If You’re Not Thinking About Direct Action, It's Time To Think In Context And Cop On

This is a response to Chris Cullen’s most recent article. It is the kind of slop Marxism  that Aontacht seems to push on slow news days. It is of an emerging genus of expat middle aged socialists and republicans that we seem to nurture at this publication. Detached finger wagging that  punctuates the publication’s otherwise stellar reporting and analysis. There are nuggets of superficial truth to the work, but it is most ironically so divorced from the Irish context that it fails to equip the  reader in any sense. Furthermore, its pseudo-socialist certainty lazily casts the whole field of direct  action aside.  

It is separated from the context of this place and struggles more generally and so seems to simply recycle available platitudes. Without a serious dialectical practice to guide the analysis all the writer has to pull from are bourgeois media caricatures that barely relate to any kind of central argument to “think globally and act locally”.  

Yes, the Just Stop Oil protests were ineffective in their material cultural environments. They  were not stunts that made much material progress. The level of risk to reward was so little that only  very privileged student aged people seemed to be involved. Awareness raising is not consciousness  raising... duh.  

I think anyone with a dialectical materialist practice would know that. But Cullen is so  sloppy that he paints his wide brush over a variety of direct action tactics, including blockading and gluing yourself to the floor, and he is wrong to do so.  

How did the Ballymun flats get their Irish school? Through sustained direct action. Storming and occupying. Gluing is just another tactic to accomplish something like that. It is a valid tool in the  arsenal and likely necessary if you are a member of a community that is marginalized under Capital. This includes the working class, women, migrants, queers and republicans and so on. Dublin’s history is so rich with these social currents of resistance, however, it does not seem like you know that.

Yes, it is good to be in the community generally, for some maybe they should join their local  5-a-side team. Yes, community is the site of much resistance and football is an activity that  community is built around. Big upps ‘rovers against racism’, ‘bows’ and ‘the green brigade’. All the same these groups do a lot more than just kicking a ball around. They confront power, they agitate  and they coalition build 

If you want to call people to praxis you must invite people to ask themselves how much they are actually communicating socialism in their words and actions. If they are not engaged with actual struggle, it is not necessarily praxis. Praxis comes from being in your community and standing up to injustice, as it affects real breathing persons. 

This is where I get pissed off with Cullen. In rehashing Marx-ish slop regarding immigration,  he fails to recognize injustice along these racial lines as a site of cultural and material struggle that  should be taken up by socialists. He is just repeating rightist framing of a working class, formed from a technocratic mediascape.  

Cullen does not have a material analysis in which ways immigration systems are used to  control and categorise bodies. He sees this as contested ground that should be abandoned for the  sake of conformity, and supposedly getting into communities. Where are your principles if you are not  having those conversations with your community? You are a tofu socialist you simply taste like whatever currents you are cooked with.  

Your praxis will not develop if you are divorced from the cultural and material struggle of the  marginalized. We fight the State and corporations everywhere they impose the reigns of Capital,  imperialism and domination!  

Because when we do not, they further develop their tools for processing all of our bodies. This is the serious materialist line. I am sick of these supposed leftists who get off on endlessly dunking  on their own side. The kids who did the Just Stop Oil actions are likely part of those who will grow  and develop into the more effective actioners that we badly need. They carry the tradition and they  are ours to nurture and support. They are part of the future of our movement. One of those  misguided ‘idealists’ is worth ten comment section materialists.  

The game of resistance is difficult. Capital and the State are so diffuse as to make  opportunities for sustained resistance obscure and costly. Capital survives by reproducing its own  interests as the necessities for working persons to get paid and eat. Separating out and fighting the  system in a way that builds mass support is an art. Especially in a colonized media scape,  undergirded by State violence. 

It is only with networks of actors in their own specific material context, poking and  prodding the scales and thorns of these systems can we occasionally find openings to its soft belly.  At that point it is time to bloc up and support our own side who take action. How can we ask our  comrades to take effective action when we have not developed solid accessible analysis to help  guide them beforehand? How can we expect our comrades to consistently take such action when  we do not support them in the aftermath? There is both a need to organize broadly and bloc up and mobilize when required.  

If all you can offer to other socialists is patronizing half-cocked analysis about their material  conditions from an ocean away; maybe it is better to cop yourself on and start asking more questions about how you can provide actual material and informational support.  

We have no choice but to be experimental in our actions. Being in the community is  necessary but not alone sufficient. We fight eviction, we fight deportation, we fight austerity and  ecocide. Climate collapse is on the way and we must build assemblages that can affect the sheer  scale of the survival migration that is on the way. If we do not get our shit together millions will die  at the borders of Europe just as conditions here continue to deteriorate for the working class at  home. Yes, we must be careful but also time is running out. You must actually think globally and actually act locally!