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#PowerFromBelow ❤️🖤 Second part of our interview series on libertarian socialism with South American comrades from @OP_ASL in Argentina discussing political organization, popular power and feminism. THREAD.
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1. From the interview: We are ASL (Acción Socialista Libertaria/Libertarian Socialist Action). We have militant nuclei in La Plata (Buenos Aires), Greater Buenos Aires Sur, Greater Buenos Aires West, Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and Cordoba."
2. The nucleus of ASL was the confluence of comrades with prior political and social militancy: OSL (Organización Socialista Libertaria) in the ‘90s, the piquetera movement, and worker groups which make up the FOL (Frente de Orgs en Lucha/Front of Organizations in Struggle) ...
3. ... comrades with militancy in the Colectivo Desde el Pié/From the Foot Collective, a radical interdisciplinary research collective based in the physical and natural sciences), others in the Red Libertario (Libertarian Network) in Buenos Aires as well as in feminist spaces.
4. We have militants active in various popular struggles— in territorial, environmental, feminist, union, student, and human rights— in addition to developing propaganda, dissemination, and training activities.
5. In South America, anarchism established itself as a current in the labor and popular movements early and solidly. Especially in the large cities with access to the ports, the arrival of European immigrants brought in their saddlebags an experience of organization and struggle.
6. A libertarian socialist current would become broadly majoritarian, in the left and in the labor movement until 1930, with organizations such as FORA (Federación Obrera Regional Argentina). Until then, anarchist and worker militancy were fused in the same organizations.
7. We like to define ourselves as part of the revolutionary left, as a libertarian current within it. Our hypothesis is to be able to construct a mass political alternative that challenges the delegative, authoritarian, vertical, and patriarchal representative forms.
8. We take 3 central and transversal axes of our current as distinct elements: classist, feminist, and libertarian practice. Our base-building tries to develop disruptive and democratic elements, prioritize consciousness instead of disputes over formal direction of popular orgs.
9. A third vector is to develop an integral anti-patriarchal politics that cuts across all the experiences of the masses, beyond the specific tasks of the women’s and queer movement itself— the struggle for legal abortion, self-defense against femicide, etc.
10. Also the questioning of the notion of bourgeois democracy as a space for resolution or improvement of the living conditions of our class seems central to us— and instead trying to develop experiences of direct, democratic, and bottom-up management.
11. Within anarchism [we see] least three positions on the issue [of political organization] : 1. those who see the “libertarian political group” as a space solely for propaganda or diffusion and where agreements are lax and there is almost no intervention in social movements...
12. .... 2. those who do not see the need to develop a strictly political space and combine common political-social aspects in grassroots militancy; and, 3. a current like ours that sees dual organizationalism as central: the political and the social.
13. Our vision of the Libertarian Political Organization tries to take lessons incorporating the experience of diverse organizations within so-called “Latin American especifismo,” such as the FAU (Uruguayan Anarchist Federation) since the ‘60s or ...
14. ... the OSL (Socialist Organization Libertaria) in Argentina in the ‘90s and 2000s. Also, the experience of the [platformist] Russian exiles of Dielo Truda, with Makhno and Archinoff.
15. We consider our political organization as an application of the coordination of our popular militancy, the development of libertarian militants, and the strategic debate of our specific tasks, considering ourselves as just a nucleus of a broader construction in development:
16. On electoralism: Since the return of democracy in 1983, the most important anti-capitalist left organizations in Argentina have been those of Trotskyism. All of them have developed, during more than thirty years, a sustained policy of electoral intervention.
17. Since the formation of the FIT (Left and Workers’ Front), an alliance between various leftist groups, they have had small “electoral successes,” with 3-5% of the national electorate, winning national and provincial deputies and references to certain “tribunes of the people.”
18. Anarchism and its organizations in Argentina have never developed sectors that have participated electorally in bourgeois democracy, although, in recent years, there has been a paradox with respect to our framework of alliances.
20. This forced us to debate with them, more from the tactical and political conjuncture, without falling into closed positions and abstract abstentionism.
21. The electoral issue is seen as a possible “leap to politics,” an outgrowth and a response to overcome corporatism and trade unionism from social militancy. Our position is that the need for that “leap” is correct, but that circumscribing political intervention to ...
22. ...electoral intervention discounts politics, puts it in the enemy’s arena, w/ the tactics of the class enemy & its instruments. We maintain that bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, an instrument of consensus for capitalist & patriarchal exploitation.
23. On popular power: For ASL, the construction of Popular Power (DPP) is a complex, permanent, and contested strategy. Given the many meanings, we began to define this strategy as “Direct Power of the People,” since it seems to us that it is much closer to a libertarian vision.
24. We think that the development of the DPP must go hand-in-hand with experience, with a reading of the moment and of the forces that we, as a class, have.
25. Disagreeing as much with the “escape from power” as with the “taking of power,” we consider the DPP strategy as building a power from the oppressed sectors and from the working people with which to materially prefigure that libertarian socialism.
