From the “Second Grade Strategy Manual”
Though we’ve discussed the limitations of metaphors, especially as they relate to gardens as fabricated “settlements”, whether because of their potential to be interpreted as colonialist or vanguardist, we still see a use for the image of cracks appearing in the system, sprawling outward, ready to be filled with soil and plants that will also be sprawling as they take root.
This metaphor helps us understand what is meant by words like conjuncture, context, and situation. Reality is experienced as a situation, so when people’s needs are met, their experience of a situation is very different. We’ve discussed a connection between this plurality of experiences and the utopian objectives of the Zapatistas who say they want a world “where many worlds fit”.
How can different people, living within the same system, but with different experiences of that system, coincide and interact in strategic ways?
Different realities produce different experiences, and from our militancy, we know that some experiences are repeatedly discounted. This can be a persistent problem for an organization. After our discussions on strategy, we see a need to factor in a plurality of perspectives when conceiving of a strategic line because it’s a mistake to think that there’s only valid information coming from one front of struggle.
Racism, xenophobia, misogyny, etc. are persistent forces acting against the political solidarity of the oppressed classes. They serve as built-in defense mechanisms protecting the system. When these forces have more influence in society, the system doesn’t need to respond directly. This is why a revolutionary project is aimed at these destructuring cracks that are already forming at multiple points in class society. These “protagonist nodes” create opportunities for the production of a new strategically relevant perspective.
Here, it’s important to point out that a historical subject is not just a single individual or stereotype. The protagonism of social revolution is a collective form of leadership, so it’s centered on the popular organization as a whole. This means that while individually we may be experiencing dissonance, collectively there’s still potential for the production of a new kind of outlook based on the popular organization of society. This is what we mean when we talk about “a strategy of building Popular Power”; it’s based on the potential force of our cooperation over time. So, after a dissonant experience or a period of crisis, taking time to reflect collectively can strengthen our militant commitment, as well as our strategic unity.
At the Center for Especifismo Studies (CES), our conception of the historical subject of the social revolution is broader than the economic sphere. For us, the popular organization of the dominated and oppressed classes specifically includes those who have nothing, those who are deprived of almost everything, and those who have access to very little.
Today, most people live in conditions that don’t give them access to most of what they need. The situation is made worse because the capitalist system and the State provide alternative routes that lead people away from politics as a form of direct action and toward the mass consumption of politics as a spectator sport, meaning a kind of entertainment. Representational democracy and the entertainment industry are both ways of taking our discontent, packaging it, and selling it back to us.
CES 