Lenin’s question ‘Chto delat?’, usually translated as ‘What is to be done?’, has more energy and passion to it in Russian than that translation suggests.
What should we do? Having thought about these things, we need to come back to the central question around which all of Marx’s work revolves – as does the best of feminism, ecological thought, anti-racist analysis, LGBTQI theory, radical democracy, anti-colonialism, anarchism and the other popular energies which give life to thought. From the point of view of a fully developed human being, what makes these ways of thinking more real and more alive than others is precisely the way in which they speak for real human needs, name the barriers to their development, discuss what is needed to overcome those barriers and ask what we should do, here and now, to contribute to this whole process of our own development as individuals and as a species.
We do have to look elsewhere, outside ourselves and our own lives, to ask how we can take action against the structures, mechanisms, cultures and processes that block our development, stifle our deepest needs, turn our own daily activity against ourselves and force us into trapped and narrow lives. We might, though, need to have a bigger picture of who we are and what our lives entail: to see the ways in which our oppression, exploitation and cultural stigmatisation is bound up in each other’s, rather than remaining stuck in a particularist resentment against others whose oppression, exploitation and stigmatisation is configured differently. If we can see ourselves in them, them in us and name the voices of management, of authority and of glamour that set us against one another, we have already gone a long way.
We do this best not in separate thought but in movement practice, as we try to make alliances around concrete common goals that matter to both of us and that point beyond their immediate effects to the bigger picture. The same is true as we try to develop our movements across space, connecting up the many different, but equally specific, shapes our own struggle takes in another part of our own country, elsewhere in our own region of the world and on the other side of the planet. The process of deepening and radicalising our struggles, of generalising and internationalising them, is the best kind of educator.
As we do this, if we are honest with ourselves and listen carefully to others, we can see two things. One is the many ways in which we collude with one another’s oppression, exploitation and stigmatisation. Some of us objectively benefit from particular structures of wealth, power and cultural hierarchy, others less so; but we are all inclined to avoid noticing the structures, routines and assumptions that do benefit us, whether they are those of class situation or background, gender, sexuality, trauma, disability, race, caste, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, cultural acceptability, mental health or ‘neurotypicality’ – ignoring how the world is for people with autism, Down syndrome and so on.
Hegemony operates in large part through the ways in which those who are relatively poor, powerless or culturally stigmatised – in other words, the large majority – nonetheless accept the ‘common sense’ negotiated between the goals of those who rule and our own everyday culture; how we trim our needs and thoughts to fit; how we battle with one another rather than with the real enemy; and how we reproduce in our own lives the forms of exploitation, oppression and stigmatisation we have learned in the world. Articulating ‘good sense’ is also the process of overcoming this ‘muck of ages’ in ourselves and above all in our practical, everyday relationships with others, in movement activity and outside it. For this reason, there is no social movement, and still less no revolution, without widespread cultural transformation.
The second thing we can see in this process is the way in which we have learned to accept and internalise our own forms of oppression, exploitation and stigmatisation: how we have learned to trim ourselves to fit into a world shaped to suit others. This process goes deep, and it can be the work of a lifetime to unpick it, particularly if we have suffered from serious trauma and abuse in the process. All too often in the history of movements, people engaged in one struggle start to realise that they were also fighting about something else that they had not yet been able to see in their own lives, and start to fight for that as well – for women’s rights as well as black rights, for lesbian equality as well as women’s equality; for freedom from religion as well as freedom from sexual control, for example.
A life in movement, then, is also a life in which we can expect to be challenged by ourselves as much as by others – and where, bit by bit, we unpick some of the different forms of suffering we cause others and come to free ourselves as individuals in the process of struggling for a wider transformation ‘out there’. If the unexamined life is not worth living, then this repeatedly challenged life is a way of being more fully alive: not in the sense of trying to live up to some impossible external ideal of who the perfect moral individual would be, but in the sense of trying to live more fully with ourselves.
In this process, and in the wider process of struggle, courage grows in unlikely places. Sometimes – perhaps particularly if we have come through trauma – courage can mean in the first place being able to admit that we cannot face every enemy right now, being more honest with ourselves and others about our own limits in terms of the physical threats to our bodies, the practical threats to our lives and our families, or the emotional threats posed by confrontation. With whatever different tools help us to handle this, we can sit back a bit more fully into who we actually are (for now) rather than who we would like to be in order to look well in the eyes of others, or of those eyes as we imagine or internalise them.
When we are being more honest with ourselves, though, we can come to find a new kind of courage, that represented in a firm ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise’. We know more fully who we are, and what the bottom line in our own lives is in terms of what we must defend, what we must stand for and who we must be. Past the early adulthood sense of immortality and the rush of adrenalin, we become better able to stand our own ground and fight where we are, in our own lives even without great physical bravery or much willingness to stand in the spotlight. We may also, if we live longer, if we have children or work with students, come to find that we accept the suffering and impermanence of life and become more focussed on what our actions mean in practice for others.
With greater relaxation and honesty, perhaps, we may also find greater creativity: we know that the struggle is likely to be a long one and that there will be many smaller battles along the way – and that other people stand in many different and often contradictory relationships to what we are trying to do. This frees us up to be less a prisoner of how particular issues are presented to us by institutional processes or within social constraints, and makes it more possible to step outside those and ‘respond to P-K2 with a lob over the net’, refusing to play the game our opponents would like to trap us in.
Social movements are extraordinary spaces of creativity, liberating energies that people often did not know they had. Any real large-scale protest sees people develop their own banners, costumes, jokes and bring different parts of their own world into play – but it also sees people find different ways to engage in the struggle. Some of these may be dead ends, but we do not always know until we try what is going to work best, and what once seemed impossible may now have come within the realm of the doable.
Creativity, no less than courage, is our ally in transforming what might otherwise seem like a lifetime sentence to suffering and conflict into a way of living lightly with what are, after all, inevitable parts of life even if they are not the whole.
Earlier in this book, I criticised an unreflected use of ‘we’. The problem is not that this is a form of rhetoric or ideology but that it creates a false sense of ourselves and of our relationships to others. In movements, we necessarily use ‘we’ all the time – in fact, in any good movement it rapidly becomes hard to identify who came up with a particular idea or slogan. Action comes out of ‘we’, talking together and organising together as part of larger conversations with people we may never meet personally but whom we partially and imperfectly bring into our discussions as we consider who we can mobilise and how, what they may be up for doing and what their hopes are for a better world.
A better sense of ‘we’, in movement action, is one which captures this process as well as possible – both the concrete ‘we’ in our meetings, networks and events and the different social ‘realities’, as Latin Americans say, that I and you and she and he bring into the room and (for now) speak for, in suggesting a change of wording, different practical arrangements, a new way of doing things or a wider goal. By paying closer and more political attention, good activists also come to hear what isn’t being said, to spot who is not in the room and to think about not just what is immediately doable but how far a particular constellation of ‘we’ can be taken – or what new ‘we’ it might grow into.
From a better sense of ‘we’ comes a deeper confidence, as our sense of who we are and what we do is reshaped in this ongoing interaction with others – and as our collective ability to understand and act grows. As movements engage in conflicts with opponents, our confidence can take severe knocks at times, but if we survive the experience we have moved to a different level of possibility and reality in our action.
Confidence also comes from the wider picture: understanding that our struggle here and their struggle there are intimately interlinked, or (even better) moving to a sense of these as one struggle and one ‘we’, far more complex and contradictory than any we could find in a single space. Standing in our longer history, too, reminds us of how often the kinds of defeats which today we are finding devastating have been overcome in the past, and helping us to think of our action not from a conservative point of view, as a foolish and risky challenge to an inevitable present, but instead as part of the process of helping a real potential express itself into (forgive the cliché) a better future.
I spent part of my last year in school, when I was supposed to be preparing for exams, sitting in a now-vanished alleyway behind the Dunnes Stores supermarket in city centre Dublin in case management attempted to sneak in deliveries. Eleven young staff had gone on strike, refusing to handle South African fruit. Initially, they knew very little about apartheid or the international boycott campaign, but were following a union decision to join the boycott. As the strike progressed, of course, they learned a huge amount, while South African activists made many connections with them. The picket line brought together labour and anti-apartheid activists, socialists and republicans, peace activists and development workers, older Dublin workers and young Goths. Ordinary shoppers were mostly very supportive: even without knowing much about South Africa, many had worked in Dunnes themselves or had relatives who did, and had good reasons to support those who were challenging management. The strike lasted nearly three years, with many twists and turns; eventually, the Irish government banned South African produce, the first state to join the boycott. Seven years later, apartheid came to an end under massive pressure from inside and outside. In retrospect, the internationalist perspective of these young supermarket workers and the long perspective of the struggle against apartheid were justified.
I have suggested in this essay that there are serious difficulties with the main tools we have for thinking about the world and our place in it. We encounter these difficulties in ‘common sense’ on a daily basis but in more articulated form in mainstream media, academia and a certain kind of left. With Marx, but also with a long tradition of thinking in radical psychology and education about what constitutes a healthy human situation, I am arguing that it is betterfor us – in terms of emotional health, our practical interests and the possibility of creating a different and more human world – to demystify what is apparently given. We can then translate it back into human practice, in terms both of the movements from above which have (usually) won out and the struggles from below which have set limits to them, modified the outcomes in ways that are crucial to the possibility of any kind of good life in the present and continue to contest the way things happen to be at present.
Seeing the world we are in as fully constructed enables us to reclaim a clearer sense of our own agency, both as (under circumstances not of our choosing) we contribute to reproducing it – through our activity in the workplace, the social relations of gender and sexuality, racial and ethnic hierarchy, ability/disability and neurotypicality and so on – but also to pushing against these structures and trying to reshape them. It equally enables us to give life to our frustration, suffering, rage or quiet misery in connecting it with meaningful action and with others in those situations we can grasp as related – and to experience ourselves as part of those wider struggles. Rather than ranting online, keeping our heads down or seeking purely private escapes, we can connect up who we are, what we think and what we do.
Finally, this process helps who we are to come into closer focus as these different lenses – of ideas, emotions and practice – become sharper and more aligned with one another. Theory is sharpened by the discipline imposed by the need to connect it with practice, and practice becomes clearer as we seek to articulate its meaning more clearly in theoretical terms. Our own identity, and our vaguer emotions, move into three dimensions in this process. Of course, these are ongoing struggles for as long as we exist within class society, patriarchy, racial and ethnic hierarchies and states; and of course our own processes of self-construction only come to an end with our death. But this side of those dramatic changes, we have the choice whether to be passive in relation to our own everyday activity, thoughts and feelings – or to take an active role in shaping them, with others.
The world we live in knocks us back, constantly. In 1955, William Carlos Williams, writing the foreword for a thin book of poems by a barely known young gay Jew, wrote, ‘It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.’ We would now change the language but the point – that we are defeated in our actions but not in ourselves – remains crucial. Allen Ginsberg was knocked back many times: by a conservative culture, by his own mental health and in his last years by his dying body. And yet he gathered his energy each time, became more honest about his weakness and put himself on the line more fully, inspiring others to challenge the controlling American normality of the 1950s, helping assert the cultural side of the revolts of the 1960s from Prague to San Francisco, and speaking both to the horrors and the hope of the years that followed.
We may not be poets; but we have to pick ourselves up again and again, for our children, sick partners and aging parents; to keep a roof over our heads and deal with the indignities of work; to handle our own mental health, poverty, sickness and fear. We do this; it is nothing remarkable when we see it in other people but it can demand a lot of ourselves just to get up and go out in the morning, or to actually say something real rather than just keep a stream of light chatter going. What stepping out means to me and to you is probably very different; but I know from my own challenge of keeping going just how hard it can be for you, and vice versa.
So too with movement activism: we do not need to go looking for it, but we need to keep on stepping out of the door and into the street, placing ourselves in the unpredictable situation with our allies which is movement organising, and then in the unpredictable situation with our opponents that is conflict. Often enough, the challenge arises in the middle of daily life and it is really a question of recognising it, thinking politically, and taking appropriate action rather than simply doing what we are expected to do. It is, in other words, the challenge of actually being ourselves in that moment, and not who other people would like us to be.