145.-individual-projectuality-and-affinity.pdf
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Individual projectuality and
affinity

the nature of affinity groups

Anonymous

March 2009
Contents

‘The anarchist individual projectuality
‘The affinity group

‘The emptying of affinity and of affinity groups
Final considerations
“Projectuality:

starting position that tries to have, from the beginning
till the end of the struggle, a global vision — but con-
tinuously looking at the changing of necessities ~ of the
elements that compose and characterize it"

(Su gazetinu de sa luta kontras a sas presones #0)

‘The anarchist individual projectuality

For us to act on life, instead of it being something that happens
to us, we need to know what we desire and how to try to attain
it, we need to know who prevents us from doing it and who are
our potential accomplices in this collective adventure for individ-
ual freedom.

‘The anarchist individual projectuality is born from this reflec-
tion and from the will and the disposition to act according to it.
It is a question of taking the initiative over life, of acting to break
and create contexts, and not to respond to a context. Developing an
individual projectuality, the individual acts according to his princi-
ples and goals, be it before or after a given situation. That situation,
instead of conditioning him to act in a given way, offers him cues
that contribute to the development of his own project, according
to which he continues to act.

In practice, I feel that the anarchist projectuality is a question of
taking the initiative and of being prepared, because you have, from
the start, a global vision of reality and of ourselves.

Therefore, we take the initiative because our actions are the be~
ginning of other possibilities, and this beginning is born from the
attack on the existent. Besides, this initiative has the essential char-
acteristic of us not waiting for the “time to be ripe” to act, because
waiting only brings more waiting. It’s us ourselves that create the
possibility of something else. At the same time, to be prepared
means to know what we want to do in a given moment, analyz-
ing the elements at play and how, starting from our own principles
and goals, we want to act on them. Being prepared results, mainly,
from a perspective that we have over reality, a perspective that,
very often, takes us into hypothesis, situations, methods, enemies
and comrades long before we're there.

‘The affinity group

Frequently our individual projectuality joins us together with
other comrades in affinity groups to carry on a specific common
project. We get together temporarily, and because during our own
individual project we found comrades that found us during their
own individual project, and in this encounter we discussed per-
spectives over the reality and over our own surreality, we discussed
needs and desires. And in this discussion and knowing we discov-
ered some specific affinity.

‘The affinity group is, by definition, made up by individuals that
share a specific affinity. To know their affinities, the individuals
need to know and discuss the ideas and wills of each one of them,
and how each one sees reality and how he wants to act on it. It’s a
relation of deepening the knowledge among the individuals. And to
have this knowledge between individuals, each one needs to know
what he wants out of his life, what is the analysis he makes of so-
ciety and how he wants to fight against it and for that which he
wants, Everything begins, therefore, from an individual projectu-
ality that, when expressed, can discover points of affinity we may
have with others with whom we can discuss a specific common
projectuality.
‘The emptying of affinity and of affinity
groups

When the common project diverges from the individual project,
the affinity ceases to exist, and it’s obviously time for the comrades
to dissolve the affinity group. If this dissolution isn’t done, and the
group keeps dragging itself independently of the individuals and/
or the individual wills involved, the group ceases to be based on
affinity, at the same time that it starts existing for itself, reproduc-
ing the kind of permanent and formal relations that exist, for exam-
ple, in an anarcho-syndicalist union and in the rest of society. And,
in this way, everything that initially originated the affinity group
is subverted, the affinity ceases to exist and the groups ceases to
make any sense.

Frequently, we see comrades forming groups that, from the start,
empty the concept of affinity and of informal organization. This
is the case of the agglomeration groups (I don't find a better con-
cept) that, taking an activity that somehow was decided to be done
(or an organization that was decided to exist for itself), go after-
wards picking people up to make numbers and/or to do that activity
or to compose that organization. Then, these people agglomerate
themselves in this group, having no mutual knowledge between
the individuals and/or with no affinity between them, Then, we
see the people that constitute these groups fighting each other at
the same time they start discovering what each one really wants
and how he wants it (and this when they even do these discoveries),
while the group stagnates or drags and deteriorates itself, following
what was decided from the start. Often we hear calling this kind of
groups “affinity groups”, even though there's no affinity between
the agglomerated individuals, and the concept of agglomeration it-
self is opposed to the qualitative strength of a common anarchist
project of a few comrades, to the deepening of knowledge and to
the clarifying of affinities. There is a changing of qualitative rela-
tions for quantitative relations, sometimes against the will of some
of the comrades involved in these groups that would prefer to de-
velop different relations, but that can’t see another way to do the
things they'd like to see being done.

I think that the emptying of affinity groups have been growing
in more recent years, specially since the anti-WTO demonstrations
in Seattle, in 1999. Nowadays we've come to the point of having
“affinity groups workshops”, done by activists, where those who
show up are invited to form “affinity groups” with people they
don't know and/or with whom they don’t have any affinity, for
example around activities typical of this kind of demonstrations
(legal group, street medics group, noise-making group, window-
breaking group, etc...) I think it is useless to refer the complete
absence of any qualitative and revolutionary element in this kind
of workshops, in the agglomeration groups composed in them and
in the relations they propose, as well as the fact that they don’t
have anything to do with affinity or affinity groups.



Final considerations

‘To sum up, it seems to me that, in different ways, the concept of
affinity has been being emptied of its content with the passing of
the years, and that in this way it has been losing all its revolution-
ary potential as the basis of informal organization.

If an individual projectuality developed by each individual
doesn’t exist, there is the tendency of his individual projects end
up being outlined by the projects of the agglomeration group,
and of existing a complete and practically uncritical identification
with that group. If that individual projectuality does exist but
diverges from the projects developed by the group, existing no
affinity between the comrades, each individual ends up frustrated,
enclosed in projects that say him/her nothing and that diverge
from his/her analysis and desires.It is also possible that those
individual projectualities exist but that the comrades prefer not to
discuss them, for example, because of an attempt to not evidence
differences that may put their union in jeopardy, an union that is
based, therefore, on the silencing of the individuals. In any case,
the individual is controlled/dragged by the collective, just like
what happens in the rest of society.

‘The affinity group, on the other hand, is based on the discovered
and developed affinities between comrades that deepen the knowl-
edge of one another. This mutual knowledge, in its own turn, can
only reach all its potential if each comrade keeps developing his!
her own individual projectuality, his/her own way to look at reality
and how he/she wants to act on it, based on his/her own personal
desires and goals. In this way, two or more comrades can meet and
coordinate themselves in a kind of informal organization that is
logically directioned towards action, that emerges from their per-
sonal projects and that doesn’t exist in time beyond the adequate.
‘The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Anonymous
Individual projectuality and affinity
the nature of affinity groups
‘March 2009

Terra Incognita ...here be dragons... march 2009 [taken from:
Saltar para 0 Desconhecido, #2 (portugese)]
‘Taken from: “Terra Incognita ... here be dragons... march 2009";
source named in “Terra Incognita”: “Saltar para o Desconhecido,
#2” (jumping into the unknown).

theanarchistlibrary.org