Re-Architecting Resistance, Part II
In our last post in this series, we talked about the architectural problems with how we have conceptualized and executed social movements during our generation. In that post, I suggested that *this* post was going to be about changing architectural directions and presenting a new design proposal; however, I have found yet MORE shit I want to talk about the way stuff is done under the current model, so this is just another post about what we are doing wrong. Which is basically everything. Yet that is something I think we need to belly up to: just how broken our strategies for movements are. And discuss them and make sure we truly understand them.
The things we discussed in the last post focused on moving to a progressive, aggressive, design pattern against oppressors, recalibrating away from the passive and reactive model we’ve been using. We talked about how building in the moment of political chaos without a plan, has been ineffective again and again, unable to translate into sustained effort, and typically landing the energy in a black hole instead of an enemy door. We talked about reformism as a fundamental flaw in our systems thinking and how we have approached the oppressive system, the need to move away from reform strategies which have been an abject failure, and towards revolutionary strategies which are focused on making fundamental changes to the oppressive system, the needed change in the economic system. We talked about working from “within the system” — focusing so much time and energy on getting jobs, representation and votes — being non workable. We also talked about how we DO have the resources we need — the people, the time, the energy and even the money — but we haven’t been using them effectively. We need to design a better plan, that can be replicated across the movement, that can be widely understood and used, so that we can change this story around and go from literally fucking just openly and pathetically losing to being WINNERS.
We are SPARTA!!!!
Okay, let’s get back into some MORE of the fundamental design flaws we see in our movements. And then maybe *next* time we will get to the initial outlines for the plan itself, even though a lot of it is of course implied by this post-mortem and the technical explanation of the systems design we have been using.
One major question in movement design is how we deal with talent or the available population and how we structure the movement. People are our most important resources, and how we manage the flow and activity of people in the movement, is at the foremost of architectural questions. These are the resources we are dealing with, and it is also their baggage that we carry.
Couple points here.
One of my biggest issues is that the movement has relied on a rapidly churning pool of ambulance chasing, reactive people, uneducated in revolutionary theory and praxis, non-professional activists/agitators/party members/“comrades” generally doing extremely part time work on the issue, to generate the plans for all of this. This is absolutely stupid and also speaks to the lack of respect for the craft and practice of revolutionary movement, where architecture and design and strategy are worked on in incredible detail, with incredible sensitivity, and speaking back to a large body of work on how to MATERIALLY change the structure of society. And each of these transient groups and peoples and moments are generating a bunch of activity that is getting sent right into societal “Spam”.
This has proved woefully ineffective for the purposes of designing enduring infrastructure, especially because this reliance on part time, hobbyist organization, rather than giving people something to fold up into that has actually been architected for results, just leads to a lot of wasted fucking effort.
And the time that people are spending in the movement tends to be extremely superficial and short in nature. People quickly get bogged down in the other matters of their life; projects disappear into the void constantly. People often drop out of movements entirely after going to a protest or two. In my experience, someone’s time in the movement can be as little as three weeks. It’s awesome we have 3 weeks of their time, but not if they are whittling away at sticks while we are trying to storm the fortress; this goes back to our previous discussion about people reinventing the wheel over and over and over for each moment of viral social disruption. Unsustainable, and frankly childish. The idea that everyone can jump in there is patently absurd, and treating everyone as de-facto experts, means every asshole is trying to come up with their own bizarre doomed skunkworks version of whatever they think will get them the most followers on Twitter. It just sucks. It’s so bad. I wrote a bit about a better way to use these resources here; as well as here.
From a movement position, we should aim to make the most of those three weeks that someone is active and to use them as a naturally occurring, predictable resources, that we have a responsibility to help that person make the most impact during their 3 weeks. But as far as having people who are responsible, like Bolsheviks and other Marxist groups before us, for the overarching direction of the movement, that is something that should emphatically NOT be done by weekend warriors, yet is again and again. People spend their three weeks organizing events that never come to fruition, reading groups that don’t meet… the rate of failure is extremely high. It is a disservice to their contribution of time and energy to continue to let so much of what we need to bring to the doorstep of the enemy, drop into a black hole. And it is fucking stupid to let design decisions be made by someone who has the shelf life of heavy cream.
This is a fucking science, this is a matter of changes to the economic system, and effecting this system, and the people who have the credentials — observable, material, provable — should be in position here; we should not be trying to assemble an operating method out of 10,000 people with 20 hours of total time to give and no experience. It goes nowhere.
Having a model created by people who are actually trained in this, learned in this, who have the theory chops, the history chops, the economist chops, becomes the basis of effectively aligning these resources when people are activated. As is, chaos is born of chaos, and there is no higher operating unit of the movement which has a responsibility to properly channel the resources towards the single focus of the movement, which is achieving a financial system change; away from capitalism, which is fundamentally and scientifically, based on exploitation and leads directly to the worst outcomes of human existence, including war and sexual violence.
As Lenin established and demonstrated with his successful revolution, the ideal organizational pattern for structuring revolutionary resistance is actually small groups and teams and parties working together, full time, on the problem statement. These people set things up so that other efforts are more effective, more theoretically sound, and staffed with always-available talent that is not splitting their attention between jobs and the real work being done within the resistance. It helps with fundraising, international outreach, theoretical education of the people (which Lenin held as a sacred value), development and execution of strategy, and action.
These people need to be working on this full time, in a way that is funded directly by the party or group. I.e., independent revolutionary parties and organizations where this is what people live and breathe and die by. That is very different than someone on social media occasionally “signal boosting” a tired bit of “awareness” that everyone is more than enough aware of.
Up to this point, people who have been working on this full-time and in a dedicated manner, are people who are in the pockets of corporations and government - DEI officers, non-profit employees, media outlets, and so on. That capital backing meant that they had the opportunity to be the leaders of the movement, even while that same capital backing clearly compromised them and made them utterly unfit for duty and in practice, almost completely impotent.
Limiting conflict of interest and collaboration with the power structure frees up talent in incredible ways. And when we have full time, what Lenin calls “professional revolutionaries”, we have something we have basically never had before around this bitch: an actual party of full time people, backed by their own independent organization and finances, who is able to devote to this, absolutely everything; to not make a career of it, but a sacrifice to it.
You would think that people would be hammering down the door if these positions were available; you are perhaps not as familiar with the cowardice of the left as I have become. Either way, resistance and political and economic revolution absolutely demands the full attention of its leaders. Despite all the money that has circulated on the left, almost none of it has gone to provide for the long-term independent, uncompromised sustenance of people at the center of the movement and a core of full-time revolutionary experts. This again means we do not have continuity across movements, that people are often only active for a short while, that projects have extremely small timelines. While again the mass movements, are absolutely useful, in order to be effective, there must be a more robust and enduring infrastructure for managing and providing for the people who can fight in this full time — and not in the pockets of billionaires, tech companies and VC-backed media companies.
Going back to this idea of our resources getting multi-furcated across millions of small, disconnected, distributed efforts, the amount of funds available to resistance movements have gone into millions of directions. Each project does its own fundraising, prohibitive for small collectives who don’t have this level of expertise and thus struggle to get the funds they need, even if their efforts are valid. Ideally, a professional organization of people can also help to make these small efforts more successful or to connect them, to save and nurture what is good in them. This is another reason to focus on building a small core infrastructure instead of these mass movement flare ups, the standard fare of reformist democratic fake dissent; these flare ups should be things we are prepared to use as a resource to drive the agenda, but revolving the core revolutionary infrastructure around what is essentially discontent manifesting the hype cycle, the media cycle, the clout cycle, etc. Is just fucking stupid. We are responsible for helping to direct that energy OUTSIDE of those cycles and onto a new cycle, but this is only one of many strategies, one of many parts of the revolutionary vehicle that we are designing.
I think one of the biggest roles of these organizations or groups of people is to act as a switchboard, to have an understanding and coverage of the full field of play at the time, globally and domestically, and be able to dynamically and intelligently connect parts of the movement, people, infrastructures, resources and efforts, in real time, to deliver 10x and 100x results. Coordination has also failed because of the lack of an actual revolutionary back-bone.
I’ll go more into the switchboard idea coming up in the NEXT post because I really feel like we can do some crazy airbender shit on the switchboard idea, and I think a switchboard makes a lot of sense when we’re trying to make some sense out of the chaos.
Importantly, what aligns people in this proposed model, as we will discuss in a future post, is not a cult of personality, it is not democratic voting, and it doesn’t require clout to spread: it is a MODEL that has been developed with an eye for broad-based and foundational change. It’s a path forward towards a singular and encompassing end, a discontinuous shift in the financial system from which a new age of prosperity will emerge.
We cannot continue to be tied to the machinations of reformists and their ever creation of marketing material pouring into ballot boxes and petitions, going nowhere. We are locked in this toxic back and forth with them in which we never are able to advance. They are constantly stoking themselves up into impotent frenzy, and its fucking amateur hour everytime. One of the downfalls of the social media age of activism is that we have ended up with tens of thousands, even millions of people who think that they are activists just because they have amassed a following on Twitter for ham handed theory, usually regurgitated from somewhere else. Theoretical rigor, is something we can hold as a small group of professionals, and use that at a basis for discussion. And have a formal and rigorous process for evaluating the theory that is presented or used. The crowdsourced, ad hoc, social media theory popular on the American left has generated nothing but endless spaghetti. People on the left in America, their heads are literally like scrambled eggs. This points to what Lenin has spoken about, as far as the importance of rigor about theory, and on the organizing power of rigor about theory.
There is a difference between “awareness raising” and actually teaching revolutionary theory, which provides the grounding, goals, operating mechanism, focal points and directionality that “awareness” lacks. So where we are engaged with “awareness” — and we must be, if only in hopes of finding others like us; where we are engaged in awareness it must be in the vein of PROPER theoretic education. This is actually something I am not particularly qualified to do and points to the importance of putting Marxist-Leninist experts or at least devoted students in the center of the movement and as helping to orchestrate the actual design of the movement and our anti-Imperial forces.
RIGOR in the analysis has been totally missing. And this is even before a design pattern — this is about a fundamental position of commitment to the TRUTH, to accuracy, to the cause. It has been a free for all, and the discourse is fucking pathetic.
One part of our design has been “anyone can do it”, which I actually think has been just really insulting to the revolutionary tradition and to the rigor of our field, where people literally spend their lives developing their practice but some idiot on Twitter who got 10 RTs on a non-profit talking point, is going to be prioritized because of the clout cycle.
“Lived experience” has been the de rigor. Let’s just call it what the fuck it is and not be delicate about it. Just because something bad happened to you, doesn’t necessarily mean you have an accurate, Marxist-Leninist economic analysis of what the fuck is going on, okay. It doesn’t mean you know how to engineer an effective response to the enemy. We need to stop overgeneralizing limited personal experience and replace that with provable theoretical rigor.
This is related to one design pattern of the existing movements: the production of HUGE volumes of discourse. LOTS of discourse; if volume of discourse was enough to cause a revolution, the universe would have flip flopped. Our model has produced massive volumes of low quality, ineffective, confusing, contradictory and undifferentiated, cookie cutter discourse (take representation: there should be more X in Y is a never-ending void of discourse, always replenishing, never goes anywhere, and doesn’t work). Instead, we should be aiming to produce theoretically accurate and consistent, tested and circulated and widely discussed, documents that apply the existing revolutionary body to our material circumstances. These documents are also generative because they promote a great deal of intensive scrutiny and debate, we form discourse around these texts, and we engage each other not on the surface analysis of the day to day management of capitalism, but in a very meaningful way with the beast at the center.
In a word, the left is going podcast when we need to be going essay and oratory, two forms of discourse that have been leaned on most heavily by the revolutionary movements of the past, specifically because they require a formal and structured argument, because it requires the speaker to expound upon their thesis with more than two sentences, which is just about where a lot of the analysis you see in Tweets drops off on the defensibility meter. I think serious people who are interested seriously in these matters should move into these forms; and indeed, I think that the attempt to build movements off of Tweets, that this has not been an effective strategy and has been particularly ineffective when it comes to generating theory and understandings of it that can guide the many catalysts and infernos that are generating at all times from the clash between capitalism and the people. A lot of people who can make some pretty banger one-tweeters about the motherfucking DSA would not be able to defend it or explain it in 4 paragraphs.
Or stare down a debate with someone who has actually read Marx a single time.
This is to say, that we have some really big internal obstacles or rather, things we know to be true about the resources we have. We need to move from a design that is predicated and sustained by bad theory and ineffective practices like reformism, and towards a design THAT CAN OPERATE DESPITE THE CONDITIONS, towards a design that ACCOUNTS in no uncertain terms, for the reality of the terrain and the quality of resources available to us. I.e., we cannot rely on almost any of the left, we cannot follow their hype cycle, and we must update our understanding to know that. We must also move from entertaining spheghetti theory, and indulging everyone’s need to feel like a special fucking snowflake inventing their own shit, to having rigor of theory; this is essential because rigor of theory leads our action.
All of this points to the inherent instability and weakness and fragility of our movements. Yet, these are the hands we are dealt; we can’t cry over spilled milk, but rather figure out what to do with the milk on the floor.
Where this really brings us is the need for us to design to work in unstable conditions, using unstable and unreliable people, knowing that most people are only going to be able to a devote a little bit of time, that people do not stay engaged in movements, that we cannot count on stable populations, that most people in the broad base are caught up in clout chasing and media ops, that most people who are engaged in the movement have literally no idea what they are talking about. Not to mention the constant interpersonal problems that rip apart movements, the constant selling out that is pulling our most qualified people into the void, and the general lack of reliability on every single measure possible.
FUCK lmfao.
While I hate the term “anti fragile”, it does come to mind.
In computers, we solve for problems like this all the time: how do we keep a massive application online when the traffic pattern is unpredictable and prone to “burstiness” — I.e., sudden and dramatic increase in capacity required by virality. Often we are working with computers all over the world who are constantly failing and having mechanical problems. Networks, machines, all can be unreliable. Network partitions. DDoS. Power outages. Hacking and exploits. Thus the art of managing a large computer system is about becoming resilient to those failure conditions and still being able to meet a certain threshold - usually called a ToS, a level of availability and latency and so on, needed to meet the demand. Essentially, the ability to deliver in very complicated and constantly failing and changing situations.
If we design for a computing world without thinking about all these obstacles, rather than accurately modeling them, our design will be brittle and break on contact with reality. Instead, we have to develop strategies for making our design resilient and effective in the current environment — chaotic clout chasing by reformists, the lack of time and training of movement participants, inability to rely on “fellow” leftists, the constant selling out that happens, infiltration, the lack of movement infrastructure, etc. These are all things we must account for in our design, be resilient to, and actually use them to drive the scientific conclusion.
To begin to close this out…
An important part of our architecture, of course, is what types of actions we take and use; what our design and our architecture lets us DO, and what it makes available or prohibitive to us as far as actions we can take in the playing field. Changing from the existing architecture to a more aggressive architecture requires taking into account what actions are available and advisable within each. There are only a limited number of actions that we have in our toolkit, flowing directly from our architectural choices, and thus it is essential to take great care in picking them and making sure they are supported by the model and effective in the material world.
A bulldozer can pick up dirt and move it around. A crane can lift another crane 60 stories in the sky and bring it back down again. A sportscar can go 130 miles an hours. A truck can haul packages across the country. Obviously, the link between architecture and action is clear, yet, we rarely ponder it.
The reformist movement that has dominated and ultimately destroyed the social progressive movement in America has been defined by a limited number of actions itself.
These are 99% of the actions currently taken: tweeting, building websites for projects that are never revisited, awareness raising of various kinds, donations to non-profits, protests of various threat levels (mainly benign), voting in elections, supporting Democrat campaigns (disgusting), signing petitions, getting jobs at non-profits, corporations and the government, developing media platforms and personal platforms. And towards the tail end of our era, organizing unions has become a major focus as well, although the overall unionization efforts have produced very little result, been quickly co-opted by organizations and infiltrated by agents, etc. See: how quickly Amazon was able to get the broad based momentum destroyed by offering their main organizer a full-out package; he got the Hollywood one, one of the hardest to get because only a few of the major tech companies have a mechanism for delivering a mainstream celebrity package.
A fundamental change in architecture means a change in the actions that are being used and that are available to us; moving away from reform-oriented actions and towards proactive and aggressive actions focused on fundamental systems change. I’ve talked a lot about the failure of awareness strategies which have suffused the environment; I won’t say too much more here except to say that while everyone seems to suffer a failure of imagination when it comes to tactics, there are some GREAT alternatives out there, the number one being:
BUILDING MOVEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE. (Like the switchboard).
We will discuss the range of actions and tasks and activities and CAPABILITIES of a new revolutionary architecture, in a post soon.
I know this all seems like a lot, but everyone from our kind who came before us, faced the very same. This is the long game; welcome to it. Let us take solace in their work. Read more fucking Lenin.
PS:
If we are explicitly trying to meet that as an architectural principle — committed, full-time members — funding as a result should be optimized for that goal. We can even start to pool infrastructure and resources to support our actors, perhaps in small groups. I.e., renting out housing to house and feed multiple members. This is not for pussies and we will be looking for people who are willing to lose everything. In the process we develop an infrastructure and operating procedure for finding and onboarding new full-time members.
But, more on the delightful, cottage-core, communist commune in a future post. See? There are better things ahead if we but take the path naturally offered us. We have not been moving with the currents of revolution, we have fallen down in its squall.