In relation to Castree's recent 'Border Country' I thought that this
article below raised some interesting questions about in what ways
we can 'define' an activist. Noel covered some of the issues
between being an academic and being an activist, and the tensions
that emerged from this; this article questions what an activist is.0000,8000,0000
http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?arti
cle_id=27715&group=webcast
GIVE UP ACTIVISM
by Andrew X 9:31pm Sat May 25 '02 (Modified on
7:25pm Sun May 26 '02)
--------------
a few observations, reflections written post J18
in the UK ---------------------------- 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.1 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."2 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."3 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.4
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'.5
"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."6 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."7
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 theogony
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 monstrous asceticism."8 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 forwards 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!"9 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."10
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."11
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."12 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'
(1969)13 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 filip."14 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.
Andrew X
You can contact the author of this piece via:
SDEF! c/o Prior House, Tilbury Place, Brighton BN2
2GY, UK
Notes
1 Squaring up to the Square Mile: A Rough Guide to
the City of London (J18 Publications (UK), 1999)
p. 8 2 see 'Direct Action: Six Years Down the
Road' in Do or Die No. 7, p. 3 3 Raoul Vaneigem -
The Revolution of Everyday Life, Trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Left Bank Books/Rebel Press,
1994) - first published 1967, pp. 131-3 4 see 'The
Day they Drove Twyford Down' in Do or Die No. 1,
p. 11 5 see 'Personality Politics: The
Spectacularisation of Fairmile' in Do or Die No.
7, p. 35 6 Op. Cit. 2, p. 128 7 Op. Cit. 2, p. 107
8 Op. Cit. 2, p. 109 9 Op. Cit. 2, p. 108 10 Op.
Cit. 2, p. 109 11 Op. Cit. 2, p. 111 12 Op. Cit.
2, p. 143 13 Jacques Camatte - 'On Organization'
(1969) in This World We Must Leave and Other
Essays (New York, Autonomedia, 1995) 14 Op. Cit.
2, p. 110