Guerrillas of Desire by Kevin Van Meter

Author:Kevin Van Meter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2017-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

7. On Organizing

8. Conclusion: To Make a Revolution Possible

7

On Organizing

Guerrillas in the Contemporary Period. Left Community-Based Organizations.

Rise of Nonprofits, Decline of Unions. Affinity Groups and Collectives.

Organizers to Come, Organizations “All the Way Down.”

The question of the future of the revolution is a bad question because, in so far as it is asked, there are so many people who do not become revolutionaries, and this is exactly why it is done, to impede the question of the revolutionary-becoming of people, at every level, in every place.1

—Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Claire Parnet, Dialogues

While Long Island’s Modern Times Collective was initially caught in the whirlwind that was the counter-globalization movement, by August 2000 it increasingly focused locally. These endeavors included hosting long-term community dialogues (regular public discussions without predetermined topics or ends), active solidarity with a network of day labor workers’ centers, and amassing resources (e.g., space, funds, art and printing supplies, and books) for use by the collective’s members and constituents.2 An excommunicated reverend along with a former guerrilla with the Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, El Salvador), both well studied in the pedagogy of Paolo Freire, trained the collective to facilitate community discussions.

Dialogues were held in large, open church halls with participants facing each other around a circle. Those who partook often described their desire to produce a “life worth living” and to situate their lives within the ecosystems of Long Island: coastal forest, pine barren, grasslands, estuary, and beach. Questions emerged: How will food be cultivated? What agriculture will this require? How will fruits and vegetables get picked? To address human needs, those assembled began to figure out labor processes and collective projects. Time spent in dialogue is unlike time spent awaiting the alarm bell or watching the time clock. Often these conversations ended organically, as those in the circle instinctively understood matters to be temporarily settled and knew that unaddressed and under-addressed questions would find their way into subsequent sessions. New participants would join these circles to talk about an occasion when they had refused an imposition—of work, compulsory schooling, family obligations, gender identity norms, assumptions about sex and sexuality—or bourgeois expectations. These refusals typically had required mutual aid in the form of accomplices, affinity, a sense of trust, and an awareness of solidarity and commonality.

In the previous chapters of this book, everyday forms of resistance were drawn from the historical record. This chapter will examine organizing strategies that hinder or further the amplification and circulation of these practices.

On organizing

In the first two years of the twenty-first century, New York-based social anarchist and then nonagenarian Sidney Solomon, a mentor of mine, would argue that anarchism was always organized. Social anarchists as part of the oddly named Vanguard Group in the 1930s would “draw a circle to mark that we believed in organization,” he would say.3 And organization requires organizing or at least implies it. Historical and contemporary approaches to organizing vary widely. This can be framed as consciousness-raising, unionization, or building community.

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