Brian is a member of Pittsburgh DSA. Note: Some names and identifying details have been changed. Several organizers are presented as composites, combining multiple sources who requested anonymity to speak about internal debates within their chapters.
“I believe that all organizing is science fiction — that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.”
—Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019)
“All our works are a compromise between the material and the tool. Tools are never quite equal to their tasks, and none is beyond improvement. Aside from differences in human skill, the tool's imperfection and the material's resistance together set the limits that determine the end product.”
—Leszek Kołakowski, “The Concept of the Left” (1957)
IN THE SPRING OF 1969, three months before his heart would fail in a Swiss hotel room in Visp — after student protesters had written "If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease" on his blackboard, and weeks after three women flashed him and scattered flower petals over his head during a lecture he fled from — Theodor Adorno published "Resignation" in Der Spiegel.
The essay confronted a question he'd been asked with increasing hostility since the German student movement discovered that their professor of revolutionary theory had no interest in revolutionary practice, the same question that had haunted him since watching the German Left choose fascism over communism in 1933: isn't theory without action simply capitulation? “Resignation" laid out his defense: not in a world where action had become another form of consumption. For Adorno, critical thought itself was the most pressing intervention for the Left.
While Adorno critiqued many of the actions that contemporary socialists recognize as essential tactics for non-violent direct action, such as student building occupations, disruptive protests, and confrontational demonstrations, it’s a dishonest reading to accuse Adorno of quietism or withdrawal. Adorno argued that thinking itself was a form of resistance; that critical thought which refuses to be instrumentalized for immediate action preserves the possibility of genuine transformation. As he wrote in the essay's closing lines, “Whoever does not let thought atrophy has not resigned.” His target wasn't action per se, but “pseudo-activity:” the frantic activism that serves as a substitute satisfaction, allowing people to feel they're changing things while actually reinforcing the very structures they claim to oppose.
His skepticism came from historical context. He had lived through the collapse of the German Left, the capitulation of workers’ parties to fascism, and he carried that trauma into his judgment of younger radicals whose slogans outpaced their power. For Adorno, symbolic protest that could not alter structures risked reproducing domination rather than overcoming it.
Writing in 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration and the seemingly inexorable rise of the fascist right, I return to Adorno with the eyes of a weary millennial socialist. While my heart is with the students and their wonderfully creative flashing ritual, my head is with Adorno and his critique. Based on my recent organizing experiences, especially at this political moment, I’m tempted to see pseudo-activity as a dead end and a real problem for the left and my DSA comrades to contend with.
Yet Adorno's framework, shaped by the trauma of watching the German Left fail, may miss something crucial about how political consciousness develops. What if certain actions that appear merely performative are actually constitutive — building the very capacity for transformation they seem to lack? What if the process of failing collectively generates precisely the consciousness that makes genuine change possible? These are the questions that haunt me as I watch my own generation of organizers process our defeats.
An overly coarse reading of socialist organizing as psuedo-activity misses how failure itself can serve as a school. How defeat, when processed collectively, can generate the very consciousness that makes transformation possible. How “useless actions” are not necessarily pseudo-activity, but the process of learning that is essential to effective organizing.
In May 2025, Pittsburgh’s Not On Our Dime referendum died a second time on procedural grounds. Organizers had gathered 21,000 signatures to let Pittsburgh voters decide whether their taxes should subsidize Israel’s war on Gaza. Organizers withdrew the Not On Our Dime referendum after the Jewish Federation's lawyers — including Ron Hicks and Carolyn McGee, who'd worked Trump's 2020 election challenges — spent weeks documenting how signatures failed technical requirements: whether someone wrote "Ave" instead of "Avenue" on the petition line, for example. Eventually, organizers acknowledged in court that more than 90% of the challenged signatures weren't valid, withdrawing before any judge could rule but after accumulating $85,783 in legal fees the Jewish Federation now wanted them to pay.
Marcus, one of three canvassers who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said, "I knocked doors for six weeks. The polling showed majority support. We had hundreds of members sign on to help. Look around this room and count who showed up."
The frustration in his voice carried a familiar weight; the same exhaustion I'd heard (and expressed myself) in the many post-mortems of so-called “failed” campaigns. When it's easier to count the empty chairs in the room than to calculate the resources deployed against us. When blaming comrades for their absence feels more manageable than acknowledging that forces of capital can spend $80,000 on lawyers that worked Trump's election challenges, while we couldn't get 20 people to show up on a Tuesday night. Rage at your friends for not doing enough is at least rage you can express, unlike the paralysis that comes from truly comprehending the machinery arrayed against even the modest proposal that tax dollars shouldn't fund genocide.
Diana, a composite of three organizers I spoke with about recent DSA actions, joined DSA through the referendum campaign after encountering signature gatherers outside Giant Eagle. She watched democracy get strangled by procedure, learning that "Ave" instead of "Avenue" could invalidate popular will, discovering that law wasn't neutral but purchasable by the hour. "It’s not that they don’t care," she said during an interview with me. "People are exhausted from work, from watching genocide livestreamed, from being the one progressive voice at their job. We're asking them to fight a system that has unlimited lawyers with their Tuesday nights."
These discussions clarified a deeper question: whether these actions should be judged by their immediate policy outcomes, or by what they build in participants. This question drives the experimental materialism framework, a tool I’m using to understand this moment.
After years of campaigns that succeeded, failed, or landed somewhere in between, I’ve come to think about organizing in terms of four levels: ethos, theory of change, strategy, and tactics. While these categories emerge from collective wisdom — from union halls to liberation struggles, from abolitionists to Zapatistas, from organizing manuals to movement conversations, oral tradition, memoirs, zines, and TikToks — the specific framework I'm presenting here is my attempt to synthesize and formalize what often remains implicit in organizing practice. Consider it a formalization of piecemeal movement history, offered back for collective refinement.
~ ETHOS
Ethos is the gut sense that a better world is possible. It is not a reading group conclusion but an orientation, formed through lived experience. It’s the recognition that capitalism is a social process, not a law of nature. That solidarity, democracy, and human dignity can be organized into existence.
Movements across history have carried this ethos. Haitian revolutionaries in 1791, when the idea of Black emancipation was dismissed as impossible. South African freedom fighters, who refused to accept apartheid as destiny. Irish republicans who endured prison and hunger strikes. Palestinian organizers who, against staggering odds, insist their people have a right to life and land. Rojava’s experiment in democratic confederalism, where Kurds, Arabs, and others attempt to govern without a state. Each example reminds us: ethos begins when people decide oppression is contingent, not natural.
This also sets boundaries. We do not debate the “validity” of people’s identities, or whether disabled, unhoused, or racialized communities are lesser. To allow those questions would violate our ethos. Here, the paradox of tolerance is real: we tolerate many strategies, but not the dehumanization of people.
~ THEORY OF CHANGE
If ethos answers why struggle, theory of change addresses how transformation happens. Marxism’s great contribution was to argue that emancipation comes through class struggle, not charity. But there has never been only one theory of change.
The Civil Rights Movement often framed its work through exposure — forcing America to confront its contradictions on TV screens and in courtrooms. Abolitionists saw that sustained confrontation with slavery’s violence would eventually split the republic. The labor movement believed strikes and unions could build worker power until capital conceded or collapsed. Suffragists wagered that persistence, spectacle, and sacrifice would finally force recognition.
In the global South, the Zapatistas in Chiapas taught that prefigurative politics — building autonomous communities in the shell of the old society — can themselves be transformative. Palestinians show us how resistance and solidarity movements can shift consciousness even when they cannot yet shift the balance of arms. Rojava models confederal structures where theory of change is not seizing a state but dissolving it.
For socialists today, the insight of experimental materialism is this: exposing people to struggle, and the contradictions inside it, grows their capacity. Failure is not always wasted. It can be the spark that moves someone from despair to clarity.
A non-dialectical reading of Adorno sees only the opposition between genuine transformation and pseudo-activity. But dialectical thinking recognizes that categories transform through their contradictions, that what appears as mere performance at one moment can become constitutive of new political capacity at another. Failure itself must be understood dialectically — as both a simple absence of success and as a moment that contains a negation of failure, the seeds of future possibility.
The experimental aspect of experimental materialism means testing actions not against an abstract standard of revolutionary purity, but against their capacity to develop political consciousness in specific conditions. When DSA chapters lose campaigns, the question isn't simply whether they failed but what the failure produced: which contradictions it exposed, which capacities it developed, which relationships it built. Under conditions of massive power asymmetry, small actions that reveal how power operates can shift participants' understanding from individual frustration to structural analysis. The standard isn't lowered — the measurement accounts for what's actually possible when 20 people with Tuesday nights face million-dollar law firms.
~ STRATEGY
Strategy is the medium-term plan that translates theory of change into building durable power. Here, debates rage, and productively so. Some argue electoral campaigns can provide infrastructure and visibility. Others insist direct action and mutual aid sustain radical energy when elections co-opt it.
Strategy is never invented in the abstract. It emerges when movements build the infrastructure to sustain confrontation and then test it against power.
In 1934, longshoremen in San Francisco struck after police killed two workers on what became known as Bloody Thursday. The general strike that followed shut the city down for four days. It was a lesson written in blood and barricades: strikes could paralyze capital, but only if workers spent years beforehand building unions capable of holding the line.
Disabled activists learned a similar lesson in 1977 when they occupied the Health, Education, and Welfare Federal Building in San Francisco for 26 days — the longest takeover of a federal building in United States history. Protesters in wheelchairs survived on hot meals delivered daily by the Black Panthers, and with the help of sign language interpreters and communication devices, they kept the occupation going until the government finally signed Section 504 regulations (designed to prohibit discrimination against those with disabilities) after four years of delay. An action that a coarse reading of Adorno would dismiss as performative pseudo-activity shut down a federal agency because activists had the organizational capacity to sustain themselves under siege.
Other movements discovered the same pattern. The African National Congress’s underground networks in apartheid South Africa were parallel power structures durable enough to survive the security state and make resistance visible. Indian independence organizers spent years building swadeshi supply chains before they could call on people to burn British cloth. The Black Panthers fed children breakfast before school because they knew people needed projects of survival now as a foundation to fight for revolution later.
A critical reader might object: wouldn't Adorno recognize these as genuine acts of resistance rather than pseudo-activity? The 504 sit-in secured concrete policy changes; the Black Panthers built parallel institutions; the ANC waged armed struggle. These aren't performative gestures but material interventions.
This objection reveals the problem with how Adorno's critique gets deployed today. In “Resignation,” Adorno's target was actions that provide psychological relief while leaving structures intact — what he called “substitute satisfaction.” But who decides which actions qualify? The students who flashed Adorno believed they were building revolutionary consciousness. The Not On Our Dime organizers thought revealing the machinery of oppression would catalyze resistance.
The experimental materialist framework rejects the binary between “real” organizing and pseudo-activity. Instead, it asks: what capacity did this action build? The 504 sit-in didn't end ableism, but it transformed disability rights and taught a generation how to occupy federal buildings. The breakfast programs didn't end exploitation, but they demonstrated that communities could meet their own needs while building revolutionary consciousness. These actions worked at multiple registers simultaneously: fulfilling immediate needs, building organizational capacity, and shifting political consciousness.
The point isn't that all actions are equally valuable. The point is that under conditions where revolution isn't immediately possible, the distinction between “real” and “performative” action often obscures more than it reveals. Better to ask: what does this teach? Who does it organize? What capacity does it build for the next fight?
Across continents and decades, this insight appears again and again in our movement. Strategy means creating the material conditions for sustained confrontation. Hope or outrage on their own are never enough. Confrontation can win only when movements build the capacity to withstand its costs.
As Maikiko James, who has experience organizing with DSA-LA, the Socialist Majority Caucus, and who served on DSA's National Political Committee (NPC), put it in an interview with me: “For me, failure is a rough word. I prefer to talk about challenges. Burnout and tokenization often go hand in hand. If you’re one of the few people of color, you can be asked to step into leadership based on identity. It’s not ill-intentioned, but it can still replicate the very hierarchies we’re trying to dismantle.”
James's observation about burnout and tokenization points to a critical gap in how we often measure organizing success. We count petition signatures and rally attendance but rarely track who burns out, who gets tokenized, whose labor becomes invisible. Experimental materialism requires us to ask not just “did we win?” but “who did we lose along the way?”
In practice, this means rotating roles deliberately, compensating emotional and administrative labor that often falls on women and people of color, and building redundancy so no one becomes indispensable. It means counting the cost when organizing replicates the very hierarchies we claim to oppose — when meetings run on academic time, when leadership looks like the same demographics year after year, and when “urgency” becomes an excuse for bypassing democratic process.
The Not On Our Dime campaign, for all its lessons about legal machinery, also taught this: sustainable organizing requires infrastructure for the organizers themselves. Childcare at meetings. Food that accommodates different needs. Translation. Transportation. The mundane material conditions that determine who can show up on their Tuesday nights.
In DSA today, this debate — what constitutes successful organizing? — is not settled, nor should it be. Experimental materialism requires that we treat each strategy as a hypothesis to be tested. We ask not only “did we win?” but also “what did we build?” Implicit in this is the idea that progress is incremental, and evaluations of progress must necessarily be relative to the goals set out and the conditions those seeking to achieve them operate under.
~ TACTICS
Tactics are the immediate actions we take — a march, a phonebank, a petition, a blockade. Tactics fail constantly. The sit-ins of the early Civil Rights Movement were broken up; labor strikes are often crushed; Black Lives Matter protests did not end police killings. But tactics also transform participants and reveal power structures.
The National Union of the Homeless offers one of the clearest lessons about the far-reaching usefulness of “failed” tactics. In 1990, the union orchestrated coordinated takeovers of vacant Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) buildings in seven US cities. Many people involved expected the occupations would be short-lived. As one leader, Ron Casanova, put it: “Forget about it being against the law. I don’t care. Hell, I’m dying in the streets. That should be against the law.” The police eventually cleared the buildings, but not before something crucial happened. For three days, homeless families lived inside homes the government kept empty. That direct confrontation exposed property relations in a way no pamphlet could.
The union’s motto is blunt: you only get what you’re organized to take. That principle turned survival into pedagogy. As Chris Sprowal, a founder and veteran of civil rights and union campaigns, said of Dignity Housing, the first homeless-run shelter the union built: “Dignity was not just housing. It was a way of life.” For the people who moved in, it was proof that the poor could run their own institutions, not simply be managed by charities.
Measured on one level, the HUD takeovers were defeated. Families were evicted, and homelessness continued to climb. But measured on another, they produced an entire generation of leaders. Willie Baptist, who organizes in the union, argued: “You can’t talk about the problems of poverty, the pain of it, the daily struggles to survive, the plight, the fight and the insight, without involving the newly emerging leaders from the growing ranks of the poor.” That was the tactic’s hidden success: it transformed people’s understanding of homelessness from a personal shame into a collective, structural fight. Baptist would go on to write one of the most important texts of 20th century Marxism, It’s Not Enough to be Angry — a clear example of how so-called failures bear unexpected fruits.
The lesson here is not to romanticize loss. The crack epidemic, state repression, and nonprofit co-optation nearly destroyed the union by the mid-1990s. But for those who passed through them, the failed occupations became the crucible of future movements. Many of the same organizers went on to train today’s tenant unions, poor people’s campaigns, and housing justice networks. The tactic failed in one dimension but succeeded in producing leaders, exposing contradictions, and shifting political common sense. That is what experimental materialism means: refusing to measure an action only by the policy win; recognizing the transformations it sparks in people and structures. It insists that we evaluate tactics not only by their stated goals but by what they uncover and who they shape. A phonebank that flips no votes but produces 10 new committed organizers hasn't failed, it's revealed a different opportunity.
The importance of flexibility in organizing means recognizing when to pivot: when your referendum campaign becomes a political education project, when your electoral campaign becomes a base-building operation, when your protest becomes a networking space. Campaigns that rigidly pursue their original goals often miss what they're actually building. The Not On Our Dime organizers could have seen those 21,000 signatures as purely a legal defeat. Instead, they recognized they'd built a base of Pittsburgh residents who oppose funding genocide — infrastructure for the next fight.
One reason organizing debates can feel circular is that people argue from different levels without realizing it. A question like “are all people dignified?” belongs to our ethos and not in our organizing spaces. “Should we risk arrest at this protest?” belongs to tactics and how it relates to our theory of change.
So when one comrade says “direct action reveals contradictions,” and another says “if our five members get arrested we can’t sustain this work,” they may not actually disagree; they’re just speaking across levels.
DSA’s strength is its big tent. Members come from Marxist-Leninist traditions of democratic centralism, from libertarian socialist currents of horizontalism, from union campaigns, mutual aid groups, and abolitionist movements. We inherit everything from Adrienne Maree Brown’s vision of emergent strategy to the organizing discipline of Jane McAlevey. These apparent contradictions are not obstacles, they are the raw material of organizing as democratic socialists. But it does require clarity about which levels and topics we’re debating.
My conversation with Maikiko James, which occurred not long after the 2025 DSA convention, crystalized my thinking and the importance of thinking about debate. James reflected: “After this past convention, there was fighting, debate, argument over what we believe. But we didn’t split. For the left, that’s revolutionary. We need to absorb more people, not fewer. Sticking together despite disagreements or because of them is part of building a mass movement.”
This brings us back to Adorno. Pseudo-activity is tactics for their own sake, done to soothe anxiety or signal virtue. Experimental materialism is the wager that even failed actions, if processed collectively, can build the ethos, theory, and strategy that make success possible.
Here, I draw on the Polish Marxist Leszek Kołakowski, whose essay “The Concept of the Left” argued that socialist politics is always caught in a dialectic between idealism and materialism; between the vision of a better world and the hard constraints of present conditions.
Capitalist realism tricks us into believing that what is socially contingent — wage labor, racial hierarchy, permanent war — are material facts. Organizers who embrace the experimental materialism framework have another tool to process the dialectic without collapsing into futility or romanticism.
Our task is not to escape failure but to metabolize it. To treat defeats as data. To see campaigns not only as battles for immediate wins but as experiments in political development.
Every movement we inherit — abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, anticolonial struggle — was built on a series of defeats that taught participants and created a foundation of theory. Our own era is no different. The work continues, not because we expect to win tomorrow, but because losing together today may be the only way we learn how to win at all.
Brian Nuckols is a socialist organizer and journalist in Pittsburgh. Correspondence welcome via email brianjnuckols at gmail.com or on xwitter @briannuckols13
