Organizational Strategy

Global crisis and intercommunal possibility

“It’s not a question of ‘when the revolution is going to be’: the revolution is going on every day, every minute, because the new is always struggling against the old for dominance.”
– Huey Newton, 1971.

Before we do anything, we always need to have a concrete analysis of our concrete situation. That principle is not to privilege thought over action. We know that thought is an action. And we know that every tiny and important gesture we make in our lives is sparked first by thought – by the electrical impulse of decision that flashes from our heads or hearts along the columns of nerves to our fingertips or feet. We move by the activity of thought, which sums up our knowledge and experience and creates the foundations for action: thought places the stone stable enough to leap from, over the rushing water of the dangerous world around us.

Marx, in discussing his philosophical method, explains: “The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse.” The “many determinations” are the multiple forces that create our specific moment and position in history: including the objective forces of grand global imperial power since World War II; the economic forces of class restructuring in the “globalization” movement; the political forces of local governments embracing austerity and legal forces of Supreme Court judges deciding to displace tent cities; and the subjective forces of our own capacity organizationally and, individually, our determination and the danger of discouragement.

Marx continues: “In thinking,” reckoning with this synthesis of many determinations “[the concrete] therefore appears as a process of summing-up, as a result, not as a starting point, although it is the real starting point, and thus also the starting point of perception and conception.” After “summing up” these “many determinations” to better understand who we are in the world and in the flow – or circular movements – of history, we can then begin.

For an organization, the communication between thought action and collective action mobilizes a complicated and conscious series of events. We think, and then act, reflect on the experiences and lessons of those actions, which again is thought, find occasion to write about and think more deeply and more together, to decide, and then act collectively again. There is more to it too. Our activity as members of an organization is carried out and measured in community spaces, amongst those we experience as our social base, who we are accountable and responsible to, and against those we consider the enemies of our social base and therefore our enemies. The responses of our friends and our enemies must also be counted, measured, considered, as we decide what to do next.

The terms of our considerations, our principles that we weigh our experiences against, and the goals that we chart our progress against, are laid out in our basis of unity. Again: thought. But while our political principles are secure (not unthinkable or eternal because we must assess them as well), our political strategy and tactics must be always reflexive, and dependent upon the objective conditions that face us as obstacles put in place by history and by our enemies, and the subjective conditions of our own leadership development and the limitations and strengths of our collective power.

This political strategy comes out of our reflections on our experiences of three initial years of collective struggle along the arc we set in the Fiery File, where we decided to organize along two roads of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle, and where we decided strategically to focus on building social bases in communities outside the imperial metropole of Vancouver. We do not think this strategy is particular to the conditions in Western Canada: we believe that this strategy speaks to an emergent political tendency of revolutionary struggle in intercommunal spaces throughout the world.

Part 1: Summing up: The condition our condition is in

Part 1a. Inter-Imperialist rivalry

The end of the second decade of the 21st century is shockingly similar to 1919: the old empires suddenly feel old. Faultlines of power between nation states are creaking as new powers are straining to fill the space they find themselves suddenly and already occupying. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has a double character in this dynamic. On one hand it heralds the arrival of a new power eager to challenge US hegemony in Asia and Africa, and even eastern Europe. This new power hurls baubles and promises to the colonized, as President Xi swears that the Chinese dawn will be different than the American twilight. But if the Chinese state’s attacks on the power of workers at home, to whom Xi denies political citizenship, and the power to organize independent unions, are any sign, then the more appropriate slogan may be “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
But on the other hand, China’s challenge to US hegemony deals an important challenge to the revolutionary left and anti-imperialists in the west. Anti-imperialists in Canada and the US have become accustomed to a unipolar world where opposing imperialism means supporting the struggles of oppressed nations for self-determination. But the US-China dynamic recalls the challenge met by revolutionaries in Europe at the opening of the First World War, when the armies of one bloc of imperialist countries squared off against the armies of another. The lesson of the Second International’s response to World War I should be, in the words of the Zimmerwald Left and later the Third International: revolutionary defeatism. The primary task of revolutionaries in inter-imperialist war must be to work, in collaboration with revolutionaries globally, for the defeat of the mother country: of our own country first and foremost, and never to fall in line in support of our own government and armies against foreign enemies.
Inter-imperialist war was, 100 years ago, premised on an old-style imperial power, feeding national capitalist demands within the imperialist country itself. The role of armies in times of “peace” was to orchestrate the corporate theft of land and life from colonized nations, to speed stolen wealth back to the metropole, to process it into manufactured goods, and then sell those goods back into the international market. War was the open, military contest between imperialist and inchoate imperialist powers for control over that mass theft.
Inter-imperialist contest today – not yet and hopefully never to be open war – is a new-style imperial power. Capitalist power is still concentrated in imperialist countries, but in a financialized global network of cities where office towers and “financial services” are the marker of influence rather than the presence of factories and mills. The presence of the machinery of production itself is a symbol of poverty and underdevelopment: whether in rural and impoverished areas and special economic zones within the imperial nation, or in colonized and formerly colonized countries. The imperialist contest today is for control over distribution channels and hubs, technological and administrative networks, the centrality of banking and currency exchange, and majority ownership over the companies that organize the theft of land. This economic dynamic alone should have pushed the nation state into the shadows of a globalized finance capital, where corporate boardrooms that are trans and multinational would be the stars.

Part 1b. White nationalism

But imperialist nationalism has proven resilient, and particularly toxic when threatened. White nationalism is resurgent. It has not been the contradictions of the economy that has given rise to white nationalism: not “financialization” and the offshoring and deunionizing and deskilling technologizing of white men’s industrial jobs. Racism was present, but played a secondary role in the anti-globalization movement. White nationalism is surging against two threats: global climate catastrophe and its resulting mass displacement crisis, which has produced the largest refugee and international movement of people from poor, Black and brown nations into the imperial metropoles of Europe and North America; and the decline of Euro-American global hegemony.
In and around global financial cities in North America, these global political and economic dynamics are hardening lines of civic citizenship. A civil society, those who feel they are part of the hegemonic order and play the social and cultural role of state actors, is re-forming amidst immense wealth in the metropole, and amidst increasing insecurity in the suburbs and smaller towns. In both cases this civil society is recasting belonging through exclusion: the poor and especially the homeless, Indigenous people in the in-between spaces, Black and South Asian youth, racialized and migrant working class communities, trans and gender non-conforming workers, employed or not, and people who are too young and too old. Those of us excluded from civil society are the subaltern, and our numbers are swelling.

Part 1c. The long retreat is still not over

This social and historical crisis also arrives during the continued, long retreat of the revolutionary left that began in the 1970s with the end of the postwar decades of national liberation and anti-colonial movements and the new left. This period marked the beginning of the neoliberal era, which championed, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, “individual responsibility” and was premised on the belief that “there is no alternative” to capitalism.
Since around 2010, a series of rebellions in Canada and the United States have indicated that the retreat may be coming to an end: Occupy, Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, and the democratic socialist movement, all should be read as hopeful signs that young people are not settling for the “no alternative” thesis. But these spontaneous energies have not crystalized into a cohesive revolutionary politics, into organizational forms independent from a bourgeois political apparatus, or with sustained and deep social bases. The retreat may be slowed, but it has not turned into an advance nor are we yet holding independent ground.
The challenges and opportunities of global capitalist crisis have made virtues of our retreat, which has driven declarative and practiced politics into separate islands. A crevasse separates speaking and acting so completely that it is possible for one person or group to utter one position while practically holding another without feeling any contradiction or hypocrisy. Declarative politics have been perfected by professional thought producers who receive pay in exchange for developing innovative slogans and thought frameworks. For our movements, declarative politics have dovetailed with the hyper-individualism of neoliberalism and a retreat into pure idealist politics that make a point of refusing the really existing world and its struggles as hopelessly contaminated by practice. Practical politics are, meanwhile, contaminated by pragmatism. Lacking infrastructure and institutions that we can mobilize to make revolutionary politics relevant in the lives of people in survival struggle, community organizers capitulate to bourgeois institutions, like social service organizations, NGOs, and legal and political reform projects directly or indirectly connected to bourgeois political parties and institutions. These are self-affirming islands. Revolution flourishes as self-righteous declaration by practice flourishing in the dead ends of depoliticized reform.
Indigenous reformers in Canada have taken advantage of the one space that multiculturalism is expanding rather than contracting: Indigenous “rights.” In 2018 the Trudeau Liberals reopened the legal and political “rights” framework that was started with the 1969 White Paper in order to wipe out distinct Indigenous status and, more importantly, to convert lands commonly held by Indigenous Bands into fee simple private property. “Rights” is the framework that threatens to assimilate Indigenous difference, which is based on Indigenous, non-capitalist, national land relations, apart from Canada’s private property regimes, into a racialized position within Canadian multiculturalism, and a legal-administrative position within a legislative division of power as a “fourth” level of governance, similar to municipalities. Rights are the opposite of decolonization, but aspiring Indigenous politicians and investors argue that this is no time to be idealistic, that sovereignty is unrealistic, and that it is time to settle for rights and self-government within Canada.
Left practice, meanwhile, emphasizes investing in elections where, some leftists assert, they can “move the Overton Window” to normalize “socialism” in public discourse. The opportunity this project seizes is for revolutionary intellectuals; the underlying premise is that the “marketplace of ideas” is an important space of transformation, and that, lacking a mass movement of workers, the best that intellectuals can do is take their space as protagonists of reform.
There is a contradiction between the objective possibilities of our historical moment, and the subjective powers and political vision of mainstream left and Indigenous leaderships. Feeling the effects of global economic and political crisis, and without a socialist, decolonial politics at hand, fascist currents are rising in the cultural and ideological spaces of middle-class communities, and working class people are influenced by this movement. Our responsibility is historic. If we cannot rebuild a revolutionary, decolonized socialist politics then we are facing a future of, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, barbarism.

Part 2: Subaltern revolutionary subjects and our theory of power

Our goal is not to win arguments against the mainstream, respectable, and reasonable leadership of progressive forces in Canada and the United States. Our goal is to build relationships that allow us to be part of community experiences of political contradictions and tensions; to make revolutionary politics relevant at a moment when the truth is that there is no practical reform possible that will make a real difference in poor and oppressed peoples’ lives. Our goal is to build institutions of struggle that are independent of bourgeois and settler colonial state power, grounded instead in the democratic self-activity of working class and Indigenous communities. Our goal is to rebuild a decolonial socialism through practices of revolutionary struggle.
White nationalists are acting as though their nation state form is vulnerable. A nationalist reaction, from the left through protectionist border controls and a redistribution-based social democratic agenda, and the right through white nationalism and anti-migrant racism, is the first manifestation of this vulnerability.
To imagine a future without Canada or the United States we must broach the subject of dissolving Canada. Now is the time to work through imagining a post-revolutionary social form. The contemporary nation state model is unimaginable without its colonial dominations. A revolutionary union of intercommunal spaces could be a post-revolutionary model premised on dissolving the colonial nation states of the Americas as the starting point of imagining.

Part 2a. Basebuilding

In our organizing, then, it makes sense to adopt a similar form: not depending on nation state forms, but seeking points of identity, unity, and collaboration through similar politics and struggles regardless of nation state. A “basebuilding” tendency has begun to emerge in North America; it is not completely or clearly defined, but the spirit of basebuilding is somewhere we feel at home, and finding and working with comrades outside of our region who share our basic political tendency is absolutely necessary political work.
“Basebuilding” as an organizing strategy has some competing and overlapping definitions. We do not see basebuilding as simply “community organizing” in the model defined by Saul Alinsky’s “non-communist left” of the 1960s, where organizers seek to mobilize oppressed communities as a constituency to advocate for reforms on issues that affect them. Alinskyism plays at self-activity by creating avenues for oppressed peoples’ self-expression but only within the theatres created and controlled by the organizer. The politics and theory of the organizing is controlled by the organizer, who would better be called the puppet master of the reform effort.
We also do not see basebuilding as the “serve the people” model practiced by some groups influenced by Maoist traditions, where the needs of communities are met through the direct provision of services by organizers. Serve the people projects refer to a dialectical model where the revolutionary organization is in touch with and responsive to their base communities, but the political theatre is one-way: activists can introduce and test their political slogans in the communities but the interpretation and organization of those slogans into action is a power held exclusively by the organizers. Serve the people undermines the dialectical moment of self-activity, where the possibility of politics is realized through the creation or revelation of the political core of community life.
Our basebuilding politicizes the existing survival struggles of subaltern people. We do not bring services to poor people, particularly because we have to confront the influence of social workers in low-income communities, who arrive bearing gifts and represent the corrosive power of the state. Our contribution to survival struggles of the subaltern is political: we offer organizational infrastructure, experience in coordinating and managing meetings, and analytic lenses that sharpen contradictions and build the collective power of the community in struggle.
The purpose of Red Braid is to be the spinning transmission belt between the suffering, needs, rage, and dreams of these subaltern communities in struggle and revolutionary politics. Our organizational structure is set up to support this purpose: members are the sovereign body that direct the organization overall, with decision-making and coordination delegated to the Coordinating Committee for the overall work of the group, and to specific campaign leaders and organizers to carry out the work of the group in corroboration with these communities.
Our structure becomes complicated at the point of contact with communities. We conceive of our relationships with communities, exercised through campaigns, to be our dialectical point of contact with our social base. We have contact with our “tangible” social base, through meetings, discussions, and mobilizations, and discuss and analyze the meanings of these experiences and relationships in order to divine the feelings of the “conceptual” social base overall. We approach and interact with our tangible social base as the expression of the most developed, political consciousness of the social base as a whole, assuming that those who become active and assume leadership positions in their community are those who represent the fighting edge of the social group as a whole.
A “declassed” membership, driven primarily by identity with political ideals, by default would exclude Indigenous and working class people who join the movement through recognition of their group interest. While we may develop close relationships with people in the social base, because our campaigns are connected to and influence the conditions of peoples’ survival, it would be a mistake to make a structural assumption that our members are benevolent. So long as the enfranchised member is only an outside organizer who approaches the community as supporter, any accountability over Red Braid’s interactions in communities depends on voluntary recognition and transmission of the character of our relationships.
The conclusion of our “basebuilding” organizational strategy is, therefore, to fight to draw the majority membership of Red Braid from the Indigenous and working class subaltern communities that are the engine and actuality of revolutionary struggle.
Basebuilding does require organization, and our social bases strengthen and root our organizational infrastructure. But the organization is not an end to itself. Organizationally, we tie our political future to the self-activity of the subaltern. Our destiny and power is identical. Our organization is alive in the crashing waves of a dialectical tide between the concrete analysis of the concrete situation that we experience in struggle. Our commitment is to building a militant, autonomous organization as servant of the struggle, not as a fetish unto itself.

Part 2c. The subaltern and the aristocracy of labour

Who are we wanting to build “bases” with? The short answer is “Indigenous and working class communities.” But this has to be more clearly defined. In short, we believe revolutionary political possibility begins at the point where our people feel socially, politically, economically excluded from bourgeois, settler colonial, imperialist society. Revolutionary transformation begins with flipping exclusion into its opposite: from misery, isolation, humiliation, and dangerous poverty into shared, positive expressions where each of us feels we are part of international groups, and experience the power of collective action that transforms the real conditions of being for ourselves and our communities.
Indigenous peoples are those who have relations to land and nation that precede and continue to exist separate from the settler colonial nation states of Canada and the United States. Some Indigenous people, particularly some Indigenous intellectuals and politicians, are investing in forms of inclusion in settler colonial society and power. But their potential or experienced inclusion does not represent possibility for most Indigenous peoples, who remain radically excluded. Our people are the unrepresented and excluded, subaltern Indigenous people who have been displaced from their home territories and forced to live in poverty in cities and towns, and who live in impoverishment and without basic infrastructure in rotting and inadequate housing on reserves. There is a political point of division between Indigenous peoples who aspire to be part of Canadian civil society through assimilation, and the subaltern, who are positioned as protagonists of a revolutionary struggle for sovereignty.
Working class people are those who are forced to work, selling their labour power to capitalists in exchange for wages and in order to survive. Whether or not working class people are working jobs at a given moment in the day or in their lives is unimportant because it does not change their class position. If you can’t or won’t work then you are punished with horrible poverty and, in the worst case, homelessness – which is a form of collective punishment used against working class and Indigenous people.
The consciousness of many members of the working class in Canada is corrupted by imperialist and settler colonial power. This partial, imperial consciousness is not an ideological problem alone but is rooted in the real material benefit that some workers, particularly white workers, receive as a portion of the super profits that capitalists harvest from Canada’s imperialist adventures globally and especially from Indigenous peoples on territories regularly occupied by Canada.
The working class is divided by social role, race, gender, and by imperialist identity. The social role of some workers is administrative; they administer bourgeois and colonial power through discipline, education, and social services. These people are not really part of the working class; they are petty bourgeois or middle class. Race, gender, and imperialist identity is accumulated by workers themselves regardless of their social role; the feeling a white worker has that they are part of Canadian civil society is an imperialist identity that usually coincides with making high enough wages that they live the lives of the middle class, and not of the average worker in the world. This section of the working class is what revolutionaries historically have called the “aristocracy of labour.” We refer to this group as “privileged workers,” and understand that, even though these workers objectively share interests with the rest of the workers of the world, their consciousness is tied to the wellbeing of the imperialist and settler colonial nation state.
We are not trying to organize with the middle class or privileged workers, and we are not catering to their consciousness. This means we are not, at this point, a “mass movement” organization that measures success by the size of mass demonstrations or the support of mass institutions like trade unions and churches. We do not automatically dismiss these mass organizations as inevitably counter revolutionary, like we do state and bourgeois institutions like Business Improvement Associations, social work agencies, and police, but so long as the overall working class retreat continues, mass politics will be limited to reforms within the limits of civil society, which are premised on the exclusion of national, racial, gender, and subaltern others. In this context, we are not afraid to oppose majority opinion or to stand out as too radical. We see our political role as fighting against both reactionary right-wing politics and against the conciliations and compromises of social democrats and assimilationists that sell out the actual needs and lives of the subaltern.
While the Aristocracy of Labour has a material basis for its existence as a wing of the working class globally, its membership is sustained and expressed ideologically. The main questions that divide the Aristocracy of Labour from the subaltern working class are property ownership, which indicates attitudes towards Indigenous sovereignty, and nationalism, which indicates attitudes towards racialized migrants and the international structures of class.
While privileged workers have a material basis for their existence as a wing of the working class globally, its membership is sustained and expressed ideologically. The main questions that divide privileged workers from the subaltern working class are property ownership, which indicates attitudes towards Indigenous sovereignty, and nationalism, which indicates attitudes towards racialized migrants and the international structures of class.
The subaltern working class includes the unwaged, unemployed and underemployed, young, elderly, refugee, homeless, criminalized, illicit and sex workers, and some social reproduction workers. At the point of production (the workplace), the subaltern are to be found where low wage, precarious work intersects with oppressive race and gender power. Some rural and producer workers, many migrant workers, especially temporary foreign workers, many day labourers, and many private sector service workers who rely on this work long term are also subaltern. There is no sure, categorical way to identify and organize subaltern workers because of the powerful influence of imperialist ideology in Canadian and US society. The way to find the working class subaltern is through outreach and education that must be militant, clear, and uncompromising.
The need to call out clearly in order to identify and collaborate with subaltern groups is, if nothing else, the reason electoral tactics are not appropriate to our time. Electoral tactics appeal to civil society: amongst the working class, an electoral orientation emphasises privileged workers who harbour imperialist and settler colonial consciousness and desires to win inclusion in the project of making and being Canada.
The potential power of the working class is in seizing the value and productive power that we create, and which is stolen from us by capitalists. Workers’ power is necessarily aggressive – it must seize what is rightly ours from bosses. Outside the point of production, it is possible for workers to take space and defend their communities, but this is limited to protest and resistance activity. The strategic locus of worker power is at the point of production. If we do not mount attacks on capitalist power at the point of production – working past labour unions where they exist, not waiting for or trying to reform them – then we will never find our hand on this lever of power.
The potential power of Indigenous peoples is in defending, keeping, and building autonomous Indigenous economies and societies. Indigenous power is necessarily defensive – it must stop the settler colonial and imperial theft of lands and life that has been underway for hundreds of years but remains incomplete. Indigenous power is qualitatively different from working class power because while working class power exists in contradiction and must emerge from its potential form in the capitalist process of production, Indigenous power already exists, and has to be exercised and increased. Colonial power is repressive and violent against Indigenous peoples because Canada represses the existing power of Indigenous nations. So Indigenous blockades and national defence campaigns are not protests, they are exercises of war. Indigenous refusal of colonial power is, in our current climate, the clearest expression of the organic existence and resurgence of Indigenous nationhood.

Part 2d. Intercommunalism

Our revolutionary group seeks to develop bases of activity with Indigenous and subaltern working class people. By politicizing survival struggles of these social bases, we can explode the possibilities of dual power into autonomous spaces and moments where our people can develop a deeper revolutionary consciousness.
“Dual power” refers to a revolutionary moment when self-organized working class or Indigenous peoples exercise control in a region within a country where capitalists or the settler colonial state still has power overall. In the weeks before the Russian revolution, workers in St Petersburg controlled most of the factories and the infrastructure of daily life in the city through their worker’s councils, called Soviets. In Red River Manitoba in 1869, the Métis provisional government took power, controlling the seat of local government autonomously from Canada, as well as the economy and life of the city. Workers in Winnipeg managed a similar feat through the “strike committee” that decided which parts of the economy functioned and which did not during the General Strike of 1919. These experiences of workers’ and Indigenous peoples’ dual power control over production, economy, and social life operated precariously and temporarily within the cauldron of bourgeois and colonial state power overall. In Russia this tense equilibrium broke in favour of the Soviets, which swung their power from factories and cities to toppling the state completely in the October Revolution. In Red River and Winnipeg, the bourgeois, colonial government of Canada restored its monopoly over the use of force by crushing the secondary power of Indigenous people and workers through the force of North West Mounted Police guns.
Dual power is also a term used to discuss Mao’s “base area” and Che Guevara’s “foco”: the rural and mountainous territories controlled by guerrilla armies. These too were outside the control of the bourgeois, colonial nation state, though the force that held the state at bay was the guerrilla army rather than mass control over factories and worker and Indigenous peoples’ self organization.
Our community survival struggle autonomous spaces are not characterized by the dual power of the self-organization of a mass and militant group of subaltern people who have taken control over productive forces, the economy, or the infrastructure of everyday life. And they are also not strictly bordered and defined territories controlled by armed guerilla armies. Our “dual power” is not realized: we are not in a pre-revolutionary moment, but the potential of our dual power is a force that we can sense, and which is the motor for a revolutionary politics and consciousness.
Huey Newton’s term intercommunalism, although he and the Panthers leaned more towards a “serve the people” approach, is more attuned to our context than Mao’s “base areas” or Che Guevara’s “focos” because both referred to the territorial boundaries of a space defined by the military power of the guerrilla army. The intercommunal space is defined by two political features: 1) the exercise of a collective power by a subaltern group that expresses a positive inversion of their exclusion from civil society with possibilities of dual power, and; 2) the expressed and practiced connection of that collective power and group identity to others, including internationally.
One example is the tent city, which we defined as a people’s autonomous space only when communities exercised political direction over the space, and determined – always in contest with police – access to the space. An intercommunal site is not only a protest site, although protest and opposition to the dominant order is part of its characteristic. It is also an organic survival space that affords our social base a means of survival in adverse conditions.
In our experience, with the capacity we have had available to us, we have been able to defend intercommunal territories, though we have not managed to develop self-governing practices of economy, education, or social supports, beyond those that exist organically.
Our organizing goal should be to always expand the political terrain influenced by our intercommunal project. Although territory always matters, the more important terrain is cultural and ideological, expressed through the self-organization of subaltern communities for freedom and power. We must prioritize education work and the sharpening of autonomous organizational skills and revolutionary class and decolonial consciousness amongst people in our social base projects.
We cannot call intercommunal spaces into being at will; the opening of these possibilities requires political preparation, the existence of a social base, and the analysis, identification, and elaboration of political crises – to move on opportunities where the radical social exclusion experienced by our subaltern communities can be turned on its head, into expressions and possibilities of political power.
There is a danger in such a strategy of turning localism into a virtue, and it is the intercommunalism aspect that presses back against that force. Rather than embracing, strengthening, and reforming the nation state, the intercommune identifies with other peoples in struggle rather than with the nation state – the activity of being in struggle is the human thread that connects us across imperial borders.
Our strategic formula is: Social basebuilding + dual power = intercommunalism
Building a decolonial socialism with subaltern Indigenous and working class communities should be the basis for a new political tendency.