Tag Archives: strategy

Against the Sisyphean Mass

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.

A Fear of Violence is also a Fear of Change

I reject nonviolence and the American left’s obsession with it.

I’m against a diversity of tactics, which is almost always used to weaponize against violence and militancy while claiming to be not against it.

The “diversity of tactics” recognizes the status quo in which there hasn’t been “violent” protests beyond riots in decades and the violence of those riots is almost exclusively to property or the perpetrators of state violence. The imagined strategy of violence is still exclusive to the historical imaginary and we see this in art, in current writings on violence, where violence has been relegated to the myths and truths of radical history.

As someone who does statistics for a living, unwillingly, this is an imprecise measure of what I’ll offer you, but I’m certain if we looked at the actual numbers, that reality would be far harsher. I am ignoring riots in this capacity only because if property violence is the epitome of violence from the left in this country, we’re fucked, but if we look at organized, formal or informal, violence against the state and in the name of liberation, whether this be in the form of actions of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Weather Underground, various assassinations, and random deeds of anarchists, if we were to total the events into a singular timeline, the days spent would not even add up to a year of actual violence.

Why am I making this comparison?

Because, we know from various liberal sources that since 2020, we can easily identify a single year where more than ten thousand demonstrations have happened and protests where we’ve had upwards of a few million in attendance (Hands Off, Women’s March, etc).

With all due respect to the militants in Portland holding down street action during the George Floyd Rebellion, just to reference a few, I think we can argue what is perceptibly seen as “violent” protest would account for less than a percent of all movement action within the modern American left. Even when it was flourishing in the historic American left, it was still an incredibly small percentage of the population. At its height, the BLA had less than 100 members most likely in the decade it was active, the Weather Underground even less, and there was absolutely overlap.

All insult to the DSA, their membership eclipses these organizations entirely, and I mean that in the most negative sense.

What use is it to compare the two, you might ask.

To emphasize that organizations committed to liberatory violence hold an outweighed existence both within political history and the imaginative.

The American left so readily condemns “violence” when 99% of so-called radicals have never committed it. Even if they don’t condemn it, they are as easily eager to “we should treat both strategies equally” which does not actually uplift “violent” protest or militant strategies, but is another variation of left “unity” which seeks to silence the discussion about actual, militant, meaningful resistance, and does not in fact center violence or militancy.

Make no mistake, the status quo of the American left is:

Non-violent “direct action” and electoralism as pillars of resistance, which were the two main strategies behind the anti-war movement in the early 2000s, which were the largest protests in American history, and yet did absolutely fucking nothing. Yet these never became nails in the coffin for NVDA, electoralism, or mass movement strategies. Anyone who suggests otherwise is being a scold whose unwilling to actually critique their politics or they’re deeply afraid, which should bring more internalized shame than it actually seems too. 

“Why do you keep quoting violence and mentioning militancy? “

Because of radicals who are actually liberals and their sensitivities.

Even in their own imaginary, the violence is not violence.

Violence is a moral term, one of negative implications (not to me), and to reluctantly cater to who may be reading this, I pivot to militancy. Self-defense as it has been performed within movement spaces is not an act of violence, but it is a threat of violence if violence were to occur. Rather than perpetually making this distinction, I would simply like to move to calling it militancy, which refers to a capability of committing violence, but not always an action of violence. Shooting a gun at someone and having a gun in case of shit going down are two different things, but both are militant. I loathe to even kind of use this comparison because I also don’t think militancy = guns, but again, it is within the left imaginary. Or bombs.

Back to the issue at hand, I’ve been in organizing spaces where we’d organize according to the St. Paul Principle’s as a means of respecting a diversity of tactics, but that actually meant nothing because by nature of who we’d organize with, in the name of unity, and not wanting to scare them off, we’d scale down what actions we were willing to commit.

I’m against bomb-throwing simply because its too indiscriminate and I think you should have the courage to use a weapon that demands accuracy, but do you think a democratic socialist would meaningfully share organizing space with a bomb-thrower or would-be assassin? Not even. These spaces are made of up so-called militants willing to degrade their militancy for the sake of a coalition that does nothing.

I’ve been in other organizing spaces where even joking about armed resistance was squashed with raised-voices by people who’d never experienced an FBI or police door-knock. I wasn’t making the joke, but as an observer it was incredibly telling what was allowed to be said by group consensus and what wasn’t out of fear, which is the main driver of counterinsurgency within the “movement” and not by direct agents of the state.

They’ve become so obsessed with the notion that anyone speaking of direct, violent action is secretly a cop, that they’ve effectively ensured no meaningful action will occur because any real resistance is now meant with contempt and charges of conspiracy. Leftwing conspiracy theorists are the frontlines of counterinsurgency and should be meant with violent contempt in every space they exist until they’re made irrelevant.

There has never been an overthrow of the state in which militancy was not the primary driver. There is no such thing as a peaceful overthrow and never has been.

There’s been erasure of militancy, there’s been overemphasis on nonviolence, and an overemphasis on the failure of “violent” actions or organizations because the risk is higher, but even the “failures” of violence can be more powerful than the greatest successes of nonviolence. The “failure” of John Brown’s raid most certainly was critical in escalating the US into a civil war (hm another act of violence) that ended slavery as we then knew it (although took other forms), could you imagine if it had succeeded as they’d planned?

When non-violence fails, it often looks awfully similar to what it looks like when it succeeds, and if that’s not true, then when has it ever succeeded without the looming threat of a violent uprising in the background?