Organizing a Revolution?

Camera zooms far in from earth to continent to bioregion to city to neighborhood to block to house to well-lit room, in through the window and in a spiral round and round a group of four sitting, standing, pacing, lying on the couch. Their voices become audible as the camera enters the room, mid-sentence.

Nelt: ...because the working class is no longer this mass, this undifferentiated formation of interchangeable pieces that capital has socialized into cogs.

j(A)de: Has that ever been a very liberatory vision for a, a, what do you call it? a "revolutionary subject"?

Jax: Well, yes, but only in the sense of negation. In other words, what capital has made, this working class wrought of people ripped from the land, from the kinship networks that reproduced us under feudalism, this proletarian way of being is so wretched that there's nothing for us to lose but our chains -- and capital has at the same moment placed us at the site of production, ideally situated to seize control of the means of production and wrench History from its hopeless track towards the glorious beacon of communism. Thus liberation. Or that's the idea, anyway.

Regina: But it hasn't really worked out, has it?

Nelt: Well, no. And there's lots of reasons for that, lots to debate. But where we are now is a situation that offers new possibilities. This new phase of capitalism, what some people call the "social factory" but is really more like people being turned into niche markets and niche marketers, a perpetually-connected universe of "unique" nodes of meaning-and-value creativity, or something. Everyday life, and all the relationships we have with people on a daily basis, have been recognized as core to the economy. Facebook! Billion-dollar IPO for a virtual "place" where people talk to their friends!

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j(A)de: Look, I understand the attractiveness of what you're calling "cadre" formation. It's awesome to work with a tight crew of kids who really get you, where you're coming from. Fuck, yeah! You don't have to waste a lot of time with the whys, or even the hows: just lay things out, people get it and take things on and you can rock. The problem is this idea that just because your "cadre" has some kind of kink for ideology and spends all its time reading obscure Europeans, it's going to be best situated to lead the revolution. Not to call you all "vanguardist" or anything, but that's what it sounds like.

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Regina: So, how does a group like PLOC actually organize? There's all these different ways of seeing the world and what approach will appeal best to the "right" people. What I see, is a coordinating context in which people gain skill at working well in small groups, and in linking their groups together, across difference. Some of the groups will be ideologically-aligned, others will be based on various identities, or shared histories, or really anything ties a group of people together: affinities, if you will.