Those Small Acts

Many revolutionaries look down their noses at the small steps we take to change our lives. These acts include growing our own food, buying locally, buying fair trade products, riding a bicycle instead of a car, etc. On their own, divorced from the greater liberatory movement, they would seem feeble, feel-good actions. However, few ever believed, say, growing your own food was The Revolution. Everyone I have ever met who engages in these small acts is also involved in the larger picture, those movements for peace, environmental sanity and liberty.

The small act links us to the liberated future, allows us, in a minor way, to live the life we wish to lead, only now. The little movements are also a transmission belt to the larger movements. You may start out only interested in growing organic food in your back yard, but if you take your little act seriously, inexorably you will be drawn to a criticism of the entire system. You will begin to ask why corporate agriculture uses pesticides and artificial fertilizers and why the state has encouraged these practices. You will begin to question a system that eliminates local farm land while importing vegetables from China. Encouraging the small act leads people toward the greater movement.

 
The criticism of small acts is a moralistic one, and not at all dialectical. It fails to see the holistic nature of the movements great and small, and it fails to see that a person's thoughts work as processes, that they are not static.