From the “Second Grade Strategy Manual”
We know from experience that popular mobilizations can be stopped. They don’t just survive and continue on their own. To keep them going, we need to be ready to take risks and be responsible for their consequences. This is what we call militancy. The oppressed classes must have the independence to create their own path and the militant commitment to follow that path through a multitude of shortcomings, unforeseen problems, personal and organizational conflicts, crises, repression, etc.
What we’re saying is that the class struggle is messy. With its ideological pluralism and lack of organization, it’s equally as complex as the social forces shaping the current conjuncture. Currently a revolutionary movement is not one of these forces, to say nothing of the weak position of anarchism today. It’s true that, as anarchists, we may be well anchored in place, at stations in the struggle (unions, study groups, community assemblies, co-ops, mutual aid collectives, etc.). However, this also means that we’re often irrelevant to social movements more broadly since we’re sometimes too stuck in place to be part of advancing the class struggle. Especifismo militants want anarchists to be immediately recognized as comrades in the revolutionary project, as militants headed down the same road of struggles, even if we have a different zigzagging pattern.
This is related to our discussions about militant style. Obviously, since especifismo militants are active participants in the class struggle, their militant formation consists of more than just posing in the mirror and putting on labels found online. Militant style is not a final product or a glossy presentation. It consists of daily tasks that have a strategic direction. These tasks can’t be done alone, and they can’t be done by following old habits and dogmatic ways of doing things. And, maybe most importantly of all, the militant style we’re describing can’t be developed by ridiculing people and only ever getting frustrated with them.
Like the class struggle more broadly, developing revolutionary strategy is a messy process of learning, and not always looking good doing it. Militants have the daily task of participating in the class struggle from within the system, not from outside, and with the people, not against them or only by criticizing them. This project must be taken to heart by the militants, and it must point toward the final objective of libertarian socialism.
We have to ensure that our activities are contributing to the revolutionary project. This means staying connected to and attuned to the concerns and urgencies of the community, not arguing from a removed position or an outside perspective, not claiming an enlightened point of view. This relates to the basis for the “North American Anarchist Primer”. It’s about our responsibility to speak from somewhere at some time. While the Center for Especifismo Studies (CES) is an international organization with participants and supporters on multiple continents around the world, to make this manual as practical as possible, it has been written with the North American English-speaking anarchist revolutionary as the assumed reader. This doesn’t prevent people in other contexts or coming out of other tendencies from learning, using, transforming, or elaborating on the especifismo theory articulated in this text. But it does explicitly force them to adapt it to their local and regional contexts. Even in our own local contexts, we will have to work to make this theory relevant to our own communities and social-level militancy.
Staying attuned to the struggles of the people is an ethical principle of anarchism. This is why we criticize authoritarians and self-proclaimed vanguards who ignore the reality of how class struggle is taking shape today. This current manifestation of class society splits the oppressed classes across multiple different fronts, so it would be wrong to see zigzagging tactics as inherently problematic. We think the various daily tasks of militants require them to zigzag in response to current conditions. For us, this pattern of movement is a way of advancing toward a point of rupture with the capitalist system, while not getting stuck at just one station, repeating the deployment of just one tactic. We don’t want to spend our energy only on defensive measures. We want to make gains. We want to push forward. We want to win.
A revolutionary movement’s success is based on its potential for coordination and organization. It will take multiple steps in succession to create a popular organization capable of confronting reactionary forces, of surviving a revolutionary moment, and of establishing a libertarian socialist society. This means that mutual aid collectives, unions, and assemblies are zigs (or zags depending on the context), but we don’t want their influence to be stuck in one place. Just like how we don’t want the revolutionary movement to be stuck in one place either.
CES 