I actually started writing this yesterday morning, before someone tried to assassinate DJT at a rally in Butler County, PA (about a 45-minute drive from where I live in Pittsburgh). I have a lot of thoughts about what this means and what is going to happen from here (none of them involve rosy predictions for the future of the US left) that I am not going to elaborate on. Instead, I’m going to present the post below, which I do think is deeply relevant both for how we think about the recent past and how we should strategize about the future.
I’ve been reading (listening to, more accurately) Vince Bevins’s new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution on the recommendation of a friend. There are several interesting things going on in the book, one of the most bracing being its frank confrontation of something that I have wondered through countless grueling political and organizing experiences: what the fuck are we actually doing here? Bevins examines, obliquely but effectively, the deep structuring effect that social media has had on the mechanics of street protest. (McLuhan is right — the medium is the message. More than that, the medium is the tactic, which in a lot of US left-wing formations and movements has completely displaced the idea of strategy. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, I’m sure you’re already familiar with “street contention” — Bevin’s great term — optimized for engagement. I can think of dozens of examples of this but one that sticks out in my mind is the response of the politically and ideologically vague, but vaguely left-wing, American Jewish group If Not Now to the Trump administration’s scandalous mass imprisonment of migrant children in 2019. Pick a target — just about any will do — recruit some people, stage a sit-in, make sure to livestream it, try to get arrested, end the livestream after the arrests.) Related to the replacement of strategy with tactics, I think there is something going on ideologically here as well.
[Here, I had written several paragraphs about my experiences in protest movements and various forms of organizing over the decade that Bevins covers. Maybe some other day, or maybe I’ll save these for another post about Hannah Proctor’s Burnout, or The Romance of American Communism. Hah. I will speak in generalities below; these generalities are informed by the particularities of my experiences which, of course, are not universal. I make no claim that they are. Moreover, everything I criticize below, I have done and taken part in myself. This is self-criticism as much as anything else.]
An idea of Lenin’s runs through Bevins’s book like a golden thread. This idea is usually read through the caricature of Lenin as “against spontaneity” and indeed there’s some truth to that (Rosa Luxemburg ably criticized Lenin’s stance in The Mass Strike). But Lenin is, unsurprisingly, correct. He argued in What Is To Be Done? that, as Bevins paraphrases, spontaneous uprisings will take on whatever ideology is “in the air” around them. (Rosa Luxemburg, as I understand her argument, which it has been several years since I’ve read, asserts — also correctly, in my view — that quasi-spontaneous uprisings are the form of motion of the proletarian masses. Interesting!) This, as Bevins’s book documents in contemporary example after contemporary example (mercifully few of them based in the US), is how big uprisings can create power vacuums, how the incredibly abstract and heterogeneous “demands” that issue from such uprisings are susceptible to appropriation, perversion, and to stunning reversals of momentum and fortune.
Lenin is famous as a “vanguardist.” One of the crucial elements of developing a revolutionary vanguard is political education. It’s almost impossible to imagine any left-ish group in the US today actually requiring people to read and study things as a condition of membership, although that’s what the Black Panther Party did. (Not super easy or accessible texts either, which I deeply respect — revolutionary struggle demands deep engagement with revolutionary thought.)
All of this brings me to a crystallization of my what the fuck are we doing here sentiment: what is the place of political education (those inclined in a Maoist direction might say “line struggle”) in the US left today? From all my long experience, the answer seems to be: there is no place for political education or struggle over the revolutionary ideology (some might say… strategy) that undergirds our tactics. This is what I mean when I say the issues Bevins identifies with “social media movements” have an ideological component as well. The influence of social media means that the logic and metrics of engagement and optimization drive how movements even conceptualize the formatting of their grievances or demands in specific political terms.
We are not allowed to talk about what we’re actually doing, and we’re especially not allowed to disagree. To disagree is to engage in “infighting” and “drama” that occlude the core mission of most NGO groups (many, many leftist formations are NGOs in the US): building lists of emails. This is a consequence of social media optimization logic together with the chokehold that nonprofits and other NGOs have on the political landscape in the US (this is particularly pronounced in Pittsburgh which informs my perspective tremendously — I am not arguing this is the sum total of the left or the case everywhere, just that it is widespread). It all adds up to a distressing “banking” model of political education. Gone are the days of study, argument, struggle, development of oneself and others in common intellectual pursuit. Were they ever here? LOL. Who knows. But time after time in my own life I have been expected to just show up and execute on some tactic that I had no part in developing and was not welcome to have any part in developing, from the mundane (aimless canvassing “for Medicare for all”) to the risky (a favorite strategy of NGO-affiliated organizers in Pittsburgh during the first Trump administration was “taking intersections” — stopping traffic, often with a terrifyingly inadequate number of inexperienced people, to no conceivable strategic or even tactical end). Someone else — they’ll never tell you it’s some old ass white person on a nonprofit board — already has the correct idea, even though the political situation is shifting and unfolding, and they’re gonna put it in your head, and you’re gonna act like you believe it and you understand what it’s doing, by doing what they tell you to do. That’s what it means, in the vast majority of cases, to participate in protest in the US in recent years.
There are some other demobilizing aspects of this. Optimizing political action for engagement and subsuming political education and the development of strategy into the rote repetition of tactics (that play well for engagement, obviously) corresponds also to a conservative public relations strategy of plausible deniability for any kind of really hot-button ideological issue. Here we have NGO-affiliated movements adopting some safe radical rhetoric but never really committing to anything, never really saying what we mean outright, and certainly never permitting open argumentation and struggle about it. Why, that would distract from the glorified charity work that passes for political organizing in so many areas today.
Which brings me, of course, to a recurrent bugbear of this newsletter project: Emergent Strategy. Best described as a “social justice self-help book,” Emergent Strategy is A Course in Miracles for the managerial left. The book borrows (liberally and incorrectly) from systems theories to paint a nice picture of organization and resilience “emerging” from chaos and instability. Heat air up, and the molecules will move faster and more chaotically — to a point. After this point, the system will suddenly become ordered and exhibit convection, undirected and self-organizing behavior of the movement of air across thermal gradients. It’s a comforting idea, that stability, organization, and meaning will emerge out of escalating chaos. But Bevins’s book (along with a long history of thinking about this stuff — Bevins’s book is good, but these insights, mine or his, are not terribly original), I think, proves it wrong. Just economists insist there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no possibility of victory without principled struggle.
We’re far enough into this cursed century now to know that public relations strategies do not build political power. The revolution will not be impression-managed to bloodless fruition from the safe remove of a smartphone or personal computer. Instability will erupt — bloody, scary, contradictory, and fast — from the chaotic and tangled currents of history, both world events and personal grievance. Lenin and Rosa understood this. Those who have a plan are not guaranteed success, but they’re at least at an advantage — the advantage of not being defeated before they even started, of not having their ideas smothered in the nest by managerial caution, of having the skills and intuition that come from being allowed to hone your strategic vision and tactical skills through internal struggle and honest confrontation with events as they are.
We love to sing Florence Reese’s 1931 song about the protracted miners’ struggles in Harlan County, KY: “Which Side Are You On?” It has become a beloved piece of millenial leftist kitsch. It is indeed stirring. But the Harlan County War was a different kind of struggle — a labor struggle between two clearly defined sides, operators and miners. The question in the song’s title is rhetorical. It is directed at miners who know the contours and the stakes of their struggle, even if they don’t (yet) know it in political terms. But it is not 1931 anymore. In today’s world of multilateral mass movement, you had better be prepared. When the moment of contention actually arrives, you won’t have time to contemplate which side you’re on — you’ll need to already know.