Rage is Not Strategy

Populism, Power, and the Need for Revolutionary Organization

Morning Comrades.

This is one these conversations about Tactics and Strategies. If you know me well enough you will have had this conversation in real life many times over as I am a real stickler on this topic. More importantly, this is not a conversation to strike down rage but understanding what it is and how it to use it.

A strategy is the overall plan or long-term goal guiding actions toward a desired outcome. It defines what you want to achieve and why and is shaped by the broader historical, social, or organisational context. Tactics are the short-term actions or methods used to implement a strategy. They define how you carry out parts of the strategy and are flexible, adjustable to immediate conditions.

Rage is part of our tactical arsenal. It certainly is part of mine and no matter how old I get, it remains, it burns and is an important fuel to what I do, here and out there. Yet, rage in on itself, as we are seeing clearly, here in the West, politically especially, is a tool within the populist construct of manipulation, especially since the only principle guiding the “Western Democratic Populism” is greed and power.

Populism without principle serves as a revolving stage for authoritarian revival.

Populism untethered from principle becomes a stage on which power changes costumes.

This if anything captures the recurring pattern in modern political history: discontent with the ruling elite erupts, yet in the absence of revolutionary theory and organised force, these movements are inevitably co-opted. The populist cycles of rage without a clear revolutionary vision tend to pave the way for new forms of domination, often more brutal than the last. As Marx famously warned,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please...but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”

(Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).

Only a Marxist, ultimately communist organisation of the working class can turn protest into transformation. Let’s argue that rage, while necessary, must be directed by strategy, and strategy must be rooted in class consciousness, historical materialism, and the abolition of capital.