October Club Address

I've been invited to speak at the Oxford University October Club in November, and as I've just finished writing my address I thought I should share it here for those who won't be able to attend.

So, overthrowing the government - as a technical challenge - how do you rate it? We’re dealing in hypotheticals here: obviously actively discussing plans to overthrow the government would be sedition and highly illegal and as the law is the arbiter of morality it would be therefore not only illegal but also wrong. This is purely a question of imagination and theory, how hard would it be to overthrow the government? This is after all, how many people conceive of what revolution means, right? The intuitive perspective of what revolution means is some kind of liberatory revolutionary group carrying out some kind of attack or coup against the government.

So how hard is that? Well in 2022 it would seem that your odds aren’t great - the technological advancements of warfare, the absurd modern spending, the surveillance state, all of this means that if the state notices you and considers you a credible threat it can wipe you off the face of the earth, or they could entangle you in endless bureaucracy or petty fines or nonsense and make your life just awful without you even realising that they knew what you were trying to do, or infiltrate your movement with undercover agents or any number of things, and even supposing that you got as far as having an organised plan to carry out some kind of attack on the organs of government, how far would you get through heavily militarised police? It seems that we are safely in the hands of the British government for the time being.

Let’s look at a recent example that might challenge that conclusion - the January 6th storming of the American government buildings by a coalition of Trump supporters, QAnon conspiracy theorists, christian dominionists and 2nd Amendment preppers. The invasion of the halls of power at the dead centre of the imperial core would seemingly throw our ideas of the invincibility of the modern state out the window. The surveillance state knew it was coming and didn’t stop it, the police had the power to contain it before it got out of hand and didn’t, it seems that I have really good news for you about the viability of overthrowing the government, provided of course that you’re a fascist.

This doesn't actually challenge our conclusion about the viability of revolutions, but rather our starting assumption about what a revolution means. After all, the Jan 6th invasion of the halls of power was not a revolution and it's achievement primarily shows us that a definition of revolution that relies on a moment where people storm the halls of power and declare themselves in charge is actually a very pale and insufficient one.

So let's instead look for a better definition. If we start with a point A before a revolution and a point B after which it's taken place, a handy definition that suggests itself to us: Revolution is the fundamental renegotiation of social relations, however it is that that takes place. Could that be at the ballot box? Perhaps part of it could, though if 20thC Europe and modern day America teach us anything, it's that the nature of electoral politics is more likely to give us a fascist revolution at the ballot box than anything else. That's OK. The vast majority of political life exists outside of the polling station. The point we should focus around is: revolution is about the rupturing and reknitting of the social fabric. It doesn't happen because someone wills it. It doesn't happen because someone plans it. It happens because the material conditions demand it. It happens because enough people fundamentally disengage with the social contract because they are not getting the rewards they were promised for participating in society. To put it another way, any government that can be overthrown necessarily overthrows itself. So, as a technical challenge: overthrowing the government - piss easy. Don't have to do anything at all.

What is much harder of course is creating what the bolsheviks called Dual Power - a secondary structure of organisations that provides all the infrastructure that people need to allow the transition of power between the existing structure and this new one. Socialists - Anarchist or Communist - need to rely on this model because the reality of bourgeois electoral politics is both that the population is too primed with reactionary gibberish to ever simply vote in a communist party and that the structures of parliament exist to perpetuate the capitalist state - that is to say exist to mediate class tensions in favour of the ruling class. Any socialist party can only build power by serving as a hub of organising and class consciousness, not by winning elections - certainly not in the imperial core.

Am I saying that electoral politics are entirely not worth our while? No, a lot of ink has been spilled on the subject both of non-reformist reforms that lead to a better life for everyone or even aid in the building of the power of the organised working class, and the ways that a socialist party can interact with bourgeois electoralism once dual power has been established. But without mutual aid, without direct action, without meeting the needs of the people directly and building community power and institutions that replace the power of the capitalist state, all of this means very little.

It is not ideology or socialist dogma which will unite the people who shape the future, but the viability of an arrangement between them which can meet the needs of the population.

To avoid being unclear about this: why am I saying you need to do this much more laborious and convoluted process if revolution is merely an inevitable matter of social fabric and material conditions? We need to fight for a more loving world because while the yes-no of revolution, the whether-or-not some kind of revolution takes place is beyond our control, the character of a revolution is determined through struggle as everyone with an opinion on the future arrangement of social relations vies for control. So if a socialist society is to form, it is up to socialists to work for it.

Now we’re not being seditious here, obviously it would be both illegal and by consequence wrong to actively plan for the downfall of the capitalist state, and while the educated fellows of the October Club might argue that I have been clear enough on this point, one can imagine the capitalist state listening through the ear of PC Plod pressed up against the door, might not see a distinction between predicting its imminent demise and plotting it. Therefore I invite the audience to independently assess the likelihood of the social fabric violently rupturing in the foreseeable future. Such an event would be contributed to by dramatic economic uncertainty, a governmental crisis of confidence and legitimacy in the public eye, the natural uncertainty of changing over the head of state, supply chain collapse, environmental catastrophes especially where the government response is lacklustre and just a general sense that everyone is going to fucking die if nobody does anything.

Now I’m an academically minded youtube influencer and don’t really have time to keep up with the news or go out and see the conditions for myself - I have far too many books on deleuzian theory - so I’ll have to leave this assessment up to you. However if I might add just a little more to your consideration, I would say that an impending climate catastrophe that is going to continue to worsen until capitalism is ended would have an altogether more interesting effect on all this, since the quelling of revolutions by the state relies on at the very least the impression that the problems that caused social breakdown have gone away, and it might be fair to predict that states will find themselves in a constant cycle of revolution until those revolutions result in societies which are primarily and most urgently focused on the safety and wellbeing of the people.

So where to begin: Look for people’s problems and solve them. If you have absolutely no clue where to start, just look at the problems around you and try to figure out how organising together could help. At the start of the COVID 19 pandemic all sorts of deep systemic problems became apparent like cracks widening in stressed concrete, and the response in community organising was overwhelming. The need for large scale pull logistics for the basic survival of many resulted in mutual aid organisations across regions where the state left people entirely without, and pre-existing organised groups flourished in some cases as well - for instance in the UK the tory government’s deliberation over whether landlords could evict people during the pandemic coupled with the eternal cynical opportunism of landlords resulted in a massive rise in the popularity of tenants’ unions.

This brings me to a crucial point. People will seek to solve their own problems through collective action and organising, and to be clear they can be pretty fucking good at it. Mutual aid groups, tenants’ unions, and other forms of collective action don’t need the guidance of well read socialists to fight for what they deserve. Obviously a better understanding of the problems they face will help but in order to engage in the kind of organising and action they need, a socialist versed in all the historic nuances of theory and ideology isn’t an integral part. What socialists can offer to collective action groups is a path toward a world where the problem they solve is no longer a problem, so that rather than struggling constantly to solve the same problem for everyone they can simply live in a world where people’s needs are met.

This is also why university educated socialists are their own worst enemy. Just as too many cooks spoil the stew, too many theory nerds can easily spend all day arguing over exactly how the society of the future is to be run and completely miss the forest for the trees. We need socialists spread far and wide offering this perspective to as many people as possible, we need socialists showing organisations for collective action that their food bank could be working towards a world where noone ever goes hungry, their prisoner rights group could be working towards a world without prisons altogether, their refugee support network could stand for the abolition of all borders.

Now additionally, a warning on so-called “Identity politics”. It can be easy to look at the way that elite bourgeois politics uses the issues of marginalised people as a media spectacle and think that it is a distraction from the real politics of materialism, but this is a catastrophic mistake. People at the margins are both the greatest comrade that a revolutionary could look for and those whose needs should be examined first and foremost to understand the failures of the current systems. Those at the margins will have also engaged in their own organising - mutual aid in the queer community, immigrant communities, ethnic minority communities, among homeless and addicts and the unemployed are all organically thriving forms that will not benefit from being dictated to by outside voices, but could well be linked together in solidarity, and furthermore brought into a growing structure of collective action toward a socialist world. This is what I call “growing the revolutionary society” - bringing more people together to live in the kind of world we want to live in now and make that world stronger as the old one decays. We don’t have to make everyone agree or believe the same thing, we only need to coordinate the reduction of harm and the issuance of care.

Let me repeat myself for a little emphasis:

It is not ideology or socialist dogma which will unite the people who shape the future, but the viability of an arrangement between them which can meet the needs of the population.

So my final advice is this: Be open to integrating with others to grow the revolutionary society. If you can help the organising and planning then excellent, but if you can help the growing and solidarity then even better. Well-studied socialists should have a variety of organisational and ideological tools at their disposal, and be working to allow our ideas to promulgate. We must act not as one seed but many spores, growing into one another until our mycellium spreads throughout the world and touches everything in it.