Thinking of activism as ritual magic is exactly what people think of when they criticize performative slacktivism. Holding working class people’s livelihoods hostage is nothing more than hooliganism in practice, and because ends actually don’t justify means to the people that get the ends, it just results in the people you pissed off hating you. The rhetoric around it is nothing short of religious, and the commitment to Orthodoxy is absolute. Slacktivists have a deep and abiding faith in the idea that blocking streets and screeching at fellow wageslaves is how Real Activism happens, and that it alone produces real change and should therefore never, ever be questioned.

I think it’s because effective action is scary and risky: making wealthy people and policymakers literally fear for their lives. Unions didn’t win rights like a 40 hour work week because they blocked roads. They won their rights on the remains of burned-down factories and the corpses of bosses and cops. People in positions of power generally are only capable of understanding violence or the threat of violence, reasoning with them or disrupting the society they live in is like trying to reason with an attack dog or trashing the back yard it lives in. Attack dogs don’t understand rhetoric, they understand the choke chain. A few weeks ago, Luigi Mangione gave it a yank, and the health insurance industry whimpered and heeled the same day, and only returned to form when they realized it wasn’t the opening of a class war.

Note: this is something the far right does understand. Just look at the Bundy Standoff in 2014. Were they in the wrong? Yes. Were they making empty threats when they pointed guns at federal agents? No. It’s not a coincidence that they got told “we’ll return your cattle within 30 minutes”.

Magic sure can work, but political action is no magic. It’s connection, from person to person.