“Communism will… be an intense and unpredictable struggle for life on the part of the species, which no one has yet brought to a conclusion, since the sterile and pathological solitude of the Ego does not deserve the name of life, just as the treasure of the miser is not wealth, not even personal wealth.”¹

THE CASE OF THE PRAXIS GROUP

A group of people who met through their participation in various struggles decide to produce a theoretical magazine. What they produce could be described as a Marxist journal for anarchists, combining reports of struggles and movements, many of which they participated in, with longer historical and theoretical material. It also embodies a set of assumptions about the role of those who want revolution, assumptions that could be summarized along the following lines: you intervene or involve yourself in struggles not as teachers or provocateurs, but as fellow proletarians who share a desire for revolution. While ready to make friends and comrades in the struggle, you never make growing a group the goal. Instead, you push struggles as far as they will go by being open to the radical potential of any given moment. You ruthlessly oppose bureaucratic manipulators of all stripes, and all those who for whatever reason are wedded to the return to normality. To do this you must draw on the rich history of proletarian struggle, a history that — from the Paris Commune to May ‘68, from the emergence of workers’ councils in the early twentieth century through to the refusal of work and the “Movement of ‘77” — demonstrates again and again the spontaneous capacity of proletarians to leap ahead of their situation, to educate their educators.

This way of orienting itself to struggles worked well for the group both in its practice and in its capacity to make theoretical sense of what was going on in the world. However, when confronting a sophisticated theory that challenged some of these assumptions, the group proved unable to deal with the crisis that the new ideas provoked. A division emerged between a group orthodoxy and dissidents attracted to the new ideas. The group’s internal discussion, which had been characterised by an openness and seriousness towards critique, became polarised between these two sides: one side feeling it had given the discussion as much time as it deserved, the other wanting to pursue it to the end. The discussion became stuck. Following a logic of conflict escalation — trust broke down, motives became suspected. One side argued that the ideas it was fed up with did not really make sense or add up to that much. They suspected that behind the other side’s insistence on pursuing the theoretical discussion there was a destructive impulse towards the group’s previously shared aim. The other side saw a defensiveness and bad faith in the first sides’ argumentation, which they traced back to the discussion, implicitly questioning some key unstated assumptions of the group. At a certain point, the group seemed to arrive at a thoughtful way of going forward. The orthodox side agreed to develop their critique of the new ideas. Although this course of action seemed to offer the possibility of real progress, it was suddenly abandoned. The orthodox side moved from talk to action, expelling the dissidents without any further discussion. Thus, despite the group having enshrined a critique of the sect-like behaviour prevalent in other groups, it had split and had done so in an acrimonious and unpleasant way, which had a wrenching, traumatic character for both sides. Those who had left or been expelled reformed as a discussion group taking a great deal of time to work through what had happened. The residual group redirected itself to practical matters, to what it saw as its prime task — the production of the magazine — and rarely discussed what had happened and why.

THE CASE OF THE THEORY GROUP

A small group of individuals meet regularly, reading and discussing a variety of texts, talking about whatever is raised that is considered worth talking about. The group imposes a very strict frame for its discussion: everyone is expected to do the reading, come to every meeting, and be committed to the process for at least a couple of years. The notion is that such rigid boundaries will allow the content of the group — the conversational process — to be unconstrained and attain a depth that would not be achievable if the commitment to the process was less demanding. Whilst an interest in struggles, in communism and in the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism forms a background to why the group had come together, this purpose is not held to tightly in the conversation, which is instead allowed to take its own course. There is an idea of being maximally open to what is happening in the world rather than trying to fit it into any existing theoretical framework. One or more people take up subjects for research with the intention of writing something and bringing it back to the group. There is an idea of eventually publishing in some form, but there is a desire not to rush into it. There is a faith in the idea that if one takes one’s time something truly worthwhile may emerge. That approach seems to be paying off. The discussions are rich and creative. There seems to be something like a collective field between the participants: ideas flow freely, with each adding to others’ contributions without much sense of anyone owning the ideas. There is a shared sense of making progress together and that something worthwhile, even important, is developing. The comparison is made to the good feeling of a band jamming whose music is really coming together.

However, at other points, relations between individuals and between individuals and the group as a whole become troubled. Distrust, hostility, even paranoia emerge that negatively mirror the intensity of the positive feelings when the group is working well. At times what is going on feels for some members strange, distressing, even a bit mad. At such moments the group which seemed to thrive on the freely given creativity of its members suddenly makes great demands of time and emotional effort to understand and manage its internal tensions. With some members engaged in post-graduate academia, one fear that emerges is that the ideas freely given to the group’s collective discussion may be appropriated by some members to pursue individual academic careers. When one member states his desire to go abroad to study and requests altering the group’s way of operating so that he can continue to be involved in some way, a strong reaction is provoked. His departure is felt by everyone as a big loss and a threat to the group’s continuity. However, while some might be willing to facilitate “membership from afar”, others feel the group must take this member’s decision to leave the country as a complete break; this, or they themselves cannot continue with the group. The group is consumed by a tension that is only resolved when this member “agrees” to cease group membership. Less than a year later, an individual who has played a leading role in the group resigns, expressing exhaustion with the “politics of groupuscule life”. Going forward, efforts by new people to become involved are as often as not difficult either for the new members, the existing ones or both. The group survives these and other stresses, eventually producing a publication that has a measure of success, but the feeling in the group rarely touches either the exhilarating creativity or the tension and struggle of the earlier period.

These stories express some of the gratifying but also frustrating and unpleasant sides of being together in groups, in this case “political” groups. Neither group were sects in the normal sense: they were not orientated towards recruitment and numeric growth but focused on specific tasks. They were composed of people with a degree of maturity and experience in struggles and theory. Indeed, the way in which the Praxis Group related to struggles (an orientation largely shared by the Theory Group) is perhaps about as good an approach as can be suggested. Participation in struggles on such a basis creates moments of connection with others that can be profoundly transformative. However, the emotionally charged way some of the conflicts were expressed underscores a darker side of group life that is also a common experience.

What was striking about the experience of the Praxis Group was that it prided itself on openness and non-dogmatism towards struggles, but in its own discussions succumbed to an intractable conflict resolved only by resorting to actions that it did not even try to explain rationally. The Praxis Group pattern of conflict between a side representing the established position and a dissenting tendency is one often repeated in political groups, frequently leading to acrimonious and venomous splits that those outside the group — and even participants themselves — often find hard to understand.

In the case of the Theory Group, there was a sudden switch to hostility and distrust after it had functioned at a high degree of almost effortless cooperation. This case captures something experienced by other groups and projects we have heard of, namely an inability to sustain themselves at an initially exhilarating, intensely rewarding, and high level of cooperation and shared creativity without at some point crashing into an opposite experience of suspicion, mistrust, and antagonism.

These experiences seemed quite baffling until we came across some psychoanalytic theories of group dynamics. These theories can help explain these and other cases, and we will return to them later.² However, we might wonder what relevance such small group experience really has to getting beyond capitalism...

If “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”;³ if communism is a matter of billions ceasing through revolution to produce and reproduce capital, changing their form of life and thus themselves, then how do we understand the existence and activity of those “minorities” (including ourselves), who in the apparent absence of such a general movement develop an explicit consciousness of the need for “revolution” or “communism”? Do they have certain “tasks” now or in the future? Is it possible to be revolutionary in the absence of revolution or to be communist in the absence of communism? If not, then how do we understand ourselves and our activity?

We?

This is a text about the we. Who do we think we are? How do we understand what we are doing? Naturally, we do not mean only the “we” that produces this journal but a wider we whose boundary remains unspecified. This text attempts to look in two directions at once. In one lies the group phenomena that will produce communism — this will clearly be at the level of class struggle and social movements, mass strikes, occupations, assemblies, crowds, riots, insurrections, and ultimately revolution(s) and communisation. In the other direction is the experience of being in a small group, more or less formal, orientated mostly to thinking about capitalism and the real movement of its overcoming. Drawing on a distinction made by Henri Simon, we can say that the former phenomena display the features of spontaneous organisation while the latter is characterised by forms of willed organisation.⁴

Spontaneous organisation emerges from a given collectivity acting to defend its interests in an immediate, concrete situation and is able to change its forms and goals as that situation develops. By contrast, willed organisation is defined by a “a limited (often very limited) number of people” coming together on the basis of some pre-established ideas of their interests, which they then attempt to promote.⁵

Such a polarity corresponds to an experience of the division between the small formal or informal willed groups we participate in and the wider, dynamic movements and collectivities of struggle that rise and fall with a logic that goes beyond our wills. Those involved in willed organisation are often very attracted to movements of spontaneous organisation because they recognise it is the pole out of which social transformation will come.

What is the relation between the willed communist group explicitly thinking about the overcoming of capitalism and the spontaneous group phenomena that will carry out that overcoming? There is a naïve conception among some communist groups, in which they feel that their key role is to persuade other people of the validity of their ideas and/or to lead the masses or class in its struggles. Faced with their lack of impact on the world, their main activity often becomes to increase in numbers — build their group, organisation or party — so that they can have greater influence.

Of course, within the spontaneous organisation of existing struggles and social movements, there are tasks performed by those involved. Often those performing these tasks or taking such roles emerge from the situation of struggle itself; at other times, a role can be played by those connecting to such struggles from a pre-existing political identity or “willed group” involvement. In a revolutionary movement, there would also be tasks to be done. However, it is not at all clear that there are revolutionary tasks in relation to existing social movements and struggles. Nor is it clear in any future revolutionary conjuncture what role (good or bad) those with pre-existing political identities will be able to play.

It is with some caution then that we attend to the question of who we are and what we do in terms of the pole of willed organisation. The focus on the small group or milieu can look like navel-gazing in the face of the enormity of developments in the world that seem to beg for attention. Talking about who we are, even in a critical way, risks falling into issues of identity formation and position-taking, and is reminiscent of some of the bad habits of unreconstructed “revolutionaries” who spend most of their time talking about (and to) themselves and their “movement”.

A relatively healthy impulse perhaps would be to avoid the identitarian question entirely — what matters is to express theoretically what one is able to learn from struggles. If, as suggested by Debord (following Marx and Hegel), theory is the expression of our times and its struggles in thought, it is a matter of indifference who expresses it.⁶ Yet, of course, those who actually produce works of theory like Hegel’s Logic, Marx’s Capital, or Debord’s Society of the Spectacle do tend to be people with time to read, to discuss, and to think.

As Wilfred Bion suggests, if the “I” or the “we” of a statement is to the fore, then that is a sign that something false is at work.⁷ Ideas that seem indelibly imprinted with the supposed identity of those who have them—whether an individual (“this is my opinion”), a group (“here is what we think”), or even an imagined lineage such as Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, council and left communism, or situationism⁸ —are nearly always suspect. Even if such traditions emerged once as a dynamic way of making sense of the experience of a period of class struggle, they tend to become hardened frameworks into which experience is forced to fit.

One can see such “isms” as so many apparatuses for thinking which in fact have generally become apparatuses for not thinking too much. We would hope that the texts that have appeared in Endnotes simply give expression to some true thoughts about the world, about capitalism and the movement of its overcoming, rather than imply our identity as a group, as individual authors, or as a political tendency.

However, we are, on some level, also a group composed of a number of individuals, and our participation in larger group processes and struggles are also mediated through this. As we draw from our own experience of being a small (anti-)political group oriented to the development of theory, we are aware that this is a pretty peculiar and unfashionable experience. However, the task that we set ourselves — thinking about capitalism and the possibility of its overcoming — is one that we suggest is not so alien, at least to our readers, and is perhaps, at some level, “in everybody’s heads”. We engage in self-reflection about what we do and how we do it. That is why, in this text, we are sharing aspects of how we do this.

The Impotence of the Revolutionary group?

In a still-provocative text published in 1939, Sam Moss, a member of a council communist group in the USA, mercilessly undermined the significance which “revolutionaries” and “revolutionary groups” assign themselves.⁹

Moss starts off from how the problem appears: on the one hand, there is a “we” — that of “revolutionaries” — and on the other, there are the masses or the working class. The former wish to overthrow capitalism but are incapable of doing so, while the latter, the only possible agent of a revolutionary struggle, are concerned with everyday needs and not the revolution. Asking himself about the reason for this apparent difference in objectives between the masses and “revolutionists”, he argues that while the masses are socialised by capitalist culture to “play the role of machines”, the “revolutionists” are a harmless “byproduct”. For Moss the masses are an understandable product of the society while the “revolutionists” are merely “deviations from the working class” representing “isolated cases of workers who, because of unique circumstances in their individual lives, have diverged from the usual course of development”.¹⁰

Going further, Moss suggests the ground of the difference is that the “revolutionists” are “unsuccessful careerists” — workers who have acquired an intellectual interest and a higher level of education than their fellows, but whose personal advance has been blocked. Continuing the uncomfortable analysis, he suggests that although their efforts to help the rest of the class may appear to come “from the noblest of motives, certainly it doesn’t take much to see that one suffers for another only when he has identified that other’s sorrow with his own”.¹¹

Separated from their fellow workers who don’t share their concerns, the “revolutionists” tend to unite outside of the workplace with others like themselves, people who are interested in changing society. Yet these groupings, in wishing to influence the class struggle in non-revolutionary circumstances, are faced with a dilemma: either they can have an effect but only by adapting themselves to the limits of the movement — thus no longer being revolutionary — or they can maintain their revolutionary principles but their intervention will thus be lacking in effect.

Such groups, Moss maintains, “have done nothing to affect the course of history either for good or ill”.¹² The separate existence of “revolutionary groups” is not, then, an expression of their revolutionary nature and function, but a product of this non-revolutionary situation, and “when the revolution does come, their numbers will be submerged within it, not as functioning organizations, but as individual workers”.¹³

A key aspect of Moss’s argument is the way he undercuts the justifications that “non-Leninist” groups and individuals — such as his own avowedly anti-vanguardist council communists — use for their own activity. Noting that council communists and others emphasize their difference from Leninist groups by claiming they do not want to “lead the working class”,¹⁴ he brutally points out that this amounts only to an ideological difference to which corresponds no practical material difference in such groups’ exterior relation to the working class.¹⁵ He also points out that if an “anti-Leninist” revolutionary group against all likelihood succeeded in their stated purpose of escalating the class struggle, it would be playing exactly the “leadership” role they reproach the “Leninists” for wishing to perform.

Having given up on the idea that the revolutionary group can escalate the class struggle, Moss outlines a more realistic conception of how “what we do” might relate to revolution. Rather than delude ourselves with illusory stories about the “role of revolutionaries” and the persuasive power of ideas, we should recognise that our existence and activity emerges from a personal — one might say emotional — need based on the peculiarities of our life histories. Moss notes that while in present circumstances only a small minority feel the need for this activity, and they cannot lead or persuade others who do not share it, their existence suggests that when large masses are induced to feel a similar need— not by peculiar personal circumstances, but by the objective situation — they will act in the same way, namely to come together and use whatever weapons they can find. Moss suggests that when they act, it will not be because their ideas have been changed but because of a changed sense of necessity, which when acted upon, will result in a change of their ideas. In the meantime, he suggests that while other groups overemphasise the importance of ideas and thus of themselves as the carriers of those ideas, “we wish to see the truth of each situation”.¹⁶

**So what are we?** — deviants and freaks. **Why do we do what we do?** — because it serves a personal need. **What can we do then?** — we can at least see the truth of the situation, perhaps.

Moss’s scepticism hits a chord. There are hundreds of “revolutionary” groups, often expressing adherence to particular ideologies which are defined by a prominent thinker of the past, often with the terms “marxist”, “communist”, “anarchist”, “socialist” or “workers” in their titles, often claiming to be parties, or seeing themselves as embryonic poles of regroupment for a future (or imaginary) party. An understandable reaction to these groups and much of this activity is scepticism. One may find some of these groups more agreeable than others, and/or find some of their members more agreeable than others, but as a whole, they paint rather a sad picture. There is so much unconsidered and naïve presupposition, so much evasion, illusion, and delusion, brazen mismatches between what people actually do and what they think they do, between the story they tell themselves and the reality of their impact on the world, between the grandiosity of their ambition and the misery of their actuality. The great deal of time and energy these groups expend simply on maintaining themselves is also notable, and from time to time, they suffer crises, often resulting in venomous splits and fallouts.

Many prefer to avoid that world of formalised groups and exist loosely in a scene or milieu, perhaps engaging in more modest projects. However, even those who have never felt attracted to or are personally repelled by participation in groupuscules may remain in a certain sense part of the “communist group”, defined as the set of people oriented to the communist overcoming of capitalism.¹⁷ And it should be noted that illusions are not restricted to formal groups, but also exist among informal milieus and scenes,¹⁸ and, of course, even within individuals themselves.

The critique of the failings of other people and groups rarely extends to oneself, and indeed such criticisms of others can act as a binding agent for those sharing one’s prejudices. We can all experience some of the difficult and even crazy stuff that tends to afflict formalised groups. Think, for example, of the way in which, within informal scenes as much as in organised groups, conflict is often not about what it purports to be about; how others’ behaviour, particularly when it is seen to transgress certain norms, can become the subject of scandal and intrigue; how one is pulled to take sides in petty personalised disputes; how emotionally charged arguments can become; how one can feel sucked into certain kinds of behaviours and roles; how painful and personal political fallouts can be; how nasty people can be to each other. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that both formalised radical groups and looser milieus are prone to forms of madness from time to time.

In relation to the pretensions of political groups, we and others often reach for certain Marx quotations. There are his dense “Theses on Feuerbach”, in which Marx criticised those who divide society into two parts, one of which has the role to educate the other, and argues that social and self-change must be understood as a unitary revolutionary practice in which the educator must be educated.¹⁹

There is his insistence, in a letter to Ruge, that “we” do not have principles and doctrines to give to the world and its struggles, but rather that our task is to help the world become conscious of what it is already fighting for.²⁰

And perhaps most famously, there is the line from The German Ideology about communism not being an ideal that we seek to realise but rather the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.²¹

While the thrust of all these statements is to put the “role of communists” in perspective, and the “real movement” notion, in particular, seems to be a fundamental part of Marx’s (Hegelian) contribution to communist theory, it is not at all obvious what behaviour they actually imply. A notion of the real movement can, it seems, mean (and justify) anything, everything and nothing. Indeed it seems to have a danger of acting as a comfort to justify whatever sort of activity one is already committed to. If there is a movement of the abolition of the existing conditions happening before our eyes it is not at all clear what this is and how we might relate to it or participate in it.

There are three main approaches or threads that have particularly informed our understanding of this question of who we are and what we do. These approaches can be filed under the following headings:

1. Conceptions and *critiques of organisation* that emerged in the second revolutionary wave of the 20th century, primarily among councilists, situationists and left communists. 2. The “open Marxist” understanding of theory as based on a *conversation* involving mutual recognition, practical reflexivity, and immanent critique, as exemplified in some texts by Richard Gunn. 3. Psycho-dynamic conceptions of *groups* and *thinking*, especially those associated with Wilfred Bion.

These are approaches that we have found useful, which have and continue to inform our activity, so we offer them here. The essential idea is that these threads can inform each other, making up for weaknesses or blind spots of each approach on its own.

We do not think that these approaches exhaust the resources that can be drawn on. Reading Gunn is not necessary to make a critical and open use of Marx, nor is it necessary to know Bion’s theory of thinking in order to think. The post ‘68 debates on organisation and the party that we find significant are not the only ones worth looking at. Moreover, much of what any of these sources tell us can be discovered or rediscovered in other ways. What matters is learning from experience, including the experience of trying to think for oneself and with others. The abstraction of this text has to be, ultimately, brought phenomenologically back to one’s own experience. This is something we all have to do in our own way, but we expect people to recognise themselves and their experiences in what follows, and we think what we have found useful might be of use to others.