These are posts on activism from the blog Base and Superstructure. This takes many forms. The focus here is on political activism, above all on activist organizing and base-building. One concern is how to build effective movements. There’s also a need to create solidarity with fellow members and build coalitions with other groups. The main aim of good movements is to work together to advance material interests. This section also includes critiques of electoral work, and discussion of how and when to use elections to advance activist goals. Navigating the balance between grassroots work and electoral work is difficult for everyone.
Here’s a common scenario for lone wolf activism. Imagine you’re attending a city council meeting. You probably don’t make it a habit to go to these things. Because, well, who really wants to do that? The meetings take too long. They’re uninteresting. And they cram the agenda full of inside baseball for local politicos.
As John Gaventa would put it (e.g., Power and Powerlessness), governments set up the agenda and the rules of the game to favor insiders. And to exclude people like you and I.
But there’s something you care about on the agenda this time. So, you show up and argue forcefully for your opinion on that issue. Maybe you get a little passionate. Maybe even indignant, landing a zinger at the expense of your opponents.
Or, like some people, maybe you attend every city council meeting and do this. Whichever.
The point is that, in the moment, it feels good. It feels satisfying. But then you watch the council vote the other way. They shoot down your side of the argument by a comfortable majority. You lose.
In her essay collection Dirtbag, Amber A’Lee Frost usefully distinguishes between achieving socialism and being a socialist. I find this quite useful. In fact, Frost helps me get at some of my own issues with frustration on activist movements.
As Frost puts it, she does activism because she wants “socialism, and socialism for me is simply a chore that needs to be done.” She wishes it were “already done.” As she puts it, the goal of activism “isn’t to ‘be a socialist’ (whatever that means). The goal is to change the world so that we can live under socialism.”
I have to admit the notion resonates with me. Lately, I feel more than a little discouraged about certain issues in the world, like the Israel-Gaza war. On those issues, I see little I could do to achieve positive results. But I can easily ‘be a socialist’ by demonstrating my disapproval of the Israeli invasion. It just takes a few social media posts.
And, furthermore, much of the activism I see on the issue achieves the latter more than the former.
That said, I don’t resonate fully with Frost’s line on this. In fact, I think we can find joy in the process of achieving socialism. It’s not just a chore. We can come together and create fun and culture as a supplement to our activism.
But it feels like a chore at times. And worrying too much about ‘being a socialist’ takes our eye off the prize.
Nathan J. Robinson spent some time with an old leftist mag called New Masses. And he suggested in a recent issue of Current Affairs that we need more leftist cultural spaces.
From 1926 to 1948, New Masses created an entire system of leftist cultural spaces. It included poetry, fiction, cultural analysis, music, and art. And it did all these things in addition to the political analysis one might expect from a leftist mag. Its Stalinism aside, the mag created a playful, insightful space for leftists to engage with one another.
Robinson flirts with the idea of creating new leftist cultural spaces in the 21st century. Wouldn’t that be a grand idea? At least, Robinson muses that it would be.
Would it?
Maybe. I’m far from opposed to it, at least in principle. But mass cultural narratives in the 21st century create special difficulties for us.
But I want to ask a different question. How would these leftist cultural spaces differ from what we already have?
Let’s face it. The internet encourages leftists to create all sorts of cultural bubbles. Especially Internet based bubbles. Leftists spend a lot of time talking to one another on platforms like Twitter (or Xitter, my favorite term for it). In those spaces, they offer often lousy political analysis, and they compete with one another to see who can use the most elevator words and express the most ultra-progressive sentiment.
So, I’m open to the idea Robinson proposes. But I also want to hear how we can make it better than what we have now. How do we keep leftist cultural spaces from degenerating into Internet based cultural and sub-cultural bubbles?
Sometime last year, I attended a neighborhood meeting. We were setting up a local org to advocate for neighborhood interests. As well as hold fun parties and events.
Setting up a group like that involves considering lots of issues. But one key issue amounts to deciding who, exactly, makes up the org’s constituency. Whose interests should we include? Did we want an org of residents or residential and commercial property owners?
What is a neighborhood org, anyway? Did we want it to be an org of tenants and homeowners, or an org of homeowners, landlords, and small business owners? As readers might imagine, I advocated strongly for the former.
But during the discussion, a local politician objected to that whole question. He claimed constituency ‘doesn’t matter’ and that ‘debates like this turn people off from joining an org.’ In his opinion, the policies we advocate would matter far more than who makes up the group.
A few readers have noted that I haven’t posted on the Israel-Gaza War. The war has raged since last October, at times overtaking the news and even U.S. political debate.
That’s true enough. I haven’t written anything new on Israel and Gaza in the last few months. Here’s a brief word about why.
First, the things I said a few years ago about the Israel Palestine Conflict, sadly, still apply pretty well. I wrote a post in 2019 introducing readers to the conflict. I also expanded the post into a full chapter in my second book, Left Foreign Policy. In those outlets, I laid out the conflict as one primarily about resources, which then drives the moves Israel makes as the hegemonic power in the region.
Predictably, much of the mainstream press presents the conflict as one about religion or (Israeli) national security. Almost all sources fail to identify the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the major cause of the current fighting. This all leads the press astray.
Second, I’ve found a few sources worth following closely. Both for the day to day details of the conflict and broader analysis. Early in the Israel Gaza War, the American Prestige podcast established itself as an great source for news, interviews, and commentary. +972 magazine also stands out as a solid source that moves beyond the pro-Israel biases that pervade the U.S. press.
Finally, I’ll admit that I struggle to find useful things to say about the Israel Gaza War. Not that there aren’t things to say, but rather that most of the things worth saying won’t help move us toward a better outcome.
I’ve moved past that phase of life where I think personal displays of awareness on social media do anything positive. Rather, I think people – myself and readers all included – should join orgs like DSA that are trying to build a better U.S. left. DSA, better than any other org, works an internationalist perspective on the Israel Gaza War into a deeper vision of what the left can become. Shouting into the void on Twitter – or even joining single-issue orgs – can’t do anything like that.
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