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Title: Lines in Sand Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: critique, identity, organization Source: Retrieved on March 21, 2011 from http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12215][anarchistnews.org]] [[http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12230][anarchistnews.org]] [[http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12245
There is a line that divides many people whose struggles I respect. I
wonât name this line or define either camp, to avoid entrenching them,
and I donât know of any fair definitions that have been put forward by
any of those involved in this antagonism. Most of us are familiar with
the strawmen that litter this battlefield, though. Those on one side are
guilty of âidentity politics,â those on the other are âprivilegedâ or
âdogmatic.â
In some cases I think the different practices can complement each other,
each having their own shortcomings. But in other cases they are merely
different; I know of people on either side who seem to me to have a
complete revolutionary practice, with its own particular advantages, but
no failing that could be addressed by the other side. Simultaneously,
there are those on both sides who I do not consider allies. Among those
who speak of social war are some who want a homogenous front that
struggles only for freedom in the abstract, who stifle any talk of
oppressions they do not personally experience. And among those who speak
of privilege and oppression are some who are just politicians and
guilt-mongerers.
Between those who speak of privilege and oppression, and those who speak
of social war, I come largely from the former, and now find myself
closer to the latter. While I want to direct these criticisms in
multiple directions, I donât want to create a false balance between two
fictive positions. I hope these criticisms aid not in the development of
a better anarchist practice, a peace or synthesis between those who have
not seen eye to eye, but in the development of better anarchist
practices that need not ever come to terms.
However, recognizing that weâll never all agree on anything, and this is
good, I want to argue nonetheless that a needed common ground is an
understanding and embrace of social war. Iâm afraid that those who speak
of oppression without acknowledging the war we are a part of, not as
metaphor but as a real and current practice, will only succeed in
turning a battlefield into a garden, decorating this cemetery of a
society with flowers, ensuring equality of access to a graveyard. I
donât care to argue that one side or another is more correct, only that
revolution becomes impossible when we start believing in civil society
and stop noticing that the guns are pointed at us too.
It is vital to have connections with people we donât share affinity
with, people who are different from us, but it can be difficult to work
with people whose desires are reformist without also adopting reformist
modes of struggle. Lacking a specific and foregrounded critique of
recuperation, as do many who focus on privilege and oppression,
coalition politics are almost certain to end up in Popular Fronts that
stifle anarchist critiques, prop up Authority, and hoodwink
anti-authoritarians into being the shock troops or grunt workers for the
leftwing of the system, whether in the guise of NGOs, progressive
politicians, or Stalinist parties.
Under democratic government, recuperation is far more common than
repression as a tool for counterinsurgency. They prefer the carrot over
the stick. Those who talk about exclusion more than exploitation, and
who focus on getting more carrots for everyone, are sure to defeat
themselves.
âYou Have to Do It My Wayâ was written in the summer of 2009, and âSo
Fucked Upâ and âSome Suggestionsâ were written in the summer of 2010.
anarchists
One of the most loaded terms I see in the critiques of certain
anarchists is âidentity politics.â What exactly are identity politics? I
canât deduce a coherent definition from its usage; given how the term is
thrown around it seems only to imply that the speaker is annoyed by
someone else focusing on racism or sexism. I thought identity politics
meant the process of creating a homogenous identity within a certain
population to serve as a political constituency and power base for a
group of politicians, whose role as exploiters sitting atop that
population is hidden by the shared use of that singular identity. In
other words it calls up the likes of Gloria Steinem, Adolf Hitler, David
Ben-Gurion, or Ron Karenga.
Yet when anarchists use this term, frequently theyâre using it against
people involved in the construction of fluid, heterogenous, and complex
identities, who extend solidarity to people with different identities
and develop holistic critiques of power, and adoption of this identity
does not also mean the adoption of a preformulated and unquestionable
dogma. For example, the group Anarchist People of Color includes people
who identify as black, latina, indigenous, Asian, Palestinian, biracial;
immigrants and citizens; queer and trans people. From what I know from
the outside, they engage in discussions regarding these multiple
identities rather than suppressing internal difference. Their published
writings reflect a diversity of thought rather than a single political
line. Iâve read things by APOC members I disagree with, and other things
that have really challenged or developed my thinking regarding
imperialism, race, gender, anarchist struggle, and other themes. I know
of people of color who are critical of the way the group operates and
donât feel included, and I know white people who strongly dislike
generalizations regarding themselves that often appear in writings by
APOC. I donât let these bother me because I know that without exception,
someoneâs definition of an Other can be useful, but never valid. Beyond
this Iâve read one or two things from members of this group that were
purposeful manipulations of white guilt. [This essay was written before
Smack a White Boy 2].
All this goes to show that this group is not a singular entity and they
express a range of perspectives in a number of different manners.
However in disregard for this diversity there has been a certain
singularity of response from white anarchists: whenever writings from
the group are posted on other anarchist websites the charge of âidentity
politicsâ inevitably appears in the comments section, regardless of
whether the writing being critiqued posits essential differences or
homogenous, unchanging categories.
Perhaps for many anarchists, identity politics have come to mean the
construction of identities within political projects? But this doesnât
pan out either. You have the more old-fashioned white anarchists
claiming that there is only the working class, and that emphasis on race
or gender divides the working class, thus aiding the capitalists. Others
donât go in much for the workers and identify strictly as anarchists.
One typical internet harangue of Anarchist People of Color bristled at
their support for Mumia abu-Jamal, who is ânot an anarchist.â Does this
mean we should be concerned about what happens to other anarchists, but
what happens to other people in the same social category as us doesnât
affect us? In the end itâs not a coherent criticism, itâs just white
people telling people of color how they should identify. This is true
identity politics, in the Mobutu Sese Seko sense of the term, that only
regards one identity as natural or at least unquestionable in the common
project (nationhood, the struggle against capitalism, what have you),
and any other identity as superfluous or harmful.
A common argument made by these critics of a poorly identified identity
politics seems to be that the speaker pays lipservice to the evils of
racism or sexism but claims that the basis of racism and sexism is the
division of people into categories along lines of race or sex, thus
people who include these divisions in their political work are guilty of
reinforcing rather than attacking the oppression itself. How valid is
this hypothesis? First I want to analyze the logic a little more. An
assumption underlying this argument is that the first apparent feature,
chronologically, of a phenomenon will become the basis of that
phenomenon, and thus its generative feature. In other words, a
distinction of gender is a prerequisite for sexism, thus gender
distinctions generate sexism and by destroying gender distinctions we
destroy sexism. What was that video game where the boss of a certain
level is this evil bug that flies around and suddenly multiplies into a
dozen copies of itself, but if you can kill the original, then they all
die? Anyways I think I make my point: if identity itself is the basis
for oppression then we can destroy oppression by destroying identity. A
further assumption of this line of reasoning is that history is
mechanical, progressive, and unilineal, because if the first feature of
a phenomenon automatically leads to the development of the entire
phenomenon, then there is no possibility for multiple outcomes or even
for stasis or reversal. A always leads to B always leads to C.
There. The idea has lost its clothes. It reveals itself to be Historical
Materialist at best, and Social Darwinist at worst.
In this sense it bears similarity to the worst excesses of primitivism
(which, donât get me wrong, I believe has had a number of good
influences on anarchist theory and practice), namely that the
development of agriculture led inevitably to the development of
authority, which is historically untrue, unless we redefine authority to
mean, well, agriculture.
I canât argue hard enough that history is neither mechanical,
progressive, nor unilineal. These characterizations are a fundament of
Western dogma, and God help us if they are true because that would mean
that unless anarchy has been preordained by the machines of history then
there is nothing we can do to bring it about.
Revealing the cultural assumptions hiding behind this particular
understanding of identity is far from enough to disprove it. So letâs
take it at face value: do identity categories in themselves recreate the
oppressions that operate on those identities? I donât think thereâs any
evidence of this. For every example that occurs to me of some
authoritarian group that used identity to suppress difference or create
prejudice, even as they were fighting against oppression, I can think of
another group of oppressed people who used identity as a means of
survival and who maintained relationships with people and groups with
other identities to jointly attack the power structure itself.
One might argue that when it comes to indigenous people, it is not at
all the category that oppresses them, itâs the people who came and stole
their land and continue to colonize them, and in this case the identity
of being indigenous may be a vital tool in surviving cultural genocide.
Losing that category may be tantamount to disappearing as a people and
allowing the genocide to run its full course. One might also say that
anthropologists and philosophers who look at identities as tools are
only reflecting their own manipulative and mechanical way of looking at
the world, and that an indigenous identity is a history, a culture, a
community, and an inseperable part of who one is. I donât know. In any
case, many active indigenous people have already expressed that white
peopleâs denial of their identity and nationhood is one reason they
donât work with white people, and as a generalization white people
didnât listen.
But this vague critique of identity politics rejects such an argument.
Itâs a posture that bears much in common with the postmodern rejection
of Grand Narratives. This rejection is highly useful in denying the
racial myths of European nationhood and refusing the stories that give
us a shared history with our rulers. This is great. On the other hand
such a posture prevents one from acknowledging legacies and histories of
resistance and oppression, which is useful for the rulers. For example,
if one can only connect oneself to 500 years of brutal colonial
oppression and also 500 years of impressive resistance, by identifying
oneself within a certain category of people, and we hold such
categorization to be oppressive and undesirable, then how is one to make
sense of her position in society if she grows up in highly marginalized
circumstances and is treated a certain way by ruling institutions and a
great many people on the street? This is just coincidence? And when she
finds out that the other people in her family, and certain other people
all across the country, have experiences that are remarkably similar,
while the dominant culture talks nothing of these experiences, this is
just meaningless? Or is it a legitimate basis for a shared identity, and
a point of departure for struggle?
I have to say that the example Iâm giving is miles away from my personal
experience. All the identities that society tried to stitch me into
donât fit, and the fabric is coarse: man, American, white person, member
of the middle class, or more recently, outcast, failure, criminal,
terrorist. To varying degrees I have peeled these identities off my
body. The common experience I find with other people is our shared
alienation, our desire to destroy what created us. It would be unfair to
call this a white experience, or a middle class experience, because of
all the other people I have met who also share this experience. On the
other hand it would be tokenistic to assert that this identity-free
identity is one-size-fits-all just because Iâve seen it fit so many
different types of people. I might tie this experience to growing up in
the suburbs, and in most cases I might be right, but to declare this a
suburban identity would be unfair to all the people who grew up in the
same categories as me but had different experiences, or all the people
who had similar experiences despite growing up in different categories.
Even though a negative identity is still an identity, it doesnât feel
like one, so building a politics around that particular experience of
the world, as CrimethInc. has done quite effectively, I would argue,
doesnât seem to have any commonality with identity politics, though in
fact it does. In fact it is typical to the category that I grew up in
that I have generally never wanted to belong to an identity group, and I
always felt awkward and pretentious when I tried one on.
Until I met anarchy. I donât mean anarchism, or the anarchist movement,
I mean the shared experience of struggle with people who have my back,
who comprise my material and emotional community, who share my history,
and who learn and grow within a very real continuity of struggle that
goes all the way back to the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution,
the Paris Commune (a continuity that doesnât exist in the United States,
in my experience). People who will invite you into their home and feed
you because they share the same dream, people who will risk themselves
for you in the street when they donât even know you, because they can
look at you and know youâre on the same side. It was when I met the
grandparents of the struggle, who fought in mythical 1936, met them as
friends, and doing so realized that one day I or my friends, if we
survived, would be the grandpas and grandmas telling stories of a
struggle equally distant in time; it was when my friend took me on a
tour of Moscow (or Barcelona, or Berlin, or that little village in
Friesland) and showed me â this is where they killed our friends Stas
and Nastya a few months ago, and here is where the Bolsheviks executed
some anarchists in 1921 â and I realized that these places had the same
meaning; thatâs when history became demystified and I discovered that
the anarchists are my people.
This is not an identity I want to ideologize or spread beyond my own
personal experience. But itâs something I feel very real in my bones.
And itâs something that shows me that my discomfort with identity was in
part an alienation from the history of struggle.
But the identity of anarchist does not say much to my starting position
in society or the forms of privilege and exploitation the various ruling
institutions have designated for me. What about an identity imposed on
me by racism and sexism, by the nation? At this level my identity tells
me of my descent from a long line of poor farmers who over the years
consciously decided to cooperate with a capitalistic, religious, and
racial project that ultimately left me with an inheritance stripped of
anything I value. My living relatives no longer even farm or work with
their hands; in the end their farming was the first rung on a
professional ladder. They did not fight for their land and resist the
enclosures or the industrialization of farming, and they cooperated
fully in the various forms of active racism white people engaged in to
create the United States. And in their eagerness to control each other
and stay within their complementary reproductive roles, they created
patterns of abuse that almost destroyed me before I was old enough to
understand what the hell was going on. The bad choices of my ancestors
help explain the well fed misery I was born into, and give my struggle
more meaning. And this part of my identity bears overwhelming
similarities with the identities of many other people, and overwhelming
differences with the identities of even more people.
To get theoretical again, the discomfort with identity also seems to me
to be a symptom of postmodern society. Oh God, not that dreaded label
(even worse than âidentity politicsâ). But no, patient reader, I mean
something very concrete by that. I mean the postmodern recognition that
identity is constructed and performative, and its association of
identity with the ironic and insincere, consequential to the
unprecedented bombardment of the individual with the basest forms of
marketing and chicanery to manipulate the formation of an identity that
has become nothing more than an interface with commodities and political
categories. How the hell can we take identity seriously when it is so
evidently produced for us by clothing commercials, sports teams, and
talk radio?
But moving beyond the historical moment in which, for many people,
identity has become an absurdity, what is identity if it is not
inherently a product of manipulative outside factors? I would argue that
even though identity is a project and it is historical, it is
nonetheless natural, in the sense that it arises from the nature of
human consciousness. Identity is a function of the way humans understand
ourselves and recognize others; and I would make the Chomskian argument
that the epistemological movement to and beyond categories is universal
to the human brain itself. In other words, I think that we always have
and always will label ourselves and others, challenge these labels,
reinforce them, abandon them and integrate the fragments into new
labels, and there is nothing wrong with this project except where it
intersects with an authoritarian society that uses a discourse and a
regulation of identities, among many other means, to not let people be
who they want to be. Thus, using or not using identities is not as
important as addressing the very real social structures and power
dynamics that lie behind these identities.
It seems to me that addressing our personal relationship to these power
structures entails the creation of identity if it includes any talk of a
collective response, i.e. struggle. This is true even if we adopt as
broad an identity as âthe exploited.â Our identity becomes more specific
the more specifically we examine those power structures and how they
affect us. If we try to understand patriarchy and colonialism and
migrant labor and liquor stores, something as vague as âthe exploitedâ
is no longer a useful identity to help us understand our place in all of
this. Such a broad identity can be useful in preventing an atomized
understanding of the system â it is a wholesale rejection of the system
on the part of everyone who can consider themselves exploited by it
(which is basically everybody). But this need not entail a rejection of
a specific approach that looks at one or several parts of the system in
detail, in tandem with a more specific identity, as long as that
approach does not lose a holistic analysis of the system and thus give
birth to a partial struggle.
After all, identities need not be singular or mutually exclusive. In
examining patriarchy it becomes apparent that different people have
different categorical relationships with that power structure, but just
because someone understands herself to be a woman does not at all
prevent her from understanding herself as an enemy of the entire system,
together with all the other enemies of the system.
Here I want to quote from a thought-provoking article by Craig Calhoun
about identity politics. He provides a succinct definition of
essentialism in identity which is similar to the one Lawrence Jarach
uses in his article âEssentialism and Identity Politics,â although I
find the Calhoun article to be better developed, much more precise, and
less loaded. He defines essentialism as the â[notion] that individual
persons can have singular, integral, altogether harmonious and
unproblematic identities.â Further along:
Bosnian Muslim feminists and other advocates of Bosnian women faced in
1993 a horrific version of the way nationalism and gender can collide.
Serbian men raped thousands of Bosnian women [...]. This was a
specifically gendered violation equally specifically deployed against a
nationally defined group. Yet Bosnian men added to the calamity by
treating the women who were raped as defiled and impure. They were
defiled not only in the general sexist discourse of female purity, but
in a specifically nationalist discourse in which they had been inscribed
in proper roles as daughters, wives and mothers. To think of themselves
as either women rather than Bosnian Muslims or Bosnian Muslims rather
than women made no sense. They were raped because they were both, and to
condemn the Bosnian Muslim culture equally with the Serbian project of
ethnic cleansing (as some American feminists have done) is to condemn
those very women. Yet the obvious claim to be both women and Bosnian
Muslims was available only as a political project (however implicit) to
refigure the discourses of gender, religion and nation within which
their identities were inscribed and on the bases of which their bodies
and their honor alike were violated.
[...] But the puzzles lie not just in invocations of strong collective
identity claims. They lie also in the extent to which people [...] are
not moved by any strong claims of identity â or communality â with
others and respond instead to individualistic appeals to
self-realization. Moreover, these two are not altogether mutually
exclusive in practice. The same unwillingness to work in complex
struggles for social transformation may lie behind both a preference for
individualistic, psychologistic solutions to problems and a tendency to
accept the illusory solutions offered by strong, simplistic identity
claims on behalf of nations, races and other putatively undifferentiated
categories. [1]
How can emphasizing collective identities actually be helpful in an
anarchist struggle? I can think of plenty of examples. Hereâs a good
one. One of my best friends in the place where I live now was, when I
met her, a lesbian separatist feminist. She is an anarchist and we had
plenty of affinity, but in the majority of her political projects and
personal relationships she chose to only have contact with other women.
She lived in a women-only house, worked with a women-only self-defense
group as well as a couple women-only political collectives, and she only
had romantic relationships with women. She chose this strategy because
of her personal experience with sexual and sexist violence, because it
seemed to her that only women really understood and could support her in
these experiences, because she notices a different dynamic in these
women-only groups that feels safer and also more enabling of effective
communication and action, and because sheâs sick of always having to
justify her experiences or argue with men and with anti-feminist women
that the sexist violence experienced by her and her friends actually
exists.
It would be arrogant to tell her that these experiences are invalid, and
moreover, her effectiveness as an anarchist seems to validate her
strategy. From what I have seen, she has made important contributions to
the struggle against sexism that include direct action against rapists,
counterinformation, and participation in theoretical debates that most
anarchists here have deemed important, regardless of what side they
take. And she has made important contributions to the anarchist
movement, beyond its feminist aspects. Of course I canât say what these
have been, but I would wager that nearly all anarchists, regardless of
how they feel about so-called identity politics, would find her work to
be worthwhile and even impressive. And the base for much of this work is
the safe space she has created for herself in women-only groups.
The whole time I have known her, she never imposed an identity on me or
made me feel devalued or excluded. All it took was for me to listen to
her, accept her experiences as valid, and respect her choices regarding
whom she wanted to work with and when, even if it meant that sometimes
she didnât want to work with me, not so much because of my gender, but
because of her gender experiences. As a Catalan anarchist pointed out,
separatism is only separatism if we accept the authority that bound the
two together in the first place. Otherwise, itâs voluntary association.
This constitutes one of several stories I am familiar with that
contradict the hypothesis that anarchist strategies emphasizing identity
will divide the struggle or recreate oppression. But this example is
especially interesting because this friend of mine is no longer a
lesbian separatist. She now works in mixed groups and has relations with
boys. She does not reject her old strategy, she has just moved beyond
it. It was a necessary part of her process. Other anarcha-feminists here
remain more permanently in that mode of action and although we have less
common ground to struggle together, I respect that they are doing
important work, which I can see, as just one example, by how much they
helped my friend. For me to set some sort of timetable for them, to
demand that they pass through separatism as a phase, would be the height
of arrogance. As long as I respect their work and they respect mine, the
struggle is not divided. The division occurs when we invalidate the
struggle of people who have chosen to focus on a different part of the
system.
What I wish all those snooty bastards who tout the term âidentity
politicsâ would understand is that anarchist theories and practices
exist to serve our needs. This is not to say that anything goes, that
Iâm okay and youâre okay, but that the basis for our criticisms should
be how well our practices serve us in our struggle for liberation rather
than how well our practices fit a clear blueprint derived from a pure
anarchist ideology. Yet so often I hear the formula: anarchism is
opposed to involuntary categories, so organizing as women or as people
of color or reinforcing those categories in any way is contrary to
anarchism. This reminds me of debating pacifists. âWe want a peaceful
world, so you canât use violence to get there.â
Not only are there many examples of struggles that are aided by the
development or defense of identity, I would argue that the rejection of
identity implicit in a rejection of political contestations of identity
is a throwback to times when social struggles willingly adopted
institutional forms â to when the anarchist movement hadnât yet learned
what anarchism really was. A rejection of identity differentiation and
the concomitant homogeneity of an implicit identity (whether that be
âthe exploitedâ or âthe workersâ) makes more sense within the âone big
unionâ form of organizing that has largely been retired by the struggle,
than it does within the networks that are more common today. A
fundamental feature of networks as I understand them is the autonomy of
their constituent parts, and this autonomy and the ability of distinct
parts to recognize and relate to one another is developed precisely in
the continuous project of identity formation.
Yes, identity can be misused. So can culture, or individuality.
Rejecting identity is revealed to be as absurd as rejecting culture or
individuality when we recognize that forming identities is a part of
being human. What we should reject is borders, purity, and control
within the formation of identities.
It is not enough to dismiss racism and sexism. Yes, race and gender are
socially constructed, but that does not make them any less real
(moreover gender arguably has not been oppressive in every society in
which it has existed). Racism and sexism require specific attention and
prolonged struggle in order to be destroyed, just the same as how
capital is a social construct, yet capitalism will not be destroyed
without specific attention and prolonged struggle. In a criticism of
sexism within the movement there, a Greek insurrectionist, who was also
an anarchist and a feminist, said that freedom is not theoretical, it is
practical. Freedom exists not on being declared but when we figure out
how to make it work on the ground, and when we fight for it. I agree
wholeheartedly: this is the difference between the liberal notion of
freedom and the anarchist one.
In working out these practical details we will start from our own
experiences and we will develop our own strategies. But anarchy can only
benefit from a diversity of experiences and strategies.
practice
Many folks who were learning how to be good anarchists between 2000â2005
on the East Coast were influenced by what Iâm going to call an
âanti-oppression practice.â The phenomenon is broader than this; Iâm
simply speaking from experience. The term is not precise, and I want to
keep it that way, so no one feels pigeon-holed, and so everyone can
consider whether these criticisms apply to them or not; and at the same
time so no one can ignore these criticisms if they do not fit within the
precisely defined target.
An anti-oppression practice posits a list of different forms of
oppression at work in society on a macro and micro level, that reproduce
themselves through socialization at the micro level and through
continuing political and economic restructuration carried out by elite
institutions at the macro level. This practice has cultivated a number
of strengths in the anarchists who passed through it â an awareness of
oneâs socialization, a sensitivity to situations and group power
dynamics, the challenging of traditional identities, an abandonment of
the monolithic politics of the now extinct revolutionary Left, which
could not fathom forms of oppression that were not primarily economic.
But anti-oppression politics, though not homogenous, has a number of
common weaknesses built into it thanks to the academic culture out of
which it largely grew; the guilt, blame, and victimization that run
especially intense in the Anglo-Saxon colonial society of the US; and
the leftism and reformism of many formulators of this practice with whom
anti-oppression anarchists uncritically allied themselves. I think the
practice has blocked off its own path to revolution, and needs to be
junked. A few key parts can be salvaged. The rest should be left to the
desert.
The second lesson new acolytes learn in an anti-oppression practice is
that feeling guilty for privilege is also âfucked up.â The Calvinists
couldnât have done it better. Guilt is intentionally built into
anti-oppression politics, firmly rooted in its syllabus. Anyone who has
a heart is going to feel guilty when they are assigned the label of
âprivileged,â when they are pressured to acknowledge that âall white
people are racistâ or âall men are sexistâ (both of these statements are
tenets of anti-oppression politics). Dogmatically insisting that guilt
on the part of privileged people is unhelpful and burdensome for
oppressed people only ensures that their guilt is permanent and
self-perpetuating, because there are no tools in this toolbox for
righting the wrongs that are the source of the guilt; only for
acknowledging them. It is an original sin practitioners are powerless to
change.
Quickly, a division becomes apparent in the mobilization of guilt within
an anti-oppression practice. Because of the laundry list of oppressions
that require equal consideration, nearly every individual is privileged
in some way, and oppressed in others. However, anti-oppression activists
refuse to use âprivilegeâ and âoppressâ as situational verbs, with the
obvious connotation that these are things imposed by a larger social
structure. Instead, the commonly upheld norm is to use these terms as
labels that inhere to individuals and qualify who they are. This means
that most individuals can choose what is, according to the theory, not
something we have an ability to choose: which category we belong to.
Theoretically this comes with an awareness of an intersectionality of
different oppressions, but in practice people end up identifying and
being identified with one camp or the other. Skin color tends to be the
prime determinant in whether someone can get away with identifying as
privileged or oppressed.
Because revolution or âsocial changeâ is reformulated as working against
oppression, and because âthose most directly affected by an oppression
must lead their own struggleâ (another common tenet), people in the
oppressed category become the primary agents of social change. A system
of rewards develops to encourage compliance with this practice.
Privileged people gain power and legitimacy by being allies to oppressed
people. It is conceded that privileged people are also negatively
affected by the system, but the appropriate response to their privilege
is to educate themselves and call one another out on all the ways they
are tied to and benefit from the system at the expense of others. (A
friend of mine aptly calls this a zero sum economy of power). Privileged
people who forcefully struggle against oppressive institutions are
frequently called back into line for trying to lead other peopleâs
struggles, or endangering those who are more oppressed. In other words,
their major opportunity for struggle as something other than
self-improvement is as an ally in the struggles of others.
Here we see another contradiction; tokenization and paternalism are on
any list of âfucked upâ behaviors in an anti-oppression practice, thus
the practice protects itself from open complicity with the very problems
it creates. Human agency is a fundamental component of freedom, perhaps
the most important one; therefore if someone is denied agency in their
own struggle because the most legit thing they can do is be an ally to
someone elseâs struggle, it is inevitable that they will exercise their
agency in the course of supporting a struggle they view as someone
elseâs. To do so, they will either look for any oppressed person who
supports a form of struggle they feel inclined towards, and use them as
a legitimating façade, or they will try to participate fully and affect
the course of a broader campaign or coalition in which they are
pretending to be mere allies. In other words, by presenting privilege as
a good thing, anti-oppression politics creates privileged people who
have nothing to fight for and inevitably tokenize or paternalize those
whose struggles are deemed (more) legitimate.
White men within the anti-oppression practice gain legitimacy and
influence by appearing hyper-sensitive and self-flagellating, and by
visibly acknowledging their privilege. Because this inevitably creates
guilt, and guilt is a crippling emotion, those white men who will be
most effective as anti-oppression activists will be those who are least
affected by their shows of guilt, in other words, the least sincere.
White women, or others who generally have to identify as privileged but
also visibly belong to some oppressed category, remain effective by
shifting guilt up the pyramid. A frequent formulation is to acknowledge
white privilege, but consistently talk about âwhite menâ as the creators
of patriarchy and white supremacy, as though men of color or white women
were powerless and uncompliant in these respective processes.
Those fully in the oppressed category face another power dynamic within
the political space of anti-oppression activism. They either have to put
up with allies like these, and, frustrated by the constant hypocrisy
that they help perpetuate by ascribing to the political values of
anti-oppression activism, face the choice of walling themselves off from
those who are supposed to be their comrades or wasting all their time
educating them out of contradictions that arenât going away.
Or, they are there because they specifically want allies like these, and
want the forms of political power that accumulate to those who are
categorized as oppressed within this practice. While I think most people
who choose anti-oppression politics are sincere and do a lot of good,
there can be no doubt that that political space attracts politicians who
thrive on the power plays and office politics that infest
anti-oppression groupings, organizations, and affiliated NGOs. Friends
of mine who chose to work with respected organizations led by oppressed
people have experienced such an extreme degree of manipulation and
mindfucking that I find it completely fair to say that the leaders of
those particular organizations, which I wonât name, were not
revolutionaries, but careerists.
As a generalization, anti-oppression politics primarily sees individuals
as a node of intersecting oppressions, each of which generate common
experiences among their subjects. The result is the sometimes implicit,
sometimes explicit assumption that oneâs place in the hierarchy
(differently abled queer female-bodied latina) can tell you more about
them and their history than any individual differences. Some
anti-oppression activists are more gung-ho than others in this
minimization of personal experience, but I would argue that those who
are less gung-ho and more sensitive are in fact more hypocritical or
inconsistent, as such a minimization of the individual is an inevitable
product of an analysis that foregrounds oneâs position in hierarchies of
privilege and oppression.
I think this fact is not unrelated to the embarrassing, one might even
say harmful, delay before anti-oppression activists acknowledged how
frequently people socialized as men have experienced sexual violence. In
fact, the denial of trauma with which men are socialized proved to be
quite at home in anti-oppression politics precisely because those
politics reinforced that socialization by encouraging men who have been
intimately harmed by our society to view themselves as extraordinarily
privileged by it and complicit in it.
In other words, by emphasizing how certain people are privileged, this
practice has in some ways perpetuated rather than undermined a personal
identification with the system, and prevented struggle against it, in
the rubric of self-improvement or taking personal responsibility, an
ethic that has already proven its counterrevolutionary effectiveness
when in the hands of the Christians.
I think awareness of history and socialization is critically important.
But the set of nuances and emphases that anti-oppression activists
choose encourages personal identification with systems of oppression
rather than mutiny, in the case of those in the privileged box, and
victimization by systems of oppression that are perpetuated by allies as
much as by enemies, in the case of those in the oppressed box.
By putting interpersonal or micro power-dynamics on par with structural
or macro power-dynamics, these activists may be training themselves in
weakness and victimization. I think it is necessary to understand how
these behaviours filter upwards and downwards, but without making any
facile equivalence between above and below. An individual who echoes
oppressive behaviours he has been trained in shares very little in
common with an institution that can both generate, model, and evolve
those behaviours. Emphasizing that commonality can be useful, with an
indispensable caveat, in understanding how the system works, but if we
place our new understanding in a revolutionary framework â with the
desire to actually abolish these institutions â then this knowledge
points directly to the strategic necessity to undermine and sever this
commonality or identification with power, not to reinforce it.
The caveat is this: I think an honest, critical look at how power and
socialization work in this society makes it undeniable that, except in
the case of armed colonization or chattel slavery, oppressed people and
privileged people are equally tied into and socialized to identify with
the functioning of the system, even though their median experiences as
groups are vastly different. Oppressed people are not more outside of or
less complicit in the present system â they simply face a different,
more frequently violent set of inducements to participate. In other
words, as an accurate generalization lesbians, gays, and women help
perpetuate and identify with patriarchy; and people of color (with the
possible exception of peoples still fighting against colonization) help
perpetuate white supremacist capitalism. I hope this statement does not
come off as insensitive to people whose struggles I respect. I could
quote the many radical women or people of color who have argued the
exact same thing, but this time I want to say it with my own voice,
because it is a truth that is evident to my own eyes, too.
To return to the question of micro power-dynamics, by equating them to
macro power-dynamics we acknowledge their prevalence but exaggerate
their strength. If we view oppressive/privileged socialization as
determinant, as extremely powerful over who we are, we risk making a
mountain out of a mole hill. True, a person who enacts oppressive
behaviours is perpetuating the same power dynamics as institutions like
the media or the police, but by creating an equivalence we blind
ourselves to the fact that we are strong enough to confront this person;
in fact this should be relatively easy. We are currently not strong
enough to overcome the media or the police in the day to day, except for
a few fortuitous engagements, and it is this fact, this real â not
imagined â weakness, that must illuminate the path of struggle ahead:
how to build the collective force we need to attack and defeat these
power structures. This struggle does not come at the expense of
understanding interpersonal dynamics and relationships. In fact, fuck
that dichotomy entirely. There is no inside and outside. There is
building healthy, caring relationships, solid alliances, and networks of
complicity and mutiny as we wage war against a social system we could
not identify with in the least, because it is impossibly far away from
who we want to be.
Looking at socialization with the old set of nuances, as a privileged
person, the conclusion is that the system privileges us, it has trained
us, and this will be the case for the rest of our natural lives. Someone
who says she doesnât want to be privileged anymore is simply smiled at
and told to read the next few books on the reading list. I personally
have no use for any theory or practice that leaves out human agency,
because powerlessness is always a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I admire those who work with non-anarchists and participate in
non-homogenous campaigns and struggles even though they donât agree with
everyone else participating. But I think we all need to fiercely reject
the Ally as a primary identity of struggle. You cannot give solidarity
if you are not struggling first and foremost for your own reasons. To be
only or primarily an ally is to be a parasite on othersâ struggles, with
no hope greater than to be a benign parasite; it is to refuse to
acknowledge our interests and place in the world out of a dogmatic
insistence on identifying ourselves with the system we are supposed to
be fighting. Being aware of relative oppression and privilege is vital,
but emphasizing those differences over the fact that all of us have
common enemies and all of us have reasons to destroy the entire system
is deliberately missing opportunities to make ourselves stronger in this
fight.
Many partisans of an anti-oppression practice, including people I
respect, have simply stopped talking about revolution, and frequently no
longer identify as anarchists, at least ânot openly.â They often
characterize those who do as naĂŻve, privileged, isolated, sheltered from
the consequences of ârealâ revolutionary struggle. So talking about
privilege has come, in many cases, into direct conflict with talking
about revolution. What are the implications of this? Would this be an
appropriate time to bring up that Nietzsche quote about staring into the
abyss?
A frequent justification I have heard is that anarchism has no currency
in their broader communities, and that so many anarchists they know are
privileged and empty-headed. This reasoning baffles me. If you come to
believe in total freedom, why would you abandon one of the only
theoretical and practical frameworks that espouses total freedom, just
because so many others donât live up to the ideal?
If youâre for real, you donât abandon the ideal to the hypocrites, you
call out the hypocrisy. (Speaking of hypocrisy, in my experience most of
the people who back off from anarchy for this reason still use the term
âdemocracyâ in a good way, even though way more proponents of democracy
are bastards than anarchists who are bastards. Evidently theyâre more
comfortable associating themselves with good politicians than with bad
revolutionaries.)
I think in many cases the true reason for this disavowal is fear of
failure, lack of confidence in oneâs own ideas, the need for affirmation
through working with those who are more oppressed and whose experiences
thus seem more real. The feeling of sophistication built into
anti-oppression politics is an effective shield against self-criticism.
One can give up hope in the struggle, which is a painful thing to carry
around, without having to admit to personal weakness or failure, by
clinging on to and supporting struggles carried out by people who one
sees, in a hyper-alienated way, as more real.
Itâs true enough that outside of certain cultural groups, not many
people in struggle identify as anarchists. However, those who insist on
being allies tend overwhelmingly to ally only with a certain portion of
those others who struggle: the portion that is most recognizable to an
activist practice. Gangs and prison rebels are usually ignored, while
leftist organizations and NGOs need never go wanting for volunteers. In
other words, while justifying this disavowal of or distancing from
anarchy on the grounds of leaving comfort zones, this is exactly what
many anti-oppression activists refuse to do. After all, visible activist
organizations are the easiest form of resistance in oppressed
communities for activists with college degreees to find.
The fact that the job of these reformist allies is to recuperate
resistance leads to interesting contradictions. When black youth in
Oakland rioted a few days after the killing of Oscar Grant, aided and
encouraged by an embarrassingly small number of anarchists (black and
white), the professional activists in the black community working
explicitly for the forces of order denounced the uprising as the work of
outside white anarchists. It was these black leaders who were being
racist, by silencing and erasing the black anarchists who helped kick
things off, and portraying the black youth as misguided sheep
manipulated by white people. By extension, the anti-oppression activists
who took up this rallying call for retreat were complicit in this racist
operation. Concerned with appearances and lacking confidence in their
own political analysis, they latched on to the most visible figureheads
from the black community (who, considering we live in a media-driven
society, were the most reformist) and parroted their line. The media,
perceptive to the effectiveness of this tactic, adopted it to preempt
riots when the verdict of Oscar Grantâs killer was announced, using
guilt-laden language to portray all the potential rioters as anarchists,
and all the anarchists as white outsiders. It worked. In order to be
good allies, many white anarchists in the Bay stayed home during the
riots.
By privileging someoneâs skin color over an affinity with their
political analysis when choosing alliances, anarchists are more likely
to defend racism rather than to challenge it, because at this point most
people, regardless of their color, have been trained to behave in a way
that perpetuates the system.
I am not heading towards the insulting and insensitive conclusion some
proponents of social war have made when I say that American anarchists
are those who talk most about trauma, and are also the most traumatized.
Letâs not go back to the days of stoic, emotionless revolutionary
sacrifice. But letâs also not ignore the massive failure represented by
our trauma. Talking about it, in the way weâve been talking about it,
just isnât working.
A friend of mine hit the nail on the head when she said, âto heal from
trauma, you need to feel empowered.â The US anarchist movement exists
within one of the most disempowered political cultures in the world. It
would be nothing less than a narcissistic vanity of that very political
culture to suggest the all-too-common explanation that the State, the
Spectacle, is simply stronger in this country, and society simply
weaker. In fact, the forces of order are only stronger here because
weâve been losing for so long, and that losing streak has long since
manifested as analysis, as practice.
Seeing our socialization as more powerful than our wills leads to a
number of errors. The first is the belief in a pure body that exists
before socialization and has been irrevocably imprinted. In fact there
is no body without history, without relationships, with imprints from
society. Because the body is not and cannot be on a trajectory ideally
towards, and therefore practically away from, perfection, but is already
imperfected, oppressive socialization becomes just one stain among many,
and we as persons become mosaics of scars that, in sum, are really quite
beautiful, and hella tough.
My privileged position in society notwithstanding, Iâve had more than
theoretical encounters with trauma, and Iâve found that I healed best
when I did not identify with the trauma or make an identity out of it.
The most dramatic reversal of a traumatic event came when I used
violence against someone who had successfully victimized me. This
experience helped me to see that it is not blaming the victim, but
rather, good therapy, to focus on how disempowerment is something we
choose or reject, and how it can be reversed through our own personal
agency in a traumatic situation. Friends of mine who have also healed
from traumatic experiences have had similar observations.
One aspect of anti-oppression politics I find hardest to forgive is the
idea it has implicitly promoted that freedom is a fragile thing that we
create first in our own internal spaces. At a recent talk on identity
politics at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair, one of the presenters told
of a consent workshop at an activist or anarchist space. He said it was
a good, important workshop, but he was struck by how limited that safe
space was after they left, when a female-bodied friend was harassed and
threatened by a passing motorist as they walked away.
Freedom has to go armed. Our notion of freedom canât be something that
falls apart if every single person involved does not follow perfected
norms of consent. Such a notion, more than any of our fashions or
specialized vocabulary, will imprison us in a political ghetto. By
trying to banish sexism and heterosexism on the micro level, by
perfecting behaviours and norms in our circles of friends, we have made
ourselves incapable of actually engaging with and transforming those
behaviours and norms outside of our cliques, and we make it increasingly
difficult for outsiders to come in, or for allies to work with us. What
we are left with are a series of fortresses, that are no less plagued by
gender violence for all our emphasis on new rules and processes, in
which we can either hide, fearing the days when we have to deal with
outsiders who will assign us to a gender category we donât fit in, or
from which we can make violent forays, a lĂĄ Bash Back, to assault the
fortresses of the normal.
I want to mention that I love the theoretical and tactical developments
represented by Bash Back; however one of their possible future
trajectories is a detente, a war of attrition, in which the bitterness
of surrender is blunted with the sweetness of vengeful attacks directed
from an ideally oppression-free internal space that can never expand or
explode to include all of society in a revolutionary way. A militant
refusal to be assimilated, an inability to sabotage assimilation in the
rest of society, an admirable dedication to the contiunation of this
contradiction through attacks on church services and gay businesses. I
bring up Bash Back because within it are those who are more closely
aligned with a practice of social war and those more closely aligned
with an anti-oppression practice, and so which future trajectory they
follow is undecided. It is not a question of specific tactics so much as
projectuality. If our actions can facilitate revolutionary social change
only if more and more people join the in-group we have created, we will
never win.
I first started to seriously doubt anti-oppression politics when I
witnessed what I realized was a typical response to criticism. Someone
from outside the movement was respectfully questioning whether there
werenât better ways to fight sexism than using gendered speakersâ lists
in meetings (ensuring that no more than half of those who speak are
men), and a white man well versed in anti-oppression rhetoric responded
dismissively and rudely, calling the skeptic a sexist and giving him a
list of recommended readings to study up on so he could understand
sexism better. âRead these first, then weâll talk,â was the tone of the
reply. In this covertly academic framework, someone from the outside
canât even properly be engaged with until they are brought up to the
appropriate level.
More recently, I witnessed a disgusting exchange that struck me and
other people as typical of other experiences weâd had. At the
aforementioned workshop at the Seattle bookfair, the presenters
explicitly stated, multiple times, that they think it is important to
fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression,
and that they see nothing wrong with people focusing on sexism, for
example, or coming together as queer people to fight against
heterosexism. However, they criticized a number of features of what they
labeled âidentity politics.â While they did not successfully clarify
what they meant by that, they gave precise criticisms of specific
analyses or paradigms during every step of their presentation.
Because they criticised the dominant paradigm for how to confront
oppression, the talk was highly controversial. Anti-oppression activists
who were there summarized the presentation thusly: âThey said focusing
on racism and sexism or things like that only gets in the way of the
struggle.â This is such an inaccurate representation, if I didnât know
the people responsible for it I would assume it was an intentional or
malicious lie. The only other possibility I can see is that the
orthodoxy of anti-oppression politics makes practitioners incapable of
hearing criticism without assuming that their critic is being
oppressive.
One area APOC member, capitalizing on a racist police shooting that
happened around then to foreground the importance of identity, attacked
the two presenters, whom he characterized as a white woman and a
half-latino man (thus undermining the latterâs status as a person of
color and thus reducing their legitimacy within the anti-oppression
paradigm, as part of the sadly common game, Darker Than Thou). It would
have been much easier if the two presenters had been white males, but
since they belonged to some oppressed categories (never mind their class
backgrounds), they had to be linked to white males in some other way in
order to ignore their actual critiques. So, these two were turned into
representatives of the anarchist group to which they supposedly
belonged. (Incidentally, its preference for representation was one of
the criticisms the two had of identity politics.)
That anarchist group, according to the APOCer, was comprised of majority
men and only one person of color (when in reality, the group doesnât
exist, but the circle or scene he was confusing it with includes
multiple people of color, multiple women, and no majorities). In other
words, to defend the orthodox form of anti-racism, this person had to
create the category half-latino, turn several people of color into white
people, and turn women comrades into a sort of silenced minority. From
his description, youâd think the white male majority of this
non-existent anarchist group had forced the powerless, oppressed members
of their group to publicly denounce identity politics so they could stop
thinking about privilege and get back to ruling the movement. In the
words of one of the workshop presenters, âI donât feel tokenized by the
white anarchists in [my city] but I do feel it from you in this
caricature you portray.â
An emphasis on micro dynamics can be helpful within the framework Iâm
about to elaborate, as an attentiveness to tactical details that can
facilitate or hinder our attacks on the system. But given how theyâre
nuanced by anti-oppression activists, micro dynamics become a laundry
list of behaviours that are oppressive, or incompatible with freedom,
which is to cast freedom as a pure state that is banished by impure
behaviours.
Within this framework for social change, the primary activity for
creating freedom is in fact suppression.
Because of this reliance on suppression and belief in the fragility of
freedom, women who talk loudly and donât want to be put on a stack,
donât want men to step back to make room for them, are called
âmanarchists.â Individual personalities disappear under categorical
generalizations, and such women are told they are simply adopting
masculine characteristics as a coping strategy. Not being oppressive is
boiled down to adopting a certain personality type that, perhaps, is not
so suited to revolutionary struggle: being soft spoken, having thin
skin, learning and following group norms, and submitting to group
process.
On the other hand I think building a culture of respect, solidarity, and
sensitivity is vital. In some ways, freedom exists more in the details
than in the abstract, and the details are different from one person to
the next. This is a truth that anti-oppression activists have helped to
foreground. I donât at all want talking about micro power dynamics to go
out of vogue, nor discussion of our socialization and our personal
experiences within social settings. But maybe we should base our idea of
freedom on an expectation of constant confrontation which we are strong
enough to deal with on our own and with friends, rather than on an
expectation of perfected norms that must be upheld by the entire group.
Freedom is not a fragile thing. It is also not lacking in discomfort or
conflict, but these unpleasantries are exactly what we need to grow
stronger, and strength is what we need to create and defend freedom.
To talk primarily about social war rather than about privilege and
oppression is to acknowledge that capitalism, the State, patriarchy â
all of these interconnected systems â constitute a war against all of
us, and each and every one of us have a reason to fight this system. Our
reasons and capabilities are not the same, so we will never have a
unified front. But we have the possibility to seek alliances with nearly
everyone else around us, to undermine the consent and participation this
system rests upon and shields itself with, and to attack its exposed
structures and symbols.
An analysis that focuses on privilege and oppression will encourage a
primary response, among oppressed people, that aims at challenging their
exclusion from the system more than their exploitation by it. Among
privileged people, the primary response is likely to be contemplative or
educational.
An analysis that foregrounds social war will encourage a primary
response of offensive or defensive action from oneâs unique position in
society, coupled with the seeking of subversive alliances. To start
with, this is a far more empowered and realistic practice, because each
of us are the primary agents in our own struggles, and each of us are
declaring we are strong enough to fight back. In order to be effective,
we have to acquaint ourselves intimately with the social terrain on
which we struggle, which will lead to a similar awareness of history,
socialization, and power dynamics, but without the guilt that
accompanies the anti-oppression practice.
We recognize that the system privileges some of us, but this is
something that is imposed, and something we reject, rather than
something we view as inhering to us for the rest of our lives. Hereâs an
important distinction: you fight something imposed on you. You take
responsibility for something that belongs to you. We did not create this
system, and from now on we do not accept its claims to us. Precisely
because privilege is not something voluntary, it is not something we can
simply dismiss, but we recognize this as a result of historical
struggles, and a tactical reality on the battlefield.
It is no coincidence that whiteness was created at a time of major
social revolts in Europe and anti-colonial revolts in the Americas, at a
time when the ruling class needed ever greater participation in its
project of domination. Neither is it a coincidence that patriarchy
experienced a qualitative leap forward in that era. Much like higher
wages, privileges of gender and skin color are in fact concessions that
have been won by past struggles, but like all concessions, they were
designed to weaken rebellion, in this case by dividing it and
encouraging greater portions of society to identify with their rulers.
But also like all concessions, they offer new possibilities if we refuse
to see them as a gift given to us, and instead view them as weapons we
have stolen.
People who are privileged by the system can feel guilty about this, or
we can use these privileges to attack the system. Those of us with white
skin donât face as much attention from the police or store security. We
could say, therefore, that itâs a privilege to shoplift. Or we could rob
those stores blind, sell the merch, and donate the proceeds to our own
struggles and the struggles of people who canât shoplift so easily. By
using privilege as a weapon rather than obsessing over it, we actually
undermine it, because stores that intentionally conduct racial profiling
or more passively give in to the common prejudices will be hurt
economically. If they shift surveillance to well dressed white shoppers,
then white privilege, which helps prevent rebellion, erodes a little.
By seeing race not as essential categories or forms of socialization we
have to own up to, but as counterrevolutionary alliances that never
succeed in negating our own agency, the Phoenix Class War Council
achieved a victory of a magnitude Iâve never seen come out of privilege
workshops. They approached white libertarians who generally remained
within right wing coalitions, and called on them to honor their own
principles by joining them in a protest against neo-nazis who were
capitalizing on anti-immigrant racism with a xenophobic rally. The
libertarians showed up, and helped drive the nazis out of town.
Subsequently, the Phoenix anarchists intervened again, and called on the
white libertarians to stand true to their opposition to big government
by joining them in a protest against the militarization of the borders,
which was also an immigrant solidarity protest. Many of them came out,
mutinying against the alliances of white supremacy. (One might argue
that this momentum was largely destroyed by the leftist Boycott Arizona
campaign, which had a watered down politics, was based on shaming and
guilt, and gave all Arizona citizens, i.e. from the nazis to the
libertarians, cause to unite).
With this different nuancing, being a good ally means fighting for your
own reasons, unapologetically, and familiarizing yourself with your
capabilities as compared with the capabilities of your allies, looking
for ways to acknowledge these differences but make them complementary.
Whatâs required, above all, is finding allies who actually share
affinity with you, while breaking up the alliances that protect the
system. This means working in broader campaigns, without a haughty and
insular disdain for âleftists,â but also without the dishonest and
hypocritical suppression of oneâs own political identity, oneâs own
reasons for struggling (which has become second nature for the hundreds
of anarchists who work in other peopleâs campaigns and parrot social
democratic rhetoric rather than openly expressing their own ideas and
radical critiques).
Too many anti-authoritarians serve as the supporters and shock troops
for reformist campaigns that can only humanize the prison system, the
borders, the War on Terror, when what we must do is speak openly about
the need to abolish these things, and look for ways that our
participation in these campaigns can open revolutionary paths rather
than following reformist dead-ends. If we donât have our own reasons for
hating the border, are we offering any more than charity by taking part
in a campaign to soften it? And what are we admitting about the depth of
our alliances when we donât talk openly about the need for a world with
no borders? How much do we truly respect the people we are working with
if weâre hiding our actual dreams and motivations from them?
Experience in other places has shown that by being an uncompromising
force, saying the things no one else would say, and militantly pushing
the envelope, after the initial conflicts and arguments other people
will come to appreciate anarchist solidarity because our presence gives
strength to a struggle, much the same way that most of Martin Luther
King. Jr.âs reformist victories can be chalked up to those who fought
more forcefully for something more radical.
In other words, the pragmatic arguments about the immediacy of human
suffering in certain struggles, and the need to approach those timidly,
fall short, because by silencing our radical critique, we ensure that
reformism and recuperation will maintain the problem indefinitely, and
by not manifesting a threatening force we ensure that the system will
have little motivation to decrease the human suffering in the short
term.
It deserves to be mentioned that one of the largest amnesties for
illegal immigrants in recent decades, that was not lobbied for by
business interests, happened in Greece, after anarchists and others
violently and uncompromisingly rose up against all aspects of the system
of domination, and immigrants took part in that uprising. Despite being
the most vulnerable or at risk, they were frequently the most violent
and reckless, once the humanitarian, reformist leadership who generally
mediated their rage was proven obsolete.
By coming out of the closet, anarchists can discover who our real allies
are. Among the leftists, we can distinguish the politicians from the
sincere ones, and we can set a tone of radical direct action that makes
it easier for people in more precarious positions to come out in support
of that approach. By speaking about the abolition of borders and prisons
and the State and creating a material force in society, with its
creative/supportive and negative/destructive aspects, we make those
radical ideas a real possibility and create an exit from the timeless
cycles of guilt, reform, recuperation, and identification with the very
system that makes living impossible for all of us.
Letâs pick a real life situation. A US city, a protest against the
police in the wake of yet another shooting. Among the small crowd,
thereâs a group of homeless youth, some anarchists in a black bloc, and
others. There are no politicians here, no counterrevolutionaries, just
various people with differing reasons to participate, all of them
sincere. Many of the people donât know one another, however; itâs
something like the coincidence of separate islands, and when they go
their separate ways, few if anyone has met a stranger or made a new
friend.
At one point, someone tries to pull at least two of the homeless youth
into the street, where the black bloc are blocking traffic. Many if not
most of the people do not notice this incident. This upsets the homeless
youth, as they have decided to stay on the sidewalks for their own
safety; they have no shortage of opportunities to confront the police.
Despite this show of disrespect, at the end of the protest they talk
about having had an overwhelmingly positive experience standing up to
the police and starting long-lasting conversations about police
violence.
Later, an argument develops between anarchists or anti-authoritarians,
some of whom who identify more closely with a practice of identity
politics or anti-oppression, others who identify more closely with a
practice of insurrection or social war. The same old arguments come out.
âThe black bloc tried to force people into the streets, they endangered
people with their tactics.â âThey were being fucked up.â âTheyâre just
privileged,â âstraight white menâ etc. Even though not the black bloc
but one person was involved in pulling, and the black bloc was neither
all white nor all male, and possibly did not include any straight people
at all. And even though some people who later made these arguments saw
the pulling going on and didnât intervene, they just blamed others for
it.
And on the other side: âI call bullshit,â âthatâs just identity
politics,â âtheyâre just trying to pacify our response,â âthey claimed
the black bloc was endangering people just by taking the streets,â even
though it wasnât about taking the streets but someone trying to force
others to do so, and someone within their friendship circle reported
hearing about the pulling incident directly from the mouths of two of
the homeless youth.
Two well known games make communication impossible: the privilege game,
and the more-militant-than-thou game. In the first, any unorthodox idea
about how to confront oppression is said to be a product of privilege,
and an attempt to preserve oppressive dynamics. In the second, any
criticism of a militant or illegal action is said to be a move towards
reformism and pacification.
It seems clear that these boxes and arguments exist primarily to rescue
us from complicated situations: confronting disrespectful behaviours
rather than just denouncing them, or feeling judged by those carrying
out more risky actions, on the one hand; and on the other, taking
criticisms seriously and humbly, and understanding and supporting other
peopleâs tactics.
I think everyone is tired of the dichotomy between negation and
creation. Itâs clichĂ© for anti-authoritarians these days to admit that
we need to tear some shit down and build other stuff up. Weâre not all
on the same page, and thereâs still worthwhile debates to be had around
nihilism; the idea of alternatives, blueprints, and processes versus
communes, visions, and capacities; but hopefully we can all see that
there are plenty of people on the other side of these debates who, even
if they are making a real strategic mistake, are struggling sincerely
and have their hearts in the same place as ours, which is often more
important, because itâs much easier to see a strategic mistake than to
actually be right about it; therefore excommunicating everyone we
believe to be guilty of strategic mistakes is more likely to result in
hyper-fragmented sectarianism than in good, effective strategies put
into practice.
It should also be easy to see that so much of these arguments is a
question of temperament. Some people prefer acts of creation, healing,
and support; others prefer acts of negation, destruction, and attack.
This is great, because we need it all.
So what would real solidarity, and a real diversity of tactics look
like? The first step is to abolish any hierarchy of tactics. The riskier
and more exciting tactics are not the most important ones, and not the
only ones deserving direct support.
Weâve had to put up with authoritarian, reformist pacifists controlling
protest marches for so long, that it becomes easy to view a protest
march or some other manifestation of a social movement as just a tool, a
cover to get our riot on. But we have no hope of subverting the control
of the institutionalized Left and forming real relationships of
solidarity with a broad network of people in struggle if we hold on to
this arrogant, utilitarian view.
In the protest I mention above, not only the black bloc but all the
people present deserved direct support for the type of involvement they
chose. The less militant were not simply the bottom of a pyramid holding
up the more militant. As someone who works at a drop-in center with
those homeless youth put it, for some people present it was
revolutionary to take the streets or attack the police; and for the
homeless youth it was revolutionary to take a public stand against the
police and yell at them, because of how different this power dynamic is
from their everyday experience. Risk is different for every person
involved, based on their standing in various social hierarchies.
Oppressed people are not fragile, vulnerable, or unable to participate
in dangerous, violent resistance, as many spokespeople of
anti-oppression politics have claimed, again and again, implicitly and
explicitly. However, different people do face different choices in the
exact same situations, and we all need to be aware of that.
I want to go back to the idea that it was ârevolutionaryâ for those
folks to simply yell at the police. This is true insofar as it gives
them a sense of their own power. Many people might scoff at the limited
scope of this ârevolutionaryâ victory, but we should consider that riots
are often claimed as minor victories on the basis of how they make
people feel. This should not be underestimated: if we feel weak and
demoralized, we will never win.
No single tactic should ever be expected, on repetition, to lead to
revolution. Every successful tactic simply opens new doors, that require
other tactics in order to walk through. Homeless kids yelling at the
police undoubtedly open a door that leads in the right direction. Being
able to fight the police and beat them in the streets is a subsequent
door through which all revolutionary struggles must be able to pass. The
simple act of yelling at police can be claimed as revolutionary, but
only if we are willing to build off of what is won and look for the next
steps that lead to a social transformation that actually deserves the
name ârevolution.â
Those who are participating in less combative forms of struggle can help
end this divide by more vocally supporting combative actions. Repression
works by dividing the struggle, and those who focus on more creative or
short-term organizing often help this process of isolation occur. On the
other hand, those who focus on the more destructive side of the struggle
often ensure their own isolation by disrespecting the work of their
potential allies.
The work of supporting prisoners, supporting other people in struggle,
communicating and building relationships with other groups, and making
anarchist critiques and projects visible is as important and as heroic
as sabotage and street fights. Insurrections themselves consist of all
of these, not just the latter, more obvious acts.
People who work in the community can help build a real culture of
struggle if they do not fall into the trap of pragmatism, if they risk
frightening some potential allies by vocally and visibly valuing
revolutionary struggles. People who fight in the streets can undermine
alienation by building relationships with those who do not participate
in such forms of struggle, and by more vocally appreciating and honoring
support work and creative forms of struggle. And those who feel inclined
can engage in both creative and destructive forms of struggle, erasing a
line that should never have been drawn.
With all this in mind, here are some suggestions for developing real
solidarity:
you, in what ways it tries to buy you off, and how other people around
you may face a different situation.
goals, and be upfront about those goals.
that induce privileged people to be loyal to the system.
people in struggle who have less access.
Â
[1] Craig Calhoun (1994), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity,
p.13, pp.28â29. The Jarach article I refer to is âEssentialism and
Identity Politicsâ in Anarchy 26 Magazine no.58, 2004.