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Title: Give Up Activism
Author: Andrew X
Date: October 1999
Language: en
Topics: activism, Do or Die, anti-globalization, anti-road, Earth First!, situationist
Source: *Do or Die* issue 9. Retrieved on September 9, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/guactivism.html][www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/guactivism.html]].  Post-script retrieved on 2020-08-31 [[http://libcom.org/library/give-up-activism

Andrew X

Give Up Activism

Editor’s Note from Do or Die

In 1999, in the aftermath of the June 18^(th) global day of action, a

pamphlet called Reflections on June 18^(th) 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 18^(th) day of action was the adoption

of an activist mentality. This problem became particularly obvious with

June 18^(th) 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 18^(th) 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

anticapitalist 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 cliches — “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

18^(th) 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 18^(th) 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’ 95 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 selfrighteousness. 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 18^(th). What

is more of an issue for us is the feeling of separateness from ‘ordinary

people’ that activism implies. People identify with some weird

subculture 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

18^(th) 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 something 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 18^(th) 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 18^(th). However there is a certain paradigm of activism which

at its worst includes all that I have outlined above and June 18^(th)

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

Give up activism — Postscript

Many of the articles printed in the Reflections on June 18^(th) 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 18^(th). 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!,[16] 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.”[17]

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.”[18] 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.[19] 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 18^(th) was a valiant attempt to do just this, and

‘Give up Activism’ was not a criticism of the action on June 18^(th) 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?”[20]

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.[21] 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.

[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 Geneve, Suisse) and in changes 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

andhttp://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, Trans. Donald

Nicholson-Smith (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

[16] ‘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

[17] The Bad Days Will End!, p.5

[18] Gilles Dauvé (Jean Barrot) — ‘Critique of the Situationist

International’

[19] See ‘Whatever happened to the Situationists?’, Aufheben No. 6, p.45

[20] The Bad Days Will End!, p.6

[21] The Kolinko proposal was recently published in Collective Action

Notes No. 16–17.