Speculative Organizing: What mechanisms of organizing or institutions would you like to introduce into the political landscape?
🪐☁️ Harrowday 🌖🦅 Eagle Moon🌹⚒️ 02 Marx 2024 ♓🐟 Pisces 🌬️🎐163 Ventôse CCXXXII 🍁🐉🏮🐯🏮🐯 Wood Dragon Year - Fire Tiger Month - Fire Tiger Day 🌁 Day 10,122⛩️
I'm currently reading Assembly by Hardt and Neghri and thinking about forms of organizing and the dialectics they are entangled through the paradigms (neoliberalism, patriarchy, colonialism, Fordism) and what kind of schema you need to dismantle the world while living within it.
Democratic Campuses
Institutions have infinite possible variety but tend to confirm to a very strict set of models specific to their native paradigm. A university, a school, could be and have been organized ten thousand different ways. But within American for profit higher education we have very strict ideas of how they are run, that they have departments and professors and grades and labs and seminars and lectures and accreditation and a hard student/faculty/support staff (gardeners, janitors) border and that the function is to compete in a pedagogical market place with other schools. None of this is naturally inevitable.
So I would like to see universities reorganized and founded on radically divergent forms as inclusive, democratic campuses. Universities as communes of teachers and students and workers and locals whose combined economic power can be leveraged into creating anti capitalist economic modes, whether through research or accreditation or group apprenticeships through local unions, holding their own housing and utilities in common.
I would like to see seminars open to the public established on local social and environmental issues which would then play a leadership role in drafting policy and promoting political tactics to implement such policies through or outside of the state.
'Bash
Another institution I'd like to see radically changed is marriage and parenthood. instead of marriage and parenthood as the skeleton of the family, something along the lines of Ada Palmer's 'Bash, derrived from Obasho meaning something like home or family but more intensely and intimately, a 'bash as described in the first book of Palmer's Terra Ignota series, Too Like the Lightning, is a group of people who live, work, and raise children together, often derrived of siblings, friends, lovers, who may collectively own or rent their home, own and operate businesses, and raise children.
In such a 'bash some members may be married or date inside or outside the 'bash. 'Bashes may be hereditary or founded anew by a group of people. they may be grafted into each other when two people from different 'bashes marry, and one may leave a 'bash to join a new one or to be independent at will. but the bash is considered primary.
if several conventional couples make up the 'bash, they might be called several families within one 'bash, but if one couple wished to separate, they wouldn't necessarily be able to unilaterally remove their own biological children from the 'bash. this is because each adult in the 'bash are considered a child's bash parent, or 'ba-pa for short, and the relationship a child has with the other children in the 'bash is not especially privileged over their biological siblings; rather everyone raised in their generation is a 'ba-sib, and rather then one person or couple having custody a child's rights to spend time with any or all the parents who raised them is socially and legally valued.
this network of responsibility rather than unilateral custody has the effect of creating the positive foundations for child liberty, since there will be a variety of adults to turn to if a one or two parents are neglectful and abusive. as it is now, children have the most minimal range of freedom: they can run away and be pursued by the law like a criminal, or call CPS and usually get ignored, or seek emancipation if they can provide for themselves independently and have major legal resources.
'Bashes in Ada's Terra Ignota are traditionally formed among students at campuses, which have loosely inspired my own call for democratic campuses. Palmer's campuses are sites composed from a collection of universities, where most people spend a number of years during their adolescence, any time between their mid teens and early thirties. Lifelong students, such as grad students and academics, may spend much longer at such sites, just as they do in contemporary universities.
While Palmer herself does not specify, the organization of such campuses or universities along the lines i propose earlier could be pursued and enabled by the use of 'bashes among the faculty, workers, students, and locals, especially in the early days, when professors could host students and apprentices in their living rooms or shops, owning collectively an apartment complex for dormitories, taking advantage of the economies of scale of food preparation, child rearing, and utilities.
Labor Temples and God Building
The establishment of Labor Temples and Union Halls for providing resources for socializing and enjoyment of working class culture and company.
Labor Temples have been used as meeting spaces for local union chapters and as HQ for general strike committees, designed to be as impervious as possible to police and fascists. this could be combined with the legal protections of sanctuary afforded to churches if made explicitly orientated to working class spirituality, as through the projects of Godbuilding, Liberation theology, monastic communism, etc.
Depending on the jurisdiction churches may be de facto or de jure granted sanctuary from arrest. for example, hundreds of migrants in the Netherlands were able to we've deportation by sheltering at a church where cross sectarian officiants performed mass and other rituals 24/7 for several months until visas could be secured.
Spirituality would not just be a legal gambit. Spiritual community is important for many members of the working class and currently it is largely monopolized by independent wealthy churches funded and controlled by the rich, wielding enormous propagandistic power and control over the means of socialization, association, assembly, and self-production. Instead, sites open to use by all walks of faith skills ought to be provided and opportunities for discourse on the development of syncretic and altogether novel political theologies be fostered.
Assemblies by Sortition
(my current hyper fixation.)
the establishment of assemblies by lottery, locally and nationally, to create an alternative site of contestation for political action. such congresses in the short term would publish discussions of contemporary issues, such as homelessness and the pandemic, war, etc. they would be a voice of democratic leadership, independent of politicians, able to declare opposition to specific government decisions in the name of the average person, since they would library be a statistically representative body of the populace, unlike the people rich enough to find a campaign.
in the medium term, as they gain influence, such assemblies could act as tactical leaders, promoting strikes, coordinating across different movements. see Gramsci's organic intellectuals.
travel and publication costs could be funded by participating labor and tenants unions, left wing political parties, Indian Nations, universities, workers councils, etc. In exchange, such bodies would be granted the right to send ambassadors to speak before the assemblies and give them advice. they should also get a guaranteed delegation of members within the assembly membership drawn from the general membership of the participating union, party, university, tribe, etc. these reserved assembly seats could be fixed at, say, 40% of total seats in the assembly, while the rest would be statistically representative of the given community.
The assemblies should be able to invite philosophers--journalists, independent writers, academics, spiritual leaders, party organizers--to teach public seminars and lead working groups of assembly delegates to propose resolutions.
longer term, the assemblies should aim to wield dual power, claiming for example the right to challenge supreme court cases, forcing the justices to defend their decisions in the eyes of a truly democratic court and over-ruling cases like Dobs, vetoing laws, removing corrupt politicians, etc. In other words, they should aim to operate like the Tribunes of the Plebs and provide a counter-leadership alternative to organizing within the capitalizing machine of bourgeois electoral politics.
as the assemblies gain power it will likewise be necessary for them to choose, from among themselves or their advisors, commissars to represent their will, procure and manage resources, provide strike aid, et cetera. rather than a Parliamentary model where one faction rules and the other Opposed, as much as possible commissars should be drawn from across all participating socialist parties, workers councils, universities, trade and tenant unions, Indian Nations, and general membership.
the assembly itself gains it's legitimacy and novelty by being representative of the general people without being beholden to the corrupting influence of needing to raise money for multi million dollar re-election campaigns.
leftist parties as well as unions, campuses, and all member communities are incentivized to increase their general membership and contribute money and resources to the assembly in order to promote themselves to the general public in a way they never could by competing in a senator or governor race. Instead it would place a premium on organizing and educating their own membership with the knowledge that a guaranteed fraction of that membership will represent them on a political stage with a strong claim to democratic leadership. meanwhile, those members not chosen in a given lottery would be putting their knowledge to use directly by organizing unions at apartments, workplaces, public transit users, patients, migrants, et cetera.
some social groups which are particularly inclined to radical social transformation skills be granted representation in the assembly with membership fees waived, since the very presence and participation in assembly debate and seminars provides revolutionary content. in particular, prisoners, the unhoused, the chronically ill and disabled, youth and students, migrants, sex workers, and other such groups should be guaranteed delegations.
Therefore to the Democratic Campuses, 'Bashes, Labor Temples, and Lottery Assemblies, we can add the emergence of a new kind of avantguard party or caucus or collective, which seeks not to seize the state to establish an educational dictatorship, but rather promotes it's program by gaining delegates in the Assemblies. By aiming to cut across all communities associated with the assemblies to maximize their influence, such collectives would function as bridges between those communities represented in the assembly and cultivate bases of support orientated towards and invested in spreading the power of the assemblies and thereby create a force capable of challenging both the authority and
the legitimacy of bourgeois electoral functionaries.
Relevant Texts
Terra Ignota series, Palmer
The Congress, Borges
The Lottery in Babylon, Borges
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt
On Revolution, Arendht
Assembly, Hardt and Neghri
Can the Subaltern Speak, Spivak
Federalist No. 10, Madison
The Dawn of Everything, Graeber
The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci