Do not Despair
I’ve recently moved back to the UK after making the decision to go for a PhD. Part of this moving process has been to re-register with the international union that I organize with, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). I have been a member of the IWW in Toronto for close to a year before I left, and I was eager to find out how things were done on this side of the Atlantic. I signed up online and within a few days received my ‘welcome pack’ and my eye was immediately drawn to one of the items in there which read “The Industrial Workers of the World, not waiting for someone else to do it since 1905”.
I found the statement to be absolutely brilliant, not just because it captures the ethos and values of the union such as autonomy, self organization, and direct democracy, but because it also sums up our current divide in the conception of struggle itself and subtly criticizes our submissiveness to the ‘powers that be’.
It is under these conditions of submissiveness that we can locate today's struggles, or lack-thereof, that come in the various shapes of defeatism, cynicism, and reformism where any argument, and counter-argument for that matter, is found within the confines of current existing systems of power. How did we get here?
The Ideological Paradox of Activism
One of the first places to look is the role of ideology. In public discourse, Ideology is equated to dogmatism, a fixed way of looking at things that only the most ardent (and backward) political activists posses. Ideology is seen as the opposite of pluralism and in our world where liberal democracy practices a strong hegemonic presence, anything that may go against pluralism is dangerous and totalitarian.
This is partly true, but it turns to a blind eye that the values found under liberal democracy (individualism, free markets, private property) are themselves formed by more than a century of ideological development that now penetrates every aspect of our life. We just don’t notice it like a fish doesn’t know that it is in water — we simply don’t know anything else, or what living under/in other conditions may be. Most of us are too busy to even think about it.
This is important to understand for two reasons. The first is to understand that how we weigh our decisions is influenced by this system of values we have inherited, or based on a system of values we have developed under the conditions created by the ideology we exist under. The second, and arguably more important to the topic at hand, is because this ideology focused on individualism and plurality has helped develop a world where we feel like things are out of our hands, that there is a ‘system’ that we need to appeal and negotiate with as individuals as opposed to collectively.
One of the simplest ways in which this manifests itself is on a self-conscious level. As individualism is seen as a core tenet of liberalism, any collective action is easy to dismiss as a mindless and performative activity. Our refusal to participate in collective action becomes based on this idea of maintaining the sanctity of our individuality. Me, go to a protest? unheard of! I am an individual who can come up with my own opinions and know best how to deal with a situation I am in. Why should I subsume my identity into this mindless hoard of people marching to nowhere and pointlessly yelling?
It is this reasoning that claims to be the highest representation of ‘free thinking’ but it is based on the buy-in to an ideology that puts the ‘individual’ ahead of the ‘collective’. Indeed it is based on the buy-in to an ideology that splits the individual and the collective in the first place and refuses to view them in their natural dialectic relationship — that is, that one cannot exist without the other and that both have an influence on what the other turns out to be.
From the Individual to the Collective
Apart from the above cynicism brewed by liberal ideology, two other responses emerge. The first is that of defeatism, often expressed in the sentiment of I am one person, what can I do? how much of an impact will anything I do make? This mindset is equally embedded in the atomized view of the individual portrayed by liberal ideology and reinforced by the competitive forces of the market and the concept of merit. All of these, paradoxically, reinforce a relationship between an individual with something above the individual, an employer making a selection between candidates, or an individual wrestling with the machinations of the state.
The second response is one where individual action is combined into collective individual action. This can be in the form of protest, lobbying, or forms of civil disobedience. In these cases, we see a transformation from individual to collective action, an important step that can be inspirational, as we have witnessed with the recent ‘strike’ called for by activists fighting against climate change. Yet as ‘collective’ as this action is, it retains its core individual component and a hierarchical relationship between an individual and a higher power of some sort. To explain, collective action such as protests, lobbying, and other forms of civil disobedience does not seek to question or change the relationship individuals have with each other. Rather, it fits quite nicely with the ideological framework of liberalism where nothing more than momentary individual participation in a collective activity is required after which we can all return to the atomized lives we lead. Second, is that this form of collective action does not seek to build alternative forms of social relationships. Rather, it appeals to present structures of authority in a bid to negotiate or haggle with them.
Power meets Power
I want to be clear that the argument being made here is not one against ‘individualism’, the forms of collective activity that occur under its banner are not ‘wrong’— any form of movement is better than the cynicism or defeatism previously discussed. However, it is important to understand that individualized collective action, especially the sort that embeds itself into current structures of authority, is not enough to implement the sort of change necessary to fight the immediate issues of our time. We need to go one step further.
To effectively fight power, resisting it — pushing it in one direction or the other, is but one side of the fight. The other is building alternative collective and sustained forms of power, ones that eat away at the current structures and authority and changes the seat of power towards autonomous centres. This is known as the concept of Dual Power and is exactly what the IWW’s flyer of ‘not waiting for someone else to do it’ is getting at. We should not wait for the government to act, we should act independently from the government while at the same time making it difficult for the government to act in the way it is currently acting. This means not only participating in acts of civil disobedience but also performing acts of direct action. If we think that fossil fuels should stop being used, then we should shut down centres of production and distribution of fossil fuels instead of pleading for the government to do it for us. In this way, the current structure of authority is completely bypassed and the centre of authority is placed directly within the people themselves. Direct action does not need to be confrontational as in the previous example, it can also present itself in more subtle ways such as the organization of citizens assemblies that seek to manage resources in a specific geographic area despite what local points of authority may be doing.
This is all easier said than done, but it rests on the central argument that power needs to be met with power and that it is by building these centres of power within the populace that effective change can be made; not by waiting for someone else to do it, but by doing it ourselves. To build these centres of power we need to move beyond individual actions and start building the collective bodies that can implement and not just affect the change we want to see.
