Command: this is the dominant relationship existing within a company (or not-for-profit project), constituting its line management tree. The stream of command begins with a Board of Directors or CEO and flows along with funds down the tree to the ‘coal face’ employees. Command is a strong archetypal form of project collaboration which has characterised projects from nation-states to families down the centuries. It is a limiting case of collaboration: a non-collaborative form of collaboration.

Exchange: this is the dominant relationship in the marketplace, but is increasingly found within commercial projects with the use of one-line budgeting, out-sourcing, franchising and so on. This is the other limiting, non-collaborative form of collaboration in which each party retain their independence and formal equality through control of the relationship through payment. Command flows in one direction and money in the other, but the parties retain their freedom to leave the collaboration.

Collaboration: this is the relationship which predominates among the productive employees of a company as well as within the ‘directing mind’ of a company. In both case, ‘working together’, consultation, sharing work and attribution are the norms. Profit-making companies rely on the collaborative labour not only of their employees during working hours, but on working class communities who collaboratively produce the labour power made available for exploitation.

In the economy, command and collaboration are subsumed under exchange, while within companies, collaboration is subsumed under command. A complete picture of economic activity is possible only by recognising the mutual subsumption of these three modes of collaboration, including both normative collaboration and ‘non-collaborative’ forms of collaboration, which are normative within hierarchical organisations.

I don’t know if anyone’s of your network is familiar with the work of andy blunden? I find his work very claryfying in this matter and he has done great work on Hegel’s logic. I share the link here to his forms of radical subjectivity and project as an interdisciplinairy concept:

http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/radical-subjectivity.htm
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/project-interdisciplinary.htm

anyway, i’m not a forum-writer in any sense but i just thought i could give some food for thought if you guys don’t know him. I found it very helpfull to get things clearer about subjectivity and the situation wich exists today…

I made the same point about the doorstep in Bradford. But inviting Ian to make comments on the commune, after one meeting, five months after the meeting does show the wrong priorities.

The failure of the Left is down to two things, neither of which are exemplified by the Commune.
The first is that the working class in this country have such a weak/non-existent tradition of struggle, that they are barely receptive to anti-capitalist ideas. Most of them just aren’t interested in the first place – no matter how much good stuff the Left does, we’re performing in front of a tough crowd. This isn’t our fault and should not be seen as *our* failure – rather extremely tough operating conditions imposed by neoliberalism and a working class with a conservative history (dating back to roughly 1848).
The second is that most of the Left still advocates the Labour Party to varying extents. The Labour Party is a nicer form of capitalism. It is not anti-capitalist and can in no way breed ideas of an alternative. Voting for it actually retards working class action (in the workplace or wherever) because it makes people feel they’ve achieved something politically. It’s a reliance on leadership to act for the working class – not the working class realising its agency and through that building ideas of an alternative, democratic society (as has been done in for example, Spain in the 30s). So, after advocating Labour for the last forty years, Left groups (Militant, SWP, AWL, CPGB, etc) fail to build any ideas of an alternative; the failure of the Left, and the working class politically understanding only Labour, is hence no surprise. It’s not a failure of groups like the Commune who are against Labour and the general denial of working class agency.

In general terms, my sympathies lie mostly with Ian, though I am pretty sure that Barry also relates to Ian’s concerns and this got lost somewhere. I have wondered whether there is any benefit in trying to construct a ‘platform’ at all out of a small group of activists who are able to get together, intermittently, sometimes with different people involved. I have also wondered whether there is any point at all in trying to construct a national ‘organisation’ as opposed to a looser affinity network. I have wondered whether or not what Ian is looking for is better achieved by concentrating on your own doorstep and on rebuilding the movement around concrete issues and ways to deal with them. I still don’t have any answers to these questions, but my tendency is to look to the third option if only because it is more practicable to get involved in an effective and communicative way at the grassroots.

All ways of working have their problems, but fighting over abstract platforms is the least useful. Equally useless are splits, such as the latest one in the Anarchist Federation. I remember back in the early 70s trying to get the ‘left libertarian’ milieu to talk to each other for the same reason put forward by Ian. Sadly nothing much has changed, except that there are now movements who deliberately shy away from organisations that try to construct ‘the right way forward’. Don’t give up Ian!

I don’t feel let down by Commune locally. I made my misgivings about the email traffic after the Leeds Aggregate clear the following month and others may quite reasonably have taken that to indicate I had no time for Commune in the future. It also coincided with me starting a new writing project of my own – and probably with other local acquaintances having their own priorities at the time. The Bradford Branch and its members still have my complete respect and I wasn’t trying to point a finger at them. I didn’t hear anything from Commune at any level.

I’m afraid your second paragraph is beyond me and, I have to say, couched in terms that I think exemplify some of my misgivings. I doubt if the unemployed of Bradford – or anywhere else – see their situation in terms of either Marx or Mao. The key issue is to learn how they do feel about it and work with them from there.

Obviously from your comments you are not a pupil. And how could you be a pupil of a school following one lesson! But seriously, your point about shibboleths does echo a recent debate in the commune. The programme does reject “state socialism” This is not an old shibboleth, but is about the nature and meaning of socialism/communism. Why change this programme for Mao and Chinese nationalism. What possible meaning could liberating the Chinese peasantry in the 1930′s from rival nationalists,Japanese occupation and unpatriotic landlords and setting up the state exploitation of the Chinese working class have for the unemployed of Bradford? Marx or Mao? I think we know the answer. The programme of the commune is not a new shibboleth either. We have changed it a number of time’s. I voted against the current version, which was cobbled together shortly before the Leeds aggregate, so its not a shibboleth for me.