Activism is a Gamble

Talking about diversity of tactics

“Diversity of Tactics" is almost a Cliché of anticapitalist activist ideology of the 90s and 00s wave that I grew up in. There’s a lot that has been written about it in general, but I thought it would be worth talking about it in a different way to the usually moralistic case of “we are justified to do what our conscience directs us to do against the law” or the civil-rights pragmatic theory of change case that says “we should have liberal groups and radical groups to make sure that the institutional elites understand they have to work with the liberals to keep their heads attached and their necks unbothered by the proles". I’m not that much of a believer that moralism can usefully direct how we practically implement liberation efforts, and the civil rights theory of change very clearly embeds in it an understanding that we can and will only ever replicate more liberal models of the existing oppressive regime.

Instead I’m going to talk about our efforts to change the course of the future as a process of making bets and learning from them.

We live in a universe of uncertainty. If the existing systems that govern human life were fixed we would give up any attempt to change them (and a lot of effort is put into persuading us that there isn’t much we can do about them!) If our success were as guaranteed as those Immortal Scientists of Marxism would tell us they are, the powers that be have the institutional wherewithal to come to that understanding and make an effort to ensure that their futures in the inevitable post-revolutionary society are as favourable as possible.

But no such certainty exists. We hope we can change things. The ruling class, oppressive organisations around the world all hope they can maintain them. We are each betting that the other side are wrong and we can not be sure at all! Human society is incomprehensibly complex and has undergone many revolutions and as many long periods of stagnation in between. The Complex Systems Theorists would have it that these systems are incomputably complex and shifting between temporary optimal minima, and that this complexity itself is a matter that tips the scales in our favour, and yet at the same time, maybe they’re wrong! Complex Systems are by their nature unreasonably complex and the only thing we know is that human society is definitely complex.

So to cut a lot of waffle here short, my argument here is that from a human liberation perspective, we benefit from making lots of low stakes bets here. We don’t want to just try to theorise how to win. We do want to theorise, but we shouldn’t trust it without seeing results! What we really need, what scales best, is for many different groups to apply their local, particular knowledge and experience and to have them all trying what they think is best. Effective strategies for liberation will be successful. Ineffective ones maybe less so. Complementary strategies will emerge from groups realising connections between needs. We need dun-dun-dun:

Diversity of Tactics!

There are a few things we need, not quite as additions to this but as conditions for this wider effort to be effective. We need for most bets to be safe enough to lose that they don’t wipe the gamblers making them right out when they lose. Most things anyone believes about the world are wrong and surviving being wrong is how you learn to be right.

We also need to maintain our activist history well enough that we are able to build longer term models with information that outlasts a few generations of activist burnout in order to break through more deeply ingrained minima.

The other thing we need is good communication, sympathy, mutual aid, kindness and solidarity between people trying out different things with the same aims. That’s how when something works we learn from others and when it doesn’t work we spread the costs and mitigate burn out.

We got this. 🏴‍☠️