What is Love and Rage?
 
 

-Today more than ever capitalism is the main cause of  burden in peoples' lives. The massive attack by the right on welfare, education, trade unions and living standards all over the world has further undermined the littlecontrol over our lives that we have. For those in employment, we do not only have to deal with longer and longer hours of work and lower and lower wages, but also having the time to spend with our relatives, friends and lovers reduced to the minimum for the sake of some one else's benefit. For those out of employment, we do not only have to put up with poverty but also being taunted as lazy or dole bludger by those who are too busy playing the game our rulers want them to play. Through its new push for "freedom", "productivity" and "efficiency", the new order of capital is destroying day by day social gains and rights that took us decades of struggle to achieve. And this is happening everywhere. The so called globalisation is recolonising the planet for capital with unprecedented speed and intensity, displacing people from their communal lands and traditional life styles, rolling back reforms, destroying the environment, propping up military repression, racism, sexism and ethnic cleansing.

-Love and Rage is a political forum and space for those who want to fight these attacks and become active. As such we conceive ourselves as a militant organisation who seeks the revolutionary transformation of society by means of the collective self-organisation of ordinary people in their struggle against all forms of oppression. We are active participants in a variety of social struggles and we have come to the conclusion that the real human needs can not be met unless there is a social revolution that smashes the oppressive social relations and institutions that keep people from exercising control over their own lives.

-The new society we fight for is one based on the principles of collective property of the means of production, social equality, the fullest participatory democracy and solidarity among people. This vision has nothing to do with the societies which once were known as the "actually existing socialism" such as Soviet Union, China or the Eastern block. We believe that these were a variation of state capitalism based on the power of the ruling bureaucracy of the communist parties. While we believe on the genuine popular basis of the Russian revolution of 1917 and others, we acknowledge that their degeneration into totalitarism was a consequence of the destruction of collective organisation of the working class by a new ruling class. This was the result of two set of factors. The "objective“  factors such as the political isolation of the revolutions, the little development of the productive forces, the human and material destruction generated by protracted civil war and the dismantling of the basis of grassroots support. And the "subjective" factors such as the mistaken politics of self-proclaimed revolutionary "leaderships" from day one -despite some of the progressive reforms implemented- and the lack of left alternative to them.

-While we come from Anarchist and Marxist traditions and believe that both of them has important things to offer, we also believe that we have much to learn from a variety of different radical traditions. We take from anarchism our intolerance for all forms of oppression, our refusal to accept that anybody's fight for freedom needs to wait until "after the revolution," our insistence on participatory democracy within mass movements, our commitment to direct action and the creation of counter-institutions, and our opposition to the state as an instrument for social transformation. We also take from revolutionary Marxism our understanding of the working of capitalism and the centrality of autonomous action of the working class as the necessary political basis for collective self-organisation. But we also draw from radical feminism, anti-colonial struggles of national liberation, queer politics and radical ecology and as such, we are genuinely interested in opening up lines of discussion with other organisations and tendencies that share our desire in building the left of the 21st century on a revolutionary and really democratic basis.

-We think that one of the fundamental types of oppression which people live under capitalism is class domination, where a minority of capitalists exploit the labor of the vast majority of the population, subordinating human needs and desires to the relentless expansion of profit. The greed of a few, however, does not go on unopposed. The logic and dynamic of capitalism is based fundamentally on the class struggle. If capital seeks
constantly to extract as much as surpluses from the working class through exploitation, workers also seek to minimise that extraction and liberate itself from the capitalist relation through a multiplicity practices of individual and collective resistance ranging from absenteeism to strike action, from picket lines to revolutions.

-The power of the workers to resist capital lies in the fact that they are the producers of the wealth and the resources needed by capital to expand. We believe therefore that there is no substitute for working class power as a main agency of social transformation. That is the reason we support workers self-management of the process of production.

-Our conception of working class, however, is not a restricted one. Capitalism is based on the boundless imposition of work, and therefore the working class is an inclusive category which embraces not only the industrial workers or wage labor more generally, but all the people whose work is directed to the reproduction of labor itself playing a vital part on the process of capitalist accumulation. We reject the orthodox marxist notion of non-productive labor and recognise domestic labor, students, the unemployed and others as equal partners in the struggle with waged labor.

-The working class is never homogeneous, and is made up of multitude of groups and sections with different relations of power among themselves, whether the positioning of power is based on gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, disabilities or others. A central component of our politics therefore is focusing on the liberation and unity of the multitude by the overthrow of all forms of oppression, including patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism and racism.

-We support autonomous organising of oppressed groups and minorities within left-wing and working class organisations, so that these power relations within the working class are properly addressed and overcome through solidarity in struggle, not ideological unity imposed from the top. We believe that oppressed groups should not just organise separately if they desire to do so, but lead campaigns for their own liberation.  We demand that socially dominant groups within a revolutionary group, such as men in the case of women oppression, to constantly engage with the manifestations of their own privilege; this including respecting the political direction taken by comrades struggling against their own oppression.

-We believe that revolutionary practice and organisation must include the application in the present, to the extent of our means and collective power, of the practices of the future society we aspire. The end of oppression does not start in a mythical revolutionary upsurge in the future; revolutionary change starts with the collective empowerment of the struggle in the here and now.

-The mass movements against capital and the State will inevitably reflect the diversity and complexity of a new working class. The struggles of women, people of colour, queers and oppressed nationalities throughout the world are not secondary to the struggle of "the proletariat". They  are consubstantial to it and constitute the potential, in their plurality, to be the foundation for a new mass movement and new society. What will bring these diverse struggles and peoples together would be the  deliberate effort by revolutionaries to unite them into a radically democratic and plural movement which will maintain their respective autonomies and challenge the existing power structure as whole. We are therefore in support for revolutionary pluralism.

-Our engagement with the ideas of autonomous organising (autonomism) does not mean support for getthoism, life stylism or shopping list politics. This is on the basis that they do not present a strategy to directly challenge and defeat the fundamental structures of state power and capital. Nor does it suggest a way to democratically bring these multiple lifestyles and oppressions together to collectively craft a vision of a free society. Our focus is on campaigns, not merely political programs. To that extend, disciplined organisational practice and commitment to a level of unity in action are necessary.

-This vision is based on a new perception of what a 21st-century mass movement against oppression will look like. While movements aimed at organising factory workers may have been appropriate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ever-changing landscape of capital and imperialism has grown much more complex today. For that reason, we are for the constant reassessment and of revolutionary strategy and organisation in the light of globalisation and changing composition of proletariat (post-fordism). The current period requires on the part of revolutionaries the willingness and courage to experiment with new forms of organising to find the way forward out of the mess created by capitalism through our own actual experiences of struggle, and not pre-defined grand ideological projects.

-We are for a vigorous internal debate and engagement, with the toleration of difference within the organisation.  Emphasis on political education should not be with the purpose of creating a revolutionary elite, but to create the conditions for each comrades to use theoretical tools so that they are able to elaborate politics autonomously in concrete situations and campaigns without having a leadership handing the "line" down and controlling its members' political practice.

-The liberation of the working class would the result of the self-activity of the working class itself, or it won't be at all. We reject the leninist conception of class consciousness, where revolutionary ideas are bought to the working class by the "vanguard" revolutionary party. We believe that development of political consciousness is the result of the self-reflective collective experience which workers acquire autonomously from their leaders when they become organised. In contrast, the "vanguard" strategy of leninism, from the Russian Revolution to the present, is to build an organisation of an elite of professional militants who will guide the masses through a revolution and lead them to a socialist society. This strategy has proven to be an utter failure because it has failed to fulfil the promise of freedom. By creating a highly centralised and undemocratic organisation, vanguard approaches have reproduced these same power structures in society, with the party as the new ruling class.

-In so far as we are a collective of the most radically active and committed individuals in relation to other section of the working class, we are ourselves without any doubt part of the social "vanguard” which makes up the entire left in Australia. Our opposition to "vanguardism" is strictly in a political sense. This means that our group seeks not to make ourselves a hierarchical organisation which forces the entire social movements to conform to its ideology and be subordinate to its own organs of power, popping in and out of campaign where there is no longer benefit for recruitment.

-This does not mean there is no role at all for a revolutionary organisation. The role of a revolutionary organisation like Love and Rage in a mass movement is not to lead the movement but to participate in it as equals with other organisations and people. Through such participation we seek to do two fundamental things: 1) to argue for the most democratic and militant mass movement possible, one that gives every person the ability to participate in it fully and actively; and 2) to argue for our anti-authoritarian politics within this plural movement in order to influence it into struggling against all forms of oppression, not to control it or disband it if we fail to control it as other organisations in the left do so often.

-We seek to practice revolutionary activism without lapsing into ultraleft posturing, attempting to establish the transitional link between reformist demands with the maximum demand of revolution. We are not against reforms; we are against "reformists" such as ALP that looks at parliament, elections and backdoor deals as the main avenue of social change. Our strategy is to fight for reforms by revolutionary methods, that is, through the collective and self-directed organisational power of ordinary people at the grassroots level plus collective militant action. Moderate gains are always achieved not so much by moderate and respectable means, but by militant and
disrespectful activity of the multitude itself. It has been the more implacable, the most oppositional struggle which have undermined the existing basis of power to the point that the political mechanism of the system accede to the most moderate demands in order to protect itself from political position considered more dangerous for the status quo.

-If you sympathise with these ideas and are willing to become and activist for real social change, join us. We have regular meetings where we discuss and develop our politics and organise our partcipation in different political campaigns concerning the campaign for free education, the environment, trade unions, women's rights, anti-racism and so on. If your are not sure, but would like to talk to us anyway, please feel free to contact us so we can can have chat since we welcome anyone interested in our politics.