Mark Phillips: The American Question

How do we square this entry about politics and fun with Ted's entry about Comradeship and obligation?

The old, bad answer would likely have been, make our sect-groups more 'totalizing'. This was the pressure many people came under: limit your relationships to members of the sect, make the sect more fun. Even the healthier groups had this discussion, I think. I seem to recall an exchange about exactly this in ATC somewhere back there. If memory serves, Dave Finkel slammed the lid on it pretty hard, and was right to do so.

The answer I lean toward is kind of the symmetrical opposite. Build our political working groups around networks of friends. I don't see any reason why little projects can't exist which consist entirely of people who who like each other and who like to work together. I kind of feel that if we do this, comradeship and obligation take care of themselves. Maybe Ted can correct me if I'm missing his point or if my suggestion is too simple.

I'd add that IMO it's extremely important for people to have lives outside of their organizational commitments and indeed outside of their political activity. All over 'the left' you meet people who seem stunted. I don't mean to be mean, but to call attention to the unhealthy cultishness which our milieu seems to engender. You probably know what I mean. People who won't see a movie unless it's a 'political movie', or won't listen to music unless it's 'political music', won't go to parties unless it's a narrow circle of 'political people'. One irony being that this kind of self-isolation seems to make people less effective in their activism.

I dunno if y'all will agree with this. I hope I'm not over generalizing or being unfair! I'm personally exceptionally frustrated with the insularity of traditional movement culture and there are times when I'd like to grab people by the hair and drag them out into the world. Which is really not my right or place.

There is a need for an incest taboo on the left. Also, people need to get a life. Part of it, is a sense of perspective. Perhaps, I was always to much of a contrarian, I find better politics in popular film and music then in the political films. Also, I always mixed friendship and comradeship both in terms of external activity and internal politics: it is my style. And, I agree we can start small and have fun. But, big is fun, what if things get going, there is a need for more organization, meetings, voting and the discipline of democracy. Let us get rid of the rot, the formulas, but in the end there is organization, disagreement and....

We've swapped roles. :-) While back, I was the one for organization and you were saying that it's not about discussion bulletins.

I don't think these things are counterposed. Growth is good! But it must be organic. Much of the sect-ness of the TI legacy is due to the fact that the TI itself was "hothouse grown". There was the emergency of the revolutionary conjuncture, without revolutionary parties. In the here-and-now, the "key link in the chain" (Illych) is to escape the sectism.

Which, IMO, moves the protocols by which network nodes interact -- united front, priviledged united front, etc. etc. -- to center stage.

Another word that I like to use when talking about this issue is "fulfilling." One of the important findings that has come out of left history circles in the last 25 years is that the people's movements of the past (esp. prior to 1930s) emerged from dense community networks of social organization that were not only narrowly political, but included such activities as singing and musical groups, sporting and hunting clubs, ethnic support groups, and the like. In this type of social ecology, movement participants could both organize and "recreate" themselves (i.e., the movement provided a range of fulfilling activities that were not market based and were democratically organized).

Maybe there's a helpful distinction to be made between fun and play. Careful, I just thought of this. Fun is a subjective experience, play is a type of work that adults do. Fun is a great internal radar: something which is not fun likely has something wrong with it. Play is a more effecient kind of work. It's what work would be if it were free -- "free" in Marx's technical sense of lacking external constraint. Play is the work that one does because one enjoys doing it. The experience of play should by definition be fun. If these are at all reasonable things to say, then our political work should be play, and it should be fun.

A second thought. We talked about this at lunch the other day. Perhaps the distinction to be made between 'fulfillment' and 'cultic totalization' is that fulfillment in your sense is provided by socialization within the community networks you describe, whereas cults or organizations with cultlike tendencies want to substitute themselves for the broader networks.

Lastly, the kinds of 'community networks' you mention sound like they're made up of 'nodes' in the way we've been using that term. We should try to theorize that 'community network' experience, to see how it compares with the organizing model we're playing with.