Thoughts on Activism From a Class-Conscious Worker

Each class has its own way of going about things, be it art, music, or in our case, activism. There is art that serves the justified rebellion of working people, and it is revolutionary, proletarian art. And there is the kind that serves the small-business class, the intellectuals, and so on, which is not practical and is petty-bourgeois art. It is easy to look at it and tell the difference, but apparently it is a bit harder when it comes to activism.

I never met so many rich people until the day I started to organize alongside self-proclaimed “communists.” All of a sudden, I was surrounded by petty-bourgeois concepts of activism, which reject the honest and very practical working-class conception of the same thing.

Workers want results, concrete tangible results, and we put our hands to getting them. That’s why Marxism is for us. It’s practical and gets results in the long and short term. The only reason for going and doing something dangerous is to force your enemy to give you what is yours. It’s another form of economic engagement. We want a raise, we walk off the line, set a picket, and hurt the bastards into giving us a raise. All genuine communist ideas about revolution are based on this same practical, honest approach. We workers want power and to make the rules from here on out, so we hurt the bastards into coming off it and keep hurting them so they can’t take back what is by rights of history to be ours.

For the petty-bourgeois fellow-travelers who fancy themselves revolutionary, the form, or the aesthetics, are more than enough. These comrades—if you really can consider them that—get very excited to take up the aesthetics of revolution, what they’ve seen in history books and in other countries, and are eager to take pictures and show off every little thing they are doing. But when it comes to getting tangible results, they are unable to pay the bills. When it comes to the essential, real and practical revolution, they are nowhere to be found.

So I asked why and these are the answers I came up with, take them or leave them.

Authentic internationalism is based firmly on the principle of making revolution at home, corresponding to the type of revolution and who the revolutionary masses are. The aesthetic rebels cannot answer this; the practical rebels already have answered it in practice. The two represent the different class approaches to activism. For the petty bourgeoisie, making the right banners and having small solidarity actions are the meat and potatoes of international solidarity. Each act is a bold victory in their minds, it needs an article and a bunch of pictures saying “look how red we are.” It is a performance art, puffed up more when comrades abroad use it to demonstrate that people in the US give a shit. The problem is, it does not actually confront class enemies or disrupt their activity as class enemies. So it does not draw in the support of practical workers, but more petty-bourgeois sub-culturists and lifestyle or community seekers.

On the other hand, working class activists go among the workers, trying to get the best practical results possible in the given conditions. They try and materially disrupt the goings on of the class enemies. They know that quality forces are only accumulated through organized confrontation with practical results. They are materialists, not idealists and aestheticists. Their activism is geared for more than producing photos that can be shared around in stylish revolutionary circles. They do not need to say, “look how red we are,” but organize the kind of activity that is concrete in results, educates the masses in the fight, and leads regular-old problematic masses far from the lifestyle of activism to reach out for “the reds” when the class enemy is giving them hell. That is the difference.

So why are our young “anti-imperialists” and “people’s defenders” and whatever other petty-bourgeois fellow travelers like this? Why are they so damn impressed by the aesthetics of rebellion but so damn repulsed by the dirty, unsung work needed to make an authentic rebellion?

The petty-bourgeois activists, those whose never miss a protest, who make every little cultural event, and whose friends are all in the same scene are most often the children of the intellectuals and small-business class. They seldom come from our class or have any real proximity to it. They are from campuses where the Non-Governmental-Organization (NGO) forms of activism are firmly in command. When a worker attacks management or production for raises, the money we get is a direct result of how much we scare them. We do not need a bunch of photos especially when we feel like being extra. For the NGO, they rely on funding and donations from very wealthy people, people who want to know their money is going to “good use,” so good NGO organizers know damn well how to showcase everything, how to build their activism around that funding and how to look appealing to their set of donors.

NGO activism has been up to this for decades. It sets the standard for all petty-bourgeois activists and influences some workers too. It is worse than ever now though, because the internet and particularly social media have effected something similar for the whole rotten society we live in. A wedding, concert, or a place to swim are no longer about having the experience, but documenting the experience. The real experience becomes receiving recognition, or to be blunt, the hit of dopamine users get from a rush of likes or hostile engagement from unknown spectators. This combined with the culture and methods of NGO activists has left the “left” in a piss-poor state.

When all you end up doing for practice is striking a pose for “propaganda” to go online, you deal with a revolving door of demoralized people. You might draw in a lot, but the quality won’t be good and it won’t be stable or be what the working people need. You will not embody Lenin’s teachings and you will end up running around tailing the spontaneity of the masses. You will keep the look of anti-imperialism, but lack essential internationalism. By that I mean you won’t be able to hit at the interests of the genocidal, reactionary old-states, or the imperialists themselves, which is real solidarity and not just the performance of solidarity. Imagine for a moment if you had the kind of organization that could do more for the comrades abroad than hold up pictures of their slain!

Next time you are evaluating the quality of “anti-imperialism,” ask yourself, is this really anything more than performance art? Which class enemies suffered a blow? What institutions were really disrupted? Was this just done to have pictures to share on the internet, in the never-ending quest for likes and reposts? Is it taking internationalism seriously at all? These are important questions for anyone from our class looking to get organized. They are important because more and more so-called revolutionary organizations are based only on the practical activity of posing for likes. This has to stop. Get to work organizing things that accomplish something. Remember the capitalist culture we live in is organized to prevent revolution, to replace materialist activism with idealist posing. A revolutionary is judged only by his or her social practice in class struggle.

Image: A welder. Credit: Pix4free.

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