Human Resources: Some thoughts in response to the current ACORN discourse.
Thursday, 23 March, 2023
I woke up this morning to find that my spouse was engaged in Twitter beef with the entirety of the British wing of international ‘community organisation’ ACORN. He had, it seems, posted a tweet criticising the rate of pay for a job that ACORN is currently advertising. Although I’m doing my best to avoid Twitter these days, the sheer volume and intensity of this particular outrage, directed as it is at the person with whom I live, has been impossible to ignore. More so given that this one intersects with a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about recently, including some particular dynamics that have structured and limited my own life.
All morning, the thoughts were haunting me, so I sat down to write about them. I’m very committed, these days, to the idea that ‘what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter’, but unfortunately, the thread I drafted came to about 22 tweets when I was only halfway through—so I’m putting it all here, instead.
There are three sections. The first deals with the slippery questions of wages, of relative value, and of the extent to which legalistic, pedantic categories are useful to the left. The second, ‘Sacrifice’ for ‘the class’, is where I get angry; angry about the profound condescension of the approach of many high-profile ACORN defenders, and by extension, a very vocal section of the left and its attitude towards class. I also consider the strange phenomenon of underpaid workers defending their own exploitation. In the final section, I offer some reflections on how all of this connects to my recent thinking (particularly around the naturalisation of certain capitalist assumptions), and pose some questions for the left about where we might want to go from here.
None of what follows is to say that people shouldn’t join ACORN, organise with ACORN, etc. To offer critique, in this instance, is not to call for abolition; nor is it an attempt to ‘cancel’ the organisation. The vast, vast majority of ACORN members whom I have encountered are genuine and committed activists, utterly dedicated to unmaking the present social order. That commitment is not in question here. What I do seek to call into question, however, are the structures of the organisation itself, as an employer, as well as some of the attitudes that have emerged during the recent discussion. All positions against which I will argue in this post are positions which have been stated in tweets, subtweets, and direct messages to (and about) Tom. I do not want to encourage pile-ons, or reduce this debate to the level of ‘bad’ individuals when it is, in fact, structural, so I have not reproduced these tweets (etc.) verbatim, and nor have I linked to them.
Too much and not enough.
First of all, I should note that questions around pay are, for me, extremely fraught and contradictory. I grew up poor, and I’ve never earned anything close to £21k in my whole entire life. (The highest-paying job i’ve ever had was technically £16k p/a, but it lasted a grand total of 2.5 months.) Nor do I have any family in the background to support me. I want to be extremely specific here: it’s not that they won’t, or that it would be horrible, or difficult; it’s that my family literally do not exist. Or rather, they continue to exist as people (I assume), but not as my family; I have no idea where they live or how to reach them, and the reverse is also true. This has been the case for my entire adult life, from the age of 16 onwards (I’m 40 now).
You might want to ask: how have I survived? The answer is this: barely, and with a lot of luck. The kindness of strangers, and all that. To live as I have lived, to survive as I have survived, was extremely difficult then; I would guess that it is close to impossible now. I would not recommend it to, nor wish it on, anybody. But/and, because and in spite of this, the Little Orphan Josie within me says: “I’d bite yr hand off for £21k”, even as i know that it is simply not enough. It’s the same mixture of gratitude and resentment I’d feel when I was homeless & someone chucked a quid at me. All at once too much, and nothing like enough. Value is a slippery thing; it is multi-scalar, and it is tangled up with so much other stuff.
A vulnerable truth: I wouldn’t apply for a £21k job. Not because it’s a joke wage (which, as we’ll see, it is), but because I wouldn’t expect to get a job that paid that “much”. It’s the same reason that I will never pitch anything to Vittles: their excellent rate of pay causes me to automatically disqualify myself. I value myself low; experience has taught me to do so—and I am not unique in this. Now, I don’t think that this is a good attitude to take. I think it’s a very bad one. But it’s a lesson life has given me (and countless others), over and again. And, much like the experiences that taught me to believe this, I would not recommend it to, nor wish it on, anybody. People deserve better: I would like, one day, to believe that for myself, too. Similarly, while there are indeed many people in London surviving on less than £21k a year—nobody should have to. I thought that this was an axiomatic position on the left. I am learning that this is not the case.
I think it’s important to note all of this; not least because the spectre of ‘worse-off people’ so often gets summoned to discipline those who would complain, like parents invoking “starving children in Africa” to make you eat your broccoli. Worse-off people exist (hello!), and often in complicated relation to the means of survival, but we do not want to be used as illustrations or weapons for your shitty arguments. We can speak for ourselves! (‘The working class’ is often invoked in a similar way, of which more presently.) It’s also important, I think, because there’s so much obfuscation, moralism, shame, & defensiveness around the question of how movements reproduce themselves & their members. But we really, really need to be able to talk about this stuff! What’s paid has a real relation to what’s possible. What’s paid has a real relation to who’s participating.
But also: what can be paid has a real relation to the size & capacity of an institution. For example, at New Socialist, we have been in dire need of more editorial capacity for years now. But we’re tiny; we literally can’t pay for it, and we don’t want to demand the unremunerated labour of others—so unless somebody willingly volunteers their time, it’s pretty much on me and Tom to do it all. And, as I have learnt through trial and error, there’s only so much engaged editing and accurate proofreading one can do in a day—hence the slowdown in our publishing schedule. My workload is… way beyond full-time. I do the work of three or four roles, all bundled up into one overwhelming, never-ending tangle of tasks. I do this because I have the skills, because I believe that New Socialist is important, and because I don’t want to exploit others. Now, this doesn’t make me some perfect saint! I am, in many ways, a dickhead; but where I have a choice, I try to choose not to exploit. New Socialist is entirely subscriber-funded; if our financial situation improves, things will change (though not to the extent of becoming an employer)—but this is the nature of being a small, slow, self-started left wing publication. And, if by some happenstance we were to end up in a position to ‘recruit’ people, I would certainly not expect those people to work as I have worked, ‘for the greater good’.
ACORN, on the other hand, are massive. They’re an international organisation (albeit one run on a federated structure rather than centrally-controlled). Their filed accounts deal in the hundreds of thousands—not big-league stuff by NGO standards, but certainly pretty major for the British left (outside of the major TUC unions, of course). And, you know, good on them. Most of that money will be coming from membership subs, and that’s very cool! I am not trying to claim that they’re some evil empire. But I do feel that ACORN has a choice not to exploit.
The job vacancy which has caused all of this furore offers a salary of £21,749 p/a. Based on a 35-hour week (which movement jobs, in practice, very rarely are), this salary equates precisely to the current London Living Wage of £11.95 p/h. The LLW was last recalculated in September 2022, so does not account for recent inflation, particularly the huge spike in October 2022. All of this means that it is likely that this job will, in practice, end up paying lower than the London Living Wage. But, more crucially: what are we dreaming of for one another, comrades? Just ‘living’? Scraping by? Or can we do better than that?
Similarly, I note that this job is for women, and I think that that’s a good move on ACORN’s part (& not just because I personally associate the British iteration of ACORN with sad little moustache men cosplaying at being proles). But of course, ‘women’ is a big category, and this rate of pay (and shift pattern) will functionally exclude a lot of women from applying. If you have caring responsibilities, or you rent privately and need more than just a room in a shared house, to offer just two examples, this job is unlikely to be possible for you.
What I’m trying to get at here is the pedantic application of legalistic categories to left organisation and practice. Mostly, it ends up feeling like arse-covering: “the job may not pay much, but it is precisely, to the penny, equivalent to an already-outdated calculation of the London Living Wage”; “we are an Equal Opportunities Employer™, so this job with very specific requirements in terms of hours, physical ability, and capacity to absorb low pay is technically open to all women”. Of course, in a capitalist society modified by certain liberal principles, some of this arse-covering is necessary—but a lot of it smells extremely off, to me. Perhaps I’m expecting too much of the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now [emphasis mine 🙃].1
I think that there are a few big questions at the root of all this; questions which need to be verbalised in order to be reckoned with. The shame, defensiveness, and moralism that I mentioned before is a really unhelpful force on the left: it means that so many important issues are left unclarified, which has the effect of naturalising what is merely hegemonic. But before I get onto that, I want to address one of the most curious elements of this whole affair: the happily-exploited ACORN worker.
‘Sacrifice’ for ‘the class’.
In every job I have ever worked, if somebody had approached us and said, “you lot aren’t getting paid enough; your boss is taking the piss,” we’d have enthusiastically agreed.2 Not so, it would appear, with ACORN. Since posting the fateful tweet, Tom has been inundated with replies and DMs from ACORN members and workers demanding that he take it down. The wage is absolutely fine, they say; its low rate justified by the fact that ACORN has “achieved so much”. A second line of attack says that the wage is better than fine: that Tom would think otherwise is nothing more than a symptom of middle class greed and entitlement.
Now, perhaps the people making this latter argument live outside of London and the south-east of England—£21,749 would certainly go a lot further in some (though by no means all) places I’ve lived. But the fact is that this is a London-based job. The fact is that London is extremely expensive. The fact is that the London Living Wage calculation to which this pay offer adheres, Scrooge-like, to the penny is already outdated due to inflation. The job’s vaunted “£100 annual wellbeing bonus” (that’s a whopping £8.33/month, fact fans) isn’t going to do much to mitigate this. One might note, too, that London Renters’ Union is currently advertising a job, based in London, that offers “£33,250 for 30 hours per week plus £1,200 per year towards counselling or other forms of agreed wellbeing support”—almost double the current LLW calculation.
A screenshot from the job description page, taken at midday on Friday, 24 March 2023. Text reads: ‘Benefits: Generous holiday allowance; flexi-time policy available; £100 annual wellbeing bonus; progressive leave policies; extensive trainings and development days (including one week’s organiser training); and more to come…’
Moreover, as a fully-trained and qualified Prole™ (the training is simply a lifetime’s brutalisation, quite fun really, very chic), I profoundly resent being used as a tool to exert downward pressure on wages like this! How dare they! The very suggestion that it’s “middle class” to feel upset about a low wage is insulting, dehumanising. It’s also extremely alarming, coming from a bunch of self-described ‘socialists’. (Would they also agree with the Daily Mail’s bone-headed critique of RMT deputy and revanchist bore Eddie Dempsey?) I know there’s nothing middle class people like more than calling other people middle class, but if they could practice their hobby somewhere else, without fucking ruining the wage demands of those of us they seek to ‘organise’ (no thanks lads), I’d be extremely grateful.
I say “those of us” out of habit. When you’re working class, you’re always already constructed as a ‘them’; to turn that ‘them’ into an ‘us’, a ‘we’, becomes necessary in order to recoup a bit of dignity. But I’m well aware that those who seek to defend ACORN’s appalling wage offer would not include me in the canon of the sainted. First of all, I can speak for myself, and articulately, too. I don’t need them to knock on my door and tell me the Good News. I am not their flock. (That this is held to be so rare among proles as to be disqualifying is hilarious, and speaks volumes to me of their distance from proletarian life—and no, I’m afraid that having worked as a barista during university doesn’t count.) Secondly, I am disqualified by the work that I do—which is, of course, the only work I can do (not in a swooningly bohemian ‘I simply must be a writer!’ way, but in the very material sense that the experiences I have had, and the positions I thereby inhabit, put me at a severe disadvantage in the job market: I cannot get a job that pays enough to survive, so why not make some stab at putting my talents to use?). To write, to read theory and literature and philosophy, to make photographs and strange little zines/books? Not very Proletarian of me. Where’s my moustache? Why aren’t I driving a train? (That I was taught all of this—to love art and music and language—by my grandfather, an erstwhile binman, counts for little. In fact, they probably wouldn’t number him among the saved, either, since, as beneficiaries of the post-war settlement, he and my nan owned their home.) I wouldn’t trust people with this sort of analysis to organise a fucking Easter hat parade, let alone a whole ‘community’ (whatever that means).
“’Cause everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh”
So much for the “middle class entitlement” argument. But what of the first line of attack—that ACORN’s “achievements” justify its shitty wages? I put the word achievements in quotation marks there not to call said achievements into question, but because it’s a word that crops up again and again in the lamentations of wounded ACORN workers. There’s even a section on ACORN’s website headed—you guessed it—‘ACHIEVEMENTS’. Clearly, this is the line that’s been decided upon in the face of an unexpected attack from Famous Twitter Socialist Tom Gann, and they’re not being very subtle about it. Big Victor Anichebe energy, honestly. But, to be serious, those achievements (the word is starting to look funny now) are pretty cool! Evictions blocked, councils forced to implement safety measures, campaigns launched against second homes in Cornwall (an issue particularly close to my heart)—all of this matters, and all of it will have made a huge difference to the people being supported by ACORN. The question of whether this will matter in the ways that many newly-minted, post-Corbyn ACORN members would like it to matter remains open. Tom and I considered it to some extent in 2020, when we wrote ‘Serve the People?’—a critique which also upset a lot of ACORN members, and led to literally months of manager-calling, demands to remove the entire article, etc.. In that critique, we were sceptical but willing to be mistaken; a position I still hold now.
Indeed, I’m less interested in evaluating said achievements (oh, god) than I am in asking two questions:
Why does a relatively wealthy organisation’s efficacy give it a free pass to pay bad wages?
Why does levelling any critique of ACORN lead to days, if not weeks, of what are beginning to look a lot like coordinated (perhaps even… ‘organised’ 😎) attacks, including multiple demands that the criticism is removed? Is this the marker of a healthy organisation?
When an organisation repeatedly mobilises its ‘rank and file’ to raise the stakes of criticising it so high as to render it impossible for all but the most resilient, I start to become very suspicious.
*
As I noted at the beginning of this section, in no other job would you find workers happily lining up to insist that they take their low wages with a smile, that they do not, in fact, want to be paid more, and that by suggesting that perhaps they ought to be, you are committing some sort of unspecified transgression. No other job—except, perhaps, for arts internships c.2010 (RIP never in our hearts), and doorknocking evangelist Christians. Relatedly, the job advertisement tells us:
Your daily work will involve recruiting individual ACORN Members through door-knocking, social media and other means (door-knocking takes up around 50% of our organisers’ time)
Of course, the logic of capital dictates that people are free to do whatever work they want to do, and free to accept the lowest wages imaginable, if they so ‘choose’—and who are we, mere professed Marxists, to argue with that? But for many people, so-called ‘free labour’ is the farthest thing from ‘free’. During the strike wave of 1818, a man identified only as a ‘Journeyman Cotton Spinner’ gave a speech in Manchester:
It is in vain to insult our common understandings with the observation that such men are free; that the law protects the rich and poor alike, and that a spinner can leave his master if he does not like the wages. True; so he can: but where must he go? why to another, to be sure. Well: he goes; he is asked where did you work last: ‘did he discharge you?’ No; we could not agree about wages. Well I shall not employ you nor anyone who leaves his master in that manner.
I’d like to echo him, 200 years on: it is in vain to insult our common understandings with the observation that you freely choose your exploitation whilst purporting to ‘defend’ us from our own. Indeed, I’d argue that this sort of hierarchical attitude—whereby the ‘organisers’ can ‘choose’ to ‘sacrifice’ themselves for ‘the class’ (which class is never defined; given the mouths from which it habitually emits, I think we can understand ‘the class’ in question as being the left bourgeoisie), but the ‘organised’ are only ever acted upon, herded like sheep (until they are ‘recruited’ and become—oh joy of joys!—organisers themselves)—militates against real solidarity, and real revolutionary transformation. The Guinean revolutionary Marxist Amilcar Cabral observed that “to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie”. It’s literally one or the other. But when he talked about committing class suicide, he didn’t mean growing a Yosser tache, tweeting earnestly about picket lines, or reading Angela Nagle while smilingly pocketing your too-low wages and castigating anybody who suggests that they could be higher. If they were any higher, how would we all know that you were Sacrificing Yourself For The Class, like a big brave boy?
You don’t have to be us (or a pantomime version of us) in order to share a struggle with us, to stand in solidarity with us, to want (some of) the same things as us.
“Laugh along with the common people
Laugh along, even though [we’re] laughing at you
And the stupid things you do
because you think that ‘poor’ is ‘cool’”
Ultimately, when ACORN chose to enter into an employee-employer relation—a structure that it really has chosen for itself; there are other ways to organise a not-for-profit business—it left itself open to these sorts of critiques. If you’re going to employ people, do it properly. Pay them well. You can’t become a boss and then be surprised and affronted when you are treated like a boss. A 2020 article in Stormy Petrel (republished by Libcom) outlines some of the history of ACORN in Britain, including its attempt to entryist the IWW and its subsequent decision to become an employer rather than adopting a more lateral structure. Fascinatingly, some defenders of ACORN have pointed to its tiered structure, wherein (as far as I can tell) unpaid working class ‘members’ do the grunt work and poorly-paid professional ‘organisers’ soak up the credit, as evidence that it’s not ‘a posh organisation’ (or something). This is, to be blunt, revolting. We are not your flock—but we are not your little badges, your get-out clauses, your human shields, either. I’m reminded of Raymond Williams’s formulation: “there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.” There are ways of treating people as masses, ways that reinforce the distinction between leaders and led. They are so often presented to us as ‘strategy’—a notion shrewdly critiqued by Daniel Frost. “The elevation of strategy above all else,” Frost writes,
has become a pressing problem, at risk of losing sight of the value of responsiveness, autonomy and (by far the most important of these) looking after and listening to each other. In turn, the strategists’ strategy floats away from them like a balloon, is then caught in the branches of the realistic and the sensible.
The Stormy Petrel article also offers an overview of the activities of its parent organisation in the US—an overview which is… hair-raising, to say the least. Union-busting, strike-breaking, and filing costly lawsuits in order to exempt it from paying minimum wage? Not for me, Clive. Of course, ACORN in Britain is not ACORN in the US—though its flagship branch, in Bristol, has refused to stand in solidarity with sex workers, which doesn’t fill me with confidence. But listen, I can understand that people who work there—be they paid or unpaid—feel proud of the work that they do—and rightly so, in my opinion. It’s not their fault that the organisation is what it is, however much they seem to have been encouraged to identify with it on a deep and personal level. Ultimately, though, I don’t think that any job is worth martyring yourself—sorry, sacrificing yourself—for. It might sound heroic to some people, but for me (already, and too many times, brought close to death), it just calls to mind Diane di Prima’s first Revolutionary Letter:
the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
Sacrifice sounds much less cool when you know what it is to have nothing; to have nothing, and to have even that almost wrested away from you. It probably sounds less cool to people who only wanted help in getting their landlord to fix their broken heating, and then found themselves, against their will, interpellated into somebody else’s weird saviour fantasy. At best, it’s infantilising. As for me—I dream of a world where nobody is ‘sacrificing themselves for’ anybody, or anything; where the notion of ‘winning’ power, like it’s a prize on Bullseye, is laughable; where the distinction between leaders and led has been utterly dissolved, not by subsuming us all under the banner of a single organisation/employer, but by (di Prima again:) “all of us shoving at the thing from all sides”.
Questions for ‘the movement’.
I want to wrap this extremely long polemic up by returning those questions I mentioned earlier, at the end of the first section. They are, as far as I can see, the question of priorities/resources, the question of growth, and the question of prefiguration. I’ve been reflecting on these questions for a while now, so while this particular incident has thrown them into sharp relief, I suspect that they may have a wider relevance in terms of how we think about institution-building on the left.
Let’s start by considering priorities/resources. What, given limited resources, should our priorities be? Now, this is a thorny one for thinking about ACORN, because its approach is focused on door-knocking, acts of service, and the subsequent recruitment of subs-paying members. Given all of that, of course what it needs most of all is bodies on the ground: it needs people to knock on those doors. Of course that’s going to be its priority. It’s not for nothing that the job description states:
DESIRED EXPERIENCE/ABILITIES
Desired candidate will have experience in one or more of the following roles:
-Recruitment, sales or customer facing roles;
-Fundraising roles, particularly on the street or door-to-door;
-Managerial roles;
-Volunteer management roles;
-Educational roles;
-Workplace organising roles.
Note the order in which these things are listed. It’s very revealing—and not only with regards to ACORN. Managerialism, sales, and comms are approaches that run right through the British left post-Corbyn, and perhaps people are cool with that. I wonder if more of us might want to take a minute to reflect on this tendency, and just ask ourselves whether or not we are, in fact, cool with it. (For myself, I am not cool with it. It’s not the revolution if you have to manipulate or trick or flatter people into it.)
There’s another question we could ask, too: is it better to do more, or to do less, and go deep with it? To take a hypothetical example: if your resources are limited, as everyone’s are, is it better to do 5 simultaneous discussion events, including one with BSL translation, or to do one event, with BSL translation, and where all participants are paid an honorarium? If you are organising a weekend conference, and you have to choose between a big closing-night party and paying two experienced people to take care of chaotic admin and organisational stuff, which should you choose? These are questions of priorities, and they’re the sorts of unpleasant choices that are forced upon us by limited resources. When we can’t have it all, what do we do? I know, in both cases, what my choice would be, but similarly, I can see the arguments for other choices, too. The problem is that when those arguments are not made openly, a lot of bad stuff (oppression, exploitation) gets naturalised and glossed over. Likewise with the low wages. If your organisational priorities mean that this is all you are prepared to pay, then be honest with us about that—and honest with yourselves about the kinds of people you will likely be recruiting.
The bare fact of the matter is that money on the left is not unlimited, and what money exists is extremely unevenly and unfairly distributed. I would really like it if the left as a whole was able to be more honest about the ways in which resources are distributed—about the choices that are being made, and why they are being made. Rather than being upfront about the real limits imposed on left institutions, fundraising emails, for example, tend to take the form “we’ve done so much already—but we could do so much more!” I understand why (nobody wants to look pathetic)—but still, I wish and dream and hope for more honesty, more vulnerability. Solidarity doesn’t consist in comrades marketing to comrades. Sales, PR, comms: these are all capitalist technologies whose unthinking deployment militates against any possibility of actual democracy within our movements. Along with the prevalence of backchannel patronage networks facilitated by WhatsApp group chats, the whole thing renders the rest of us completely unable to give informed consent to anything being done ‘for’ us, or in our names, and thus ultimately relies on manipulation and coercion.
This uneven and unfair distribution of resources on the left also leads to a great deal of competition over what resources there are. The notion of sharing space gets reframed as ceding space, and the whole thing runs entirely counter to basic solidarity, not to mention the communist horizon. Speaking from experience, it is fascinating to see people spend 9 months of the year being unpleasant to you on the internet, only to transform into models of obsequiousness when they are seeking “media partners” for their events. But I don’t want to be your “media partner”; I want to be your comrade, or nothing at all. This doesn’t feel like any sort of way to build a revolution.
Related to all this is the question of growth. I’ve noted a tendency to assume that endless growth is a good thing. But is this the case? Should we inherit, unquestioning, the socially-embedded notion that growth is the highest value? Should the left’s goal be to be the biggest, the best, the one with the most members (or the most mates)? Or does a focus on growth end up just reducing every disagreement to a fight over territory, be that ideological, literal, or ‘market share’? Will the revolution be branded with an ACORN logo? Will it be carrying a Novara Media refillable water bottle?
I suspect that this fixation on growth, the desire to be seen as the biggest, coolest, most popular ‘movement’, stems from the disappointment of 2019, and I get that. For all my own suspicions of electoralism (if 2019 had gone differently, that would in many ways have been the beginning of the struggle, not the end of it), I’m not here to make some ultraleft sneers, as though I was above it all. 2019 hurt me, too. (Sidenote: a lot of anarcho comrades are often extremely baffled when I explain to them that my own politics were (and are) way further left than anything that the Houses of Parliament could possibly contain, but I still campaigned. To them, I offer Diane di Prima’s reminder that “no one way works,” and add to it the fact that, much as I might wish it, I increasingly feel that we can’t simply community meals our way out of the problem of the state. More on this latter point here.)
But, you know, there’s a world of difference between critically supporting an electoral project that did, ultimately, aim to take over and transform the British state, whatever its limits, and attempting to close down all criticism of a literal employer because it makes some vaguely left wing claims on its website. It makes me worry that the left has taken the wrong lesson from what happened in 2019. The problem with Corbynism wasn’t ‘unpopularity’ so much as it was a completely hostile media environment coupled with a ludicrous electoral system and a Labour Party which was completely unfit to be administrating a major campaign. Given that the ‘parliamentary socialism’ route has since been decisively blocked by Starmidor, surely we need to turn our attentions away from electoralism, including the engage-and-persuade, doorknocking, get-the-vote-out model? It’s worth remembering that ACORN’s role in the US was primarily as a GTVO organisation, and that the current reigning faction in Momentum has close connections with British ACORN, particularly the Bristol branch. Without any plausible channel to exert real left wing pressure in the Labour Party, this model becomes nothing more than an Underpants Gnomes approach to political action:
Phase 1: Get somebody’s boiler fixed
Phase 2: ?????
Phase 3: Socialism
There’s a critical problem with this means-to-an-end approach: when we treat people’s lives, their problems, their real experiences of oppression as a means to an end, we risk treating them as a means to an end. As instruments. Human resources. It’s a capitalist way of thinking, an extractive way of thinking—which is to say, it is dehumanising, disempowering, and entirely counter to the experience of true solidarity (which can be fucking transformational, in ways that go far beyond the narrow concerns of the electoral).
Instead of allowing ourselves to become ever more hegemonised by the usual, in the desperate hopes of ‘Making the Left Normal Again’ (a phrase that, as I recall, originated in a now-deleted tweet by one of the very noisy blokes currently defending ACORN), we could use this period to tend our own garden. Rather than continuing to mope over the fact that Santa didn’t bring us a socialism for Christmas whilst attempting to clothe existing structures in the tattered rags of Corbynism; rather than watching our strategies float away like a balloon, to inevitably get caught in the branches of the sensible, we could stop, think, listen, try something else. We could continue to resist where we can without using the suffering of others as a means to an end. And that resistance might also mean pushing back against those who would project-manage the revolution, and against those who would insist that ‘popularity’ is everything; who would dissolve every boundary and paper over every contradiction in a desperate attempt to make the left appear more numerous than it is. “Freedom,” as Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “ is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
This brings us to our final question—that of prefiguration. Prefigurative questions seem, to my great concern, to have disappeared almost entirely from the mainstream contemporary left. In many ways, given what we’ve discussed above, this was bound to happen: when you’re committed to popularity on the terms of hegemonic capitalist culture, you probably do have to let go of your desire to do things differently, in case you end up looking ‘weird’. Being weird, so the thinking goes, doesn’t recruit members, or sell tickets, or accumulate social media clout. When these things are held to be the most important things, then we become—as the ACORN job description shows us—little more than salespeople.
I’ve written about prefiguration already—see, for example, this post from early 2019—so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Emma Goldman when she insists that “no revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved.” I think that this statement gets to the heart of the matter; it reminds me that the questions what do I want? and how do I want to get there? are inextricably intertwined. The older I get, the more deeply this resonates.
Over and again, throughout my adulthood, I’ve seen the same superficial politics sold to the disempowered and dispossessed; the same notion that you can lifestyle your way to liberation, that as long as you’re dropping the right names, displaying the right signifiers, the actual content of your actions matters not at all. And listen: partying together, dancing, drinking, breaking bread—all of this is fun, and necessary. Having friends is, in fact, extremely good. There must, as Simone de Beauvoir once cautioned, be joy. There must be joy. The risk, though, is that selling the left as a lifestyle will lead to demoralisation and disengagement when people are confronted with the often tedious work involved in trying to make a revolution. The risk is that we mistake solidarity for clique-formation—the Venn diagram of people I want to have a pint with and people I want to organise with is by no means a circle, and nor should it be.
Another risk is that, in prioritising our own joy, following our desires, we forget that, in a capitalist social order, our desires can also do great harm; that, in our joyful abandon (or a narcissistic coke haze), we end up dancing right over the backs of the people with whom we’re supposed to be standing in solidarity. The old saw “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” doesn’t really hold any more: it’s nothing more than a self-drafted permission slip to excuse oneself from exercising basic compassion, consideration, and solidarity. Besides, it makes precisely 0 sense to claim you’re fighting the real problem, the big beast, Capitalism, and yet continue to feed it whenever you are able to choose otherwise. Note that I say whenever you are able to choose. Of course, it’s impossible to get outside it entirely—come on lads, we’ve all been coerced into exploitative behaviour by global supply chains and the law of value—but that doesn’t mean we can’t fucking try.
The other side of all this is the model proffered by ACORN: the doorknocking, the drudge, the low wage, the Hard Graft. This, too, is selling a lifestyle (and, as we’ve seen, a fair amount of false hope). My sense is that both are worse; both maintain the present order of things, including the exclusion of those who are already structurally excluded. At best, ‘outsiders’ might be given a subordinate role: a spectator, a volunteer, a member of those perceived ‘masses’ whose sole function is taken to be some hybrid of symbol and instrument. This is a sort of prefiguration, yes—but it’s prefiguration by default, produced by a lack of attention to these questions, and the ways of being that it suggests do not resemble anything that I have ever wished for.
You see, we’re always prefiguring something. Nothing occurs in a vacuum: every moment is connected to every other moment. For this reason, it is worth being careful; care-full; full of care. When we consistently prioritise endless growth and broad (which is to say, shallow) popularity as the highest values, the world we call into being is one that doesn’t look too different to the world we have now. A superficial, conformist left, focused only on minor economic redistribution within the bounds of the nation-state, can have little to say about liberation. How can they, when they’re prepared to enter into days of what Patricia Lockwood has called “mortal online combat” over a boss’s right to pay insulting wages?
You can’t manufacture consent for socialist transformation; you can’t sell it door-to-door. And worse, it does something to us, to our subjectivities, to our hearts, when we behave as though we can. This is no way to move forward. There’s no point in pretending you’ve struck a great blow for socialism when you’ve had to water the concept down so much, in order to get there, that it ends up to the right of the fucking Gotha Programme. As Gertrude Stein wrote: it is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated.
All Diane di Prima quotations, as well as the Gertrude Stein line, are taken from the Silver Press edition of di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. Thank you to Diane di Prima, for your life and your vision; and thank you to the friend who gave me a copy of the book (you know who you are!). You can read a PDF of Revolutionary Letters here.
The quotations threaded through the second section are taken from Pulp’s 1995 indie disco hit Common People. I could write a whole essay on this song alone (it’s complicated), but suffice to say: I was 12 years old when I first heard it, and, for all its problems, to this day, I don’t think I’ve come across anything that articulates my own sense of class rage any better.
Footnotes.
1 There has been some suggestion that ACORN pays low wages as a form of praxis, perhaps in an effort to mitigate against the movement creating its own bourgeoisie. This has the effect of enabling the movement to create its own petty-bourgeoisie: a bunch of relatively affluent people who think that earning a lower wage automatically bestows a halo upon their sainted brows. ↩︎
2 We probably would then have asked them for help in getting a union—any union!—recognised so that we could bargain! I haven't worked in retail for over a decade now, thankfully, but none of the companies for whom I have worked would have permitted us to even think about joining a union; to do so, it was made clear, would have put our jobs at risk. ↩︎