Conclusion

Five Habits of Highly Effective Relatively Undamaged Socialists

I’d love to give you specific advice, but, unlike Google and the National Security Agency, I don’t know who or where you are. So I’ll keep these brief and general.

1. Choose a side.

The most essential ingredient of socialism isn’t its analysis of capitalism but its passion to fight on the side of the people. The theory only matters to the extent that it helps this fight (which it very much does). So before someone decides whether she is a socialist, she has to ask herself the more basic question: which side am I on?

As I was writing this book in summer 2014, Israel rained bombs upon Gaza and Black people rebelled against police violence in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. In these conflicts and others, some identified with the oppressors and others with the oppressed. Then there were those, including many who call themselves liberals and leftists, who carefully criticized both sides to justify sitting on their safely neutral asses.

Don’t do that. We can express disagreements with this or that strategy or ideas being used by people in resistance, but we have to clearly support them in whatever ways we can. Until the socialist movement is a lot bigger than it is at the moment, capitalism will be challenged for the most part by people who don’t use socialist strategies. We can critique from the sidelines where nobody is listening except for other haters, or we can join the fight and hopefully win some more people to socialism in the process.

2. Organize with other socialists.

It used to be a commonsense idea on the left that you could accomplish more as part of an organization than as an individual. These days, many prefer to be free agents, organizing through social media and temporary coalitions, which works okay around specific issues but doesn’t do much to build the forces we need to take on capitalism in the long run.

Unfortunately, after decades of setbacks, the state of most socialist organizations is pretty miserable. Many at this point are just handfuls of aging radicals who alternate between squabbling with each other and proclaiming that they are the future leaders of the revolution. Others, like the one I organize with, are much healthier but need to be much bigger and broader to have the impact we want to have. Hint hint.

3. Don’t be a snob.

Becoming a socialist is an eye-opening experience. You start noticing so many aspects of the world that are unfair or just silly that you had never questioned before. Each observation makes the case for socialism that much more obvious to you, to the point that you don’t understand why your coworkers and friends don’t see it. This is an old problem on the left. Many wide-eyed students who went to their first anti–Vietnam War protest in 1967 thinking that the war was an honest mistake on the part of the president had by 1968 become jaded radicals who looked down on new protesters for being so naïve as to think the war was an honest mistake on the part of the president. Don’t be that guy. Not only is it obnoxious, it’s the worst way to build support for our side.

4. Become familiar with the Serenity Prayer.

At every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, people recite the following words: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” This is not a bad approach to the task of being a socalist, whether or not capitalism has driven you to excessive drinking. We need the boldness to stand up for our ideas in the face of a hostile capitalist society and also the patience to understand that it is not we alone but the larger working class that has the power to make those ideas a reality. We have to recognize the factors that we can currently control in order to make our numbers as large as possible in preparation for those rare historical moments we can’t control when hundreds of millions of people to decide to resist.

On a related note, the only way we can get this balance somewhat right is to be able to freely debate with one another about the best way forward and not let those arguments curdle into permanent and bitter feuds.

5. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

I’m stealing this one (and why should I stop now?) from the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. Building a movement that realizes the potential of working people to run the world requires both the inspiration to believe that it’s possible and the hard-headedness to understand just how difficult it will be. Try to stay out of the twin traps of bullshitting yourself that things aren’t bleak and wallowing in self-pity as long as we still have a chance to win.

In my experience, the best way to stay on track is to keep finding reasons to laugh—at the absurdities of capitalism and at our own sometimes clumsy efforts to challenge it. When I started going to socialist events I was surprised at all the humor amid the passion and theory. I had thought socialists would frown upon lightheartedness in a time of so much darkness. Nobody laughs until everybody gets fed! It turns out I had things backward. The deepest laughter comes when you’re among people who are well aware of how screwed up the world is and know that there’s nothing better they can be doing with their lives than fighting like hell to change it.