Rage and the $100/month food budget

boxedjoy

Well-known member
thinking about all the protests and marches that I've not been on because I work weekends and I'm not a position to abandon work and risk being caught at a march when I'm off "sick"
 

luka

Well-known member
Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thinking about all the protests and marches that I've not been on because I work weekends and I'm not a position to abandon work and risk being caught at a march when I'm off "sick"

don't worry about it mate, Save your energy for organising a wildcat strike or a tenants strike. If protests changed anything they wouldn't allow them. Mostly a politico hobby horse. better to learn how to fire a gun if you're going to do something in your spare time. Or just get plastered, whatever you want. Protests are an activist trap though.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
By 'an activist mentality' what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing, it becomes an essential part of their self-image.
The activist is a specialist or an expert in social change. To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change.
Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour - it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education - instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised property of doctors and teachers - experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.
A division of labour implies that one person takes on a role on behalf of many others who relinquish this responsibility. A separation of tasks means that other people will grow your food and make your clothes and supply your electricity while you get on with achieving social change. The activist, being an expert in social change, assumes that other people aren't doing anything to change their lives and so feels a duty or a responsibility to do it on their behalf. Activists think they are compensating for the lack of activity by others. Defining ourselves as activists means defining our actions as the ones which will bring about social change, thus disregarding the activity of thousands upon thousands of other non-activists. Activism is based on this misconception that it is only activists who do social change - whereas of course class struggle is happening all the time.

 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
yeah my days of political protest are over after I went on countless Iraq marches as a teenager and saw nothing change. I feel guilty about not lending my voice to the BLM marches in solidarity, but I wasn't convinced I would be safe enough and as a household we weren't in a position to gamble on it.
 
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