Chapotraphouse

I’m not confusing insufficiency with futility, I’m pointing out that political struggle is not additive. Ten, a hundred, or a thousand uncoordinated individual actions do not accumulate into power. That’s the core issue. The problem with adventurism isn’t that it “does nothing,” it’s that it cannot scale, cannot consolidate, and cannot reproduce itself in a way that threatens bourgeois rule. Without organization, actions remain episodic and dissipate as quickly as they appear.

When you say individual acts can still have “impact,” that’s true in the loosest sense but impact is not the same thing as material change. Media attention, fear, symbolism, or moral satisfaction are not power. Power means durable leverage over social relations: control of labor, institutions, territory, and political direction. Individual violence outside organization produces none of this, which is why the system can absorb it indefinitely while continuing to function normally.

The idea that a “multiplicity of individual actions” can generate long-term positive change reproduces methodological individualism, not Marxism. Historical materialism doesn’t treat history as the sum of personal acts; it treats it as the motion of organized social forces. Classes make history only when they organize themselves as classes. Without that transformation, individuals remain politically atomized no matter how sincere or numerous they are.

Individual acts only become politically meaningful when they are absorbed into an organizational structure, when they are strategically directed, politically interpreted, materially supported, and connected to mass struggle. Outside of that context, they are uncontrollable and incoherent. This isn’t a moral claim; it’s exactly why Lenin, Chairman Mao, and every successful revolutionary movement drew a hard line against adventurism despite fully endorsing revolutionary violence itself.

You say individual acts can play a “supportive role,” but supportive to what, exactly? Which organization, under what line, with what coordination and accountability? Without answers to that, “support” becomes purely rhetorical. Support without strategy is indistinguishable from chaos, and chaos does not challenge a state whose primary advantage is organization and monopoly over force.

Historically, unorganized violence tends not to weaken bourgeois power but to strengthen it, justifying repression, expanding police powers, isolating militants from the masses, and allowing the state to reassert legitimacy. The bourgeois state is structurally advantaged in isolated confrontations; meeting it on that terrain without mass backing is self-defeating.

None of this is moral finger-wagging. Anger is justified. Violence is not inherently wrong. But catharsis is not revolution, and sincerity does not substitute for strategy. Revolutionary politics requires discipline precisely because the enemy is disciplined. This question isn’t abstract, it’s been settled repeatedly through blood, defeat, and experience. Every successful revolution subordinated individual action to organization; every movement that didn’t was crushed or neutralized. That’s not dismissing individual resistance it’s insisting that without organization, it cannot become power.

As I said tons of blood, sweat and ink have been poured out in answering this question and the answer is clear that adventurism is not positive.

Im the words of Lenin:

Revolutionary adventurism is the attempt to substitute one’s own desires for the objective conditions of the revolution.

Stalin:

Adventurism is the opposite side of opportunism. Both depart from Marxism, one by capitulation, the other by reckless assault.

and Chaiman Mao:

Without the masses, the most heroic actions become adventurism.