This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here.

The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in his influential Pensées, called the human being a thinking reed.[1] He did so in order to emphasize the uniqueness and dignity of human thought, pointing out that compared to an ordinary reed which lacks consciousness, a human, the thinking reed, possesses the power to recognize the significance of its impending death in the moment before it is crushed underfoot.

This metaphor, which Pascal immediately follows by claiming that “the principle of morality” is “thinking well,” contains much of what Marxists, often rightly, despise in philosophy. Here we find the moral elevation of thought above matter, the location of the good (and consequently much of meaning itself) in the power of the mind, and the adulation of thought’s powers with little consideration of the body, let alone of the social conditions which permit the “mind” to come into being. 

As Simone de Beauvoir once demonstrated, the analogy of the thinking reed can say more than Pascal intended. While Pascal uses the analogy to wax poetic about the dignity of mind, the analogy of the thinking reed refers equally to body, to the “material world” considered central in Marxist thought. If the human being is a thinking reed, as Beauvoir observed, it is necessary to consider both aspects of the analogy quite carefully: to “hold both ends of the chain at the same time,”[2] the thinking and the reed, subject and object, interior and exterior, the so-called will and the condition which produces it, which it faces, and upon which it acts. To consider the thinking reed is to think through the relationship which allows it to persist and function as a discrete object which is affected, which reflects, and which creates—it is to return to a question central to the birth of historical materialism, to think the identity and non-identity, the difference and connection, of thought and being.

Much left-wing writing which purports to address practical social problems fails to think philosophically about the relation between thought and being, even in a cursory manner—and sometimes, this is hardly a failing, given that political practice often relies only tangentially (if at all) on philosophical musings. The determining role of matter (over that of thought) is often looked at as the only necessary and possible metaphysical position a Marxist can take up, at least among the organized (as opposed to the purely academic) left. This view is often useful for leading socialists away from the aimless idealisms of the liberal left, too numerous to name. That said, this almost instinctive theoretical position can cause problems for even the most pragmatic political discussions. Socialists, communists, and anarchists too at times describe the relation between organizational structure and organizational activity in what philosophers would call a voluntaristic way, reducing the actions of a group to the ideas and intentions of either an organization taken as a whole, or to those of its individual members or its leadership.[3] Conversely, other socialists, communists, and anarchists conceive of organizations in what philosophers might call a mechanical way, wherein organizations are viewed as bodies set up in accordance with strict rules that only fail insofar as some integral component of the organizational machine ceases to function.

The voluntaristic approach founders because it assumes the primacy of thought (more specifically, the power of thought to straightforwardly dictate activity, a staple humanist error), while the mechanical approach fails because it assumes the primacy of being (more specifically, of the mechanical, natural laws which are taken to govern being). I draw a crude philosophical picture here, but a helpful one, I wager, because insofar as political organizations are composed of subject-objects, people, they must be understood as sites where thought and being interact, or fail to interact, in specific ways. A thinking reed, the malleable “human being,” does not simply consist of thought on the one side and of material being on the other, but is constituted largely by the ways in which these two aspects produce one another while, trickily, remaining consubstantial.[4] The connection between the relations of the world “beyond” us, of ourselves taken as objects, and of other “external” objects on the one hand, and our sensemaking, our reason and unreason, and our conscious and unconscious life, which form our understanding of thought and being on the other hand, is the mediated realm we all occupy, a space not reducible to thought or being insofar as it is at all times both. We make sense of this relation between thought and being socially, historically, even if we don’t realize that we’re doing so, even if this “making sense” is something that happens to us as much as it’s something that we do. Our ability to make sense of the connection between ourselves, our conditions, and our thought is itself something which is enabled and limited by social structure, by the mode of production, by our temporal and geographical inheritances; not every way of making sense of the relation between thought and being is favored equally by these social structures, and some persist or diminish while others are nurtured, and thrive.

One product of the different social attempts to make sense of the relationship between thought and being is culture, and one could go so far as to argue that culture is nothing but a term we use to refer to this type of sensemaking. The question of culture has, in recent years, been regarded rather snidely by many on the left as inherently secondary to a focus on class analysis (which, quite conveniently for some, becomes itself a form of newly-marketable cultural analysis, uniquely able to deny its status as such). If we understand culture as a collection of ways that people make sense of the relation between thought and being, both at a global and localized level, then it becomes obvious that such analysis is unavoidable within organization. For socialist, communist, and anarchist organizations, questions of culture are inseparable from questions of organizational reproduction. Everyday problems like meeting attendance, burnout, communicating workload, mediating interpersonal conflicts, and ensuring that organizing spaces are safe for those regularly targeted by racial and sexual violence are all cultural matters; larger-scale issues such as creating relationships with other radical organizations, providing support for mass movements, and navigating issues of “public perception” are equally cultural. 

To generalize, organizational culture is often discussed in line with the mechanical/voluntaristic split I described above. A mechanical view of organizing might assume that the installation of rules governing communication standards, sexual and racist harassment, and other potential cultural problems should in most cases take care of cultural problems, so long as the organization is efficiently disciplined—without, generally, digging too deeply into the problems of the notion of “discipline,” which refers only to a group’s capacity to adhere to its own stated rules. Additional rules are consequently devised to ensure that members adhere to the original rules; little thought is paid to what may happen when this secondary set of rules fails, “discipline” collapses, and a crisis must be addressed (or more often, shoved under the rug for the sake of “discipline”). A voluntaristic view may understand the culture of an organization as a product of the choices made by its members: each and all are responsible for being decent, for making themselves communicable to one another, and so on. The solutions to cultural problems here become the responsibilities of individuals—each is expected to render themselves amenable to others, in one way or another, and failures to do so become the foundations of long and bitter feuds, interpersonal dramas which, morally justified as they may be, fail to interrogate how the cultural failings of individuals were enabled by the stated or implicit structure of the organization in question.

Each of these views greatly underestimates the weight of cultural life within an organization. A culture is not simply a byproduct of an organization’s rules, nor a product of the freely chosen decency (or indecency) of its members: it involves both the stated aims of the organization, the dispositions and decisions of its members, and far more than this. If culture is something as weighty as the relation between thought and being, expressed by particular people in particular times and places, it demands to be treated as such.

Outside-Insides

Organizational culture is, on the rare occasion when it is actually analyzed, usually understood in one of a few ways. First, in the two manners mentioned above: as either a mechanistic product of rules agreed upon and enforced by an organization, or as a voluntary product of the wills of an organization’s members. However, organizational culture is also often understood, generally by liberal and conservative critics of socialist movements, as something extrinsic to socialist, anarchist, and communist organizations themselves, as an expression of broader social tendencies which unilaterally produce left-wing organizations as a means of responding to generational cultural concerns.

Anyone even remotely familiar with left-wing organizing will be aware of this idea, now practically a trope—the idea that young artists, bleeding-hearts, and flaneurs become socialists in order to sate their innate desire for a sense of purpose and capability, to feed their vanity and dreams of grandeur. Conservatives drool salaciously at the thought that their opponents are, ultimately, not only hypocrites but total vassals of their libidinal drives, floundering headlong into incoherent philosophies of right which, in the end, are nothing but crude, alluring reflections of elite liberal sensibilities. 

Socialist organizers may highlight the idiocy of such reactionary fantasies, noting that left-wing organizing often undermines one’s vanity more than it builds it up, demonstrating that their solidarity extends beyond the bounds of petty self-interest through their actions in the class struggle, and so on. They would be right to do so. Yet of course, in typical Hegelian fashion, there is something true in the conservative lie—certainly, the cultural concerns specific to the professions, classes, generations, et al which tend to join and organize within left-wing organizations do, in some sense, color the types of interactions possible within these organizations, even if these organizations are by no means reducible to a crude pseudo-Nietzschean account of millennial ressentiment.

The first step in any serious accounting of the cultural problem in left-wing organization must admit this feature of left-wing organizations (and political organizations in general): their status as entities which are autonomous and possess a set of identifiable characteristics, but which at the same time constitute only a minor part of the cultural lives of the vast majority of their members. Left-wing organizations are, in general, outside-insides, broken crucibles which alter their members and meld them together but only incompletely, temporarily.

What does this mean in practical terms? This must be stated very carefully, because if I simply say that “left-wing organizations are semi-autonomous groups which nevertheless reflect larger cultural trends,” then 1) very little is ultimately learned, and 2) it becomes easy to take up a conservative tack, to moralize or dismiss large swaths of the left as mere reflections of “professional-managerial class” or “postmodern” thinking,[5] to treat the assertion that organizations reflect broader cultural considerations as an invitation to overgeneralize and to dismiss entire organizations or organizational tendencies due to their perceived cultural behaviors. So, let us phrase this differently. Individuals who join left-wing organizations do so for a variety of reasons; many of these reasons are “cultural” in the colloquial sense, meaning that they are derived from beliefs or perceptions explicitly held by individuals, which they have come to hold due to their sustained interactions with others who possess these beliefs or perceptions for similar reasons. Ideally, left-wing organizations would be able to practice politics in a way that respects the variety of cultural reasons members possess for joining the organization, while adhering strictly to strategies conducive to the overcoming of capitalism[6] and to the protection of all members of the organization from internal and external abuse, violence, and harassment. However, the specific cultural considerations underlying an individual or group of individuals’ memberships in a left-wing organization often clash with the cultural tendencies of other members, or of non-members with whom the organization wishes to join themselves—in the classical formula, this would be the sought-after “merger” between the party and working class. 

So, the problem is this: how can an organization address the cultural concerns that it imports from the “outside”—which may include differing religious, racial, ethnic, and gendered backgrounds, diverse personal morals, and distinct, individualized experiences of labor? How can an organization which seeks to “organize” those most exploited by the capitalist world-system, by gendered violence, and by white supremacy account for its own specific cultural constitution and for the cultural constitution of those it seeks to organize, both hyperlocally and at a more general level?

In some ways, this observation and problem might seem self-evident. Of course organizations reflect the elements of broader culture which their members bring into organizing with them. Yet, obvious as it may seem, much left-wing thought suppresses the implications of this observation. Organizations often tend to phrase their practical aims somewhat abstractly, rather than investigating what kinds of organizations they themselves are, the people they have already organized, and the implications of these factors. Respecting organizations as outside-insides involves asking questions regarding the cultural norms a group gives itself based on the cultural norms it imports, often unconsciously, from the outside, as well as investigating the types of cultural norms the group has spontaneously generated since its inception. 

Before discussing what kind of actions I think this theoretical conclusion should encourage within left-wing organizations, let us discuss some failed attempts to deal with this problem, as it has been imperfectly perceived in the past.

Militant Subjectivation, Managerial Cynicism

If we agree that individuals bring cultural norms along with them into the organizations they join, even importing specific forms of thinking and behavior en masse if many people with shared cultural touchstones join an organization at once, then the question arises: how should these “outside” cultural leavings be managed on the “inside,” by the organization itself? There are, I think, two prevalent solutions on offer currently, neither of which address the problem very well.

First, the solution of militant subjectivation, a “classical” response to the outside-inside problem. The advocate of militant subjectivation sees the role of the organizer as the gradual separation of the self from the “external” cultural milieu which formed them, so that they might be reformed as a cultural product of the organization itself, a model of discipline who is able to freely choose to follow the cultural dictates of the organization because their desires have been remodeled as reflections of the organization’s needs.[7] If we think back to the mechanical and voluntaristic models I outlined above, we can see how militant subjectivation clumsily combines the two: an organization is, in this picture, a machine, which operates consistently and in accordance with its ingrained rules; however, the organizational machine can only reproduce itself as such and retain its specific character if its members exercise their voluntary capacities in order to purge themselves of features which are contrary to the operation of the machine. In essence, the advocate of militant subjectivation wishes for the organizer to become more “disciplined,” to mutate their will to adhere to the rules of the machine, which in turn generates a new culture rooted in the rules themselves. 

A glance at the history of communist parties will make it clear that militant subjectivation is quite realizable in the short term; a longer look will show how often even the most successful projects of militant subjectivation have ultimately failed. Even if an organization is capable of creating a mass internal culture which alters the character of its members, and even if these members embrace this internal culture, no organization can ever become a pure inside, immune to the intrusion of exterior cultural elements; moreover, cultures which do somewhat manage this type of insulation for a prolonged period of time often veer into a dangerous, inward-facing cultism inimical to the communist task of confronting the world as a whole. This is not a universal law of militant subjectivation, of course. But what we might generally claim about militant subjectivation is that it fails to account for the fact that even if, at some point, an organization is able to develop an internal culture of discipline upheld by dedicated members, the exterior culture upon which this organization is constantly acting, via the act of organizing, is itself always changing and growing in dynamic ways which will continuously challenge the organization’s internal culture. Even a mass socialist movement composed of dedicated members bought into their organization’s culture will, in time, be challenged by broader changes in culture which make their “discipline” untimely, unable to hold up under new social pressures or unable to support organizing goals. Militant subjectivation is only ever a ticking time-bomb.

The second approach to the outside-inside problem, what I call managerial cynicism, is in many ways a more “contemporary” approach, though hardly better (and perhaps worse) for its contemporaneity. This approach rightly recognizes that “outside” cultures which make new homes “inside” left-wing organizations are not wholly suppressible. Managerial cynics respond to this by arguing that the culture within an organization ought to mimic either a specific “outside” culture or mirror the exigencies of culture taken as a whole—the role of an organization, they say, is to manage itself so that it replicates the immediate needs and desires of either the “average person” (the most violent of abstractions) or the desires of a specific group, usually the (apparently culturally unified) working class.

Such a view leads to the aforementioned diatribes against the professional-managerial class, infinite hand-wringing over the perceived normality of socialist organizers, screeds against postmodernity and wokeness from self-proclaimed left-wingers, and so on. In their attempts to replicate a form of culture which, simply put, does not exist (“working class culture,” “normie culture,” what have you), managerial cynicism develops itself as a new cultural disposition which, far from mapping onto existing cultural trends, opposes itself to them. This version of managerial cynicism often fails before it begins, alienating its proclaimed audience with the obvious particularity (and peculiarity) of its basic, ostensibly universal premise.

However, some managerial cynics are better adapted to the demands of organization, and the more subtle form of managerial cynicism is the more dangerous one. These managerial cynics don’t appeal to the hive-mind of the working class, per se, but rather insist on basing tenets of organization on the popularity of undeniably ubiquitous trends or on commonsensical ideas. Even though the notion of appealing to the desires of the “average person” begins to wear thin when you spend enough time talking to, well, people, the idea that it may be in some cases wrong to foster cultural tendencies which are evidently popular across various cultures and which are supported by polling data or common experiences remains a hard pill for many to swallow. Yet, even more innocuous, calculated tailisms often lead to organizations investing overhastily, both publicly and internally, in pervasive ideas or practices which are not considered in terms of the cultural needs of actual group members; consequently, these cultural investments often backfire and foment unproductive intra-organizational divisions, which itself harms the organization’s cultural relationships with non-members.

Neither the partisan of militant subjectivation nor that of managerial cynicism, then, seem able to fully address the outside-inside problem. Militant subjectivation ignores the changeability of culture and, subsequently, the likelihood that culture will shift in ways which make militancy of older days impossible on new terms; managerial cynics attempt to replicate the cultural demands of the world outside of the organization but either fail to understand the cultural richness of this outside world or, conversely, ignore the cultural needs of their members at the expensive of replicating larger cultural trends or practices. How, then, to address the outside-inside problem? I conclude with a few notes towards answering this question. 

Ships on a Tempest Sea

Left-wing organizations—socialist, anarchist, communist—are neither high hills nor sprawling plains. They are ships on a tempest sea. If the ship’s crew focuses too much on adjusting the ship to the waves, rains, and winds, they may lose their sense of coordination, so necessary for survival; if they focus entirely on keeping their operation in lock-step, on the division of maritime labor, then they may lose sight of the storm, and perish. The key, of course, is to find some balance—but what kind of balance?

The base-building tendency of the late 2010s was buoyed by the hope that its organizations might organize the unorganized, bringing their own skills and enthusiasm to workplaces and communities which had yet to link up with the socialist movement. They wished to avoid the problem of “activism,” which leaves organizing confined to a small in-group of specialists without ever really incorporating workers, the poor, and others targeted by systematic violence and intent on stopping it. In the process, the base-builders briefly noted that before this organization was to begin, groups must take stock of their own backgrounds and relationships to help inform the work ahead. Nearly a decade after the trend emerged, it was all but vanished, due to a variety of factors. One such factor was a failure to sufficiently anticipate that a merely cursory cultural investigation of one’s own organization could lead to the faulty assumption that a base, once organized in a community or workplace, would naturally retain its cultural links to the base-building organization. Of course, without a frank understanding of the nature of the cultural bond between the organization and its base, and of the extremely fragile relation of any such bond, base-building organizations began to fray, and many groups, rather than attempt to take stock of their own cultural qualities and to use this knowledge to reformulate their approach, instead entered a crisis of identity, wherein the fear of cultural inadequacy in relation to an intended base became the catalyst for internal disputes and fruitless pushes for complete, impossible self-reorganization.

How is this kind of mistake to be avoided, and how are related dangers of organizational culture to be overcome? My hope is that the following suggestions may be of use here:

1) Ongoing Organizational Examination. 

Left-wing organizations ought to conduct internal study, frequently and as a matter of routine, of the experiences, skills, and desires of their members. Rather than leaving issues as often uncomfortable as sexual, ethnic, racial, and economic experiences hidden from plain sight, often exacerbating existing cultural tensions, make these experiences plain, while recognizing that none of these experiences ever implies that an individual is necessarily any one specific kind of individual entirely. Even more than this, inquire as to the cultural investments, needs, and histories of individual members: an organization’s greatest (and only necessary) resource is its members, and the wealth of experiences members bring to the collective organizing effort may in fact help provide ideas for new types of outreach, new types of internal political education, and, more importantly, new conversations about shared ideas of socialism, anarchism, and communism. Organizational examinations should never be inquisitions, but need only encourage members to share themselves with others, freely, and to share what they think might be valuable about their experiences for their cause. 

2) Ongoing External Inquiry.

Just as internal examinations are necessary, so too are outward ones. At a macro level, such inquiries are extremely difficult, but for local organizations or chapters, community outreach, formal and informal, can help provide members and the organization as a whole with ideas as to what kinds of things their communities want, how community members agree and disagree on cultural issues, how various workplaces view their work, and so on. Following in the tradition of the worker’s inquiry, this approach allows for organizations to understand how their own histories overlap and diverge with those of members of their community; moreover, the very act of conversation does more to generate new cultural links between community members and organization members with both shared and different cultural backgrounds.

3) Experiential Emphasis.

Taking cultural stock of one’s own organization and the community which that organization seeks to organize is no easy task. It becomes more difficult—and ultimately fruitless—if cultural examination and inquiry become exercises in noting and cataloging identities. Rather than asking for organization members and community members to respond to inquiries like they would a census, ask people about their experiences rather than their ascribed cultural identities. What kind of things are meaningful to people, within and outside of the organization, and how did these things become meaningful to them? What kinds of past experiences do members especially value? An emphasis on experience over identity can provide organizers with a better understanding of the insights their fellow organizers can provide, and also helps to connect organization members possessing unique experiences and histories to community members who may share those experiences and histories, even across other cultural differences. A focus on essentializing the cultural identities of individuals doubtless leads to moralization and games of status; open discussions about personal experiences allow individuals to more productively explain how they view their possible contributions to their organization.

4) Acceptance of Limitations.

An organization’s cultural composition may prevent it, in some cases, from effectively communicating its aims to others and thus from embodying those aims effectively. Left-wing organizations, historically, do not handle such limitations very well, both at the individual and collective level. However, if such limitations are to be transcended, they must first be admitted, communicated within the group, and recognized as a factor affecting an organization’s capacity to connect with community members and with other organizations possessing similar interests. Something as simple as an organization’s reputation in a community, sometimes forged years before current members were even involved with left-wing organizing, can impede free conversation and sincere cultural connection with other local organizations and community members. Accepting these limitations as tangible problems serves as a predicate for discussing these limitations and for making plans to overcome them.

5) Communal Openness.

It is eternally unwise, once an organizational limitation is recognized by the organization’s membership, to attempt to hide this limitation from the community one seeks to organize (though it is equally unwise to overstate this limitation). Rather, for example, a group of organizers relatively new to a city aiming to make connections with longtime residents should make no attempts to hide their own cultural experiences, without apologizing for experiential differences. Organizational limitations will make certain types of organizing activities difficult and perhaps even impossible; attempting to ignore or hide these limitations does nothing to help this, and hand-wringing over them does even less. A spirit of organizational openness permits organizers to be forthright with community members about their differences, encourages them to engage patiently with community members who may have frustrations with the limitations of organizers, and ultimately to grow from the open admission of their own limitations. It is ever difficult, and ever necessary, to avoid dishonesty on the one hand and self-flagellation on the other.

It is, of course, possible that these suggestions are too abstract to be of much help, that they offer only starting points at best and that they must be developed further to be of much use. I think this is likely the case. However, my feeling is that to be more concrete or explicit would be a mistake. These basic indications ought to be only starting points; anything more would be to step from the role of the theorist into the shoes of the organizer, and in truth, the usefulness of each of these suggestions can only be explored and proven in practice. If anything is on offer here, it is an attempt to recognize past failures to mediate between being and thought, between the subjective desires of the members of left-wing organizations and the objective conditions of and obstacles to those desires, which include the unconscious drives behind those desires themselves. Radical mechanism and voluntarism, as well as militant subjectivation and managerial cynicism, are alluring frameworks, but my sincere belief is that if we simply replicate these past and ongoing views of the problem of organizational culture, we will only continue to fail to solve it, in increasingly humiliating ways. Instead, we must try to understand ourselves as thinking reeds, radically constituted and constituting, and to locate ourselves at the crossroads of the cultural formation which makes us what we are and the forms of organization that may give us the ability to alter our cultural futures.

Notes

  1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and other writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 72-73.
  2. Simone de Beauvoir, “What is Existentialism?” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret Simons, Marybeth Timmerman, Mary Beth Mader (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press): 325.
  3. In “Contra Fortuna,” written for a previous Negation dossier, I criticized voluntaristic conceptions of organization, specifically in relation to the party-form. While “Contra Fortuna” at times entertains an overly mechanical notion of organization, I still view the current essay as a continuation and development of my prior position. See “Contra Fortuna” in The Specter of the Party, Negation Magazine, 2022: 103-130.
  4. As I see it, nothing about this claim contradicts Marx’s most crucial philosophical insight, which in my view is not (as is often claimed) simply that “material” forces dictate possible forms of thought, but rather that systematic social relations, specifically labor-processes amalgamated under particular relations of production, emerge as a result of internal or contingent failures of earlier such relations and processes, and that these relations are only reproduced only insofar as they in turn generate new labor-processes, forms of thought, and political relations that buttress the existence of the entire social system without fundamentally changing its nature. The claim that thought and being are in some sense interdependent accords neither thought nor being an independent ontological status and it does not deny that modes of production act as a restraint on the possible forms of thought in a given epoch. Rather, the claim states that thought and desire form a part of the system’s reproduction, much as the process of thought parallels, challenges, and defines, consciously and unconsciously, the process of bodily activity which in some sense acts as its condition.
  5. See Andrew McWhinney’s essay in this volume for a discussion of this problem.
  6. Obviously, determining these “strategies conducive to the destruction of capitalism” is another massive problem. However, in order to address that problem, I believe it is necessary for an organization to answer, in some way, what kind of organization it is, both on paper and as a cultural product. I focus primarily on this latter question.
  7. See Chloe Cannon’s essay in this volume for a far more incisive analysis of this form of subjectivation.