Sisyphean
adjective
Sis·y·phe·an ˌsi-sə-ˈfē-ən variants or less commonly Sisyphian
: of, relating to, or suggestive of the labors of Sisyphus
specifically: requiring continual and often ineffective effort
A Sisyphean Task
From the first Trump administration to the current, there has been an unfortunate amount of broad, left antifascist coalitions, and it is clear when anarchists are influenced by the worst of other ideologies.
Electoralists, or legalitarians, for obvious reasons treat progress as a numbers game. There is a perpetual state of raising awareness, trying to recruit more people (although to what means), and that if they eventually get enough, they can make change. Statists, who may not be electoralists, echo a similar sentiment, although arguing it under different theories, and incidentally anarchists have bought this wholesale.
When you have breadtubers using the term democracy uncritically as a positive term, you know not only are they illiterate with anarchist and communist histories, you also know they’ve long lost the plot. They’re just democratic socialists with an edge.
I use the term edge lightly, it is a dull blade with one pass on a whetstone.
The issue is the pursuit of mass, numbers, “bodies”, is a Sisyphean act that consumes the entirety of “movement” spaces.
How do we educate?
How do we propagandize?
How do we build community?
Yet without a direction to turn to, nonprofits, legalitarians, statists, and anarchists who believe this merely becomes hoarders of frustrated people with no where to appropriately turn their energies into a form of counterinsurgent edging.
The mass is an abstraction.
There is no number to aim for, there is no tipping point, and these groups hardly bring in as many as they lose over the course of their lifetime. They move the boulder and the boulder rolls back down hill, then they resume the charade all over again.
This is not a theory or a praxis rooted in the current reality. It is an organizing strategy built on insecurity, of being afraid of being outnumbered, of being afraid of never having enough, of being afraid of not having the resources.
It is not built on reason; it is built on a flawed logic that suggests having more means we’re capable of more. I can hear it now, “but clearly with more, you can do more” and I would beg you to look at the early 2000s anti-war movement, the largest protest movement in American history, and look at its successes: none, whatsoever, except a plethora of public theater to feel super weird about.
All that is leftover is cringe, broken hearts, and bad theory.
More mass does not mean more skilling up, it does not mean more direct action, it does not mean much of anything. What does it mean? It means that electoralism that has effectively brainwashed supposed anti-electoralists where “more people” is not only an unequivocal necessity, but the prerequisite to anything else.
We cannot act without more people
We cannot take risks without more people
We cannot “win” without more people
This train of thought becomes the sole, driving obsession of orgs.
If anything, decades of American organizing have proven the alternative, that the more we center on educating people, recruiting people, not only will we not get more people, we will do less things with the people we do have. These organizations are not asking themselves, what if this is all we ever get? What can we meaningfully do with this? What are we capable of with what we have?
No wonder Americans can’t block any boats, despite whatever the nonprofit resistance has suggested. They’re more afraid of deterring people by committing to a courageous action against genocide. They’re afraid of scaring people off until they can hopefully educate them enough to instill confidence. Escalation, agitation, actual conflict, these are all seemingly a deterrent to mass organizing and therefore should be avoided at all costs. Cointelpro could only wish to be as successful as the counterinsurgent byproducts of organizing to build mass, of maintaining the left’s status quo.
This isn’t to say we can do it alone or we can do it with a few. This is a social war after all. It is to say that if we wait until we have enough people, we’ll be dead long before we are ready. This is us at a crucial moment in history and refusing to do what must be done at this moment, hoping we can buy time a little longer, when we are out of time.
We must act as if we are all we have.