Against activism

Notes on so-called “messing up” in various recent movements[1]

Friday, its’s Black Friday,
Saturday it is…

1)

Activism could be defined as a pathological obsession with activity, or more precisely as a voluntarist development of activity to compensate for and camouflage the lack of revolutionary perspective.  It is therefore a false solution, aimed at immediate. It’s a false solution aimed at immediate action, or at overemphasizing action at the expense of reflection to “correct” the real course of events.

“A common deviation, which is at the root of the movement’s worst episodes of degeneration, is the one that underestimates the clarity and continuity of principles to push ‘being political’ to plunge into the activity of the movement, which will indicate the paths to take. Don’t ‘stop and decide’, by referring to texts and sifting through previous experiences, but continue the non-stop action” Invariance N°3: Milan meeting. 1952, p.7, “Faux recours a L’activisme”.

This detour quickly translates into an apology for anything that moves, makes noise and/or is violent. This is nothing other than the exacerbated form of the “perpetual present” of the integrated spectacle (Debord). This is the indispensable complement to the sheep-like crowd, staged and multiplied by the rage of impotence. It’s the moment when, at the tail or head of pacifist and gregarious processions, a limited space is dedicated to ‘spectacular inversion, to “confrontation” in more “militaristic” but essentially symbolic and predictable forms.[2]

These two realities are, of course, largely complementary and thus provide all consumers of the political spectacle with a more “virile”  variant of programmed political defeat.

2)

This plunge into activity per se, without concern for historical purpose, is also immediatism, as it aims to occupy the news scene for only a very brief period. period. If there is “victory”, it is necessarily ephemeral, and in no way concerns the essential political issues at stake, at the heart of which is the necessary unification of the working class against the bourgeoisie. If there is a “defeat”, it’s easy to blame it on a lack of will and or to “disproportionate” repressive force. But in any case, we’ll be careful to avoid drawing any political conclusions that call into question the central issues of work, value and the state. “This forgetfulness of the main points of view in the face of the momentary interests of the day, this relentless pursuit of momentary success without concern for ulterior consequences, this abandonment of the future of the movement in favor of the present, all this may have its starting point in “honest” intentions, but it is and always will be opportunism, and it is perhaps “honest” opportunism that is the most dangerous of all”. F. Engels: Critique of the draft social-democratic program of 1891.[3]

3)

In this sense, activism is only a specific form of political opportunism. Opportunism can manifest itself on the terrain of legality and bourgeois parliamentarianism, or on the contrary, it can take on a more muscular appearance and invest the extra-parliamentary field. But in all cases, it is a revisionism aimed at keeping oppositional contestation on the terrain of capital and its reform.

“Basically, the revisionist deviation was activist and not ultra-deterministic, for example, Bernstein’s was evolutionist, reformist and legalistic. It was not just a question of replacing the revolutionary goal, which was unattainable in the immediate term, but of closing one’s eyes to the burning vision of the complete historical arc and saying: the immediate result is everything, let’s propose not universally but locally and transitorily reduced and immediate goals, and it will be possible to model such results by will. The syndicalists, partisans of violence, of the Sorel school, said the same thing and ended up the same way; the former were more attentive to wresting legislative measures through parliamentary channels, the latter to winning company and category victories: both turned their backs on historical tasks.” Invariance N°3: Milan Meeting, already quoted.

4)

One of the most visible features of the conformist character of these movements is that they all fall within the framework of democratic legitimization: the “popular” legitimization of the street for trade unions and other associations, and/or that of parliament for extreme left/right parties. But in any case, these movements are always circumscribed within the very framework of democracy, i.e. within that of capital and its substitute representations. Even in moments of spectacular violence, the unions have never lost control of the management of these movements, which is also reflected in the complete absence of any independent organization, even a minority one, of the working class in struggle. As a result, the working class never appears as such, unless subsumed under forms specific to capital and one or other of its multiple ideological agents. In the processions, the weak workers’ delegations march by sector, like the selective blockades and sectoral strikes (garbage collectors in certain major cities) which in no way paralyzed the country during the recent movement against pension reform. The class composition of these movements is nothing more than a sum of individuals atomized by intermediary structures, constituting a docile mass that defines itself as “the people”.[4]

This was already the case during the so-called “Gilets Jaune movement” at the end of 2018 and beginning of 2019, when particular forms of protest and piecemeal opposition – the occupation of traffic circles and recurrent climbs on the Champs- Élysées in Paris – obscured and camouflaged the nature and political meaning of this type of “movement”. Interclassist, “populist” and strongly impregnated with nationalist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideologies, it is characterized in particular by a proven porosity with extreme right-wing identitarian and fascist factions, particularly in terms of the composition of the “order services” of these demonstrations.[5] But the overall political sense remains that of an essentially “petit-bourgeois”, plebiscitary (Référendum d’Initiative Citoyenne) movement calling for a fairer state (in this case, lower taxes on fuel) akin to “poujadism”.[6]

Returning to the “movement against pensions”,[7] its “messing up” or “yellowing” was nothing more than a “negative” demonstration of the hegemonic strength of the unions and the frustrated recognition of a programmed defeat. This is the dark side of union strength, just as counter-revolutionary as its pacifist façade.

5)

Activism is also a pathology of “militancy”. That of the sacrificial “militant”, who in his congenital incomprehension of the temporality of counter-revolution survives on expedients, in the immediate but vain hope of doing something, and above all, anything at all. And yet, all it does is agitate, preventing itself from reflecting and applying the only weapon available today, that of materialist critique. The loss of perspective on the long term of counter-revolution leads these “militants” to believe that a few smashed shop windows and burnt-out garbage cans (all duly insured under the system) will herald revolution, whereas these are nothing more than the counter-fires of social peace, the preventive and cathartic staging of a shoddy revolution, to prevent the only hard and long road to the transmission of the communist program.

“Activism” is therefore not a “nail”, but the breeding ground for all the “nails” and fixations that periodically afflict the labor movement. But epidemic outbreaks of activism don’t just happen. It can be argued that Marxist theory was formed in a ceaseless critical struggle against activist pretensions, which are in reality no more than the sensitive manifestations of the idealist mode of thought. The periods when this phenomenon reached its greatest intensity were invariably characterized by the victory of counter-revolution. A passage by Engels, taken from the article entitled “The Program of the Blanquist Refugees of the Commune” and published on Der Volksstaat in 1874, bears witness to this: “After the failure of any revolution or counter-revolution, the émigrés who have fled abroad display feverish activity. Political groupings of various shades are founded, each blaming the others for the failure of the movement, accusing them of treason and every conceivable mortal sin. At the same time, people are keeping in close touch with their homeland, organizing, conspiring, publishing leaflets and newspapers, swearing that they’ll do it again within the next twenty-four hours, that victory is assured, and in anticipation of this, dividing up government posts in advance. Of course, disillusionment follows disillusionment, and since these setbacks are not attributed to inescapable historical conditions that they refuse to understand, but to the fortuitous errors of individuals, reciprocal accusations pile up and it ends in a general brawl.” A. Bordiga: Battaglia Comunista n°6 (March 20 – April 3, 1952).[8]

6)

Activism is thus an inherent aspect of the decomposition/recomposition of leftism as the extreme left of capital. The use of superlatives such as “ultra”,[9] only serves to make the media images of clashes even more “frightening”, in order to discredit and criminalize political movements defined by default as “ultra-left”, in fact developing real state terrorism: ideological and repressive. This focus reinforces the need for “revenge” and idealistic opposition to the state (or worse, to the mere person of the head of state), paving the way, for some, for the escalation of activist deviations to a new “armed reformism”, even “green”. This process of spectacular crystallization of certain forms of protest reinforces the scotomization and camouflage of the real political stakes, in this case, the course towards war, the fall in real wages due to inflation, the rejection of alienating work, … and other “natural” and health disasters to come.

The other perspective proposed by the bourgeoisie is that of electoral deadlines, which have already amply demonstrated their cyclical propensity to mislead and delude the proletariat.

“Parliament is the form of political representation peculiar to the capitalist regime. Marxist communists’ principled critique of parliamentarianism and bourgeois democracy in general demonstrates that the right to vote cannot prevent the entire state government apparatus from becoming the defense committee for the interests of the ruling capitalist class. What’s more, although this right is granted to all citizens of all social classes in elections to the representative organs of the state, the latter nonetheless organizes itself as the historical instrument of bourgeois struggle against proletarian revolution.” Bordiga: Theses on parliamentarism, II° Congress of the Communist International, 1920. note 10.

Source

Critical Materials, Contre l’activisme, July 2023. Translated, including quotes, with help of Deepl.com
https://81b6bb22-93ff-445e-9132-db9118c0c19f.filesusr.com/ugd/ca292a_ea29f6db4f534a07b934c80f498a9921.pdf

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[1] The aim of this text is not to analyze these different “movements”, but to identify their common deviationist substance: activism. All the more so that we are once again dismayed by the widespread media exaggerations about their pseudo-radicality and their supposed ability to reverse the current counter-revolutionary course. We believe it’s an overblown bluff that also affects revolutionary groups and comrades, that it’s part and parcel of the spectacle as a “social relation mediated by images” (Debord), and that serves only to pre-emptively disarm and demoralize any hint of a solid political perspective. The excessiveness of descriptions and the outrageousness of qualifiers are typically French mystifications, which become more pronounced the further one moves away from their authors, who were not so ignorant of their trivial and banal reality.

[2] We are not in any way referring here to the use of workers’ violence, of which direct action, sabotage and the arming of picket lines… constitute means at the service of an independent class movement conscious of its emancipatory project. The example of the I.W.W. at the beginning of the twentieth century is one of the demonstrations of the concordance between the proletarian content of a movement and radical forms of action, in a period favourable to class struggle. On this question, we refer the reader to our study: “La soumission du procès de travail au procès de valorisation au travers de l’exemple du mouvement ouvrier américain (1887 – 1920)” on our website: https://materiauxcritiques.wixsite.com/ monsite/archives

[3] Marx-Engels : Programmes socialistes, p.74, Spartacus, Paris, 1971

[4] On this question, see our text: “Proletariat V.S. Peuple” in our April 2020 issue of Matériaux Critiques N°1 and on our website: https://materiauxcritiques.wixsite.com/monsite/textesriti

[5] Without elaborating on this subject, we refer the reader to S. Boulouque’s book: “Mensonges en Gilet Jaune”, Serge Safran éditeur, Paris, 2019; as well as to the magazine: “Ni patrie ni frontières” N°60-61, “Gilets jaunes et confusion politique”, 2018.

[6] “Jean-Marie Le Pen has noted a “similarity” between the Poujadist movement in which he participated in the 1950s and the “yellow vests”, although the latter have neither a leader nor a “watchword”, except for a common “hostility” to Emmanuel Macron.” On the site: https://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2019/01/10/97001-20190110FILWWW00239-gilets-jaunes-des- similarities-with-poujadism-jean-marie-le-pen.php

[7] We have already addressed the analysis of this programmed defeat in our position paper of 03/02/2023: “Retraites : Victoire syndicale, Défaite prolétarienne” on our website: https://materiauxcritiques.wixsite.com/monsite/textesritiques

[8] On the website: https://www.pcint.org/03_LP/512/512_activisme-1.htm

[9] We’re not talking here, of course, about the historical “ultra-left”, most of which originated in revolutionary opposition to the involution of the Communist International in the early 1920s (the German-Dutch Communist Left, the Italian Left, etc.)