>>2749752The central problem is not one of ideology or will, but of space of social reproduction in relation to class struggle. I once spoke with someone who had traveled abroad and spent time with militant Marxist-Leninist formations in the Third World, Irish republicans in Belfast, Kurdish movements in Turkey, and anarchist collectives in Athens Greece. What struck them, what they emphasized was that these militants do not simply act, then return to their individual lives within capitalism. They live together. Every day. In squats, in cadres, in shared housing where the boundary between organizing and existing dissolves. They see one another constantly, and in that proximity they build something the American left has largely lost; genuine comradery, every day structures of mutual survival, and a territorial claim on the spaces they inhabit.
What passes for movement life in the United States, by contrast, tends toward the episodic. People gather for actions. They disperse to isolated apartments, our precarious work schedules, our atomized existences. Mutual aid becomes charity , a distribution event rather than a mode of existence. We do not claim neighborhoods. We do not live with one another as a unit. We do not transform the everyday into the terrain of struggle. The changing material conditions of modern American life, the housing market, the geography of sprawl, the fragmentation of the working class conspire against the kind of dense, sustained, face-to-face organizing that characterizes movements elsewhere. But we must also name our own failure to resist these conditions, to carve out space where there is no space, to build the kind of collective life that makes daily revolutionary practice possible. The problem is not that we lack the will. It is that we lack the architecture, the squats, the cadres, the shared kitchens, the rooms where the struggle continuously engages in spheres of social reproduction. Squatting as a culture exists, and even thrives in the USA, but like everything else, it is overall hyper individualistic and isolated, centered around addiction too.
I will not claim that business unions are without failures. Their histories are entangled with bureaucracy, with compromises that have often sold out rank-and-file militancy. But when I look at the most resilient unions in the United States such the IBEW, th
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