in which i make up something i called "resurrectionary action" to impress the old activists

“What else should we expect? So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just think of that Paris Communard of the previous century who used to sit in cafés, constructing such beautiful little barricades out of breadcrumbs that everyone admired him; come the uprising, he built a perfect barricade out of stones — and the troops marched around it.”

— William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

In Israeli prisons, Palestinian inmates charged with lethal attacks “negating Israel’s existence” are facing the death penalty via hanging without due process… Meanwhile Lebanese christians are being told to not hide Shiite muslims or “face consequences” by the invading Israeli military who’s too busy bulldozing statues and displacing close to a fourth of the Lebanese people before the ten-day ceasefire began to follow international law… In Sudan, the Saudi-backed RSF militia has been rounding up tens of thousands in Dafur, condemning them to the firing squad... In Iran, the IRGC is preparing for a years’ long fight while the US military is preparing for a months’ long military campaign — Hegseth apparently remains unaware that Iran’s geography alone makes it into a fortress…

Over Easter Weekend, I was invited to a dinner party in Bucktown of older (mostly retired) activists, lecturers, and business-people who would sometimes throw up their hands and cry out “I sold out!” while eating tiny meatballs and tiny potatoes.

I don’t mean to be cynical. These people have been actually trying for decades, and there was real warmth in the apartment that night, and it was a beautiful apartment. I met the spokesperson for the Luigi Mangione defense fund, wearing a thrifted ‘90s windbreaker and sporting bleached hair, speaking at length about a book he was writing about John Locke. “The um Wealth of Nations guy?” I asked. He quickly corrected me, almost snapping his fingers like in West Side Story. What an idiot I am! Later in the night, I learned from an old friend at a housewarming party up in Avonsdale that this spokesperson also happens to work for the Sierra Club and has taken two-years’ sick leave from the organization to take on the role of Mangione Defense Fund Spokesperson.

Dinner parties with older intellectual leftist types are fun because, as a young leftist, you can usually make up ideology stuff and they’ll nod along and ask questions and so you can make up more stuff. It’s fun. Improvisatory. I made up a theory of media/organizational structure which I was calling “ressurectionary action.” The Loyola business professor I was pitching the idea to wore a skin-tight, black “KILL THE POLICE” shirt and seemed very enthusiastic about the idea, began gesturing broadly, and nodding back and forth to Ian and I like he was running a discussion group.

When I first said ‘resurrectionary action,’ I was thinking mainly about Easter and wanted to make some sort of He Has Risen joke at the end of my explanation but soon enough found myself carried away by the idea. It went something like this:

Media companies have overplayed their hands by going all in on digital media, and there’s a coming wave of revivalist projects aimed at bringing old, abandoned forms of media and organizational structuring back into the mix as a more stable alternative to the chaos of the internet. I wouldn’t be surprised if the 2030s are a decade of indie magazines, newspapers, and zines like we haven’t seen since the 1990s — just so long, I suppose, as the ability to print and create cheaply is somewhat expanded from its current state — and revitalizing print would be the most clear-cut way for the counterculture to rediscover itself, hence “resurrectionary action.”

On the other hand, in terms of activism, 2008’s Occupy movement led to an over-reliance on flattened organizational structures. The ‘resurrectionary action’ in this case would be to revive vertical organizational structures. Trying to avoid looking around the room, I said it doesn’t seem like horizontalist approaches are doing much. If there were to be a grand definition of the term I’d just made up it’d be this: intentional revival of discarded or “outdated” ideas and touchstones into a new, twenty-first century context in which they can interplay with the modern homogenized world in new and novel ways which might pave a path towards a future which is better than this.

That’s more-or-less what I said. Who knows if it meant anything. There are still people dying in Lebanon. Everything sucks. What’s the point of any of this. I try not to get caught in these doldrums but it becomes difficult to engage and not drift away…

The most interesting part of the night was later at the housewarming party when the hostess explained how her mother had discovered she was pregnant with her. Way back in 1995, her mother had been hit on the back of the head with a Wowee Zowee CD while on her way to a stationary job in Pittsburg. Most likely it was thrown out of a car window from the nearby overpass and had frisbee’d all the way down and into her dome — an honest accident! — but then, checking into the ER for a potential concussion, she discovered that she was, in fact, four months pregnant. Wowee Zowee was right.