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in the first place – their purpose was not to create a community institution that could expand anti-capitalist, communal values and forms of living, but to revamp rural capitalism, unlock a new source of aggregate demand for electrical machinery and appliances, and push forward the industrialization of agriculture. Consumption was the priority, not cooperation. Hardly surprising, given that this was a program by the US government – but still worth spelling out.

Reform movements started springing up around RECS in the 1970s. Here, the structure of RECs gave social movements an advantage, since co-ops can’t accumulate capital as can IOUs, which limits the resources that management can draw on to defend and entrench themselves. RECs are also supposed to be democratically controlled via direct elections. So there ends up being a lot of interesting case studies of co-op reform movements, usually fighting against some combination of mismanagement and reliance on fossil fuels, and for some combination of increased transparency and increased renewable energy. Thus, these movements are relevant for the modern climate movement, and related movements fighting to reform and even nationalize/municipalize modern electric utilities.

But the flip side of these movements is their limited class character. Most of them are largely based in middle-class professionals – the exact kind of people you would expect would have the time, energy, knowledge, and interest to involve themselves in these kinds of local government battles around wonky policies. And if they can get the job done, fine – but it presents a problem for socialists who want to create a mass, working-class movement against the climate crisis and fossil capital, and for public institutions.

The solution to this problem I start to pose, is that co-op reform movements – and any movement for energy democracy that targets electric utilities – should develop a wider program of intervention into the conditions of day-to-day working class life, that can remove the obstacles to mass participation and organization that are set up by capitalist society. But this commentary is limited, and does not address the point of how to organize and mobilize a mass working-class movement that could enact such a program in the first place. (This relates to a hunch I have that simply having a cool working-class-focused policy program does very little to create and mobilize a working-class base – which is why Bernie lost in 2016 and 2020 – but more on that some other time.)

Further Commentary and Points of Interest

There are many interesting and noteworthy aspects of RECs and their history that I have left out of the two published essays. Perhaps some of this can be put into a third essay.

A context of rural radicalism

Its interesting to muse about the wider political context of the Roosevelt administration’s heavy support for rural electric co-ops. There was a sense running through US elites at the time that the countryside was a a dangerous place, whose underdevelopment, isolation, and poverty was becoming a breeding ground for radicalism. Electricity was seen by some as a kind of pre-emptive counter-insurgency strategy, to “civilize” rural America and stave off growing discontent. Consider the many radical movements that had been springing out of rural and small-town America. The post-Reconstruction era saw the Knights of Labor organizing workers and co-ops across the country, often in an agricultural context. The Populist movement was largely an agrarian/farmers’ movement in the south. The later IWW was more urban based, but had plenty of rural roots with their network of wandering “hobo” workers and their bases of support in far-flung mining and timber towns, and other frontiers of extraction. In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, there were incredibly violent battles between miners and corporations in states like Colorado and West Virginia.

It was around this time that the Country Life Commission was established, which reported on the widespread socio-economic problems plaguing rural America [PDF]. Its report did not touch upon political dissent, but at one point it did warn that “the incubus of ignorance and inertia is so heavy and so widespread as to constitute a national danger”. President Roosevelt, in a special message commenting on the report, specifically identified cooperatives as the ideal means by which rural residents could work together for self-development and to overcome the stagnation of rural life. In any case, political dissent continued. In 1915, the Plan de San Diego, a program of armed insurrection spearheaded by Tejano separatist militants, was exposed and defeated in Texas. Two years later, the Green Corn Rebellion broke out in Oklahoma. Three years after that, the Battle of Blair Mountain took place in West Virginia. And by the 1930s, the Communist Party was growing, and had major bases of organization in places like Alabama, among Black sharecroppers.

Maybe too much of a reach to draw a direct line between these currents of radical rural organizing, and the initiation by the federal government of cooperative-driven rural electrification. Still, its probably a piece of the puzzle, which overall in the 1930s is a picture of US elites pulling out the stops in order to prevent economic crisis and social upheaval from destroying the country. And all this would have pre-empted later theories of counter-insurgency and anti-communism, that pinpointed “development” as a key means to stave off unrest and make the ground less fertile for revolutionary upheaval.

Social movement organizing via the federal government

The flip side to the decidedly capitalist nature of the Roosevelt administration, the New Deal, and RECs, is the fact that key officials in the REA did view rural electrification efforts as requiring at least some aspects of a grassroots social movement. Rural people had to be contacted, persuaded, organized, and mobilized to actually form cooperatives, apply for REA loans, put up the poles and wires, and maintain the infrastructure in a democratic and professional manner. To this end, a large number of REA workers were specifically engaging in basic organizing tasks: roaming around the countryside, knocking on doors, coordinating town hall meetings, holding informational sessions, and most importantly, training locals to take on these tasks themselves. It looked like what modern NGO or electoral campaigns might look like, or even union organizing, except the REA was organizing with the weight of the federal government behind it, and was organizing to build up material infrastructure.

REA organizing was also not simply a purely technical venture, of the sort you see today with get-out-the-vote campaigns or other modern state-adjacent efforts. The project was overtly seen as a political movement, that was in opposition to IOUs and right-wing business interests in general. As such, anti-IOU agitation was part of the REA playbook, as was wider propagandizing about the benefits of cooperative power versus dependence on private utilities (who didn’t want to run lines out to the countryside anyway). This political battle even carried over after cooperative-driven rural electrification was well underway, as some IOUs tried to step in and buy out co-ops, with the REA serving as a nerve center to coordinate battles against privatization. (I can’t track down exact citations for this stuff, but I recall reading about this across many pieces on the REA and early RECs, so it seems to be a canonical part of the history, and easily found in any writings about rural electrification or the public power movement).

Socialists are a long ways off from having any comparable power in federal or state-level government, as did advocates of public and cooperative power in the 1930s, but the REA could still be a template for how a segment of the state could become politicized and even radicalized, and operate in a way that blurs the lines between the state and social movement, especially in the context of a Green New Deal and climate policy. It is also perhaps an example of how “top-down” organizing can be productive. It would be interesting to compare this against the ongoing efforts to foster communes and co-ops by the radical governments in Venezuela and Bolivia.

Race

A major under-discussed aspect to rural electrification, which I regret not at least touching upon in my two essays, is race. The stereotypical image of rural America as mostly all white rednecks or whatever isn’t quite true today, and was substantially less true prior to the two waves of the Great Migration, when there were large numbers of rural Black communities in the South. Several of the radical rural movements mentioned earlier had prominent participation by Black militants, such as the Knights of Labor, the Green Corn Rebellion, and the Alabama Communist Party.

The REA, like the New Deal in general, had tendencies that reinforced racialization and white supremacy; Black households were often excluded from initial electrification efforts. One factor in this was the institutionalization of racism via market-oriented logic – since RECs were meant to be self-sufficient business entities, potential co-op members had to have a certain level of income and wealth to qualify for membership and electricity, which excluded many poor Black households, who were still entrapped by the post-slavery sharecropping systems and Jim Crow laws. There is a good academic paper on this that examines North Carolina’s rural electrification process during the 1930s. Overt racism also played a role, given that the hyper-localism of co-ops meant that it would often be local, Klan-adjacent elite networks who dominated co-op boards.

RECs thus became a target for the civil rights movement and related campaigns in the 1960s and onward. Unfortunately, there does not seem to have been much in the way of detailed pieces on this phenomena, just scattered reports and remarks. But one particular success story is that of Roanoke Electric Cooperative, in north-east North Carolina. Roanoke EC had a majority-Black membership for most of its history, however for the first few decades, the board of directors was controlled by an elite White network. Organizing campaigns in the ’60s fought and eventually succeeded in winning more expansive voting rights and mobilizing members to become engaged with co-op issues. Today, Roanoke has some particularly innovative programs that push beyond the framework of an electric co-op as being solely about selling electricity, such as a land management and conservation program that looks to help Black farmers and land-owners – although, since this program is about turning “unprofitable family farms and forests into economic assets”, this doesn’t exactly represent a radical cooperative-based break with capitalism. Today, there are similar struggles still ongoing, such as in Mississippi, where Black organizers are fighting to reform RECs to become more democratic and more representative of their members, and invest more into programs like cooperative broadband. However, its unclear how rooted these campaigns are in the local Black working-class, and it is likely these are still the kind of professional-based advocacy groups that defines most non-socialist and non-union activism today.

Techno-scientific knowledge & the public sector

An important plank of not just the cooperative power movement, but the public power movement in general, was the cadre of engineers who had the techno-scientific knowledge and skills necessary to design power grids in the first place. The first director of the REA, Morris Llewyellyn Cooke, was himself a mechanical engineer by profession. He commented on the role of engineers in the public power movement in a 1948 paper for the American Political Science Review, which discussed various political dynamics during the early days of America’s efforts toward rural electrification. The movement to set up municipal utilities was taking off in the first decades of the 20th century, but in the beginning it was a challenge to rally the technical expertise necessary to actually design and build municipal utilities. This wasn’t just a matter of employment and government planning, but rather, political and social opposition from the entrenched corporations. Cooke reflected that “it was not easy in those days to get electrical engineers who would burn their breadwinning bridges behind them by testifying on the public side”.

It was a slow process to build the kind of pro-public power networks that could concentrate and distribute the necessary techno-scientific knowledge needed to build the state capacity to build and run power grids. A major boost came from World War 1, during which the state took a more direct role in certain areas of power systems, bringing along a number of engineers who gained experience and increased interest and confidence in publicly-owned power. Cooke also identified a series of major studies done by various municipalities and state institutions on grids, rates, and engineering, which enlisted many electrical engineers to carry out the research; and of course the actual establishment in the early ’30s of major public power institutions:

“REA is the lineal descendant of the Philadelphia Electric case (1914-16), the Giant Power Survey (1923-1927), the distribution cost studies of the Power Authority of the State of New York (1932-34), the passage of the TVA Act in 1933 after years of study and struggle, the report of the Mississippi Valley Committee (1933-34)…have a thought for possibly two score indispensable men and women down the line without whose willingness to work skillfully and conscientiously, with plenty of overtime, and sometimes in the face of biting scorn of the opposing commercial interests, always at modest compensation and often without any compensation at all, such accomplishments would have been impossible” (447).

Similarly, it is important to think about what role techno-scientific workers, and the rest of the energy workforce, can and should play in today’s movements to decommodify and democratize the energy system. Compared to the 1920s and 1930s, we have the advantage today that there is a large public power sector. On the flip side, this sector is largely depoliticized, and is in most areas not an organic part of any kind of public power movement, let alone a more radical socialization movement. Progressive-minded expert and techno-scientific knowledge tends to be concentrated in the non-profit/NGO sector, which mostly draws more on academic researchers, rather than industry workers, and tends to be weighed down by liberal ideologies. The general workforce of utilities in certain regions (not RECs!) tends to be unionized, but these unions tend to be largely defensive and either disinterested or hostile to the idea of public power – not without reason, since many public power union contracts can come with no-strike clauses. Bridging these gaps and radicalizing the public sector will be crucial, particularly for the nuanced and in-depth high-level planning necessary to rapidly decarbonize the energy system. In many ways, it is a much more challenging technical feat to transform an existing system, than to build out a totally new one – triply so for a system that is the basis for modern human life, which must be kept up and running 24/7.

Capacity & activism

The question of techno-scientific knowledge also gets at fundamental matters of class, organization, and mobilization around utilities and climate. In the last section of Co-ops, Climate, and Capital I reflect about how campaigns around RECs, and other utilities, seem largely limited to educated professional-class people, with conclusions that apply in general to matters of local government and civic participation. My main point is that basic democratic activity – let alone more militant campaigns – requires time and knowledge: time to go to meetings, talk to neighbors and friends, attend town halls; and knowledge about the technical and social aspects of government (which in turn requires time to accumulate). And knowledge is especially relevant in the context of a sprawling and complex technical system like the power grid.

“However, both of these resources—time and knowledge—are valuable and scarce resources under capitalism. Workers spend much, if not most, of their time laboring for corporations, limiting their ability to substantively participate in social and political activities that aren’t grounded in day-to-day life. On a more fundamental level, capital is constantly deepening the division of labor, concentrating knowledge amongst a small class of professionals and managers, and further alienating the working class from the production process, and science and technology in general. Thus, in a capitalist society, the average worker is functionally excluded from democratic institutions.”

This fundamental problem of a lack of capacity (time + knowledge), as driven by the dynamics of capitalism, can also be extended to the general problem of why many activist campaigns seem so limited in class character – with the exception of workplace and tenant union campaigns. What makes the latter different is that they are directly intervening into the lives of working-class people, helping people attack constraints on their capacity (low wages and long working hours, or high rents and lack of maintenance, etc.), in a way that is immediate and concrete. This is a very different matter than fighting for more abstract and immaterial goals around reforming a utility, or really any kind of reform at the level of government. Even if its a worthwhile reform, its hard for people to put limited time and energy into work whose payoffs are uncertain and far down the line – especially when there are more pressing day-to-day problems to worry about. In other words, I don’t think the solution is to simply have a progressive, worker-oriented policy program – even if people agree with the program, that isn’t going to automatically inspire people enough to become organizers, activists, and cadre to actively fight for the program. (I would also argue that this is one of the key lessons from the 2020 Bernie campaign).

I don’t say it in the piece, but my hunch is thus precisely that you can’t really organize a mass working-class movement around utilities, energy, and climate, without there first being a reconstruction of more fundamental proletarian organizations, that can attack basic problems of the class, and build militant networks on that basis. In other words, the analysis put forward by the DSA’s Communist Caucus, “Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time”.

Of course, one solution could be the basic, orthodox-Marxist position that we need to center utility workers when strategizing and organizing around utilities. I don’t really disagree with this, but I don’t think this actually gets around the basic problem of working-class disorganization, given how much existing unions have stagnated, and their general lack of interest in fighting for serious reforms – let alone taking up a vanguard position to democratize, decarbonize, and decommodify the grid.

Utility workers and utility socialism

Despite the lack of real militant organizing among electric utility workers, it is still worth brainstorming about its potential. Electricity is arguably the foundational infrastructure of the modern world, and as such, electric utilities are essentially layered underneath the entirety of socio-economic life. A map of electric infrastructure is a near-complete map of capitalism. Electric utilities thus have unrivaled insights into the pulses of capital accumulation, industrial trends, settlement patterns, etc. There is a good reason that Lenin said that “communism is soviet power plus electrification”, and that the first five-year plan of the USSR centered on national electrification.

This also has implications for what a radical group of utility workers can do. In my experience, utility workers in many different roles have ready access to both information, aka maps of the grid, info on upcoming developments, demographics data, as well as autonomy, aka freedom to roam around the territory, respond to calls, plan inspections, or just mill about and talk to people (this experience may be heavily biased by my old role as a utility engineer, and not a lineman or other kind of supervised field personnel – but I dunno, the linemen and techs I knew seemed relatively free too!). Utility workers thus have enormous potential as organizers and agitators, with their access to a wide array of data, and their ability to “steal time” to roam around and talk with people, spread propaganda and conduct inquiries, and in general as people who can be first-contact to find and confirm organizing leads across the entire spectrum of a territory’s working class. This is especially true with RECs, whose workers are generally held in high esteem by locals.

At a more advanced stage of revolutionary struggle, we can also start to think more about how utilities can be instrumentalized as a weapon of the proletariat. The fact that electric utilities are dynamically interconnected with the whole of capitalist political economy means that even absent full state control, radical influence over electric utilities could be used to weaken and overcome bourgeoisie forces.

In many ways utilities are already a class weapon in a soft sense, albeit for capitalists, not workers. Here is an example and personal anecdote. I used to work at a publicly-owned wastewater treatment plant. Part of the plant recycled wastewater into non-potable (non-drinkable) water, and at one point, the plant decided to embark on two new infrastructure projects, to build pipelines and pumping stations to deliver recycled water to two customers: a local oil refinery, and a local country/golf club (can’t make this up!). These projects took place at the same time as the water rates were “rationalized”, which included disproportionate hikes on lower-usage users, as well as on schools (seriously – can’t make this shit up!). To be fair, the oil refinery and country club projects were going pay for their projects – but still, it was a net drain on our engineering and labor personnel, and presented added maintenance costs in the future.

Now, imagine a scenario where the plant – or an electric utility – was under the control of a socialist movement, instead of MBAs. The above logic could be flipped on its head. Instead of subsidizing oil refineries and golf clubs, utilities could deny resources to refineries and golf clubs, and instead subsidize schools and cooperative housing, perhaps in coordination with their unions. And this could be taken well beyond rates, into a militant direction – electricity could be routinely cut off to workplaces whose workers are on strike, or hookups could be denied entirely to environmentally-destructive subdivisions.

The book Recharging China in War and Revolution has some fascinating examples of this general framework of seizing control of electric utilities and infrastructure playing out during the Chinese Revolution, in the most extreme scenario of armed revolution and civil war. A key part of the Chinese Communist Party’s war strategy was to seize control of power plants and substations, and deny power to the Guomindang’s industrial production bases and logistics networks, and to use power access and grid maintenance as a negotiating chip to gain better military positions, and to win over hearts and minds of urban residents. It was as much a social strategy as a military strategy; taking over the grid wasn’t just about sending in troops, but winning over the workforce and the professional-managerial class to the communist project (see Chapter 6).

Fingers crossed, we won’t see a full-scale civil war in the US….but regardless, case studies like this are good food-for-thought when thinking about how utilities can be a weapon of class war, and an important organizing target for socialists.

Revolutionary sovereignty and indefinite disruption

One way to think about revolutionary struggle is in terms of sovereignty. Revolutionary movement should work to build working-class sovereignty, a force by and for the masses that is able to govern and sustain itself socially, politically, and economically, and exert its power and authority against capital. This is in contrast to liberalism and its goal of incorporating restive classes and communities into the existing order, and thus stabilizing the rule of capital instead of undermining and overthrowing it. And as discussed previously, this form of liberalism is often infused into would-be radical and revolutionary movements, as seen in how often our campaigns revolve around lobbying politicians and technocrats on moral or rational grounds.

In the context of the climate crisis, to build revolutionary working-class sovereignty requires creating a force capable of moving beyond lobbying and symbolic acts of disruption (i.e. one-off sit-ins coordinated by a small group of activists), to being able to impose serious material costs onto fossil capital. This could look like a kind of popular regulation, where actions that are supposed to be monopolized by the state (levying fines, ordering production shutdowns) are implemented by a movement autonomous from the capitalist state.

The Dakota Access Pipeline protests in the spring of 2016 show what this could look like. Establishing encampments, and using them to directly block construction of an oil pipeline, was an expression of indigenous sovereignty. Indeed, the overall conflict was itself an explicit clash over sovereignty between the United States of America and the Sioux, over the question of who has the power and authority to permit or prevent the construction of a pipeline in a particular area. But it is also an example of how difficult the construction and exercise of sovereignty really is, and underlines the harsh truth that it is ultimately violence that is the foundation of sovereignty (or, as Mao put it, that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”). The technicalities of treaty rights and other legal entities is secondary to who can actually control and hold territory against would-be challengers and interlopers. In this sense, although the protests raised the specter of direct popular regulation and revolutionary sovereignty, they were also clearly limited by the fact that the encampments did not intend to hold out indefinitely against state security forces – the real purpose was to raise awareness, capture media attention, and put a kind of moral pressure on federal authorities. And this was perhaps the only choice: the terrain of the Standing Rock reservation and the pipeline’s construction path was such that it was very easy for state security forces to lay siege to the encampments, cutting off reinforcements and supply lines, and thus eliminating the material basis of exerting Sioux sovereignty over the DAP.

Given the difficulty of deploying popular regulatory power in situations short of a full-scale revolution, it is still important to strategize around how to win gains through more limited campaigns and sway the state one way or another, without succumbing to the liberal impulse of incorporation. What is key is that such campaigns are organized with the understanding that even these constitute a clash of power, similar to that of two sovereigns, with the determining factor ultimately being not morality or logic, but force. A revolutionary movement understands that the only way capital can be pushed into giving concessions that go against its own interests is if other, broader interests are under threat.

A fantastic example of this framework can be seen in the insurrection in Ecuador in October 2019, when a massive uprising erupted in the capital city of Quito, demanding the state to reverse its abolition of fuel subsidies (see here for a discussion of how to resolve the contradiction between demanding access to cheap fossil fuels, and demanding decarbonization). The uprising was lead by the national indigenous federation, CONAIE, and created a crisis of governance, where state officials were forced to relocate the government to a different city entirely, key buildings in the capital were seized and occupied, police officers were taken hostage, and oil infrastructure in the Amazon was forcibly shut down. After two weeks of violent street clashes, the state gave in to the intransigent movement, and re-instated fuel subsidies and planned for future budget negotiations that would include CONAIE.

Unlike most protest movements in the US and other Western/Northern countries, this uprising took on the distinct characteristics of a sovereign power clashing against another sovereign power, mobilizing its own governance structure, logistics infrastructure, territorial holdings, and dedicated combatants. There was little moral dimension to the uprising, in terms of appealing to hearts of politicians or the ever-amorphous concept of the “public opinion”, and nor was there any focus on “raising awareness”. Instead, it was a straightforward assault on an enemy power, the goal being to disrupt and destabilize it as much as possible. CONAIE’s strategy was to paralyze Quito by seizing control of key buildings and streets, repelling attempts by state security forces to dislodge them, and thus shutting down the city. CONAIE also sought to blockade the oil industry, shutting off a vitally important source of revenue for the state. This way, the state would be threatened with a complete collapse in its ability to govern, as well as face an economic and fiscal crisis; compared to such a disaster, bringing back fuel subsidies would be a small price to pay. The state’s goal, of course, was to disrupt the disruption, and dismantle the blockades and occupations and stabilize and reinforce its rule. As it turned out, CONAIE and its allies were organized and dug-in for the long haul, and so the state was forced into complete capitulation. The October 2019 insurrection is thus a prime example of what revolutionary mobilization looks like outside of an actual revolution: an indefinite and concrete disruption of capital and the state, until demands are met.

Of course, the real question is how such a force can be assembled in the first place. How was CONAIE able to organize – and more importantly, sustain – a popular uprising that created an existential crisis of governance? Indefinite disruption requires numbers; to really disrupt state and capital, you need thousands of people in any given area on strike, manning blockades, and pushing back police lines, as well as cooking food, securing transportation, providing medical aid, and so on. This also requires a high level of coordination, and a synthesis of different skill-sets and resources. This is something that is near impossible to develop at the necessary scale spontaneously, in the heat of riot. It must be based on long-term grassroots radical organizing, that facilitates the creation of a widespread militant collective identity, and which brings together various fractions of the masses.

Developing mass organizations requires an ensemble of activities that are embedded in the materialities of ordinary working class life, and which create and preserve a kind of collective and militant socialization that resists and counters the drive of capital to atomize people into alienated individual consumers. Such activity could be seen as what some in the US have theorized as “base-building”, where militants dig in for long-term, day-to-day struggle in particular geographic and/or social niches, instead of engaging in aloof activism or haphazard protest-hopping. CONAIE consists of precisely such an ensemble of base-building activity, with constituent groups that have been active for decades at the center of indigenous life. Consider the case of an anti-mining campaign in the province of Azuay in 2011, as described by Thea Riofrancos in her book Resource Radicals. At the center of this campaign was UNAGUA, a local constituent organization of CONAIE and the coordinating body for 31 different community water boards across the province. These water boards are institutions of popular governance over water resources in the area, and emerged in the 1970s when local indigenous communities organized to build their own water infrastructure. Later, in the 1990s, it lead campaigns against efforts by the state to seize control of this infrastructure; and then in the 2000s, against efforts by the state to hand control over to private corporations.

UNAGUA activists collecting signatures for a community referendum on a local mining project – MiningWatch Canada, 2015

UNAGUA was also part of the steady consolidation of different indigenous groups into a wider confederation encompassing increasingly larger geographic and social blocs. UNAGUA became a part of the Federation of Peasant and Indigenous Organizations of Azuay (FOA), which itself became a part of the regional highland indigenous federation (Ecuarunari), which was one of the two major regional indigenous organizations that founded CONAIE in 1986 – the other being Ecuarunari’s Amazonian equivalent, CONFENIAIE. The density, diversity, and granularity of CONAIE points to the fact that it was built over decades, as part of a long-term effort to bring together disparate indigenous groups in different regions, speaking different languages, working at different nodes of capitalist political economy – all of which themselves have been struggling (or, “base-building”) for autonomy, political rights, etc. for decades, if not centuries.

The process of connecting all of these different organizations, movements, and networks with one another is essentially the process of articulation that Salar Mohandesi describes in this essay on party-building. Articulation is the process where different social and class compositions are synthesized into an increasingly revolutionary force – or, a type of sovereign power rooted in the concrete struggles of the masses. If the process of articulation has matured to a certain point, then the party (or whatever is fulfilling the function of the party) can instigate a confrontation with the state, such that the state is not confronting small bands of activists or even a mass of angry but uncoordinated rabble, but a virtual society with its own autonomous institutions and the ability to sustain itself economically, even as it throws the circuits of capital into chaos. This was seen in the October 2019 insurrection, when indigenous militants from across the country, from highland agricultural villages to Amazonian tribes, traveled to the capital in massive caravans, where they converged with union transit workers, informal laborers, and radical students to seize control of key sites and bring the flow of capital to a grinding halt.

The process of base-building and articulation in the US will face different challenges than what indigenous radicals faced in Ecuador. For one thing, social atomization and the hegemony of the market is incredibly advanced in the US, making us unable to build off of existing ethnic and cultural institutions as effectively as indigenous groups in Ecuador. But this is all the more reason that we must immerse ourselves in patient base-building activity, and be wary of the activist/liberal habits of constantly jumping by ourselves into this or that policy battle or electoral campaign. Such causes are not unimportant, but we cannot hope to wage an effective and efficient struggle on such fronts if we are not connected to a variety of different day-to-day struggles against bosses, landlords, police, and other class enemies, and coalescing these into a sovereign force that can engage in ruthless combat – not cordial negotiation – with state and capital.

Liberal protests vs. radical power

There is a certain kind of liberalism that has fused with socialism, and the way that socialists and other radicals talk about strategy. This is seen in how there is a common tendency nowadays to talk about militant mass movements as primarily being about pressuring politicians and capitalists in order to extract concessions and reforms – but ignoring the question of how to actually dislodge and overthrow the power of these politicians and capitalists.

This is quite common in how many leftists talk about the Green New Deal. Groups like the DSA and the Sunrise Movement have a theory of change that focuses on using public pressure via sit-ins, demonstrations, and strikes, to push politicians into supporting the GND. DSA leaders do tend to recognize the material power of the working class, as seen in this excerpt from this essay on strategy in Socialist Forum:

Most importantly, the working class has a “lever” at the core of the operation of the capitalist system. If workers stop working, or go on strike, business as usual grinds to a halt. As we’ve seen recently, this ability to shut down the system at its core is the greatest source of power for the working class as a whole. When workers strike, or organize other mass disruptive actions, those in power are forced to pay attention.

And yet, this limits working-class power to the ability to make politicians and capitalists “pay attention”, with the tacit assumption that these elites are indeed the ultimate decision-makers in society, and that this power cannot be challenged – only influenced. Working-class militancy thus becomes simply an inverted form of lobbying to that of the K-Street suits; instead of showing up to DC offices with bags of money, workers can threaten to stop the flow of money by striking, and thus achieve political influence. But at the end of the day, the levers of actual power and decision-making remains in the hands of the same people and institutions. The structure of liberal democracy, the functionaries who run day-to-day operations, and rule of capital over economy and society is all left intact.

You especially see this pattern in the way popular discourse talks about general strikes. The general strike is talked about like a secret weapon of the working class that can force all kinds of reforms out of the state, whether its about halting deportations or family separations, or police abolition, or getting Trump out of office. Again, this framing casts the power of the working class as being solely about lobbying the state. But the original radicalism of the general strike was not about influencing politicians and pressuring capitalists, but about kick-starting working-class autonomy and self-governance. The general strike is meant to demonstrate that society is in fact run by workers, even though decision-making power is monopolized by an elite class, and that this state of affairs only exists because we consent and go along with it; and thus, we the workers can and should organize and run society ourselves, rather than continue to carry out the dictates of capital. All this is lost in popular discourse today, and the general strike is seen as simply a kind of super-protest, which will make politicians do this or that, after which we go home and let the machinery of the status quo grind on as before, except with maybe a slightly different tempo.

None of this is to say that we should abandon attempts to influence politicians via mass militant protests. Its not the protesting that is liberal, but the general strategy that protests are used to support, and the fact that this strategy accepts the rule of capital and its institutions and functionaries. Protests that are primarily meant to influence/lobby politicians absolutely have a role to play for radical and revolutionary movements; but they should exist alongside an arsenal of different tactics, and should play a secondary role to those tactics which actually help develop autonomous working-class power, and which engage with issues of biopolitics and dual power and political economy.

After all, it is ultimately the threat of autonomous working-class power that actually forces big reforms in the first place. The ruling class only reacts to mass disorder and unrest when there emerges the real possibility that alternative forms of power are being developed. The New Deal was not passed because workers went on strike for reforms, but because key fractions of the capitalist class saw a real threat in the growth of the communist movement, and its links to the USSR and revolutionary movements elsewhere. It was to head off this revolutionary force that the New Deal was made. Likewise, despite big regular protests since 2014 around police violence, it wasn’t until this year when militants in Minneapolis took matters into their own hands and looted and torched a police precinct, that politicians started talking seriously about police reforms. The threat of an uncontrollable street movement, fighting back police and ransacking shopping malls, demonstrated a kind of independent power that frightens the ruling class enough to reform the system.

Thus, even radicals who are mainly focused on mobilizing for electoral-legislative victories via pressuring/lobbying politicians ought to support movements that are building out independent bases of working-class power. A Green New Deal won’t be made unless there is a growing popular working-class movement that is taking ecological regulation into its own hands, rather than simply asking politicians to do so. What is necessary isn’t (just) more sit-ins at DC offices, or even mass marches in urban centers, but more train blockades, mining site invasions, pipeline shutoffs, etc. — or, as Andreas Malm puts it, what is necessary is “to disrupt the normal routines of the fossil fuel industry”.

Lessons from abolitionism, 1830s-1860s

The abolitionist movement was an awe-inspiring mass movement that shook the foundations of American capitalism and white supremacy, and laid the foundations for all future revolutionary struggles in the United States.

It is fascinating to trace the rise of the movement, which is done in a sweeping fashion in Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). The main wave of abolitionism began in the early 1830s, riding the aftershocks of the two great slave rebellions of 1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia, and the Baptist War in Jamaica. In the beginning, abolitionists in the US were a fringe and ostracized group; those who pushed for the abolition of slavery, such as the followers of William Lloyd Garrison and his famous newspaper The Liberator, were routinely targeted by violent mobs lead by law enforcement officials and politicians, who attacked meetings and destroyed buildings and printing presses owned by abolitionists. Garrison himself was almost killed in least one such occasion. These ruling-class riots took place in the North, in cities like Cincinnati, where in 1836 the mayor organized a mob to attack the home of a local abolitionist, which then turned into indiscriminate attacks on black homes and churches. In the South, antislavery politics was explicitly illegal, and underground organizing was routinely smashed apart with the full force of state repression. 

However, such violence also had the effect of increasing revulsion against the anti-democratic and anti-civil liberties tendencies of the proslavery elites, and correspondingly spread sympathy for, and interest in, the cause of abolition. The militant wing of abolitionism started to work in earnest to help escaped slaves remain free, forming the Underground Railroad, which helped Frederick Douglass escape from slavery in 1838. Indeed, the Underground Railroad initiated a kind of feedback loop, where fugitive slaves would grow the ranks of abolitionism and become its most militant and dedicated cadre, increasing the capacity to help free more slaves and agitate against the power of the slaveholders. Abolitionism received a further boost in the late 1840s, when popular revolutions erupted in Europe, and radical exiles migrated to the US, bringing with them fierce antislavery sentiments, socialist politics, and combat experience.  

In the 1850s, abolitionism grew into a true mass movement; its primary social base was free black communities across the North, but as a coalition it included white urban laborers and farmers. The popularity and militancy of abolitionism during this time period is especially clear in the many cases of unrest that took place whenever authorities attempted to apprehend and extradite fugitive slaves. Multiracial crowds numbering in the thousands, would rally and attack cops and slave catchers, break into jails and courthouses, and forcibly rescue captured slaves. This was not just spontaneous popular violence, either; it was often coordinated and organized by local “Vigilance Committees”, set up by abolitionists as part of the Underground Railroad. The first major rescue was the 1851 rescue of Shadrach Minkins in Boston, and the last was the 1860 rescue of Charles Nalle in Troy, Pennsylvania (which involved none another than Harriet Tubman herself, who just happened to be in town on her way to Boston). Meanwhile, in the world of electoral politics, the Republican Party emerged in 1854 as a popular antislavery party that brought together abolitionists, Northern workers and farmers, and certain segments of Northern capitalists. Six short years later it would seize control of the presidency, precipitating the Civil War and the full emancipation of all slaves in the US.  

One important dynamic to emphasize, and which is the central thesis in Sinha’s tome, is that abolition was driven by the slaves themselves, acting in their own self-interest. This sometimes took the form of spectacular rebellions that captured the national imagination, such as Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, and the Amistad rebellion in 1839. But it was also driven by the simple act of running away; it is estimated that something on the order of 50,000 slaves ran away each year during the antebellum period. It was this literal mass movement that underpinned the importance of the Underground Railroad and its associated networks and organizations, which both spread propaganda about the plight of the enslaved, as well as coordinated concrete assistance to fugitives in the form of food, shelter, transportation, and weapons. White and free abolitionists did not create abolitionism; they simply joined and expanded a movement that was already underway, initialized by slave resistance that had been present since slavery was brought to the US. 

There were a number of strategic debates and controversies within the abolitionist movement that parallel issues in radical politics today. Notwithstanding the explosive rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, there were fierce debates among abolitionists about electoral politics, whether to engage in elections, and how to work with politicians whose goals overlapped those of abolitionists, but who weren’t actual abolitionists. These debates intersected with debates over “revolution vs. reform”, and whether the Constitution and the federal government was amenable to becoming an anti-slavery force, or whether disunion or insurrection was the only viable path forward.

This also, of course, raised debates about violence; many abolitionists were “non-resistors”, although most of them simultaneously defended and even celebrated the slave’s right to violently rebel. There was also the messy contradictions of coalition-building, especially when it came to electoral politics; the successful expansion of antislavery sentiment was coupled with the fact that many held antislavery views out of racism, and a desire to keep slavery, and therefore, black people, out of the new territories – which, of course, were being seized from various Native American nations. Abolitionists thus had to grapple with the problem of how to balance the costs and benefits made by such coalitional politics, and whether supporting a particular politician or campaign against slavery would be worth the costs to wider goals around anti-racism and equality. 

Another interesting and relevant dynamic is the way that slaveholder power evolved during the rise of abolitionism. Contrary to certain teleological narratives, slavery was not automatically withering away due to industrialization. On the contrary, it was on the upswing in the 1850s, with southern elites in firm control of the federal government, and working to build an empire of slavery, based on reopening the slave trade and expanding US colonial holdings into the Caribbean and Central America. New laws, such as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court case, were expanding the power and rights of slaveholders across the country. And where law and order wasn’t enough, outright violence was used, as seen in the 1830s, and later in “Bleeding Kansas“, when proslavery gangs from Missouri invaded Kansas to attack free-state settlers and rig elections. In some respects, this aggression was a response to the growing power of abolitionism, and an effort by elites to maintain their position in the face of rising opposition by a combination of law and brute force. 

This gets into what is one of the most interesting lessons from abolitionism: the way radical politics, violence, and polarization interact with one another. Faced with violent suppression from its very origins, and dealing with a system that was fundamentally rooted in physical violence and coercion, abolitionism had to develop practices of self-defense and armed struggle from the beginning. As time went on, abolitionist use of violence became increasingly confident and sophisticated, and rooted in mass mobilization; this is one way to understand the emergence of the Underground Railroad, and the popularity of direct action against law enforcement in defense of fugitive slaves. John Brown and his fellow travelers escalated this further, first in matching the violence of proslavery forces in Kansas in the mid-1850s, and then by attempting to instigate a full-scale slave revolution in Virginia with the Raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. 

Meanwhile, the Republican Party, despite its composition from relatively moderate forces, also helped lay the groundwork for the both the massification and the militarization of abolition. Matt Karp’s excellent essay in Catalyst, “The Mass Politics of Antislavery“, lays out a compelling overview of the Republican Party as a party marked by its mass politics and antislavery platform, which effectively utilized both popular mobilization and electoral contests to battle against the power of the southern slaveholders. Especially interesting in Karp’s narrative is the Wide-Awake movement,

which enlisted perhaps 100,000 Northern young men into something like a grassroots Republican paramilitary organization. Mostly wage-workers and farmers, Wide-Awakes from Maine to Minnesota formed themselves into companies with ranks and officers, donning soldiers’ caps and dark cloaks for midnight infantry drills. Their theatrical torchlight parades, accompanied by brass and drums, under banners celebrating “Free Labor,” “Free Land,” and “Lincoln, Liberator of Slavery,” attracted hundreds of thousands more awestruck spectators, and testified to the martial intensity of Northern popular feeling.

The Wide-Awakes are a fascinating case of how the lines between social movements, electoral politics, and military conflict can become blurred. The Wide-Awakes were initially organized by the Republican Party as a supplement to its 1860 election campaigning, but they also served as a self-defense organization to protect Republican politicians from disruption and assault from proslavery thugs. The following year, when the Civil War started in earnest, Wide-Awake locals became a crucial military force; in Missouri, the local Wide-Awake chapter mobilized and successfully defended a federal military arsenal from being captured by Confederate militias. But they also, in some respects, helped instigate the Civil War itself; the formation of such a paramilitary force, combined with events like John Brown’s raid in 1859, convinced the southern slaveholding elite that regardless of Lincoln’s intentions, there was no future in the union with such popular antislavery forces unleashed and growing by the day.

It is also worth noting how, during the Civil War, the movement of fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad also became militarized. Many militant abolitionists enlisted with the Union Army and helped spread armed struggle into the Confederacy. They carried out spectacular campaigns like the famous Raid on Combahee Ferry – lead by Harriet Tubman and James Montgomery, a veteran of Bleeding Kansas – a lightning-strike attack which freed ~750 slaves and destroyed a number of plantations. Pretty much all of the men who were freed by Tubman and Montgomery immediately enlisted to fight the slaveholders: an example of how quasi-guerrilla attacks by abolitionists in the Union Army merged with slave resistance ratcheting up to a revolutionary pitch. In what Bruce Levine in an essay for Jacobin calls the “Second American Revolution,” tens of thousands of slaves abandoned the plantations, crossed over to the Union, picked up guns, and then turned right back around to help free their friends and families. 

By the end of the war, some 200,000 black men had served in the Union army or navy, most of them recruited in slave states. Black soldiers took part in about 450 military engagements, some 40 of which were major battles, and they provided the Union with 120 infantry regiments, 12 heavy artillery regiments, 10 batteries of light artillery, and seven cavalry regiments. They were crucial to the eventual victory.

After reading such a history, it is impossible to not view abolitionism as foundational to the revolutionary current in the US. Indeed, Sinha’s close reading of the intellectual currents within abolitionism reveals it to be a remarkable echo of contemporary radicalism; abolitionists not only fought against slavery, but also actively connected the movement to movements around women’s rights, indigenous sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and class struggle.  

One can trace the afterlives of abolitionism in the movements that came afterwards. Many abolitionists were unsurprisingly at the forefront of Radical Reconstruction and the battle to preserve black socio-economic and political power in the South against a vicious counter-revolution. When this gave way to the Gilded Age of industrialization and elite power, these veterans went on to build and influence radical and multiracial movements like the Populists and the Knights of Labor. These, in turn, were the forerunners of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World of the 1910s and 1920s, which would then give way to the Communist Party and its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Communist organizing laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and would come back in a much more explicit and militant fashion with the Black Power Movement and New Communist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. After that, there seems to be an abyss in terms of revolutionary continuity – but the ongoing uprisings in 2020 against police violence and for Black Lives has, of course, the unmistakable imprint of abolitionism and this 150-year current of popular American radicalism. 

The Three Climate Strikes

I recently wrote this piece, titled “The Three Climate Strikes”, for The Trouble, a blog/magazine focusing on climate politics. I compare the 2019 Global Climate Strikes with two other events that took place right around the same time: the Houthi/Iranian drone strikes against Saudi oil infrastructure, and the civil insurrection of the indigenous working-class in Ecuador in defense of fuel subsidies.

The initial, obvious point is that radical changes – like those necessary for decarbonization – will require the masses to actually build and exert power, rather than continually holding polite and legal street protests that whine at the elites to change things. Both the Houthis and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) understand this, which is why they have typically carried out very militant campaigns (and in the case of the Houthis, up to and including full-scale military mobilization).

The less obvious, and perhaps more interesting point, is that building “real” power in the context of the climate crisis will require serious working-class organization, and must be embedded in working class interests and working-class mobilization. This lesson is drawn out from the fact that both the rise of the Houthis in Yemen and the more recent rise of CONAIE in Ecuador were driven in part by rising fuel costs; indeed, there has been a large number of violent uprisings across the world in recent years that have been at least partially triggered by increases in the price of carbon energy – notably, in France, with the rebellion of the “Yellow Vests” against a tax on fuel. Given the present state of global political economy, still mired in a decades-long regime of neoliberal austerity, the masses have little room to bear further cuts to their living standards or increases in the cost of living. As such, any attempt to decarbonize the economy by imposing the costs onto the working class will likely be met with fierce backlash, even as this is the only strategy that the capitalists will be willing to take to bring carbon emissions and the climate crisis under control. It is thus a precarious situation for the climate movement, given how it has tended to side comfortably with elite-driven projects, rather than embed itself in the working class; continuing such a habit in this era will risk a wholesale popular backlash against climate crisis mitigation efforts in general. The necessary alternative is to craft a program and practice of decarbonization that attacks the elites, and ensures that the costs of transition are paid for via the expropriation of capital, not through regressive taxation on workers. This is the paradoxical beauty of the events in Ecuador: an ecologically-minded indigenous coalition rose up to fight for continued subsidies for gasoline and diesel, even while maintaining its opposition to domestic fossil fuel extraction, thus fighting to ensure that the costs of overcoming economic and ecological crises will be borne by the elites.

Another point, that needs to be expanded on more in some future essay, is that elites won’t take such an attack lying down: historically, especially in the context of struggles around carbon energy, elites have responded to powerful revolutionary movements with violence and lawlessness. Thus, it will do no good for the climate movement to continue to have blind faith in the sanctity of laws and stable governance – these will be thrown out the window if capital decides that profits can be better protected without them. The slow genocide in Yemen by the West and the GCC, in particular, is today’s best example of just how savage global capitalism can get in its quest to safeguard its property against upstart popular movements.

And this is not a separate issue from that of building a working-class climate movement; if the left is not present, then popular reaction against neoliberal decarbonization initiatives will be the fuel that feeds the rise of fossil fascism. I had to cut this analysis out of “The Three Climate Strikes”, but we saw a glimmer of this potential future recently in Oregon, when an armed bloc of rural workers and paramilitary groups, in conjunction with the Republican Party, blocked a cap-and-trade bill from being voted on. The popular sentiment at the time was that this was an undemocratic and cynical attack on legislative norms – which is true – but the hidden undercurrent is that this was precisely a case where a neoliberal solution galvanized unrest among a largely working-class population, which has long suffered under neoliberal austerity, and accelerated its fall into the clutches of far-right/neo-fascist bloc revolving around rural extractive industries. And the main reason this process seems so smooth is because the left is absent from the field, restricting itself largely to the coastal metropoles, and content to tag along behind Democratic Party politicos and operatives in the non-profit-industrial complex.

To summarize (vaguely):

We need a movement which can cohere and coordinate existing networks (tenant associations, unions, direct-action collectives, student groups, environmental justice advocates, left-wing gun clubs) and different segments of the working class (nurses, teachers, truckers, taxi drivers, coal miners, fast food workers, IT technicians), and which dispenses with any illusions that we can peacefully and politely ask the elites to undermine their own wealth and power. The struggle for climate justice and decarbonization must ultimately be a manifestation of class struggle, and a leading front in the battle to overthrow the rule of capital.

Notes on Endnotes’ “We Unhappy Few”

The first essay in Endnotes 5, “We Unhappy Few“, is an interesting look at various psychological and psychiatric concepts, and how they can be applied to the dynamics of small groups of radicals and revolutionaries. The first half looks at some ideas that were born out of the struggles in Europe in the 1968 period around the proper orientation between “willed” groups of radicals and the larger, “spontaneous” movements around them, through writings like Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman’s Worker- student action committees: France May ’68, Gilles’ Duave’s arguments about a “historical party” vs. a “formal party”, and Jacques Camatte’s criticism of organizations as always tending toward becoming “gangs” and “rackets”. The second half gets much more abstract, centering on concepts advanced by the psychiatrist Wilfred Bion, such as “basic assumption groups”, “paranoid-schizoid states”, and “mystics”. Strange stuff, but actually simpler and more relevant than they initially seem.

Bion’s work fundamentally revolves around unpacking how people think, how thought is dependent on and shaped by other people and their thoughts, and how this can impact the behavior and evolution of groups. One key dynamic is how open somebody is to new knowledge, which is dependent on whether somebody is actually relating to and engaging with the object of potential knowledge. Resisting knowledge because of “assumed knowledge” is common, especially in dogmatic communist sects, who tend to never truly participate in or relate to the real world, whether that is via conversation with other groups or people in the streets during moments of struggle, since they believe that they already have the necessary knowledge. Another common cause of refusing knowledge is because it has been replaced with moralism, in the sense that groups or movements are declared as “good” or “bad” based on pre-conceptions, without any serious investigation or inquiry. Consider how some segments of the left rejected the Yellow Vest movement out of hand, as an inescapably fascist mobilization, without truly grasping the movement’s internal dynamics and contradictions, or engaging with first-hand accounts.

Another insight is the relational and collective nature of thought. All thinking is in relation with other people’s thinking, which we absorb via conversations, writing, etc. When we think, it is always mediated in some way by a larger array of other people’s thoughts, whether we are reflecting on them, responding to them, processing and understanding them, etc. A group, therefore, acts as a sort of container to hold and assimilate thinking, and to an extent can even do some thinking for us, which at its best leads to spreading knowledge faster, and at its worse enforces dogma.

Individual and group ability to think and develop knowledge is a constantly-evolving process, building on itself in some moments and regressing in others. Central to this process is how the realization or non-realization of a certain preconception is dealt with. When something happens that does not fit our pre-conceptions, how we respond influences whether we end up changing and developing our knowledge, or whether we resist this information and cling to the old pre-conception. Dealing with the falsification of our pre-conceptions can be challenging, and requires patience and discipline to deal with the accompanying feelings of confusion, doubt, and uncertainty, but it is a crucial part of developing our capacity to absorb and process knowledge and build our understanding of the world.

Bion identifies two general states that define a back-and-forth process of dealing with new information and consolidating it into knowledge: a paranoid-schizoid state (Ps), where thoughts are uncertain and confusing and chaotic, and a depressive state (D), where thoughts are structured and integrated (presumably these names have some actual meaning drawn from Bion’s work in psychiatry, even if their connection to how they are defined here is very unclear). Learning and growth requires continual movement between progressively developed states of Ps and D, where a new Ps state is triggered by new information (perhaps, a certain pre-conception being proven wrong by experience or argument), which in turn eventually settles into a new D state, where the new information is processed and synthesized into a new set of concepts. Of course, this progressive development requires the ability to actually carry out the productive absorption and integration of new knowledge; without this, a new Ps state triggered by new information could easily just decay back into the old D state, with its old pre-conceptions still intact.

For radical groups, this framework can be applied to understand how they interact with new information, such as the sort that emerges from moments in struggle, based on their participation or observation of “spontaneous” uprisings, or their own attempts to instigate a struggle, or perhaps some new unorthodox idea that a member brings up based on some text, or their own personal experiences. A group that is too dogmatic will mechanically brush aside any new information and experience, clinging to its existing ideas, and remain stagnant in a D state. A more open and healthy group that is interested in learning and growth, on the other hand, will open up to new information, triggering a Ps state where assumptions and ideas are up in the air and there is much uncertainty about the future, but then steadily consolidates into a new, more developed D state, with new and robust frameworks, synthesized from the old frameworks and the new ideas, that guide the groups activities. The splitting or dissolution of groups can also be analyzed through this perspective, as being moments where the group cannot bear the tension and strain of the Ps state.

All in all, some fairly useful concepts here. Unfortunately, there isn’t much offered beyond the basic idea that individuals and groups should be open to new information and experiences, and accept the kind of periodic disarray and doubt that may come with such openness. Specifically, the question of how to maintain such openness is not answered. This is hardly a trivial matter, especially insofar as larger radical organizations are concerned. How to build and maintain a radical organization or group that can keep itself open to new experiences and ideas, while also maintaining a certain level of discipline and cohesion to effectively wage class struggle, is a complex question that touches on all aspects of how such groups are structured, governed, and networked.

Based on my experiences in organizing (i.e. in tech worker organizing), my focus when thinking about organizational health and dynamism tends to be on how an organization interacts with new and prospective members and sympathizers. Are newcomers seen as containers of new ideas and experiences who can contribute to the intellectual and practical fabric of the group; or are they seen as abstractions which can be uncritically and mechanically plugged in to pre-existing committees and campaigns? Is there an organic process by which newcomers can learn about organizational history, structure, and norms, or are they left alone to waffle about and scratch their head about who they should talk to and what they could be doing?

If we understand new members as a type of new information, then whether they are properly assimilated into an organization is a measure of how open that organization is to building new knowledge, and how willing it is to go through the progressive back-and-forth Ps-D oscillation. New members of radical and revolutionary groups, if they are actually allowed to be full individuals with their own ideas, experiences, struggles, will lead to a progressive transformation of the group, and a reforging and reconstitution of the relationships and strategies that underpinned the group prior to their joining. This requires the organization to have the collective capacity and will to weather the period of uncertainty and awkwardness that is inherent to taking up new members, as well as some idea as to how to eventually stabilize and synthesize the new with the old.

This dynamic is most pronounced in moments of intense popular struggle or upheaval, when large numbers of people who are swept up in the moment start to look for organizations to join and continue the fight. Organizations that have the capacity and will to absorb this new energy will grow and evolve; those that don’t will stagnate and split. And of course, just because an organization is able to absorb new energy, ideas, and members in one moment does not mean it will always be able to do so; for example, the DSA grew tremendously in a certain direction in the context of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, but there are signs that it is unable to really relate to or connect with the current wave of uprisings and rebellions against the police state.

There is a lot more that can be said about how to understand and apply Endnotes’ analysis of Bion’s psychological frameworks, especially in how they are parallel with other frameworks the Maoist concept of the mass line, but for now this is hopefully a good sketch of the basic concepts and some rudimentary ways to apply them to radical organizing.

The insurrection in Ecuador, October 2019

Last October, there was a fearsome struggle in Ecuador against the government’s decision to end subsidies for fuel, which was reversed after nearly two weeks of protests, riots, blockades, and occupations.

In February 2019, the government of Lenin Moreno signed a $4.2 billion financing deal with the IMF, which was conditional on cutting government spending. Moreno decided to achieve this by firing a number of government workers, privatizing certain state-run enterprises, and ending subsidies for fuel.

On Tuesday night, October 1st, it was announced that subsidies for fuel — worth around $1.3 billion a year, and which had been in place for some four decades — would end that Thursday. The price shock was immediate and brutal — a more than 25% rise in gasoline prices, and a doubling of diesel prices. Trade unions and indigenous movements immediately announced their intention to strike and demonstrate against the decision.

On Thursday, October 3rd, transit workers took the lead, taking to the streets and blockading major highways and roads in the two major cities, Quito and Guayaquil. The protests almost immediately took on a militant air, with barricades being thrown up and strikers clashing with police. The government declared a state of emergency.

After two days of battling the police for control of the streets, the transport unions called for an end to the strikes, with leadership declaring that their disagreements had been expressed, and that they hoped the government would listen to their demands. Over 350 people had been arrested, including union leaders; government officials said that 60 police officers had been injured, and a dozen police vehicles destroyed.

However, other groups, especially those of the indigenous communities, continued to rally, and called for a national general strike the following Wednesday, October 9th. La Confederacion de Nacionalidades Indigenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE), a huge nation-wide coalition of various indigenous communities, announced that they would be mobilizing indefinitely until the reinstatement of the fuel subsidies.

CONAIE drove the insurrection to new heights on Monday, October 7th. Tens of thousands of indigenous activists and militants had spent the weekend travelling from every corner of the country to the cities, particularly the capital city of Quito. There, in coordination with angry urban workers and students, they quickly overwhelmed security forces and seized control of highways, universities, government buildings, and other urban spaces, including brief occupations of the General Comptroller’s Office and the National Assembly. The Moreno administration quickly packed up and fled, relocating the government to the port city of Guayaquil. Meanwhile, CONAIE declared a “state of exception” in indigenous territories, effectively rendering them autonomous from the central government; dozens of state security personnel were subsequently arrested by indigenous militants for violating this newly declared sovereignty. Meanwhile, several oil fields in the Amazon were attacked and forced to shut down 165,000 bbl/day of production.

The battle continued on for the rest of the week. Running street battles between demonstrators and police were constant. A national strike took place on Wednesday, October 9th, with the unions coming back to the streets. Police officers continued to be arrested by the indigenous forces, usually for a scold-and-release. La Casa de la Cultura (House of Culture) became the central headquarters for the militants in Quito, where large assemblies were held to discuss and coordinate the insurrection. Occupation and sabotage of oil infrastructure continued; by Friday, October 11th, production had been reduced by 900,000 bbl/day (an odd figure given by the energy ministry, since most sources have Ecuador’s oil production at typically around 500,000 bbl/day) .

On Saturday, October 12th, peace talks were finally announced between CONAIE and the Moreno administration, even as the latter announced a curfew and deployed the military to help control the streets. But within a day, Moreno capitulated; fuel subsidies were re-instated, the IMF austerity plan was cancelled, and further talks were planned between the government and the indigenous communities to devise a different set of spending cuts and taxes. After celebrating, the thousands of indigenous activists and militants spent some time cleaning up the streets of debris, before starting the trek home to their rural villages.

 

Overall, the insurrection is a fascinating case-study in organization, power, and militancy. At first glance, the almost two weeks of chaos look like a series of daily riots; but this characterization overlooks the intense level of organization, planning, and logistical coordination that was present. An interview from Crimethinc with a participant lays out the dense networks of solidarity and cooperation that made the sustained insurrection possible. There was the coordination of transport for tens of thousands travelling to the capital from the mountains, jungles, and lowlands, as well as food distribution centers, volunteer medical brigades, childcare services, entertainment, popular assemblies, and so on. All of this synced up with a fierce level of militancy, where thousands armed with sticks, stones, shields, rockets, petrol bombs, and molotovs battled state security forces for control of urban territory, while their counterparts in the hinterlands staged decisive strikes on oil infrastructure. And it should be noted that none of this was a spontaneous or sudden outburst of reactive anger; they had no illusions that the struggle was about anything other than forcing the state to reinstate the fuel subsidies. They were ready to fight and shed blood from day one, and had planned accordingly.

The insurrection is also noteworthy when situated against the deepening crises and contradictions of capitalism and Earth’s ecology. On Friday, September 27th — mere days prior to Moreno’s explosive announcement — the Global Climate Strikes took place. Millions around the world, including contingents in Ecuador, rallied in the streets to protest against political inaction around fossil fuel emissions and the climate crisis. An important cause, but one with very little teeth, and which was quickly eclipsed by the potent force of the fuel subsidy protests. The contrast in form between the two movements (peaceful demonstrations vs. violent confrontation) is matched by the contrast in content (demanding political action against carbon emissions vs. demanding popular access to carbon energy). This dynamic has emerged in other parts of the world, notably in France with the successful rebellion of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) against the Macron administration’s new tax on fuel.

This could be chalked down to the different social bases of the two causes — a relatively abstract and long-term vision of conservation, embraced by professionals and the middle-class, versus an immediate and harshly material necessity to defend the already empty pockets of the laboring masses from further deprivation. But CONAIE’s history has in fact been in opposing extractive capitalism, and upholding an indigenous environmentalism. In fact, perhaps the main reason why the disruption of oil production during the uprising was so effective was because CONAIE and other groups had been engaging in such actions for many years. So why did they rise up in defense of fossil fuel subsidies?

Because, they are not naive, or detached from the day-to-day material lives of their constituents. Fossil capitalism must be stopped — but this cannot be done on the backs of the masses, who depend on carbon energy to live and yet never had any real choice in the matter. The transition must be at the expense of those who benefited: the already wealthy and powerful. Thus, the attempts by capital to impose greenwashed austerity while protecting its ability to profit must be opposed.

And in Ecuador, at least, it seems that the mainstream environmental movement has recognized this fact; in an interview with Truthout, the local leader of Fridays for the Future states her intention to connect the student/climate activist organization with the country’s indigenous movements. If this goes well, then it will be a landmark in building a militant social composition that fights against the ecological devastation of capitalism, while remaining rooted in the lives of the masses.

We’re going through a climate crisis, not climate change

I am developing a minor, rhetorical gripe with the how deeply embedded and widespread the term “climate change” is. It is an incredibly vague and passive term, and does little to represent the actual magnitude of the ongoing destabilization of the climate, and other sub-systems of the Earth’s biosphere. This is why I am going to try to go out of my way to avoid using the term “climate change” in discussions and writing, and instead use the term “climate crisis”, or refer to the “destabilization of the climate/Earth’s ecology”, or alike terms (the term “climate chaos” seems to have been gaining some traction among climate justice activists).

But whatever we use, it should evoke a sense of destruction, since that is what is actually happening. The Earth’s climate has changed before, many times, (as climate crisis deniers are quick to argue) — but what’s unique about the climactic changes being driven by anthropogenic carbon emissions is just how rapid, in geological and evolutionary time-frames, the changes are taking place. Let us make sure our language properly reflects this.

Disorientation and decomposition

The modern Internet is an immense and finely-tuned engine for distraction and diversion. The big tech companies have some of the smartest people in the world working around the clock to ensure that their platforms are as engaging, addictive, widespread, and panoptic as possible. (Indeed, I’d like to see the economists who complain about the low observed productivity gains from the information revolution do a study on whether productivity gains were simply undermined by workers wasting a good chunk of their work time with dithering around on the Internet).

I think this is a key reason why the modern world feels like its in a state of constant frenzy, and why its so easy for people today to feel disoriented. As commented on in “Too Fast, Too Furious”, a wonderful essay from n+1 published in late 2015, the Internet has created an endless stream of information, audio-visual consumables, and social media chatter. This is part of a larger trend where capitalist innovation in labor-saving technology has created the paradox where workers (in the imperialist cores) by and large have more free time than they once had, but also find this free time under constant stress, pulled apart by an unceasing barrage of inescapable nudges and tugs, in an infinite number of directions, by an infinite number of competing corporations pushing an infinite number of goods and services. Combine this with the stress of working meaningless jobs and running on the hamster wheel of bills and debts, and disorientation becomes one’s natural state.

Systematic attack on our minds is not new. Such is the entire history of the advertising industry, as laid out in Tim Wu’s excellent book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016). What is new is how effective, intrusive, and ubiquitous advertisements today are, with the ability of advertisement technology corporations to soak up huge amounts of information about our social and psychological dynamics and adjust their ads accordingly. This is not just the result of technological advancements, but also the absorption of huge amounts of social activity into social media platforms, which can then apply data science and artificial-intelligence techniques to continually analyze and manipulate human behavior. Our social lives have become increasingly sucked into intelligent and interactive billboards, and our thought processes increasingly outsourced to advertising algorithms. This Twitter thread by a Google AI researcher is a good description of all this (although it is amusing that he puts all the blame on Facebook, as if Google isn’t doing the same thing).

The framework of class composition can be useful in analyzing all of this. Economic restructuring — shutting down and moving factories, deploying labor-saving automation, stratifying the labor markets by race and gender — disrupts working-class organization by breaking up the economic foundation on which such organization was structured. Likewise, social and psychological restructuring — pulling social interactions and individual entertainment into a world of infinite scrolling, push notifications, and constant information overload — disrupts our own ability to sustain in-depth, complex lines of analysis, and build and maintain relationships that are genuinely on our own terms. Of course, the flip side of economic restructuring is that even as old working-class forms of organization are decomposed, the new economic structures drive new forms of working-class organization, as seen in the major worker rebellions in China in the late 2000s, or in the unrest among tech professionals and gig workers in the US in recent years. Likewise, the flip side of social-psychological decomposition can be seen in the subversive uses of the Internet to drive networked, decentralized movements like the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter.

However, it is essential that we don’t mistake these positive flip-sides to mean that there is some kind of teleological, automatic process where capitalist development generates an equally powerful reaction. It should be clear by now that the networked, decentralized movements dependent on social media have been unable to undermine capitalist power, and easily dissipate on contact with the hard, well-organized forces of capital and the state. This should be expected — as observed in “Too Fast, Too Furious”, the social spaces provided by techno-capitalism don’t allow for particularly deep experiences or relationships. These will only come about in the “real world”, outside of and autonomous to state and capital. Thus, while radicals should make use of social media platforms and related communications technologies, it is crucial that the ultimate purpose of such uses points outside of these disorienting spaces.

Thinking about climate crisis mitigation: time limits vs. carbon budgets

The slogan “we have 12 years to prevent a climate catastrophe” has been thrown around a lot since the IPCC released a special report in 2018, which focused on the importance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. I don’t particularly like the slogan, for two reasons: one, because it implies a kind of hard, unchanging timeline, and two, because it creates the image of an apocalyptic brink, past which there is no return. Neither of these are a good way to think about the climate crisis.

Mitigating the crisis is not about how much time we have left, but how much carbon we have left. The 12-year time limit is derived from how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere before we cross 1.5 C of warming. Chapter 2, Section 2, Part 2 of the IPCC Special Report analyzes this budget, and finds that the general range of how much carbon dioxide we can emit is likely somewhere between 420 and 840 gigatonnes; the 50% confidence value of the limit is 560 GtCO2. For reference, the total amount of carbon dioxide humans have emitted so far is roughly 2200 GtCO2. Comparing this budget with the rate at which we’re emitting carbon dioxide tells us how long we have until we push warming past the 1.5 C — assuming, of course, that this rate stays the same. If fossil fuel use peaked and stabilized in 2017, at a rate of 42 GtCO2/year, then our carbon budget would be exhausted after 13-14 years, around 2030. 12 years after the report’s release in 2018 — thus, the time limit.

But since this depends on the rate of carbon emissions, the time limit will change as the emission rates change. Global fossil fuel use today is in fact growing, at a rate of 2-3%/year, which knocks a couple years off of how fast we’ll exhaust the carbon budget. One the other hand, if somehow global carbon emissions peaked this year and went on a 2% yearly decline, we would instead add two years to the time limit; a 5% yearly decline would add around nine years. Thus, there is reason to be both optimistic and pessimistic: if emissions keep rising, that 12-year time limit will shrink, but if we can peak emissions and start decreasing it, the timeline will start to slowly stretch out, giving time for even more emissions reductions.

Graph of what year the carbon budget for 1.5 C of warming gets exhausted, for different rates of carbon emission increases/decreases. If carbon emissions keep increasing by 2%/year, the budget will be exhausted in 2029; if carbon emissions are decreased by 5%/year, the budget will be exhausted in 2041.

And if we don’t meet this moving deadline…well, things will get bad. But we should be clear about when and how things will get bad; its not like we’ll suddenly be engulfed with hurricanes and mega-droughts destroying our cities and displacing billions the second the last molecule of the carbon budget is used up, whether that is in 2030 or 2040 or whenever. And its not like things will be fine and dandy until that moment, either; this much should be clear from the widespread negative impacts that 1 C of warming is already having on the world. Peaking at 1.5 C will prevent much catastrophe, but it would have been much better if we had peaked at 1 C. Likewise, peaking at 2 C will bring much worse impacts than peaking at 1.5 C (such as the destruction of the coral reefs), but will nonetheless be much better than peaking at 3 C, which in turn will be much better than peaking at 4 C, and so on. This logic holds even when accounting for feedback loops and tipping points that could push climate change beyond the scope of human mitigation, since peaking human carbon emissions earlier rather than later will (presumably) prevent more dire tipping points from being reached, and make it more likely that we can figure out some way to stabilize the climate before any extinction scenarios play out.

So people shouldn’t despair when looking at the more sensationalist headlines about “12 years to save the world”. Its not a make-or-break deadline even though the stakes are massive and planetary in scope. Whatever we can do in the crucial decade of the 2020s will make the future that much marginally better, and we shouldn’t let pessimism about whether we can have a total victory stop us from fighting like hell.