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Title: Affinity Identity Tactics Author: Bonfire Collective Date: 2018 Language: en Topics: affinity, affinity groups, identity, tactics, diversity of tactics, organizing, the left, identity politics
When movements for social and political change gather to work together,
there are always three essential elements that movements should keep in
mind: Affinity, Identity, and Tactics. Affinity refers to your political
goals, that is, your vision of a what a good society looks like.
Communism, anarchism, and mainstream liberalism are all different
Affinities with different political projects. Identity is created by
your position in your society, and is made up of facts about you that
affect your experience of life. Your race, gender, (dis)ability, and
socioeconomic status are all parts of your Identity in a political
sense. Tactics are the methods that you are willing to use to bring
about the political goals set by your Affinity. Boycotts, public
educational campaigns, voting in elections, and black bloc are all
Tactics. Planning successful political campaigns and actions requires
that we pay attention to all three of these elements without leaving any
of them out. How and why should we address each one?
Do you want to live in a society in which everyone can get medical care
without having to worry about whether they will go bankrupt? What about
a society in which police aren’t just another kind of predator? A
society that seriously works protect the future of this planet and the
beings that inhabit it? Your answers to these questions and others like
them define your Affinity. As people learn more about the history and
current reality of movements, they tend to define their Affinity more
precisely and start to use words like “anarchist” and “socialist” to
refer to themselves and their comrades. Sometimes we combine terms to
emphasize what we think is important, such as “eco-socialist” or
“anarcho-communist.” We choose these Affinities because we share the
goals of larger movements. Consider some choices of Affinity within the
Left:
If you oppose capitalism but not the State, then your Affinity is
authoritarian communism. If you believe that the State can limit the
worst parts of capitalism and that both can coexist in a reformed
version of our current society, then you are a liberal. If you oppose
both capitalism and the State, then you are an anarchist. These are just
some of the choices of Affinity available to you. While activism can
work by just being reactive, that is, by seeing that some problem needs
fixing and working on it together, it is hard to broaden and sustain our
movements without a clear idea of where we are going together. For
example, if we are working together to fight the spread of dangerous
opiates around our community, will it be a good solution for the local
police to promise to arrest more people who sell drugs? An activist
group built entirely around “solving” this problem will likely split on
this issue. Liberals and authoritarian communists may be satisfied,
while anarchists will not be, because anarchists believe that police
don’t solve problems at their root. Understanding the big picture of
what you and others in your group believe will help you explain your
disagreements, find common ground, and reject inadequate solutions.
We want to see the big picture, not just the little issues. If you
haven’t yet, begin the work to understand your Affinity. Read about
diverse political movements, follow politically active people on
Twitter, watch historical documentaries and go to university lectures.
Revolutionary Left Radio is a podcast with a big archive of people
having smart conversations about their political Affinity. Remember that
the Left has more commonalities than differences, but that the
differences are still very important. Most people change their Affinity
as they learn more, and that’s alright too. Political traditions offer
rich lessons, ideas, and inspiration. The work and sacrifice of others
in the struggle for justice was meant to nourish us, and when we
understand our political beliefs, it does.
Our Identities are produced by the interaction of individuals with
positive and negative aspects of our society. In society, individuals
are seen as members of groups, and this group membership affects us
whether or not we want it to or not. Privileges flow from being seen as
part of a dominant group (Whites, men, colonizers, wealthy, first-world,
citizen, straight, cisgender) and oppression flows from being a member
of an oppressed group (people of color, women, colonized, poor,
third-world, undocumented, queer, transgender). Experiences of
solidarity within identity groups come from shared worldviews,
literature, art, and history, and are not reducible to shared
experiences of oppression and hardship. This is true of the solidarity
of people of color, queer folks, women, and other identity groups.
People with privileged identities, such as men, white people, and
middle-class and rich people are also members of identity groups, even
if they do not feel solidarity with other members of those groups.
Consider the negative and positive experiences of being a person with a
disability. On one hand, the life of a person with a physical disability
may be negatively defined by the way in which buildings are
constructed - there are social spaces that cannot be entered, extra
assistance that may be needed from other people, and forms of
discrimination faced in seeking work. On the other hand, physically
disabled people form communities based on their shared experiences and
have positive experiences of solidarity - there is a deaf community, a
physically disabled community, and non-neurotypical community. This
mixture of positive and negative experiences creates the common ground
needed for communities to form, and these communities become Identity
groups.
Because culture comes from close social interaction between people in
group settings, it shouldn’t be surprising that people who belong to
identity groups have specific knowledge that comes from their community.
People with hearing really don’t know the daily reality of what it is
like to be deaf. White people really don’t know the daily reality of
what it is like to be Black. Especially relevant for political
organizing is knowledge about how a group’s social position has affected
their struggles for freedom and self-determination within dominant
cultures. Oppressed people often know more about how their community has
been affected by police, laws, corporations, and powerful individuals.
Although it is possible for outsiders to learn about these things
through patient study, it is still very hard to see the big picture from
the perspective of the insiders.
There is a misconception among some Leftist circles that all “identity
politics” is counterproductive and doomed to fail because it emphasizes
difference over shared interests. Our view is that identity-based
movements have historically succeeded or failed by virtue of how clearly
they send also messages about Affinity and Tactics. In identity
movements these messages are often recoded into specific and relevant
terms, such as the disability-rights slogans “You do not exist to be
used” and “Nothing about us, without us” - messages which point to
anticapitalism and representation. Although Identity movements are not
always Left-aligned, historically most have been, and the work they have
accomplished has significantly advanced the goals of the Left at large.
Tactics are the methods by which we strive to achieve our political
goals. Mainstream Tactics include running political candidates, voting,
signing petitions, media appearances, and the occasional well-mannered
demonstration. More radical political Tactics include highjacking time
and space on mainstream media, closing down essential services like
airports and highways, attacking dangerous enemy politicians, hacking
and exposing incriminating information about opponents, or destroying
property for symbolic or practical reasons. When Tactics include
intervening directly to stop an objectionable event or to alleviate an
evil, these Tactics are known as “direct action.” Direct Actions include
personally feeding the hungry or destroying the offices of a military
recruiter.
When choosing Tactics, consider the three R’s: reward, risk, and reach.
The rewards for using a particular Tactic should be clear. For example,
publicizing personally embarrassing information about a political
opponent has the obvious reward of damaging his reputation and making
his job a little harder. At the same time, you should do everything you
reasonably can to reduce the risks of your actions. While some older
activists still seem to think that getting mass- arrested to “overload
the system” is a good tactic, the criminal punishment system has grown
so much in recent years that it can handle mass arrests without
difficulty. When you plan to get arrested, you risk thousands of dollars
that will have to be raised by you and your community for your defense -
all of which will go to rich lawyers or to the State. Even if you end up
being released quickly, the police will use the opportunity of having
you custody to fingerprint you, document who you were with, search your
phone, perhaps sexually assault you, and generally waste your day. It
should be a red flag when rewards and risks seem to balance out.
Publicly attacking a political opponent for taking a position with which
many reactionaries agree may actually help his reputation to grow among
your enemies. Watch out for these expensive victories. Finally, consider
the reach of your Tactics, that is, how many people will find out about
your actions. Even an action with a small reward for those involved,
such as temporarily stopping the construction of a pipeline, can have a
huge reach if it is expertly timed, executed, and publicized. Actions
long in reach multiply the rewards for the movement as a whole. When you
undertake an action, you can amplify its reach by preparing a statement
for the media or anonymously uploading pictures to Twitter.
Tactics are most effective they are tailored to the political climate,
time, and place. During the Nazi occupation, it was appropriate for the
French resistance to assassinate enemies, set off bombs in public places
where innocent people were hurt, kill informants within their ranks, and
fight to the death rather than be captured. Such Tactics would be
ineffective and ruinous for movements in the US and Europe today.
Consider what one of us saw at a demonstration for climate justice in
Paris in 2015:
When we arrived at the Place de la Republique, there were hundreds of
pairs of shoes littering the plaza with no owners. Parents with
strollers and old pacifists hunched and clutching purses with concern,
well- meaning, were taking pictures. One man had climbed the statue at
the center of the square with a Lebanese flag and was draping it over a
shrine of votive candles. The gendarmes were still in their vans, though
their ranks were silently growing. An hour later I was rushing an
elderly woman toward the sidelines as a tear gas canister landed three
paces away. The appearance of the black bloc in no way justified the
violence exhibited on the crowd by the French police, but they had
escalated the demonstration, and in the news reports and hostel lobbies
the following day, they would be blamed for getting a bunch of peaceful
protestors mixed up in a lot of violence for no good reason. It should
be clear that baby strollers and black blocks don’t mix. On the other
hand, the idea that resistance must sink to the lowest common
denominator of polite inaction surely gets us nowhere. The lesson here
is this: to make sure that Tactics are well-suited to the situation, we
will need to join in solidarity across tactical differences. To
facilitate better collaboration, groups should be explicit about their
level of commitment and ability to take risks, refrain from making
simplistic judgements about the relative morality of different tactics,
and implement a variety of complimentary tactics. Had the passive
marchers and the black bloc communicated about, for instance, the timing
of their very different Tactical moves, people could have done a better
job at taking care of each other. Coordination should not be confused
with unanimity here. If the peaceful marchers and the black bloc tried
to arrive at a single consensus regarding their tactics, it is likely
that neither group would have gotten what they wanted. When
communicating about Tactics, be firm in your commitment while remaining
flexible to the requests of others. Start these planning sessions with a
commitment to help your allies carry out their ideas while not giving up
on your own. A diversity of Tactics makes your movement harder to
outmaneuver and makes it more likely to gain traction.
Up until this point, we have argued for the importance of Affinity,
Identity, and Tactics separately, but the key insight is that we should
not consider any of these three elements in isolation. Let’s explore the
practical consequences of doing this for each one of the three elements
in order to understand why this is true.
First, paying attention to Affinity to the exclusion of Identity and
Tactics may seem like a logical way to assert the unity of your group,
but it’s ultimately too narrow. People from different Identities bring
different knowledge to the group. When Identity issues are ignored,
communication differences can turn into problems that reproduce
oppressive power relationships found in society, or failing that, simply
breed confusion and hurt. Within your Affinity, you will also find that
people who fly the same flag are fond of different Tactics. There are
more pacifist and more confrontational flavors of every Affinity. Some
members of your group may be able to take more risks than others because
of privilege, immigration or parole status, or because they are
undercover in enemy territory (e.g. an informant in a corporation).
Assuming that everyone is ready and willing to take the same risks will
likely push out valuable members of your group who might otherwise be
able to support your actions. When working within your Affinity group,
you will still need to talk through issues of Identity and Tactics, and
you may need to get creative to accommodate everyone. Remember that it
is usually better to split your group into allied factions that have
clarity about their Affinity and Tactics than to stay together and
accomplish nothing because of infighting. Another way of saying that we
can’t just organize around Affinity is that we need to remember to put
Affinity in context.
Next, what happens when we pay attention to Identity while ignoring
Affinity and Tactics? As Zora Neale Hurston once said, “All my skinfolk
ain’t kinfolk.” People within the same Identity group are almost always
divided about both Affinity and Tactics. It is very difficult for people
to work within the same groups when they want radically different worlds
and are not willing to use similar methods to further their cause. Those
who believe that capitalism is not responsible for their oppression may
oppose shutting down a busy street in protest because of the harm done
to businesses. Those who believe that all protests should be peaceful
may give information to the police when a window gets broken. Huey
Newton was murdered in his sleep by the FBI because one of his friends
put sleeping medication in his dinner, trusting the agents when they
said they wanted to take him alive. Failures like this happen because we
don’t pay attention to forming groups around Affinities and Tactics, and
they have certainly happened within Identity-based movements.
Milo Yiannopoulos is not an ally of the LGBTQ community, Ben Carson is
not an ally to Black folks, Marco Rubio is not an ally to Latinx people,
and Condoleeza Rice is not an intersectional hero. There is a common
misconception that the only movements worth pursuing today are
identity-based, and that questions about Affinity and Tactics can be
avoided until the “right people” hold power. In practice, this idea
mainly serves to steamroll important disagreements from within the ranks
of identity-based movements. Should feminism and the LGBTQ movement
reject capitalism? Is it a good idea for racial justice groups to be
hierarchical or should they be direct democracies? These are essential
issues that aren’t going away. Identity-based movements need to know
where they are going and how they intend to get there.
Finally, what happens when we join together as Tactical allies without
thinking of Affinity and Identity? In a word, you’ll have strange
bedfellows. There are many groups who want to delegitimize the
government, expand access to birth control, or demand more ecological
ways of living - and we promise that some of them have really terrible
views. Focusing only on the immediate objective may seem like
“pragmatic” politics, but take a look to make sure that you are truly in
the presence of allies. When you win fights alongside people who differ
with you on fundamental issues, remember that they will also claim
victory, that their reputations will be elevated, and that other groups
will begin to associate you with them. Some differences of opinion are
probably healthy, but here’s a rule of thumb: never collaborate with
people who think you shouldn’t have rights, shouldn’t be safe, or
shouldn’t be listened to. Not all groups deserve to be included as part
of “Left unity.”
We hope what we have said about the relationship between Affinity,
Identity, and Tactics will help bring some nuance to our talk about
organizing. Our theory that when we lose sight of any one of these three
elements we are vulnerable to avoidable mistakes, co-optation, and
self-destruction. When we create organizations that know how to make
these Affinity, Identity, and Tactics work harmoniously, we can win the
big victories of moving together and the small victory of respecting
current comrades and winning new ones to the struggle.