Thanks for your text, though I'm not from NL, we have similar discussions where I live. I wanted to comment on two points:
- "Don’t go in default mode for every action that we do" This is in my opinion the strongest and most important thought of this text. It wraps the main point up pretty nicely and, more important, tackles the underlying problem: not only do we confuse tactics and appearance, we don't have different tactics at all! There's a political culture of self-isolation and retreat from society that leaves us more or less unable to just have normal conversations with workers on the street, although most people tend to agree with a lot of our political goals (higher wages, fighting against alienation and expolitation, and to lesser degrees also a lot of anti-racist, feminist and even outright anticapitalist ideas). In my experience, we have exactly two modes of operating: agressively shouting from the safety of an anonymous mass/bloc or standing around an info table/at a stationary manifestation, being unsure about our own ideology and afraid of people who don't agree with every word we say. So I think this important text adresses one big part of the problem but also leads to a bigger discussion about our tactics and just ways of doing politics. Thanks for that, comrade!
- the second part is just about a word chosen in the text, that may be down to translation or my understanding, but I think the usage of the word "civilian" for people who don't participate in our events is not a good choice. On the other hand, it shows how we all come from this flawed political culture, even if we criticize it in a constructive way. I think I know what you mean by "civilians" and I definitely felt this relationship to "bystanders" before, but maybe we should try thinking about people not as uninterested outsiders, but as political subjects and in large parts these are people we want to reach with our ideas one day, or maybe some of them are thinking just like us and just didn't participate in this specific event... Like you said, "this will also alienate us further from other non or less politicized people. Which we are trying to engage in the struggle remember?".
TL;DR: it's a good text, very good indeed. Gets to the bottom of a big problem about our political culture.
Thanks for your text, though
Thanks for your text, though I'm not from NL, we have similar discussions where I live. I wanted to comment on two points:
- "Don’t go in default mode for every action that we do" This is in my opinion the strongest and most important thought of this text. It wraps the main point up pretty nicely and, more important, tackles the underlying problem: not only do we confuse tactics and appearance, we don't have different tactics at all! There's a political culture of self-isolation and retreat from society that leaves us more or less unable to just have normal conversations with workers on the street, although most people tend to agree with a lot of our political goals (higher wages, fighting against alienation and expolitation, and to lesser degrees also a lot of anti-racist, feminist and even outright anticapitalist ideas). In my experience, we have exactly two modes of operating: agressively shouting from the safety of an anonymous mass/bloc or standing around an info table/at a stationary manifestation, being unsure about our own ideology and afraid of people who don't agree with every word we say. So I think this important text adresses one big part of the problem but also leads to a bigger discussion about our tactics and just ways of doing politics. Thanks for that, comrade!
- the second part is just about a word chosen in the text, that may be down to translation or my understanding, but I think the usage of the word "civilian" for people who don't participate in our events is not a good choice. On the other hand, it shows how we all come from this flawed political culture, even if we criticize it in a constructive way. I think I know what you mean by "civilians" and I definitely felt this relationship to "bystanders" before, but maybe we should try thinking about people not as uninterested outsiders, but as political subjects and in large parts these are people we want to reach with our ideas one day, or maybe some of them are thinking just like us and just didn't participate in this specific event... Like you said, "this will also alienate us further from other non or less politicized people. Which we are trying to engage in the struggle remember?".
TL;DR: it's a good text, very good indeed. Gets to the bottom of a big problem about our political culture.