The Only Important Division
November 10, 2006Long before I ever encountered STO or learned of the inspiration the group took from CLR James, I was myself deeply influenced by the Greek/French revolutionary theorist Cornelius Castoriadis, who collaborated with James (and Grace Lee Boggs) on the seminal document Facing Reality. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Castoriadis, emphasizing his trajectory from revolutionary Marxism to something approaching anarchism. In that process, I happened upon the following quote, which I still find helpful in framing the distinction between revolution and reform:
“Here is the only important division. There are those, like myself, who consider that the margins of freedom contained in the contemporary regime are but the sedimented by-products of movements of this type [the “movements of the sixties”] that have been going on for centuries; that without these movements the regime not only would never have produced these freedoms but would have, each time, unrelentingly whittled them down (as is happening now); that, finally, humanity can certainly do better. And there are those who think – they seldom dare say it, except “on the right”, but their arguments and their reasoning boil down to the same thing – that we live in the finally-found form of a free and just political society (some reforms, of course, remain to be accomplished). The discussion cannot but stop here, and everybody can make their choices or confirm ones they have already made.”
– “The Movements of the Sixties,” Thesis Eleven, no. 18/19 (1987), page 29.
As I noted in my previous post about anti-imperialism, STO was firmly committed to the revolutionary break, and was always distinguishable from the reformists and reformists-in-training that dominated much of the US left in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A deliberate disregard for the boundaries between legal and illegal action permeated every period of the group’s existence. In this sense, STO always located itself on Castoriadis’ side of the “only important division.”
At the same time, the limits of this binary analysis of the world have become clearer in the two decades since Castoriadis put forward his schematic. A number of anarchists today (including the many of us who have been influenced by the legacy of STO) have begun to speak of a three way fight, rather than a simple two-part division. From this perspective, a third political faction, which may or may not be helpfully described as “fascist,” maintains the revolutionary stance advocated by Castoriadis, but their politics are at least as opposed to freedom as are those of the “contemporary regime.” This is a problem that STO only briefly attempted to address, near the end it its existence, but which has become more pronounced with the emergence of undeniably revolutionary, but also undeniably anti-freedom, groups like Al-Qaeda. (More soon on anti-fascism, “then and now,” as they say.)
