Postscript to the article "Give up Activism"

Submitted by noone:

Postscript to “Give up Activism”

Many of the articles 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
a external "cause". It is true that the activist and the militant share this
common factor and it is a good point to make, 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. What we do is in general not a
sterile routine repetition of a few set poses. 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.

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 our way of thinking?). 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 as Gilles
Dauve says in his "Critique of the Situationist International", "Vaneigem
was the weakest side of the SI, the one which reveals all its weaknesses".(3)
The sort of degeneration that Situationist ideas underwent after the
disintegration of the SI in 1968 took the worst elements of
Vaneigem's "radical subjectivity" as their starting point, in the poorest
examples effectively degenerating into bourgeois individualism. 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 is 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 think 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" shied away from recommending 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 all 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).

It's not 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 happen. 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 ebbs and flows of
the class struggle as like some force of nature that just come and go without
us being able to effect them 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
maybe to a lesser extent, and at least we will be making it more possible for
us to abolish activism altogether at some point in the future.

One way of doing this is suggested in the critique in The Bad Days Will End!
“To lose the specialisation of activists, we could choose to listen to the
thousands and thousands of non-activists and
engage with them and the struggles they are involved in. We could try and
facilitate and link what struggles are already going on, attempting to build
the upsurge in class struggle rather than just waiting for it to happen all
by itself. A recent example quoted in The Bad Days Will End! is the
investigation into call centres initiated by the German group Kolinko, which
was also contributed to in the recent Undercurrent No 8.”(4) 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 center 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 being a radical minority while we wait for everyone
else to make a revolution 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. I highly recommend this article, and the magazine contains some
other good stuff too, so it’s worth getting hold of. Try and get your hands
on a copy by
sending $3 to: Merrymount Publications, PO Box 441597, Somerville, MA 02144,
USA.
bronterre@earthlink.net Web: www.geocities.com/jkellstadt/index.html
2) The Bad Days Will End!, No. 3, p.53)
3) Gilles Dauve (Jean Barrot) “Critique of the Situationist International” in
What is Situationism?: A Reader, Ed. Stewart Home (AK Press, 1996), p.35
4) The Kolinko proposal was recently published in Collective Action Notes and
is also available on the
web at: www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/index_e.htm