by S. Nappalos

Political organisation is a collective answer to common problems. People organise based on a collective sense of need, and the perspectives and problems encountered in social groups crystallize into organisational forms and moments. This is a general historical trend; even without a theory, organisation emerges to meet concrete needs that cannot be solved except by building social forms to address them.

Part I: Trajectories of Struggle, the Intermediate Level, and Political Rapprochement

Political organisation is a collective answer to common problems. People organise based on a collective sense of need, and the perspectives and problems encountered in social groups crystallize into organisational forms and moments. This is a general historical trend; even without a theory, organisation emerges to meet concrete needs that cannot be solved except by building social forms to address them.

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by Karl Blythe

In this essay I will examine some selections from the Organisational Platform together with some of the writings of Nestor Makhno, as a starting point in the question of anarchist organisation. So as to avoid lengthy explanations of historical context, I will assume the reader is familiar with most of these materials. For those who are not, I refer as a main source and starting point for research to the work of Alexandre Skirda (Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation from Proudhon to May 1968, with a translation and discussion of the Platform) and to The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays by Makhno. Note that this is not meant as a comprehensive analysis of the Platform, so much as a look at certain of its shortcomings or weaknesses which I would like to repair. After going through these I will then conclude with some general propositions as to how we might construct and/or improve our organisation, taking off from my discussion of the Organisational Platform.

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by members of Common Cause Ottawa

Prelude

This booklet is based on a presentation made by two members of Common Cause Ottawa at the “Capitalism and Confrontation: Grassroots Responses to Empire, Ecology and Political Economy” conference in March 2010 held at Carleton University. We thank the conference organisers, the Critical Social Research Collaborative (CSRC), for allowing us to participate.

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Foreword

This reader is a collection of texts that we, the Zabalaza Books editors, recently came across.  The reason they are published together here in this format is that we feel that they all contain valuable ideas for making our struggle more effective and that, because of this, they should be read by as many of our movement’s organisers as possible.

The one point of contention in these articles is the “We must stop trying to build a movement of anarchists and instead fight for an anarchistic movement” sentence in the first article Active Revolution by James Mumm.  A response to this, and one with which we agree, is covered by the Editors note from the comrades from the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists found after the article.  Another idea that comes to mind in this regard is that it could be argued that we should shift our emphasis from building our anarchist organisations to building anarchistic movements, as building the organisation very often comes across as just another form of party building to those in the mass organisations of our class that we may be organising with.  The alternative being that those in the mass organisations, coming across our ideas, will find them worthwhile and come to us; thereby making their commitment to our ideas and political organisations that much stronger.  This however is not explicit in the sentence in James Mumm’s otherwise excellent article so is probably not what he had in mind.

Zabalaza Books
August 6, 2010

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