A Response to Critics of Especifismo*

Not a “side project” or a form of co-optation, but a strategic organization:
Dealing with skepticism and criticism of especifismo

From the concept of a “specific anarchist organization” comes the term “especifismo”. It’s a current of anarchism that defends the need for a theoretical, strategic, and tactical organization oriented toward a libertarian socialist society. The political organization: something like a station in the struggle, situated somewhere between the different tendencies of social and organized anarchism and always trying to influence mass movements or “broad fronts”. That’s why we use the term “organizational dualism”: a revolutionary political organization has no sense of purpose if it’s not oriented towards popular struggles. Of course, all of this occurs with a shared strategy and a clearly defined program. The specific anarchist organization aims to cultivate revolutionary seeds, providing a solid foundation capable of mitigating the inevitable ups and downs of social conflicts and political cycles.

Many critics of especifismo accuse it of “entryism”, of having secret meetings, of hiding the power of a coordinated minority, or even of disloyal praxis towards the social spaces where these militants are active participants. We do think some of these fears are valid, but if they really are genuine concerns, they’re coming from a lack of understanding of what exactly is being proposed by this current. Especifismo is a defense of the concept of Popular Power. It’s about a revolutionary process coming out of the organized proletarian masses themselves. The firm belief that the popular classes should themselves be the protagonists and subjects of the revolution. The defense of democratic mechanisms of decision making. The commitment to the self-management of these struggles and to building popular structures based on the active participation of a broad majority. The political practice of especifismo aims to ensure that mass movements are places for learning, real-life sites of popular participation. This means it wouldn’t make any sense, based on these aims, for especifismo militants to seek to exercise control over any kind of mass social space. The specific anarchist organization is in no way an end in itself. But a rejection of “self-proclaimed vanguards”. And an understanding that the libertarian communist militant has to be inserted within the people and their struggles, not above them or ‘in the shadows’.

Obviously, not everyone is or is going to be an anarchist. Not even everyone in libertarian spaces shares a single, wide-reaching consensus regarding political action. For this exact reason, the specific anarchist organization is a space of affinity for those of us who think that strategy, conjunctural analysis, and militant formation are indispensable. Since especifismo comes out of the socialist tradition, we firmly believe that we can learn and develop our ideas better together. And we reject the anarchist individualism of the last few decades as a liberal deviation.

Let’s go back for a moment to the concept of Popular Power. Much of the concrete praxis of especifismo, in real life, consists of working to ensure that mass movements are participatory and democratic. This implies the existence of other political groups situated on these same fronts. Groups with which it will sometimes be necessary to find common ground and, other times, to oppose. Anarchist political practice on these fronts should provide effective tools for organizing and taking action. You could even say the strategic organizing of especifismo seeks the exact opposite outcome of co-optation or entryism. It’s about being active subjects within these struggles as a means of preventing these fronts from being deactivated by institutionalized and/or vanguardist tendencies. It aims to organize and radicalize the popular masses under their own will, training and developing their capacity for struggle, and fostering the collective desire for liberation.

Pre-figurative politics are essential to anarchism. Defending the idea that organizational forms and tactics must accurately reflect the future society we’re trying to achieve. This anarchist principle of not distinguishing between means and ends affects everything from organizational forms to modes of action and militant ethics.  We believe that the means are always important and related to our trajectory; we don’t want to create a new world by reproducing what’s already wrong today. This is why especifismo has a clear ethical code: to ensure that transparency, clarity, and honesty are always high priorities. The strategies of entryism or co-optation are usually based on unethical aims like controlling working groups with an organized minority, taking power either formally or informally, and/or using vague messaging that hides their true intentions. Vanguardism leads to a future class society that would be managed by a bureaucratic-intellectual elite, so we understand its antidote to be the popular participation of a working class majority organized under a federalist framework and with the fully socialized control of production. In this way, especifismo is about building a wide-reaching institutionality that can’t be taken over by a minority of privileged intellectuals.

On top of all this, the political organization can also become a point of reference and a kind of militant school for people disoriented by political struggle. It should be a space for mentoring and learning together. Since so many of us have started out totally orphaned, without any political referents, confused and separated from previous historical knowledge or context, the political organization has to be a place for channeling collective knowledge towards a unified and coherent strategy. A place where young militants can find theoretical and analytical refuge and militant support. Today, it’s all too common for militants to be frustrated by the absence of any point of political reference and by the persistent feeling of never making any progress. This is exactly why we need spaces where we can begin to fill these gaps.

When we look specifically at revolutionary syndicalism, skepticism about the specific anarchist organization is somewhat reasonable. The union is a kind of synthesizing structure capable of combining politics with popular organization. Revolutionary syndicalism doesn’t really need to differentiate between the political and social levels. Generally speaking, it’s the union that will replace the State as the administrator of society until the eventual establishment of communism. We are formally committed to this political position and its strategy, but even when we take that into account, we still don’t see anything contradictory about an organization of militants from the anarcho-syndicalist tendency meeting to establish a coherent strategy, share experiences of struggle, and have theoretical debates that go beyond the immediate issues of the union itself. Revolutionary syndicalism is the popular materialization of the working class, specifically in the form of unions. It’s a means of combining our efforts towards the shared end of exercising control over production. But there’s a problem when young militants aren’t attracted to anarcho-syndicalism because they can’t easily fit in and participate. Either because of the material conditions or due to the general lack of theoretical formation, it’s not easy for people today to just “tag in” and join a larger militant organization without also dealing with other shortcomings at the same time. This is why we think the political organization could serve as a space for developing and perfecting the skills of the anarcho-syndicalist militants of the future. A political school for  people coming from different backgrounds. It’s about preparing them with analytical, strategic, and militant capacity.

When you can’t see the forest for the trees, the political organization should be the hill you climb up to get a good lay of the land. A place that can serve as a dependable, revolutionary station for multiple distinct and different fronts of struggle. Developing and encouraging interconnections between them and enriching tendencies like anarcho-syndicalism with pragmatic and informed methods of militancy. It’s true that “coordinated gears” like this have a lot of moving parts, so we’re very excited that these kinds of  debates about organization are taking place. They show how, after many years of theoretical stagnation, sectarianism, disorganization and purely aesthetic activism, libertarian spaces are coming back to life. While the task ahead is daunting, that doesn’t make it any less encouraging.

*by SrgHkBk, a militant from the CNT; translated from Spanish by the Center for Especifismo Studies; original text available here: https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/07/04/el-especifismo-ante-sus-criticos/