On the left, people rarely use “voluntarism” as an attack on others in a responsible manner. What I think is a worthwhile political subjectivity will be hard to explain as something other than voluntaristic, without inviting an attack from determinists, or from Marxists who feel the correct plan has already been handed down from Lenin, Mao, or Kautsky. Our own actions can become meaningful when applied to collective projects, and a better sense of accomplishment comes on the other end of that. We give up the individualistic expression of power, dodge the relations of competition, and in turn procure a sense of accomplishment in shared political action. Where we now see the individual’s meaning as coming only at the expense of others, we turn to a new way of life that derives individual meaning, at baseline, through collaboration. That may open heretofore unknown areas of competition and individualism, but we root new forms of such expression in a collective attainment of freedom.

In politics, we want that people should see their individual actions as meaningful and at the same time limited. Meaningful, in the sense of erasing the boundaries of atomized competition that forces them to think at odds with society. It must, in the same individual, limit the tendency towards competition, while freeing a boundless social individual in its place, who does not need regimented, competitive activity in order to find meaning. We turn individuals from facing inwards to outwards. Your move towards the collective action is most meaningful when the individualistic frame for reward has been dissolved. To think about what your lone action accomplishes on quantified terms would be a distraction from, and a misunderstanding of, the political task.

Take, for example, people in Minneapolis right now fighting ICE. There are currently actions to root ICE out of the community and they involve large numbers of people. Surely, everyone in the action has a role that acquires a degree of specificity, but when the total action is relayed to the outside world, it does not express itself as an individualistic act, or one guided by a leader. It is a group giving voice to widespread anger, and representing a righteous current within society that aims to protect all life on universal terms. Even the thwarting of an ICE agent could be the demand for the creation of a border-less society that could not kill or harm anyone for their attachment to one piece of land or another. That would free individuals from ever being the ICE agent or being dominated by them.

Everyone participating in these actions is surely energized. If they push ICE back, they will feel a sense of accomplishment. The individuals in this action were not “unscientific” or “too voluntaristic” to think their actions mattered. A goal can be accomplished without lone people getting singled out as heroes, and they can still walk away satisfied in their near-anonymous participation. Their individual ego is nestled within a proper social structure in this act, that attaches to something beyond the ego in single individuals, yet still defends the space of individual identity more thoroughly than the ideologically individualistic route. It is activity that secures the space where individuals can exist, where today’s space is premised on the endless competition and violence of individuals, that, connected to environmental destruction and weapons of war, threatens life for everybody.

The undifferentiated conditions and uniformity of subjectivity that are taken for granted when some Marxists declare action voluntaristic is itself more an issue. It is possible for your direct actions, that you take as meaningful, to not immediately have a result, or even need one. It is possible your actions won’t lead to your individual acclaim, but that is perfectly fine. You do not have any proof that such actions are meaningful at first, at least through the schemes of quantification we are used to in capitalist society. But that first, seemingly rewardless step in struggle, untethered from exchange, can become meaningful, first, in the very fact of helping you escape such matters of quantification.

We want, in political struggle, to challenge the direct, one-to-one causal relation to achieved outcome. We do not want such concern to mediate our actions, and so we should take up action from a point that de-links us from such concerns. We are not taking to politics to move up the ladder and acquire a social promotion, and we want to close off the space that utilizes such mediation. Our desired outcome develops from numerous people abandoning the sense of directly legible individual accomplishment and actually shutting off our egoistic self-censorship, that often demands directly quantifiable meaning, accomplishment, and reward in exchange for all our activity.

Getting over this expectation of equal exchange and direct quantification of actions, to have people give themselves over to actions that are unbound to such relations, is difficult. Some determinists will become hysterical and read this is unscientific. If they do not have a legible reward for an action staring them in the face, they will reject what you’re saying as some kind of exotic anarchism. But an initial unquantified action can be an avowal of one’s power in a sensible capacity as an individual, but also a recognition of limitation simultaneously. Certain Marxists who are stuck in their ways will still call this volunteerism, as if somehow not living in a total state of subsumed spectacle is unscientific. The overbearing reality we endure that tells us that action doesn’t matter is not science, but is rather a concession to spectacle, and is a disavowal. The truth is that we are always in some way acting in the world, and our actions can be consequential when we truly believe we are passive.

It is not the easiest thing to explain the benefit of this kind of subjectivity, while also stressing that it should center around non-individualized reward. I think even for an individual, it can become empowering to silence that part of your psyche. Taking action in this manner frees you from commodified relations and likewise pulls you into the relation that can overcome capital’s demands. We dissolve capital through the shared action of securing each other’s subsistence. This doesn’t mean all activity has to become blind. Grounded in new collective endeavors, we can redirect each other towards personal strengths.

The cult formation of this kind of process is something to be leery of, obviously. We cannot permit a guru or leader who tells us to shut off our individualism for the sake of the group. Especially not when that group is itself still dominated by a hierarchical form, with a patriarchal ego acting as its head and heart. The trick will be to turn off our individualism in groups in order to then lay down a foundation of care that can in return sustain limitless individual expression. Still, it means something now to find other people and begin to act in groups, without knowing precisely what the end goal will be. You are not more scientific if you refuse to act, hunkering down to wait for New Mao to descend from heaven and lead the masses. Nor are you more scientific to decide that you and a handful of your friends already came up with the plan for revolution, and you’re just waiting for the right time to strike, where the masses will finally be receptive to your idea of replacing the constitution with a new constitution.

Communism itself does not permit you to constantly play Goldilocks and present yourself as more sensible when compared against determinists and voluntarists. The communist objective will often force your hand and make you act in ways that don’t fall directly into some reasonable centrist’s posture. Communist avowal might cause you to appear sensible one moment, and like an alien to other people the next. A further problem at play here is the sense of communism being taken a future object. When communizers, for example, bring the matter of communism to the lived present, the deterministic Marxist will think in terms of completed objectives and balk at the idea that you can snap your figures and achieve communism in its total quantification in just a mere moment. Yet what the communizer is attempting to focus on is a change in the quality of our relations, that eschews the idea that the long term object is only a heavenly one, that must at all times separate itself from our action.

We are not attempting to quantify all matters of communism as accomplished in one fell swoop, but are trying to change the way we relate to social experiences that unfold through time and can not be felt tangibly in any moment in total. To participate in a path towards any given communist objective must also become communism itself, and must abide by a new relational logic in order to meaningfully develop communism at all. The communizers are trying to bridge the present to the future, where the deterministic Marxist is permanently split in the present from that future because of their inability to see communism in multiple dimensions, unfolding in space and time. They can only say “you’re crazy to call this communism because from what I can tell, the static end state of communism is not totally visible.”

When in fact, once we start down this road, we are attempting to suspend life being mediated by the neatly cleaved future goal that steals our existence from us. The future goal goes from being a mediating force outside experience to one inside of it. For it to be inside, means its logic must govern our relations, regardless of what we have accomplished. Otherwise, as mediation, it becomes religion, that likewise must make existence something other than heaven. Instead, we can be on the path to accomplishing this or that aspect of communism, but take more seriously the way we relate in doing such a thing. The deterministic Marxist does not have a scheme for this that cans scientifically quantify it, but it is the most central aspect.

These kinds of fantasies in relation to communism negatively condition us in the present, whenever we refuse participating in struggle because we have no sense that it will achieve anything that can be seen as a reward to the individual ego. The supposedly lofty “theoretical” idea of transcending the expectation of future transcendence and orienting social and political meaning in a current moment, is exactly our immediate task of finding other people in struggle against ICE and Trump, and dedicating ourselves to collective action on those issues, without guarantees. The trick of the political masters moving meaning from the present to the future goal is always born out of us not being permitted power, either by capitalist reality, or by the “anti-capitalist” forces that nonetheless become terrified of masses leading themselves. We cannot be granted the power from without, and we can not earn it from a training program. We must must take that power.