Principles of Activism 1: Capital Accumulation
by Joseph Rowlands
Objectivist activism can be a lot of work. In many ways the philosophy is radical, and so the distance we have to cross to change the culture is daunting. The number of Objectivists is also quite small, with an even smaller number of activists. It means if we want to be productive, we have to approach activism in a very intelligent way. This is the first part in a series of articles exploring the topic of activism, in an attempt to identify some basic principles to help guide our decision making process.
The first principle I want to discuss is one out of economics. Capital accumulation plays a large part in economic activity. Instead of consuming all of the efforts of your labor, you can create tools of production that enhance your ability to produce. Generally, more capital enhances your productivity, expanding the range of your productive ability.
For Objectivist activism, we have the problem of very limited manpower. That means if we dive right into activism directly, we probably won't be able to accomplish much. We have to think about how to increase our effectiveness. What kind of capital accumulation goes with activism? Let me provide some examples from my own work.
One of the first Objectivist projects I worked on was the Importance of Philosophy website. The project not only helped Jeff and me get a more comprehensive understanding of philosophy, but allowed us to explore methods of communicating the ideas to others. On top of that, we have a site that many people link to, some professors point their students towards, people interested in learning Objectivism read with interest, and a place where random Google visitors get a new perspective on various topics. It took a lot of work to get up, but at this point it takes no maintenance except domain name costs.
I see this as a complete success story in terms of activist capital accumulation. After completing the task, we have a powerful tool at our disposal. Not only that, but the maintenance cost is very low. This is another critical principle of activism. If the capital consumes all of your time just to maintain, you have no room left over for further ventures. The principle is to not be swamped with maintenance.
Contrast this to the "blog" phenomena. Blogs take an enormous amount of effort to maintain, depending on how often you want to update them and how high you'd like to keep the quality. They take a ton of your time, and there's no point where you can call it quits. As soon as you do, the blog loses its value. I view them as the opposite of the capital accumulation idea. This isn't to say they aren't worth doing, or they aren't effective. They certainly can be effective in terms of activism. But they violate the principle of not consuming all your time in maintenance.
Another example of capital accumulation is this website, Rebirth of Reason. The software package has been steadily improving for years. The membership has been growing. The article archive gets bigger and more diverse. As we go, more options are available to us. We have a number of local clubs, interest groups, extended profiles, etc.
How about maintenance? I admit the site requires a lot of maintenance work. But one of the initial decisions we made was to create a site where the users create the content. That includes forum posts, articles, galleries, etc. So the maintenance is not unbearable. On top of that, it can be distributed to multiple people. Now we have interest group leaders, a web developer, and an article editor. To that extent, it has been a successful model. We continually look for more ways to reduce the amount of maintenance work, or to spread the load a little more.
One other example is the RoR University project I started. The project had interesting results. I was able to accumulate a set of "lectures" that do a pretty reasonable job of teaching the philosophy, so there was quality capital accumulation which I intend to use on later projects. And the maintenance for that capital is nothing, so both principles turned out well.
But evaluating the entire University project, I have to conclude that it failed the maintenance principle. Running a second session would be easier because of the lectures and lessons learned, but it would still be very expensive. If I were to start it up again, I would change it radically to ensure that the students were the ones who continued the future sessions.
There are plenty of other examples. For instance, when writing an article, a timeless one is a valuable resource in the future. A commentary on current affairs can be educational and useful, but has the drawback of limited usefulness later. Or if we create an informational website like the Capitalism War Room project, make sure it is a stand-alone site that require no maintenance. With a little forethought, we can take projects we might already be interested in doing and enhance their productivity.
There's more to being effective than mere capital accumulation, and none of this is meant to imply otherwise. But if we want to increase our ability to produce, these can be powerful principles. We have a long road ahead of us, and finding ways of multiplying our efforts is an important first step.
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