• 0. One of the happy consequences of having written up All In as a book is that it made me connect with processes I otherwise couldn’t even imagine existed. This was also the case with Espaço Comum de Organizações in Brazil, reason-for-being of which is exactly to explore movement ecology approaches to doing politics. Their own take of this approach, explained in Investigate, Compose, Continue, has a lot of intersections with the main arguments of All In.

 

Crucial Contributions

 

1. Investigate, Compose, Continue makes a lot of important contributions to social movement analysis. I will highlight those that I find also crucial for the All In project. (I start with this section in case you’d like to read only the first page of this article. If you have even less time, then just read §4 and §5, and ignore the rest.)

 

2. The authors recover a very important strategy tool. Acknowledging that strategy and tactics arise from military language, they warn us that in fact, in military thought, there are

“at least four terms: strategy, which defines the general objectives to be achieved; tactics, which defines the specific path to be taken and how it should vary depending on the setbacks we encounter; logistics, which describes the costs of different tactics and the means we have to effectively take one path rather than another; and control, which concerns the ability of those involved in a given tactical mobilization to carry out what has been determined.”

I am grateful for this remark. It might enable us to integrate the Grand Strategies and Movement Capabilities into one single framework. We would have to think a bit about the exact application, but the intuition is already there.

 

3. With a very abstract presentation (what they call “three social logics”), not worth repeating here, Investigate, Compose, Continue identifies degrees of political advancement:

• persistence of a conflict between a political organization and the social organization from which it springs;
• social achievement, which leads to a transformation of social life without changing the political form, like a reconciliation of the emancipatory and conservative politics (e.g. a specific demand won);
• political victories, that produce consequences that are not reducible to the existing social organization but which also do not threaten the dominant logic social formation (like universal suffrage and reduction of working hours); and
• revolutionary triumph, that reorganizes the society as a whole.

These degrees are rather obvious. What is non-obvious is why a movement would get stuck at a specific level. Investigate, Compose, Continue offers a conceptual framework for the organizers to think about what our tasks could be, in order to elevate the movement from one degree to another. (For the theory geeks, the discussion of social logics might be illuminating too.)

 

4. A checklist for movement-level thinking: There is a chapter called “The dimensions of communist practice” in Investigate, Compose, Continue. In the All In language, this might translate to something like “Stuff that any organizer must do if they are serious about winning”. In this chapter, they give degrees of movement-level thinking practices. This is an interesting list, almost a Sixth Chapter article on how an organization can integrate movement-level strategizing into its daily routine. They call it “building networks of effective interdependence”, a very clean formulation.[1]

4.1. Taking the organizational point of view: Recognize our organization’s point of view (what it can see, what it can’t see, depth, scope, as well as specific lenses it has). Plus, take the perspective of other organizations (what they see, what they can’t see, how they see our organization).

4.2. Active collaboration: Articulation between actions aimed at transforming the world (not only demonstrations and campaigns led by many organizations together, but also the circulation of political force that emerges in moments of widespread revolt – amplifying the power of very different collectives and struggles at the same time).

4.3. Active observation of the movement: Transit of people through different social environments.

4.4. Listening campaigns of the base: “Workers’ inquiries” in order to shift the core of political thought from militants to workers. Verification of whether the political point of view of the workers coincide with the restricted vision of the organizations that carry out the inquiries. All of this, for a construction of a perception of the totality of struggles.

 

5. But these still seem a bit abstract. So in the chapter right after this one, Investigate, Compose, Continue gives an actual to-do list for building the movement-as-party. It is presented as a sequence of openings that an organization would do into its movement ecosystem.

• Meetings between militants from different groups, joint actions, or conversations with a base linked to both collectives
• Lasting immersion in the practices of another political organization
• Find core issues, problems, and challenges that can only be addressed at the movement-level – that is, points where there will either be an insurmountable impasse or a new path that necessarily involves common articulation.
• At the last stage, the very vision of the struggle changes, to the point of potentially reversing itself: instead of conceiving its particular objectives and agendas as central, and the common construction in which it is entangled as an additional element, this second dimension begins to have a value of its own.

 

Immediate Commonalities, Irrelevant Differences

 

6. Now that we covered the most juicy parts, I’ll now move on to more secondary comments.

It is curious to observe in how many different ways we reached same or similar conclusions. In some cases (§7 and §8 below), it is just a matter of presentation or conceptual terminology. In some cases (§9 and §10 below), the argument starts from the opposite end but somehow reaches the same practical conclusion as we did in All In.

 

• 7. The reminder

“Rather than starting from a theory of the structure of capitalism we need flexibility in our theory to keep up with the different ways in which this structure presents itself in each social context. This flexibility implies that more aspects of the workers’ situation must be grasped from this diverse reality than a general theory of capitalism could directly offer.”

which I see as a rephrasing of Lenin’s famous “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, is extremely useful. It brings empiricism back into our praxis. As the left, we lost accountability as we moved into general theories. We have to return to real-life so that we can be refuted, be disproven, and fail forwards.

 

8. The typology of “composition, interaction and perception” seems to fit well with our movement mapping exercise. From an organizational point of view,

• “composition” could be the image resolution when we do the balls for organizations (sometimes you put an entire network as one element, sometimes to disaggretate, depending on what you want to achieve) and the additional information we write about each;
• “interaction” could be the lines between the balls as well as its social targets; and
• “perception” could be the scope of its interactions (so for instance, how far it goes through 2-3 relational lines).

This would be an over-simplification of Investigate, Compose, Continue. Still, it is worth noting the degree of similarity between the two approaches.

 

9. Defining a communist: Their definition of a communist is: one that looks at the movement as a whole. They pick this concept from the Communist Manifesto.

In All In, we have a more materialist definition: a communist is that whose actions bring the society closer to communism. According to this, you cannot pick a definition of 1848 and carry it to 2026; the definition must include its historical context.

My understanding of our definition goes like this: In the 1840s, Marx considered that the task was to give the working class a consciousness of itself, which is what the Communist Manifesto aimed at. The 1850s onwards, the task was to give this class its historical task of dismantling capitalism; therefore Marx focused on The Capital and other political-economic studies. From 1910s onwards, though, the task became something else: doing the revolution. By 1960s, Fidel Castro already says “Those who are not revolutionary fighters cannot be called communists”, and so on.

Here is the plot twist: In All In, we argue that in order to win in today’s worlds and within climate deadlines, we need to look at the movement as a whole. So we end up in the same place, somehow.

 

10. Peripheralization thesis: Investigate, Compose, Continue seem to argue that the unification of the circuits of value is resulting in fragmentation of proletarian experience. So capitalist integration is not composing the world working class into a single subject.

I am not sure if this thesis is correct. There are of course major differences in the real-life experiences of laboring people around the world. I genuinely think that those differences are much less now than ever before. And that’s exactly why we notice the differences: It is only in the last decades that different segments of the working class came into actual contact. They weren’t talking at all, but now they are talking regularly. This is not just because of communication technologies. It is also because we are all exploited by Jeff Bezos in different forms.

More importantly, I think this thesis is unnecessary. Even if there was some “natural” process that would integrate the working class globally, it is obvious that such a process wouldn’t be finalized in the following few years. But few years is the timeframe for victory for those of us informed by the climate crisis. So the task of composing the class is not only necessary (as Investigate, Compose, Continue argues), it is also extremely urgent.

This is a curious situation. Perhaps an organizer’s operational experience might shortcut a sophisticated theoretical analysis and we may find ourselves at the same end point.

 

Clarity that All In might provide

 

11. We explored the ways in which folks engaging with All In would benefit from Investigate, Compose, Continue (§1-5). I also mentioned a few intersections between the two texts (§6-10). There is a third direction: from All In into Investigate, Compose, Continue. I noticed a few things present in All In that might help push the latter forward.

All In is a product of collective frustration and exploration by organizers feeling obliged to win. This carries with it a unique perspective that might be interesting to highlight.

 

12. The vanguard question: Investigate, Compose, Continue seems to take struggles or movements as given, and then define the communist practice. This is a strange framing. Movements do not “exist”. Organizers exist them. Sometimes, organizers will comfortably choose not to invest in a movement, and then that movement will not exist (or will die out). This matters from a practical viewpoint: A movement agitating through a specific grievance or injustice will have a certain level of predisposition to transnational movement building and a certain predisposition to cooptation by the system. For instance, a mining project done by a small state company has more predisposition to remaining a local struggle, while a Google data center construction in the exact same region could internationalize very quickly.

We organizers make strategic choices. We value and devalue struggles. Even when a struggle already exists, we sometimes ignore it consciously. Sometimes we insist on a struggle even though it is very small, because we see big potential in it.

These predispositions can be measured and analyzed. The choice must be made. In fact, the act of choosing smartly is the task of the organizer.

It is therefore also the task of the communist to think in these terms. This is a very uncomfortable position. We will indeed have to divest from movements mobilizing millions of people due to these considerations.

To repeat: Movements are not a given. We the organizers exist the movements consciously.

 

13. The communist position: Related to the previous point, Investigate, Compose, Continue seems to define communists as outside of movements right after having criticized other communists for doing exactly that. In this case, the problem is more ontological. They define the base, the militants and the organizers of a struggle. Then comes the definition of a communist.

“… communists are those who have “one foot outside” their own organization: they consider what actions to take, what organizational revisions to propose to the collective, or even how to participate in a specific collective action, based on the fact that their organization exists within a larger political space and that we need to take this into account. This is a contradiction, not mere duality, because the communist’s “foot outside”does not stem from a lack of engagement or adherence, but from its deepening: it is in order to win that we need to consider our interdependence with other struggles and political processes.”

This is so extremely close! But it misses the target! As organizers are a subset of militants, the communist must be a subset of organizers. (And this changes everything!)

A militant doesn’t have acccess to the thought process underlying the strategic decisions that their organization made. In order to have the information to then carry it laterally, you need to be an organizer of that organization at the least.

What’s worse, for a new lateral information to actually influence the receiving organization, an organizer is not enough. One has to be a core organizer, with immediate access to organizational strategy discussions.

 

14. The above then gives us a separate problem, for which I don’t have an answer. How can communists be held accountable?

Here I use accountability as the standard protocol of (i) identify and acknowledge failure, (ii) mitigate immediate impacts, (iii) identify behavior patterns underlying the failure, (iv) commit to change, (v) monitorization of the behavioral change by the affected individuals and community (in our case, the global working class).

If the communists cannot be identified (and if we are specifically against communists organizing themselves separately), then this seems borderline conformism. For instance, if an uprising doesn’t result in a revolution, it is because someone didn’t do his job well in the process. (I personally participated in two such occassions.) Core organizers arising organically cannot be the ones to blame, because Investigate, Compose, Continue assigned specifically to “communists” the necessary function of elevating the movement’s articulation capabilities. (See §3.) So, in a way, the communists would be to be held accountable. But how can a worker do this? And reversely, how can the communists do public self-criticism?

 

15. In short, I noticed a lot of interactions between Investigate, Compose, Continue and All In – some very practical, some a bit more conceptual; some quite explicit, some rather subtle. It was quite a playful reading.

[1]In this and the following paragraphs, I will make a patchwork of direct copy-paste, rephrasing and my own interpretations. This is, of course, intellectual dishonesty. It’s just so much easier than sprinkling the text with quotation marks. So my hope is that these paragraphs are generous enough that they wouldn’t do injustice to the original text.