What Happens When Activist Goals Become Mainstream Norms?
How bosses are using social justice tools against workers.
For an in-depth discussion of this essay, check out Hot Take Think Tank episode two.
Recently, I caught up with an old friend I’d organized with in my early twenties. We arranged the glitter bombing of Dan Savage for his alleged transphobia, hosted an all-bodies beach day, and organized an accountability process that was a spectacular failure. She advocated for a local charity to endorse Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, and I salted for a service sector union. We pushed for land acknowledgements, pronoun check-ins, and the widespread adoption of anti-oppression trainings. Many people were baffled by, or hostile towards, our ideas. We believed in them fervently but were comfortable with our underdog status, never imagining these ideas would win mainstream acceptance.
Then, over the years, something unexpected happened. Land acknowledgements went from a ritual performed at far left events to a practice widely adopted by public and private institutions alike. People with little connection to trans and queer scenes started adding pronouns to their bios and email signatures. Meanwhile, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) market ballooned to an estimated worth of $9.3 billion in 2022. Although not all of the grassroots reforms we pushed for have been adopted by mainstream culture, most have, and no one is more surprised than we are.
“I’m condemned to a lifetime of workplace sensitivity trainings,
and I’ve got no one but myself to blame,” my friend joked.
There are certain actions and campaigns I stand behind to this day; there are others that I regret. This is partially because I’ve become more concerned about the material realities of working class and low income people and much of my early activism was unconcerned with economic redistribution. It’s also because some activist practices have been put to nefarious use by the institutions that have embraced them.
Both my friend and I remain firmly on the left. She mostly recently co-organized a revolutionary working class and Indigenous alliance; I co-organized a campaign to raise the social assistance and disability rates. When you’re working alongside people who can’t afford their medication, who skip meals to feed their kids, who are sleeping on concrete, whose belongings are regularly trashed by the police, and whose disappearances and deaths are not adequately investigated, it’s hard to muster the same outrage over the ever-expanding list of micro-aggressions, the hidden evil meanings of common words, and other vague claims about identity-based harm. There is plenty of real, physical, material harm going around, and not enough public pressure to alleviate it.
Something my friend observed about our early activism was that its targets were often other leftists, and its goals were to bring them into line with us. There was a fixation on purity and safety: we believed we could create a movement free of danger by getting everyone on the same page and rooting out those who refused us. What made our litmus test so exacting is that the page was constantly under revision—language around gender and race seemed to change overnight, and using an outdated term could snowball into calls for exile.
I wondered aloud why our activism was inward-facing in this way; my friend pointed out that by the time we arrived on the scene, the left had been in decline for decades. The largest anti-war protest the world had ever seen in February 2003 failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq. Neoliberal globalization appeared to be an unstoppable force that it was impossible to vote against. The Great Recession of 2008 ushered in punishing austerity measures; leftist ambition was at a low point when we were coming of age. The idea of effecting significant material change seemed almost naive. Perhaps we were grasping for what little power or control we could find, which turned out to be targeting people with whom we shared 95% of our politics.
Today, my corner of the world is in the middle of an opiate epidemic and an affordability crisis, with an annual forest fire season that poisons the air. A heat dome killed 619 people here in 2021 and landlords are still not required to provide a liveable indoor temperature. There are native reservations in Canada that do not have clean drinking water and huge swathes of the countryside are without high-speed internet. It’s hard to imagine getting worked up about Dan Savage.
Now, I believe that we humans owe each other dignity and respect. We should not go out of our way to insult or degrade or humiliate anyone, even people we don’t like. We don’t have to agree with each other’s ways of life to extend tolerance. I find myself frustrated with arguments that justify cruel and callous behaviour in the name of “standing up to an ideology”. As a socialist, I believe that it is both reasonable and necessary to compromise for the sake of those around us. If I can make someone’s life a little bit easier with my language, I should, and I do my best to live up to this. People have social and emotional needs alongside material ones, and they matter.
However: at a moment when organized labour is on the upswing for the first time in decades, the language of social justice is being deployed to keep workers down. Anti-union agents are rebranding themselves as diversity consultants and are collecting private information to assist employers in sabotaging union drives. Specifically, “employee resource groups”, which divide workers by identity categories such as Black or LGBT, are being used to sow division amongst coworkers and to divert righteous frustration away from labour organizing. The very practices that I advocated for as a young person have turned out to be effective tools for suppressing workers.
This alarming example of the corporate distortion of grassroots practices points to a larger problem. The idea that different groups of people face unique obstacles has devolved into the belief that our lives are mutually unintelligible, that we can’t possibly understand each other’s struggles and hardships. We have become atomized. If I don’t believe I can understand my own partner’s struggles because of an identity difference, what are the chances I will organize alongside a religious immigrant or a conspiracy theorist or an Indigenous sovereigntist to push for housing reforms that would benefit us all?
I am glad more people are familiar with and respectful of chosen pronouns. The rich diversity of stories being explored in film and literature lately is a pleasure. The Indigenous cultural renaissance is a profound accomplishment. I don’t want to fall into the leftist trope of denying or downplaying the progress that has been made.
However: I want to be part of a left that dreams big and organizes accordingly, a left that believes in the power of mass movements, a left that welcomes people of all stripes, a left that values its ambition and keeps its eye on the prize. Let’s break up the grocery monopolies. Let’s build massive amounts of social housing. Let’s bring public transit to every corner of the country. Let’s raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Let’s nationalize the food banks. Let’s gather in such large numbers that the government is forced to live up to its own promises, the ones we voted for: publicly funded dental care, a national childcare program, electoral reform.
There’s so much we can accomplish if we end the internal purges and the purity tests. A mass movement will include fierce debates, personality clashes, hurt feelings and heated crossroads. But it’s our only shot at putting power in the hands of regular people, and it will be worth the fight.
Great piece.
You mean the DSA? We are in a global phase of corporate immersion. All capitalist systems are now designed in alignment with corporate interests. This is in direct conflict with democratic ideals. Democracy is definitely losing. They can’t coexist. Any system within this environment will inevitably internalize the capitalist set of priorities, which include the disenfranchisement of certain populations to maximize profits, resource extraction regardless of social or environmental impacts, and the imposition of hierarchical power structures (police & military) to protect the wealthy from the inevitable and understandable hatred of the less privileged. The only escape from this hellzone is a radical socialism. Functional societies require decency as a fundamental reality. Above and beyond profiteering. First: feed, clothe, shelter, healthcare, educate. Then talk money (educate does NOT mean propagandize).