The Luddite

This has been my longest gap between posts since I started in 2022. Due to the political situation here, I've been dedicating more time to local organizing. This is undoubtedly the correct decision. As important as I find the issues that I talk about here, and as much as I like reading and writing about them, we're in crisis. This post reflects my current orientation. Before I say anything else, I will repeat my call to get organized. Now is an important time to get involved, particularly in the US, but also around the world. Here, shortly after the 2024 presidential election, local activist groups saw a surge of interest, and that interest has already died down to pre-election levels. If you want to get involved but don't know how, always feel free to email me.

I started writing this in the dead of winter, and there had recently been protests at every state capital organized by 50501, a decentralized viral movement that started on social media. Similarly and alongside 50501, there is a viral call for a general strike, generalstrikeus.com, and, apparently, hundreds of thousands of Americans have committed to joining it. I've written about these kinds of social-media-driven protests before. I continue to think that implicitly conceding the power to structure our movements to social media is a grievous error, maybe even a fatal one, but, to paraphrase Marx, while we make our own history, we do so in circumstances outside our control. We're in crisis. 50501 is here. We must figure out how to work alongside and/or within these viral movements.

This post is about 50501, but I won't be talking about 50501's recent drama, nor will I discuss the 3.5% rule, their most commonly espoused and exceedingly dubious theory of change, which will almost certainly be the subject of a future post. Whether 50501 itself grows, splits, or fizzles, the political landscape will probably include a massive movement organized on/by social media for the foreseeable future, even if it isn't this particular one.

Reasonable minds can disagree on this issue, so it's easier to start with what not to do. In the course of researching this post, I spent a lot of time on Reddit, because that is where 50501 started. We'll get into that in a second, but in that research, I found the following comment thread, from a long-time activist who participates in various anarchist subreddits arguing with none other than Evolved_Fungi, 50501's founder, expressing their initial doubt that the protest would go off at all. Here's that back and forth:

Evolved_Fungi:

As the guy behind the idea, I'm actually rather seasoned at protesting - and doing so effectively on a shoestring budget.

I'm seasoned enough to know that trying to organize an entire country to protest on the same day, at the same time, with only 10 days to go, zero employees, and a $0 budget.. you can't do that with board rooms, and budgets, and voting quorums. I mean.. you can, but damn is it hard.

It's much easier to create a well planned, simple instruction set, that's self replicating, with a high level of repeatable success, that gives all the information that's needed to organize the event...

And then throw that idea out there like a grenade and let the people take over. The proximal date creates urgency. The lack of leadership creates leaders. The instructions create the goal. And BOOM - you have 100,000 people show up.

I'll bet my annual salary against any typical organization that they can't replicate that.

Gorilla [sic] Marketing. 🍄🍄

---

EDRootsMusic:

The local organizations here in the twin cities do not rely on "board rooms, and budgets" [editor's note: more on this soon]. We rely on trusted ties we have built up through years of organizing through multiple waves of struggle.

Look, I was trying to be nice and it’s good that the local activists who actually threw this together pulled the bacon out of the fire, so to speak. But your simple instructional set missed a LOT, and you’re lucky that they were able to pull this off in a safe way. They were very clearly in over their heads and in the final days were scrambling for very basic things like security/marshals, trying to call up the local organizations that have a longer history of pulling off actions like this, and and other basic protest needs. Your instructions were not well planned, and local activists and organizers spent several days having to try to walk folks who were in way over their heads through the considerations they needed to make. It’s neat that you wanted to have a sense of urgency, but did you consider that the organizers and activists who’ve been on the ground have urgent work they are doing every day? Pivoting to advising people on how to pull off an action can mean disrupting work being done on immigrant defense, prisoner support, mutual aid networks, etc. When you push something to the front burner, people are forced to push stuff to the back burner while we figure out what’s going on. That’s why dialogue and coalition building are important.

[...] This all could have VERY easily gone south in a BAD way. Protests have in this town, many times. This time, the police didn’t kettle everyone or start getting violent with the crowd. This time, nobody rammed the protest with a car. This time, the far right didn’t show up armed. These are all things that have happened in the Twin Cities, and if they had happened yesterday, that crowd would not have had the infrastructure in place- security, medical, police liaison, emergency decision making crew, etc- to deal with it. [...]

This latter comment matches a common attitude among longtime activists and organizers. Before the first round of protests, I received many emails through various activist channels calling the protests sketchy and warning about them. It's tempting to frame this discussion as people doing it wrong, and doing so would be consistent with my earlier posts. In fact, I'd even argue that it's true, but it's not productive. Politics is a contest for power, so winning is the test of truth. Similar to accusing Trump of being dumb, the analysis is correct under most circumstances but ultimately misleading precisely where it matters most: Trump is in power, and you are not.

Seen this way, the failure of longtime socialist organizers (like me), especially in the US, where we can't even win the most tepid concessions like healthcare, despite its overwhelming popularity, ought to inspire some humility. That these decentralized viral movements have such traction speaks to a constituency that we have failed to organize, which lead to the pathological and ineffectual organizational pattern of 50501 et al.

Returning to the topic of 50501's origin, here is Evolved_Fungi explaining its name and how it started:

Yes! The idea is that the idea itself will organize the masses. Everyone can spread the idea with less than 20 words - 50 Protests - 50 States - 1 Day - 2/5/25 - Your State Capitol Building.

It's a Decentralized Self Organizing Community Action Event.

The word is still spreading and it's still got plenty of time before the day of the event to grow even more. It would be AMAZING if every state had 1,000 people. It would be phenomenal if every state had 10,000 people. It's possible.

All we have to do is show up and it will happen!

There's a definite savviness on display here. In a previous post, I reviewed the book Hashtag Activism, and Evolved_Fungi here succinctly articulates Jackson et al's observations on the power of hashtags, with which I totally agree: Their brevity can "designate collective thoughts, ideas, arguments, and experiences that might otherwise stand alone or be quickly subsumed within the fast-paced pastiche of Twitter." In my response, I argued that, while true, it does so at great cost: Hashtag activism spreads quickly not because, as they argue, it is "public speech [...] without mediation by the mainstream media or other traditional sources of power," but because it accedes to the demands of the medium.

50501 provides us with a perfect case study. Here, the message becomes so brief as to be explicitly and purposefully without content. Evolved_Fungi, by their own admission, didn't create a movement, but a meme ("self replicating"), or a brand ("Gorilla [sic] Marketing"). In the age of hyperpersonalized algorithmic advertising, the ideal brand is the one that means the right thing to each person. 50501, on its own, means nothing. It is a non-ideological container of inoffensive logistical information. This allows each user to see themselves in it without having to deliberate the issues. What little logistical information it does convey contains artificially-constructed urgency, a classic advertising trick. Evolved_Fungi put it perfectly:

The proximal date creates urgency. The lack of leadership creates leaders. The instructions create the goal.

In short, if you organize the resistance on an advertising platform, it looks like an advertising campaign. When politics become marketing, organizing is tactical, not substantive. Marketers don't debate whether or not to market their products, only how to do so. Similarly, 50501 originally had no political program, or, at most, an exceedingly vague one. Instead of discussing it, the subreddit discusses how to, metaphorically speaking, move the most product by broadening the appeal of the movement. For example, there is a constant stream of posts about bringing American flags to the protests so as to attract moderates and conservatives.¹ In fact, as of this writing (early March 2025), there are more of these posts than there are days since the subreddit was created.

Even the protests that they organize look suspiciously like the platform around which the movement is structured: We all write the pithiest thing we can (within the character limit of a sign) and show up somewhere hoping to get attention. As previously discussed, and as formalized in the increased adoption of the "3.5% rule" theory of change, the goal of these protests is, like social media, engagement.

This is an important tension in the structure of 50501: Liberation struggles ought to subvert power, but advertising accepts and reproduces it. Where women are objectified, for example, advertising will objectify women, but feminists challenge it, even if objectifying women is popular. Activists seek to change the world, but advertisers must accept it as is. The 50501 group is so committed to being an advertising campaign that they struggle to decide how explicitly they should denounce Trump even though that is the entire point of the protest.

Similarly, there are many posts and comments in 50501 calling on the military to "remember their oath." These can be ambiguous. In this post, the prevailing attitude seems to be that the military ought to reject unlawful orders, like, say, firing on protestors. Other times, like in this one, the call is for either a military coup or a revolution, depending on your perspective:

Every military member, federal agent, and elected official takes this oath:

“I solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

If that oath means anything — why haven’t they acted when the greatest domestic threat is standing in plain sight?

This ambiguous, seemingly popular call for either a military coup or a revolution, totally lacking in self-awareness, is chilling. It's also the perfect encapsulation of the point that I'm trying to make: These movements are simultaneously gaining power and have no idea what to do with that power, or what that power even means. They are ambitious but vacuous, a volatile combination. At this rate, so early in the new regime, it's plausible that 50501 could grow into a massive movement, wielding significant power that points nowhere in particular.

Its substantive vacuum is further mirrored in its structure. In fact, they more or less refuse to acknowledge that they have structure at all. After some recent drama, the details of which I won't get into, statements from some of the factions made it clear that they conflate any formal structure with "going corporate," an attitude that was also present in that earlier comment ("you can't do that with board rooms, and budgets, and voting quorums"). Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" discusses the error here and its implications: It argues that the lack of formal structure gets filled with the informal structures present in all human social interactions, just like, as we've seen, the substantive vacuum gets filled with the ideological detritus that all Americans have lying around after a lifetime of propaganda: patriotic duty, American exceptionalism, respecting the flag or the military, worshiping the constitution, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, etc.

50501's decentralized non-structure defers almost entirely to local chapters, which do get things done. This obviously necessitates structure. For example, my local 50501 uses signal as its main communication and organizational channel, where 7 admins can add or remove people from the main group, a right that they've exercised to boot people that needed to be booted for it to accomplish anything. Those admins are also part of a core group of organizers who staff the various organizational committees that actually do the work of, say, preparing the protests, a major logistical undertaking. This group is a mix of seasoned activists and people who have never cared about politics in their lives until now, after 50501 finally politicized them. This is very cool and good.

This post, however, isn't about the work of the local chapters, but the conceptual, infrastructural, and ideological container uniting their work into a single movement. Even if the real work happens in local chapters, there does exist a national 50501 website, as there exist various social media accounts. Someone has the passwords to those accounts, through which they have the power to speak for the movement. Without some sort of structure, this power is wielded without accountability.

To learn more about this, I sent 50501's national organization a media inquiry in February. The Luddite isn't exactly the biggest publication, but it does somehow have tens of thousands of visitors per month. I didn't hear anything for several weeks, and, frankly, never expected to hear anything at all. Then, at the end of March, they did get back to me! Unfortunately, that pattern repeated itself, culminating in an interview date on the 21st of May, which they confirmed, and at which no one showed up without so much as a message. I have since emailed them to follow up, but, as of this writing, I haven't heard back (Update while editing: I did eventually hear back on the 26th, but I've decided to cut bait).

The point of this anecdote isn't to complain about being blown off, but to emphasize the point I made earlier: 50501 is both gaining power and structurally incapable of recognizing or managing that power. They can't seem to organize a simple meeting. Many might disregard my concerns about the national organization, pointing out that the real work of 50501 happens at the local level, but that's not a feature of 50501. That's just politics. This entire situation only exists because the American government recently changed, but regular Americans, mostly at the local level, continue to do the day-to-day work of making the country function. How we organize matters, and 50501's ostensible commitment to grassroots decentralization is actually a commitment to empty, structureless populism, which leaves a vacuum at its core.² The subreddit drama to which I alluded earlier is the first of what I predict will be many waves of opaque and undemocratic power struggles trying to fill that center.

Given all this, I think that socialists should approach 50501 (and movements like it) in 2 ways: First, get involved. If someone is building power, and they're willing to have you, then you need to be there. Politics is a contest for power, not an analytical or intellectual exercise. Socialists in the US are universally rejected from centers of power, but 50501 is mostly open to being part of a kind of united front, even if somewhat unwittingly. We need to show up and treat our fellow organizers as, if not collaborators or allies, then at least as coalition partners. Don't do what that organizer did in the quoted section at the beginning of this post, but, just as importantly, do make your socialism known. Maintain and prioritize your affiliation with your socialist organization. Make that affiliation known in 50501. Bring your fellow members in to work with you. Have speakers and tables at 50501 events; give out pamphlets, etc.

Second, socialists ought now to build the radical programs that, in a few short years, will seem a lot less radical, and will make us both a credible alternative to mainstream political parties and an answer to the inevitable questions raised by empty populism. This work has to happen within socialist organizations.³ Attempts to advocate that 50501 take these positions in some official capacity, be it on social media or in your local 50501 chapter, will fall on deaf ears. 50501 has no mechanism for even coming up with a program, and, more importantly, such a program is at cross purposes with the movement's structure as a marketing campaign: Radical programs, by their nature, don't yet have broad appeal. The movement is successfully politicizing a base of hitherto apolitical people, who are joining, organizing, and expanding it. These people are coming from mainstream American life, where they've been subjected to a lifetime of red scare propaganda. They're not ready for a socialist program, and such a program, in the impossible case that your local 50501 does somehow figure out how to adopt one, would not allow the movement to continue growing.

During Trump's first term, for example, calls to abolish ICE were seen as radical, even unserious. As the regime expands ICE and makes plans for concentration camps, this position is increasingly mainstream. For a historical example, consider the Bolshevik opposition to what we today call World War 1. As socialist parties increasingly caved to domestic pressures to support their national war efforts, Lenin's Bolsheviks retained their internationalist, anti-war position, knowing full well that the warfare made possible by industrial capital would mean devastation for an entire generation. A few years and millions of lost souls later, the Bolsheviks looked pretty smart.⁴ This is where we need to be right now.

Even a cursory glance at the Democrats' response to Trump shows that they have no idea what we're facing, much less what to do about it. For our many flaws and disagreements, most socialists have been warning about something like this for some time, and we've spilled much ink trying to understand the rising far right, the increasing power of tech capitalists, the decline of union membership, skyrocketing wage inequality, the housing crisis, and so on. Now is the time to put years of theorizing about the incoming regime's coalition to good use. The mainstream of 50501 lacks this depth of understanding. They are simply not ready for the years-long fight that we face, nor do they have the vocabulary to describe the situation in which we find ourselves. As their movement grows, what little theory it does have, built mostly from the sanitized American self-mythologizing that passes for history here, will be unable to explain reality, be it police repression or seemingly coordinated attempts by the mainstream media to downplay or discredit the movement, the latter of which they've already begun to notice. It might be that, upon reaching that supposedly magic threshold of 3.5% participation, the regime is unscathed because, predictably, a group of people holding signs and yelling at empty buildings poses no threat to its power.

Above all, now is not the time to tack right, as Democrats are wont to do, or even to soften our socialist demands in a misguided attempt to broaden their appeal. A mass movement is building. Our job as socialists is to make sure that the upcoming mass movement is a united front, not just an empty marketing campaign for commodified pseudo-resistance. When, not if, push comes to shove, which will happen sooner than later, most people will be entirely unprepared. We need to be there, program in hand, as the coalition partners with a vision for a better future.

Correction: Original post said "popular front," but I meant "united front."