How people in the activist community relate to one another and to the rest of the world, how they represent their reality to themselves and others, and how they think and act together are basic aspects of activist culture.

True, activists have all kinds of identities and belong to many cultures, constituencies, places and identities. We have all kinds of (often conflicting) schools of thought, styles, strategies, plans, tools and methodologies. What is unique about activists and activist culture is that its very purpose is to transform the dominant power structure founded on profit over people, and the culture that supports it, in pursuit of universal justice, peace and planetary survival.

Many cultures run afoul of the dominant culture and power structure at particular times and in particular places, but ours is by definition in conflict with the status quo. Activist culture is founded in the aspiration to transform society, even though this often looks like “merely” trying to uphold society’s current stated tenets, such as equal opportunity, voting rights, contract rights, etc. While specific activist actions, organizations and movements generally focus on specific areas, populations and issues, our overriding principle is that justice must be universal. 

The fact that people encounter such resistance to their attempts to uphold existing rights is what pushes some people into activism, and what alerts them, or confirms their suspicions, that the system itself is what does not allow for the justice it purports to embody (let alone greater levels of justice). This is what leads people from their particular experience to engaging with the larger question of systemic change.

Activists work for all kinds of improvements in the current status quo, and want things to go as well as they can for as many folks as possible. It is often these efforts, and the great struggles and risks activists face in this good work, that we come to understand the fundamentally unfair way society is organized, and that it must be transformed fundamentally to achieve things that nearly everyone considers desirable in a society: fairness, cooperation and compassion without favorites or exceptions.

Activists are connected in a global community, a unique culture, comprised of folks who have taken this stance in the world, with all its joys and challenges, shared experience and purpose, and common internal contradictions and tensions. 

Wildly diverse though it is, the worldwide activist community shares behaviors, priorities, beliefs, attitudes, joys, rituals, humor, history, principles, ideologies, role models, vocabulary, and more. All this makes us a distinct culture.

Our culture is shaped by the inescapable tension of living life in the belly of the Beast we are working to transform. This does not mean that others do not oppose injustice; in fact, most people do. The difference is that the very essence of our culture is the collective goal and work of transforming the status quo, putting us as a community in basic basic contradiction with the way things are.