In August of 2019, I was laid off from the job that I’d been working for the previous four years. That job had only been picked up as a stop-gap on the way to the something better that I was sure was just around the corner when I was running through the last of my savings back in 2015. In retrospect, the fact that I even managed to hold on to the position that long comes as a surprise to me because I’m not really sure what productive activities I did on a week-to-week basis. The truth was that I spent most of my time on Twitter.

I had registered the account @DJ_TOOLS_BLOG initially to repost songs that I was cataloging on my Tumblr but the blog went nowhere and I quickly found myself going from following ‘Weird Twitter’ accounts to the Dirtbag Left. The Bernie Sanders campaign was making its last stand, but the digital army it had created was still alive and well Online. I made new friends and learned how to dunk on the libs. I started listening to Chapo Trap House and learning to hate opinion columnists.

When November rolled around, I joined the DSA from my office on the morning of the election, assuming I’d want an outlet for all of the frustration I felt tilting against the world the neoliberal order was trying to sell me. My high-school friends were having an election party at a house nearby, but our politics differed and I just couldn’t bring myself to try to be happy for the bleak continuation of Mont Pelerin America. Gorilla Mindset-haver Mike Cernovich was hosting an election party an hour and a half south of me and I considered going to watch the mayhem when Trump lost. Ultimately I bought a couple of beers, a pack of cigarettes, and got comfortable on my couch. A couple of hours later my roommate was coming in asking me if I had any Xanax.

Over the next four years, I committed myself to organizing with the DSA. When I wasn’t attending working group meetings and political actions, I was reading Marx, Rosa, Lenin, Gramsci, Bordiga, Mao, and on, and on. I hated my job, but who didn’t? I could steal time from the bosses to commit to the revolution. There were more important things to be done than to build a career – there was a world to be won. How could you focus your energy on masturbatory personal goals when there was real constant suffering surrounding you?

When you confront the dire situation of the world we occupy head-on like that, it can get easy to lose sight of the meaning of your actions. The organization had its fair share of members who were not handling the stress of Responsibility well (myself included). Small personal injustices pale in comparison to the large-scale carnage happening around us all the time. Political disagreements and personal differences can bleed into each other quite easily. There was constant interpersonal strife. I attended multiple ‘struggle sessions’ -the last of which preceded my complete burnout.

That happened to coincide with me losing my job. It felt like the perfect opportunity to take a step back and reassess my place. I had talked to some of my friends in the union movement and had started browsing for openings on unionjobs.com – daydreaming about what it might be like to give up design and try to make more of a difference every day. Ultimately I decided against it. The truth was that I was a so-so organizer and unqualified for the communications jobs that popped up. Instead, I took some classes, reoriented myself towards tech, and got a new job. A month after that it was March 2020 and the world shut down.

I kept telling myself I’d get back to it. I cheered on the summer 2020 BLM protests, too concerned for the health of my sensitive respiratory system to participate. It was only going to be a matter of time until I got back on the horse. I started feeling guilty watching all of my former comrades who were still in the struggle so I started paying less attention. I ignored texts about voting in the organization, feeling that I wasn’t doing enough work to have a say. I showed up to canvas for a city council candidate and felt like a fraud. Some of the people I’d worked side by side with for years didn’t even recognize me now.

I liked to imagine throughout all of this time that if I was asked I would describe myself as a Marxist, but not a socialist. The way I saw it, Marxism was a lens through which one viewed the world, but a socialist was someone who built the new world. It was a silly distinction, but I needed some way to think about a person who held certain beliefs but didn’t act on them. There’s a Marx line that is oft quoted by socialists “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. What is the purpose of having correct opinions if you aren’t willing to act to see that they are made manifest? 

So here we are, on the verge of another Trump presidency, and I think I’m finally ready to make my way back to community building. I haven’t worked out what that will look like quite yet, but as I take stock of the situation, I feel such gratitude for all of the organizers who have kept the fight going over these last four years. The fight for a better world has a long, rich history and it’s a gift to be able to step into it. As the pundits hop to their post-election breakdown, figuring out which demographics are to blame for the most recent travesty, I want to be able to figure out how to build solidarity again. It’s only by learning to support each other today that we can build the connective tissue to form a political body tomorrow. That doesn’t happen with well wishes alone.

A little over a year ago, I was sitting at breakfast with someone I’d met recently. We were talking about the protest as a political tactic and I went matching political tendencies with desired outcomes: demonstration of political will, education -> agitation -> recruitment tactic, prefiguration. She offered another: solidarity. I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten it.