Zohran Mamdani’s popularity is not down to policy alone, neither to his class-first politics in conjunction with his unyielding defence of minorities, but also his youthful presentation, engagement with popular culture and New York’s unique history, scavenger hunts and quips and storytelling, exciting the masses. This is politics, a complete package, decorating a rational kernel with a libidinal force, presenting it to the masses. Aesthetical, emotional and cultural nodal points wrap around a political project, enveloping it as an affective shell, becoming a social phenomena. The Left, in Ireland and around the world, looks to him for inspiration, rightly so. Stuck in activism, does it, however, understand the significance, or does it see only what it desires to see, appropriating him? 

Political writing, such as this one, is made up of a trifecta of parts. The antagonism to which it is opposed, the river stream that is the melting-pot of ideological tendency on the Left, in which it interjects, and the weapon, which it crafts in order to bring about a desired subjectivity. In this case, the topic at hand is no other than the need for a paradigmatical shift, from the activist to the political tendency on the Left. The Left has come to understand politics as activism, activism as politics, and it is clear that a great flattening occurs through their being equated. Attractors lie on a plane; activism, intensifying, penetrates politics, dissolving it into a singular homogenous mass. 

What is the difference underpinning these lines of thoughts? What signifiers revolve around them? How are social forces mobilized under their umbrellas? 

There is no better place to start the analysis than with the masses. Engage an everyday person in conversation and they will take a negative view of activism. You will likely hear a mish-mash of pessimism and apoliticism, concerning the failure of left-wing activism to effect change with regards to the conditions of the working class, perhaps a slightly vindictive remark of the over-bearing focus on Palestine with little to show for in the grand scheme of things. Nothing ever changes!

It would be easy to respond, from the activist perspective, that we need to simply work harder, engage in “more activism”, “increase militancy” or “recruit new activists”.  All systems of oppression are interconnected, and hence, striking at the particular has the potential to bring down the entire regime. If this falls on deaf ears, it would be all too easy to write off the masses as reactionary, as is the tendency on the Left, and then return to our bubbles, from whence the marginal position of Communism in political discourse springs.

None of this changes the fact that this analysis, arising from a common-sense understanding of social reality, is true. People, on average, are not stupid. Their statements, even if not expressed using a theoretical framework that pleases the academic, obtain  a seed of truth about the society in which we live. Let us cast this seed and watch it bloom; what becomes of it? It points directly to the paradigmatic rut of the progressive movement, in which activism suffocates the political. 

Activism is politics on life support, in periods of depleted class combativity, attempting to resuscitate the civic engagement of the masses. Commendable; but in retreat, on university campuses. Victorious: marriage equality, abortion rights, a win on climate-friendly policies, slight counter-balance to austerity policies and a divestment from Israel here and there. Missing: continuity, as part of a well-rounded political project, lasting across decades, threatening to seize, and destroy, the State. Influenced by autonomism, it jumps, from issue to issue, stuck in immediatism, losing a support base here, securing another there, in perpetuity. 

Therein lies the truth that activism has failed to create large-scale social change. Take Palestine. It is commendable that Trinity College Dublin divested from Israel, and so too can the reader name a hundred other such victories in the case of the Gaza genocide. Yet, two years since October 7th 2023, and it is painfully obvious that the Left has no institutional power. In fact, it has lost institutional power. It is not able to gain mass support, unlike the Right, in order to take over, transform or destroy, institutions. There is a need to evaluate the position of the Left; in the electoral arena, putting aside widespread apathy which we have not managed to capture, we poll abysmally, in the universities we excel. The issue: activism has no politics! How is it possible that the large masses of people support Palestine, yet this has not been translated into politics, with our governments dragging their feet, the European Union remaining Zionist, the world silent? The way we organize is the way in which we express our social energies, like Avatar, the Last Airbender, amassing magic from the force-field, and if this is funneled into activism, it will not construct politics. People Before Profit recognize this in theory, but in practice their politics is equated with activism, pulled back from a populist approach towards single-issue campaigns. 

To be an activist is a league of its own, pulled back from the holistic to the narrow, which, while relying on periods of upsurge from the public in order to bring an issue to the spotlight, slap, whack-a-mole-it, is not congruent with the long-term construction of a political movement. It must, by its inward-looking nature, recruit from within the Left bubble, neglecting outward-analysis, engaging with the masses in society… the activist desires not to be seen through the looking-glass of the everyday person, but from within the circle. A crude example, for sure, but the subculturally-loaded badge-wearing, dyed-haired, theoretically-accurate militant refuses to change their appearance; they stand outside of the judgement of society, for they reject society; and in doing so, the libidinal element is lost. It is possible to be correct in one’s politics, while failing to do politics correctly, much of it hinging on elements which the Left brushes aside by asserting its own correctness. 

“The militant talks a lot about the masses. His activity is centred on them. He acts to convince them, to make them "achieve consciousness". And yet the militant is separated from the masses and their possibilities for revolt. This is because he is separated from his own desires.

The militant feels the absurdity of the existence that is imposed on us. In "deciding" to become militant, he tries to find a solution to the gap which exists between his desires and the life which he really has the possibility of living. His decision is a reaction against the misery of his own life. But he commits himself to a dead end.”

Dominique Blanc, 1972 

In Ireland, as in other nations, a hard-to-bridge gulf has risen between the so-called activist class and the ordinary population. Separated by class, locality, language, demeanor and behaviour, aesthetics and optics, focus points, tone and style…it has created an over-determined package culminating from a variety of libidinal factors. These have deadlocked a stagnant Left and pitted it against the general population of the country. Activism, defined negatively, is all that rejects the libidinal factors; it is all that is non-populist; it is all that is pure, siloed and calls itself such: all that rejects tactics and strategies, the emotional, cultural and the visceral. It is all that wishes to “build” and “win” certain “campaigns” so as to “make change”, robotically dissolving into a kaleidoscopic activist culture, the embodiment of the anti-political. It sees its ability to influence history not in the millions, but in the hundreds and thousands; it sees not a long-term political project, but the next campaign; around it, a network of activists festers, who, by their nature, stand apart from the class, alienated from society. In its isolation, a range of morbid symptoms appear, from right-wing to left-wing deviationism, from NGO-cozyness, rationalistic policy-churning, wokeism, awareness raising, standpoint epistemology, identity politics, privilege discourse, witch hunts, cancel and outrage-culture, dogmatism, inflexibility in methods, toxicity, inorganic externalism to adventurism and ultra-leftism.  

Activism is part of politics, but politics should be in command, everything sublated into the revolutionary goal, not activism in command of politics.  The people need to understand the need for revolutionary change in their own terms, not in the terms of someone who has brought it to them from the outside. No amount of “awareness raising”, “infographics” or “empowerment” can change this. The people number millions and more; it is logically impossible to enroll them in the School of Leftism, tabula rasa, and churn out McDonaldized revolutionary foot-soldiers. The task, as such, is not to “teach” the people, but to “intervene” with a political package which can capture their imagination based on the sentiments that they already express. ‘Vibes’ matter. Policies need to be wrapped up into an appealing force. Nostalgia, nationalism, traditions, clothing, history, humor, LARP, slogans and populism, music and poetry, symbolism, influencers, propaganda imagery and charismatic leaders, hate, love, anger and fear, all tools in the construction of a well-rounded political weapon which hits the deepest nerves, to name a few. 

While recognizing the dangers of tailing reactionary elements, talk to the people, see what they say, do not brush off their opinions, when they ask, “Why do they all look like that?!” and “Why do they all speak like that?!”. Be not afraid to dress like the people, talk like the people, be one of the people. Call Taoiseach Micheál Martin a “wanker”, a “traitor”, a “gobshite”, speak up for “Ireland’s sovereignty” and denounce the European Union as “unelected technocrats”, its head Ursula Von Der Leyen as a “tyrant” and defend “free speech”, but with a left-wing twist… this is the populist point of intersection at which to strike at respectability liberalism, and reclaim aggressive excess from the right-wing, intervening into bourgeois cultural hegemony to construct a socialist counter-culture. 

Those best suited to carry out this task are organic leaders within communities, who should be organized as a political force, within the Party. 

It is my suggestion, thus, to adopt the following approach to the question of Left politics, in the case of Ireland. 

1. The Left must immediately craft a tactical and strategical approach, based on a cybernetic model, of fine-tuning its relation to history as well as its optics-presentation, demeanor, linguistic-cultural world, center commonly-held demands and balance the focus between social and economic issues according to the needs of Ireland.

2. The Left must immediately become populist, focus on building a shared collective myth-identity within a Party, stressing the aesthetic-emotional aspect.

3. The Left must immediately reject woke framing, attacking liberalism, based on the simple recognition that the cultural turn is deeply unpopular with the masses of people, while continuing to advocate for minority rights without finger-wagging moralism. 

4. The Left must immediately adopt a “dirtbag leftist” style of communication, otherwise called “dark woke”, as well as lean into playfulness, fun, humour, vulgar-obscene sentiments and  left-populist framings of “us versus them” for good vibes.

5. The Left must immediately, while recognizing the importance of campuses, reaffirm its focus on working class areas, connecting the struggle of students to workers through raising universalist class consciousness.