Effervescence at the Mass Rally

The ongoing mass protests in support of the Palestinian resistance have reinvigorated and consolidated huge numbers of people to a common cause: the end of the Israeli occupation and the victory of the Palestinian people. In some ways, it's hard to imagine that just around month ago, this movement was considered fringe, marginalized even on the left, and far more people accepted Zionist misrepresentations of the movement as "anti-Semitic". The occupation was depoliticized as a "conflict." In not so distant memory, even wearing a keffiyeh to an action was seen as extremist!

To be clear, the same imperialist reactionaries are trying the same tricks. Protestors are being arrested, people are being defamed by everything from the Canary Project to ludicrous doxing vans displaying activists' faces. Yet, people's principles stand unfazed, or even strengthened. How is this so?

Durkheim once analyzed a ceremony honoring an important snake deity of the Warramunga people, an aboriginal Australian society. For four days, all members of the Warramunga gathered to sing, dance around fires, and engage in normally prohibited sexual practices. Durkheim couldn't entertain the idea that this ceremony was useless to the Warramunga or motivated by simple superstition; anything this important had to help maintain their social cohesion somehow. 

Effervescent marchers

He argued that the ceremony wasn't about snakes or even the deity at all, but rather the collective Warramunga values that the snake totem represented. The clan-wide ceremony generated a feeling called collective effervescence, a sacred state where shared principles and values are affirmed and updated in the presence of the whole community.

The protests for Palestine unfolding worldwide also generate collective effervescence. Protestors come together, espousing all sorts of particular ideas about Israeli apartheid, but the act of protest ceremonially constitutes and sustains a collectively heightened understanding of the situation. In addition to the affirmation these events provide to longtime solidarity activists, slogans like "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" have taken their rightful place in the eyes of people as collectively held sacred ideals through the power of collective consciousness under the guidance of militant leadership.

As in religion, individual values are instantiated by collective values, and participants take a piece of collective consciousness back to their normal lives. However, effervescence tends to diminish with distance from the frenzy of ceremony, so periodic ceremonies are needed to reinvigorate the shared values. This is why the Marxist-Leninist approach is so effective for changing people's minds. Consciously organized political campaigns fought out over time give rise to a correspondingly protracted state of collective effervescence. In contrast, liberals, anarchists, and Trotskyists often throw a protest once or twice in reaction to the news, and abandon the movement shortly after, allowing the shared principles generated at the rally to rapidly whither away.

This is precisely what I think happened, unfortunately, to some of the momentum of the 2020 George Floyd uprising. Although much organization was won and consciousness was certainly heightened across the board, conditions in nationwide organization were such that the bourgeoisie was able to successfully mobilize distracting narratives (like fake news about "crime waves" in cities with "defunded" police departments), damaging the collective consciousness that had seen millions of people march on the racist police state only a year earlier. There were not yet the requisite organizational conditions to bring forth rallies, community meetings and other organizing moves that would constantly reaffirm the collective spirit of 2020.

This time, I think things will be different. People's organization is stronger than it has been in a long time. The movement has centered the Palestinian and Arab-American masses, who have taken the lead, and organizers are bravely fighting for Palestinian national liberation in the face of heated repression. All of this has generated a shared resolve that is proving impervious to the bourgeois ideological onslaught.