4: Putting into practice

The limits of activism

What we have so far is a vision of total liberation. As of yet, however, it can only be admitted that this vision remains by and large a fantasy. Throughout The Politics of Total Liberation, Best speaks of the need for “radical, systemic, and comprehensive social changes, of a formidable revolutionary movement against oppressive global capitalism and hierarchical domination of all kinds.” This clearly describes the struggle that resonates so deeply among many of those committed to animal and earth liberation. It confirms that total liberation must be revolutionary in order to gain substance at all. But, then again, we seriously have to ask: does the current trajectory of total liberation activism – contained as it is primarily within the terrain of activist campaigning – justify speaking in such terms? The answer to this question is surprisingly obvious, given how rarely it’s admitted: we are not a revolutionary movement. For such ambitious rhetoric, our strategy leaves a lot to be desired; the state and capital aren’t going to fall any time soon, least of all from our efforts.

It’s not as if total liberation has no revolutionary content – what was said in the previous chapter contends that it certainly does. Yet this component refers mainly to something abstract and intangible, rather than anything significantly manifest in reality. Writing from behind bars rather than the comfort of academia, ALF prisoner of war Walter Bond offers an honest assessment:

In my estimation Total Liberation should be making steps to unite various struggles in the real world against the common leviathan of government and towards the reality of free communities. Unfortunately, I don’t see much grassroots organization around Total Lib. It remains, thus far, in the world of ideas, of salutations of solidarity. (Interview with Profane Existence, 2013)

Addressing this shortcoming is essential for moving forward. But it can also be an uncomfortable point, given that it means questioning the very basis of total liberation as it currently exists, namely, the method of activism itself. In the notorious pamphlet Give up Activism (1999), Andrew X argued that various direct action movements are held back by the widespread assumption of an activist mentality, where “people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists.” We often look at activism as the defining feature of our lives, as if it were a job or a career. Yet such strong assumptions of political identity often hold us back, not merely because they obscure the important differences between us, but especially because they distance ourselves unnecessarily from the rest of the population. Rather than being members of the oppressed along with everyone else – ordinary people who just happen to be fighting back in our own way – we see ourselves instead as specialists in social change, somehow uniquely privileged in our ability and willingness to intervene.

This mentality immediately undermines the possibility of revolution: by implication, the rest of society is, in virtue of lacking activist specialization, written off as an inherently passive mass. Outsiders, in return, typically see us as weird cliques or inaccessible subcultures, often justifiably so. And what a strange outcome that offers: we’ve ended up doing the work of the mainstream media for them, isolating ourselves from society at large, paving the way for our repression to be met without broader resistance.

Such a dynamic is further solidified by the amount of practical specialization often required for getting involved in activism. To paint a crude picture, the model activist is a highly trained, ideologically advanced being that utilizes a repertoire of skills, contacts, and equipment to effect social change. Those outsiders who see our struggle as relevant to their lives risk being excluded by such demanding requirements, particularly unrealistic if your life is already sufficiently burdened by everyday survival under capitalism. Even those with a chance of getting involved will need us to show them the way, which always encourages a hierarchical dynamic. Either we’ll end up being the accidental vanguards of the revolution, or, more likely, our involvement will prove irrelevant to the sudden moments of upheaval that revolutionary change is defined by. The activist subculture has thus been relegated to a kind of bubble, floating around the edges of society, and winning victories here and there, yet remaining forever impossible for outsiders to get a firm grip on. Some would say this status even strengthens the liberal paradigm, given that we perfectly play the role of the annoying, fringe radicals the center ground so gracefully tolerates, but only because we pose no real threat to its stability overall.

This introduction to the activist mentality can be refined in light of a second key limitation of activism: the focus on issue-based campaigning. The tendency with activism is to engage with power gradually, attempting to transform society one issue at a time. Normally a campaign will center on a particular aspect of the economy – say, this specific slaughterhouse, or that form of energy extraction – rather than targetting the structure as a whole. This fine-grain approach certainly has its uses, allowing something as broad and abstract as social hierarchy to be confronted in its individual, concrete manifestations. Not to mention, halting the expansion of the capitalist machine (even just in one place) is always an important victory. The basic problem, however, is that issue-campaigning remains focused on achieving essentially reformist goals, intended merely to make the system more bearable. A multitude of different concerns – potentially revolutionary if taken as a whole – are condensed into a narrow range of issues, exactly the kind promoted by capitalist organizations such Greenpeace, PETA, or the Green Party. What makes a campaign radical might be that it employs militant tactics, or else opens up a space – usually a protest camp – in which to live out a holistic critique of power. Such endeavors are always bound to ruffle feathers. Yet the primary goal of a campaign – its basic target, which determines whether we “win” or “lose” – almost never stands to bring us any closer to dismantling capitalism. After all, preventing a forest from being turned into a coal mine is the kind of thing that sounds good to most liberals, even if the means we’re willing to employ set us a world apart.

Even in the event of a victory, issue-campaigns often fail to improve the overall situation, with the devastation merely being shifted elsewhere. In Germany, for example, nuclear energy had been fought against already since the ‘70s, and in 2011 the campaign finally won, with the government announcing it would close down all nuclear power stations by 2022. However, the bigger-picture outcome was merely the economy shifting towards a greater reliance on brown coal, a form of resource extraction at least as ecocidal as nuclear power, especially with respect to climate change. A gradual phase out of coal mining seems increasingly likely in Germany; in particular, the ongoing Hambacher Forest occupation has played a vital role here. But a victory would only mean the economy shifting once again, only this time to fracking, or biomass, or tar sands, or hydroelectricty, or industrial wind. Either that, or simply importing more coal from Russia – no problem. Such outcomes merely offer an inconvenience, maybe even an economic boost, leaving the deep structure of the highly flexible modern economy wholly in tact. Meanwhile, any anti-capitalist discourse contained within issue-campaigning is normally just empty rhetoric, failing to map onto tangible realities.

Some would respond, of course, that this critique is unfair. After all, total liberation activism was previously defined as rejecting single-issue campaigning in favor of a much broader revolutionary focus. This is exactly what Best, for example, offers in his proposal for an alliance politics that builds links between different liberation struggles, drawing them into a resolutely anti-capitalist trajectory. But this isn’t a new idea, and it doesn’t overcome the problems inherent in activism. Already two decades ago, we saw exactly that being attempted by the anti-globalization “movement of movements,” which rarely seemed to gain an honest grasp of what the destruction of capitalism might look like. In the aforementioned pamphlet, Andrew X clarified that such engagement merely amounts to making links between activist groups, not beyond them. The shift remains quantitative rather than qualitative, a matter of strengthening different campaigns, but not of exceeding a framework based around campaigning on issues in the first place. The challenge is that, besides simply increasing the personnel of the struggle, we need to find ways of deepening our engagement. Otherwise, total liberation cannot help but remain a kind of paradox, the revolutionary scope of its vision scraping hard against the reformism of its strategy.

That isn’t to say, on the other hand, that we should give up on activism altogether. Any critiques here should be careful not to get carried away: activism has proven indispensable over the last decades, be it with keeping the global elite in check, opening up vital autonomous spaces, liberating millions of animals, or defending countless ecosystems. All of which continues to make a very real difference to an untold number of lives, revolution or no revolution. Not only is such activity valuable in itself, moreover, it’s often kept the spirit of revolutionary struggle alive, incubating a libertarian, anti-capitalist consciousness within various direct action movements over the years. However, the basic problem is that activism remains tailored for an era in which the overall stability of the system was taken as a given. If we no longer consider ourselves to live in such a context – if we’re honestly ready to experience what lies beyond it – then we need to exceed the current formula.

Despite offering a theory that questions everything, total liberation remains hampered by a practice that changes a great deal less. How do we bridge this gap between vision and strategy? That is, how do we make total liberation a revolutionary movement? At last, and in the middle of this piece, no less, we’ve arrived at our central problem.

The collapse of workerism

Of course, some would have it that we never lost a revolutionary perspective at all, quite confident they had the solution all along. This comes in the form of workerism, a broad set of strategies – mainly Marxist or anarcho-syndicalist – that affirm the centrality of the working class for overthrowing capitalism. In the history of revolutionary struggle, few ideas have consistently held more sway; but surely that’s only the reason why this sorely outdated approach has proven so hard to get over. Things have changed more dramatically than ever in the last decades, shattering the material conditions that once granted workplace organization such grandiose pretensions. It’s important to clarify why, or else the attempt to exceed activism risks being subsumed by yet another reformist method, this one all the more stagnant.

Only a few decades ago, the prospects of organized labor in the Global North were much more hopeful, with trade unions retaining a great deal of strength into the 1970s. Mainly during the ‘80s, however, capitalist production underwent some major alterations. Profound technological developments in the field of electronics – especially digitization – caused the productive process to become much more automated, requiring significantly less human input. This combined with an increased ability on the part of employers to outsource employment to less economically developed countries, where labor was much cheaper. Fairly suddenly, therefore, the two biggest sectors of the economy – split mainly between industry and agriculture – were greatly reduced in size, resulting in massive layoffs. Yet those who lost their jobs were generally absorbed by steady growth in the services sector, thereby avoiding immediate social destabilization. Whilst it was once the smallest economic sector by a long way, the services sector is now by far the largest in the Global North, even approaching 80% employment rates in the US, UK, and France.

The result has been a striking redefinition of the common notion of work. It’s lost its center of gravity in the factory, having fragmented instead in the direction of various post-industrial workplaces – restaurants, shops, offices. Once a largely centralized mass, the working class has been dispersed across the social terrain, the new focus being on small, highly diverse productive units. Between these units, workers possess few common interests and interact little, leading to a significantly diminished potential for collective action. Of course, resistance in the workplace continues, but the internal avenues necessary for revolt to generalize have been majorly severed, the situation continuing to decline in light of ever greater technological advance.

Nobody can deny the profound identity crisis faced by the working class. Only a few decades ago, the factory was seen as the center of everything, with workers offering the vital component in the functioning of society as a whole. Work was once a way of life, not so much in terms of the amount of time it took up, but instead because of the clear sense of existential grounding it offered. For generations, there had been a strong link between work and professionalism, with most workers committing to a single craft for the entirety of their lives. Career paths were passed down from father to son, who often remained in the same company; the families of different workers also maintained close ties with one another. Nowadays, however, everything has changed: employment is immensely uncertain, the relentless fluidity of the post-industrial economy forcing most to get by on a roster of precarious, low-skilled jobs. Far fewer people take pride in their work, especially given that employment only rarely has a convincing subtext of doing something socially important. Trade unions have also vanished as a historical force, having been defeated in the key battles of the ‘80s, their membership levels imploding in lock-step with the advance of neoliberalism. A residue of the old world still exists, but it continues to dissipate further every day, never to return. In the Global South, too, things are inevitably moving in the same direction.

These developments cast serious doubt on the validity of Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist strategies for revolution. It’s becoming increasingly meaningless to speak of “the workers” in reference to a cohesive entity. It isn’t as if the disintegration of the working class implies the absence of poverty, nor of the excluded – in no sense whatsoever. What it does mean is the end of the working class as a subject. One that was, as Marx put it, “disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself” (Capital, 1867). Over the last decades, the working class has been dismembered and demoralized by the very same mechanism: just as the mass application of steam and machinery into the productive process created the industrial proletariat two centuries ago, the invention of new, automated technologies has led to its dissolution. There’s no single project around which to unite the working class any more; it follows, as with identity politics, that gains in the workplace will almost always be limited to improving capitalism rather than destroying it. The Industrial Revolution has been superseded by the Digital Revolution, yet the revolutionary optimism of workerism remains ideologically trapped in a bygone era, fumbling for relevance in a century that won’t have it. Although, to be honest, this is hardly news: already for some time now, the nostalgic language of workerism has come across as stale and outdated to most, even if academics often struggle to keep up.

In any case, the collapse of workerism might be nothing to mourn. Another implication of the end of traditional employment is the predominance of a range of workplaces few would want to appropriate anyway. The factory has been replaced by the likes of call centers, supermarkets, service stations, fast food joints, and coffee shop chains. Yet surely no one can imagine themselves maintaining these workplaces after the revolution, as if anything resembling a collectively run Starbucks or factory farm is what we’re going for? When workerism first became popular, there was an obvious applicability of most work to the prospect of a free society. In the 21^st century, however, the alienation of labor runs all the deeper: no longer is it the mere fact of lacking control over work, but instead its inherent function that’s usually the problem. To put it another way, it should come as no surprise that Marxists haven’t yet replaced their hammer and sickle with an office desk and espresso machine, as would be necessary to keep up with the times. The modern symbols of work are worthy only of scorn, not the kind of valorization involved in putting them on a flag.

This is another big problem for the workerist theory of revolution, given its conception of revolution primarily or even exclusively in terms of the seizure of the means of production. Achieving reforms in the workplace is one thing, but only rarely can such exercises in confidence-building be taken as steps towards appropriating the workplace altogether. Surely the point isn’t to democratize the economy, but instead to pick it apart: those aspects of the economy genuinely worth collectivizing, as opposed to converting or simply burning, are few and far between. Of course, they still exist, but they’re marginal. And that confirms the absurdity of expecting workplace organization to offer the centerpiece of any future revolution.

This hardly implies doing away with the material aspects of revolutionary struggle, given that communizing the conditions of existence remains necessary for living our lives – not just this or that activist campaign – in genuine conflict with the system. All the more, the moment in which these subterranean influences suddenly erupt, and mass communization overturns the ordinary functioning of the capitalist machine, surely remains a defining feature of revolution itself. Yet such endeavors must be sharply distinguished from seizing the means of production – that is, appropriating the capitalist infrastructure more or less as it stands before us. Far from offering a vision of the world we want to see, the syndicalist proposal to reclaim the conditions of work – to assume control of very the system that’s destroying us – merely implies self-managing not only our own exploitation, but also that of the planet.

As an aside, it should be added that these issues undermine the contemporary relevance of Marxism altogether. It was previously suggested that Marxian class analysis no longer offers a credible account of oppression; the current discussion, meanwhile, suggests it cannot be used to frame the topic of revolution either. As a method for interpreting the world, as well as for changing it, Marxism has had its day. If we wanted to be a little diplomatic, we could say this isn’t so much a criticism of the theory itself, more a recognition of the fact that the world it was designed to engage with no longer exists. If we wanted to be a little less diplomatic, moreover, it should be added that what’s left of Marxism is utterly boring, reformist, and kept “alive” almost exclusively by academics. As the big guy declared back in 1852, “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Yet in no case has this claim, offered in response to the lack of imagination among revolutionaries in the 19^th century, been more relevant than with Marxism today. We should pay our respects, if indeed any respect is due, whilst refusing to be crippled by an outdated approach. The same goes for anarcho-syndicalism, its once unbridled potential decisively shut down by the combined victories of fascism and Bolshevism.

To offer a last word of clarification, none of this implies doing away with workplace organization altogether. There’s still much to be said for confronting power on every front: the collectivization of any remaining useful workplaces, as well as the fierce application of the general strike, surely remains vital for any effective revolutionary mosaic. Just as workplace organization continues to prove effective for breaking down social barriers, as well as potentially improving our lives in the here and now. The core claim offered here is only that it cannot be considered the centerpiece of revolutionary struggle altogether – quite the minimal conclusion. Merely in terms of asking what the abolition of class might look like today, workerism has lost its way. And that doesn’t begin to consider the abolition of hierarchy as such. When taken in isolation, organized labor offers nothing more than a subtle variety of reformism, thinly cloaked in its stuffy revolutionary pretensions. Total liberation, by contrast, refuses to single out any focal points of the clash, be they workerist, activist, or otherwise.

A revolutionary impasse

What an uneasy situation we’re in: whilst the need for revolution has never been greater, rarely has our grasp of what it means to build such potential seemed so vague. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that workerism – the dominant model of anti-capitalist struggle for a century and a half – has collapsed before our very eyes. The tremors continue to reverberate, most remaining unsure of how to respond. Few are willing to give up the rhetoric of revolution, not at a time like this. And yet, it doesn’t take much to see that, in all but name, the majority of radicals have long since abandoned the prospect of actually destroying the system.

One clear indication of the current impasse is how easily supposed Bolsheviks – Leninist, Trotskyite, Stalinist – get swept up by every latest rehash of social democracy. Perhaps the most important tension underlying the history of Marxist engagement was the split between reform and revolution, exactly the point of Bolshevism being to pursue the latter. Nowadays, however, the two strands are normally lumped together, even at the price of utmost incoherence, merely for Marxism to maintain a guise of relevance into the 21^st century. Surely no one who still took the revolutionary potential of the proletariat to be anything more than a buzzword would find themselves campaigning for Syriza or Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. Since the 2007 financial crash, the Left has played a sly game, gaining favor among the young by utilizing vaguely revolutionary sentiments – slogans of “people power” and “real democracy,” stolen from the anti-politics of grassroots movements like Occupy and 15M – to dress up its lukewarm parliamentary policies. Bear in mind, though, that such duplicity remains concealed only for as long as the crypto-politicians fail to seize power, their cover instantly blown if they ever manage to win at the ballot. The functions of state and capital have always proven inviolable when approached from the inside. A glum image comes to mind, one of Syriza carrying out EU-dictated austerity measures, even in open defiance of a nationwide referendum, thereby betraying the very platform that secured them the right to govern in 2015. This is exactly what a “victory” for such a party looks like.

Of course, this problem is hardly faced by Marxists alone. Nor is the issue as superficial as many anarchists finding themselves requesting the hand of governance every once in a while. Bookchin, for example, showed as much appreciation as anyone for the great libertarian upheavals of the past, including the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution. Throughout the course of his life, however, it slowly became clear that such admiration was mainly retrospective, lacking any serious designs on the future. Already in 1985, he declared in a speech that “the revolutionary era in the classical sense is over” – a shrewd observation. It could have been the basis for reconceiving the possibility of revolution in the post-industrial era, only it was used to give up on the idea altogether. The alternative Bookchin offered was termed “libertarian municipalism,” which proposes engaging in municipal elections with the aim of putting local councils under anarchist control. Yet it will come as no surprise that Bookchin eventually gave up on the hopeless idea of convincing anarchists to become politicians, to the extent he even publicly dissociated himself from anarchism in 1999. The significance of this outcome – one of the key theorists of contemporary anarchism turning his back on the very possibility of revolution – can hardly be overstated.

Another major attempt to divorce anarchism from revolutionary struggle came from Hakim Bey, this time in the book Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991). One of the main claims offered here is that “realism demands not only that we give up waiting for ‘the Revolution’ but also that we give up wanting it.” Not only is the supremacy of the state supposedly unassailable nowadays, apparently there’s also little chance of attacking authority without inadvertently becoming it. What ensues is a curiously dignified take on the simple fact of giving up, a hedonistic defeatism focused around occupying the accidental cracks of autonomy left unattended by the system. Such zones are defined as temporary precisely because there’s no intention to defend or extend them, the point being to remain invisible to power for as long as possible, scampering away and setting up elsewhere whenever confronted. This might seem like the most hopeless of the examples mentioned here, even the most pitiful; yet that’s only because Bey is so upfront regarding his pessimism. At least he nonetheless stays true to the need to live anarchy now, rather than spending our lives merely dreaming of it.

A final example on the topic comes from Deep Green Resistance (DGR). This radical environmentalist group distinguished themselves with a hard-nosed strategy for uprooting industrial civilization altogether, something that won them the hearts of many libertarians. The kind of unflinching overhaul of vision and tactics DGR offers is all too rare at the moment, especially as the ecological situation really starts to bite. Yet this can be the only explanation for how such an irredeemably flawed approach enjoyed its relative success – that is, the sad fact it has so few contenders. It’s clear this already tired clique has taken the abandonment of revolution as a central point of departure, assuming in line with co-founder Derrick Jensen that “the mass of civilized people will never be on our side” (Endgame, 2006). This leads to a terribly muddled strategy: having jettisoned a commitment to popular upheaval, DGR offers the hilarious proposal that industrial civilization itself could be brought down – not to mention kept down – by the activity of a relative handful of professional activists. What an odd combination: on the one hand, DGR seem to recognize the problems inherent in activism, that the current approach will never initiate mass struggle; on the other hand, however, they’ve extended the task of the activist milieu beyond any semblance of credibility. Whilst DGR once held a fair degree of influence, this trend flopped very quickly indeed, not least because of their rampant transphobia. And that was only a particular symptom of a much more general problem, namely, their obnoxious insistence on building a rigidly hierarchical, ideologically uniform resistance movement that reeks of eco-Leninism.

These examples are diverse, yet each of them stems from exactly the same sense of dejection regarding our revolutionary prospects nowadays. Some anarchists have attempted to escape such associations, at times even exploiting the moment to label themselves the only revolutionaries in town. But that comes across as all too certain: it’s become increasingly clear that to be an anarchist does not entail one is also a revolutionary, certainly not any more – a point both interesting and terrible. Revolution, after all, is no game of abstract identities, but instead the art of putting into practice. It would be much healthier to take a step back at this point, if only to get a clearer picture of the current impasse. We need to get our heads round the end of the classical era of revolutions. (And then immediately set out to define the next).