Whether the left develops an inclusive orientation towards organizing the working class, or the exclusive orientation of a dystopic cancellation cult, is up to all of us.
By David Rovics
Now and historically, if the goal of the left is to create a more egalitarian society — as it generally is and has been around the globe — it’s crucially important to adopt the kinds of tactics and strategies that might be capable of achieving any of the things the movement seeks to implement.
Wherever it’s been really successful, in the US and around the world, the left plays the role of always seeking to unify the population, through various means, to overcome various divisions in order to pursue goals of various sorts.
There are many forces in society opposed to these efforts, such as those who benefit from our divisions in one way or another, particularly the ruling class in insanely stratified societies like the US, and those intentionally or unintentionally doing the divide-and-conquer work for them.
It must of course be pointed out that the biggest challenge for the left has been the liberal-conservative capitalist-imperialist consensus that has been ruling this country for the vast majority of its existence. The status quo is one of inequality at home, maintained through all sorts of mechanisms (a propagandistic media, the new dominance of anti-social media over our communications and thinking, and always finding new ways to exploit and maintain divisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc.) and empire abroad.
Despite these obstacles, when the left has had success, it has embraced popular education, and popular culture in its many forms, to broadly disseminate ideas, and it has embraced ecumenical forms of organizing. When the left has not had success, it has developed a cliquish, exclusive culture, with tactics focused on highlighting divisions and finding transgressors to purge in order to achieve unreachable goals of political and personal perfection among all its members, lest they face perpetual public and private shunning and condemnation.
Neither the inclusive or exclusive orientations on the left are anything new. It’s not at all uncommon for groups, individuals, and parties on the left historically to actively engage in both very inclusive and very exclusive forms of organizing at the same time. For example, at the same time as so many millions of members and sympathizers of the Communist Party in the US in the 1930’s were actively involved with very inclusive forms of union organizing, printing antiracist literature, and putting out publications whose aim was to further popularize the left end of what was at the time popular music (Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, etc.), party members were also engaged with actively shunning various elements of the left that didn’t join the CPUSA, or dared to form alternative left parties.
For me, the age of anti-social media has been especially helpful in clarifying my understanding of recent events — and tactics related to them — on the left, and also in helping me reassess past tactics, and what they did or didn’t achieve. I’ll be the first to admit that being targeted by the most cliquish, destructive elements within the contemporary US left incessantly for the past couple of years has also been part of my education. I’ll also be the first to admit that my understanding of history and my perspective on the efficacy of different tactics over time has been continually evolving, which, far from anything to be embarrassed by or ashamed of, is a very good thing, and indicates a functioning brain that is still capable of critical analysis.
One thing I’ve increasingly come to realize is collective action gets the goods. Building a movement capable of engaging in large-scale collective action requires first that it is not a movement reliant on the corporate media to tell us when the next protest is, but is a truly self-propelled movement with its own, actually independent media. It requires building a movement that is so well-organized, forward-looking, and full of vision and comradery that it instills a widespread sense of optimism about what the movement can accomplish, with enough active, dedicated participants.
Another thing I’ve increasingly come to understand is there are many tactics that may achieve a short-term goal, but will tend to sabotage your long-term goals, or otherwise be counter-productive in many ways. This is especially true of tactics which can be normalized by elements of the left, and then used by the right, by the state, or by other nefarious actors against us, to much greater effect.
Rather than floating in the clouds of the meta conversation, however, I thought I’d briefly expound on a handful of the sorts of tactics that have built powerful social movements and even revolutions, and the sorts of tactics that are favored by the intelligence agencies and the cancellation campaigners, which have so often been successfully employed to destroy or dramatically curtail social movements.
Tactics that build:
- Eviction defense. We’re in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis in the US. There are more evictions taking place in Portland and across the country than there were prior to the pandemic. Housing is a basic human right, and housing as a human right has been a basic tenet of left thinking everywhere ever since there has been anything calling itself the left. But the media doesn’t cover this kind of thing, so it’s not building this movement for us. We have to do it ourselves. And what would happen if other elements of society engage in eviction defense as well? Will this harm our cause? Not at all — the more the merrier.
- Squatting vacant buildings, occupying empty lots. In the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis, a crisis across the entirety of the working class, for every race, gender, etc., where is the movement to take over vacant, corporate-owned properties and do useful things with them? Movements of this nature have accomplished tremendous things in many different countries over the course of centuries. Where is such a movement in the US today? Aside from isolated incidents in places like Philadelphia and Kansas City, nowhere to be seen. But it could be a good one. And if conservatives started squatting abandoned buildings, would this be a problem for the rest of us? No.
- Civil disobedience. Organizing large numbers of people to come into the streets and stay there has been a tactic that has effected all kinds of changes, when there have been movements around the world organized enough and big enough to pull off the tactic effectively.
- Organizing workers in workplaces. Successful efforts to organize workers into militant unions that win better wages, working conditions, etc., has historically been a great way to improve the lot of the working class while also teaching everyone about the power of solidarity and collective action. Organizing workers into unions has also historically been one of the best ways to overcome divisions based on race, gender, national origin, etc., as well as limiting the growth of the right.
- Organizing tenants in communities of renters. With housing being owned by a spectacularly small number of gigantic landlord corporations that are now directly running huge rental operations, it’s a better time than ever to organize tenants — or at least one would think. Movements that have won rent control and related reforms have been absolutely crucial for improving life for the working class around the world.
- Building cooperatives of all kinds. Some of the most stable and prosperous societies on Earth today, such as the countries of Scandinavia, have cooperatives of all sorts at the core of that stability and prosperity. Even in societies not dominated by cooperatives, the areas where cooperatives have taken root tend to be the more prosperous and stable parts of a country. Cooperatives, like unions, can exert real political and economic power. Short of a dictatorship coming to power that abolishes private property, cooperatives are also relatively insulated from whichever party is holding political power in a given period. (Societies characterized by cooperatives are not necessarily welfare states.)
- Modeling alternative societies. Creating the kind of society we envision may not be possible without overthrowing capitalism first, but it’s at least possible to create communities on a limited basis that can demonstrate things like ways we can live without cars, where there are lots of common spaces, everything’s run on renewable energy, etc. It’s much harder for people to envision what they can’t experience.
- Advocating for alternative societies. Even if we don’t have the means to create the alternative within the shell of the old, we can do popular education in so many different ways to get the good word out that another world is possible.
- Organizing events that bring people together. The sense of community and optimism necessary to foster and build a social movement absolutely requires regular physical gatherings that involve cultural activities of all sorts — music, dance, poetry, theater, adult/popular education, teach-ins, etc.
Tactics that destroy:
- Personal attacks against individuals. In Karl Marx’s day it was not at all uncommon for leftists to viciously attack each other in letters, essays, books, at conferences, and in and in other forms, and to call each other all sorts of names. This nonsense continues to this day, but with the influence of anti-social media, Cointelpro, and an ongoing modern version of the Puritan tradition, it’s all amplified. The personal attacks aim to vilify and discredit other people. They can work in that regard, short term, but in the longer term, people so vilified just get angrier, they don’t go away. Also it’s a tactic that can be used just as well by the right. If the left is engaged with it, too, then it has no moral high ground to stand on as far as that goes, and the behavior only encourages more of it.
- Making threats of violence against individuals. On anti-social media this sort of thing is a constant occurrence. For many of us, getting such threats is so normal, we rarely even mention it to our friends. By my observation, this sort of thing often causes people to purchase firearms or move to another town, but it rarely makes anyone disappear. When such threats are made against the right, it tends to make people angrier and more entrenched in their beliefs, and less apt to try to communicate.
- Intimidating individuals (and their families) at their homes. This has become a common practice, with both people who identify as right and left activists protesting outside of the family homes of politicians, journalists, or whatever other random individuals some folks don’t like. Whether the people (and their families) being protested are truly evil or not, the tactic being normalized just normalizes it for others to employ, and fosters a society full of fearful, paranoid people. It surely will cause some politicians to quit or retire early, but someone will take their place, and whoever that someone is, they will probably be more thick-skinned than the last guy, which will not improve anything for anyone.
- Doxxing people. Publicly revealing the home address and other such information of a person in order to encourage their political enemies to do whatever they might do to someone they don’t like, such as getting them fired, slashing the tires of their car, stalking them, etc., is a common practice these days. Has it reduced the scope or militancy of the rightwingers in the US? It doesn’t seem to be doing that. In fact, it seems to be making them more militant, and more pissed off. It often does get people fired, but if the tactic doesn’t kill them, which it doesn’t, then it just tends to make people angrier. Wouldn’t it do that to you?
- Stalking, bullying, harassing individuals publicly or privately. Another popular online tactic these days involves sending private messages of all sorts to individuals you are politically against for one reason or another, in an effort to destabilize them psychologically, while also posting about them publicly and commenting on the supposed meltdown they’re having as a consequence of the private-message trolling efforts. This does lead to depression on a regular basis and the occasional suicide, but most people just get angrier. The tactic completely backfires, and is then of course open to even more enthusiastic adoption by the right when commonly practiced by elements of the left.
- Lying about anyone, misquoting anyone, for any reason. Intentionally mischaracterizing what someone has said or making up stories about them in order to attempt to discredit people or raise suspicions about them is a common practice, which also spectacularly backfires, as it invites the same behavior from other elements, and normalizes the behavior further. Anti-social media of course facilitates this sort of thing by design. The result is a feeling that we all live in Babylon, which doesn’t help anyone.
- Initiating tactics that most people who support the cause don’t support. What tactics might be effective tends to depend very much on the circumstances — time, place, moment in history, where are people at, it varies. If people aren’t up for a certain tactic, when practiced, it will often result in most of the participants no longer participating in the action in question. For example, if most people don’t think it’s a good time to light the dumpster on fire, most people will leave the demo when the dumpster starts burning.
- Having a cliquish, exclusive orientation towards the uninitiated. On one end of the spectrum there is popular education and inclusive styles of organizing based in physical communities. On the other end are folks who spend most of their time online, using vocabulary and acronyms unfamiliar to the average literate person, which changes every week, along with the pseudonyms of the people having the discussions. This kind of behavior alienates people and doesn’t build anything other than a cult.
- Having a puritanical orientation that involves excluding individuals for committing transgressions. There is a widespread tendency today in the US to consider “safe space” more important than anything else. So, say your goal is to organize a workplace. First you have to exclude all the workers from your union who may have problematic views around race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration, and abortion. Then you can form a union with all three of your coworkers who are left standing. This is obviously no way to accomplish anything useful, unless “safe space” is the ultimate goal. But then after you and your two “safe” coworkers get fired for organizing a union that nobody else wanted to join, where will your safe space be then? Nowhere. There is no safe space in a cutthroat capitalist society where most people are living hand-to-mouth.
List of examples and lecture over. If anyone reading this is starting to realize you’ve accidentally joined a cancellation cult, and you’d like to leave it and build a real working class-oriented left movement that might actually accomplish something, welcome home, you’re not alone. Drop me a line, I’m far from your only friend out there.
