On the 22nd of February 2025 I attended People Before Profit’s (PBP) event on the future of organizing for Palestine in Ireland. The latter part of the meeting dedicated an hour to the discussion of strategy. How to get from Point A to Point B?
It was stressed that the way forward is to build the movement through grassroots work that is “catch-all”. Upon inquiry, it was admitted that “we are not in control of political events”. The idea ran that “the water is boiling, and that it will be boiled, at which point quantitative change turns into qualitative change, and an explosion of political consciousness happens”. Supposedly, each of our “catch-all” actions will contribute to the boiling of the water but it is impossible to know which of our actions will blow the lid. We are led into a situation where we need to both organize our way into that explosion and but also stand ready to intervene when an explosion happens(?). A weird tension has arisen in which party-activists are expected, due to this “catch-all” approach, to participate in essentially everything, with no consideration given to political content of what we participate in. The key point here is that the role of conscious organizing is denied, because the “catch-all” nature of this grassroots work flattens the role of tactics and strategy into nothingness, into just “showing up”. If you are everywhere, you are really nowhere. The true situation is neither; history is not absolutely determined or undetermined, but relatively deterministic, having a reflexive and subjectivist nature in which subject and object are one and the same. In the first instance, the mistake is a covert mechanical materialist one wherein all work has to be spread equally and we wait for the prophesied judgement day to come—no analysis of the concrete political situation is made, or even needed. ‘Why would it? The revolution is inevitable anyway!’ is the underlying assumption. On the other hand, when backtracking, the mistake is flipped on its head, leading to activistic voluntarism. Revolutionaries need to focus on specific moments of bifurcation, rather than catch-all grassroots work which spreads efforts thin and renders them next-to-useless.
The strategy of People Before Profit (PBP) is rooted in this mix of deterministic mechanical materialism with voluntaristic activism, rather than any variety of dialectical materialism. The organizational-activist paradigm is prevalent amongst the socialist left, in which emphasis is placed on the need to ‘mobilize’ people into movements and activists are made the ‘motive force’ of change. Its call is ‘as long as we intensify the struggle, the revolution will come’ as recognized by Scottie O. in his article The Marginality of American Communism (2025). This is an important, if subtle, difference with the Marxist method.
It is rooted in the belief that one can ‘agitate, educate and organize’ people into radical movements. Certainly, organizing is important, but this sort of approach leads activists to spread thin into various movements, neglecting their political content in the expectation that simply ‘doing the work’ and ‘showing up’ will suffice, while waiting for explosions of mass consciousness to then guide them. It is the dual sin of tailism and entryism disguised with revolutionary language—in the final reading, erratic opportunism and no application of a party programme. Conversely, a dialectical materialist approach focuses on identifying bifurcation points, paths of divergence in world-history, and directing the efforts of communists to push singular events that can ‘tap into’ mass consciousness. In this, history reveals its relatively deterministic nature, neither determined nor indeterministic, but spawning bifurcation points as time marches.
The blind organizational-activist paradigm leads to the continuous organizing of marches, protests and events with little to no outcomes. Party activists are directed to take part in various movements with no tactics or strategy, to stand on the sidelines, and to await spontaneity. Communists should, rather, identify those bifurcation points within the short-term predictability horizon and focus their efforts on them. In the case of Palestine, it is clear that the forthcoming historical moment will take place either within the trade union movement or the student movement. Thus, the efforts of communists should be focused on possible moments of class struggle within these movements to ‘help’ them into existence. “There is a “historic moment” only when the present is ordered in terms of the future, on the condition that the future makes its way into the present not in an immediate manner but having been mediated by the past – that is, by an already accomplished action,” as put by Alexandre Kojève in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947). The community work undertaken by activists should be neither tailist nor entryist, but genuine on-the-ground work, preferably in leadership positions, prioritizing the moment over the party: proceeding from the concrete to the universal rather than from the universal to the concrete.
The task of the vanguard party is to give the spontaneous sentiments of the masses political expression; it cannot directly change the micro-political attitudes of the masses—the vanguard expresses the political sentiments of the masses in a ‘purified’ form with the lens of class struggle. The mood of the masses and its expression by the vanguard party takes place at the same time, in dialectical entanglement. It is like the docking scene in the movie Interstellar (2013): the party and the people must be spinning at the same rate to produce a political outcome; the meeting of theory and practice in what emerges as praxis. Not too slow (tailism and entryism), and not too fast (ultra-leftism and adventurism); the finger must be on the pulse of the prevailing mass mood. It is possible to identify bifurcation points in the present—for example, when a radical slate ran for the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) elections and won in March 2023, it was the transformation of molecular anti-establishment attitudes to their molar forms in terms of student union leadership through the political activation of the burgeoning social transcript: a quantitative to qualitative change takes place, closing the dialectical loop, bifurcating history. In this context, molecular refers to dispersed, small-scale, anti-establishment sentiments among individuals, while molar represents their structured, collective expression in institutional leadership, as theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in terms of micro- and macro-political formations in Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972 and 1980).
The crucial difference here is the scope of the struggle. The organizational-activist paradigm believes in reacting to everything, and believes it impossible to predict where bifurcation points may lay altogether. However, according to dialectical materialism, general trends can be identified. This deliberative process must be made at a singular moment and results in tactics and strategies that are then applied in a focused way and tried out against the real-world material conditions. For example, the student encampments and the Dunnes Store strike in the 1980s are past examples of bifurcation points. A potential student strike, or a group of workers in a firm undertaking a strike for Palestine in the present day are all examples of bifurcation points that may trigger an explosion of political consciousness. By rejecting the very possibility of bifurcation points, tactics and strategy themselves are rejected, leaving party-activists in a state of limbo where anything and everything is potentially revolutionary. A dialectical disequilibrium is set up: the vanguard does not know whether to lead or to be led, and oscillates between the two poles, rather than leading and being led at the same time. Judgements should be made, theoretical discussions should be had, and revolutionary work should be carried out along those lines.
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