I’m in a tenants union, and a while ago, we were discussing a Millennials Are Killing Capitalism podcast interviewing Kali Akuno and Kamau Franklin: "And Another Phase of Struggle Begins" - Kali Akuno and Kamau Franklin on Strategy and Liberation. In our group’s discussion, the topic of organizing before and between crises came up. Here’s a thought I had about this, which has helped structure my thoughts around organizing.
We want to have built up the capacity of our organizations, to be able to take effective action when crises inevitably occur. But it’s useful to observe that there are different scales of crises: some are world-wide, like the climate crisis; some are international, like the 2008 economic crisis; while still others are national, state-wide, local, in the geographical context of a particular apartment complex / neighborhood, or in the context of a particular person’s situation.
We organize in the smaller crises, to build capacity to be more ready to face the larger crises. This is a generally viable strategy because smaller crises tend to happen more frequently than larger crises.
An Aside On Crises And Institutions
Smaller crises generally happen more frequently than larger crises.
This difference in frequency across scales of crises is a result of how the scale of a crisis corresponds to the size of the institution which is in threat of breaking down. An institution is built up of several interlocking systems which support each other to a degree. An institution is in crisis when these interlocking systems break down, to the point where they have difficulty supporting each other. The institution therefore decays because it’s not continually being reaffirmed and maintained enough.
The larger the institution, the more difficult it is for these interlocking, cross-supporting systems to break down. This is partly because each of these individual interlocking, cross-supporting systems are themselves smaller institutions—so nearly by definition, for a larger institution to break down, this must be the result of crises across multiple smaller-scale institutions.
Take, for example, the climate crisis, economic crises, and the impending crisis of full-blown USA fascism. The climate had been relatively stable because there are so many redundant mechanisms which are able to absorb the problems. More plant-growth in response to more CO2, oceans absorbing CO2, environmental advocacy—these things can absorb some of the hits and reduce the harm done. But all of these mechanisms have their limits. There’s only so much that plant-life, oceans, and environmental advocates can do to push back against capitalism’s fossil-fueled growth. Environmental systems are interlinked in cross-supporting ways, but they’ve weakened in their own ways in the face of continuous pressure from capitalist-style growth.
Economic crises occur when the systems that check each other break down to the degree that they can no longer do so effectively. In the 2008 crisis, banks—in search of profits at a time of slowing profit rates—took more risks, cared less about the warning signs for the broader economy, and dodged institutional checks on their business practices. The institutional checks themselves had been weakened through long legal battles against things like Dodd-Frank. The institutions meant to protect the general system from crisis had decayed to the point that a general crisis could slip through.
Fascism is also able to rise because of the long decay of political institutions. There's been an increase in conservative disinformation poisoning public discourse, increase in the economic fears of the downwardly mobile middle class, long attacks to weaken democratic practices, long attacks to weaken working class institutions, and a spiraling growth in the unchecked power of police. Institutions are breaking down in particular ways which allow for a well-funded bourgeoisie to promote fascist messaging, and for people across class boundaries to build a material fascist infrastructure.
In all of these cases, larger crises are the result of quantitative changes at a smaller, more particular scale of abstraction. These smaller changes themselves might be understood as qualitative changes, if we were to zoom in and look at them at their corresponding level of abstraction. For example, a “decrease” in working class institutional power is quantitative from the perspective of how this affects the likelihood of a societal break into full-blown fascism; but from the perspective of workers formerly protected by unions, this is a qualitative change from “being protected by unions” to “not being protected by unions”. How we draw the line between what counts as a ‘mere quantitative difference in magnitude’ versus a ‘qualitative difference in kind’ seems to depend on the context of the pragmatic effects / crisis / institution which we are analyzing.
We might also deduce that larger institutions face crises less frequently because, for them to have built up to the scale they are at, they would have needed to develop robust support systems. The fact that they are large institutions is evidence that these support systems are strong. The larger institutions have already survived more stringent selection filters—to exist, they must have been able to weather lots of things which would have been fatal existential crises for other instantiations of institutions in that same systemic area. The smaller institutions have, generally, faced fewer selection filters, so more of these smaller institutions exist, and they are likely to face more selection filters in the future.
Organizing In and Between Crises
In each crisis, we have a chance to organize and build organizational capacity. This growth in capacity hopefully allows us to better tackle larger scale crises. In the times between large crises, we organize at the level of smaller crises. It’s crisis organizing all the way down, for the most part.
We can try to tackle crises which individual people are facing, while organizing those people so that they may get more involved in tenant unionizing (for example). With more capacity, we can start tackling the unionization of entire apartment complexes. From there, we can build more regional locals, all while building up our city-wide tenants union. With a stronger system of tenants unions, people will be more ready to take effective action to expand democratic ownership of apartment complexes, through tenant cooperatives and social housing.
As an offhand thought, this seems like a more rigorous way of understanding how we might build ‘dual power’. We build working class organizing capacity across different scales of crises, until we are able to effectively take advantage of large systemic crises to change massive institutions in favor of the working class. In these critical, large crises, we replace the older bourgeois institutions with a large-scale working class institution, which is supported by all the interlocking, cross-supporting working class institutions that we have built up over time in smaller crises.
There’s a couple strategic considerations here, which I will go into now.
Nuance 1: Limited Organizational Capacity
First, we have limited organizing capacity. We know this already—the point of this post is to describe how we can grow our capacity. But we’ve found it useful to examine this a bit closer.
Initially, there are only going to be a few people consciously organizing around these long-term, large-scale working class goals. This means that this initial organizing ‘cadre’—for lack of better term—will have limited capacity, and therefore must choose their battles intelligently if they want to achieve their long-term, large-scale goals.
If the class-conscious organizers aim at goals that are too large of a scale than their capacity can handle, then they will be ineffective at putting pressure on large institutions. (See PSL, lol.) If they aim at goals too small of a scale, then they may be spread too thin because of how frequent the crises are at that small scale, and will not have enough energy to dedicate to turning small crises into greater organizational capacity. (This can be a common pitfall for mutual aid groups.)
One issue that our tenants union ran into was that lots of individual tenants were reaching out to us with urgent requests. They were already a decent way into the process of eviction, or to the point where they were almost certain to move out and attempt to sue their landlord. These are legitimate crises for individuals. But in terms of building up our tenant union’s capacity, it turned out to be difficult to organize people into becoming active members of the tenant union when we were only trying to patch up these urgent, developed individual crises. We would help people how we could, which was limited by our capacity, and then people would end communications because they had gotten through their crisis.
Our problem here was two-fold:
A. (problem) We didn’t have enough capacity to address all of these individual crises. The frequency of individual crises was too much for us to handle.
B. (problem) The kind of individual crises were such that it was difficult to build capacity at larger scales. We might pick up a person here or there, but it was difficult to translate the ‘solutions to these individual crises’ to ‘building organizational capacity to address the larger-scale crises’ which were what we wanted to organize around.
Our solution was also two-fold.
A. (solution) We created a set of Medium articles which we could link people to. These were the Frequently Asked Questions about things like maintenance requests and evictions. When people get in contact with us as they had been, we would link them to those relevant answers.
B. (solution) We ended up focusing on an apartment-complex-sized crisis.
This apartment-complex crisis was the result of years of maintenance neglect. At a more particular level of analysis, the ‘apartment-sized crisis’ was actually a bunch of people across the complex facing their own individual crises, caused by the common problem of apartment-wide maintenance neglect.
Organizing here has been much more conducive to scalable, long-term organizing. Sure, some individuals would be moving out and moving in. But we could be confident that the apartment’s crisis would remain, because the problems coming up were the result of the buildup of a decade of neglect, and weren’t likely to be fixed anytime soon without tenants organizing and flexing their power. Probabilistically, there would be some tenants who would be staying around at the complex for a while. Of these tenants, our union could try to help in the ways that we could, and these tenants might decide that they wanted to get more involved going forward.
It was also much easier to have meaningful conversations with people about the connection between their individual crises and the larger-scale apartment-wide crisis. We could bring up the basic facts that their individual crisis was shared by others, and that everyone’s individual crises had root problems at larger scales of the apartment-complex, region, and housing market as a whole.
This focus on an apartment-complex crisis meant that we would necessarily run into individual crises. But these were individual crises which would be far more likely to build up our organizational capacity. By focusing on a higher abstract level of crisis, we were able to intelligently direct our energy to organizationally-beneficial individual-crises.
Nuance 2: Inopportune Timing
Although large-scale crises happen less frequently than small-scale crises, they might nevertheless happen soon. Sometimes, we simply don’t have the time to build up organizational capacity from smaller crises. When a large crisis comes, we may not have built up our organizational capacity enough—not necessarily because we’ve been doing something wrong—but because of inopportune timing.
In such large-scale crises which we don’t have the capacity to address, we can still try to build up our organizational capacity, even if we don’t win at the large scale. Crises will continue to occur, and in the meantime, we can only continue to build up our capacity. It is usually a marathon, not a sprint, and while we try to take advantage of what we can, we simultaneously should not blame ourselves for bad timing.
However, these inopportunely-timed large crises can seriously weaken our organizational capacity. See how the 80s neoliberal revolution was able to cut down working class institutional power. This is a serious danger, and something we should try to anticipate and prepare for. Organizing between crises must include a sort of defensive preparation to this possibility.
We might also look at how the Russian and Chinese Revolutions skipped from feudalism, past the liberal/capitalist stages, and straight to attempts to establish robust socialist societies. They were successfully able to take advantage of a massive crisis in feudalism, and more prepared than the liberals to take power when the opportunity presented itself. But the timing of it meant that they hadn't built a deep environment of working class institutional power through responses to smaller capitalist crises. That sort of organizing would have likely prepared them for better implementing socialism. There have been considerable pros and cons to this style of opportunist leap from feudalism to socialism. For more thoughts on this, check out Rosa Luxemburg discussing Blanquism and reformism/revisionism in the last quote I excerpted in this post.
Conclusion
It’s a common Marxist thought that we should organize between crises, in preparation for crises when they inevitably occur. Crises demand a response—growth or destruction—and are crucial moments where the working class can gain significant beneficial institutional changes.
I’ve brought up how it can help to think about different levels of abstraction—of different scales of crises which correspond to different scales of institutions. In preparation for bigger crises, we organize through smaller crises. The organizing wins we get from smaller crises are precisely the ‘preparation’ we do for the larger crises. Our analysis of a larger crisis can help us focus on the specific smaller crises which have larger organizing potential. For me, this has been a useful style of thinking about organizing.
That larger crises are the results of smaller crises can seem to imply an infinite regress. There is not an infinite regress of crises—at least, not one which is too useful for us to understand. This is a similar style of thinking as Sellars’ method of addressing infinite regress in conceptual justification. At some point, we reach a precision of ‘crises’ within ourselves—but these are essentially our own thoughts about how we decide to act after we weigh what are and are not in our interests. We might break it down further to ‘crises’ of particular biological events—for example, whether a neuron reaches the action potential necessary to pass on an electrical signal. But this starts to lose its relevance to us in terms of what matters to our lives. We only really need to understand what our reflective judgements are, not necessarily our own biological mechanisms which compose those judgments (except perhaps to confirm that we are in a properly reflective state of mind and being true to ourselves). There is at least a pragmatic rock-bottom in these ‘crises’—a rock-bottom which is defined in terms of what matters to us.