About Decay and Rebuilding

Who are we?

Decay & Rebuilding is a communist and marxist educational project with the aim of combating sectarian and reductionist tendencies within the socialist movement. That means we do not accept the manner in which theoretical positions are posited as explanations of historical and political phenomena and view approaches which situate theory in this way – for example, a reductive approach to modes of production which stipulates class categories as uncomplicated social realities (ie. “there is the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and this alone”) - as actively harmful to the Marxist tendency and the proletarian movement.

We are of the opinion that the western (roughly, Europe and the United States) communist movement has, beginning in the second half of the 20th Century, fallen into a deep malaise. Instead of parties rooted in a real social and class basis, we are now presented with innumerable sects, rooted in a mixed and fluid social milieu. Rather than a “simple” ideological problem, this reflects the historical defeats, fragmentation and disorganisation of western workers’ movements. To reconstitute the communist movement is, therefore, not a matter of founding the “best sect”, but a complex historical and political question, the answer to which has yet to be found. We view this project as an attempt to not only put that question on the map, though we are not so arrogant as to suppose we may answer it, but also as an attempt to make the movement more habitable by forging meaningful connections between comrades during welcoming events.

We are anti-oppression and anti-sectarian. We do not tolerate discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, nationality or disability. Moreover, we do not think any politics which neglects these phenomena can rise to the moment. To combat those tendencies we aim to provide a space in which we can help build up comrades from oppressed groups to wage their struggle for liberation. Alongside this, we view sectarian tendencies and the process of making any disagreement into an insurmountable problem as anathema to a serious process of movement building.

What do we do?

With this project we endeavour to organise several educational events open to comrades throughout Europe. One of our goals is to build solid networks and connections between comrades internationally paving the way for further cooperation between organisations of different nationalities. In order to achieve that we ensure that the participants in our events come from diverse national contexts and we aim to create an atmosphere of good comradery encouraging the creation of meaningful connections between comrades.

With regards to combating sectarian tendencies found within today’s left, our strategy is twofold. First we try to bridge the gap usually found between educators and their audience by placing ourselves in a situation where we are in a position of learning alongside our participants. This allows for an easier questioning of the events’ content encouraging critical thoughts and fostering a healthy environment in which to express disagreements. Second, we do not claim to bring definitive answers to the questions we raise during our educationals, only potential solutions. This may seem like a show of weakness on our part but we think it is the contrary: we can not pretend to have definitive answers before they have been proven to work in our contemporary contexts.

each event we also endeavour to succeed in giving participants the means to better engage with materialist and historical research in ways that are linked with their organising practices. In addition we also aim to encourage participants to apply theory to actions and to get involved in movements on the ground, in their respective contexts. As stated previously we aim to do that through a fostering of international comradery and the development of an anti-sectarian tendency but there is a third component in our strategy. A lot of today’s marxism events and content are more often than not geared towards theoretical and abstract debates with little practical content. We, on the contrary, try to gear our events towards more practical questions. To us if a participant is leaving one of our events without a clearer idea of what concrete actions they can take to better participate in organising and movement building then we have failed in our mission. To avoid that we place great emphasis on questions of contemporary strategies and tactics within the organising context of each participant.

On a final note, organising those events is a learning process for us educators and organisers. We organise those events to the best of our abilities and we very much rely on and welcome any kind of feedback from participants to help us better ourselves for the next time.