Ideological Unity and a Politics of Affirmation

The belief that all of our disparate and radical struggles will one day add up to the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism has been a general dogma of the North American left-activist scene.  Although many of these struggles refuse to imagine anything truly concrete beyond business as usual, and reject as a matter of principle any attempt to examine the methods that need to be taken to end capitalism and imperialism, we still like to believe that our various movements as a whole are more significant than they often are.

In the year leading up to the G20, for example, the coalition of affinity groups involved in planning the demonstrations sometimes seemed like it was under the strange impression that it would WIN.  Indeed, on one of the organizational email strings, activists would often sign-off by claiming "we're winning."  But what could a weekend of heightened demonstrations win?  Clearly the overthrow of the state was not a feasible goal, nor could it be when those involved in the demonstrations lacked any ideological unity beyond being seen and heard.  They were not planning anything that could truly score a victory against imperialism––or even against the local authorities––no matter what the representatives of state repression want us to believe.

I am not arguing that demonstrations, like those of the G20 weekend, should not happen unless there is ideological unity; I'm not a sectarian purist who refuses to participate in a protest if it is not "properly revolutionary."  We know these jokers, these marxist missionaries, who show up at protests, demos, labour strikes––not to participate but to push their papers, yammer on about how they will not help because of some abstract and theoretical quibble that we would all understand, becoming enlightened, if we only bought their newspaper.  Then, when our friends and comrades are being dragged away by the pigs, or when the tear-gas is being fired, these revolutionary purists are nowhere to be found.  So I am not advocating some sort of dogmatic abdication of activist responsibility because this responsibility is the minimum requirement of a pro-people politics.

What I am arguing, however, is that we need to stop imagining that the normative mainstream left-activist strategy evident in today's North America is not a revolutionary strategy and we need to stop thinking that it is.  All of these disparate movements have not magically added up into some critical mass of revolution capable of overthrowing the state.  Nor can they when the only politics that all of these radical movements share is a politics of rejection rather than affirmation.  Only the latter can bring an ideological unity capable of linking everyone into a possible revolutionary, rather than a simply activist-protestor, force capable of confronting state power.  As the revolutionary protagonist Damien O'Donovan says in Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley before he is placed in front of a firing squad: "It's not enough to know what you're against; you have to know what you're for."

So what are we for?  What politics do we affirm?  Obviously every disparate group involved in these coalition exercises affirm their own politics; together, however, they only express the unity of being against (and sometimes for different reasons) capitalist-imperialist business as usual.  And there is often a fear of developing a truly revolutionary ideological unity: only coalitions and popular fronts are permissible––at the very most adherence to a "popular" social democratic ideological semi-unity––because some feel that anything else would threaten their coveted piece of the activist pie.  We have all been involved in the activist left long enough to have witnessed the idiot turf wars between people who should be comrades due to some bourgeois vanity sublimated in quasi-radical justification.

Then there is the problem that many popular left-activist groups express an abstract and ungrounded internationalism: that is, they are focused almost exclusively on what is happening over there often at the expense of what is happening here.  Moreover, these types of activist organizations, which are sometimes the most common and the most popular, often fail to properly link struggles by focusing solely on their own international concern (unless some other issue can be used solely to promote theirs).  This is pseudo-internationalism and the most banal form of anti-imperialism.

In any case, there is a general rejection of political unity in North America unless this unity is understood as nothing more than defensive electoral practice: vote for social democracy or at least the lesser evil.  This fear of revolutionary ideological unity perhaps and in part emerges from the post-marxist/post-structuralist malaise that has plagued social movements at the centres of capitalism for decades: to begin with a revolutionary conception of ideological unity is totalizing, we are told, because society supposedly lacks any totality.  Identity-based struggles veil anti-capitalism in vague culturalisms; post-modern notions of political praxis, developed by academics often disconnected from struggle, become vogue; and sometimes trade union struggles for better social democracy replace revolutionary struggle.  But as Mao Zedong, that terrible theorist of totalization, once warned:

"Only those who are subjective, one-sided and superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering the circumstances, without viewing things in their totality (their history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations between one thing and another).  Such people are bound to trip and fall." (Mao Zedong, On Practice)