Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

The best analogy to use here is the Communist State: the singer becomes the Party, whose White Man's Burden it is to educate the Masses, starting of course with the Proletariat of his own band: the other members, the ones who actually manufacture the useful product?the music. He, of course, is only giving voice to the politics they aheady hold unconsciously: he is the Vanguard, and this gives him the important responsibilities of managing their labor, representing their interests, issuing statements on behalf of the group, and so on.

Being able to express one's feelings in words, to speak one's mind publicly, to articulate complex ideas on the spot, all these are valuable skills to have?the problem is not that the singer in this example exercises these, but that the specialization within the traditional band format tends to develop these skills in this one person and not in the others. The singer may well be saying and organizing things that need saying and organizing, and he or she may for that matter be the one who takes the most responsibility for important matters such as the relationship between the band and other people?but this specialization is not usually sustainable, and never healthy. Tensions develop between the different class strata of the band, now that they have different interests according to their different roles.

You can organize rent strikes to make your landlord take care of the problems with your plumbing, heat, electricity?but it would be far wiser to assemble a circle of trustworthy people to invest in a communal living space together. In the city, you could use such a space as a meeting place or center for the performing arts, while in the countryside you could grow enough vegetables to feed a lot of people.

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This is only one of countless examples of the ways specialization can concentrate control and create dissension within a collective. Even in collectives in which the division of labor is much less formal, people tend to slip into roles, and the same consequences proceed.

Responsibility and responsibleness alike tend to flow in one direction once a pattern is established. The more one person does, the more she or he knows how to do, and feels invested in these things getting done?and the less everyone else does. Worse, that person can thus become unvrilling to trust others with responsibilities, just as others cease to be aware of how much work there is to be done and what it takes to do it. The Responsible One blames others for not taking on responsibilities they don't even know exist; the others blame him or her for hostility and resentment they lack the context to understand.

How can a collective resist this insidious tendency? There's the reformist approach: stay aware of the privilege and power you hold as a result of the tasks you take on, try to keep those who assume key roles in check with continuous feedback. And then there's the radical approach: rotate responsibilities frequently between participants in the collective, keep things so nebulous that no set roles can crystallize within your collective. Neither strategy can work without the other, really: no radical restructuring of our working groups could by itself undo the effects of the decades of hierarchical conditioning all of us have already undergone, and at the same time it's foolish to think people in structures that are conducive to specialization and centralization can behave differently just by deciding to.

Translating

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Communication is central to collective activity, and it's a voodoo art if there ever was one. No two people speak the same language the same way?different words, gestures, actions always mean different things to different people. Don't get angry and self-righteous about communication breakdowns. There's no "right" way to communicate, no One and Only Way to handle things; anyone who tells you different is trying, consciously or not, to impose their personal system upon the cosmos. On the other hand, some ways do work

better than others?ultimately, the only thing that matters is that your group find a common speech or method that enables you to figure things out with each other.

Whenever the composition of your group shifts, or even when it remains the same but the people inside it go through changes, as all of us always do, you'll have to figure everything out all over again. When you have a new member or two, don't assume that you can simply march forward according to the plans and procedures you'd worked out before. Get together and make sure everyone has a say in and a feeling of ownership of what you're doing together.