💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › danny-evans-just-do-it.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:02:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Just do it?
Author: Danny Evans
Date: May 2, 2021
Language: en
Topics: strategy; tactics; social movements; anarchist movement; Left Electoralism; United Kingdom; Spain; criticism and critique; Arab Spring; 2011; Occupy; political parties; Indignado Movement; activism; direct action; ABC with Danny and Jim
Source: Retrieved on October 18, 2022 from https://abcwithdannyandjim.substack.com/p/just-do-it

Danny Evans

Just do it?

This is the second post in an effort to think through the political

experiences of the libertarian left in the last ten years. Like the

other posts, it is highly subjective and more an attempt to make sense

of my own perspective than anything else. It focuses on the anarchist

tendency to privilege action over political argument in the light of the

institutional turn. In making these points, I am aware that I conflate

tendencies associated with the ‘new anarchists’ and anarchism more

broadly. All the same, I think that on this score the conflation is

justified, and I include a couple of examples of ‘old’ anarchists

operating along these lines. At the same time, the motivation for

writing this post is to reflect on my own thinking and priorities of the

last ten years, which shared what I now see as the drawbacks of this

approach.

In last week’s piece about the 2011 movement of the squares, I mentioned

the presence of conspiracy theorists and cranks at the assemblies. I can

recall at least three occasions when I noticed various elements of a

cranky worldview being expressed and going more or less unchallenged. At

the time I didn’t give this a second thought; it seemed obvious to me

that ‘fringe elements’ and gullible people would be among the thousands

attracted to the squares. If someone had said to me that conspiratorial

nonsense would grow so much over the next ten years that it would

outstrip anarchism in numbers of adherents and organisational and

ideological coherence, I would have thought that was about as likely as

Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. To me, at that time,

the important thing was not whether cranks got an easy ride in the

assemblies, but whether those same bodies were generating political

alternatives and a basis for concrete activity.

I now see that reluctance to make a political argument as a mistake, but

one which was symptomatic of a broader approach to direct action. By

2011, this practical orientation had been the default mode of much of

the left for twenty years. Its attraction might have been a response to

the aftermath of the historic defeats of the organised working class in

the 1970s. Direct action had the advantage of shifting revolutionary

politics out of the smoky rooms to which it had retreated, where

rote-learned arguments on party, class and history were rehearsed by

ever decreasing circles, onto the terrain of responding to immediate

needs with actions aimed at strengthening collective power.

In ‘The New Anarchists’ (2002), David Graeber observed that, among the

partisans of direct action in the anti-capitalist movement, ‘Debate

always focuses on particular courses of action; it’s taken for granted

that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of

view. The motto might be, “If you are willing to act like an anarchist

now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own business”.’ Far from

being something worth arguing about, the ideology of the ‘new

anarchists’ was ‘immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that

[underlay] their practice’.

I think we should acknowledge the limitations of this approach in the

light of the institutional turn. There are two key problems with it as

far as I can see: one to do with avoiding political argument and the

other to do with the supposedly inherent politics of direct action. In

the first case, a tactical decision to avoid doctrinal debate in a

period of defeat and sterility is turned into a point of principle. In

general, we do not benefit from keeping shtum about our politics. The

occasional advisability of doing so is symptomatic of a broader historic

defeat. In periods of upsurge, people want to learn, reflect, and talk

politics. We can see an example of this in the flurry of book

recommendations and reading groups that followed the BLM protests last

summer. It might be worth stating here that an openness to arguing a

point should not necessarily mean a dogmatic insistence on its

correctness and rejection of alternative possibilities. Rather, by

arguing we are forced into an interrogation of our own ideas that has

the potential to alter and renew them.

In the second case, the institutional turn has shown that, for many

people, ‘acting like an anarchist’ in square occupations and

anti-eviction mobilisations has proven compatible with a long-term

vision of channelling that energy into parliamentary projects. After

Podemos and Corbynism, we perhaps have to accept that there is no

ideology immanent to direct action politics. For thousands of people,

joining a political party after taking part in the direct-action cycle

of 2011 (which of course included a sizeable proportion of veterans of

nineties and noughties direct action) was not a contradiction — it was

continuous. This came as a shock to me when it happened and I guess to

others too. On reflection, however, the continuities are not so hard to

perceive. People were attracted to direct action because it allowed them

to do something positive there and then. It didn’t require tedious

doctrinal debate and it enabled the left to claw back a degree of

momentum and a sense of being protagonists after a disorienting and

disempowering period of defeat. The institutional turn offered a similar

kind of consolation. As to the long-term vision, well… what long-term

vision was that again?

A failure to recognise the elements of continuity between direct action

and the institutional turn characterised one of the few English-language

attempts to confront it from an anarchist perspective. ‘Thoughts on the

Movement, or why we still don’t even Corbyn’, by libcom stalwarts Joseph

Kay and Ed Goddard, didn’t argue against the politics of Corbynism as

such but made the case that activists who wanted to reform the UK state

would spend their time better by getting involved in direct

action-oriented groups. Criticised in the comments beneath for failing

to advance a specifically anarchist case against Corbynism, the

article’s defenders pointed to the work both had put in to establishing

the libcom archives and forums. Acknowledging that work is important,

but its distance from the matter at hand is revealing and somewhat

depressing. Wouldn’t it make sense for an anarchist archive and an

anarchist argument to have something in common? The unfortunate end

point of the logic described above by Graeber is that while anarchism is

an interesting point of view to be stored in an archive, anarchists

don’t argue about politics, just tactics.

This is perhaps why the anti-parliamentary left has been largely subdued

in its response to the institutional turn. Firstly, it is out of

practice when it comes to arguing politics, secondly for this argument

to carry any weight it requires us to remember what we’d decided was

irrelevant: a long-term vision.

A recent article by the Leeds local of Solidarity Federation shows that

this problem hasn’t gone away: ‘Above all, we orient ourselves around

direct action, in other words: actually doing things. It is important to

dispel the idea that Anarchists are idealistic at all costs, with

nothing better to do than sit around fruitlessly discussing an

“inevitable” revolution.’ As should hopefully be clear by now, I think

that this line is symptomatic of an imbalance in present-day anarchism

that needs to be addressed. Aside from which, I’ve never met an

anarchist who sat around fruitlessly discussing an inevitable

revolution, which is a pity as they sound nice and I could do with that

kind of optimism in my life.

There is a danger that anarchists will see in the decline of Corbynism a

vindication of their position that direct action beats parliamentary

politics if you want to have a practical impact. This would be to

misread the significance of the institutional turn, which is that

thousands of people involved in direct action politics could be

persuaded to join and campaign for political parties, more or less at

the drop of a hat. If it is true that the decades prior to the

institutional turn had seen the ‘new anarchist’ position become broadly

hegemonic on the direct-action oriented left, then the ease with which

the institutional turn was effected suggests that hegemony was highly

superficial.

I am not arguing that anarchists should eschew direct action, or that

the institutional turn in itself negates the justification of a

direct-action focus. What I want to suggest is that there is no

necessary link between direct action and anti-parliamentary politics. If

we think that such a link can and should exist, then we need to make

that case, first and foremost to ourselves.