This is not mexico we do not have an insurrection or anything more than strong activist and community groups. However in the pacific there is, and in the past there has been very strong movements in aotearoa. I think we need broader participation, and wider goals – like you said going after more than one mine, going after more than mines.

It’s nice of our insurrectionist comrades to update the debate with new examples and some thoughtprovoking critique, but it must be understood within the context that insurrectionists advocate SPONTANEOUS social rebellion.

Being part of revolutionary organisations and supporting revolutionary movements (such as the anti-monarchy Tongan movement and the Zapatistas) must go hand in hand with our reformist activism whether it be in union work, anti-deportation struggles, eco-campaigns or the anti-war movement.

However I feel that “social warrior” or “insurrectionary” is just as confining and specialised definition that can only be done long term in non-revolutionary times by a tiny elite.

But you don’t need to wade through a lot of Situationism to make this point. It’s related to certain tendencies in the green movement and amongst the liberal left, surely? I had a rant about this, a couple of years ago:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2004/08/give-coasters-break.html
Since 2004 a number of radical young enviro-activists seem to have gravitated towards politics that place more emphasis on class, gotten involved with unions etc
On the other hand, the Green Party has moved further and further to the right, to the point where a deal with National in 2008 is a real possibility.

This seems to be one of those critiques which picks out a word – in this case ‘activism’ and ascribes to it all the characteristics the author dislikes, you then ascribe positive characteristics to a differnt word (revolutionary).

The question for revolutionaries, as you describe them, is what to do if they find themselves in a specialised role, given everyone else may not want to take on that role, nor will revolutionaries find much value in their own dissolution into the rest of society.

It’s a critique of the specialised role of activism, as separated from the rest of society. And it’s a critique of activism that functions so as recuperate dissent into (partial) solutions within the existing framework of capital, and thus serve to prolong the social role of activist. They would compare the role of activist with the revolutionary, which (should) have as its aim either the dissolution of itself as a category, or the expansion of the category so as to include everyone (both are the same).

This critique is especially obvious when directed at professional activist organisations, like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, etc. But the insightful aspect is precisely how much the same critique applies to those who entertain radical ideas.

Oh, and I’m not even dealing with your second sentence (I mean honestly? lifestylism?? …such a throwaway word).

It may also be of interest to check out a critique of activism from a number of years ago in Do or Die, and its follow up. These critiques are derived, in part, from the Situationist International and in particular the work of Raoul Vaneigem in his book The Revolution of Everyday Life, and are closely tied up with their notion of the totality.

Take Happy Valley for example: This is treated strictly as an environmental campaign, occasionally (but seperately) as a campaign concerned with indigenous land rights, and more recently a campaign calling for “responsible” SOE practices (I mean, wtf??). In separating the campaign out into these constituent parts the underlying unity and totality is hidden. Indeed, the fact that this campaign is characterised as being simply environmental has stopped any decent critique of of the general social relations that make environmental degradation commonplace, that were the basis for iwi dispossession, etc. Happy Valley should be a campaign not simply aimed stopping one mine (and thus functioning so as to better manage the environment under the relations of capital) but rather as a campaign which tries to push the critique to its logical limits.

The campaign similarly shouldn’t seek to “solve” the problem, as if stopping one mine could ever be considered a solution. It should, rather, seek to draw out social conflict and push that to its limits and hope that this could, one day, lead to a radical break with the current social relations.

To quote Vaneigem:
“In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges everyone to be for or against Brigitte Bardot, the nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroën, Italian cuisine, mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nationalization, thermonuclear war and hitchhiking. Everyone is asked their opinion about every detail in order to prevent them from forming one about the totality.“

So if you ARE atttacking the social order, you are not an “activist”? What exactly does this mean? It just seems to be either an intellectual word game or a call to retreat from political organising for a lifestylist approach.