hydrarchist write:"The following article was written in the context of the Carnival against Capitalism in London in 1999. That said, the themes which this critique evokes have obvious relevance to the general culture, and impediments to, agitation of recent years. This piece was published in Do Or Die number 9. Enjoy
Give Up Activism
In
1999, in the aftermath of the June 18th global day of action, a pamphlet called
Reflections on June 18th was produced by some people in London,
as an open-access collection of "contributions on the politics behind the events
that occurred in the City of London on June 18, 1999". Contained in this collection
was an article called 'Give up Activism' which has generated quite a lot of discussion
and debate both in the UK and internationally, being translated into several languages
and reproduced in several different publications.[1] Here we republish the article
together with a new postscript by the author addressing some comments and criticisms
received since the original publication.
[See also the Postscript
to this article]
One problem apparent in the June 18th day of action was
the adoption of an activist mentality. This problem became particularly obvious
with June 18th precisely because the people involved in organising it and the
people involved on the day tried to push beyond these limitations. This piece
is no criticism of anyone involved - rather an attempt to inspire some thought
on the challenges that confront us if we are really serious in our intention of
doing away with the capitalist mode of production.
Experts
By
'an activist mentality' what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily
as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist
identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job
or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor
or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing,
it becomes an essential part of their self-image.
The activist is a specialist
or an expert in social change. To think of yourself as being an activist means
to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others
in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to
achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle
to create this change.
Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in
the division of labour - it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour
is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between
mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine
or education - instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge
and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised
property of doctors and teachers - experts that we must rely on to do these things
for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people
separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.
A
division of labour implies that one person takes on a role on behalf of many others
who relinquish this responsibility. A separation of tasks means that other people
will grow your food and make your clothes and supply your electricity while you
get on with achieving social change. The activist, being an expert in social change,
assumes that other people aren't doing anything to change their lives and so feels
a duty or a responsibility to do it on their behalf. Activists think they are
compensating for the lack of activity by others. Defining ourselves as activists
means defining our actions as the ones which will bring about social change,
thus disregarding the activity of thousands upon thousands of other non-activists.
Activism is based on this misconception that it is only activists who do social
change - whereas of course class struggle is happening all the time.
Form
and Content
The tension between the form of 'activism'
in which our political activity appears and its increasingly radical content has
only been growing over the last few years. The background of a lot of the people
involved in June 18th is of being 'activists' who 'campaign' on an 'issue'. The
political progress that has been made in the activist scene over the last few
years has resulted in a situation where many people have moved beyond single issue
campaigns against specific companies or developments to a rather ill-defined yet
nonetheless promising anti-capitalist perspective. Yet although the content of
the campaigning activity has altered, the form of activism has not. So instead
of taking on Monsanto and going to their headquarters and occupying it, we have
now seen beyond the single facet of capital represented by Monsanto and so develop
a 'campaign' against capitalism. And where better to go and occupy than what is
perceived as being the headquarters of capitalism - the City?
Our methods
of operating are still the same as if we were taking on a specific corporation
or development, despite the fact that capitalism is not at all the same sort of
thing and the ways in which one might bring down a particular company are not
at all the same as the ways in which you might bring down capitalism. For example,
vigorous campaigning by animal rights activists has succeeded in wrecking both
Consort dog breeders and Hillgrove Farm cat breeders. The businesses were ruined
and went into receivership. Similarly the campaign waged against arch-vivisectionists
Huntingdon Life Sciences succeeded in reducing their share price by 33%, but the
company just about managed to survive by running a desperate PR campaign in the
City to pick up prices.[2] Activism can very successfully accomplish bringing
down a business, yet to bring down capitalism a lot more will be required than
to simply extend this sort of activity to every business in every sector. Similarly
with the targetting of butcher's shops by animal rights activists, the net result
is probably only to aid the supermarkets in closing down all the small butcher's
shops, thus assisting the process of competition and the 'natural selection' of
the marketplace. Thus activists often succeed in destroying one small business
while strengthening capital overall.
A similar thing applies with anti-roads
activism. Wide-scale anti-roads protests have created opportunities for a whole
new sector of capitalism - security, surveillance, tunnellers, climbers, experts
and consultants. We are now one 'market risk' among others to be taken into account
when bidding for a roads contract. We may have actually assisted the rule of market
forces, by forcing out the companies that are weakest and least able to cope.
Protest-bashing consultant Amanda Webster says: "The advent of the protest movement
will actually provide market advantages to those contractors who can handle it
effectively."[3] Again activism can bring down a business or stop a road but capitalism
carries merrily on, if anything stronger than before.
These things are surely
an indication, if one were needed, that tackling capitalism will require not only
a quantitative change (more actions, more activists) but a qualitative one (we
need to discover some more effective form of operating). It seems we have very
little idea of what it might actually require to bring down capitalism. As if
all it needed was some sort of critical mass of activists occupying offices to
be reached and then we'd have a revolution...
The form of activism has been
preserved even while the content of this activity has moved beyond the form that
contains it. We still think in terms of being 'activists' doing a 'campaign' on
an 'issue', and because we are 'direct action' activists we will go and 'do an
action' against our target. The method of campaigning against specific developments
or single companies has been carried over into this new thing of taking on capitalism.
We're attempting to take on capitalism and conceptualising what we're doing in
completely inappropriate terms, utilising a method of operating appropriate to
liberal reformism. So we have the bizarre spectacle of 'doing an action' against
capitalism - an utterly inadequate practice.
Roles
The
role of the 'activist' is a role we adopt just like that of policeman, parent
or priest - a strange psychological form we use to define ourselves and our relation
to others. The 'activist' is a specialist or an expert in social change - yet
the harder we cling to this role and notion of what we are, the more we actually
impede the change we desire. A real revolution will involve the breaking out of
all preconceived roles and the destruction of all specialism - the reclamation
of our lives. The seizing control over our own destinies which is the act of revolution
will involve the creation of new selves and new forms of interaction and community.
'Experts' in anything can only hinder this.
The Situationist International
developed a stringent critique of roles and particularly the role of 'the militant'.
Their criticism was mainly directed against leftist and social-democratic ideologies
because that was mainly what they encountered. Although these forms of alienation
still exist and are plain to be seen, in our particular milieu it is the liberal
activist we encounter more often than the leftist militant. Nevertheless, they
share many features in common (which of course is not surprising).
The Situationist
Raoul Vaneigem defined roles like this: "Stereotypes are the dominant images of
a period... The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form
of behaviour. The repetition of an attitude creates a role." To play a role is
to cultivate an appearance to the neglect of everything authentic: "we succumb
to the seduction of borrowed attitudes." As role-players we dwell in inauthenticity
- reducing our lives to a string of clichés - "breaking [our] day down
into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant
stereotypes."[4] This process has been at work since the early days of the anti-roads
movement. At Twyford Down after Yellow Wednesday in December 92, press and media
coverage focused on the Dongas Tribe and the dreadlocked countercultural aspect
of the protests. Initially this was by no means the predominant element - there
was a large group of ramblers at the eviction for example.[5] But people attracted
to Twyford by the media coverage thought every single person there had dreadlocks.
The media coverage had the effect of making 'ordinary' people stay away and more
dreadlocked countercultural types turned up - decreasing the diversity of the
protests. More recently, a similar thing has happened in the way in which people
drawn to protest sites by the coverage of Swampy they had seen on TV began to
replicate in their own lives the attitudes presented by the media as characteristic
of the role of the 'eco-warrior'.[6]
"Just as the passivity of the consumer
is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability
to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. The repetition
of images and stereotypes offers a set of models from which everyone is supposed
to choose a role."[7] The role of the militant or activist is just one of these
roles, and therein, despite all the revolutionary rhetoric that goes with the
role, lies its ultimate conservatism.
The supposedly revolutionary activity
of the activist is a dull and sterile routine - a constant repetition of a few
actions with no potential for change. Activists would probably resist change if
it came because it would disrupt the easy certainties of their role and the nice
little niche they've carved out for themselves. Like union bosses, activists are
eternal representatives and mediators. In the same way as union leaders would
be against their workers actually succeeding in their struggle because this would
put them out of a job, the role of the activist is threatened by change. Indeed
revolution, or even any real moves in that direction, would profoundly upset activists
by depriving them of their role. If everyone is becoming revolutionary
then you're not so special anymore, are you?
So why do we behave like activists?
Simply because it's the easy cowards' option? It is easy to fall into playing
the activist role because it fits into this society and doesn't challenge it -
activism is an accepted form of dissent. Even if as activists we are doing things
which are not accepted and are illegal, the form of activism itself - the way
it is like a job - means that it fits in with our psychology and our upbringing.
It has a certain attraction precisely because it is not revolutionary.
We Don't Need Any More Martyrs
The key to understanding
both the role of the militant and the activist is self-sacrifice - the sacrifice
of the self to 'the cause' which is seen as being separate from the self. This
of course has nothing to do with real revolutionary activity which is the seizing
of the self. Revolutionary martyrdom goes together with the identification of
some cause separate from one's own life - an action against capitalism which identifies
capitalism as 'out there' in the City is fundamentally mistaken - the real power
of capital is right here in our everyday lives - we re-create its power every
day because capital is not a thing but a social relation between people (and hence
classes) mediated by things.
Of course I am not suggesting that everyone
who was involved in June 18th shares in the adoption of this role and the self-sacrifice
that goes with it to an equal extent. As I said above, the problem of activism
was made particularly apparent by June 18th precisely because it was an attempt
to break from these roles and our normal ways of operating. Much of what is outlined
here is a 'worst case scenario' of what playing the role of an activist can lead
to. The extent to which we can recognise this within our own movement will give
us an indication of how much work there is still to be done.
The activist
makes politics dull and sterile and drives people away from it, but playing the
role also fucks up the activist herself. The role of the activist creates a separation
between ends and means: self-sacrifice means creating a division between the revolution
as love and joy in the future but duty and routine now. The worldview of activism
is dominated by guilt and duty because the activist is not fighting for herself
but for a separate cause: "All causes are equally inhuman."[8]
As
an activist you have to deny your own desires because your political activity
is defined such that these things do not count as 'politics'. You put 'politics'
in a separate box to the rest of your life - it's like a job... you do 'politics'
9-5 and then go home and do something else. Because it is in this separate box,
'politics' exists unhampered by any real-world practical considerations of effectiveness.
The activist feels obliged to keep plugging away at the same old routine unthinkingly,
unable to stop or consider, the main thing being that the activist is kept busy
and assuages her guilt by banging her head against a brick wall if necessary.
Part
of being revolutionary might be knowing when to stop and wait. It might be important
to know how and when to strike for maximum effectiveness and also how and when
NOT to strike. Activists have this 'We must do something NOW!' attitude that seems
fuelled by guilt. This is completely untactical.
The self-sacrifice of the
militant or the activist is mirrored in their power over others as an expert -
like a religion there is a kind of hierarchy of suffering and self-righteousness.
The activist assumes power over others by virtue of her greater degree of suffering
('non-hierarchical' activist groups in fact form a 'dictatorship of the most committed').
The activist uses moral coercion and guilt to wield power over others less experienced
in the theology of suffering. Their subordination of themselves goes hand in hand
with their subordination of others - all enslaved to 'the cause'. Self-sacrificing
politicos stunt their own lives and their own will to live - this generates a
bitterness and an antipathy to life which is then turned outwards to wither everything
else. They are "great despisers of life... the partisans of absolute self-sacrifice...
their lives twisted by their monsterous asceticism."[9] We can see this in our
own movement, for example on site, in the antagonism between the desire to sit
around and have a good time versus the guilt-tripping build/fortify/barricade
work ethic and in the sometimes excessive passion with which 'lunchouts' are denounced.
The self-sacrificing martyr is offended and outraged when she sees others that
are not sacrificing themselves. Like when the 'honest worker' attacks the scrounger
or the layabout with such vitriol, we know it is actually because she hates her
job and the martyrdom she has made of her life and therefore hates to see anyone
escape this fate, hates to see anyone enjoying themselves while she is suffering
- she must drag everyone down into the muck with her - an equality of self-sacrifice.
In
the old religious cosmology, the successful martyr went to heaven. In the modern
worldview, successful martyrs can look forward to going down in history. The greatest
self-sacrifice, the greatest success in creating a role (or even better, in devising
a whole new one for people to emulate - e.g. the eco-warrior) wins a reward in
history - the bourgeois heaven.
The old left was quite open in its call
for heroic sacrifice: "Sacrifice yourselves joyfully, brothers and sisters! For
the Cause, for the Established Order, for the Party, for Unity, for Meat and Potatoes!"[10]
But these days it is much more veiled: Vaneigem accuses "young leftist radicals"
of "enter[ing] the service of a Cause - the 'best' of all Causes. The time they
have for creative activity they squander on handing out leaflets, putting up posters,
demonstrating or heckling local politicians. They become militants, fetishising
action because others are doing their thinking for them."[11]
This resounds
with us - particularly the thing about the fetishising of action - in left groups
the militants are left free to engage in endless busywork because the group leader
or guru has the 'theory' down pat, which is just accepted and lapped up - the
'party line'. With direct action activists it's slightly different - action is
fetishised, but more out of an aversion to any theory whatsoever.
Although
it is present, that element of the activist role which relies on self-sacrifice
and duty was not so significant in June 18th. What is more of an issue for us
is the feeling of separateness from 'ordinary people' that activism implies. People
identify with some weird sub-culture or clique as being 'us' as opposed to the
'them' of everyone else in the world.
Isolation
The
activist role is a self-imposed isolation from all the people we should be connecting
to. Taking on the role of an activist separates you from the rest of the human
race as someone special and different. People tend to think of their own first
person plural (who are you referring to when you say 'we'?) as referring to some
community of activists, rather than a class. For example, for some time now in
the activist milieu it has been popular to argue for 'no more single issues' and
for the importance of 'making links'. However, many people's conception of what
this involved was to 'make links' with other activists and other campaign
groups. June 18th demonstrated this quite well, the whole idea being to get all
the representatives of all the various different causes or issues in one place
at one time, voluntarily relegating ourselves to the ghetto of good causes.
Similarly,
the various networking forums that have recently sprung up around the country
- the Rebel Alliance in Brighton, NASA in Nottingham, Riotous Assembly in Manchester,
the London Underground etc. have a similar goal - to get all the activist groups
in the area talking to each other. I'm not knocking this - it is an essential
pre-requisite for any further action, but it should be recognised for the extremely
limited form of 'making links' that it is. It is also interesting in that what
the groups attending these meetings have in common is that they are activist groups
- what they are actually concerned with seems to be a secondary consideration.
It
is not enough merely to seek to link together all the activists in the world,
neither is it enough to seek to transform more people into activists. Contrary
to what some people may think, we will not be any closer to a revolution if lots
and lots of people become activists. Some people seem to have the strange idea
that what is needed is for everyone to be somehow persuaded into becoming activists
like us and then we'll have a revolution. Vaneigem says: "Revolution is made everyday
despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution."[12]
The militant
or activist is a specialist in social change or revolution. The specialist recruits
others to her own tiny area of specialism in order to increase her own power and
thus dispel the realisation of her own powerlessness. "The specialist... enrols
himself in order to enrol others."[13] Like a pyramid selling scheme, the hierarchy
is self-replicating - you are recruited and in order not to be at the bottom of
the pyramid, you have to recruit more people to be under you, who then do exactly
the same. The reproduction of the alienated society of roles is accomplished through
specialists.
Jacques Camatte in his essay 'On Organization'[14] makes the
astute point that political groupings often end up as "gangs" defining themselves
by exclusion - the group member's first loyalty becomes to the group rather than
to the struggle. His critique applies especially to the myriad of Left sects and
groupuscules at which it was directed but it applies also to a lesser extent to
the activist mentality.
The political group or party substitutes itself
for the proletariat and its own survival and reproduction become paramount - revolutionary
activity becomes synonymous with 'building the party' and recruiting members.
The group takes itself to have a unique grasp on truth and everyone outside the
group is treated like an idiot in need of education by this vanguard. Instead
of an equal debate between comrades we get instead the separation of theory and
propaganda, where the group has its own theory, which is almost kept secret in
the belief that the inherently less mentally able punters must be lured in the
organisation with some strategy of populism before the politics are sprung on
them by surprise. This dishonest method of dealing with those outside of the group
is similar to a religious cult - they will never tell you upfront what they are
about.
We can see here some similarities with activism, in the way that
the activist milieu acts like a leftist sect. Activism as a whole has some of
the characteristics of a "gang". Activist gangs can often end up being cross-class
alliances, including all sorts of liberal reformists because they too are 'activists'.
People think of themselves primarily as activists and their primary loyalty becomes
to the community of activists and not to the struggle as such. The "gang" is illusory
community, distracting us from creating a wider community of resistance. The essence
of Camatte's critique is an attack on the creation of an interior/exterior division
between the group and the class. We come to think of ourselves as being activists
and therefore as being separate from and having different interests from the mass
of working class people.
Our activity should be the immediate expression
of a real struggle, not the affirmation of the separateness and distinctness of
a particular group. In Marxist groups the possession of 'theory' is the all-important
thing determining power - it's different in the activist milieu, but not that
different - the possession of the relevant 'social capital' - knowledge, experience,
contacts, equipment etc. is the primary thing determining power.
Activism
reproduces the structure of this society in its operations: "When the rebel begins
to believe that he is fighting for a higher good, the authoritarian principle
gets a fillip."[15] This is no trivial matter, but is at the basis of capitalist
social relations. Capital is a social relation between people mediated by things
- the basic principle of alienation is that we live our lives in the service of
some thing that we ourselves have created. If we reproduce this structure
in the name of politics that declares itself anti-capitalist, we have lost before
we have begun. You cannot fight alienation by alienated means.
A Modest
Proposal
This is a modest proposal that we should
develop ways of operating that are adequate to our radical ideas. This task will
not be easy and the writer of this short piece has no clearer insight into how
we should go about this than anyone else. I am not arguing that June 18th should
have been abandoned or attacked, indeed it was a valiant attempt to get beyond
our limitations and to create something better than what we have at present. However,
in its attempts to break with antique and formulaic ways of doing things it has
made clear the ties that still bind us to the past. The criticisms of activism
that I have expressed above do not all apply to June 18th. However there is a
certain paradigm of activism which at its worst includes all that I have outlined
above and June 18th shared in this paradigm to a certain extent. To exactly what
extent is for you to decide.
Activism is a form partly forced upon us by
weakness. Like the joint action taken by Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool
dockers - we find ourselves in times in which radical politics is often the product
of mutual weakness and isolation. If this is the case, it may not even be within
our power to break out of the role of activists. It may be that in times of a
downturn in struggle, those who continue to work for social revolution become
marginalised and come to be seen (and to see themselves) as a special separate
group of people. It may be that this is only capable of being corrected by a general
upsurge in struggle when we won't be weirdos and freaks any more but will seem
simply to be stating what is on everybody's minds. However, to work to escalate
the struggle it will be necessary to break with the role of activists to whatever
extent is possible - to constantly try to push at the boundaries of our limitations
and constraints.
Historically, those movements that have come the closest
to de-stabilising or removing or going beyond capitalism have not at all taken
the form of activism. Activism is essentially a political form and a method of
operating suited to liberal reformism that is being pushed beyond its own limits
and used for revolutionary purposes. The activist role in itself must be problematic
for those who desire social revolution..
Notes
1)
To my knowledge the article has been translated into French and published
in Je sais tout (Association des 26-Cantons, 8, rue Lissignol CH-1201 Genève,
Suisse) and in Échanges No. 93 (BP 241, 75866 Paris Cedex 18, France).
It has been translated into Spanish and published in Ekintza Zuzena
(Ediciones E.Z., Apdo. 235, 48080 Bilbo (Bizkaia), Spanish State). It has
been republished in America in Collective Action Notes No. 16-17
(CAN, POB 22962, Baltimore, MD 21203, USA) and in the UK in Organise!
No. 54 (AF, c/o 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, UK). It is also
available on-line at: http://www.infoshop.org/octo/j18_rts1.html#give_up
and http://tierra.ucsd.edu/~acf/online/j18/reflec1.htm l#GIVE
If anyone knows of any other places it has been reproduced or critiqued, I would
be grateful to hear of them, via Do or Die.
2) Squaring up to
the Square Mile: A Rough Guide to the City of London (J18 Publications (UK),
1999) p.8
3) 'Direct Action: Six Years Down the Road' in Do or Die
No. 7, p.3
4) Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution of Everyday Life, (Left
Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1994) - first published 1967, pp.131-3
5) 'The Day
they Drove Twyford Down' in Do or Die No. 1, p.11
6) 'Personality
Politics: The Spectacularisation of Fairmile' in Do or Die No. 7, p.35
7)
Op. Cit. 4, p.128
8) Op. Cit. 4, p.107
9) Op. Cit.
4, p.109
10) Op. Cit. 4, p.108
11) Op. Cit. 4, p.109
12)
Op. Cit. 4, p.111
13) Op. Cit. 4, p.143
14) Jacques
Camatte - 'On Organization' (1969) in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays
(New York, Autonomedia, 1995)
15) Op. Cit. 4, p.110
Postscript
Many
of the articles printed in the Reflections on June 18th pamphlet repeated almost
to the onset of tedium that capitalism is a social relation and isn't just to
do with big banks, corporations or international financial institutions. It's
an important point and worth making, but 'Give up Activism' had other fish to
fry.
Therefore the conclusion reached by these other articles was the point
of departure for this one - if it is true that capitalism is a social relation
based in production and in the relations between classes then what implications
does this have for our activity and for our method of attacking it? The basic
kernel of the piece and the initial idea that inspired the writing of it is the
'Form and Content' section. It had occurred to many people that there was something
a little odd about a 'day of action against capitalism'. The original inspiration
behind the article was an attempt to pin down what it was that made the idea appear
a little odd, incongruous, contradictory.
It seemed there was a similarity
between the way we were carrying on acting like liberal activists campaigning
against capitalism as if it was another single issue, another 'cause', and Vaneigem's
critique of the leftist militant, whose politics consist of a set of duties carried
out on behalf of an external 'cause'. It is true that the activist and the militant
share this common factor, but it is about all they have in common. I made
the mistake of carrying over all the other characteristics attributed by Vaneigem
to 'the militant' and assigning them also to the activist, when they largely weren't
appropriate. As a result, large sections of 'Give up Activism' come across as
far too harsh and as an inaccurate representation of the direct action movement.
The Situationists' characteristic bile was perhaps more appropriate when directed
at leftist party hacks than as a description of the sort of politics involved
around June 18th. The self-sacrifice, the martyrdom and guilt that Vaneigem identified
as central to the politics of 'the militant' is much less a feature of direct
action politics, which to the contrary is more usually criticised for the opposite
failing of lifestylism.
As has been very neatly drawn out by an excellent
critique in the American publication The Bad Days Will End!,[1] the original
idea that motivated the writing of the article and this rehashing of Vaneigem,
translating the critique of the leftist 'militant' into that of the liberal 'activist',
are incongruously roped together to produce an article which is an unwieldy amalgam
of the objective (What social situation are we in? What forms of action are appropriate?)
and the subjective (Why do we feel like activists? Why do we have this mentality?
Can we change the way we feel about ourselves?). It is not so much that the subjective
aspect of activism is emphasised over the objective, but rather more that the
very real problems that are identified with acting as activists come to be seen
to be mere products of having this 'activist mentality'. 'Give up Activism' can
then be read such that it seems to reverse cause and effect and to imply that
if we simply 'give up' this mental role then the objective conditions will change
too:
"[Give up Activism's] greatest weakness is this one-sided emphasis
on the 'subjective' side of the social phenomenon of activism. The emphasis points
to an obvious conclusion implicit throughout [the] argument: If activism is a
mental attitude or 'role', it may be changed, as one changes one's mind, or thrown
off, like a mask or a costume... The implication is clear: cease to cling, let
go of the role, 'give up activism', and a significant impediment to the desired
change will be removed."[2]
The article was of course never proposing that
we could simply think ourselves out of the problem. It was intended merely to
suggest that we might be able to remove an impediment and an illusion about our
situation as one step towards challenging that situation, and from that point
that we might start to discover a more effective and more appropriate way of acting.
It
is now clear that the slipshod hitching of Vaneigem to a enquiry into what it
was that was incongruous and odd in having a one-day action against capitalism
was an error, prompted by an over-hasty appropriation of Situationist ideas, without
considering how much of a connection there really was between them and the original
idea behind the piece. The theory of roles is perhaps the weakest part of Vaneigem's
ideas and in his 'Critique of the Situationist International', Gilles Dauvé
even goes so far as to say: "Vaneigem was the weakest side of the SI, the one
which reveals all its weaknesses".[3] This is probably a little harsh. But nevertheless,
the sort of degeneration that Situationist ideas underwent after the post-1968
disintegration of the SI took the worst elements of Vaneigem's "radical subjectivity"
as their starting point, in the poorest examples effectively degenerating into
bourgeois individualism.[4] That it is this element of Situationist thought that
has proven the most easily recuperable should give us pause for thought before
too-readily taking it on board.
Revolution in Your Head
This
over-emphasis in 'Give up Activism' on the theory of roles and on the subjective
side of things has led some people to fail to recognise the original impetus behind
the piece. This starting point and presupposition was perhaps not made clear enough,
because some people seem to have assumed that the purpose of the article was to
make some kind of point concerning individual psychological health. 'Give up Activism'
was not intended to be an article about or an exercise in radical therapy. The
main intention of the article, however inexpertly executed, was always to think
about our collective activity - what we are doing and how we might do it better.
However,
there was a point to the 'subjectivism' of the main part of the article. The reason
why 'Give up Activism' was so concerned with our ideas and our mental image of
ourselves is not because I thought that if we change our ideas then everything
will be alright, but because I had nothing to say about our activity. This
was very clearly a critique written from the inside and thus also a self-critique
and I am still very much involved in 'activist' politics. As I made plain, I have
not necessarily got any clearer idea than anyone else of how to go about developing
new forms of action more appropriate to an 'anti-capitalist' perspective. June
18th was a valiant attempt to do just this, and 'Give up Activism' was not a criticism
of the action on June 18th as such. I certainly couldn't have come up with anything
much better myself.
Although the piece is called 'Give up Activism', I
did not want to suggest at all that people stop trashing GM crops, smashing
up the City and disrupting the gatherings of the rich and powerful, or any of
the other myriad acts of resistance that 'activists' engage in. It was more the
way we do these things and what we think we are doing when we do them that I was
seeking to question. Because 'Give up Activism' had little or nothing to recommend
in terms of objective practical activity, the emphasis on the subjective made
it seem like I thought these problems existed only in our heads.
Of
course, thinking of ourselves as activists and as belonging to a community of
activists is no more than a recognition of the truth, and there is nothing pathological
in that. The problem I was trying to make clear was the identification with
the activist role - being happy as a radical minority. I intended to question
the role, to make people dissatisfied with the role, even while they remained
within it. It is only in this way that we stand a chance of escaping it.
Obviously
we are constrained within our specific circumstances. During an ebb in the class
struggle, revolutionaries are in even more of a minority than they are in any
case. We probably don't have any choice about appearing as a strange subculture.
But we do have a choice about our attitude to this situation, and if we come to
ditch the mental identification with the role then we may discover that there
is actually some room for manoeuvre within our activist role so that we can try
and break from activist practice as far as we are able. The point is that challenging
the 'subjective' element - our activist self-image - will at least be a step
towards moving beyond the role in its 'objective' element also. As I said in 'Give
up Activism', only with a general escalation of the class struggle will activists
be able to completely ditch their role, but in the meantime: "to work to escalate
the struggle it will be necessary to break with the role of activists to whatever
extent is possible - to constantly try to push at the boundaries of our limitations
and constraints." Which was precisely the point of the article.
For if we
cannot even think beyond the role now, then what hope have we of ever escaping
it? We should at the very least be dissatisfied with our position as a radical
minority and be trying to generalise the struggle and make the necessary upturn
happen. Doing away with the activist mentality is necessary but not sufficient
for doing away with the role in practice.
Up the Workers!
Although
'Give up Activism' neglected to recommend any actual change in behaviour outside
of saying that we needed one, perhaps now it would be appropriate to say something
about this. How can we bring 'politics' out of its separate box, as an external
cause to which we dedicate ourselves?
Many of the criticisms of the direct
action movement revolve around similar points. Capitalism is based on work; our
struggles against it are not based on our work but quite the opposite, they are
something we do outside whatever work we may do. Our struggles are not based on
our direct needs (as for example, going on strike for higher wages); they seem
disconnected, arbitrary. Our 'days of action' and so forth have no connection
to any wider on-going struggle in society. We treat capitalism as if it was something
external, ignoring our own relation to it. These points are repeated again and
again in criticisms of the direct action movement (including 'Give up Activism'
but also in many other places).
The problem is not necessarily that people
don't understand that capital is a social relation and that it's to do with production
as well as just banks and stock exchanges, here as well as in the Third World
or that capital is a relation between classes. The point is that even when all
of this is understood our attitude to this is still as outsiders looking in, deciding
at what point to attack this system. Our struggle against capitalism is not based
on our relation to value-creation, to work. On the whole the people who
make up the direct action movement occupy marginal positions within society as
the unemployed, as students or working in various temporary and transitory jobs.
We do not really inhabit the world of production, but exist largely in the realm
of consumption and circulation. What unity the direct action movement possesses
does not come from all working in the same occupation or living in the same area.
It is a unity based on intellectual commitment to a set of ideas.
To a certain
extent 'Give up Activism' was being disingenuous (as were many of the other critiques
making similar points) in providing all these hints but never spelling out exactly
where they led, which left the door open for them to be misunderstood. The author
of the critique in The Bad Days Will End! was right to point out what the
article was indicating but shied away from actually mentioning: the basic thing
that's wrong with activism is that it isn't collective mass struggle by the working
class at the point of production, which is the way that revolutions are supposed
to happen.
The sort of activity that meets the criteria of all the
criticisms - that is based on immediate needs, in a mass on-going struggle, in
direct connection to our everyday lives and that does not treat capital as something
external to us, is this working class struggle. It seems a little unfair to criticise
the direct action movement for not being something that it cannot be and has never
claimed to be, but nevertheless, if we want to move forward we've got to know
what we're lacking.
The reason that this sort of working class struggle
is the obvious answer to what we are lacking is that this is THE model of revolution
that the last hundred years or so has handed down to us that we have to draw upon.
However, the shadow of the failure of the workers' movement still hangs over us.
And if this is not the model of how a revolution might happen, then what is? And
no one has any very convincing answers to that question.
A Vociferous
Minority
So we are stuck with the question - what
do we do as a radical minority that wants to create revolution in non-revolutionary
times? The way I see it at the moment, we basically have two options. The first
is to recognise that as a small scene of radicals we can have relatively little
influence on the overall picture and that if and when an upsurge in the class
struggle occurs it probably won't have much to do with us. Therefore until the
mythical day arrives the best thing we can do is to continue to take radical action,
to pursue politics that push things in the right direction and to try and drag
along as many other people as possible, but basically to resign ourselves to that
fact that we are going to continue to be a minority. So until the point when some
sort of upturn in the class struggle occurs it's basically a holding operation.
We can try and stop things getting worse, have a finger in the dam, try and strategically
target weak points in the system where we think we can hit and have some effect,
develop our theory, live our lives in as radical a way as possible, build a sustainable
counter culture that can carry on doing these things in the long term... and hopefully
when one day, events out of our control lead to a general radicalisation of society
and an upturn in the class struggle we will be there ready to play some part and
to contribute what things we have learnt and what skills we have developed as
a radical subculture.
The flaw in this sort of approach is that it appears
almost like another sort of 'automatic Marxism' - a term used to poke fun at
those Marxists who thought that a revolution would happen when the contradictions
between the forces and the relations of production had matured sufficiently, when
the objective conditions were right, so that revolution almost seemed to be a
process that happened without the need for any human involvement and you could
just sit back and wait for it to happen. This sort of idea is a flaw carried over
into ultra-left thinking. As is explained in The Bad Days Will End!, many
ultra-left groups have recognised that in periods of downturn, they are necessarily
going to be minorities and have argued against compensating for this with any
kind of party-building or attempts to substitute their group for the struggle
of the proletariat as a whole. Some ultra-left groups have taken this line of
thinking to its logical conclusion and have ended up turning doing nothing into
a political principle. Of course our response would not be to do nothing, but
nevertheless, the point remains that if everyone similarly just waited for an
upsurge to happen then it certainly never would. Effectively by just waiting for
it to happen we are assuming that someone else will do it for us and maintaining
a division between us and the 'ordinary' workers who will make this happen.
The
alternative to this scenario is to stop thinking of the ebb and flow of the class
struggle as like some force of nature that just comes and goes without us being
able to effect it at all, and to start thinking about how to build class power
and how to end the current disorganised and atomised state of workers in this
country. The problem is that over the last twenty or so years, the social landscape
of the country has changed so fast and so rapidly that it has caught us on the
hop. Restructuring and relocation have fractured and divided people. We could
try and help re-compose a new unity, instead of just being content with doing
our bit and waiting for the upturn, to try and make this upturn happen. We will
probably still be acting as activists, but to a lesser extent, and at least we
will be making it more possible for us to abolish activism altogether in the future.
One
way of doing this is suggested in the critique in The Bad Days Will End!:
"Perhaps, then, the first steps towards a genuine anti-activism would be
to turn towards these specific, everyday, ongoing struggles. How are the so-called
'ordinary' workers resisting capitalism at this time? What opportunities are already
there in their ongoing struggles? What networks are already being built
through their own efforts?"[5]
A current example of exactly this sort of
thing is the investigation into call centres initiated by the German group Kolinko,
which is mentioned in The Bad Days Will End! and was also contributed to
in the recent Undercurrent No. 8.[6] The idea of this project is that call
centres represent the 'new sweatshops' of the information economy and that if
a new cycle of workers' resistance is to emerge anywhere then this might just
be the place.
It is perhaps also worth considering that changing circumstances
might work to our advantage - the restructuring of the welfare state is forcing
more and more activists into work. For example the call centre enquiry project
mentioned above could represent a good opportunity for us as call centres are
exactly the sort of places where people forced off the dole end up working and
exactly the sort of temporary and transient jobs in which those involved in the
direct action movement end up working also. This certainly could help make the
connection between capitalism and our own immediate needs, and perhaps might allow
us to better participate in developing new fronts in the class struggle. Or the
increased imposition of work could just end up with us even more fucked over than
we are at present, which is obviously what the government are hoping. They are
attempting to both have their cake and eat it - trying to turn the clock back
and return to days of austerity and privation while gambling that the working
class is so atomised and divided by twenty years of attacks that this will not
provoke a return of the struggle that originally brought about the introduction
of these amelioration measures in the first place. Only time will tell whether
they are to be successful in their endeavour or whether we are to be successful
in ours.
In conclusion, perhaps the best thing would be to try and adopt
both of the above methods. We need to maintain our radicalism and commitment to
direct action, not being afraid to take action as a minority. But equally, we
can't just resign ourselves to remaining a small radical subculture and treading
water while we wait for everyone else to make the revolutionary wave for us. We
should also perhaps look at the potential for making our direct action complement
whatever practical contribution to current workers' struggles we may feel able
to make. In both the possible scenarios outlined above we continue to act more
or less within the activist role. But hopefully in both of these different scenarios
we would be able to reject the mental identification with the role of activism
and actively try to go beyond our status as activists to whatever extent is possible..
Notes
1) 'The Necessity and Impossibility of Anti-Activism',
The Bad Days Will End!, No. 3. p.4. I highly recommend this article, and
the magazine contains some other good stuff too. Send $3 to: Merrymount Publications,
PO Box 441597, Somerville, MA 02144, USA. Email: bronterre@earthlink.net
Web: http://www.geocities.com/jkellstadt/
2)
The Bad Days Will End!, p.5
3) Gilles Dauvé (Jean Barrot) - 'Critique of the Situationist International' in What is Situationism? - A Reader, Ed. Stewart Home (AK Press, 1996), p.35
4) See 'Whatever happened
to the Situationists?', Aufheben No. 6, p.45
5) The Bad Days Will
End!, p.6
6) The Kolinko proposal was recently published in Collective
Action Notes No. 16-17 and is also available on the web at: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/index _e.htm [ Updated 4 March 2002: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/engl/ e_koidx.htm ]
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