Mark you write: 

"I think an assembly of movements would be a good thing. However, I don't think that a "counter-power" for a classless / participatory society with no clear ideas of how to run such a society will be stable enough to maintain power. It is, it seems to me, more likely to result on chaos or be hijacked by coordinators - as has happened in the past."

Why do you think the mass social movements would have no ideas about how to run a society? It seems to me that what's required is to win over mass social movements to a libertarian socialist aim. But I think that in practice people are more likely to be motivated to seek out this kind of change and to work for it if they have been drawn into active engagement through social movements along the fault lines in society, such as struggles against employers, the govenment, landlords etc.

Mark:

"You ask, "Why do they need to form themselves into a political organization?"

Well first of all we will need political organisation in a post-revolutionary society so we need to establish them at some point during the transition. I say that we should priorities the creation of these new institutions (first in embryonic form as chapters and later as actual councils) because I believe that by establishing a new participatory government first will make social transformation easier and less violent."

There is a basic fallacy here. From the fact that I reject any political organization taking power, it doesn't follow that I reject political organizations. Such organizations are useful and I envision that a libertarian socialist political organization would try to acheive influence for its ideas within society and within mass social movements. A libertarian socialist outcome is not likely unless the mass social movements have come to have that as an aim.

Your approach is useless because it is apriori. It doesn't base itself on an examination of how mass social movements actually arise.

Mark, you write: "Okay, what I want to say is -
What if the "political organisation taking government power" is made-up of the "mass social movements"" And: "You see, basically, I don't understand why the mass social movements can't come together to form a political organisation - in fact I think this is exactly the kind of thing that is needed if we are to succeed in transforming society. "
 

Within mass social movements it is very likely that there will be political differences and these will include differences about the steps to be taken and about the goals of the movement. Often these differences will be expressed in the existence of separate political organizations. This has historically been the way things have worked out in the periods of social upheaval in various countries that seemed to challenge the dominant groups in society.

And I don't understand why the social movements have to form themselves into a political organization. There are indeed various Marxists I am familiar with who will say that, for example, unions are too limited, they can only deal with relations to employers, so there needs to be another organization that takes up all the issues of the day and looks to the overall social change in society. This is their argument for some kind of mass socialist party. But this typically been proposed as part of a strategy to capture the state. And if in periods of great social upheaval, there is inevitably diversity of political organizations, then how is a one political organization going to embrace all the social movements?

Based on actual historical experience, political organizations end up being narrower than the mass movements (including labor organizations as among these), not broader. So there is this historical evidence.

If we think of a period of major upheaval and mass social movement organizations have formed themselves into an alliance, perhaps around something like Adomovsky's assembly of movements, they form a kind of counter-power to the state and the dominating classes at that point. Why do they need to form themselves into a political organization?

This is getting to be rather repetitive.  You write: "In fact your earlier replies were not "particular" at all. You wrote, "Certainly there are political organizations formed to take control of, or create governments. They are called political parties." This, to my mind, more than implies that you consider all political organisations to be political parties. However your later comments seem to suggest otherwise. I find all of this and your use of the term "partyism" (and Steve's "party left") very confusing."
 

Nope. Read my essay on social anarchist political organization:

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22097

There I explain the concept of "dual organizationalism"...a Left libertarian understanding of the distinct roles of political organizations and mass social movement or labor organizations. I think I make it clear that the libertarian socialist left has historically, for the most part, advocated that social transformation is the work of the mass social movement & labor organizations, or what Steve calls the "social left." This is how we interpret the old slogan "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves."

A political organization taking governmental power in its own right is partyism. Opposition to partyism is a defining feature of libertarian socialism or social anarchism.

I don't think a technomanagerial mode of production emerged from the Russian revolution because the Bolsheviks lacked "shared vision". And their "hierarchical division of labor" was also reflected in their view that it is political party (a minority) that takes power rather than the mass organizations (such as the factory committee movements, grassroots soviets).

Also, too much of an emphasis on "shared vision" is likely to lead to sectarianism and an inability to build either political or mass organizations that are effective. The fate of the Socialist Labor Party, which had very strong agreement on "shared vision", is a lesson to observe. As I pointed out, if I were to insist on "shared vision" to the extent of agreement with parecon/lparsoc in a political organization, I'd be isolated, as the political organization I am a member of has only a minority who agree with this. It would also ignore the fact that there is in fact a lot of shared agreement, on both strategy and vision that we have. And in the immediate situation, agreement about strategy is more pressing.

But we've trod over all this before. So I think maybe we should end this here.

Mark, you start by quoting me:

 [QUOTE]
 I believe that this comes about through more and more people being drawn into mass struggles and developing their abilities and knowledge and changing their consciousness in various ways.
[/QUOTE]

And then you say:

[QUOTE]
Again I would agree but I would add that engagement in mass struggles does not guarantee the kind of consciousness that will result in the kind of society we desire - this is where a vanguard organisation comes in (something that both Marx and Bakunin understood).
[/QUOTE]

I doubt the relevance of the Marx and Bakunin citations, but Marx and his supporters had Bakunin expelled from the first international because they objected to Bakunin's vanguard organization. What Marx and Engels did advocate was the formation of a working class political party to participate in elections...and Bakunin and Marx disagreed about that also. So they agreed about the usefulness of a political organization...just as you and I both do...but they disagreed about its role...and you and I disagree here also.

Anyway, anarchists often nowadays don't like the word "vanguard" because of its association with the Leninist idea of the "vanguard party." Nonetheless, I...like many social anarchists or libertarian socialists both now and historically...do agree with the idea of a political organization. In my article on political organization

(http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22097)

I tried to answer the question "What is the vanguard?" this way:

[QUOTE]
To answer this question we need to start with some idea of what "the vanguard" is. I think there are two aspects to this. Both anarchists and Marxists in the past have talked about "uneven consciousness" within the working class population. People vary in terms of how far they aspire to change society for example or to the knowledge they gained about how capitalism works, and so on. But also there are some people who exhibit more leadership skills than others...speaking ability, self-confidence, a disposition to take initiative, ability to articulate a viewpoint or rally others behind them, ability to write, self-education about various aspects of society, knowledge about how to organize.
 
This is shaped by various things, including past experience, being involved in organizations, and the kinds of differences in skills, confidence and education that reflect a society that is unequal along class, gender, and race/nationality lines.
 
To put it another way, some people have more "human capital" as far as being effective in, and disposed to, activism and organizing.
 
Thus understood, the "vanguard" within the working class consists of the layer of people who are active, do organizing, have some influence through the sorts of leadership qualities I've referred to, take on leadership positions in organizations, can articulate and theorize situations and do things like publishing leaflets and newsletters. The "vanguard" in this sense is extremely various in its ideas but most right now may not be anti-capitalist in their
thinking.
[/QUOTE]

Thus the vanguard that is organic to the working class consists of all the activists, organizers and publicists within the various mass social movements rooted in the working class...not just people who belong to political organizations, tho these activists are part of the "vanguard" also. These provide leadership for movements in the sense of having influence within
them, providing direction, etc.

When I talk about the idea of "social insertion," for example, I am talking about the role of the political organization within mass social movements.

From a parecon/parsoc point of view, it's essential to work to develop in rank and file participants in mass social movements skills and knowledge to enable them to participate effectively, and to work against tendencies to concentration of decision-making and skills in a few. This is part of the task of building mass social movements that "prefigure" the kind of society we want. What I've found is that it is possible to gain support for this idea in mass organizations without people necessarily buying into the full corpus of ideas in parecon/parsoc. But it's true that it is helpful if people who support the values of parecon/parsoc are voices for self-management and democratization of expertise.
And I think that popular education programs to do skill development are of major importance.

But you'll notice I'm assuming that the relationship of a libertarian socialist political organization...whether it subscribes to parecon/parsoc or only agrees partly with it...respect the organic development and self-managing autonomy of mass movements. Ultimately the mass social movements *will* have to come around to supporting and embracing a self-managed, libertarian socialism as a goal for it to be actually a result of a social transformative process. But this is something that would be an organic development within the mass of the oppressed and exploited and their mass social movements. I agree that a revolutionary libertarian socialist political organization can play a useful role in this process....through its participation in "the battle for the hearts and minds" of the population and the influence of its activists in social movements and in other ways.

You say:
[QUOTE]
Regarding your comments on anarcho-syndicalism I think you have double standards. It seems, from what you write, that it is perfectly okay for you guys to have political organisations but when anyone else proposes them you dismiss them as "partyism" -- the definition of which seems to change every time you make a statement.
[/QUOTE]

It's not a "double standard" because I gave an argument as to *why* I reject a particular conception of the role of a political organization...as an organization to gain hierarchical control over movements and/or use its mass base to capture control of a state, and then implement its program through the state. Is the political organization the agency of social transformation or is it the mass social movements that are the agency of social transformation? That's the question.

It is not the existence of political organization in itself that I am opposed to but a particular role for political organization. And my view follows the historically dominant conception of the organized libertarian socialist left.

Nor am I opposed to the creation of a new form of government...I think the working class & oppressed will need to consolidate a social transformation through creating an overall social/political structure to decide and enforce the rules for society. But it's the mass social movements that I envision as the agency of this transformation.

Historically large parts of the left believed that it would be through a political organization being built up and then capturing control of, and running, a state that socialism would come about. This led either to accommodation to capitalism...as in the social-democratic parties...or creation of societies dominated  by a techno-managerial class through
state control of the economy, as in the Communist countries.

Here is how Steve D. summarizes the issue:

[QUOTE]
That, I believe, is part of what concerns Tom (if I understand him correctly) about what you're saying: he wants the exploited and the oppressed to mobilize themselves through collective action in mass social movements, and to find ways of coordinating their struggle(s) successfully, in order to push their struggles as far as they can go, ultimately culminating in revolutionary transformation. But you seem to want to create a programmatically-defined parsoc political organization, and to have that evolve into a kind of alternative, radically democratic state, which will then organize the transition to participatory society.

So these are importantly different political projects, at least in the long run: one is to be driven by the social left, the other is to be driven by the party left (by whatever name). That, I believe, is what he means when he says that your view is "partyist."
[/QUOTE]

I think Steve has fairly stated the difference here, as I conceive of it.

Mark, you write:

"In the program I propose we would be looking to build support for the new political organisations  (nested chapters / councils) from about one third of the population of any given country. At such a point we would be in a position to claim legitimate power for government through these new institutions making the old political system redundant."
 

The problem I have with the comment of Michael Albert  you cite is that Michael says nothing about how this one-third for revolutionary change comes about. It's necessary to consider the process through which large masses of people shift in their consciousness away from fatalism and lack of belief in building a society where the working class is empowered and oppresions removed, towards belief in the possibility of fundamental change. This is the process that Marxists call "class formation" but we can generalize this to the oppressed and exploited in general.

I believe that this comes about through more and more people being drawn into mass struggles and developing their abilities and knowledge and changing their consciousness in various ways. Mass struggle is important here because it is how large numbers of people can participate in activity and self-organization directly, unlike in electoral politics which encourages people to just vote and look to leaders to do things for them.

Mass struggles emerge along the various fault lines in the society. And mass social movements and mass organizations thus are built to fight in these areas. A mass organization differs from a political organization in that it doesn't presuppose agreement with a narrow ideological or political platform....It will have a politics but it will tend to be broader and bring together people with a variety of viewpoints. So, the community land trust I helped to organize...a small mass organization with 120 members...was initiated by several of us who are libertarian socialists and in fact it tends to have an implicitly anti-capitalist politics, but it attracts a wide variety of people with Left views, including independent socialists, Greens, people with a sort of Left social democratic or Left liberal viewpoint. The same sort of thing has happened in situations in the past where I participated in building a local union from scratch.

The ideological narrowness of a political organization put together on the basis of agreement with parecon/parsoc would prevent it from being an authentic mass organization in the sense I've just described.

you write: "I should also point out that by your own definition of "partysm" you would have to reject arnarcho-syndicalism for exactly the same reasons that you reject my program proposal because, as you rightly point out, they both incorporate political organisations."
 

Anarcho-syndicalism is a particular strategic orientation that advocates the building of a certain kind of workplace organization or base union....what I call self-managed solidarity unionism. These organizations are not put together on the basis of agreement with the narrow political ideology of a particular political group. For example, several members of my political organization, Workers Solidarity Alliance, are members of the Starbucks Workers Union. There is no ideological litmus test for belonging to that union. Any Starbucks barista who is prepared to join with them to fight the bosses can join.

This is where "dual organizaionalism" is important. This is the social anarchist equivalent of the distinction Steve refers to between the "party left" and the "social left." To take an historic example, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in Spain in the '30s was a massive social movement of over 2 million workers. The political organization, the FAI, on the other hand, had at its height 140,000 members. There were a number of different political tendencies within the CNT mass union. The CNT wasn't built on  the basis of people agreeing to some narrow political line. In the '30s, for example, a fourth of the CNT members regularly voted for the left-liberal Republican parties.

So political organizations can have members, and an influence, within mass social movements. But we need to respect the autonomy of social movements and their organic development through the various campaigns and struggles they organize around.

I think it is unrealistic to expect that a small political organization, built by agreement with a very narrowly defined political program or ideology, could actually be the kind of massive and diverse social movement that is needed if major social change is to be on the agenda.

In regard to Venezuela, I recently did an interview with a Venezuelan anarchist who is a member of the "El Libertario" publication group. He told me that when the Chavez government first announced its program of funding for grassroots community councils and cooperatives, the Venezuelan anarchists were excited. They were thinking "We can work with this." But what they found in practice, according to the person I interviewed, is that funding is cut off if the radical left, such as anarchists and Trotskyists, become dominant in local councils. So they are part of a project to build a kind of political patronage machine...something that has a long history in Latin American populism...Think of the PRI in Mexico for example.

He is a  lawyer and is working with radical workers in the oil workers union. In Venezuela, to elect new union delegates requires government approval. Radical oppositions in the oil union are strong, he says....Trotskyists, anarchists, etc. But he says that on five occasions workers have petitioned for new elections and all five times the government denied them the right to elect new delegates. He says the current leadership are Chavistas and are considered ineffective by many workers. So the government denies the right of the workers to elect delegates of their choosing because this would reduce the control of the Chavista party.

Again, these are the kinds of problems that you run into if you have notions of socialism being achieved "from above."

In reply to mike m: I don't think it is possible to predict the exact point at which it will become possible to replace the state. This depends upon the particular course of events in the political and social history of a particular country. What I think we can say is that the existing state institutions and other institutions of the prevailing capitalist order must have achieved a very deep loss of their legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the population, so that masses of people no longer have any illusions or belief in them.

Thanks Steve. You expressed this more clearly than I did.

Mark, when I said I didn't know the details for how social transformation would happen, I was referring to the events. I didn't profess complete agnosticism about an anti-capitalist social formation. The class structure has its basis in the system of social production, and the working class cannot be liberated from domination and exploitation unless they take over the management of the various workplaces & industries. I also suggested that there needed to be a coming together of the various mass social movements...and pointed to Adomovsky's idea of an assembly of social movements as possible idea of how that might happen.

We can't predict at this point exactly what mass organizations that would have a presence in this process. but I would expect that there will be mass organizations in the various areas of social struggle, and various spheres such as workplaces, neighborhoods, students, environmental justice groups, women.

No single political organization is likely to encompass this diverse mass movement. It is very likely there will be a variety of poliical organizations who have supporters within these various movements, and there will be competing political ideas.

The more organized libertarian socialiist left tends to be "dual organizational." That is, we distinguish between the roles of political organizations and mass organizations. Political organizations are put together on the basis of people agreeing with a specific political perspective or program or ideology. Mass organizations arise in particular spheres of struggle to organize people who are subject to a particular oppression or concerned with the problems in that parrticular sphere. Libertarian socialist political organizations do not aim to create a government or take power in their own right, but to support mass organizations/mass social movements in doing so.

Your proposal sounded like you were proposing a political organization that would create a government. Certainly there are political organizations formed to take control of, or create governments. They are called political parties. Political organizations are not mass social movements.

I don't have a specific conception of how exactly the state would be gotten rid of, replaced, because that would depend greatly on the particular evolution of social struggle in a particular country. Consider, however, Adamovsky's idea of an assembly of the mass social movements. He conceived of this, i think, as something like a replacement for the model of the  soviets of the Russian revolution.

This would be more likely to develop in a situation of major social conflict where mass movements see the need to band together, provide solidarity, and work out a common way forward. This assembly would then "prefigure" a new governance system. In one of my Resoc essays I mentioned the example of the 1998 general strike in Puerto Rico where there was in fact a major assembly where enviro, student and other groups were present as well as labor organizations.

However the state is replaced, it needs to be the popular mass organizations/movements that decide on the new institutions. I tend to think of this as occurring most likely in some sort of mass strike situation where workers are taking over management of their workplaces. My disagreement with Mark was over his conception that the process of social transformation was a process built through and guided by a political organization. I see that as being partyist even if he doesn't call it a "party."

Okay, this is the third of my responses to Mike's comment. It's possible that by political power you're talking about the idea "taking political power." I think it's important to keep in mind that this can be done by mass organizations, mass social movements. One should not assume that political power can only be assumed by a political party or political organization.

Marx said that "the emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves." I think we need to take this literally. To me, this means that it is through their mass social organizations/movements that the oppressed and exploited majority can liberate themselves. In the course of a social transformation the mass movement for social liberation does need to consolidate its social power, and this includes creating new political governance institutions.

Mike, perhaps you're referring to my comment about the relative roles of political organizations and mass organizations.

Historically most Marxists have been partyist. This means that Marxists have advocated the creation of a political organization with the aim of that organization gaining political power in its own right, with the aim of using this to then implement a program through the hierarchies of a state. I think we have enough evidence to reject partyism as a strategy.

Liberation of the mass of the oppressed and exploited can't happen from above, by leaders implementing a program through a state. This implies the kind  of hierarchical division of labor such as that between the techno-managerial and working classes. Partyism in both its social-democratic and Leninist forms has always tended to empower the techno-managerial class, and in many cases has tended to be rotted out over time by capitalist ideology.

The alternative to partyism is to see the mass social movements of the oppressed and exploited as the vehicle for their self-liberation. Radical political organizations may be able to play some sort of productive role if they have a healthy relationship to mass organizations and social movements.

tom,

i certainly understand what youre talking about in terms of political power. our state - and all others - certainly were created in specific fashions that are counter to self-management and social liberation and empowerment. and they still are reflective of that in many ways.

i also agree that our revolutionary movements need to be built and grow outside of the political/electoral arena so as not to be subservient to it. but dont you think that when you "participate in organizing that wins some things" we are establishing some sort of "political power" as well as economic?

just as union organizers act to affect the economic part of our lives in order to assume more economic power, arent we also doing the same to assume political, and various forms of social power?

ive read where Albert and you talked about the need to ensure we are not talking past one another, and i wonder if ive witnessed something similar in regards to the political power issue.

First, let me say, I definately think having coherent vision is a worthy starting point. But I also don't think one should feel guilty not having a good answer when confronted with, "I agree with you about what's wrong, but you don't offer any solutions." Since in many cases stating what's wrong amounts to a plee to one's peers to join one in figuring out how we can make things better.

In some cases the question is asked legitimately, but more often, I feel, it is just a tactic to get the messenger to shut up anyway. Therefore, I'm not sure, besides, harping on bleak reality of the present political setup in order to convince people that things left as they are have potential to become so bad that one has nothing to lose in fighting it, what strategy can be expected to work. That only once the fear of political engagement has been transcended can we hope to fruitfully discuss alternatives.