Ferrets, Electioneers, DA’s, Scavengers, Grubstakers, Maroons, Barristers, Civilians, Attachés

 “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

-Matthew 10:16

“Asymmetric struggle presupposes an epistemic break.”

-Jake the Snake

So now all three branches of the US Federal Government are in the hands of reactionaries, who have backstopped themselves for around thirty years in the high court.

Betsy Rose recently wrote: “The Kavanaugh vote liberates us from dependence on the federal level of government—we must turn our attention fully to the grassroots, local, and (for now) state levels, where systems are lighter on their feet, influence-able, and where there’s room for genuine progressives and radicals to seek and win office, occupy positions of power from school boards to City Council to Mayorships to state legislatures to Governships. It’s already happening! And we downplay this progress at our peril. WE MUST NOT FOCUS ON THE FEDERAL LEVEL. We must withdraw from this trance-like fixation on the appearance of power, the trappings of power, but not a power that can or will bring any meaningful policy or change to our decaying society. I don’t mean don't vote in federal elections, don’t vote for president etc. Not at all. I will continue to vote, I hope you do too. But my FOCUS, where I let my precious attention and energy go, cannot primarily be there. It’s a waste of valuable time and activity.”

She’s onto something; but we want to take that a step further.

Notes on Strategy and Tactics was an overview. Now let’s cover a provisional division of labor in a hypothetical movement that corresponds to our specific circumstance. We begin with those premises laid out in Notes; Tactics, not strategies, are the strong suit of weaker antagonists. Strategies, with tactics subordinated to strategies, is the strong suit of more powerful antagonists. Strategies, however, begin with a form of self-delusion, which is enhanced by the delusory characteristics of self-isolation—also an inescapable aspect of strategy (a “self-isolating calculus”). Tactical agility is the forte of the weaker, and its advantages are compounded by a degree of decentralization that never provides a critical target to the strategic opposition. The strategist cannot cut the head off the snake, because there is no head. This was the conundrum for US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan—two historic strategic failures. The strategist is compelled to control the environment; and the tactician dances with the environment, making an ally of “chaos,” or unpredictability.

The other thing Notes covered was practice. In short, so long as the struggle is (a) ideological and (b) electoral, these two aspects relate only to themselves and one another . . . the error here is in believing that these come first, and nothing else can be done without the eventual development of centralized power first.

We can suggest the self-organization of a tactical agility network through seven key practices and their practitioners: Ferrets, Electioneers, DA’s, Scavengers, Grubstakers, Maroons, Barristers, Civilians, Attachés.

Ferrets do what the military calls intelligence: information organized and analyzed with an eye to increasing the efficacy of actions. Intelligence, to be effective, must be (a) as rigorously accurate as possible and (b) analyzed by intel mavens who have demonstrated the greatest ability to predict outcomes. Ferrets gather intelligence, crunch intelligence, make intelligence accessible, map intelligence, graph intelligence, update intelligence, etc. Every operational failure is an intelligence failure. The enemies of good intelligence are (a) wishful thinking, (b) defensive egos, (c) lack of detail, and (d) agendas. Intelligence must be made available to all other practices. Speaking for myself, I was a DA (explained below) when I was younger (45-60, the army before that), along with an occasional electioneer, but I’m more of a ferret now that I’m old. The first priority of Ferrets is to map the networks of Ferrets, Electioneers, DA’s, Scavengers, Grubstakers, Maroons, Barristers, Civilians, Attachés, and make them available to the Attachés, Electioneers, DA’s, Barristers, and Grubstakers.

Electioneers are people (DSA is moving this way) who become the political mavens of a movement. They focus on candidate recruitment, election-organizing, campaign tactics, voter education, voter turnout, et al. This is a full-time practice that will improve the longer the same people stay at it.

DA’s are direct action practitioners. They certainly participate in mass mobilizations (like the protests in Washington DC yesterday); but their focus needs to be (a strategic focus here, without falling into the strategy trap) on what Jason W. Moore describes as “frontiers.” Frontiers are where capital is digging out cheap stuff—labor, resources, energy, and food. The old labor organizing has stuttered to a halt, as the Boss is now some vague network of people one never sees. The strategic idea that used to pertain was that capital could be successfully confronted at the point of production, but capital as organized around that. What went largely unrecognized is that capital depends absolutely upon these forms of “cheap” extraction, where accumulation is more “primitive.” Surplus value happens at point of production; but the points of production require feedstocks—which are frontiers. As we said in Notes, “water politics, food sovereignty, energy extraction, labor politics from the grass of the grassroots. Standing Rock is emblematic. Flint is emblematic. Black Lives Matter is emblematic. The teacher strike wave is emblematic. Everything is local.” A key arena of frontier direct action is environmental justice—where environment meets poverty, race, and war. The other key frontier is food sovereignty, because this is the most fundamental form of dependency that captures us within the monetized (and now financialized and weakened) grid.

Scavengers are the McGivers of a movement. They scavenge useful things, repurpose old things, repair things, dumpster dive, learn to live off the land (even and especially in cities), and run in small packs. Food Not Bombs is a kind of scavenger group. Scavengers are not only valuable for what they find and do, they could be remarkable intelligence assets.

Grubstakers are financiers, people who have money to give, or people who are good at finding money. The best of grubstakers would be those people who are good at it, but who themselves use as little money as possible. Their raison d’etre is to fuel the movement with cash.

Maroons are those people who are experimenting with what we will call, using Maria Mies’ notion, “the subsistence perspective.” These are the new farmers, the permaculturists, the agroecologists, the urban gardeners, what my friend Meleiza Figueroa (a Filipina-American geographer/activist with long experience in Brazil) calls quilombo—Brazilian “maroons,” African folk who ran away from the plantations and made their ways in the forests and hinterlands. Maroons are pioneers, but they have full time jobs that don’t let them spend a great deal of time doing politics. Crops don’t wait. Nonetheless, what Maroons are doing right now is making changes and experimenting with changes that will become the practical basis of any form of ecosocialism. They are creating facts on the ground, which means something materially defensible. There are already thousands of Maroons in the US, but they haven’t been approached by most political ideologues. And yet, this is the dog that should be wagging the tail of politics. As Betsy Rose says, we have to de-emphasize the centrality of that over which we exercise the least control . . . and I would add, emphasize the centrality of that over which we have the most control. (Maroons do what Notes called "ineterstial work," see the searchable pdf below.)

Barristers are . . . well, lawyers and policy experts. Their jobs are to (a) help people out of legal shit storms and (b) to participate in the development of policies that assist Maroons, Electioneers, and Civilians. Eventually, they will be the architects of laws and policies that we can put into effect if we achieve political power. More importantly over the longer term, they will begin preparation for a new Constituent Assembly to rid of us of that antiquated white male capitalist Constitution.

Civilians are all of us who cannot devote a great deal of time to any of those. The civilians that intelligence and operations need to study are (a) fellow travelers, those sympathetic to whatever our goal is now (NOT NOT NOT ideological conformity!!!!!!!!!), (b) civilians who are actively opposed to our immediate goals, and (c) civilians who are for whatever reasons politically inert. This latter group is very large, and for many reasons, most are never likely to become active. “Those who are not against us are with us.” Jesus said that. No shit. If there are civilians who are inert now, but have the potential to become active, let your practice be your preaching. The key is to mobilize the active allies, win over what you can in the middle, and isolate the active antagonists.

Attachés are the networkers. They are those people who are natural diplomats, who can talk with anyone, and who have friends and associates in common across these rough divisions of revolutionary labor. The connect people when they need connecting, and they create opportunities for new connections, especially between these various arts.
Note there are no soldiers. That's because killing is the weapon of the weak. It's easy to pick up the gun, but harder to get someone to put it down again. The reason past revolutions turned into their opposites. In any case, violence is what the establishment is already very good at; don't play to their strong suit (sorry, all you adventurist lads, this is the land of tricksters and mothers and geeks and carpenters, not gunfighters).

Supplemental reading:

http://chasinjesus.blogspot.com/2017/01/development-big-lie.html

http://republicart.net/disc/aeas/mies01_en.htm

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uD2KeGqTRRJOopwafbYMStWfu7vMT60h/view