The Political and Pre-Political

Having surveyed the political landscape of America and the imperial core, the ILC sets forth a theory of pre-politics to build a class-conscious project in this condition of advanced capitalist production. Accepting this charge, it is now for us to elaborate the theoretical definition and justification for the practice of pre-politics, and interrogate the historical precedent for this use. Through this it is necessary to clarify what politics entails, distinguish various subtypes and developments that class struggle has had to contend with in the 21st century, and how pre-politics can work for the working class. We will then observe how pre-politics is an essential moment in any political struggle through the careful examination of historical conflicts, which will ultimately allow us to pose our own program. The activities of the ILC can then be demonstrated as part of a program to build a foundation for class struggle, and to serve as an example for others looking to develop a comprehensive movement under the difficult material pressures of contemporary capitalism.

To begin we must first define what we mean by politics. To that end I propose a significantly abstracted definition which can help us define the specifics of politics in different historical epochs while maintaining a common understanding of human social relations. Politics is the gathering of groups of people for the purposes of employing, or withholding, their labor around and towards specific material ends, as set in direct opposition to at least one other group of people.

I expect some will take issue with this definition, and understandably. Attempts to transhistoricize particular political struggles have an ignominious record, especially when applied towards pre-state societies. Yet even these social formations have a form of politics, dealing as they all do with the gendered division of labor. That patriarchal systems are as common as they are points towards a specific antagonism that has to be mediated, whether through the propagation of religious ideology, direct coercive force, or threats thereof. However those forces alone can’t comprise what we colloquially know as politics, in spite of pejoratives about office or family politics. That only takes form when those forces are leveraged through the development of the state.

While the particulars are still debated, it is clear archaeologically that whether in the fertile crescent, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, or the Andean plane, the surplus provided by settled agriculture — farming, aquaculture, and/or the domestication of livestock — is coincident with the development of class society. Whether dominated from without or within, the increasing division of labor this surplus enables the creation of the state, which takes hold as a means to mediate, administer, and therefore enforce class rule.

Through the state, class rule leverages coercive and ideological force on a transformative scale. Managing hundreds of thousands through millions of people or more, the threat of violence alongside religious indoctrination formed the bedrock of politics, oriented first towards the maintenance of a subaltern class from whom the majority of work was extracted. Institutional forms took on distinct characteristics dependent on the mode of production at play, from the Patrician obligations and compelled labor of the Roman state to the feudal obligations of the middle ages. These operations kept the great masses of people locked in an arrangement where their capacity to act politically was obliterated, and formed the base of the explicit politics of earlier eras.

For the majority of history politics as conscious activity was the domain of the aristocracy, the soldiers, and the clergy, but in all systems of power the underlying foundation is labor. No coercive force can be applied unless a man holds a spear to the neck of their opponent. No ideological pressure can bear on a polity if the priests and their deacons don’t debate, and produce the stories and symbols which justify, in the minds of their flock, their lot in life. These tools are then arrayed against other segments of the ruling classes. The force of arms and religion brought down upon the Gracchi brothers by the reactionary segments of the Roman nobility, the squabbles between Feudal lords in neighboring territories over ancestral land rights, theological disputes by nobles against the prerogatives of the church, or the conflicts of the Franks against the Islamic rulers of the Levant, in all cases required the gathering and subsequent mobilization of ideological and martial labor. It is within the gathering that we can find the pre-political.

Instances of pre-political projects in the pre-modern era are by nature difficult to cite, in particular those involved in direct class conflict. One can argue that the earliest Christian communities operated as pre-political formations, and that other mystery cults like the Mithraic count as well, especially considering the character of these groups in a specific moment of class tumult and shift from the Roman slave economy. However the long transition from high medieval feudalism to modern capitalism presents us with an abundance of examples, the bulk found within the developing sphere of “civil society”.

Civil Society as Capitalist Phenomenon

The coincident events of the Little Ice Age and Black Death leading to loss of life approaching half the population and depressing agricultural production for years upended not only ideological forms of rule but economic ones as well, with the freeing of wage labor and the burghers’ harnessing of this economic power fashioning them into a third political force. Supported by the financialization of the North Italian merchant republics, the independent merchants of the Hanse, and the myriad free cities of the Holy Roman Empire, the surplus value of a new, more mobile peasantry could move more freely as well. Formed in the high medieval period, the engines of proto-bourgeois self-governance that were the craft guilds – already imbued in dialectical crisis between the master and journeyman – mark the earliest bourgeois pre-political forms we can point towards. While operating explicitly as political factions by the end of the period, their earliest formation as mutual aid societies, coordinators of production and quality of work, set the stage for the outright politics through economic power that would follow.

The displacement of peasant populations pushed by bourgeois figures, most dramatically in Britain with the enclosures, threw newly landless people into the workshops of London and Manchester to be further mechanized in a massed and deskilling industry. States facing the civil unrest from this violent upheaval of social relations pursued relief through colonization, facilitating not just low-cost resource extraction and creation of new markets, but a promise of individual agency through adoption of a yeoman lifestyle and the pride of a frontier homesteader. This ushers in the formation of “society,” one more fundamentally transformative relation birthed from the development of capitalism. Rather than the regular daily associations of communal life, the peasant village and the feudal court, society plucks its subjects from their homes, educates them in the ways of their waged profession (whether in private industry or the functions of government), then places them in the position where their labor can be most profitably applied. Each individual’s social relations become further alienated while the production of commodities alienates the worker from their product, driving the formation of civil society organizations. Within these associations the pre-politics of the bourgeois revolutions form.

The Protestant and Reformed churches should be thought of as some of the earliest pre-political spaces in this transition. Within the theological debates and discussions that took hold in the courts of northern Europe, the development of the ideology of capitalism’s practice incubated. The speed with which they became explicitly political undercuts looking towards them as a model for the pre-political dynamic, such as they were immediately forced into outright conflict with the Catholic Church. More illuminating are the Freemasons, born from the fraternal orders of stonemason guilds in England employing language and rituals which, while distinct from the particular traditions of the institutionally stronger continental guilds, provided a common and legible civil-social space whereby the increasingly empowered bourgeoisie could congregate; and, importantly, a space that itself never became a direct center of political action.

The importance of this and similar esoteric orders can scarcely be overstated. A central contradiction of a bourgeois ruling class is the inherent lack of trust in a society built on exchange; while value may not be revealed through the individual drive to “buy low and sell dear,” the merchant believes this to be the case, and, left to an unrestricted market, this would quickly tear apart any semblance of class solidarity. For this reason the bank and trust were formed, and, through religious community, a daily life under market competition could be maintained. In the same way, the fraternal order creates an association of members of the class, with rites of initiation and building of trust through mutual aid and public philanthropy; here the class develops not just a common identity but reproduces the behaviors that sustains itself.

Later cycles of capital accumulation would drive further development of these civil societies. In most cases we’ve investigated, they were responses to the disruptions capitalist development created. The American college Greek Societies began as literary associations of classics-obsessed students in the mid-19th century. When the universities they attended found themselves in a financial pinch precipitated by losses from the various railroad swindles of the time, these societies of bourgeois youths pooled their resources and became landowners, providing housing for themselves and future students. Emulating their Masonic forebears they developed rituals of initiation, and in their daily function engaged in a socializing that reinforced essential behaviors of their class, such as philanthropy, networking, and, of particular salience as women were integrated into the workforce, gendered social roles.

The forces at play also drove the development of civic associations among the emerging proletariat. The Knights of Labor initially organized as an association of craftspeople seeking to protect their control over the tools of their trade, while the International Worker’s Order was the collection in New York of myriad immigrant mutual aid communities, forming, from the proletariat of segregated ethnic communities, a fully proletarian class organization. The former would develop into an explicitly political force of union organizing, while the latter became an important base from which prominent members of the CPUSA would hail. In both, the early building of social relations facilitated the later political activities of the class itself.

Advanced Stage Disassembly

Which brings us to the present. Armed now with the examples of civil society as workshops of pre-politics, we may apply our understanding of the moment towards the reconstruction of a real politics for the working class. While the early 20th century saw the development of an increasing number of both explicitly political proletarian groups and pre-political civil society organizations, the tremendous economic power of capital has torn these systems apart. Most important in this analysis is capital’s demand for atomized subjects.

While driven by unconscious needs, it would be a mistake to describe this development as accidental. As the workers of the world developed class consciousness and organized power, the ruling class embarked on a conscious effort to break up the social conditions that brought them together. Previously, capitalism would force workers into dense urban factory production and an associated concentrated housing, making apparent the conditions of their exploitation, and with their shared knowledge would teach the class the power they hold as producers of value. Faced with this threat, the forces of reaction systematically broke this association. Efforts to disinvest in the tenements of inner cities and encourage the adoption of single-family housing sought to diffuse the radical sentiments incubated previously. This was buttressed by the Fordist compromise, which promoted the nuclear family and division of labor for an ideologically bourgeois social reproduction through tax statutes and cultural production. Public transportation faced systematic disinvestment enabled by the personal automobile, which further facilitated the breaking up of exploited communities through the razing of their neighborhoods for the interstate highway system. This increased personal mobility while an increasing reliance on trucking moved the heavy manufacturing from the city centers towards the far suburbs, and capital’s natural tendency towards automation broke down the density of workers on the factory floor.

All this has had the effect of creating a subject population that thinks of itself as an amorphous mass of individuals rather than a class with a collective power. Workers are more easily corralled into new markets, facilitating the realization of value through their consumption of commodities, many with questionable use value in either personal or social reproduction. Further, they’re more easily detached from the communities of their birth, ensuring the optimal application of their skilled labor for the economy that, in the absence of a strong national - and still further, international - labor movement, prevents their developing a shared consciousness of struggle with their fellow workers. Later mass media technologies, in particular the internet and social media, have further accelerated this trend, destroying countervailing tendencies by providing an impersonal simulacra of social life.

The damage this has visited on working class politics is stark, with knock-on effects for our daily lives we are still culturally grasping at. This has been dramatic in the proletarian sphere of civil society. Through the middle of the 20th century groups like the IWO were targeted for destruction; in the IWO’s specific case their status as insurance providers served as pretext for the state of New York to employ judicial harassment and shut down their operations. Importantly, this has also impacted the sphere of bourgeois civil-society organizations; while engines of the large capitalists such as the Bohemian Grove or the Explorer’s Club remain, groups like the Elks or Rotary Clubs, as well as the Freemasons themselves have seen membership decline. The latter has seen such a drop in membership that the perennial targets of the conspiratorially obsessed have begun to reveal (some) of their secrets and rituals in the hope of drawing in new members.

This is the clearest sign of the success of capital’s drive to atomize its subjects, and we’re witness daily to the deleterious effects. Internet communities have filled the void created by this process, and while notable centers of anti-capitalist activity have been made possible by this, they are no replacement for in-person community. Further, by exploiting the snap reactions that feed the satisfaction of an unthinking libidinal impulse, social media platforms have given reactionary movements a natural home. What had previously been the purview of mimeograph cranks, the likes of Flat-Earthers - just one example among many - have exploded, undermining hard fought programs of public education advocated by past generations of the working class. People on the edges of severe mental illness have been pushed further into delusions, illustrated clearly by online “gang-stalking support groups,” who validate and reinforce the paranoid delusions of their members - using, ironically, the most easily surveilled form of communication in existence - pushing them further from the community support that could prevent them from falling out of the already insufficient social support capitalism permits.

Naturally the left has not been immune to these forces. Inchoate as they are, scattered on Twitter, TikTok, podcasts, and YouTube, they are all susceptible to the dual forces of celebrity and discourse. Parasocial bonds are naturally generated by the rapid nature of digital mass communication, with figures rarely engaged in the kinds of hard real world organizing that is necessary for politics to take place. This represents not a moral failure on their part, as the compensation incentives from views or clicks drives a need for investing in these platforms labor hours in service of further capital accumulation. The result is hyperpolitics, where the online celebrity is incentivized to take dramatic positions while their parasocial followers invest psychic energy in online discourse attacking critics as a means to demonstrate their possession of the “correct” position. This recently reached heights of absurdity with the rise of “patriotic-socialism” or “MAGA-communism”, “movements” which exist primarily online, preying upon politically minded individuals subject to the ruling ideology of culture war against “woke” and preventing the completion of their political education into agents of the working classes.

Reconstitution of Civil Society for Pre-Politics

While circumstances may seem particularly bleak, it also presents an opportunity. Having elaborated our historical analysis of civil-social organization as a locus for the pre-political project, a productive angle of action presents itself. With civil society disintegrating, a real social need is going unmet. To build and provide that on its own is a project worth undertaking, to act as a balm to the soul of the atomized worker starved for human connection, for art, for discussion and joy set by and enjoyed on our own terms. And in those spaces, in that moment, brought together as a class for that class, the engine of class consciousness can take hold. Through intentional self-association, active participation in a consciously-engaged socialization with humility towards other members of the class, we can build the assembly of people that goes into action, our labor either put towards or withheld around specific material ends, in contraposition to bourgeois society.

This is the mission of the ILC, one which, I must stress, does not stand in place of politics. It doesn’t even stand in the way of politics; the civil associations such an organization can provide have historically worked as a tegument linking formerly disparate parts of a class. Would the political action which rebelled against the British crown have been possible without the Masonic brotherhood which American revolutionaries shared? Could the force of popular sentiment which turned against slavery have been possible absent the Quaker meeting houses and Abolitionist societies of the mid-19th century? Would the Bolsheviks have found a base to set forward absent the workers’ reading groups that met and built, on their own terms, the revolutionary consciousness that propelled them towards victory?

At the time of writing the ILC is barely a year old, but in that time in New York City we’ve undertaken several public events. Club organized trips to Citi Field for a Mets game, bowling and bad movie nights, as well as a chili cook-off for May Day in 2025; all low pressure gatherings organized by the working class membership of the club, echoing the Rotary club pancake breakfast, or union hall bowling leagues. These events were conceived and developed as products of our memberships, discussed and organized through theoretical discussions and general meetings. We have also buttressed these less politicized gatherings with our General Assemblies, where a topic of concern facing the working class brings together rank and file workers on the topic at hand. While starting as a panel discussion, rather than concluding with Q&A sessions we bring all assembled into a round and in our Town Hall format solicit a discourse on the subject at hand, drawing out ideas, fears and hopes to develop a greater comprehension of the working class is, rather than how it is imagined. In this we take the professional lecture and elevate it out of the academy and into a format directly responsive to the material experience of the working classes.

It remains to be seen just how our project will grow and adapt to inevitable historical developments. In earlier pre-political formations, such an organization has at times transitioned from pre-politics to frank politics, and this may be what the future holds for the ILC. Others in our ranks have argued that the pre-political project is important for the healthy development of a society ruled by the working class. It is a near certainty that some form of “politics” will continue if this shift in rule occurs, and debates are still being engaged around whether politics itself will exist under conditions of full communism. Will factions contending for specific group priorities come into conflict under a mature communist society where class has been abolished? Or will we be witness to an “administration of things”? These are questions so removed from our current condition as to be effectively speculative fiction, but if we are to reach that point at all pre-political projects will be needed to incubate the developing politics to lead us there. Here I personally argue it would be worth considering a project like the ILC as a truly multi-generational one, a venue by which the transmission of ideas, cultural practices, and the means of class survival and social reproduction can be mediated on our own terms. Terms that if we look with clear eyes will see transcend our individual status and embody the project of our class towards the future.