Bedtime Theory

The Faridabad Majdoor Samichar now have a website with translated pieces of their paper, an explanation of their project, and links other groups in the same milieu such as Gurgaon Workers News, and groups I had never heard of such as Subcontinental Upheaval and China Study Group. The video project Faridabad Workers News looks impressive and promising. FMS in brief is a "workers library" without books in one of the main industrial suburbs of Delhi. The FMS has produced a workers newsletter distributed at major points of transit in the industrial district. The content is derived from the conversations in distribution and at the FMS itself, making the paper something of a proletarian community voice of working conditions, resistance, and experiences. This article, written by Shankur who I met at FMS a few years back and who was a solid and committed participant in these struggles, is the best description of FMS, and is unparalleled compared to Loren Goldner’s schewed and somewhat distorted description in Revolutionary termites of Faridabad or whatever it was.

I use Mobipocket now for reading articles and books online. E-readers, I learned, give you the ability to search entire texts (or your library), to highlight/make notes/etc in a form where you have a series of links you can then pull up the section of the text from, and copy and paste it all. It streamlines writing articles beautifully and may full replace my paper books in the future!

I recently re-read the FdCA’s position paper on the Mass Organization (which it should be said is only one tiny piece of their interlocking theoretical and strategic pieces).  Taken on its own the pieces main strengths are its critiques[i], it’s weaknesses I would say are its proposals for the role of revolutionaries and mass organizations. I have to preface this by saying that I am sure I’m getting some of this wrong translating from the Italian to American context, that this article is fairly schematic and connected to other pieces I don’t explore, and my reply is likewise schematic and a rough rough draft a serious response. (more…)

I was reading Ian McKay’s interview with Mark Leier, author of the new Bakunin biography Creative Passion, and found this nugget.

"This was an activist who fought on the losing side all of his life, yet did not lose his passionate hope, his understanding, that the struggle itself was meaningful, for without it, the world would certainly get worse. While some seem him as a quixotic figure, I see him as one who realistically assessed the opportunities for success and failure and decided to fight for an ideal even when he thought there was no immediate chance of victory. "

I needed that, really. 

There are different orientations towards the political left one can take while doing revolutionary work. Broadly speaking we can break up the left based on how people organize themselves ideologically, or we can find divisions in terms of the role various left actors have in proletarian movements. Seeing these different orientations helps to sort through some of the apparent by illusory differences, and where the real divisions and unity lies. (more…)

I’m going to hazard a historical thesis: that marxism and anarchism, the red and the black, have been superseded by history. (more…)

I’ve decided to try and draw together revolutionary theory about how consciousness develops, since I think there’s actually very little explicit ideas out there beyond people parroting the leninist conception or the spontaneist conception. One hugely overlooked area I’ve found is syndicalist ideas about consciousness. There appears to be debates in the early 20th century about syndicalist conceptions of the development of revolutionary consciousness, and in fact it seems to have represented a school of thought on how to bring about revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. This is in spite of the fact that syndicalists themselves rarely wrote about such matters. Below I try to gather together the historical lessons of the proletariat engaged in syndicalist struggle, as a research thread rather than a thesis. (more…)