Cross-posted from https://ilcarizona.substack.com/
Viv Soni explores the current conditions and challenges that led him to the ILC
“If we are asked therefore, where is the state of nature to be found? We may answer, It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or in the Straits of Magellan.” -Adam Ferguson
“…the grand plan of the ensemble has no necessary relationship to the order of life as it is experienced by its residents. Although certain state services may be more easily provided and distant addresses more easily located, these apparent advantages may be negated by such perceived disadvantages as the absence of street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of the spatial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering spaces for informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling. The formal order of a geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order.” -James C. Scott
It was only after moving from London to Phoenix, Arizona that I finally got around to reading James C. Scott’s “Seeing like a State”, from which the latter quote originates. In so many ways it was the right book at the right time for me. Having spent the majority of my life living in various London suburbs, the neat, sparse, often bleak ordering of the Phoenix metro area was not a seamless adjustment. Initially I had been enthusiastic about the grid system. For an outsider, this form of ordering a city makes navigation easy, just as Scott points out in the above quotation. However the sense of sprawl – of a city that never quite found its own meaningful loci – maintained an undercurrent of impotence and isolation that I could never quite pin down until I read Scott’s insights on how these phenomena are necessarily connected.
And now I cannot stop thinking about them. Why was I initially so taken with the grid system? The answer is simple really. For an alien (figuratively and yet also literally in terms of status) the grid system makes sense out of an unfamiliar environment. Navigating anywhere is a straightforward endeavor (ignoring ofcourse the vast distances between everything). I think back to every time I have gotten lost in any part of the world, and it has always been due to a lack of local knowledge, and the situation has almost always been resolved by a local inhabitant wryly smiling at the outsider’s ignorance. The grid system simplifies all of that. Thus, being self-sufficient in navigation almost as soon as I arrived in Phoenix provided a small sense of empowerment in what to me felt like an entirely alien environment. There is an irony here. My own sense of disenfranchisement came from abandoning my home in London where I felt a very concrete belonging – that in-group mentality that I had encountered in others elsewhere in the world. This is not simply related to navigation, but the familiarity of seeing the same faces year in year out, of having the same cultural touchstones, and an expectation based on experience as to how any encounter might unfold. In short – community.
When I started writing this piece, I wanted to write about the spatial dynamics of living in Phoenix, and their consequences for organising. Instead I found myself constantly drawn back to the theme of community. There are a number of reasons for this. My engagement with politics is fairly common for someone of my age (mid 30s) on the left: galvanized during the democratic socialist moment – specifically Corbynism in my case; finding answers to the contradictions of engaging in bourgeois parties through direct experience and writings in the Marxian tradition; joining Marxist sects to seek expression of a more revolutionary politics and finding this a dead end; seeking solace and collectivity in union and mutual aid work. Given this history, I am but one of so many who are self-consciously asking themselves what they should be doing to advance the cause of revolution or indeed simply “help”. Coupled with this are my specific circumstances of working in academia. Despite the many problems with the PMC hypothesis (which I have critiqued previously), there is an undeniable truth to the distinctive habitas of the professional strata. For myself, I came to Arizona to take up a postdoctoral position, which by its very nature is temporary. Others I work with are also postdocs or grad students. It is inevitable that we will all end up in geographically different places soon enough, whether we wish to seek a career in academia or not. There is thus an inevitable churn that runs contrary to the sort of spatio-temporal consistency that is the very core of developing bonds of community. Thus, one cannot have moved in left-wing circles and have reluctantly uprooted from their own community without some sensitivity to the necessity of generating bonds that go beyond the immediate interests of those involved. Instead then, here I am attempting to pinpoint exactly why community is so central to any radical path forward, and how this led me to the Phoenix branch of the Independent Labor Club.
A short detour via complexity
Before going further, I would like to briefly talk about complex systems. The reason for this is because when we are sold a socialist strategy what we are usually being given is a simplistic model of change in which all the grubby complexities of reality are flattened out. I don’t want to talk about revolutionary strategy per se (I have written previously about this). Rather I want to get at why community and building bonds of solidarity are often taken for granted, and what are the consequences of such approaches.
Societies are inherently complex. Hundreds of thousands of people with their own life histories and interests; hundreds of communities within the wider community, often criss-crossing and overlapping. To administer such complex systems necessarily involves abstracting away much of this complexity. Rather than attempting to comb through the complex, often contradictory thoughts of each individual, administration must simplify the chaos into a manageable number of data points with which to work with. These are time-honored questions that the scientist must ask themself: How do I construct my categories? What is important and must be included, and what can I throw out? These questions are a subset of the overarching one: How do I generate a model of my system of interest? To varying degrees, this is a political question, particularly when dealing with social systems. It determines who matters; who is represented; and who is erased. And this is not just a question for the state. Any organisation – whether consciously or not – asks itself the same questions. It is not uncommon for some of the more reductive Marxist sects to abstract away all differences in the name of a class conscious politics. Whilst this provides a basis for a more coherent outlook, it also shuts out the complexities within any class formation which to varying degrees must be accounted for. A more universal example is that of nationalism and the attempts to impose a national identity. Eric Hobsbawm provides a paradigmatic example of this in the idea of the American nation as a blank slate that would wipe clean the residues of loyalty immigrants had to their homelands:
“The American nation, for instance, was based on the assumption that in migrating across the ocean many millions of Europeans would lightly and quickly abandon any political loyalties to their homeland and any claims to official status for their native language and cultures. The United States (or Brazil, or Argentina) would not be multi-national, but absorb the immigrants into its own nation. And in our period this is what happened, even though the immigrant communities did not lose their identity in the ‘melting-pot’ of the new world, but remained or even became consciously and proudly Irish, German, Swedish, Italian, etc.”
As a second generation immigrant myself, I can attest to how the diaspora experience often results in a deep anxiety about losing one’s roots, and this can manifest in a cultural zealousness that is rare in the homeland itself. The important point here is that whether you choose to ignore them or not, these complexities still exist and have very material effects in terms of how individuals choose to act, where they commit their free time, the causes they make sacrifices for, and how they spend their money.
None of this is to attack the process of abstraction itself – this is a necessary part of interpreting the world around us. In fact, what makes systems theory so powerful is that it provides us with a framework to model our world in a relational manner. Bertell Ollman describes this approach in lucid terms (I share the late evolutionary biologist John Maynard-Smith’s opinion that dialectics and systems theory are largely interchangeable in terms of practical utility) :
“Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the commonsense notion of ‘thing’ (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of ‘process’ (which contains its history and possible futures) and ‘relation’ (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations). Nothing that didn’t already exist has been added here. Rather, it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is ‘abstracts’) in which to think about the world.”
Thinking in this way is immensely clarifying in terms of understanding the incentive structures under which individuals operate. More specifically, rather than waving away the lack of class consciousness as simply a result of bourgeois ideology, betrayal by representatives of the working class, and poor organising, we can see that class has become more abstract as working class habitas and culture and geography has fractured. In short, class has become somewhat individualised. The idea of a mutuality of being predicated on class location is as remote as it has ever been.
Building an identity
Mutuality of being. I have been deeply taken with this concept ever since I first came across it. To be rooted in one another: “kinsfolk are persons who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence; they are members of one another.” I am taken with it not simply because of its analytical utility, but because of its warmth. Reading around theory and strategy is often a cold process. An emphasis is placed on objective conditions and hard realities. Then you stumble across mutuality of being and there is an instinctive yearning that requires little analytical care. To see yourself in another. I firmly believe that this type of relation requires a level of spatio-temporal consistency – something that has been and continues to be eroded by a multitude of processes, not least the social spaces in which we can simply “be”. And whilst the concept is simple enough to grasp, its essence is one of complexity. Relations that are baked in deep tend to have complex histories tethered to them – or at least complex to those on the outside. For those on the inside there is nothing more straightforward than seeing oneself reflected in another.
I will give a brief personal anecdote. When I was 17 back in London, a friend and I would ditch school every day to go to the local pub. Others would join us on occasion, but often it was just us. Sometimes we’d have plenty to talk about, at other times we’d be rather muted. It was on one of these quieter visits that my companion remarked that a truly comfortable friendship is one where we can sit in comfortable silence. How did we reach that level of mutual understanding and comfort? We saw each other every day; we had – or were able to generate with little consequence – free time; we had a physical space in which we could linger at a time when drinks were considerably cheaper than they are now; we had consistent social conditions in which we could enact consistent social behaviors. I do not believe we can speed run over these processes, pointing to objective social relations to enact political aims (Indeed, if class was such a “thick” relation, the working class wouldn’t have had to be constructed in the first place – as documented in EndNotes’ A History of Separation). There has to be something substantive binding us together, beyond relations that may be objective but not felt.
Whenever I engage with a fellow Marxist, a common refrain is that we must unite the Marxist left as a first step. I have some sympathy with this notion, but more because consistently entering into a physical space and engaging with comrades is an important process, rather than believing it to be the first step in a clearly mapped out path to a Marxist party. Certainly in the current moment I am with Gilles Dauve’s assertion that the party is,
“neither created nor not-to-be-created: it is a product and an expression of the proletariat (often identified with the working class in Marx’s writings), and less an organisation than a programme, a perspective, held by at least an active minority.”
Currently that expression is of a smaller minority than ever. We must generate the spaces in which that minority can grow. We must rebuild community from the ground up, in the face of forces that are eroding that which we seek to build. This isn’t a strategy, nevermind a revolutionary strategy, and it feels rather impotent in the face of the multiple overlapping crises we are currently facing, but it is both an acknowledgement of the defensist position we find ourselves in, and the only way of generating the material and social bonds necessary for a counter-offensive. Indeed, it is this mindset that drew me toward the Independent Labor Club in the first place. Somewhat vague though its function is, at the core lies a realisation that we must start from the ground up by building the foundations of community. It is by no means a catch all solution, but I found this message somewhat hopeful, having navigated my way through political sects and mutual aid groups for many years now.
The Independent Labor Club of Phoenix
“The rich have their country clubs and smoky parlors. The middle classes have their professional associations and civic clubs. The working class has the Independent Labor Club.” -ILC mission statement.
I want to finish by delving into the actual functioning of ILC Phoenix as it currently exists. The above quotation from the ILC mission statement is certainly something to aspire to, but it doesn’t exist in such a state just yet. I cannot speak directly to the situation in other chapters as each faces unique challenges. Certainly those located in condensed big city urban centers such as New York and Chicago are likely to have a wider potential base of people to work with than we do here in Phoenix. This comes back in part to the dispersed geographical layout of Phoenix, but also the difficulty in finding physical spaces in which to meet during the summer months, where temperatures consistently maintain at 110-115 degrees. This is challenging for a nascent organisation that is still in the process of generating engagement and investment from those that have shown an interest, and does not have a funding stream to rent out indoor spaces whenever they are required, not to mention the large distances some will inevitably have to travel to get to any agreed venue. It is important to acknowledge these functional constraints but little point using them as excuses. These are the conditions that we are operating in and must therefore attempt to establish ourselves in.
Other challenges are less unique to the Phoenix environment. The ILC’s function is inevitably somewhat vague relative to a political organisation with a programme or a union branch or a mutual aid organisation. These types of organisation have explicit functions they aspire to, be it enacting their political programme or fighting for better working conditions for members. Of course it is important to note that there is a distinction between what an organisation claims it does and what it actually does (as captured so pithily in Stafford Beer’s statement that “the purpose of a system is what it does”), and it is the disjuncture between the claims of most political organisations and their actual functions that led me to the ILC in the first place! However, a less defined function also leaves much open to interpretation, with some keen on moving quickly toward formal structures and roles, and others more cautious about the bureaucratic load this can create. Navigating through these questions in a generative way that does not alienate members is an ongoing challenge.
Thus, following a long drawn out and particularly hot summer, what has been somewhat successfully achieved has been the maintenance of dialogue amongst engaged individuals, and somewhat irregular meetups. As we move into the cooler months there is already a sense of renewed enthusiasm, planning of events and discussion of projects that might prove useful for members and beyond. These are extremely modest achievements, but as I have discussed in this piece, simply the process of being in and around one another is central to developing lasting and meaningful bonds based on care and as opposed to utility. I am often drawn to what Richard Gunn calls “good” conversation:
“‘Good’ conversation is good rather than ‘disappointing’ – it does not merely chew over factual disputes or retreat into a play of disembodied concepts – because it, and it alone, allows conversational partners to challenge one another in a fashion which brings all things about each partner into play.”
Such dialogue is somewhat easier to enter into when there is an acknowledgement that we do not have the answers ready made and that our job is not simply to persuade, but to engage. So often in organising we hear the phrase “meet people where they’re at.” Sure, but often this is interpreted as a rhetorical tool for taking people’s material experience as the basis for persuading them of some strategic truth. Acknowledging we do not have the answers all figured out opens up space for the sort of dialogue that Gunn is invoking. Debate and discussion becomes less about “winning” and more about the dialogue itself. Put simply, circumstances are against us, we don’t have it worked out, let’s work through it together.
And there are encouraging signs of this, particularly with a focus on in-person meet ups as opposed to endless online debates with little at stake, and a focus on the local. Thus far ILC Phoenix has had the flexibility to do what it wants, to talk about specifically local issues, and to run events as it sees fit. This feels appropriate, given the very different conditions chapters are working in.
The future
The future of ILC Phoenix is hard to speculate on individually. Personally, I would like to be going into next summer with a regular set of meetings, both social and administrative, with a wide number of members taking lead on projects, be they sharing skills or reading groups, or anything else that is of interest across our group. This would hopefully allow us to continue to build over the summer months despite the adverse weather conditions. It is not simply about a quantitative increase in numbers, but about building the bonds that I have discussed at length here. Of course these are simply the opinions of one person. Whatever direction we take must be decided collectively, and hopefully this piece will stimulate some dialogue and pushback. There are also pitfalls to avoid. As with any organisation, some members will have more free time and confidence to engage and lead than others. This must not develop into informal networks which decide important matters. Instead we must endeavor to build up the confidence of all, encouraging everyone to engage in reading, writing, and dialoguing with one another, as well as sharing the breadth of skills we have at our disposal as a collective. To this end, small functions such as rotating meeting organisers and a buddy system for new members will go a long way to developing and sustaining engagement whilst we eventually coalesce into some sort of formal structure.
I will conclude by once again emphasising that these are simply the opinions of one member of one branch of the ILC. I have found it immensely clarifying to work through why the ILC has appealed to me at this specific moment. I suspect others will find resonance here too. If you are interested in the ILC, our website can be found here.