The Blast
January 17th 2022
The ruling classes have done a great job for centuries of separating us and leaving us with little time in the day to talk to each other. The pandemic has resulted in moments for people to talk to each other more and do what people tend to do when they’re allowed moments to talk to each other: take the anarchy within our hearts and grow it into our relationships.
One thing is certain: the period of the reactionary ideas and sentiments of “capitalist realism” are dead and only kept alive by those who are too disconnected with the seeds of anarchy quickly developing across Chicago and suburbs and really the country.
This is manifesting in at least three ways. One is the continued development of mutual aid groups who are struggling against the subversion of nonprofits, against the subversion of internal authoritarian sensibilities and values, as well as a natural tendency for mutual aid to degenerate into charity relationships. Secondly, there continue to be the growth of good faith relationships and solidarity of anti-authoritarian-practicing people and groups across neighborhoods who come together in the spirit of various ideas of mutual aid. Last is the explosion in workers self-management through the development of worker cooperatives and the immense hunger for knowledge about how to develop them. This knowledge is mostly being asked not by academicians and theoreticians, but by ordinary people who are DONE with masters and wanting to plunge into workers self-management.
Only those who have been actively involved in the worker cooperative movement in the past few years or longer are most practically aware of this quiet revolution happening and the inability of the current worker cooperative movement locally and throughout the country to meet this growth in interest. There are not enough teachers, neither are there enough people to communicate all that is going on to many people.
Of course, worker cooperatives are not inherently anarchist or perfect. And that is okay. As the Cuban anarchists of the Havana Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop wrote in January 2021,
being radical in our conception of socialism and human liberation does not make us strict or extremist people, nor does it oppose those who sincerely seek dignifying paths. The struggle for social guarantees is legitimate, even if its germing root does not reach the ideal immediately — provided only that such a root exists ,— many of which contain living and growing germs of the common society that for now we only dare to dream of. To defend such germs and to sow the seeds of freedom even if we know that they can take millennia to become trees as robust as the ceibas of our fields is our duty and choice of life.[1]
But in them we can find many positive things, above all, healthy tendencies to support and draw inspiration from, as well as the ability for dialogue that can lead to positive change by just one or two anarchists working in collaboration with other anarchists[2]. This is unlike top-down nonprofits, workplaces, and even workers unions where tens of committed revolutionaries are needed to have meaningful impact, and such dense groups of anarchist revolutionaries are very hard to come by in the current period still.
To be clear, in some worker cooperative groups one definitely finds strong anarchist tendencies and this is the case of many old school worker cooperativists still active in the national and international worker cooperative movement.
And so anarchists have today something we didn’t quite have six years ago: inspiration and peers to support and work with among the general population.
And in some cases, the work is not much. Part of this quiet revolution that we are in the middle of is characterized by how ready people are to build on their own: people just need places to go to receive moral support and access to like-minded people to affirm that their wanting to take over production without hierarchies is not absurd. With just some encouragement and friendship, people will act swiftly and unite with their friends and neighbors to build the seeds of anarchy, which is already happening.
But the spaces must be set. We need anarchist spaces specifically dedicated to worker cooperative discussion and connectivity. We should strive to have at least three active by the end of 2022 and accessible to all Illinoisans.
We need ongoing support for Cooperation for Liberation Study and Working Group[3] an already-existing space that is conducive to anti-authoritarian worker cooperative ideas within a Black liberation lens. And we need support to develop one for Spanish speakers, the seeds of which may already be in the works. We need at least a new, general one for anyone to attend.
This work is not hard, especially since there are local anarcho-worker cooperativists who would assist them with advice and resources. Just having a book club about worker cooperatives hued with anarchist conversation is all that’s needed.
We should not be shy from crowdfunding among anarchists to support our peers who would help to hold such spaces until we’re able to get the appropriate grant money, which would be easy. We’ll certainly need people to do tech support to integrate in-person and digital participation.
CONTACT THE BLAST (A)[4] IF YOU LIVE IN CHICAGO OR A SUBURB AND WOULD LIKE TO ASSIST IN THIS WORK.
Such spaces and the constructive work they would facilitate would continue to revive capitalist workplace-based struggles for complete workers self-management. Many of us are just not aware of the role that worker cooperatives have historically played in stimulating syndicalist struggles.
To keep this short and to the point, we’ll sign you off with this. As the anarchist Ska-P says in their song ETTs, which is about the misery of temp agencies, they say, “La clase obrera ya no tiene ideal. ¡Levántate joder! ¡Vamos a luchar!”[5] This translates to
FUCKING GET UP! LET’S FIGHT!
Endnotes
[1] https://varlamstuff.noblogs.org/communique-from-the-havana-alfredo-lopez-libertarian-workshop/
[2] Examples of positive influence could be gleaned from the British libertarians when they amplified the idea that “Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others – even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.” This is found in Maurice Brinton’s “As We See It”, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1967/04/as-we-see-it.htm
[3] https://opencollective.com/coop4lib
[4] https://theblast.noblogs.org/contact/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kUaFOPrk6A