I saw the following exchange at the Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side. It is worth watching in its entirety.
At the Jacobin-sponsored talk about the present and future of Occupy Wall Street, Doug Henwoodi rritably and correctly ripped into those who argue that any form of coordination or organization is bad/ authoritarian/vanguardist/reminiscent of Stalin/kindred forms of unproductive abuse. As he pointed out, the problem during the uprising in Madison is that the energy there simply got hijacked by those whowere organized. Someone else made the point that to be free is to not have to micro-manage the idiotic minutiae of day-to-day life. I’ll have more to say about the National Students for Justice in Palestine conference later – which was great – but there was a side-current of thought, which is much more than a side-current in many sectors, that any form of organization is inevitably hierarchical and that we can simply work spontaneously, loosely, and in a perpetually ad hocmanner.
I spoke at one point of a “political machine” capable of transforming thought, mobilization, and energy into coordinated action. One response was a kind of titter as though to speak of machines was by definition authoritarian. To the extent that this is prevalent both on parts of the anarchist left and as it is represented in student activism, I think this is seriously dangerous thinking. Anarchists above all envision a highly organized and structured society. That organization can consist of inter-linked nodes – it need not have a central nervous system which does its thinking for it. But coordination is required if global or unified action is required, whether it’s to free Palestine or free our societies. Coordination can simply mean delegation. Obviously, it need not mean representation, and it need not mean the unaccountable centralization of power. Spontaneity is great when it is possible, but our opponents are organized and so must we be.
