Collective Action

You cannot have revolution nor even begin to affect our current climate catastrophe without collective action.

Photo by Markus Spiske

And therein lies the problem, because we here in the U.S. don’t even know what collective action looks like any more. There was a time when we mobilized workers and they took literal action in order to effect changes in the work place.  But today, in the 2010’s the closest we get are social media calls for lots of individual actions: boycotts, calls to show up to protests, or other personal acts.  But we seem incapable of organizing a sustained action and that may just be the death of us. Literally, or figuratively.

Photo by Startup Stock Photos

These mass media “actions” aren’t collective actions, they’re merely “simultaneous” and “distributive” actions, urged not by leaders or organizers but by armchair social media propagandists. Individuals have no relationship with the initiators of the acts, nor really the other participants, and so have little reason to join except feelings of moral responsibility and intellectual agreement with the cause.

While it may seem like this is a deeply anarchist model, it’s very far from that. Earlier anarchists organized people and communities into collectives and networks that extended past specific actions, just as communists did.  But they were organization of people in community.

Collective action is the logic of communities,
of tribes, of gangs, of kinship groups and unions.

Instead, it’s really just the capitalist model: advertise a product (in this case, revolutionary change) and hope the buyers show up. In that, there is no community beyond the sensation that we are doing just what everyone else is doing, but without any real purpose or passion.

Collective action is the logic of communities, of tribes, of gangs, of kinship groups and unions. The relationships and friendships of the people within the collective isn’t a side effect, it’s the defining feature.

It’s also what makes them willing to risk their safety or sacrifice personal time and resource: not for a cause or an invisible propagandist, but for people they love.

For all the sex in our society that gets wrongly called by the name of “love”, I sometimes wonder if we have forgotten how to truly love — our family, our friends, our associates, our neighbors — to love them with passion, to love them for their betterment, side by side with them. whatever might come, whenever we are needed.