Posts tagged Counter-institutions

Re: On Dissolving the State, and What to Replace It With

Daniel,

If you are as convinced as you seem to be that the State is willing and able to use massive violence in order to suppress potential threats to its authority; that the infrastructure for that repressive violence is already in place, ready to be called out at need; and that they are both vigilant and tightly organized around this goal, then it seems to me the obvious implication is that you need much more, and much more urgent, attention to building up counter-institutions and alternative networks as quickly as possible, well before you make any attempts at revolutionary confrontation. There is no way to successfully fight the cops or the National Guard unless you have a lot of your own infrastructure for evasion, resistance, exposure of aggressors and collaborators, safehouses, education and counterspin, contacts, support, material aid, communication, transportation, recruitment, retention, mediation between aboveground and underground life, etc., etc., etc. As you yourself have said, they’ve already got all these things and have spent a long time thinking about how to best use them and organize them. We largely don’t and we largely haven’t. Until we do so, trying to “smash” the State is going to accomplish just about as much as the Weathervain’s street riots and symbolic-action-through-explosives.

But to build up our own infrastructure requires a lot of that “building a new society in the shell of the old” stuff. (When the Wobs put that phrase to use, they weren’t claiming that if you build up the OBU enough, state capitalism will just gradually crumble away before the awesome alternative that the OBU provides. Their idea was to create a structure that would prepare them for the worldwide General Strike and what came after.)

Counter-institutions are absolutely necessary if we want to create two, three, many Vietnams instead of two, three, many Wacos.