The dissolution of the red and the black

I’m going to hazard a historical thesis: that marxism and anarchism, the red and the black, have been superseded by history.

The anarchosyndicalist contribution to the theory of revolutionary consciousness

I’ve decided to try and draw together revolutionary theory about how consciousness develops, since I think there’s actually very little explicit ideas out there beyond people parroting the leninist conception or the spontaneist conception. One hugely overlooked area I’ve found is syndicalist ideas about consciousness. There appears to be debates in the early 20th century about syndicalist conceptions of the development of revolutionary consciousness, and in fact it seems to have represented a school of thought on how to bring about revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. This is in spite of the fact that syndicalists themselves rarely wrote about such matters. Below I try to gather together the historical lessons of the proletariat engaged in syndicalist struggle, as a research thread rather than a thesis.

The French Ultra-left

The ultraleft, and particularly the ultraleft which draws from the French tendencies, has been extremely influential on my own thinking about revolution, class, history, and the left. Primarily Dauve has expressed for me processes latent in struggles I’ve participated in and intuitions I’ve had. Being a non-marxist critical of elements in the anarchist movement, I wanted to introduce anarchists to some of the concepts in the french ultraleft in hopes of broadening exposure and debate. I intended to be inclusive of a broader spectrum of thinkers (theorie communiste, Camatte, krisis, etc), but ended up only having the space and energy to touch of the tendency Dauve is a part of.