WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE SPAIN - news journal UPDATE - (en) Spain, Regeneracion: Co-optation Is Not Hegemony By Liza (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 We propose this article as an attempt to shed light on the discussion

that has plagued all our organizations, spaces of struggle, and
communication networks used by the radical left and the libertarian
movement. The debate about co-optation is recurrent because it responds
to a contemporary and historical reality. However, the way we approach
it is not always the most appropriate, either to combat these processes
or to propose alternatives. ---- To achieve this, we need, first of all,
a definition of co-optation that allows us to see what we are referring
to as precisely as possible. Once this is understood, it is necessary to
differentiate between the fight for hegemony and co-optation. To do
this, we must understand that it is ideas and strategies that are
hegemonized, not organizations. This is key to differentiating between
organized participation and the will to co-opt, and to consider how to
combat these processes. Finally, we will try to show the relationship
between these co-optation practices and the strategic constructions that
guide their actions.

This is not a debate we take on because the current controversy
conditioned by social media algorithms demands it. It is an essential
debate because the survival and usefulness of both the spaces of
struggle built by the working class and our own organizations depend on it.

What is co-optation?

We normally use this term to refer to undemocratic and dishonest
practices that seek to instrumentalize spaces by placing them at the
service of specific political agents, establishing a single way of
thinking and dismantling them as environments for meeting, for uniting
forces, for debates and consensus that give real strength to the
struggles waged by the dispossessed class.

We have seen it a thousand times: organizations that divert a great deal
of militant force or seize strategic spaces within movements to gain
combative spaces. We have detected many tricks in our militant
trajectory; They must accumulate militants to push through votes, hinder
the flow of assemblies until they defeat adversaries or unassimilable
agents through fatigue, spread rumors, function as authentic bureaucrats
by taking over sections designated for communication, for establishing
consensus, and usurping representation...

This can never be confused with a particular organization or collective
throwing itself into a struggle or a space. I wish those groups that
want to be Vanguard would always act this way, giving their all in the
struggles and pushing shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the
collectives and workers. We're not talking about this; we're talking
about the assimilation of struggles, and along the way to such
phagocytosis, their dismantling as a class space to convert it into a
private space.

Hegemony is not co-optation.

This point is key to understanding the discussion. It is perhaps the
most problematic, and it is problematic in two ways. First, some groups
believe that achieving hegemony means seizing spaces and putting them at
their service, relegating any dissidents to exile and turning them into
puppets. Second, and reactively, many comrades in the libertarian
movement come to believe that the adoption by spaces of struggle of
ideas proposed by organizations responds to their co-optation and
manipulation, rendering the defense and struggle for ideas and strategic
lines illicit.

The process of achieving hegemony is the ability to popularize your
proposals, to have them adopted by spaces of struggle, by the working
class, the dispossessed. This task is only possible if organizations
build rooted approaches hand in hand with spaces of class
self-organization. It is a debate, a dialogical construction of common
sense and strategy; it is workers' democracy in its most radical sense.

It's not just that this objective and its practice are legitimate; it's
that it's inseparable from political participation. Whether individual
or collective, organized or spontaneous. Each of us, however we see
ourselves and organize ourselves as we see fit, includes ourselves in a
broad space of struggle, bringing our proposals and ideas to the table.
The optimal outcome is to build a consensus that makes that space a
stronger, more combative, and more organized agent. It's a struggle, in
the best sense, for the defense of an idea and a strategic line. Ideas,
not organizations, dominate.

Participating in an organized way is not co-opting.

A large part of the libertarian movement has assumed as an indisputable
truth that it is unorganized participation, that is, as individuality,
that gives spaces a truly democratic character.  Furthermore, it has
become popular among anarchists that demanding individual participation
is the best way to prevent and combat processes of co-optation. Well,
neither the first is true, nor the second works.

Anarchists have always defended the legitimacy of building and utilizing
different organizational forms and intervening in mass movements.
Whether they think of the syndicalist or insurrectionist movement,
educational and cultural anarchism, or specificism, where libertarian
practice transcends the idea that anarchism is merely a way of life and
understands that, while everything is political, not everything is
political, anarchists organize and intervene.

We can pretend there is a total disconnect between our assemblies, our
affinity groups, and our athenaeums and our involvement in broader
spaces such as coordinating bodies, platforms of struggle, or other
forms that social struggle takes. The reality is that we intervene, and
we do so along the lines we've worked on in our spaces. The ethical,
fair, and practical thing to do would be to accept this and assume it as
consistent with libertarian principles, and, in the same vein, to
understand and encourage other political movements to do so.

Obstinately insisting that in these spaces, we should act as individuals
is not only undemocratic and foolish, but it also doesn't help combat
those groups convinced they're usurping our struggles. It doesn't help
because they lie, because they create front associations, and because if
they can't take over a space, they'll try to sabotage it.

In the face of this strategy of atomizing direct politics, what we must
adopt and demand is sincerity and commitment. It's the way to point out
harmful practices and to be able to criticize the actions of entire
groups. At the same time, it's not about excluding them from these
processes; it's about allowing them to work in them as long as they do
so with the goal of contributing and strengthening the spaces. And if
they win arguments, if they manage to push forward proposals, it's
because they've worked hard, have convinced others, and have proposed
something that makes sense to the majority. We can't fool ourselves; in
part of the libertarian movement, this exclusion has also served to
avoid debate and ideological and strategic work.

Why do some organizations always try to seize everything?

Simply because their strategic approaches understand that it's part of
the most successful strategy. It's not that they're terrible,
authoritarian people, obsessed with control and power. They think, and
we know this because they make it public in their proposals and because
we see them act, that the revolution stops because they belong to them
or ceases to exist.

Confusing the Soviet with the party, confusing the united front spaces
with the party, confusing socialism with the party, confusing the
working class with the party, confusing the revolution with the party,
confusing the party with God, necessarily implies thinking that strategy
requires the co-optation of spaces to serve the line produced by the
party. The line is not debatable, the line is not negotiable, there is
no possibility of autonomous growth of struggles, of transformation, or
of agreements, either from the party and therefore revolutionary, or
against the party and therefore counterrevolutionary.

In the case of reformism, things are even more shady. They are content
that instrumentalization disarms any criticism that might arise from
popular spaces against their management and their collaboration with
capital and its elites.

Our proposal

This is not about creating a dichotomy between what to do and how to do
it. This means reducing anarchism to a formal and aesthetic question. It
is about understanding that what and how are subordinated to a strategy.
 From our perspective, from our strategic approach, it's about
strengthening mass movements, spaces for convergence between tendencies
and currents, and, ultimately, building the popular power the working
class needs to confront and defeat the forces of capital.

Of course, this accumulation of strength-and by strength we mean
strategic capacity, systemic vision, and class self-organization-is
contradictory to the instrumentalization and co-optation of these
spaces. These spaces are left disarmed, disjointed, disconnected from
the possibility of creating, proposing, and growing on their own.
Subordinated to the iron judgment of a few, no real connection between
revolutionaries and the entire class is built.

Nor is it about limiting the participation of other political currents,
trying to safeguard a supposed purity that doesn't exist. It's about
standing alone, and thus being able to define ourselves as libertarians,
immaculate, and once again disconnected.

It's about participating for the construction and development of popular
power. Create broad spaces for convergence and agreement. They must be
inclusive without losing their combative capacity. They have tried to
construct a caricature based on two half-truths, that is, two lies.
Neither the historic revolutionary CNT co-opted the workers' struggle,
nor is the libertarian movement an ineffective rag disconnected from
reality. The CNT managed to hegemonize revolutionary values, and with
its successes and failures, it expanded popular power to the point of
turning it into a real threat to the capitalists. At the same time, the
contemporary libertarian movement is very broad and heterogeneous. It
can be accused of having focused on secondary issues, of having lost
focus and impact, and surely of many other things. But the criticism is
not intended to improve the conditions for the working class's offensive
potential; it only seeks to eliminate any potential critics.

Miguel Brea, Liza activist.

https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2024/02/24/cooptacion-no-es-hegemonizar/
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