If you are an organizer or an activist, think about the time you felt most effective, most powerful, most joyful in struggle. Was it alone? Was it in solitude, your face bathed in the artificial light of a telephone or a laptop screen? Was it after finding le mot juste in response to some reactionary or splitter mouthing off on social media? Was it as you typed the final period in a perfectly composed bit of argumentation for your blog or newsletter?
The odds are good that it was not. The odds are strong that the times you remember most fondly were times when you were with your comrades, your friends, your colleagues, your co-workers, or even total strangers — the who is less important than the fact that it was someone other than just yourself. Perhaps it was at a protest, or a march, or a mass meeting. Perhaps it was as part of a strike. Perhaps it was even in a riot, or part of an act of mass civil disobedience, and the memory that so energizes you, that makes you feel like there was a moment when everything was possible (not in the negative sense of ‘anything can happen’, as in there is no predicting what fresh horrors will soon be inflicted on the world, but in the unifying and glorious sense that just maybe the world made by others, the world of oppression and exploitation and deprivation, could be upended and replaced with something greater) is one of being arrested alongside others willing to suffer for their vision of that better world.
I have experienced these moments more than once. The first was in 1999, when I traveled to Seattle to take part in the anti-globalist protests happening when the World Trade Organization convened there. The most recent was when I spent a week on the strike line with Ford employees who walked out for a better contract, which they eventually won. In between, I felt that power, that exhilaration, that sense of boundless possibility, that love that only comes from the realization that socialism can only happen in a social framework, on many different occasions: the Occupy Wall Street gatherings; protests against the election of Donald Trump and mass actions to halt his plans to deport immigrants; meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America; and, most of all, strikes. Sometimes these moments led to victories; sometimes, they ended in failure. Some were thrilling, some were boring, some were frustrating. But all of them restored my faith in the power of solidarity — even here, even how, even in this country where we have never really had successful leftist movements and where the toxic broth of self-absorption is fed to us from the day we are born — and shone a light on what we can be if we try.
Where I have never felt those feelings or had those experiences is here, on the internet, the very medium in which I try to communicate to you how important it is to abandon its promise and ignore its potential. It has been necessary to repeat myself so many times, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic landed on the growing leftist momentum in America like an avalanche: We will never win a better world on line. Not even a marginally better one. If we ever win socialism in American (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), it will not be by using the internet. We should view this technology, especially in social media — its most tempting, most addictive, and most ruinous manifestation — as, at best, a dangerous tool that can be useful in specific situations but that should be handled with extreme caution, and at worst, as the psychic poison that it is. It should not be necessary at this point to reiterate how it isolates us rather than unites us, how it hooks us into an endless cycle of scrolling and reaction that does nothing but waste time, how we pay it with our attention and energy and concentration and it rewards us only with clout. The best thing it will ever do is destroy itself.
What’s even worse is how its most malevolent qualities lead people to defend its atomizing and alienating qualities. It does not teach us to be allies; it teaches us how to be enemies. It instructs us to be repelled by the people we are trying to reach, to be annoyed at our own comrades, to look for excuses not to align with each other, to make excuses for why we can’t ever participate in the kind of mass action that is our only salvation. To criticize the experience of being online is to invite accusations of ableism, to attract mockery for taking the whole thing too seriously (or not seriously enough), to be charged with a lack of understanding of how busy people get, how tired and stretched thin they feel, how depressed and anxious and full of dread they are — as if the internet experience makes any of those things better rather than markedly worse.
Believe me: I am not here to scold or to condemn or judge. I have been on the internet practically since it was invented. I am, to state the obvious, on it right now, writing this. I have had to come to grips with its failure just like everyone else. And I know how tired and sick and worn down people can get; I am almost 55 years old, and I have spent forty of those years doing a lot of deeply shitty, low-paying, exhausting jobs. I am not going to look down on anyone for staying at home with their kids or just watching TV under a blanket. A separate peace may be the only peace we ever see. So, too, I must confess that I know very well the weakness of protests as a tactic; I am typing this sentence as the slaughter of innocent children in Gaza continues without pause even as millions gather in cities all over the world to denounce it.
All I am trying to do is to tell you that to change the world, you must be in the world. Individualism is a dead end, which is why it is the most prevalent ideology in this, the most capitalist of all nations. The only way the working class can become a class aware of itself and for itself is through struggle, through movement, and most of all, through acting together in struggle. On the internet, the narcissism of small differences becomes hyper-accelerated, because nothing else is happening. In actual human society, we can find ourselves too busy acting in common for a common cause to spend too much time deciding that whoever is standing arm in arm with us on the picket line has such an intolerable position on this or that issue that we simply cannot be expected to stand with them. Simply put, we can only build solidarity by being in solidarity with one another. We can be an invincible army of the people, or we can willingly submit to being even more lost in a maze of our own creation than we already are.