Give Up Activism
An important article from Do or Die issue 9 criticising the activist mentality in the direct action movement.
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.
Give up Activism
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.html#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
