Most organizers, at some point, get frustrated and think to ourselves or exclaim:
If only everyone else held the same views as me! Then we’d have a world without exploitation that meets all of our needs!
And for many of us Marxists, this thought is all it is—a throwaway thought of frustration. Obviously the point is to build a world where we have a self-sustaining revolutionary working class consciousness. The actual problem is how we achieve that practically, given our historical conditions: the bourgeoisie’s effective control over the means of production, and the resulting hegemonic effects on the broader working class’ analysis of economics and social questions.
But for some activists, this kind of frustration bleeds into their organizing in ways that are strategically misguiding. This seems to happen especially with those of us who are new to organizing, anarchists, or a particular strain of Western Marxist-Leninist.
If our focus is merely about getting everyone to hold the same views as us, it’s easy to get lost in idealist strategies. In these idealist strategies, we try to grow the movement primarily through conversing, arguing, and propagandizing. “If only we go to enough protests, post engaging enough things on social media, weave ourselves into enough of the community—Then we will convince the working class that socialism/ anarchism/ communism is a good idea!” The thought that we can simply win socialism essentially through propaganda is a ridiculous idea, particularly in the organizing conditions of the United States. It ignores, in practice, the wide range of coercive processes of capitalism.
Merely pointing out that capitalism is coercive and harmful is not enough. It’s also not enough to barely go beyond negative criticism, by giving a set of positive political lines and utopian descriptions of how socialism could look, if only we had the chance to implement it.
Even taking actions which materially help others in the immediate term can be part of a clearly idealist broader strategy. An example of this is if the primary goal of these actions is simply to become a person who other people trust, so that we can spread our beliefs.
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The point of effective, materialist organizing is to build power and institutions of socialized production to lower the barrier for the working class to take their discontents and translate it into actionable class consciousness. We do not win by simply spreading theory in the realm of ideas, we win by creating a material world in which socialist theory is increasingly self-evident and materially actionable for the mass working class.
In Elite Capture, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò emphasizes the distinction between people ‘genuinely holding a belief’ and people ‘acting as if they hold a belief’ in situations where there are power imbalances. Táíwò uses the fable of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ as a kind of example. In the fable, the emperor parades through the city wearing nothing, with his assistants proclaiming that he is wearing clothes which are invisible to anyone who is “incompetent or exceptionally stupid”. The townspeople go along with it, until a child proclaims, “The King is naked!”
In this fable, why would we assume that the townspeople are simply believing the parade’s proclamations? Instead, the townspeople have material incentive to play along—otherwise, they might face punishment for ridiculing a powerful person, or close the door on opportunities to materially improve their life.
The idealist organizer seems to go around in this situation, acting as if the townspeople are true believers in the existence of magical clothes. They would proclaim loudly and everywhere that the emperor is naked—without recognizing the practical, material reasons people have to act as if they hold the false belief. And while this might work in the fable, the coercive capitalist practices of contemporary USA aren't nearly as much affected by naming and shaming as a prideful emperor might be.
In many cases, people already are disillusioned with capitalism, even if they don't have the language to express it. Nevertheless, they must follow along because of their material interests and needs. Many people do not need to be convinced about what is right and wrong—they need accessible material alternatives so that they may realize a break away from being a cog in the existing coercive structures.
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Let me make the same point, but coming from a different starting place.
Some people convince themselves of the justice of the capitalist structure, in lockstep with justifying their own engagement in capitalist coercive practices. Most of these people have decided to take on these coercive practices of domination and exploitation to improve their material conditions. As a precondition to feeling reasonably justified to act in that way, they will find themselves selectively focusing on learning the arguments about why it is acceptable to promote and find personal gain in capitalist economic circuits.
The ultimate capitalist justification for their actions, as we all know well, is that they are going to act in their own near-term self-interest, regardless of whether it is good for the broader society. The ideology of capitalism is simply ideological cover for this basic individualist material interest.
We should target the material base, not fight in the realms of symbolism and ideology. “Winning” a symbolic, moral, or ideological argument does not affect the underlying fact that the capitalist class will do things according to their material self-interest (at least, their self-interest as it exists within an assumed structure of exploitative material relations). A materialist socialist analysis concludes that when our organizing effectively targets the material base, the vast majority of the proletariat will recognize our material interests in destroying exploitation / class societies, and our interests in building economic democracy in replacement of capitalist anarchy.
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How is the proletariat’s consciousness pushed toward capitalist realism? The widely-held belief of the seeming naturalness and inescapability of capitalism is not merely a false belief created by capitalist social propaganda—it is materially produced, and cannot merely be overcome through idealist arguments. It is materially produced and reinforced—ceaselessly—through our life-defining, relationship-defining engagements within capitalism. We must participate in the capitalist game to meet our material needs and wants in day-to-day life, and the rules of this capitalist game are used to coerce behaviors out of us which are practically identical to acting as if capitalism is justified.
The “false beliefs” of capitalist realism often present themselves at a superficial level of “what people believe”. The idealist sees these stated beliefs—which are superficial re-presentations of the material capitalist processes—and thinks that the focus of their organizing should be to argue, propagandize, and convince people to change their beliefs, rather than to change the underlying material processes.
To some degree, changing these material processes really will rely on small, continuous conversations where we spread a socialist analysis. This needn’t even be a conversation about big, undefinable moral concepts like the meaning of ‘Justice’. Instead we can simply have a discussion of how we can come together and build economic and social democracy to not only meet our needs, but to broadly support each other as we develop ourselves in the ways we want to.
Where the idealist takes a wrong turn is that they seem to believe that our working class disagreements are rooted in the other person’s incorrect moral upbringing.
“If only we make our arguments more forcefully, more convincingly, more sympathetically—then we will have a mass movement of the working class!”
Perhaps—and this is a more forgiving explanation—the idealist organizer simply does not see the material hurdles which guide people to act in compatibility with capitalism, let alone how this problem requires material solutions.
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It certainly can feel good to be an idealist organizer. All one has to do is to proclaim one’s views loudly, and in more places, and “Hooray, we’re building the revolution!” And when things don't go their way, one can simply get frustrated at others for lacking the morality that they possess. “Hey, at least I know I’m a good person!”
Inevitably, this merely idealist strategy fails at winning over the mass working class, and leads the idealist to becoming grumpy and annoyed with the rest of the working class for not changing their behaviors in accord to the idealist’s presentation of morality.
At best, this idealist organizing can win over more activist-minded folks who are drawn to the apparently very active group. And indeed, idealist organizers do appear very active—but, of course, that appearance is essentially all that idealist organizing is: trying to proclaim one’s views loudly and in as many places as possible. They “say the right things”, make a ton of speeches, post a lot of flyers, engage in a lot of protests, but what do they materially do?
This idealist strategy doesn’t really appeal to the working class, it mainly appeals to like-mindedly frustrated idealists, or people new enough to organizing not to have seriously thought about the material production of consciousness.
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Finally, an idealist bent to organizing will mean that people aren’t practically focusing on how to materially build replacement ways of caring for each other and producing our basic needs.
This is because—even as we do things (1) to immediately improve people’s material conditions and (2) to help spread our propaganda—those are both short-sighted goals.
We can help people, and we can spread our propaganda through deed and word—but the organizing practices and analyses that are sufficient to advance these immediate goals—those short-sighted practices and analyses are insufficient for achieving our long-term strategic organizing in many key ways. When groups lose sight of building the mass organizing structures and practices that are necessary for achieving a broader strategy, their organizing becomes incapable of achieving anything of broader value. We might as well be interest-group liberals, if our organizing is not practically and thoughtfully developed around a broader strategy.
There should be a focus on building practical, goal-oriented, mass democratic institutions and norms, and helping the mass working class develop a practical understanding of what true democracy entails. (It entails inclusive deliberation with a majority-rule backstop. [Read Helene Landemore!]) There should be a focus on developing people’s capacities and experiences in organizing and taking action within organizing spaces. There should be an emphasis on understanding how capitalism materially functions, and therefore what we need to do to materially challenge it. There should be emphasis on experimentation, and developing theory through our actions. Most importantly, we should practically develop our society’s material productive capacity in ways that do not rely on domination and exploitation.
Idealism is a failure of contemporary socialist organizing. For anarchists, it’s a loss of any radical and practical anarchist history in favor of the bourgeois moral advocacy of Proudhon or the performance of “radical” “theory” that people learn from memes on social media. For Marxist-Leninists, it’s a regression to the impotency of Soviet-Communist-Party-structure-copycats in developed capitalist nations. If we want to be effective, and to play a part in the world-historical proletarian uprising, we must focus on building mass-democratic institutions and practices, and develop a long-term strategy in which spreading propaganda is always secondary to materially building class power and mass organizing capacity.