{"id":4839,"date":"2021-11-30T22:15:30","date_gmt":"2021-12-01T03:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4839"},"modified":"2021-12-08T21:43:02","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T02:43:02","slug":"four-distinct-approaches-to-revolutionary-organization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/11\/four-distinct-approaches-to-revolutionary-organization\/","title":{"rendered":"Four distinct approaches to revolutionary organization"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> want to provide a schematic framing of what I see as the different efforts at organizing on the revolutionary Left in this moment. This is as a way to situate what I believe is unique to the Tempest organizing project.<\/p>\n

I will explore what I see as four approaches by revolutionaries and revolutionary formations. These are generalizations, not fit for every individual case, but nonetheless I hope they will be useful.<\/p>\n

The backdrop to these different political methods are the widespread crises of the revolutionary Left around the world, the failure to meet the challenges of the post-2008 recession world, and failure to meet the challenges of a previously resurgent social democratic or reformist Left, for example the Bernie Sanders experience in the United States and the Jeremy Corbyn leadership challenge in the United Kingdom, but there are many other examples internationally.<\/p>\n

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“La mort de Marat” d’Edvard Munch (Oslo), 1907. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalb\u00e9ra<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first of the four groupings essentially liquidated themselves. The response of these forces, over the rising of seemingly vibrant reformist projects, was to reject the need for independent revolutionary organization and to liquidate themselves wholesale into what has since 2020 become a\u00a0 rightward moving social democracy.<\/p>\n

Especially after the second defeat of the Sanders challenge, and following the wholesale rout of Corbynism, these forces largely failed to account for and reassess the implications of these defeats, and have essentially doubled down on an electoralist strategy, an uncritical\u00a0 popular front approach to the Biden administration, and happy talk in the Guardian<\/i><\/a> and elsewhere<\/a> to the effect of \u201cpay no attention to the realities, comrades, the Left is winning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second approach is a model of so-called \u201cbase-building\u201d that defers the importance of organizing for revolutionary politics in the here and now. This trend starts with a valid premise\u2014that the institutions of working-class organization and resistance have been hollowed out and weakened\u2014and then postpones all other questions of a revolutionary party to the future, after these institutions have been rebuilt.<\/p>\n

This means deferring questions such as: How are these initial sites of resistance and class recomposition to be built? What is the role of revolutionaries in this process? What is the role of political debate? Or explicitly revolutionary politics? What is the vehicle through which inevitable political struggle is undertaken in these formations?<\/p>\n

The base-building trend asserts the need to build so-called sites of articulation or dual power that are both not part of the nonprofit industrial complex and not tied up in the networks of ruling-class party politics and patronage. A fine goal. But how these are to come into being is left for the unnamed forces of class struggle to sort out.<\/p>\n