Dilettante activists to the barricades!

Tell me this. What really constitutes effective political activism in the second decade of the 21st century? And how many of you, like me, have been made to feel like political dilettantes, have been discounted and sidelined in one way or another over the years because you haven't used your views and political activity to leverage yourself into an influential position in some organisation or other?

This is the "subject" speaking now. (This is Camraman's hateful "I") Personally, if you examined my life you would see that I obviously did not aim at financial reward, but at some form of rewarding and socially useful work. I don't expect approval for this. What do I care for approval or disapproval.

Whatever the curious mix of my personal politics, I have, in a way, held fast to my bedrock values. Many of us still do. We work for little in socially useful occupations and we do our best for society, but then then, somehow, we are told by some smart arse or other, that we are not doing enough. That we are onlookers and not actors. That we should be out there acting in the world - as if what we are doing were not acting.

In my case, my political viewpoint is that of, literally, a fellow traveller. My identity was defined by the Apartheid regime. Whether or not I actually fought and struggled as much as my parents did or as much as other people my age did against the injustices in South Africa, nevertheless that struggle absorbed my consciousness and moulded me and made great claims on my intellectual and emotional life over many decades. All my life I have been a political activist in one way or another since the age of 12. And from the moment I was born I have lived with the consequences of my parent's political activism. And where is my South African passport at the end of it all, by the way?

One example: I was driven to confront my Communist roots when I lived, studied and worked in the Soviet Union. I marched and demonstrated and argued and started societies and become a student leader and challenged lecturers and teachers, and worked as a union recruiter and wrote articles.

I followed my parents around the world when I was a child and a teenager because they were political exiles. Does that mean that my brothers and I were not political exiles? The fact that our education was fragmented into 13 schools and that we moved house 26 times and lived on three continents is not unrelated to our identity as the children of South African exiles. But do we qualify?

But at the age of 50, despite all I have said and done and the all the work I have done, I am still made to feel like a political dilettante by people younger than my self, people more adept at gestural politics, (the ones that play at Bolshevism, the ones that pose outside international conferences), and it infuriates me. Well I too have grafted in all kinds of ghettos. Millions of us have and do.

In addition to teaching my students useful skills, I teach my students, (and I have many students, and I have had many students), that capitalism and capitalists must be controlled by society. That democracy is vital and that democracy means that the state must be representative. And that for the representative state to be democratic it must be powerful.

The state must control, own and administer all the resources and natural monopolies of a country and regulate the hell out of the financial sector and the private sector in general to ensure that society and people come out on top.

I tell them that the national state, allied to other national states, must be powerful enough to terrorise the huge international corporations into toeing the line. I insist to them that public servants must have an incorruptible vocation of service, in the way that the best religious people have a vocation of service.

This also means we need to have huge, powerful and politically influential trade unions. That we must build on campaigning traditions of direct action. That consumer groups and community groups should also be powerful and fully represented. All of this in order to support the state and counter-balance the corporate lobbyists.

Adam Smith and the "social entrepreneurs" and Fukuyama and the whole host of those bought out brains, those intellectual prostitutes, can go screw themselves. Admit it.  A society where the profit motive dominates is a sick incontinent and cruel society, however many Nobel prizes you give to the economists people that say it isn't. That's the sort of thing I tell my students.

I believe in institutional good practice and I believe that good institutions are at the core of any civilised society and that if you have good institutions in your country then you are a lucky, lucky people and that you should treasure them and protect them. The BBC is one such institution, the British civil service is another.

I think that if your society hasn't developed a certain level of culture and governance then you are pissing in the wind when you demand too much of it. The first step in building a fair and just society is to build up viable institutions: a functioning legislature, an effective civil service, a fair and well resourced education system, a fair and resourced health system and an honest government.

I believe in the primacy of healthy communities as the basis of society and I don't believe in the nuclear family. The nuclear family simply doesn't work. Emphasis on the nuclear family atomises societies and makes people more and more self-centred. The nuclear family is easy to manipulate. Shamans and artists aside, we were always meant to live in large supportive extended networks.

So my question is this. What constitutes real and useful political activism in the second decade of the 21st century.

I am not talking about political posing, or gestural politics or reactionary identity and single issue politics or shallow "green" politics or fetishistic direct action seeking the adrenalin thrill of violence and the chase, or any of that other crap.

What else could I do to remove the label of dilettante?