See Part 1
And if the bourgeois state smashes you …
Nor does Falkvinge deal seriously with repression, other than to welcome it. Certainly the government’s prosecuting Pirate Bay members and seizing servers allowed the Pirate Party to turn mass anger into building the swarm. Yes, sometimes that works. He relates: “As the news spreads, people are absolutely furious over the injustice committed by the District Court [One year in prison and thirty-five million SEK (about four million euros) in damages]. That rally permit will most definitely be needed — you won’t be able to keep people off the streets. Our member count is spiking — it will triple over the next week, from 14,400 to 42,000. We’re getting over 1,000 new members to the Pirate Party per hour.” (p.185)
And sometimes mass movements just get crushed, their leaders murdered, their spirits broken. The word “repression” never appears in Falkvinge’s book.
Movements advance and they retreat. An issue runs out of gas (or steam in older days). Demands are co-opted. The swarm is best-suited to a movement on the march, but ill-suited to one in retreat. Falkvinge discusses how a swarm can collapse from internal problems such as over-confidence or infighting, but never mentions external factors, objective limitations.
Ironically, in over-selling the strength of the swarm methodology, Falkvinge understates (and he not a modest man) his own brilliance as a political tactician and group leader (which do not flow automatically from swarm methodology), and the massive impact of his own charisma on his followers. He relates, “This [initial] process takes a couple of days … The thirty leaders and you form an initial management team pyramid in the swarm’s scaffolding of officers, the swarm’s go-to people. Taken together, your subgroups form a comprehensive coverage of all the ground you intend to cover.” (p.43) Yet he says virtually nothing about who the initial thirty were. That would have told us much.
Yes, you might say, I’m asking a lot from a well-written, highly-readable 300-page work. Guilty, I plead. Perhaps I would ask less of a less significant work.
Swarm as paradigm (20 cents worth)
One problem with even the most brilliant works, from Confucius to Jesus to Darwin to Marx to Lenin to Freud, is that they get turned into paradigms, i.e., formulas, schemas, ideologies, models applied mechanistically to every situation, and the essential guts gets ripped out of them in the process.
Thus already with the swarm. So there has arisen an elixir of swarmish snake-oil, a mixture of youth chauvinism, fetishism of technology, anti-organizational hostility, trashing of the very concept of leadership, and an ahistorical and even anti-historical glorification of know-nothingism premised on the alleged inability of the young to read anything long than a Tweet. But of course this arrogance is fueled by the calcified, dispirited, intellectually bankrupt leadership of the U.S. left which in one way or another is hooked de facto into the so-called left wing of the Democratic Party. (I’m being unfair to the calcified, dispirited, intellectually bankrupt leadership of the U.S. left, you say? Well, if they’re so smart, why ain’t they rich?)
The swarm is used as a stick to beat people over the head with, with get-rich-quick promises that if you put a big Donate button in the middle of your Home page with pictures of demonstrators plastered around it, you’ll actually get rich.
Ironically enough, Falkvinge in his book stresses over and over that building and maintaining the swarm is incredibly difficult, requires massive effort, the utmost in professionalism. He devotes over 4 pages just on training people in how to pass out a leaflet. “Most people who hand out flyers have little or no training in doing so. You’ll all too often see people tasked with handing out flyers for various causes, but who look just lost, standing on their own in a corner of the street, huddling in the shadows, holding out a piece of paper to passersby who have no interest in their existence whatsoever. …” (p.99)
Falkvinge basics
Contrary to Occupy dogma, Falkvinge insists upon strong leadership. Very, very hardworking leadership. And a clear, though non-authoritarian hierarchy.
“The weak cohesion of the Anonymous and Occupy brands can partially be ascribed to their choice of being leaderless. While this brings resilience, as no leader can be targeted by adversaries, it sacrifices direction and purpose.” (p.16)
“I do not believe in leaderless organizations. We can observe around us that change happens whenever people are allowed to inspire each other to greatness. This is leadership. This is even leadership by its very definition. In contrast, if you have a large assembly of people who are forced to agree on every movement before doing anything, including the mechanism for what constitutes such agreement, then you rarely achieve anything at all.” (p.85)
“We are not afraid of saying, ‘I make this decision,’ because it is our express and explicit task to make decisions independently and then stand for them. The opposite would be if we let everybody have a say in everything. We don’t operate like that. We make decisions by ourselves; we have standalone decision makers.” (p.197)
“We stand for our opinions. We never say ‘Many people feel…’ or try to hide behind some kind of quantity of people. Our opinions are always and only our own, and we stand for them.” (p.201)
Falkvinge is angry, and considers anger an essential tool, not a moral or political defect.
“It is especially crucial that peers in the swarm don’t fear other people being angry with the swarm, and punish the risk-taker as a result. After all, people getting angry with you is a symptom that you’re starting to cause change, that you’re starting to succeed in your mission.” (p.94)
“Rallies can be very effective when people are really angry about something that has just happened, compared to staging rallies as a ‘just because’ activity. When people are angry, they will tend to want to share, show, and vent that in groups. This also gives the speakers at the rally a relatively easy task; they basically just have to describe how angry they are at what has just happened, in the most colorful and provocative of terms, to draw thunderous applause at the rally.” (p.105)
Nor is he an advocate of touchy-feely within the swarm:
“[Y]ou can observe them being very polite and friendly with one another. If somebody appears offended, apologies follow immediately. These are symptoms of a group that cannot yet deliver effectively. Politeness is a sign of an inefficient group that hasn’t learned how to work as a team; people are keeping distance. Over time, as these individuals learn to work together, they also explore where their limits go, and these limits of people’s roles will start to collide and flow into one another. This is when they start fighting between themselves over rules and culture in the group. This is a significant step forward from overfriendly politeness and shows that the group is well on its way to becoming a well-functioning team. (p.143)
Falkvinge is not paralyzed by fear of making mistakes:
“Failures are expected, but with every failure comes a learning experience. In almost every organization, a number of failures are a prerequisite for an ultimate success with a particular activity. Make it possible to make those failures in as short a time as possible.” (p.164)
At every turn, and at his best, Falkvinge’s goal is to release the untapped energy constrained by traditional organizations. (And at his worst, he over-relies on energy that may not be there.) The GPFL could well use (may not survive without) a judicious application of the swarm method.
By the way, I do not mean to minimize the importance of our electronic technology, any more than I would disparage the invention of electricity, the steam engine, the telephone, radio, the automobile and television in impacting society and how political struggle is conducted. My quarrel is with those who would wrench it out of its historical context.
And the Green Party of Florida?
For the sake of argument, one could make a strong swarm-based argument that the GPFL (and by extension, the GPUS) should just be swept into the dustbin of history. Those who sincerely believe this should read (or re-read) the book and then roll their own. But for the rest of us, perhaps we should take to heart the best of the swarm method and try to apply it to the GPFL and the people within it as they actually exist.
To begin, the progressive movement we operate within is not marching onward to victory. Certainly one can select this demonstration or that election as proof that the masses are rising up and the people united can never be defeated. From that perspective, the masses are always rising up.
I address my remarks to the non-delusional among us, who have at least some dim inkling that the left has collapsed into the Democratic Party and is not on the verge of breaking out of that miasma.
The GPFL moves with excruciating lethargy and agonizing caution. It is paralyzed by an ill-defined factionalism. (If that factionalism were better defined, it could better be dealt with. See my article Politics for an attempt to clarify our issues.) The two amorphous blocs have been at loggerheads for quite a while, and everyone decries all this strife out of hand. But it serves an important purpose. Each bloc can blame the other for its own failures.
The swarm accepts no such excuses. You want to do it? Do it. Want to write something for the website? Write it. (Okay, we need a policy here. The website should be open to all views. There.) You want to run for office? Run. Support some candidate? Support them. Fight for a particular issue? Fight for it. There.
Yes, damage can be done to the GPFL by people doing stupid shit. But the fact is that our weakness is a plus. The scope of any blunders we might make is limited by the fact that most of the State of Florida is utterly unaware of our existence. Such damage is far less damaging than our utter impotence.
No, structural issues can’t be completely avoided. Our bylaws are set up to confer all sorts of duties on our poor Executive Board, and then renders them powerless to perform them, as anything it wants to do has to be maneuvered through a slow and ineffective Coordinating Council. Amend the bylaws? Well, that’s just another thing that we have been and will be by-and-large too paralyzed to do. Excuses, excuses.
No more excuses! Yippee!
This June 7 Orlando State Meeting could mandate the Board to act, thereby conferring upon it the legitimacy, nay, the responsibility, to act. Act how? Who the hell knows? Taking off the reins is a precondition for even figuring out what to do.
Is that too much trust to ask for? I guess. But on second thought, the bylaws require little and forbid less. Just to keep us out of jail. If Board members wanted to organize, what’s to stop them from organizing? It’s just an activity, nothing more and nothing less. It means coming up with ideas (no rule against that) and getting others to agree with them (no rule against that either), and then doing them as members in good standing of the GPFL. No further legitimacy is required. (Falkvinge: “We stand for our opinions. We never say ‘Many people feel…’ or try to hide behind some kind of quantity of people. Our opinions are always and only our own, and we stand for them.” If people like those ideas, they fly. If people don’t like them, back to the drawing board.
As Jerry Rubin put it, Yippee!—
See Part 1
