>At 01:50 PM 5/12/2005, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Demos are in any case primarily a way to count noses (whether the count
>>be small or large is irrelevant).
>
>I think Doug, Liza, and Christian complained
>about this in their article about activistism.
Not exactly. Here's a relevant passage <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html> - and given the decline of the antiwar and global justice movements, I think we were pretty prescient:
>So what is the ideology of the activist left
>(and by that we mean the global justice, peace,
>media democracy, community organizing, financial
>populist, and green movements)? Socialist?
>Mostly not - too state-phobic. Some activsts are
>anarchists - but mainly out of temperamental
>reflex, not rigorous thought. Others are
>liberals - though most are too confrontational
>and too skeptical about the system to embrace
>that label. And many others profess no ideology
>at all. So over all is the activist left just an
>inchoate, "post-ideological" mass of do-gooders,
>pragmatists and puppeteers?
>
>No. The young troublemakers of today do have an
>ideology and it is as deeply felt and
>intellectually totalizing as any of the great
>belief systems of yore. The cadres who populate
>those endless meetings, who bang the drum, who
>lead the "trainings" and paint the puppets, do
>indeed have a creed. They are Activismists.
>
>That's right, Activismists. This brave new
>ideology combines the political illiteracy of
>hyper-mediated American culture with all the
>moral zeal of a nineteenth century temperance
>crusade. In this worldview, all roads lead to
>more activism and more activists. And the one
>who acts is righteous. The activistists seem to
>borrow their philosophy from the factory boss in
>a Heinrich Böll short story who greets his
>employees each morning with the exhortation
>"Let's have some action." To which the workers
>obediently reply: "Action will be taken!"
>
>Activists unconsciously echoing factory bosses?
>The parallel isn't as far-fetched as it might
>seem, as another German, Theodor Adorno,
>suggests. Adorno - who admittedly doesn't have
>the last word on activism, since he called the
>cops on University of Frankfurt demonstrators in
>1968 - nonetheless had a good point when he
>criticized the student and antiwar movement of
>the 1960s for what he called "actionism." In his
>eyes this was an unreflective "collective
>compulsion for positivity that allows its
>immediate translation into practice." Though
>embraced by people who imagine themselves to be
>radical agitators, that thoughtless compulsion
>mirrors the pragmatic empiricism of the dominant
>culture - "not the least way in which actionism
>fits so smoothly into society's prevailing
>trend." Actionism, he concluded, "is
>regressive...it refuses to reflect on its own
>impotence."
>
>It may seem odd to cite this just when
>activistism seems to be working fine. Protest is
>on an upswing; even the post 9/11 frenzy of
>terror baiting didn't shut down the movement.
>Demonstrators were out in force to protest the
>World Economic Forum, with a grace and
>discipline that buoyed sprits worldwide. The
>youth getting busted, gassed and trailed by the
>cops are putting their bodies on the line to
>oppose global capital; they are brave and
>committed, even heroic.
>
>But is action enough? We pose this question
>precisely because activism seems so strong. The
>flipside of all this agitation is a corrosive
>and aggressive anti-intellectualism. We object
>to this hostility toward thinking - not only
>because we've all got a cranky intellectual
>bent, but also because it limits the movement's
>transformative power.
>
>Our gripe is historically specific. If everyone
>was busy with bullshit doctrinal debates we
>would prescribe a little anti-intellectualism.
>But that is not the case right now.
>
>
>
>The Real Price of Not Thinking
>
>How does activist anti-intellectualism manifest
>on the ground? One instance is the reduction of
>strategy to mere tactics, to horrible effect.
>Take for example the largely failed San
>Francisco protest against the National
>Association of Broadcasters, an action which
>ended up costing tens of thousand of dollars,
>gained almost no attention, had no impact on the
>NAB, and nearly ruined one of the sponsoring
>organizations. During a post-mortem discussion
>of this debacle one of the organizers reminded
>her audience that: "We had three thousand people
>marching through [the shopping district] Union
>Square protesting the media. That's amazing. It
>had never happened before." Never mind the utter
>non-impact of this aimless march. The point was
>clear: we marched for ourselves. We were our own
>targets. Activism made us good.
>
>Thoughtless activism confuses the formulation of
>political aims. One of us was on a conference
>panel during which an activist lawyer went on
>about the virtues of small businesses, and the
>need for city policy to encourage them. When it
>was pointed out that enthusiasm for small
>business should be tempered by a recognition
>that smaller businesses tend to pay less, are
>harder to organize, offer fewer fringe benefits,
>and are more dangerous than larger businesses,
>the lawyer dismissed this as "the paralysis of
>analysis." On another panel, when it was pointed
>out that Alinsky-style community organizing is a
>practical and theoretical failure whose severe
>limitations need to be recognized, an organizer
>and community credit union promoter shut down
>the conversation with a simple: "I just don't
>want to discuss this."
>
>The anti-war "movement" is perhaps the most
>egregious recent example of a promising
>political phenomenon that was badly damaged by
>the anti-intellectual outlook of activistism.
>While activists frequently comment on the
>success of the growing peace movement - many
>actions take place, conferences are planned, new
>people become activists, a huge protest is
>scheduled for April in Washington, D.C. - no one
>seems to notice that it's no longer clear what
>war we're protesting. Repression at home? Future
>wars in Somalia or Iraq? Even in the case of
>Afghanistan, it turned out to be important to
>have something to say to skeptics who asked:
>"What's your alternative? I think the government
>should protect me from terrorists, and plus this
>Taliban doesn't seem so great." The movement
>failed to address such questions, and protests
>dwindled.
>
>On some college campuses, by contrast, where the
>war has been seen as a complicated opportunity
>for conversation rather than sign-waving, the
>movement has done better. But everywhere, the
>unwillingness to think about what it means to be
>against the war and how war fits into the global
>project of American empire, has also led to a
>poverty of thinking about what kind of actions
>make sense. "How can we strategically affect the
>situation?" asks Lara Jiramanus of Boston's
>Campus Anti-War Coalition. "So we want to stop
>the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan - what
>does it mean to have that as our goal? I don't
>think we talk about that enough."