Though Cowards Flinch

I admit to being something of a misanthropist, on occasion. Sitting in my regular coffee house, I have to wear earphones because listening to some of the ill-informed conversations going on around me really gets me uptight. One conversation today about goings on in Venezuela managed to get past my usual defences of either music or my own conversations with other people and instantly I was irritated. And I was wrong to be.

The conversation was being carried on by people who clearly didn’t know much about the different political groups in Venezuela, much less the relationship between them or to the people. Moreover, it was being conducted by someone I’ve never seen on a picket line, or at a political meeting. These days I know by sight the majority of Socialist Student or SWS members, UAF participants, Kent Labour Students etc. And even if the person was somewhere, somehow politically active beyond my ken, plenty of others who talk like this simply aren’t.

This gap between talk and practice is basically what I define as pretension. It is someone striking a pose, perhaps self-consciously, perhaps because they really believe they care. It is true of virtually every aspect of how we define ourselves; plenty of people talk the talk about things like politics, but rarely do they really walk the walk – as defined by me, obviously, because inside our own heads we’re all judge, jury and executioner of those we come into contact with.

Insufferably arrogant as that may seem, strolling home I was struck by a thought. The nature of Marxist dialectics is to think in terms of process, of becoming and ceasing to be, rather than in the abstract – because nothing exists in the abstract. This puts the gap between talk and practice into perspective; it is not irreducible, but in reality one is connected to the other. More talk, more learning, will lead to some form of action, the logical conclusion of every strongly held opinion, which opinions often are if people are waxing lyrical about them.

Of course, from the outside, we can facilitate this process by spreading word about issues ourselves as well as being available to provide ways in which people can move from talk to action. This is the correct response, rather than dismissing such talk with derisive comments along the lines of, “Bloody students”, which contains so many invalid assumptions that my head should have exploded.

Indeed, we should recognize that even talking about the matter is helpful, as it encourages others to think about their own position – and ultimately a great quantity of people thinking and talking will result in a qualitative change – towards action. Likewise blogging is a form of this coffee-house chatter, which encourages others to think and talk about political issues, undertaken as a pose – as happens – or in the hope that enough evidence gathered to our side, the correct persuasive argument, will convince readers that now is the time to do something.

What we suggest doing is usually inherent to the arguments we’re making – such as the conviction of myself and Paul that a local network of points of resistance is an absolutely necessity; trades councils and unions in general, socialist parties, interest groups and so on. It’s up to us not merely to pontificate but to be prepared to offer channels for that activity. As anyone who blogs will know, however, what activity we should be undertaking is often hotly debated – everyone wants to encourage ‘the right kind of activism’.

Discussions on this blog and elsewhere, between organisers and supporters of the Power 2010 campaign on the one hand and those who dispute their method, exemplify this sort of debate.

Just how hotly this is debated, I think, depends on the stakes – and because blogs (and political activism generally, for the present) exist on a large sea of continued depoliticization (not the same as apathy), the stakes are huge even whilst having tiny ramifications, because every group and every approach is prepared to fight to the death to convince anyone they possibly can. One more or less activist can mean the difference between being able to declare something a success or having it declared DOA.

One more or less criticism can mean the difference between feeling vaguely self-satisfied that you are contributing to ‘the cause’ or feeling that you’re just a poser behind a keyboard with a few posh friends and contacts you can lobby.

Yet anger at other approaches is the same as anger at the student sitting in the coffee house, being completely politically inactive but wanting to seem intelligent, or radical or whatever. It is inappropriate, even if it is an easy pressure valve for activists to vent through. Some other approaches exist that are utterly contrary to everything we, as activists, want to achieve – but a great many are muddled, inconsistent and unlikely ever to possess real social weight through a failure to orient towards the real social divisions in our world.

This is the difference between being actively conservative, reactionary, and groping towards one’s own position through a fog of information mediated by one’s one role in and practices vis a vis society. This is a situation that will be clarified and polarised rapidly through the onset of an active revolutionary movement, larger and capable of bigger achievements than at present. Again, rather than an irreducible gap between two political positions, the living processes that sustain politics can bring people around to a correct orientation.

All that is required is to continue articulating those processes, and providing the sort of organisation which can understand how best to intervene in them. None of which requires unnecessary hostility or even an over-emphasis of and concentration upon differences – something I have been guilty of. With that said, I want to make clear that Jon Cruddas and his Compass lot will still not escape the odd verbal battering around here. Said with all the love in the world of course.