I read a lot to learn what people had tried and that
Early beginnings – entry into anarchist life/politics
Point of no return
Living Anarchism – finding a language to explain habits of living the struggle
Organizing, structurelessness, informal hierarchies– identity impact conscious (give up activism) o
Going beyond activism
o
Give up Activism: Postscript
o
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
Consent Culture & Transformative justice o
Support zine
o
Subversive Submissive #1
o
The anarchist world and feeling okay to be fucked:
o
Defeated Binary?
o
An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender
Sex Critical o
queering heterosexuality
o
I'm a better anarchist than you...
o 2Fucked2Furious o Flying - Kate Millett
Travel o
Learning from life
o
Why does society need people who go on crazy, stupid, arduous adventures?
o
Into The Wild - Rebecca LaMarche
Solidarity Activism o
Thoughts on Saving the World
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Charity or Solidarity?
o
The Spaniard
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A huge mess, pt I
Resentment – a universal language o
Accomplices
o
i am no hero, and neither are you thoughts on how our histories of abuse inflect our anarchist practice
Personal solutions to finding the energy to keep on going, finding your place in something bigger than yourself – Developing skillsets and philosophies for achieving more linked into the movement, than any one person could do on their own.
Personal Solutions o Political Ethnography as Art and Science o
Hate Kills: A social justice response to “suicide”.
o Involving Others From Toolkit to Ethos for a Different Kind of Democracy
Biography - Other people’s solutions o
When Kerouac Met Dostoyevsky
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Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism: one practice, no dogma.
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Chapter 4: Bad Faith and de Beauvoir’s Gendered Self
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From Solitude to Solidarity How Camus Left Nihilism Behind
o A Conversation Between Alexei Penzin and Dmitry Vilensky From the Perspective of Hope o Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid o Zapatista Spring – Ramor Ryan o Sociology of the homeless man o
Toby Higbie - Crossing Class Boundaries Tramp Ethnographers and Narratives of Class in
Progressive Era America
Table of Contents
Personal beginnings
Point of no return
Anarchists are made and not born. Many of us have stories about specific moments or experiences that marked a turning point, something that made us become anarchists, or realize we already were anarchists. We compiled th,s zme because we wanted to hear stories of what pushes people over the edge to help us imagine ways we can create breaking points for others.
This zine is not representative of anything. A good number of submissions were received from friends and allies, so it is weighted more towards people to their mid-20s living in the Ontario-Quebec region. The other pieces were mostly in response to a call-out posted to anarchistnews.org We had fun writing and hearing these stories, and hope you will find some inspiration inside.
- Rabbit & A.V., May 2013, Kingston.
T. Jordan – St. Louis, USA
As a teenager hanging out in the punk scene in St. Louis in the mid-1980s, I knew about anarchy because of the
Sex Pistols hit, "Anarchy in the U.K." The Sex Pistols" idea of anarchy didn't seem very sophisticated: "I am an anti-
Christ... I want to destroy passers by..." It seemed that the Sex Pistols' anarchy was just about shock value, like the fourteen-inch Mohawks worn by what we called "post card punks." I was more attracted to bands like Millions of
Dead Cops, the Dead Kennedys, and the Minutemen, who offered issue -specific arguments and positions that were explicitly anti-war, anti- capitalist, and opposed to bigotry.
The punk kids in St. Louis used to hang around in the Central West End and the Delmar Loop area, where there were record stores. Before the Internet, the record store was a place where you could find ideas beyond those being pushed at home, school and church – in music, movies and ‘zines. Those neighbourhoods were the border areas where St. Louis’ largely segregated Black and white communities overlapped. The Central West End was also a cruising area for gay men. The activists of the Revolutionary Communist Party came to these border areas to find young people who were looking for something different or edgy. These devotees of Bob Avakian would sit with us for hours to explain the mechanics of imperialism and capitalist oppression; but even before I’d become an anarchist, I was troubled by their Maoist authoritarianism.
Another group willing to spend time with inquiring teenage minds was the Socialist Workers' Party. They used to pick us up and drive us to their Communist Manifesto study group. I was especially inspired listening to the cassettes of
Malcolm X's speeches they sold, and I remember sitting on the school bus, listening to Malcolm X on my Sony
Walkman. One of my most deeply radicalizing experiences was riding with an SWP member to Austin, Minnesota for a rally supporting the wildcat strike of Local P-9 of the Hormel meat packing workers. Union representatives and activists came from all over the U.S., from Latin America and Europe to support the P9 workers, and to give them strike funds, which they were being denied by their national union.
Then I met Bobby.
The first time I saw Bobby, his hair was spiked with Vaseline like Sid Vicious. He wore a white t-shirt covered in band names and political slogans scribbled in black magic marker, and all entirely illegible. He was tall and lanky, but also warm and approachable and fun. We started hanging out, and he showed me his copy of Emma Goldman's Living My
Life. It looked awfully thick. Bobby told me about Goldman's ideas of free love, and about her affair with Alexander
Berkman, who had tried to assassinate a big industrialist. He told me about Bakunin and the idea of "propaganda by the deed." Now anarchism was beginning to become a set of ideas, rather than just a gesture of defiance. I felt that Bobby might like me to become an anarchist with him, but he was just one person. I could not imagine - what would it mean, to be committed to that ideal? I could see that anarchism was a higher ideal than that of democracy/capital ism, or the various forms of revolutionary leftism; but, would a commitment to anarchism require a commitment to violence?
Would I have to commit anarchist acts that might lead to incarceration or an early death, in order to maintain personal integrity and credibility with others? Would I have to refuse all authoritarian institutions, like school or work, and wander like a hobo or a Buddhist monk, stealing or begging? What would it mean to be an "anarchist"?
Bobby and I started an anti- authoritarian youth group that put on punk shows, set up benefits for activist groups, and arranged for groups of young people to attend protests in other cities. I played in a band that often performed at our shows, and that band was invited to perform at a planning meeting for an upcoming
Continental Anarchist Conference in Minneapolis. The prior year, about a thousand anarchists from around the world had met in Chicago for the centennial of the Haymarket Rebellion, and the anarchists in Minneapolis had volunteered to keep that spirit going. We played in the basement of the Mayday book store, and the planners liked us well enough to invite us back for the full conference.
That conference in Minneapolis was an epiphany for me. If I had thought about what kind of folks might be there with us, I would have expected other punk kids in their teens and twenties, and a few latter-day hippies. Arriving in Minneapolis, I was surprised to find myself among people of all ages, from teens like my friends to grad students, baby boomers, and even older people, like the elderly man who had heard Emma Goldman give a talk in the 1930s. One memorably well-spoken woman had come from Albuquerque and was about the age of my grandparents; she was a co-founder of the Society for the Eradication of Television. There were more women and people of color than I would have expected, too.
In the 1980s we lived under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, yet Americans just loved Ronald Reagan and his doctrine of "peace through strength," i.e., building more nuclear warheads. It seemed there was little that could be done by the angry and frustrated minority of activists and political punks. Despite that, some of the older
folks in Minneapolis conveyed a positive vision of anarchy that was something you could be "for" One of the first positive formulations of anarchism I heard went something like this: "Anarchy is not chaos. Chaos is what we have now - a lack of social order in which the powerful use force to get whatever they want. They arrange the laws to their benefit, and hire cops to enforce them. Anarchists propose a social order based upon free association and mutual aid. where statism relies upon force or the threat of force." The anarchists' views were as broad and diverse as you would hope for. I really liked these people, and felt I could be a part of this group. By the time I made it back to St. Louis, I was an anarchist. I attended the gatherings in Toronto in 1988 and in San Francisco in
1989, as well as the debacle that was the founding conference for Love and Rage.
In the early years of my anarchism. Anarchy magazine introduced me to Situationism, Guy Debord. Bob Black, and the neo-primitivism of John Zerzan. I learned to question every fundamental or assumption. But as I grew older, I became more class conscious, more aware of my working-class background. I began to see that much of the
"radical" political theory had no "praxis" - that there was no way for most ordinary people to realize something like Zerzan's neo-primitivism. I realized that theory with no possible practice is merely a practice of leisure, a lot like sci-fi. by people who have the time to sit around reading and writing fanciful critiques and imaginings. I wanted an anarchism that might be relevant to ordinary working people. I decided that an important criterion for any truly radical theory should be that it can be explained in twenty minutes or less to a new immigrant, someone with children and hopes for their health and education, and that they should be able to say. "Yes, that is a good idea, I like it," even if they are not instantly converted. Thus, today I am an anarcho-syndicalist, focusing largely on worker cooperatives and sustainable alternative economy.
Sadly, I admit that we are unlikely to see the abandonment of capitalism in America in my lifetime; however, I believe it is possible to build economic enclaves based on humane, anti-authoritarian values in the meantime.
And, anarchism gives us much more than a vision for a just society; it offers an ethic for day to day living that challenges us to constantly grow personally, socially and politically, throughout our lives.
A.V. -
KINGSTON, CANADA.
When I was 18 I moved away to university and for some reason thought every campus was exactly like Berkeley in the 60s, all the time, I accidentally went to one of the most conservative schools in the country. I also realized that
I was getting into anarchy just as the anti-globalization era was fizzling. I was devouring the anarchist FAQ and
Crimethlnc and was eager to protest something. When George Bush visited Canada I jumped on the free bus to
Ottawa and wandered around in a one-person urban camo bloc and looked RIDICULOUS. That night I marched into the red zone with some kids from Montreal who offered me rocks but I was too scared to take them. I sort of stood there in shock and watched the ensuing melee before catching my bus home. I needed to hook up with other anarchists, ASAP, Eventually I found a left-wing coalition and reading group, and plugged into some campus activism for a while, I also decided to email all the local listservs I could find and attend every event imaginable basically announcing I was an anarchist and where were the others? Luckily this sloppy adventure led me to anarchists and not undercover cops trying to sell me fertilizer.
I hit my point of no return when I was challenged to move beyond being an anarchist in theory, and decided to take action which would affirm and solidify my commitment to anarchist struggle. There was rumour of an impending military raid on the tobacco trade at the nearby Mohawk reserve of Tyendinaga which threatened to become another Oka. Some anarchists in town had connections on the reserve and were invited to join the lines should another standoff occur. Shortly afterwards, provincial police attacked the Six Nations land reclamation at
Caledonia, only to be beaten back by hundreds of community members with sticks, who then set up a highway blockade. Tyendinaga responded by shutting down the rail lines that run through the territory, a major economic artery.
I was inspired by the strength of this resistance and we started organizing solidarity actions locally and camping out at the blockades. As we sat around the campfire, wondering if the police would raid, I realized I was surrounded by serious revolutionaries who were willing to literally risk everything for liberation. This is an outcome of an anti-colonial struggle that dates back hundreds of years, but also specifically from a decades-long project of building resistance-connected dual power on the reserve, both political and economic. It doesn't call itself anarchist, but it's the closest thing to autonomous community I've seen. It made my activism until then feel like a game, because in most ways it was.
We had little to contribute to these efforts, and the risks we took as anarchist settlers paled in comparison to the warriors who realistically expected that they could be imprisoned or even killed by police as Dudley George had been in 1995. Despite this, during this period I began taking more personal risks to support this movement than I had ever taken because of my beliefs, and started seriously considering how far I would be willing to go as an anarchist. I came to accept that a commitment to anarchist struggle could mean going to prison or worse one day, even if my privilege still made it a relatively unlikely outcome. So even though we were almost entirely on the sidelines, this was my point of no return.
ANONYMOUS - HAMILTON, CANADA.
Currently I'm 21 years old. My interest in politics really began to materialize in my early teens, around the age of
15. There are 2 major factors that pushed me towards radical politics in general, which can be summarized with my family background and music (scenes). To start off with family, my father was primarily involved (both physically and intellectually) with the social revolution boiling up in Chile back in the 1960's and 70's. He was mostly involved with student organizations, as a student; and because of his activism he was kicked out of the
University of Santiago under the regime of Pinochet. As I grew up I was well familiar with the icons of the "left", including Che, Allende, Castro, Miguel Enriquez, Simon Bolivar, Zapata etc. Hell, even the music my father listened to was political. Clearly, my father was/is a hardline marxist mostly in the vanguardist tradition. I think he even managed to do some community organizing here back in the mid 90s. Although my father never identified with anarchism because he believes the state can be used as a weapon for the proletariat, I still believe he has an anarchist spirit. Regardless, the "revolutionary" atmosphere and passion was always present in my life.
Ironically enough. I neglected most of that revolutionary atmosphere for most of my childhood until I found myself getting into politically charged music, which unfortunately lead me to fascism first. Long story short, the punk scene both local and abroad and philosophy itself was what reignited this interest in class struggle, and it led me to investigate anarchism for what it really was. By the time I was 15 I knew the basic principles of socialism, but eventually I found out that anarchism was a serious movement, with it's own theory and history, and actually developed closely with socialist movements as far back as the 19th Century. For the longest lime 1 was unable to determine if I was against the State or not (as a means to liberate ourselves). I have now officially identified with anarchism for 3 years, and had an interest in it for longer, but that interest has never stopped growing!
Viva y Salud
Anonymous
I became an anarchist because I had a crush on a boy. Perhaps it would have happened sooner or later anyway, or perhaps it wouldn't have-it's impossible to say. He was the new kid that had just moved with his family from
Labrador, and he was apparently vegan, anarchist, into parecon and Propaganda. He was quite possibly the only other person in the entire school who identified with a radical political ideology of some sort, and he was hot.
I was sixteen years old and a decided Marxist- Leninist. Really, though, my politics at the beginning of Grade
Eleven didn't amount to much more than a means to distinguish myself from my peers and forge an adult identity. This doesn't mean that I didn't believe the shit that I said, that I didn't adhere to some kind of communist ideal (one which 1 still adhere to, and have done pretty much consistently since I was thirteen years old), or that I could have just as easily believed in some other wingnutty idea. What it means is that my politics didn't translate into any kind of conscious action. I did more or less the same things as other kids of my class background and gender: I played video games, watched TV, talked to my friends on the internet, put in the minimal effort necessary to keep up with school and my parents' expectations about it, whatever.
I started hanging out with buddy towards the end of the first semester; some of my friends had become some of his friends. Then in December, a hardcore band we both liked was coming to play a show in Fredericton just before the year 2006 turned over into 2007. The venue was an anarchist infoshop that also, incidentally, organized itself on pareconish principles. One of the people involved in starting that place up was someone I knew, albeit only online; he was the older brother of a friend of mine and buddy's. I knew that little bro was going to Fredrawk to hang out with big bro and party with the punks, and I wanted to do the same, for my own reasons.
But I had the good sense to see if buddy could be invited, too, and as a matter of fact, yeah he was.
We took the bus together. I wanted to walk to the bus station, perhaps forty minutes' walk away, because I didn't want to waste gasoline. My dad questioned my motives for wanting to walk, and insisted on driving me. A few weeks earlier, I had given away a lot of my clothes because they were useless possessions that I no longer needed. In retrospect, it's funny to think that this is how I first started to act on my politics, and it's even funnier how concerned my dad was about this behaviour and the new friend I was meeting at the bus stop.
For the three days and two nights that we were in Fredericton. a lot of stuff happened: a show, three parties, visits to the college radio station and a natural food store, plenty of conversations with a lot of different people who were broadly into a lot of things that I wanted to know more about But it wasn't until I got into an argument with one of the punks about veganism that I really started rolling towards the point of no return.
I don't remember the details. I just remember that I had been defensive about eating meat for a long time. I was briefly vegetarian when I was thirteen years old, as part of a brief flirtation with the worship of Krishna, but I gave it up because it was hard and I actually just didn't care that much; I thought I did, but I didn't. In recent months, though, I had been encountering more vegetarians—even made out with one at a party—and thus I was talking about the subject a lot more, as were my friends. ''They're misanthropes," we determined. And even with my desire to get into buddy's pants, I was not yet convinced that this diet was for me. I was willing to tolerate it, but I mostly hoped the subject wouldn't come up,
Veganpunkbro confronted me about it though, and my counterarguments faltered; thing is, I didn't reaily have a critique. Eventually, he gave up and dropped the subject, shaking his head. Buddy was observing, but didn't pipe in. Probably as a result. I took the criticisms to heart. About three weeks later, I switched my eating habits from omnivore to soyfncker. (The final nail in the coffin was a stupid PETA propaganda video that buddy showed me.)
Let's be clear: many of the things that I liked about buddy were his diet, his musical preferences, his nonchalant attitude, his clothes, the things he did—in essence, his consumption choices and his lifestyle.
Unlike myself, he had been making an effort to practice his politics. These days, I'm pretty critical of the whole suite of those politics (parecon and veganism-as- essential-action, but also Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now, the
BDS campaign, and an approach towards queer "inclusivity" no different from that of any boring liberal) and embarrassed about the degree to which I ever bought into it. That said, I'm glad he came into my life, glad I got excessively puppy-eyed about htm (he was straight, btw), and glad this attraction pushed me to do what he was doing: acting on his chosen principles.
Note: I remained a professed Marxist -Leninist for over a year after this, but losing that argument to veganpunkbro in front of a boy I liked is what, I think, made sure that I did become an anarchist eventually. I was,
from the beginning, much more willing to throw myself into adventure and risky situations than buddy. Unlike his parents, mine didn't support my new diet, so I took up shoplifting. I also wasted more of my money on bus tickets to Fredericton, in order to hang out with punks, and I started doing graffiti. Me and him did do one sweet thing together, which was to start publishing a "revolutionary" weekly that—despite its generally poor, sometimes sketchy analysis—was at least a half-decent eifort to counter a rural Canadian high school's apparatus of patriotic/pro ductivist socialization. All of this, and more, was enough to put me into sustained conflict with both parental and scholarly authorities, and to push me closer to those for whom I had affinity. Mostly anarchists, as it turned out; the Marxists I met were generally dickheads.
As far as I know, buddy's politics never changed much. He still likes parecon, Propagandhi, and maybe even PETA;
I'm pretty sure he's a normal member of society with lefty opinions. This kind of annoys me, actually, considering the shit we used to talk about. All things considered, though, I'm fucking glad that the essential thing that piqued my curiosity about this guy—the way he consciously translated his principles, but also his desires, into action—are things I'm still interested in now that my principles and desires have changed, now that buddy's out of the picture.
Anise – USA
I was sympathetic to anarchist ideas for a couple of years before I called myself an anarchist. Like many anarchists who grew up in the mid-1990s, my political views were initially shaped by the DIY punk scene. They embodied the vague forms of ant i -authoritarian radical politics that are articulated in "the scene," both in its practice (underground DIY shows, a participatory culture where everyone is theoretically equal, self- publishing, etc.) and in its politics (anticorporate, anti-racist, etc). I became aware of anarchist bands and started listening to those quite a lot, which definitely had an influence on my emerging views.
My views developed on things and tended in that direction, but it really seemed like there was nothing I could do to further my ideas. The few » anarchists-mainly punks-that I've since learned were around, didn't have a terribly visible presence and their scene tended to be more insular and closed I would occasionally see wheatpasted anti-cop or other anarctust flyers but there was no real way to get in touch with those people. On the few occasions where I did encounter anarchists at anti-police brutahly protests, 1 generally stayed on the sidelines and watched from a distance.
In ! the punk scene there was a lot of Up service to politics—I listened to a lot of "anarchist" music, had anarchist patches, and even read the few anarch.st publications I could find (among them, early Crimethlnc stuff)-but I never; really did anything. In the punk scene, it seemed a lot of people had "radical" or "anarchist" politics, but expressing those views wasn't always encouraged-if you were in a band and talked too long, people would yell "shut up and play." if you spoke out against anything other than the few token political topics accepted in the punk scene-anti-Nazi, animal rights, anti-cop-people got upset, and if you challenged the punks to do anything beyond lifestyle changes like going vegan, people tended to get mad, and most importantly, you could never speak of any of the numerous problems that existed in the punk scene.
Attempts to connect with the "activist" types in town were disappointing such as their public efforts against a bombing campaign in Iraq-where protests were dominated by speakers, peace signs, and a sense of hopelessness. So I largely floundered, listening to my records and reading and writing zines, but not really doing much of anything.
That all changed in November of 1999 after learning about the anti-WTO (World Trade Organization) protests that took place in Seattle. I had received a flyer about them in the mail and knew that they were going to be taking place, but had nobody to go with and no idea how to get there at the time. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was intrigued.
The flyer promised that people were going to "shut down" the meeting using "direct action"-something that really appealed to me after my experiences seeing the miserable nature of traditional "protests." On the night of November
30, 1999, I remember seeing news reports that showed people rioting in the streets, smashing windows, throwing tear gas canisters back, fighting with the police, and generally throwing down. In the subsequent days, reports in both the mainstream and leftist media started to come out about the role anarchists had played
Some members of the black bloc released the "N30 Black Bloc Communique" that explained why they decided to attack property and argued against the idea of nonviolence. At the same time, I found out about Indymedia.org, read countless accounts from the protests, and learned about the myriad ways that anarchists participated in the convergence from making food to opening squats to house protestors. I read about the notorious "Eugene anarchists" and got exposed to various zines and writings that caused me to question everything about modern society. It really blew my mind and at the time it was one of the most inspiring things I had seen.
What happened in Seattle— cheesy as it may be—convinced me to be an anarchist. It was a spark or a catalyst—no longer would E just keep my views to myself, locked away in zines and records, but I would try to do what I could to further anarchist ideas and practice. It was hard to say what that would mean in my own life, but I figured I would do what I could. And in the wake of Seattle, almost overnight it seemed like a wealth of anarchist activity started happening out of nowhere. In reality, I had just received the push I needed to dig deeper, but the explosion of activity certainly made it easier. New lines were circulated, websites launched, new projects started, and importantly, anarchists gained initiative and became involved in organizing a series of confrontations at various trade summits, political conventions, and the like. For a while, it seemed that even obscure summits-like the Organization of American
States meeting in Michigan or the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialog in Cincinnati—were met by large protests with sizable anarchist involvement and participation.
At the same time, various cells of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) were active across the United States attacking developments and issuing statements. The energy was infectious and it propelled me to try new things, to make new connections, and to take chances and risks. Whereas I might have felt alone or completely disempowered acting with a few people where I lived before Seattle, afterward there was suddenly a larger context in which our actions ft. Here was a sense of momentum and connectedness that encouraged me and helped give me confidence. While this era had its problems and mistakes were made, the time between Seattle and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks was quite intense-and the energy that existed no doubt created many anarchists.
Christopher – Sweden
Injustice and discrimination has always bothered me. I remember countless fights and arguments with my neighbors or random people about harassing my friends as a kid, especially the Roman! Discrimination is a concept a child has to leam, it is not something that comes naturally. During my life so far I've tried to find the political ideology that fits me, based on my views on individual freedom, ethnic and gender equality and a system which promotes healthy values.
I researched, in depth, almost every system there is, from fascism to communism. But every system seemed flawed. It doesn't matter how you organize a society if it's based on hierarchy They all share the same kind of problems, even though some systems have less than others.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember how I ending up there but someone linked or talked about the "Homage to
Catalonia" by George Orwell. As a fan of his other books, I decided to read it. As I was reading through the first chapter,
I will always remember how those words lit up something in me. Here is a really good part:
Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists-, every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.
After finishing the book I decided to research Anarkism, I turned my eyes to the famous(?) Anarchist FAQ. After reading through a large portion of it and a lot more anarchistic literature, I knew. I am an anarchist! This was quite recently.
After that day I demonstrated for the first time in my life. Together with socialists and anarchists we have started an organisation to, fight racism in our country. With direct action and cooperation with others, this is how 1 start my struggle.
Solidarity and liberty!
MUS,
MALE/QUEER, 23 —
AARHUS, DENMARK.
I started taking interest in politics when the Youth House (Ungdomshuset) was evicted in March 2007 in Copenhagen, and some parts of the city exploded in riots. I was 17 years old and had followed the case every day for a half year in the media and free newspapers while I was traveling to school in trains and bus. I was somewhat sympathetic to the youngsters fighting for the right to have a place to hang out. They made me participate in my first demonstration on the U'6 of December 2006 - two days before the riots.
I understood that they had made their voices heard using all the usual bourgeois democratic methods of getting attention, but were ignored. It made it even worse that the buyer of the house was a christian sect (Faderhusel), as I had applied to a christian school.
I somehow realized that my life was boring and that I had nothing to live for at that moment. I had lost all of my friends while moving from the mainland to north of the capital, my mom wasn't there for me and my stepfather was a conservative, christian, authoritarian idiot.
The demolition of the house was generally unfair and made me aware of public affairs and injustice all over the world.
I joined the unofficial political youth organization of the most left-wing party in parliament (revolutionary socialists that derived from the unity of three communist parties after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989): Socialist Youth Front
(Socialistisk Ungdomsfront - SUF).
I started going to weekly political meetings in my hometown after 1 was expelled from my christian school after only four months because of marijuana use. I lost all faith in religion after that incident. I began feeling more and more alienated. The organization and local groups gave me back a lot of my lacking social networks that I had lost during the tough years in the rich suburbs of Copenhagen and similarly in Ringkobing in the Western part of Jutland.
But I still didn't feel quite at home.
Randomly about a year later, I had a quarrel with one of my punk friends. We had an argument about housing policies and how people decide where to live.
He didn't convince me at first, but after some reflection, I realized that he had a point. Why shouldn't people be able to decide autonomously where to live, based on their own perceived needs and abilities and desires?
I started reading about anarchism, because he claimed he was an anarchist and I found a lot of inspiration. I then started hanging out more and more with punks and antifascists in the extra parliamentary left-wing movement in the country, while continuing marxist activities in SUF and the reform oriented student movement.
I continued organizing with SUF for about another year and a half until the global COP15 UN climate summit in
Copenhagen, where I participated in most of the actions and important demos. I was one of 1000 innocent protestors mass-arrested who sued the police afterwards, winning about $1500 in the court ruling.
I started getting more interested in anarchism and I joined an anarchist organization and eventually left SUF. Today, I have a giant network in Denmark in almost all cities of significance, because of all the traveling to demos and social happenings for years. I prefer to spend a lot of time being social with my comrades while also doing ad hoc-work for different movements that match my abilities. The few years in SUF really meant a lot to me, and I finally feel that I am no longer a lonesome outsider in life, as I was before.
Laura
When I graduated elementary school I went to university for half a year, but realized that it wasn't for me. Then I took whatever job was available for a dropout like myself. My mother had always been engaged in environmental issues and
I got a job at Greenpeace to get people to give them money. I started reading a lot about the situation the world was in and fast I realized that what I was doing at the time wasn't going to help. I was only selling people good consciousness by working for GP. So I started looking for some other organization I could meet people with similar realization and met a German studying biodiversity that also was interested in these issues. Then I went to the anarchist book fair in
Stockholm and was looking to buy some new books about the state of the world. There I found ‘As the world burns: 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial' by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan. I read this comic book about how all of our personal consumer choices weren't going to do the trick, then I gave it to my friend to read. Then many long discussions followed. We realized that people are very much led astray by the consumer culture they live in, we realized that no consumer activity was ever going to stop the destruction of the wild and exploitation of people. That would have to be done by force. The question became: how and with what kind of force?
I read a lot to learn what people had tried and that had worked before. I thought that a lot ofwhat people wrote wasn’t in a movie for others to grasp fast and so I started working on a film I called: The Fuck-it Point (the point when you have had enough of all the crap and start to fight back). The film is about how things look in a grand picture and about why people don’t fight back even though there are so many struggles and so much to do. I wrote it and stole clips for it for one year, then I decided it was done and released it to the world on savagerevival.net. Then it was time to do things for real so for the last year I’ve been out in the world doing actions and talking to people to spread the idea that we don’t need a specific ideology or strategy of pacifism or what not but instead need to do WHATEVER WORKS. We need to approach every situation differently and try everything to stop the industrial corpse machine.
I continued to look for people and organizations focused on resistance rather than lifestyleism and it was first among anarchists that I felt at home. I read on the Internet about a gathering for green anarchists in what remains of the
Swedish forests. There I made a lot of friends and comrades! I have realized that there is not one fuck-it point but many, for every new thing I learn I reach another fuck-it point and get more engaged in the struggle to liberate the earth. This is part of my story.
B. RABBIT - KINGSTON, CANADA
My story is about the person who wrote the one on the next page. <3.
It’s funny, because I don't, think anybody we know would expect me to tell my story this way. We have this joking dynamic in which I’m the responsible adult who always has a house and a job and way too many projects on the go and he’s the goofy kid who travels too much and relies on his friends and shows up once in a while to crash on my couch, come to a protest, and leave his smelly socks all over my common room. But I will say it now, and he’ll know this story is about him. B made me an anarchist, and I am and always will be grateful.
I was a pretentious would-be social climber from a poor family in the country who just wanted to grow up and be
"somebody." He was a middleclass artsy kid who lived downtown and wanted to rebel against everyone and drop out of everything. He was there at my very first protest, even though I didn't know him. He was at the first one that I went to without my mother too. He invited me to things even when he knew I'd be too scared to show op. We held hands as cops tried to pull us apart and we shared a ride back from the police station at 4am and we stayed up late talking about politics and relationships. He's dated my friends and eaten my food and yelled at me for thinking of selling out. We've been evicted together, kissed each other (only once!), hitchhiked together, studied together, been to way too many workshops together. Sometimes we lose touch but he always comes back, and I hope he always will.
My first memory of B as an anarchist is this: My two best friends and I are part of a social-justice youth group and we're organizing this environmental conference called Ecotopia (I KNOW). B is this cool musician type who I've seen around.
He's tiny, dressed all in black, wearing his signature baseball cap. He introduces himself as "an anarchist and a nihilist."
I'm so intrigued. The conference goes ahead. I find out that two of the organizers are anarchists. We talk a lot about biodegradable soap, GMOs and how much we hate the other kids at school. I learn two new songs on my guitar and write a poem about consumerism called "don't think, keep shopping." B and my friend K start flirting with each other. I go skinny-dipping for the first time. 1 conic away feeling really inspired.
I kept in touch with B after that. I grew up in the middle of nowhere but spent as much time in the city as I possibly could. My best friend and would take any ride we could into town and just hang around. Knowing was sweet because he was someone we could call to hang out if we got a ride into town. A few times he even took the J7 bus out to my community and came to our house parties.
He described himself as an anarchist this whole time and seemed pretty down with things that scared me. I'd seen a bunch of people get arrested at a G7 march once and was pretty sure the cops were in the wrong, but B knew those people and hated the cops with a passion. I wanted to find something more realistic, a way to work within existing systems to make some things better as soon as possible. My mom was into the left-wing NDP and I voted for them in my first election. I ran the "white poppies for peace" campaign at my school when war broke out with Iraq. Once at a peace march someone in a black mask gave me a pamphlet called "why anarchists oppose the war." I wondered if that person was friends with B.
I wasn't sure of a lot of things then, but I was still pretty sure that violence, all violence, was wrong. I wore a ripped-up purple t-shirt that said "Gentle Ways Are Best" almost every day in grade eleven. B told me about Seattle but I thought the black bloc was being pretty silly even if the cops were too. B and I chatted a whole lot on msn messenger about revolutions, and music. He told me about all kinds of rad historical events while I kept my web browser open so that I could look things up and not sound stupid. He sent me noisy punk songs and asked me once if I ever felt angry.
I was so, so excited when I found out that B had, like me, chosen a university in Montreal. I lived in residence and got super lucky, meeting lots of new friends including Mike, my best friend and an anarchist who I still count as an important ally. B lived with two roommates from back home who ended up sucking. He was really lonely and I had more friends and more money so he would come over several nights a week to share my social life and food. When the
2005 student strike happened in Quebec he followed me to every campus event, staying up late at intense meetings and getting up at 7am to flyer students on their way to class. I met people that year who became my friends, housemates and co- conspirators for years to come. Growing and changing with those friends, I came to see anarchy as a primary commitment, the organizing principal for our projects and the basis for our social worlds and support networks.
So thanks B, wherever you are. Your submission reminded me that while I could name lots of events, ideas, stories as potential origins for my life as an anarchist, I really owe it most of all to you.
(E) (A) (PEACE) (remember?!?) &
B.
My story is probably a pretty common one. My liberal Catholic parents, like the vast majority of both liberals and
Catholic, were hypocritical in ways that were pretty readily apparent to a rebelling teen. I had begun gravitating toward anarchist politics through a variety of influence, in the era of "anti-globalization": I was sort of an alienated weirdo and began developmg an interest in punk music; a politicized friend lent me a copy of the Chomsky Reader, which included an essay on the Spanish Civil War; the Summit Of The Americas showcased anarchists as literally being ready to fight for something. "The moment," however, was a moment that was definitive for much more than my own politics.
September 11, 2001, 1 was in grade ten at Queen Elizabeth High School. Class let out early that morning. I went home, and, like millions upon millions of others, turned on the TV Like a much smaller number, the reasoning was immediately apparent to me Regardless of who was responsible, capitalism, as embodied in the World Trade Center, and the military industrial complex, as embodied by the Pentagon, had just gotten their just comeuppance. Regardless of who had done it, the newscasters' repetition of "Muslim terrorists!" was obviously, to me, a blatantly racist deferral of responsibility. A line had just been drawn in the sand.
That afternoon, and in the following weeks, the line became increasing clear: The blond hockey-playing rich-kid jock in math class, mouthing off about how "we" were going to get "them". My friend Faisal telling me he'd been afraid to come to school - even to leave his house - after being hassled and called a “terrorist" by random strangers. The TV pundits practically foaming at the mouth and calling for blood. I knew what side I was on and it wasn't the patriots'. !t wasn't the teachers', who said we'd be suspended if we walked out against the war. It wasn't on the side of the police who formed a line between us and the American consulate. It wasn't the pacifists, who insisted we stay peaceful while bombs were being dropped It wasn't the side of the liberals who continued to fly the same maple leaf of the air force dropping those bombs.
From then on, that flag was for burning.
BOSKOTE - MONTREAL, QUEBEC. W
I'm in a social studies class, and the teacher brings up the issue of immigrant boats for a racist discussion topic, asking the class if we think that the government should turn them away, or allow them to settle in Canada and abuse our social services. I insist that where someone is born in the world shouldn't determine where they are allowed to live, and that the people on the boats are no more or less worthy of being here than any of us are. She calls me a humanitarian like it might not be a good thing. She later goes on to become a conservative politician. I continue to argue against borders and citizenship on basic ethical grounds.
I go to my first demo in Montreal, against the Liberal party convention and part of the mobilization for the 2005 student strike. It is a night demo. There are cops cars lining the street as I walk into the square. It is an explicitly anti- capitalist demo. I am excited. As we start walking, I notice B, a friend from home. He is one of the first people I knew who identifies as an anarchist. We didn't realize until that demo that we had both come to school in Montreal. We walk together in the demo until it is charged by riot police from all sides. We both run. I just barely avoid getting trapped in the kettle. He isn't so lucky, and gets mass arrested.
Around the same time as this demo. I'm learning critical theory and anti-oppression politics for the first time. Seeing how everything we assume to be so real m our society is actually socially constructed, and that we're all performing roles and scripts that are beyond our individual choices, as part of systems of power that define the structure of our society and our positons within it. I'm taking a trip across the border to the US, and see the border guards harassing people, as they usually do. but now I see if — differently than I had before. They have the same kind of power over people that the riot police did at the anti-capitalist demo. Their power individually, in their uniform, with their batons and guns, is part of a larger system of power. This is the state. I can now critically perceive it based on my own experience, and it is concept that has a meaning and clarity that it did not before.
I'm standing on a street corner with R and M late at night in the middle of winter, because we're going home in different directions but want to keep talking. I'm describing my vision of democratic alternatives to capitalism that involve all levels of political and economic federation, from the local to the global level. R and M tell me that what I'm describing sounds like a global government, which could be even worse than the nation- states we have now. They describe their much less structured vision of world with many organizational variations and fractures, but no clear borders or massive powerful institutions. That night I feel uncomfortable with their challenge to my ideas, but their inspiring vision gradually grows on me, and becomes my own.
Around this time I read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, and my imagination of anarchist possibility is made so real that it contributes to my own fantasies of living a self-determined life. I occasionally discuss with friends how things could be different, and sometimes we even find or start projects that turn some parts of our desires into a reality.
Collective kitchens, classes, and houses where we feel less alienated and are able to sustain and nourish our desires for a different world, and our struggles against this one.
In the neighbourhood next to the one where I live, there is a major project organized by anarchists from the neighbourhood to publicly squat a building and turn it into an autonomous social centre. I imagine the ways that I could be involved in a space like this, and feel inspired by seeing so many different people coming together to make it possible. As night approaches there is more talk of a police raid, and we wait at home for a phone call asking for support. No call comes until the following afternoon. We rush to the building, try to block the doors, try to reoccupy it after some people have evacuated, but it is no use. There are paramilitary cops on the roof with what look like assault rifles, and cops on the ground pepper spraying through the windows. We gather in larger and larger numbers on the street outside, and eventually go to try to squat another building, but are chased away by the police.
For the first time, I don't want to run from their baton charges. I want to stand our ground, and fight for what we all wanted out of that squat. It became very clear how violence, the threat of pain, injury, and death, is the main way that they control us physically, and therefore politically. This is ultimately the tool they rely on to shut down our efforts at making a different world possible. In discussions of the squat afterwards, I learn that despite all the effort that had been put into the organizing, there had been very little effort put into preparations to defend against a police raid. This was when I started a longer, ongoing process of understanding that among all the things we can learn to do for ourselves, we also have to collectively learn self-defence, and how to effectively engage in conflict, or armed agents of the state are always going to have the final say in what we can and cannot do.
RH1ZO - KINGSTON, CANADA.
1. “would you describe yourself as anarcho-adjacent?”
I was I the backseat of a rental car driving around the conference centre, adorned with colourful broken windows and police on every corner my colleagues - arctic scientists and researchers - were looking for parking, in turns frightened and annoyed at the inconvenience, I but I was thrilled by the previous night's defiance they were right to be angry, I was angry too bot hadn't figured out what to do about it, much less about my own complicity in the end all that my resistance amounted to that week was ditching the conference to nap in my hotel room: a wholly unremarkable personal strike I felt the thrum of the police choppers in my chest each night and fervently wished the river of bodies I the streets success and sweet escape and I wished I was down there on the other side of the coloured glass but I couldn’t see a way there from where I was so despite feeling pretty useless about it, I didn't drive back to ontario with I everyone else, I stayed in montreal to weave around in a huge night I demo, shooting belligerent glances at mounted pigs in between conversations about feminist theory and tumblr and the politics of vulnerability and I wished I was fighting instead of just walkig but I couldn’t see a way there from where I was
2. "so. ..what should I wear to this thing anyway" after staying up until 4 am, I decided alone, to go to a prison construction blockade at 5:30 am
I wrapped a flowered scarf around my wrist, made my way to the meeting point, drank several nervous cups of coffee, made small talk on the car ride to the prison we walked up to a driveway lined with cops that far outnumbered us they said “move to the side” and I did, unprepared, startled into obedience but it became evident that everyone else had braced themselves for resistance: one person haded me a coffee cup as she liked arms with the people beside her, forming a tenuous line that stretched across the roadway and I wished I was there beside her instead of standing on the sidewalk, land I started to see a way there from where I was
III. "from anarcho-whatever to anarchist"
I was learning lessons quickly that day on wearing black: freedom to disappear, fortifying courage of team colours on questions: ask only what you need to know, don't get offended on strength in numbers: the real fun begins when you outnumber the cops on friendship: moments of holding a backpack or trading masked glances changes the distance between our bodies, changes old friendships into new ones, changes everything so when night fell, I was steadier, slightly more prepared, had braced for resistance
I piled into a car with friends old and new, shyly tucked my pot lid and wooden spoon under the seat in front of me and hoped no one had noticed them, tried to settle the waves of fear and glee in my stomach, and tied and re-tied my bandanna until it was time for action and, that night, screaming and shooting fireworks into the sky outside a prison full of teenage girls made my heart sing with love and rage
in ways that marching along sidewalks, or critiquing anarchist projects from the sidelines, or gazing wistfully at news footage of blockades and occupations never did and I saw the point of no return, and I saw how to get there from where I was, and I ran through the pouring rain towards it
LEIF
I don’t think there was an individual moment that made me ito an anarchist. To be clear about my own position and where I’m coming from, I’m a cis straight white dude from an educated middle class family, and I’ve ever broken out of that. While I’m not particularly impressed with my parent’s politics nowadays. I do think that my family helped me become what I am. I was particularly lucky early on, because my parents decided ot to send me to school. I had no formal instruction until I decided to seek it out, which gave me considerable autonomy at an early age, something that I think a lot of kids don’t get access to.
Nonetheless, I didn’t become an anarchist until I was in college. Even there I actually spent a long time as an aspiring anarchist, so I’m going to try to detail some of the key points. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I can point out a few things that were really influential to me:
The one pre-college experience that's worth mentioning is the long-running argument about politics I had with a good friend who was a Ron Paul libertarian. While I could tell that a lot of what he was saying was racist and classist
(although I didn't know those words at the time), I often had trouble arguing with him because I couldn't help but agree with some of his critiques of the state.
I think one of the first things that drew me to actual anarchism was Crimethinc, which I started reading early in college.
I know this is cliche for white privileged folks at this point, but it's true. I don't remember where I stumbled across my first crimethinc text, but the stories totally blew my mind - "Are you serious? You can live a rewarding life without money and a job and following the rules?" It made a lot of sense to me, especially while I was grinding through an institution designed to transition me seamlessly into the upper class. I didn't have the guts to drop out, but those first experiences with the idea that there could be something more to life were experiences with
Experiences with the idea that there could be something more to life were powerful. Around the same time, I also read
Marina Sitrin’s “Horizontalism”. It was assigned for a class, but I think I got more out of it than expected. The book is a series of transcribed/translated stories from neighbourhood assemblies in Argentina, in which people talk about overcoming alienation and deciding to toss the politicians and organize the world on their own terms. It connected
Crimethinc’s bourgeois individualist drop-out-ism to something larger and more revolutionary.
Around the same time, I was lucky enough to share some shifts at my job with an anarchist who was a few years older than me. We argued about power and authority while hustling dishes. The thing that struck me most about our arguments was my total inability to make any coherent arguments against his ethical conviction that all power relationships were wrong. It felt like he was playing a hand made of only trump cards, to the extent that any misgivings
I had about total freedom were generally resolved by arguments for more freedom. Our politics differ substantially now, but his explicit critique of power gave me an even better framework for thinking about things. I saw my previous arguments with my libertarian friend in a new light when it became thinkable to oppose the stale while also believing in a world where poverty is structurally impossible.
Sometime shortly after this, there was a major political conference organized in my city. If there was a point of no return for me, the mobilization against the conference was it. I didn't have anything to do with planning or events, but I spent a lot of hours learning about black bloc tactics and reading action manuals on the internet. When I went to the protest, my friends and I got sucked into the big march, organized by code pink and probably some democrats. It was beyond disappointing I was one body in a generally aimless throng of a few thousand people, with no real connection to one another. We marched between 12 foot high fencing topped with barbed wire, yelled "this is what a police state looks like!" and then turned around. It was utterly demoralizing. When the march ended, I walked around, dazed and disillusioned, until I ran into a gathering of folks in black. I stood at the margins, while the group talked about what to do. Ihe difference between the black bloc and the peace march was immense.
While the march was all impersonal and directionless, everyone in the bloc was sharing ideas and information. Most importantly, they were trying to do something. After talking for a few minutes, the bloc decided to head downtown and reinforce a blockade. I followed at the margins again, until the bloc was stopped by a blockade of riot cops. I had some of the most indecisive moments of my life standing on a median, watching the bloc debate what to do while the cops sweated in their body armor and looked menacing. Somebody from the bloc yelled directly at me - I think they called me a liberal asshole, and told me to pick a fucking side.
I wish I could say that at that moment I walked across the two lanes of empty street, tied the bandanna in my back pocket around my face, and joined the bloc to roll joyfully into the sunset with my new-found comrades. I definitely thought about it. But that's not what happened. Instead, the bloc dispersed, filtering around the police line, while I just stood there in the middle of the street.
It wasn’t until over a year later that I was able to admit to myself that I was an anarchist. I spent a long time admiring anarchists from afar, secretly wishing that I could be as self-aware and self-organized as they were. Hell, I still feel that way, although I’m doing better now. Later, I spent a longer time not doing anything concrete because I wasn’t able to connect with anyone in my city. (Going to school, combined with the fallout of arrests, felony charges, and infiltrators after the convention didn’t help with this – lots of meetings abruptly stopped being open as the community realized how deeply the cops had infiltrated various organizations.) I think, though, that after those tense minutes at the police line, there was no going back for me.
Anonymous
I read a lot of shit on the internet and I agreed with it.
HANNAH FEWINGS
Politics Begins at Home
Supposedly, charity begins at home. I've never really understood this particular phrase, as I never saw any charity, of any kind, in ray house growing up. What I could say, however, is that politics begins at home. My first dealings with politics was seeing my brother so perfectly and enthusiastically parroting my parents' political ideals and feeling the unnerving need to do so myself.
Quickly, I came to realize everything they stood for and everything they believed was complete bullshit. Pure and unadulterated bullshit. (The least infuriating and least horrific idea I can remember is the time my mother told me 'The left wing parties in England are just watered-down Communism! Needless to say, there was a fair amount of face-palm going on in my then fifteen-year-old brain. I don't even know where to begin in deconstructing that sentence for analysis...)
Political life, not just in my home (and I use the term 'home' very loosely), but also in my hometown of Windsor (you know, that place where the Queen lives), doesn't really seem to exist. I know, you all must be incredibly surprised to find that the Queens home is not the hotbed of Anarchist activity you thought it was, but unfortunately this is the truth.
There is very much a feeling of 'Conservative or GET OUT' in the area. There is no room 1 for any other school of thought. And so, from a young age, we are all conditioned with our parents' beliefs and values, most of them about
'how great the indigenous British people are', "how all foreigners are thieving, violent benefit frauds (but that one guy from work, you know, the coloured gentleman, he's one of the good ones)', and 'how, if people want to be gay, they shouldn't do it in public'.
If you have somehow found it within you, as a citizen of the great and noble Windsor, to have the audacity to actually disagree you are, at best, ridiculed. If like me you're not so lucky, you are shunned, disciplined and punished. There was no room in my house for my beliefs. If my beliefs didn't tally with the rest of the Conservative voting household, they were the wrong beliefs. There was no attempt a. understanding or respect, yet it was expected from me without question. Hmm.
A memory sticks out. It is perhaps my first memory of seeing people my age trying to come to terms with a political system that isn't Capualism In middle school, when being taught about World War II, my classmates and fiot our first official glimpse of something different to our current pohucal system. Communism. (After all, Russia was there in WWII, but we tend to ignore that and talk about Spitfires a lot). When we were told everyone would be financially and politically equal and all the other dumbed-down aspects of Communism, there was no small amount of confusion as my classmates tried to figure out in our brainwashed minds how something our parents have been telling us is evil can be talking about something as amazing as equality for everyone. Just as someone final* V* up the courage to say, 'Well, doesn't that make it a good thing?* and there was an encouraging nod from my history teacher (who I now realise was vaguely Bolshevik) mevitably there was, as there always will be. someone who sard something about money, and everyone agreed and fell back into Capitahsm, and the teacher looked sad that he hadn't reached anyone that day.
So my friends and I had sorted it out amongst ourselves. As much as we thought Lhings weren't quite right with the world. Capitalism meant we could have money and stay in our parents' good books, so no new soctoeconomic/ political ideas were sought after. Eventually though, as we grew and read, I realised even Communism wasn't the ideal I'd hoped ifd be, and Anarchism started looking more and more attractive.
Since then, those I have managed to talk relatively seriously to about Anarchism as a political philosophy, and not just the idea of flipping cars and setting things on fire, seem to think my agenda for revolution would go something like this;
1. Destroy Government
2. Go on a murderous, cannibalistic rampage
The handful of people I have managed to fad with even the remotest interest in reconstructing this broken world seem to have been conditioned so thoroughly that hostility, contempt and mockery towards different ideas is now the natural response to have.
For me personally, the foundation of Anarchist thought is the basic belief in the goodness of mankind, of our ability to better ourselves and of our desire to help each other to live a good life, regardless of who we are, with love and respect.
Now THIS idea, this is something I can find huge numbers of my peers to agree with me on. The only trouble is, there is little to no information readily available to them, showing them the only way is Anarchism. Don't get me wrong, there is information, I found it. The difference is I went looking for it.
A moment I will always remember is after my first meeting with an Anarchist group and a friend asking me Are you an
Anarchist?' I'd never considered myself an Anarchist because I'd never even thought of it that way. Its ideas were just what I thought. There was no need for the label because it was just my basic state of being. However, in that moment, the answer came clear and simple, 'Yes.'
Where there is pressure, things either conform or crack. At first, I tried to fit in with my family. It would've perhaps made for an easier life. But after witnessing so much of this unquestioning conformity and seeing how, yes, it may lead to an easier life, but ultimately perpetuates all the things I thought were wrong with the world, I cracked. And rebelled against everything.
J.”G.”J.
What made me an anarchist? I was born one, but it took me over 19 years to remember what my soul always knew - - compassion and cooperation are better than control and competition, and I will take chaos over order whenever given the choice! Intuition, defiant joy and autonomy are my favorite pursuits, and I want to spend my life throwing shit into the face of my oppressor until I breathe no more! This society, this system, this beast we call reality hates my people... all people... all species... all life... and we can have no hope at all until this white -supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal death culture is completely destroyed! How did I come to recall the Afro-nihilism long-dormant in my heart? The journey was long, but Crass and Dead Prez helped. Crimethincs "Days of War, Nights of Love," helped to liberate me, and the APOC folk who righteously kicked Crimethinc's collective hyper-individualist ass helped liberate me even more at the '09 Northeast Conference. I go through periodic internal insurrections, enemas of the psyche, and through it all I owe my anarchism most strongly to LSD!
I cannot extol the virtues of hallucinogens enough! My body is a temple, and mushrooms and acid (and even weed, at times) are the Black Bloc that smashes it. It is after a brutal psychonautical cleansing that I can sift through the pieces of my shattered ego (which cannot be safely dismantled without the aid of external agents, sometimes... just as one cannot abolish with reform, nor effectively eradicate this society by "working within the system"), discard the neuroses and other blockages to my true self, and build something new and beautiful that I can rock with (until it is tainted, and in need of a phoenix-like rebirth)... To remake oneself (and I assert that the consciousness created to survive in this Hell definitely needs to be discarded periodically), look to hallucinogens! Angels to some, demons to others...
Anonymous
I became an anarchist when I saw police men shooting at people they supposedly were there to protect. Shooting at people whose only demand was justice.
I realized then that the law and what is legal often does not coincide with what is right and legitimate.
Living Anarchism
Organizing
Going beyond activism
Posted on April 15, 2011 by dangerousconversations
By MG 0151 445 3704
I have been frustrated with the culture and lifestyle associated with activism for a long time. In the UK, where I live, a particular, narrow section of the community seems to have taken ownership of the term “activist” and used it to label and justify its own activities. It was my increasingly negative perception of the anarchist activist scene that I was a part of that led me to write Why I Hate Activism , criticising the white, middle class, patriarchal values that still ruled the roost in the “alternative” subculture. The article was published on the Ceasefire magazine site but was subsequently reposted on various other activist sites and blogs.
I should say from the start that I have been deeply involved in activism for many years and have to take responsibility for my own complicity in its failings. If it hadn’t been for good friends who shared their experiences of exclusion and alienation I might never have noticed the fundamental flaws of what I was involved in. I felt a responsibility to write about the new understanding that these shared experiences had given me, as a way of showing solidarity with the excluded and to raise awareness about the power dynamics that I felt were often made invisible. Because I felt passionately about what I was writing, I was angry and antagonistic and was not always receptive to the often helpful comments others were making about the piece. Having stepped back and reflected more on the conversations that began, I’d like to try to engage in them more constructively than before.
Initial responses to the article were quite polarised with some readers seeing aspects of their own experiences touched on whilst others felt that my article was inappropriate. Given the many criticisms, I felt the need to clear up misconceptions, take heed of others’ personal experiences and try to make some positive suggestions about what we can do.
Firstly, I want to make clear what I think is the problem and why it definitely should be viewed as a problem by anyone who is against hierarchical systems. I think that the activist scene reproduces many of the hierarchies of visibility and privilege present in mainstream society and that this is not being challenged. In particular, white
British cultural norms, especially those of the middle classes, are privileged within the scene. This has given particular privileged people the feeling of ownership over the term activism, which has come to describe a movement in which they are guaranteed a place. It subsequently marginalises those activists whose activities and identities do not fit the cultural norm.
Many of the events and campaigns that come from the self-defining activist community reflect the preconceptions and preoccupations of this elite group. Attempts to challenge privilege are usually treated as subordinate to saving the planet/helping refugees/attacking capital, etc and are not taken too seriously. Fighting the state and capitalism are given priority over struggling against hierarchies which white, middle class men benefit from. When privilege is challenged more effectively, a smokescreen of denial goes up, obscuring the real
issues until the threat has passed. Take, for instance, the anarchafeminist intervention at the UK Anarchist
Movement Conference which was subsequently ridiculed by some activist men as “retrograde” (because the women involved masked their faces), “pathetic” and “manipulative”. The privileged activists lined up to belittle the action with no apparent awareness of how they were being dominating, disempowering and misogynist. The attitude amongst many of these self-appointed leaders seems to be one of outrage that women, people of colour, queers and disabled people should challenge their authority.
Faced with this cultural hegemony, many of those who don’t feel that they fit in rapidly become disillusioned with the scene and move on to environments where their race, class, sexuality and gender aren’t reasons for their exclusion or exploitation. The result is described by Kareem, who commented on the original article:
Speaking simply from experience, it is not easy for someone with a background in the Global South, especially if they also come from a working class (or even lower middle class) background, to adjust to a lifestyle and become accepted within the activist communities referred to in the piece. This is not to valorise either black and brown people, or people from a non-elite class background, except to say that if such people feel automatically alienated from activist groups – and I think many do – it is difficult to think of how such groups will bring about lasting, progressive social change.
This conclusion was echoed by Elena, who recalled her experiences of leftist activism at university as being “a very macho environment in which I felt very uncomfortable. Unfortunately it can only take a few bad experiences when someone is first dipping their toe in the water to put a curious progressive person off for life.” Switch commented that the “mainstream” activist movement “makes it look like there is one ‘movement,’ which perpetuates the invisibility of parallel movements in other (non-white, non-punk, non-student) subcultures…, but there are of course much purer revolutionary elements in all sorts of places).”
But whilst these people’s experiences seemed to validate my observations, there were many criticisms of what I had written. For example, Sara claimed that: “[t]he polemic has its uses sure, but how useful is it against potential allies; how productive is it?” She continued:
Representational polemic… disarms and is disempowering; it speaks over, speaks at as opposed to engaging with and opening up a conversation, a dialogue in which all parties are vulnerable and put themselves on the line, and learn to trust each other to be able to begin to deal with the difficult complicities and contradictions in many of our political actions and relationships amongst ourselves and the wider community.
I think that this is certainly true of the ways in which I and other university-educated people learn to engage with these problems. By adopting a particular form and style of writing to express our discontent we perpetuate an exclusionary mode of communication. However, given that the piece was aimed at precisely the kind of people who communicate in this way, I would argue that it was not excluding its targets from engaging in conversation.
I would like to move towards a place where we can sit down together, in mutual trust, to discuss as equals. But given the hierarchies that exist within the activist community this isn’t possible at the moment. There isn’t the willingness to engage with these issues because many activists don’t realise there is a problem. I think there’s an
urgent need to communicate that there are very serious problems in how we relate to one another. Until privileges are meticulously unpicked, I think it’s unwise to expect genuine dialogue (as opposed to power games) to emerge.
Other commenters seemed to disagree that the cultural majority should have to change. Andy argued that:
If people feel existing activism does not resonate with their particular ethnic or class culture, maybe instead of complaining about others living their own way (which after all, isn’t doing you any harm and very often is also socially taboo or dissident), these people should form their own affinity-groups with people who share their culture, and network these affinity-groups into the network.
These sentiments, to me, betray a lack of understanding of the problems faced by those without access to the existing activist scene. The people Andy seemed to have in mind could (and often do) form groups with people who share their culture (when they can, and often they can’t which is why they turn to the wider activist community in the first place), but then they face invisibility or reduced visibility in the wider activist scene. They may be assumed to be focussed on identity politics or accused of being separatist, even though they may feel that they should be included in wider activist circles. The decision to form culturally specific groups often results in reduced trust from the wider network, as the in-group, paradoxically, feels excluded by the autonomy of those with different cultural values. Certainly, a minority group that chooses to organise in this way may feel more autonomy, but this may come at the expense of increased separation. To blame the excludeds’ own cultural practices for their separation demonstrates a lack of appreciation of the power dynamics at play, where the majority’s cultural practices are assumed to be the norm.
Whilst I want to continue to engage in conversation with other activists and those who would be activists about the precise nature of the problems, I also feel like I should offer some suggestions about how we might start remedying the situation. For me, the main problems are the power differentials that exist within wider society and that inevitably contaminate any activist groupings we create. I think that we need to work to identify and eliminate male privilege, white supremacy, heteronormativity and other hierarchical modes of thinking not just in the obvious baddies (the police, the fascists, etc.) but in ourselves. We need to make effort to educate ourselves through the experiences of those who have suffered from and have been complicit in the kinds of abuses we seek to eliminate. There is a wealth of information available in zines, books and on the internet that is relevant to the issues I am talking about. We need to make ourselves, our friends and accomplices aware of these viewpoints.
When we experience resistance to the ideas that we find, we should interrogate that resistance and try to work out whether we have vested interests in maintaining hierarchies. I have found groups such as pro-feminist men’s groups invaluable for creating spaces conducive to collective unpicking of our complicity in perpetuating hierarchies. Many people write off such ventures as hand-wringing guilt-fests but I have found them to be a necessary step in taking collective responsibility to change the values that exist in activist spaces.
I think that once tribal groups (e.g. men, white people, straight people) have made an effort to empathise with the experiences of others and people are taking responsibility as individuals and as part of wider collectives to combat hierarchy formation and perpetuation, dialogue can begin in earnest. Once there is a respect for others’ views and perspectives we can begin a conversation. We can start to share our vulnerabilities with one another,
as those afraid of being dominated and those afraid of losing our privilege. Once people recognise the divides that exist and make genuine efforts to move beyond them, trust becomes a possibility.
I am excited at the prospect of reaching this stage in the communities I am involved with although, of course, it is a daunting mountain to climb, personally and collectively. I think that, by incorporating a lifelong struggle against our own conditioned value systems into our actions, we can move towards more enriching and sustainable relationships. It is in everybody’s interests that we work to accomplish this.
An article from Do or Die Issue 9. In the paper edition, this article appears on page(s) 166-170.
Give up Activism: Postscript
Many of the articles printed in the Reflections on June 18th pamphlet repeated almost to the onset of tedium that capitalism is a social relation and isn't just to do with big banks, corporations or international financial
institutions. It's an important point and worth making, but 'Give up Activism' had other fish to fry.
Therefore the conclusion reached by these other articles was the point of departure for this one - if it is true that capitalism is a social relation based in production and in the relations between classes then what implications does this have for our activity and for our method of attacking it? The basic kernel of the piece and the initial idea that inspired the writing of it is the 'Form and Content' section. It had occurred to many people that there was something a little odd about a 'day of action against capitalism'. The original inspiration behind the article was an attempt to pin down what it was that made the idea appear a little odd, incongruous, contradictory.
It seemed there was a similarity between the way we were carrying on acting like liberal activists campaigning against capitalism as if it was another single issue, another
'cause', and Vaneigem's critique of the leftist militant, whose politics consist of a set of duties carried out on behalf of an external 'cause'. It is true that the activist and the militant share this common factor, but it is about all they have in common. I made the mistake of carrying over all the other characteristics attributed by Vaneigem to 'the militant' and assigning them also to the activist, when they largely weren't appropriate.
As a result, large sections of 'Give up Activism' come across as far too harsh and as an inaccurate representation of the direct action movement. The Situationists' characteristic bile was perhaps more appropriate when directed at leftist party hacks than as a description of the sort of politics involved around June 18th. The self-sacrifice, the martyrdom and guilt that Vaneigem identified as central to the politics of 'the militant' is much less a feature of direct action politics, which to the contrary is more usually criticised for the opposite failing of lifestylism.
As has been very neatly drawn out by an excellent critique in the American publication The Bad Days Will End!,[1] the original idea that motivated the writing of the article and this rehashing of Vaneigem, translating the critique of the leftist 'militant' into that of the liberal 'activist', are incongruously roped together to produce an article which is an unwieldy amalgam of the objective (What social situation are we in? What forms of action are appropriate?) and the subjective (Why do we feel like activists? Why do we have this mentality? Can we change the way we feel about ourselves?). It is not so much that the subjective aspect of activism is emphasised over the objective, but rather more that the very real problems that are identified with acting as activists come to be seen to be mere products of having this 'activist mentality'. 'Give up Activism' can then be read such that it seems to reverse cause and effect and to imply that if we simply 'give up' this mental role then the objective conditions will change too:
"[Give up Activism's] greatest weakness is this one-sided emphasis on the 'subjective' side of the social phenomenon of activism. The emphasis points to an obvious conclusion implicit throughout [the] argument: If activism is a mental attitude or 'role', it may be changed, as one changes one's mind, or thrown off, like a mask or a costume... The implication is clear: cease to cling, let go of the role, 'give up activism', and a significant impediment to the desired change will be removed."[2]
The article was of course never proposing that we could simply think ourselves out of the problem. It was intended merely to suggest that we might be able to remove an impediment and an illusion about our situation as one step towards challenging that situation, and from that point that we might start to discover a more effective and more appropriate way of acting.
It is now clear that the slipshod hitching of Vaneigem to a enquiry into what it was that was incongruous and odd in having a one-day action against capitalism was an error, prompted by an over-hasty appropriation of
Situationist ideas, without considering how much of a connection there really was between them and the original idea behind the piece. The theory of roles is perhaps the weakest part of Vaneigem's ideas and in his 'Critique of the Situationist International', Gilles Dauvé even goes so far as to say: "Vaneigem was the weakest side of the SI,
the one which reveals all its weaknesses".[3] This is probably a little harsh. But nevertheless, the sort of degeneration that Situationist ideas underwent after the post-1968 disintegration of the SI took the worst elements of Vaneigem's "radical subjectivity" as their starting point, in the poorest examples effectively degenerating into bourgeois individualism.[4] That it is this element of Situationist thought that has proven the most easily recuperable should give us pause for thought before too-readily taking it on board.
Revolution in Your Head
This over-emphasis in 'Give up Activism' on the theory of roles and on the subjective side of things has led some people to fail to recognise the original impetus behind the piece. This starting point and presupposition was perhaps not made clear enough, because some people seem to have assumed that the purpose of the article was to make some kind of point concerning individual psychological health. 'Give up Activism' was not intended to be an article about or an exercise in radical therapy. The main intention of the article, however inexpertly executed, was always to think about our collective activity - what we are doing and how we might do it better.
However, there was a point to the 'subjectivism' of the main part of the article. The reason why 'Give up Activism' was so concerned with our ideas and our mental image of ourselves is not because I thought that if we change our ideas then everything will be alright, but because I had nothing to say about our activity. This was very clearly a critique written from the inside and thus also a self-critique and I am still very much involved in 'activist' politics. As I made plain, I have not necessarily got any clearer idea than anyone else of how to go about developing new forms of action more appropriate to an 'anti-capitalist' perspective. June 18th was a valiant attempt to do just this, and
'Give up Activism' was not a criticism of the action on June 18th as such. I certainly couldn't have come up with anything much better myself.
Although the piece is called 'Give up Activism', I did not want to suggest at all that people stop trashing GM crops, smashing up the City and disrupting the gatherings of the rich and powerful, or any of the other myriad acts of resistance that 'activists' engage in. It was more the way we do these things and what we think we are doing when we do them that I was seeking to question. Because 'Give up Activism' had little or nothing to recommend in terms of objective practical activity, the emphasis on the subjective made it seem like I thought these problems existed only in our heads.
Of course, thinking of ourselves as activists and as belonging to a community of activists is no more than a recognition of the truth, and there is nothing pathological in that. The problem I was trying to make clear was the
identification with the activist role - being happy as a radical minority. I intended to question the role, to make people dissatisfied with the role, even while they remained within it. It is only in this way that we stand a chance of escaping it.
Obviously we are constrained within our specific circumstances. During an ebb in the class struggle, revolutionaries are in even more of a minority than they are in any case. We probably don't have any choice about appearing as a strange subculture. But we do have a choice about our attitude to this situation, and if we come to ditch the mental identification with the role then we may discover that there is actually some room for manoeuvre within our activist role so that we can try and break from activist practice as far as we are able. The point is that challenging the 'subjective' element - our activist self-image - will at least be a step towards moving beyond the role in its 'objective' element also. As I said in 'Give up Activism', only with a general escalation of the class struggle will activists be able to completely ditch their role, but in the meantime: "to work to escalate the struggle it will be necessary to break with the role of activists to whatever extent is possible - to constantly try to push at the boundaries of our limitations and constraints." Which was precisely the point of the article.
For if we cannot even think beyond the role now, then what hope have we of ever escaping it? We should at the very least be dissatisfied with our position as a radical minority and be trying to generalise the struggle and make the necessary upturn happen. Doing away with the activist mentality is necessary but not sufficient for doing away with the role in practice.
Up the Workers!
Although 'Give up Activism' neglected to recommend any actual change in behaviour outside of saying that we needed one, perhaps now it would be appropriate to say something about this. How can we bring 'politics' out of its separate box, as an external cause to which we dedicate ourselves?
Many of the criticisms of the direct action movement revolve around similar points. Capitalism is based on work; our struggles against it are not based on our work but quite the opposite, they are something we do outside whatever work we may do. Our struggles are not based on our direct needs (as for example, going on strike for higher wages); they seem disconnected, arbitrary. Our 'days of action' and so forth have no connection to any wider on-going struggle in society. We treat capitalism as if it was something external, ignoring our own relation to it. These points are repeated again and again in criticisms of the direct action movement (including 'Give up
Activism' but also in many other places).
The problem is not necessarily that people don't understand that capital is a social relation and that it's to do with production as well as just banks and stock exchanges, here as well as in the Third World or that capital is a relation between classes. The point is that even when all of this is understood our attitude to this is still as outsiders looking in, deciding at what point to attack this system. Our struggle against capitalism is not based on
our relation to value-creation, to work. On the whole the people who make up the direct action movement occupy marginal positions within society as the unemployed, as students or working in various temporary and transitory jobs. We do not really inhabit the world of production, but exist largely in the realm of consumption and circulation. What unity the direct action movement possesses does not come from all working in the same occupation or living in the same area. It is a unity based on intellectual commitment to a set of ideas.
To a certain extent 'Give up Activism' was being disingenuous (as were many of the other critiques making similar points) in providing all these hints but never spelling out exactly where they led, which left the door open for them to be misunderstood. The author of the critique in The Bad Days Will End! was right to point out what the article was indicating but shied away from actually mentioning: the basic thing that's wrong with activism is that it isn't collective mass struggle by the working class at the point of production, which is the way that revolutions are
supposed to happen.
The sort of activity that meets the criteria of all the criticisms - that is based on immediate needs, in a mass ongoing struggle, in direct connection to our everyday lives and that does not treat capital as something external to us, is this working class struggle. It seems a little unfair to criticise the direct action movement for not being something that it cannot be and has never claimed to be, but nevertheless, if we want to move forward we've got to know what we're lacking.
The reason that this sort of working class struggle is the obvious answer to what we are lacking is that this is THE model of revolution that the last hundred years or so has handed down to us that we have to draw upon.
However, the shadow of the failure of the workers' movement still hangs over us. And if this is not the model of how a revolution might happen, then what is? And no one has any very convincing answers to that question.
A Vociferous Minority
So we are stuck with the question - what do we do as a radical minority that wants to create revolution in nonrevolutionary times? The way I see it at the moment, we basically have two options. The first is to recognise that as a small scene of radicals we can have relatively little influence on the overall picture and that if and when an upsurge in the class struggle occurs it probably won't have much to do with us. Therefore until the mythical day arrives the best thing we can do is to continue to take radical action, to pursue politics that push things in the right direction and to try and drag along as many other people as possible, but basically to resign ourselves to that fact that we are going to continue to be a minority. So until the point when some sort of upturn in the class struggle occurs it's basically a holding operation. We can try and stop things getting worse, have a finger in the dam, try and strategically target weak points in the system where we think we can hit and have some effect, develop our theory, live our lives in as radical a way as possible, build a sustainable counter culture that can carry on doing these things in the long term... and hopefully when one day, events out of our control lead to a general radicalisation of society and an upturn in the class struggle we will be there ready to play some part and to contribute what things we have learnt and what skills we have developed as a radical subculture.
The flaw in this sort of approach is that it appears almost like another sort of 'automatic
Marxism' - a term used to poke fun at those Marxists who thought that a revolution would happen when the contradictions between the forces and the relations of production had matured sufficiently, when the objective conditions were right, so that revolution almost seemed to be a process that happened without the need for any human involvement and you could just sit back and wait for it to happen. This sort of idea is a flaw carried over into ultra-left thinking. As is explained in The Bad Days Will
End!, many ultra-left groups have recognised that in periods of downturn, they are necessarily going to be minorities and have argued against compensating for this with any kind of party-building or attempts to substitute their group for the struggle of the proletariat as a whole. Some ultra-left groups have taken this line of thinking to its logical conclusion and have ended up turning doing nothing into a political principle. Of course our response would not be to do nothing, but nevertheless, the point remains that if everyone similarly just waited for an upsurge to happen then it certainly never would. Effectively by just waiting for it to happen we are assuming that someone else will do it for us and maintaining a division between us and the 'ordinary' workers who will make this happen.
The alternative to this scenario is to stop thinking of the ebb and flow of the class struggle as like some force of nature that just comes and goes without us being able to effect it at all, and to start thinking about how to build class power and how to end the current disorganised and atomised state of workers in this country. The problem is that over the last twenty or so years, the social landscape of the country has changed so fast and so rapidly that it has caught us on the hop. Restructuring and relocation have fractured and divided people. We could try and help re-compose a new unity, instead of just being content with doing our bit and waiting for the upturn, to try and make this upturn happen. We will probably still be acting as activists, but to a lesser extent, and at least we will be making it more possible for us to abolish activism altogether in the future.
One way of doing this is suggested in the critique in The Bad Days Will End!:
"Perhaps, then, the first steps towards a genuine anti-activism would be to turn towards these specific, everyday, ongoing struggles. How are the so-called 'ordinary' workers resisting capitalism at this time? What opportunities are already there in their ongoing struggles? What networks are already being built through their own efforts?"[5]
A current example of exactly this sort of thing is the investigation into call centres initiated by the German group
Kolinko, which is mentioned in The Bad Days Will End! and was also contributed to in the recent Undercurrent No.
8.[6] The idea of this project is that call centres represent the 'new sweatshops' of the information economy and that if a new cycle of workers' resistance is to emerge anywhere then this might just be the place.
It is perhaps also worth considering that changing circumstances might work to our advantage - the restructuring of the welfare state is forcing more and more activists into work. For example the call centre enquiry project mentioned above could represent a good opportunity for us as call centres are exactly the sort of places where people forced off the dole end up working and exactly the sort of temporary and transient jobs in which those involved in the direct action movement end up working also. This certainly could help make the connection between capitalism and our own immediate needs, and perhaps might allow us to better participate in developing new fronts in the class struggle. Or the increased imposition of work could just end up with us even more fucked over than we are at present, which is obviously what the government are hoping. They are attempting to both have their cake and eat it - trying to turn the clock back and return to days of austerity and privation while gambling that the working class is so atomised and divided by twenty years of attacks that this will not provoke a return of the struggle that originally brought about the introduction of these amelioration measures in the first place. Only time will tell whether they are to be successful in their endeavour or whether we are to be successful in ours.
In conclusion, perhaps the best thing would be to try and adopt both of the above methods. We need to maintain our radicalism and commitment to direct action, not being afraid to take action as a minority. But equally, we can't just resign ourselves to remaining a small radical subculture and treading water while we wait for everyone
else to make the revolutionary wave for us. We should also perhaps look at the potential for making our direct action complement whatever practical contribution to current workers' struggles we may feel able to make. In both the possible scenarios outlined above we continue to act more or less within the activist role. But hopefully in both of these different scenarios we would be able to reject the mental identification with the role of activism and actively try to go beyond our status as activists to whatever extent is possible..
Notes
1) 'The Necessity and Impossibility of Anti-Activism', The Bad Days Will End!, No. 3. p.4. I highly recommend this article, and the magazine contains some other good stuff too. Send $3 to: Merrymount Publications, PO Box
441597, Somerville, MA 02144, USA. Email: bronterre@earthlink.net
Web: http://www.geocities.com/jkellstadt/
2) The Bad Days Will End!, p.5
3) Gilles Dauvé (Jean Barrot) - 'Critique of the Situationist International' in What is Situationism? - A Reader, Ed.
Stewart Home (AK Press, 1996), p.35
4) See 'Whatever happened to the Situationists?', Aufheben No. 6, p.45
5) The Bad Days Will End!, p.6
6) The Kolinko proposal was recently published in Collective Action Notes No. 16-17 and is also available on the web at: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/index_e.htm [ Updated 4 March 2002: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/engl/e_koidx.htm
]
The Tyranny of Structurelessness
by Jo Freeman aka Joreen
During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.
The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" rap group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.
The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of "structurelessness" without realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive.
If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these.
They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why "structurelessness" does not work.
FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.
This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.
For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.
THE NATURE OF ELITISM
"Elitist" is probably the most abused word in the women's liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term
"elite" is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.
Correctly, an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. A person becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a small group, whether or not that individual is well known or not known at all. Notoriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.
Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don't. And it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication through the friends that are made in it.
Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network.
Networks may even overlap. When only one such network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
The inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women's movement nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created the "locker room" mentality and the "old school" ties which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social reward. Much of the energy of past women's movements has been directed to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. As we well know, these efforts have not prevented the informal maleonly networks from discriminating against women, but they have made it more difficult.
Because elites are informal does not mean they are invisible. At any small group meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing whom. The members of a friendship group will relate more to each other than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; they repeat each other's points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore or grapple with the "outs" whose approval is not necessary for making a decision. But it is necessary for the "outs" to stay on good terms with the "ins." Of course the lines are not as sharp as I have drawn them. They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things.
Since movement groups have made no concrete decisions about who shall exercise power within them, many different criteria are used around the country. Most criteria are along the lines of traditional female characteristics. For instance, in the early days of the movement, marriage was usually a prerequisite for participation in the informal elite. As women have been traditionally taught, married women relate primarily to each other, and look upon single women as too threatening to have as close friends. In many cities, this criterion was further refined to include only those women married to New Left men. This standard had more than tradition behind it, however, because New Left men often had access to resources needed by the movement -- such as mailing lists, printing presses, contacts, and information -- and women were used to getting what they needed through men rather than independently. As the movement has charged through time, marriage has become a less universal criterion for effective participation, but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who possess certain material or personal characteristics may join. They frequently include: middle-class background
(despite all the rhetoric about relating to the working class); being married; not being married but living with someone; being or pretending to be a lesbian; being between the ages of twenty and thirty; being college educated or at least having some college background; being "hip"; not being too "hip"; holding a certain political line or identification as a "radical"; having children or at least liking them; not having children; having certain
"feminine" personality characteristics such as being "nice"; dressing right (whether in the traditional style or the antitraditional style); etc. There are also some characteristics which will almost always tag one as a "deviant" who should not be related to. They include: being too old; working full time, particularly if one is actively committed to a "career"; not being "nice"; and being avowedly single (i.e., neither actively heterosexual nor homosexual).
Other criteria could be included, but they all have common themes. The characteristics prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, and thus for exercising power, concern one's background, personality, or allocation of time. They do not include one's competence, dedication to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former are the criteria one usually uses in determining one's friends.
The latter are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be politically effective.
The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria art pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one's personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who "fit in." One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as a potential addition, one is "rushed" by
the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person's friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.
All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
Although this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable. All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.
This has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware. The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because they like them and not because they say significant things. As long as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter. But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage, it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.
THE "STAR" SYSTEM
The idea of "structurelessness" has created the "star" system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women's liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.
While it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the movement's position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.
This is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who are labeled "stars." Because they were not selected by the women in the movement to represent the movement's views, they are resented when the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.
This has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women labeled "stars." First, because the movement didn't put them in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press put them
there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press will continue to look to "stars" as spokeswomen as long as it has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives at all. Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously attacked by their sisters.
This achieves nothing for the movement and is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly alienated -- or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her "sisters." She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the "star" system in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a "star," the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she has been accused.
POLITICAL IMPOTENCE
Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of "just talking" and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an
Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.
While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;
1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousnessraising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.
3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.
4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.
While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones. Consequently, because the larger movement in most cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not too much more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much motion and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are not as innocuous as the results' and their victim is the movement itself.
Some groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the first place. This excludes many women from participating. As long as the only way women can participate in the movement is through membership in a small group, the nongregarious are at a distinct disadvantage. As long as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism becomes institutionalized.
For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group.
Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.
The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available. Some women just "do their own thing." This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift out of the movement entirely because they don't want to develop an individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining, or starting group projects that interest them.
Many turn to other political organizations to give them the kind of structured, effective activity that they have not been able to find in the women's movement. Those political organizations which see women's liberation as only one of many issues to which women should devote their time thus find the movement a vast recruiting ground for new members. There is no need for such organizations to "infiltrate" (though this is not precluded). The desire for meaningful political activity generated in women by their becoming part of the women's liberation movement is sufficient to make them eager to join other organizations when the movement itself provides no outlets for their new ideas and energies. Those women who join other political organizations while remaining within the women's liberation movement, or who join women's liberation while remaining in other political organizations, in turn become the framework for new informal structures. These friendship networks are based upon their common nonfeminist politics rather than the characteristics discussed earlier, but operate in much the same way. Because these women share common values, ideas, and political orientations, they too become informal, unplanned, unselected, unresponsible elites -- whether they intend to be so or not.
These new informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal elites previously developed within different movement groups. This is a correct perception. Such politically oriented networks are rarely willing to be merely "sororities" as many of the old ones were, and want to proselytize their political as well as their feminist ideas. This is only natural, but its implications for women's liberation have never been adequately discussed. The old elites are rarely willing to bring such differences of opinion out into the open because it would involve exposing the nature of the informal structure of the group.
Many of these informal elites have been hiding under the banner of "anti-elitism" and "structurelessness." To effectively counter the competition from another informal structure, they would have to become "public," and this possibility is fraught with many dangerous implications. Thus, to maintain its own power, it is easier to rationalize the exclusion of the members of the other informal structure by such means as "red-baiting,"
"reformist-baiting," "lesbian-baiting," or "straight-baiting." The only other alternative is to formally structure the group in such a way that the original power structure is institutionalized. This is not always possible. If the informal elites have been well structured and have exercised a fair amount of power in the past, such a task is feasible. These groups have a history of being somewhat politically effective in the past, as the tightness of the informal structure has proven an adequate substitute for a formal structure. Becoming Structured does not alter their operation much, though the institutionalization of the power structure does open it to formal challenge. It is those groups which are in greatest need of structure that are often least capable of creating it. Their informal structures have not been too well formed and adherence to the ideology of "structurelessness" makes them reluctant to change tactics. The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of "structurelessness," the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.
Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those organizations. Such groups as NOW, WEAL, and some leftist women's caucuses are simply the only organizations capable of mounting a national campaign. The multitude of
Unstructured women's liberation groups can choose to support or not support the national campaigns, but are incapable of mounting their own. Thus their members become the troops under the leadership of the Structured organizations. The avowedly Unstructured groups have no way of drawing upon the movement's vast resources to support its priorities. It doesn't even have a way of deciding what they are.
The more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about. Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they will not be.
As long as the women's liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of organization which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among friends, the worst problems of Unstructuredness will not be felt. But this style of organization has its limits; it is politically inefficacious, exclusive, and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what already exists because of class, race, occupation, education, parental or marital status, personality, etc., will inevitably be discouraged from trying to participate. Those who do fit in will develop vested interests in maintaining things as they are.
The informal groups' vested interests will be sustained by the informal structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.
These problems are coming to a head at this time because the nature of the movement is necessarily changing.
Consciousness-raising as the main function of the women's liberation movement is becoming obsolete. Due to the intense press publicity of the last two years and the numerous overground books and articles now being circulated, women's liberation has become a household word. Its issues are discussed and informal rap groups are
formed by people who have no explicit connection with any movement group. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals, and pursue its objectives in a coordinated fashion. To do this it must get organized -- locally, regionally, and nationally.
PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING
Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all.
Some of the traditional techniques will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess use.
Top of Form
While engaging in this trial-and-error process, there are some principles we can keep in mind that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective:
1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures. Letting people assume jobs or tasks only by default means they are not dependably done. If people are selected to do a task, preferably after expressing an interest or willingness to do it, they have made a commitment which cannot so easily be ignored.
2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them. This is how the group has control over people in positions of authority. Individuals may exercise power, but it is the group that has ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible. This prevents monopoly of power and requires those in positions of authority to consult with many others in the process of exercising it. It also gives many people the opportunity to have responsibility for specific tasks and thereby to learn different skills.
4) Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group. Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a good job.
5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria. Selecting someone for a position because they are liked by the group or giving them hard work because they are disliked serves neither the group nor the person in the long run.
Ability, interest, and responsibility have got to be the major concerns in such selection. People should be given an opportunity to learn skills they do not have, but this is best done through some sort of "apprenticeship" program rather than the "sink or swim" method. Having a responsibility one can't handle well is demoralizing. Conversely, being blacklisted from doing what one can do well does not encourage one to develop one's skills. Women have been punished for being competent throughout most of human history; the movement does not need to repeat this process.
6) Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power. When an informal network spreads new ideas and information among themselves outside the group, they are already engaged in the process of forming an opinion -- without the group participating. The more one knows about how things work and what is happening, the more politically effective one can be.
7) Equal access to resources needed by the group. This is not always perfectly possible, but should be striven for.
A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources. Members' skills can be equitably available only when members are willing to teach what they know to others.
When these principles are applied, they insure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.
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Subversive Submissive #1
Three years ago, in march 2006 I started a blog called "Subversive Submissive" and began to write about my experiences with BDSM. At the time, I had already been aware of my submissive sexuality for two or three years and had explored some aspects of d / s with my previous partner - mostly playing with light bondage and rough sex - but had never quite gotten over my inhibitions around BDSM and around sex in general. Instead, I had blamed my partner for just not being dominant enough, not being the man that I needed; sometimes, I had blamed myself for having these desires in the first place. Obviously neither of these were healthy ways to deal with the issue, and for this and many other reasons, that relationship fell apart in the summer of 2005.
I never breathed a word of my submission fantasies to anyone, not even my close friends, and not even the few friends I had who were openly kinky. I had always been afraid of talking about sex and was intimidated by those to whom it seemed to come so easily and on top of that, I was worried sick about what it meant that I, an anarchist woman, fantasized about being controlled, dominated, and used by a man.
***
It’s only been over the last few years that I’ve started feeling comfortable with myself as a sexual being. Part of that is because I’d never before been able to explore my masochistic and submissive side with someone who truly reflected that desire back in his sadism and dominance. Other lovers had always expressed a desire for me, of course, but it wasn’t until I felt someone desire me as a submissive and as a masochist – because I loved to be at his feet, not in spite of it – that I felt sexy and attractive. It also helped that my partner is comfortable with talking about his own sexuality and his own desires, and encourages me to open up without being forceful or judgmental about it.
The other part is because of the outlet I find in writing it all down in my blog. There, writing anonymously, I’ve been able to speak freely about my fetishes with other people like me, without any fear of being judged. It’s started to make me feel more and more comfortable with the idea of being out, as it were, to not feel the need to lie about my sexuality or to hide the fact that I’m kinky.
But there’s a world of difference between “being out” to other kinky folks on the Internet and to vanilla friends. A few years ago, while talking to a group of friends…
***
Tonight, I learned that there’s a world of difference between “coming out” to other kinky folks and to vanilla friends. While talking to a group of friends, one of them began describing a documentary on fetishes he’d recently watched, and how uncomfortable it made him feel. He was specifically talking about a section of the documentary about people who enjoy being degraded, and expressed his shock and horror upon learning that people actually did this, that this existed. What freaks.
Immediately, I felt my stomach churning, and I became terrified to respond in any way — I was afraid that any reaction, however slight, would either “give me away,” or be a lie; I was afraid to say something like, “Of course people do that, and there’s nothing wrong with it,” but I also wasn’t about to nod in agreement or act like I didn’t know anything about it.
Then, the two other women in the group — both self-identified feminists — began to discuss whether or not such activities were “okay.” As in, “I guess it’s okay if the woman wants to….” (Me, in my head: “Why do you get to decide what is or isn’t an acceptable sexual practice for a woman to engage in?”)
I just walked away. Because, well, what could I say? I felt ashamed, afterward, for not being brave enough to speak out, for not saying a word to refute them. Because any word would mark me, I was afraid, as one of those freaks — or worse, as a bad feminist, as a self-hating woman, as a masochist.
I’m not really sure how I could have better dealt with the situation. They weren’t close enough friends for me to really talk about my sex life with them, or for me to approach them afterward to tell them how they’d made me
feel uncomfortable, or anything like that. More than anything, it was simply a rude awakening to remember that even within a so-called radical community, even among those I consider friends, even among those who are sexually marginalized in other ways (several in the group identified as queer), BDSM beyond “tee hee, I tied my boyfriend’s hands to the bed with a silk scarf, how kinky!” is seen as sick, shocking, and potentially (if not inherently) abusive. I know that my friends would never mean to intentionally insult me, and I’m sure that they wouldn’t continue to say such things in my presence if I had told them that I was a submissive, that I liked that sort of thing, and that if they had a problem with that we could discuss it some other time. But to do that would be to step out in a way that I’m just not ready for.
The anarchist world and feeling okay to be fucked:
After I learned about privilege and started to get into radical politics, everything changed for me. It took me years to really get over my relation-ship with Taryn. It might have been four years before I tried dating someone again— my sophomore year of high school. We both wore green and brown a lot and had messy hair. Sometimes people asked if we were siblings. I became so terrified of that person liking me too much, though, that I broke up with them before it ever became serious, even though I really wanted it to get serious. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that a friend that I almost started to date made me realize that I had a problem and was psychologically terrified of relationships. I really wanted relationships, but whenever they could happen I ran from them. The second that I became close to anyone that I liked after months of crushing on them, I convinced myself that I hated them and broke it off. I wasn’t afraid of being raped again, just someone getting hurt over me and getting stuck in a relationship. Getting stuck is what hurt, more than the physical abuse. The emotional trauma of not being able to leave someone even though they were hurting me, gave me more anxiety than thinking about physical abuse. Taryn made me feel like I would be stuck with her forever because breaking up meant her hurting herself. I didn’t want people to be hurt. It wasn’t okay for people to break up and bad things not happen. My relationship with Taryn, being my first relationship, set a precedent for all future ones that if you were with someone you would break up and it would be terrible for everyone. I didn’t want to get into relationships with people because I was afraid of eventually breaking up with them and didn’t just sleep around instead because I couldn’t physically fool around with anyone without getting nauseated.
In my junior year of high school I was introduced to the radical anarchist community in Raleigh via a collective house. I’d identified as an anarchist before, but didn’t really know what that meant until finding this house. It was the first time that I’d met radical kids. I’d seen some at punk shows in Carrborro. They were crimethinc kids that handed out zines before I knew what crimethinc or zines were. I met Aster at the collective house. It was kind of the center of Raleigh punk things. They lived there. I became involved with them shortly after we met. They were the first person that I had sex with after being with Taryn. It was a terrible idea for both of us. The first time we had sex I couldn’t come and just got tired out and frustrated. It was also a million degrees in the house. I was nauseated by their smell and the heat and felt like shit. I also felt amazing at the same time. Everything that I wanted was happening, but it felt terrible for some reason. The second that we started to have sex I began to get scared and wanted to not see them anymore.
The second time that we tried having sex was at my dad’s house while he was out of town after a really cute night at a show. I couldn’t come again. Aster’s smell nauseated me still, and they had fresh cuts on their chest that I couldn’t deal with. After I got tired and we stopped having sex, we took a very awkward and quiet shower. I was afraid to bring up what I felt to them, but after we finished showering and ate cereal I finally did. We stayed up all night and came out to each other about a lot of our shit. We talked and it wasn’t a fight! We listened to each other and deconstructed what we were feeling.
Aster used sex as a way to cope with their selfimage and selfesteem. They told me about previous abuses. It was the first time I had ever heard someone talk about being abused, and it made me realize that I too had been abused.
Aster was the first person I ever told about Taryn.
I started to realize that a lot of the things they went through affected me in similar ways. Listening to them and talking to them about what happened to them helped me piece together that I had been raped, that I had been abused and manipulated by Taryn. We talked about my relationships since then and how I reacted to getting close to people, how I had reacted to getting close to them. Aster thought I was afraid of committing to people and could probably never be with anyone because of it. That made me feel bad, because I wanted to have a partner, but knew it would be really hard. We decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to keep seeing each other, but still hung out every day and cuddled at night and gave each other massages when we felt like shit. They made me realize that it wasn’t okay to feel the nausea that I felt around people I got close to. They made me recognize what it was. I still didn’t have any tools for getting passed the nausea, but I knew it was there and I knew that fucked up things happened to people and it could affect them over years. I knew that I was able to be raped and had been. I also knew then that as far as common experience went, what happened to me was totally normal.
I learned about consent that winter. I had never necessarily heard people talk about it before. We put on a really awesome puppet show about it at the collective house during a show. I didn’t realize how important consent was or that it really existed until then. I felt so good to know that you could simply ask your partners if they wanted to
do things and that it was perfectly okay to say no. The collective taught me a lot about things I’d never really heard people talk about like identity politics, gender, and race. The anarchist world suddenly meant a lot more than listening to punk music. In fact, punk started to sound really silly after hanging out at the house.
There was another person that I tried to become involved with early in the year after Aster. I met her during Food
Not Bombs. It was my senior year of high school. I became really confused after she started to not want to hang out with me as much. I really liked her and felt like I could actually commit to being with her and not get scared. I didn’t get nauseated after being around her or kissing her. I think she was the first person I really felt okay kissing.
Everything felt really good. I feel like I might have acted creepily towards her for about a week. I didn’t know a lot about consent surrounding interactions, communicating intentions, or polyamory then.
Defeated Binary?
While writing this zine, I ended up in a strange situation. There were these people staying at the same warehouse that I was in Baltimore. It was my friend Ellis’ space. One of them seemed really excited when my partner asked about what their preferred gender pro noun was. It was always really nice to be around people who have been exposed to that and are really receptive to those politics and preferences. Their reaction gave me the impression that they were really down with queer politics. I’m not sure why I thought this. I think it might have been because most of the people I know that care a lot about gender pronouns are queer.
Her partner ended up asking me what I was writing a zine about. I was trying to have this ready for the Baltimore
Radical Book Fair, but ended up not. I said I was writing a personal zine about rape, because I felt like I hadn’t ever seen it from a male assigned person’s perspective. The zine Good Sex/Bad Sex also prompted me to want to write down my experience to try and deconstruct a little bit of what happened. I thought that this perspective was important, especially in queer communities, because queer communities helped me understand a lot about gender roles and how healthy and unhealthy relationships functioned whether they are polyamorous or monogamous. I don’t think that polyamorous relationships are necessarily the „right’ choice. I’ve seen poly relationships that have just as fucked dynamics as monogamous couples. I think I’ve seen more discussion about how relationships can be healthy with poly people, though. I go between being poly and monogonogs with people. It tends to be fluid, like relationships. I think it’s important to keep fluidity in mind when talking about sexuality and even serious relationships. I think queer communities are also the space I learned the most about consent in. A lot of what happened to me, I feel like was because of a heteronormative straight world dominated by a rape culture. I also know other male assigned people that have had similar experiences and didn’t know how it affected them, or if this zine could support people going through those things deal with it better.
She asked me a little more about it, and I felt like I explained what I was trying to do fairly well, that it was a zine about my experiences with rape. She said that she actually had a zine about exactly what I was writing about. She got it for me out of her pack. I started to flip through it and noticed that it was actually a zine a male assigned person had written about men trying to work to defeat sexism and men unlearning rape. She then went on to say that she was so happy that I was writing this zine because she was so happy that women could have the support of some males.
I know that I probably didn’t explain what my zine was about the best, and I want to give that person the benefit of the doubt about that, but her statement made me really angry. I wasn’t writing this zine to necessarily support female assigned survivors. I want this zine to be a form of support for female assigned people and all survivors, trans, gender neutral and male assigned folk alike, but that isn’t the zine’s purpose for me. It made me angry because her statement made me feel excluded from victimization. I didn’t feel like she thought male bodied people could be raped. It made me feel like rape was exclusively something men did. I understand that rape culture is dominated by men and patriarchy, but I question the binary that keeps people from realizing that anyone can rape and anyone can be raped. Gender is not a specification for doing fucked up things.
I want this zine to be a guide for anyone. I want consent to be more fully realized and how when it’s lacking in areas that we wouldn’t normally think about it needing to be, people are oppressed by its absence.
An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender
I wish I could tell you that I became numb to the pain after all these years, but the news of the murder of another trans woman punches me in the gut every time it reaches me. Upon discovering details of Deoni Jones’s murder,
I’m left gasping for air and for the words or actions to express my total hatred for the society that produces the rhythms of gender-maintaining violence and mourning that have come to characterize the only rhythm that is audible to those of us seeking a way out of gender’s terrible song. There’s something inside of me that almost wishes to become deaf to this rhythm, but I know that it would not be enough to quiet gender’s reverberations in my body and in my daily life, which I have unceasingly tried to silence through hormones, alcohol, drugs, and writing idiotic essays. I fear this essay is nothing but another of those futile attempts. So many of us have tried these means and more to manage the crushing pain of gender in isolation, but there is nothing we could do short of collectively interrupting this rhythm and destroying gender in its entirety that will ease our heavy hearts. It is with this in mind that I will elaborate a proposal for those weary of gender violence and death for the creation of a new rhythm of vengeance against the gendered order.
There are certain practices that exist in the ways in which self-proclaimed “radical trans” people and “anarchafeminists” of certain activist subcultures have set into motion in response to the question of gender. These include consent workshops, “trans 101”s, consent zines/workshops, and callouts of “fucked up” behavior internal to their subculture, in addition to dance parties and orgies. There is certainly nothing inherently *wrong* with any of these things, but if we take seriously the notion that we must destroy gender and all social relations of this society, there is clearly something lacking in the practice which only challenges gender at a level of language use and subcultural dynamics. If we abandon the leftist-activist model and accept the charge that “revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination, but by resonance” and writing that has further elaborated this thesis of an insurrectional music, we come to an understanding that there are at the very least a number of problems with thinking that these isolated methods alone could build a force to destroy gender. Such a practice falls short at both directly addressing the material manifestations of gender violence as well as creating practices that will resonate with the unthinkable pain we carry deep in our bodies. We must build a rhythm of struggle which resonates in our bodies and builds the links between attack, memory, and the gender terror we experience in daily life.
It is simple enough to begin a discussion of insurrectional strategy with the notion of the attack. Yet many confuse this process with merely smashing a random bank and writing a communiqué telling the cops to fuck off. Of course, I’m not interested in condemning such a practice, I’m merely more interested in examining the ways in which various notions and methods of attack are positioned in relation to our memory and all of the emotions that have built up over time due to all of the gender violence we’ve endured. While it’s easy enough to mock candlelight vigils or the Trans Day of Remembrance, these moments function to create a continuity and rhythm of memory in relation to trans violence that many radical approaches to gender fail to do. When we hear the name
Deoni Jones today and see pictures of groups huddled by candlelight, we cannot help but think of Dee Dee
Pearson, Shelley Hilliard, Lashai Mclean, Sandy Woulard, Chanel Larkin, Duanna Johnson, Gwen Araujo, and
Marsha P. Johnson. We cannot help but have our minds fill with the history of those murdered at the hands of a society that must maintain the gendered order at all costs. It’s so easy to get lost in the pain that comes along with this, to look over your shoulder as you walk home every night in hopes that the noise you’ve heard isn’t someone ready to pounce on you. You might soon forget, and then be reminded next month when it happens again to another trans woman in another city or perhaps your hometown.
This is the rhythm of our memory and our collective fear and misery, which repeats with every murder, vigil, and
Trans Day of Remembrance. An insurrectional practice which attacks the foundations of gender must also utilize the rhythms of memory and emotion, but toward the end of breaking the ideology of victimization and passivity that the former practices maintain. Insurrectional comrades elsewhere in the world write: “Power has implemented on its behalf a machine of forgetting, each time more perfect and macabre, in order to maintain actual conditions in its favor. Amnesia only generates an acceptance of imposed reality while observing past struggles or comrades like photographs, severing every connection with reality, achieved by showing how unfeasible every intent to disobey the masters is.” This has manifested in attacks in solidarity with insurrectional comrades who have fallen or who are facing repression. These attacks are an attempt to tap into the visceral stores of hatred for this world and for its attacks upon those who share the desire to see an end to it, connecting the rhythms of collective memory, a desire for vengeance, and the terrain of struggle upon which they are situated.
We might be able to remove this practice of attack from a situation in which anarchists are only self-referential to the history of their own struggle and also apply it to our place within the cycles of deadly gender violence and mourning. Indeed, this has already been experimented with amongst anarchists in the United States. This model was experimented with in Bash Back!’s “Avenge Duanna” campaign, in which queer anarchists from a variety of cities carried out actions in response to Duanna Johnson’s murder in Memphis, TN in 2008. This brought to life a practice which connected the visceral emotions of vengeance, connection to collective memory, and attack which built power and the refusal of victimization. Its failure was perhaps failing to continue to materialize this force with every death, although in recent months there has been a resurgence in vengeance attacks. If we are to build a rhythm of bashing back, we must be steadfast in refusing to let the death of a trans woman go unnoticed. We must impose our own powerful rhythm, identifying the nodes of gender policing and violence in our local terrain of struggle and exacting our vengeance upon them, displacing the rhythms of fear, victimization, and empty gestures that continue to characterize current anarchist, feminist, or trans-activist responses to gender violence.
Through connecting the terrain of our daily life to cycles of the struggle against gender violence, we make material our resistance and leave a material mark of our refusal of victimhood. If this practice is to resonate we must steadily build this rhythm and refuse to allow anyone to ignore the multiplication of trans death all around us, by means of media sabotage, graffiti, or a variety of other methods. We have the opportunity to experiment with many methods of action with the potential to diffuse techniques of sabotaging gender production. Let us boldly experiment in this regard. Only then might the painful song of gender be replaced by the rhythm of its collapse.
Sex critical non-heteronormative desires
i had a conversation with a friend of mine last week about our nonheteronormative heterosexual relationships. he is dating someone new, and was having an odd experience, or at least he thought it was odd until he started talking to friends about it. and then it turns out that there are many people having a similar experience. among anarchist hetero couples, if i may generalize for a moment, it seems that the guys are doing a really good job of being soft and sensitive, of taking direction from women when it comes to intimacy, to sexuality, and friendship. there is a new kind of language where men have had to find ways of expressing desire without being direct or aggressive. a tentative language, a conditional language, a language of questions rather than demands: would it be okay if? what if i told you? for feminists, for women who want to be respected in friendships, in intimate relationships, and in sexualities, this is sweet. it makes relationships wonderful and warm and open and caring and loving. it’s fabulous. so where is the odd experience in all of this, you may be wondering? sometimes, as women, we want to feel passionately desired. we might want to be swept away with passion and desire. we might even want things to get a bit rough, you know, a bite on the neck, an uncomfortable position. sex on the floor under a table, or going at it so hard we almost fall off the bed before we even notice. (and this isn’t news to anyone into bdsm or other fetish sex that explores intentional power exchanges in sex). i could go on, but i’ll get to the point, which is this—we seem to be creating new norms, and in those norms, there are builtin things like respect and communication, gentleness and sensitivity, and these are all of course great things, and should be a key component in every relationship, from sexual ones to intimacies to friendships to parenting to teaching to work relationships and family. but, as with any set of norms, including polyamory and other forms of anti-heteronormative relationships, the risk is that we become fixed in a certain set of behaviors, and forget that we have the power and agency to say what we want, to negotiate through active listening and honest disclosure, and to achieve very fluid and lively relationships that do not stagnate or conform to previous expectations, or someone else’s idea of what is right or wrong for us. dylan vade is a trans lawyer who has written about the gender galaxy, which is the idea that gender and sex are not configured as a binary (male/female or masculine/feminine) but rather there are thousands of different ways of living out our sex/genders, in a galaxy, where some genders may cluster together into constellations, and sometimes these constellations are perceptible, but sometimes they are not.
1 i’d like to think that sexualities are like this too. rather than the binary homosexual/heterosexual, there are thousands of different ways of living out our sexualities. this leads me to one last thing that i have recently started having conversations about. we had a houseguest a few weeks ago, a woman who took advantage of the same-sex marriage rights in canada and got married a few years back. as her partner started female-to-male transitioning, their same-sex status became a bit more fluid. she said that now that he has fully transitioned, they are read by others as a heterosexual couple. she enjoys high-femme camp performance in everyday life, particularly when it is queer, and is now unsure how this will be interpreted by others, which is most often as straight. when a queer gender performance is misread as heterosexual, the risk is that the play with signifiers—the feminine dresses, the 1950s style and behavior, etc.—will be misunderstood by both queers and heteros as reinforcing gender role stereotypes rather than subverting them. it is also odd, she said, to suddenly be experiencing heterosexual privilege in her public life, 2 whereas her private relationship is still very queer and does not feel privileged. to put it another way, her narrative of sexuality is not one of privilege, and yet this is how strangers now engage with her and her partner. the narrative thus is becoming uncertain, or what bobby noble calls incoherent. this is another way in which queering heterosexuality may take place in radical queer milieus and lives. another FTM trans person has told me how he now struggles to be accepted as queer or trans, since people read him as a straight man, though he lived for nearly forty years as a woman and a lesbian. he almost feels like he can no longer be part of the queer community, unless he is among friends who have known him a long time. for
1 Vade, Dylan. “Expanding Gender and Expanding the Law: Toward a Social and Legal Conceptualization of Gender that Is More
Inclusive of Transgender People.” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, V. 11 (2004–2005) 253–316.
2 Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
example, he told me that he recently went out to a bar that had a reduced cover charge for trans men, and he had to really insist that he was trans. the door person wouldn’t believe him. he repeatedly thanked the person, because they were reaffirming his sex/gender of choice, but in the end, he had to show the dreaded ID that still listed his gender as “F” in order to be accepted as a trans man. oh, the irony. this is not an experience that any trans person wants to go through. it demonstrates how heteronormativity, which causes people to assume everyone is gender-straight and non-queer, seems to permeate even queer scenes that are attempting to privilege trans people. furthermore, it reveals how even in spaces committed to radical queer and trans politics and subjectivities, the notion that someone’s own self-identification should be accepted at face value, without having to provide coherent identification, is not always put into practice very well. this is yet another one of the risks of queering heterosexuality. heterosexuality of course needs to be challenged, to be queered, to be wrested from its place of privilege. at the same time, we need to be very careful not to heterosexualize or heteronormativize queer spaces, subjectivities, identities, ideas, theories, and the like. there is a role here for heterosexual queer allies, even those of us who cringe at the word heterosexual and strongly disidentify with it. i believe and hope that we can queer our practices, without claiming queer as our own, or appropriating it. in other words, the idea is to support queer struggles, to integrate queer ideas into our practices, to be as queer as possible, in order to work as allies to end queer oppression. the idea certainly is not—and this is another risk—to perform queer identities when it is convenient and then return to our heterosexual privilege unchanged or unchallenged by the experience. liberation means this. it means we keep writing the narrative of our lives, our desires, our genders, our sexualities. it means that, rather than having the kind of freedom janis joplin sang about (you know, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose) when my parents were exploring their open relationship (that is another story in itself!) we have liberatory experiences and relationships that are grounded in communities and long-term commitments to exploring what these relationships mean and how they can best be fulfilling to all involved. for me, to get to this openness, the queer and/or anarchist communities that i have encountered over the years have been crucial. crucial to who i am as a person, but more than that— crucial to revolutionary politics. the entire capitalist patriarchal white supremacy that structures our world unequally, and indeed preys on unequal relations of power, requires heteronormative relationships. break down those kinds of relationships, and we are also starting to break down patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. as jamie heckert argues, breaking down micro-fascisms at the level of identities and intimate relationships is at the root of resistance to macro-fascisms at the level of institutions and structures of power.
3 queer practices, relationships, communities, scenes, and intimacies thus are making important contributions toward profoundly liberatory modes of being, doing, thinking, feeling and acting in the world that are intensely political. even for heteros.
3 Heckert, Jamie. “Sexuality/Identity/Politics.” In Changing Anarchism. Ed. Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004.
I'm a better anarchist than you...
Sometimes in anarchist spaces generalizations are flipped on their head, like it’s not how superior you are for beating your ex to the punch, in getting to say I’m dumping you. It’s who can feel most emotion about what was lost and what could have been gained.
The same goes for heteronormativity, if you’re panamorous or polyamorous, it’s almost like walking in the room with a medal saying I’ve broken down these barriers in my mind. I think these subcultural superiorities are important as a backlash against the status quo, but it’s easy as activists to counter balance the sexist, homophobic, slut hating normative culture by pushing ourselves much further than we are comfortable and paying a higher price.
Sometimes we feel like we’re playing who we want to be in an act that is life, I constantly project an outer experience of confidence in what I’m doing, which means ignoring previous boundaries that say I’m scared by this, and I get spurred on by friends also trying on new identities as part of the struggle to move away from oppressive relationship dynamics.
There is one problem though and that is with the smallness of our radical community that validates my struggles, to throw off my shackles and be the most free loving person that we all wish to be, is honouring the path I’ve already walked.
There is a reason many people call The ethical slut the bible of the polyamorous movement, and it’s not because it was the first book that dealt with polyamorous cultures it’s because it was aimed at giving repressed people an escape and it worked
But when people make that sudden jump only to rely on the latest radical theories, it feels a lot like reinventing the wheel and being fundamentalist about rules that were only meant as guidelines. When you have questions, or things go wrong you have reduced your knowledge base, you only have the small idiosyncrasies that make us feel safe and secure in the consensus of radical communities and it’s opposing mainstream conditioning.
Polyamory
If I can do polyamory well, then I free up the time I might have spent worrying about what my partner gets up to.
But if I or my partner does poly badly, I open myself up to getting hurt far worse. Polyamory can feel like stretching my line of comfort very thin to enable each of us to feel a new happiness never experienced before.
But I shouldn’t ignore the massive range of social cues which force me to acknowledging that I feel selfish, jealous, unhappy even though these are all emotions that can be tied to my social conditioning within the mainstream or traditional hierarchies.
Because without listening to myself and allowing friends to look out for me, I or my partner will start extra relationships for bad reasons and will suffer endlessly until coming to terms with the concepts of limitless love but limited time, limitless courage in the face of adversity but vulnerable and only human
Queering Heterosexuality
I get that it’s useful to draw upon examples of beautiful thriving pansexual, homosocial cultures, that help people see outside the narrow normative box of hetero sexuality, I love passing on those experiences of a lesbian comedian who only watches gay porn because lesbian porn is so geared to men, and doesn’t know whether she likes women or is just really into symmetry. That’s some funny shit right there, and I want to work on it moving past novelty into reality for more people, but at the moment it’s so nice to hear precisely because it contrasts hetero-normative culture so succinctly.
I may romantically tease and flirt with my male friends, I’ve even stayed up reading Tolkien to them in my treehouse by candlelight and fallen asleep spooning them, but I don’t think I will ever feel comfortable getting jiggy with another guy, and unless I was in massive denial because of abuse I’d suffered I wouldn’t want to be encouraged into testing the waters neither.
I know that the whole problem of men being detached from their sexuality is due to being unable to access feelings for other men because we are dangerous, hence never remedying the situation. But growing up there just weren’t any men I really admired, and I envy my gay friends, because they can take advantage of that very normal homo-social atmosphere among the separated genders. I want those easy friendships and connections with women without an atmosphere of the hunter/ prey dynamic.
I can feel that intimate familiarity with my male friends without wanting to have sex with them; I’d like the same with my female friends. Gay men and women seem to me to straddle that gender divide fluidly, friends with men and women equally and lovingly. I want to find myself in that space.
Between sex-positive and sex-normative.
So how do we move past these 2 opposite experiences of our sexuality, I think we should learn to admire authenticity. After having internalized the kudos from being physically active sexually and politically in a sexpositive activist scene, I’m really done with struggling to enjoy sex for now. I just want easy, loving genuine connections, if that means saying no to sex when I really want to say yes to make someone happy, while I work out what I want, then that’s what I’ll have to do. But that’s obvious; the challenge is changing perspective, and learning that after one controlling drama filled relationship after another to accept that love is much more subtle than that, something that grows on you slowly.
The best way I could describe what I want would be say working in a library together with some rad punk somewhere, forever enjoying the same things, never assuming the other one’s sexual preference until one day after years of non-sexual lovely familiarity, I accidentally give the game away by crushing on something they were doing, before I even realized myself doing it, then and only then do we both realize our love for each other and the dance of risking intimacy begins, but with all the knowledge of that other person as a true friend, what makes them feel safe, happy, excited, overjoyed.
But I don’t see that happening in the spaces I inhabit because they are spaces dedicated to spreading information on better ways to do sex and the only good way to do that is talking from experience. The problem I have with storytelling is there can be a strong social competitive function, you are expected to gossip and compare your good relationship to the shitty relationships of friends or how you could never naively fall into the same mistakes of celebrity scandals you here in the news.
I miss the days when my sexual orientation, expression or assertiveness, was not the most important thing about me, and I don’t want to have to leave to more repressive normative circles just to get a breather from the running commentaries on your sex lives! Don’t get me wrong I still go all gooey at being included in on the heartwarming intimate moments of personal growth, but expanding upon every tiny detail in the last 24 hours into some all encompassing theory that reduces your life into a soundbite, really ruins the real magic of living in the moment for me.
That is all.
“..It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them, and they know it, and they love you and you know it. But it’s a party and your both talking to other people and you’re laughing and shining, and you look across the room, and catch each other’s eyes, but not because you’re possessive or it’s precisely sexual, but because that is your person in this life and it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end and it’s this secret world, that exists right there, in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them, that’s what I want out of a relationship” – Frances Ha
2Fucked2Furious
I don’t know why this conversation has been so stuck in my head for so long. It wasn’t the first time I was invited to have sex with a stranger, or the last time. But maybe it was the first time after I had thought seriously about my sexuality and realised that I’d never enjoyed sex much. I have always gone for it, had sex with lots of people without second thought, on first dates and all of that, but because it was all meaningless, because it didn’t matter to me. If the other person wanted it, ok, I’d do it. Didn’t make me more sad, or more happy. I was never attracted physically to people, I couldn’t see someone as ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’, just words that didn’t describe anything.
Sometimes after I got to know someone well, I’d find them attractive, but often by this point we had established a detrimental sexual relationship that I couldn’t reconfigure to be more pleasurable, so eventually I’d end the whole thing. I heard later that some people call similar experiences demisexuality. I don’t call it anything. My sexuality has only appeared with one person so far in my life. Far from any fairytale illusions of a prince on a white horse who finally made me horny, it was someone who actually spent time talking to me and getting to know me as a person, throwing away all hetero-patriarchal cis normativity that usually dictates the ways people see each other in our fucked up societies.
I think I also remember this conversation at that queer festival because it made me sad. It made me realise the pressure that is put on everyone to perform sexually. I tried explaining to people that I wouldn’t fuck them because I was in love with someone, and that made me involuntarily monogamous (I just couldn’t feel attraction to anyone else). Yeah, right. All I got back was Freudian bullshit about my repressed internalised sexuality that needed to be liberated. It is almost too obvious to draw a parallel between hetero/cis normativity in dominant society and compulsory sexuality in queer spaces. It’s paradoxical, in a way, that we’re trying to destroy the monogamous heterosexual family unit, whilst keeping the same view that it’s ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ to want to fuck around (same ‘natural’ impulse that makes some people cheat on each other). And our anarchy consists of embracing our desires to fuck lots of people, liberating our sexualities, fucking people of all genders, doing polyamory, bondage, kink and all of that, anything but actually thinking critically what it means to create spaces where we can feel more accepted, more equal and not pressured to do anything. The idea of being queer/ activist/ anarchist/ feminist / (could insert any label really) for me is not to embrace another normativity (be it queer/ activist/ anarchist), but to question every time when you spot it somewhere growing like the little fascist flower it is.
Flying - Kate Millett
…on my arm, wanting me to kiss her. Does she know what she is doing? Ask her. She says yes. I cannot seduce women. Only men, and men are scarcely a problem to seduce. Last desperate hope that she will not expect some odd butch behaviour from me - or even butch courage. But it's Vita who's making love to me now in the blur.
Dizzy feeling the painful ease of being touched by a woman. But no orgasm. She may not know but I do. Appalled, getting sober too late, knowing then I do not want her body. Do not want to see it, caress it, go down on it. Now I am trapped. I have sinned against love, taking but not giving. Fall asleep but a few hours later awakened to make love dishonestly. Of course she demands it. Silently, her outrage smoldering if I flinch. I feel like a criminal. My
God this is the first time she has made love with a woman and it should be this barren ordeal. All the time she is rejoicing, saying it's beautiful, crying out yes yes yes. I want to shout no at her - no, it is false. But she is a woman in love today hanging upon me. I cannot so insult her with truth. I am even hoping I will grow infatuated as soon as I recover from the shock of being here at all. If not I will have to tell her the truth. The one thing so hard to say to anyone we invent a thousand reasons and excuses. Never could say it to a man's face that I did not want him.
Almost inhumanly offensive. Surely this is worse what I am doing.
Next day on the phone she has married me. I am Fred now. Already Vita's an appendage, leaning on me, a whole building's heft of dependency. I told her no, I don't want to be lovers, just can't handle it, all my fault, I am not worth what you offer. She says I am ridiculous. I am. Also scared. Wonderful how she backs off, just didn't realize what she'd done. Now she does. Has no intention of leaning any more. We are after all old friends - I cling to that idea like sanity. Says she would like the relationship to be physical but if I don't want that, she only wants to be my friend, she cares for she only wants to be my friend, she cares for me... I listen feeling like a rat, small relief I'm off the hook, guilty this way too. So much I can hardly ever rest, the accusation always in my gut, the endless reproach in her letters to me in England.
Travel
Learning from life
It was in the mindnumbed jostle of Jakarta, amidst an oppressive atmosphere of artificial aspiration, that I found the first of many communities of exuberantly friendly punks at the Taring Babi house; punks who spent their days in artistic endeavour and their evenings invariably singing songs with themes of togetherness and welcome and laughing maniacally and who printed badges that said ‘alam raya sekolahku’.1
Since then I’ve passed through various collectives and intentional spaces and the theme of mutual learning occurs often, but too often as a trope. With my activist background and culturally instilled work ethic, it took me a while to understand and appreciate the value of time spent ‘ngobrol’ – just hanging out and drinking coffee, eating gorengan (everyone but me smoking) – not only in terms of sociability, but also as a basis for connection and exchange and for the sparking of ideas and the development and organisation of political praxis. I appreciated the way in which all the punks that I met seemed to have a clear and eloquent understanding of their political values; talked about them, sang about them, and put them into practice in their spaces and their habitual welcome.
Within minutes of walking in out of the night’s shadows to the welcoming glow of the Taring Babi house, I had a cup of strong black coffee in hand and was squeezed into a corner of the sofa on the front porch, listening to a longstanding member of the collective explaining what they do and how they do it. A little later on in the evening, we transplanted ourselves – a raucous rabble of punks on motorbikes – to a free gig in another part of town where there were ceremonial mountains of yellow rice and other communal food (I couldn’t quite reconcile myself with the greasy, gristly crunchiness of the chicken feet that everyone else, it appeared, was enjoying immensely) and everyone seemed to know all the words to all of the songs and hopped up on stage to join in accordingly.
It took me a long time to appreciate the manifold value and depth of this kind of hanging out time because, try as
I might to resist it, I know that my inclinations and approaches are still shaped by very Western values of productivity and work vs. leisure time. On lots of occasions since, I’ve found myself frustrated with the ways in which, in typical terms of complaint, talk often fails to materialise into action. But then that is the nature of bases: sometimes they flourish to further fruitions, sometimes not (such frustrations are inevitable when ‘action’ is valued over understanding).
Within the anarchist scenes of Europe, mutual learning is built into the structure of collective engagement with workshops, skillshares and the like, in attempts to challenge the top-down models of institutional learning. But perhaps one aspect in which these models fall down is their perpetuation of a division between learning time and the rest of life, in a manner akin to the way that capitalism separates work and leisure time. It’s been a while now since my academic ‘career’ foundered in multiple mires of financial insufficiency, political indignation and selfdoubt before sputtering out in an ignominious anti-climax of apathatic neglect, but it’s still taken a long time to break free of the mindset of academia. I hadn’t really realised how entrenched I was in the academic way of doing things (I really like learning in academic environments; I cherish the feeling of intellectual stimulation and progress) such that it had come to define my understanding of what learning was itself.
‘Alam raya sekolahku’ is an instantly intuitive idea, but actually it’s a really difficult thing to learn from life.
Learning opportunities are relentless, requiring constant vigilance and focus (it took me a constant stream of coffee in my blood to stay awake in the classroom, and that evening on the front porch). It is easy to recognise the teacher in academia – they’re probably sitting at the front. In life we can all be teachers and learners simultaneously. Sometimes we have to struggle with power dynamics to be able to realise those roles. We have to be able to recognise the capacity of each other to impart learning regardless of relation. It’s not enough just to write down notes, but requires a greater self-responsibility for maintaining a critical attitude and sifting which information is to be retained and which to let pass in the moment (for recognising wisdom and closing our ears to bullshit). In life, knowledge tends to be more dissipated; there is not the same compartmentalisation according to specialisation; no syllabi and structured progression. It’s less likely that knowledge will come in a condensed, concentrated lump, so you have to retain, cross-reference, draw connections between morsels gathered yourself to develop completeness of perspective. It requires constant review and evaluation. There are no folders of notes, no exams or revision periods. It is easier to forget, but occasionally, like in those moments of occasional midnight essay euphoria, experiences can suddenly draw themselves together in webs of incredible understanding.
Capacity to learn is largely a matter of attitude. About developing the skills of listening and review. It was my impatience only with the format of hanging out ‘doing’ nothing that closed me off to the recognition of its potency. Of such spaces and such times as inherently educative and valuable; not just as a place that a workshop can be arranged. I’m learning that if I’m fed up with small talk, with ‘omong kosong’2, I can also take it upon myself to elicit. That barriers of language are not absolute, and that learning itself is not just a matter of accumulation, but personal critical uptake and application (as opposed to the absorption models of academia).
I’m learning the ways in which this application doesn’t always have to take the form of ‘action’, but that understanding naturally flows back out into social sphere through the small unthinking inevitable actions that form our days and interactions. And that personal learning inevitably has a collective dimension; that it doesn’t just come from books and end in essays that no one ever reads. I’m understanding again the ways again in which the separation and specialisation of knowledge (that is incredible knowledgeable in some areas and extremely dumb in others) has a penchant for feeding into persona and ego, and too easily allows us to be stupid in other ways. I’m learning again to be wise, explorative and diligent in the little things.
Why does society need people who go on crazy, stupid, arduous adventures?
My friend Simon Moore is doing something crazy, stupid and arduous. With Maria Gallastegui, he is sailing in a sixteen-foot dinghy over three thousand miles, from London to Lebanon. It’s hard to capture quite how crazy, stupid and arduous this is unless you’ve done something similar, which I haven’t. And that’s kind of the point of this article.
Within about five minutes of us waving Simon and Maria off back last July, they discovered that their boat had holes in. Then they discovered that, actually, waves could get pretty big in the North Sea and, if they capsized now, they’d be dead. It took them four days, beaten back each time by gales and high seas, to get around just one point in Kent. Then they faced the Channel crossing.
Limping into Calais port, more coastal storms “encouraged” them to change their plans, from sailing around the
Atlantic coast, to navigating through France along the canals. That change of plan meant, rather than filling their sails, they faced instead months of back-breaking rowing. Some days, Simon told me, he didn’t want to eat or drink anything because he didn’t have the strength to build a fire. When he left, Simon thought the whole journey might be over in six months. Six months later, like Odysseus returning from Troy, Maria and Simon face an
Odyssey that might take years.
Simon has now returned to the UK for the winter, to recover and take stock, waiting for the better Mediterranean sailing conditions of spring. He is also thinking of giving up.
When he told me this, I was shocked. Shocked, a little panicky and then confused. I could understand why he would give up; as if the journey wasn’t dangerous enough, the spread of the Syrian civil war into Lebanon makes even the destination deadly. Any sensible, rational algorithm would calculate risk, profit and loss and conclude abandonment of the project.
I could understand his doubts and his concerns and could not blame him for such a decision. But why did I feel shock, panic and confusion? Why should I take his retirement personally? Because, I realise, I was relying on
Simon’s journey. Facing down my personal daily struggles – publishing a book, fixing my bike, taking clothes to
Calais – relied in some small way on knowing that he was out there doing something far more crazy, stupid and arduous. And I realised that, as a society, we need people like Simon and Maria, sacrificing themselves to do crazy, stupid and arduous things.
Why? The Philosophy of Inspiration
The process of doing anything starts in your imagination, with the conception that it is possible. Without the imagination, there can be no action. That’s why the most reliable indicator of whether you’ll end up as a doctor is if someone in your family is… a doctor. This is also one reason why rich or privileged folks are more likely to embark on ambitious projects: thanks to their elite education and lineage, they have witnessed that anything is possible. They have an arrogance of potentialities; they do not doubt what they are capable of.
Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of the charity Kids Company, remembers as a child hearing her grandfather and uncles talking about setting up the biggest ski resort in the world . Within a month, they’d started. Camila grew up with that as a model: You dream something up and then make it happen. She’d written the business plan for Kids Company by the time she was fourteen. The charity now helps 36,000 of the most vulnerable children in the UK with practical, emotional and educational support. It wouldn’t have been possible – it wouldn’t have been even imaginable – if she hadn’t had her family’s lineage of imagination and action behind her.
You can’t do anything of which you can’t conceive; nor can you do anything you believe is impossible. Camila
Batmanghelidjh believed she could set up Kids Company because she’d experienced as a child that such things were possible. I never considered a career in medicine because I had no conception that such a career was possible for me. I had no role models so it just wasn’t on my radar. It might be illustrative to demonstrate how imagination turns into action with an example from my own life.
The Genealogy of an Adventure
Until 2009, I had no lineage of grand cycling adventures in my life. Bicycles were annoying machines that rusted in the garage and occasionally used to cycle two miles into town. I had no conception that anyone could use them for adventures. My imagination for cycling extended as far as Wallingford and that was about it. My parents did travel widely before I was born, hitch-hiking to Australia in the 1970s. On Sunday evenings at home, to a soundtrack of Peruvian panpipes, they’d often show slides of their adventures in South America, my sister and I gazing in awe from the sofa.
But I didn’t connect cycling with such adventures until I stumbled across Alastair Humphreys at the Royal
Geographical Society’s Explore Conference in 2008. He’d recently finished cycling around the world, which is about as extreme a demonstration of the adventuring possibilities of the bicycle that you could hope for. That conference marked the beginning of my imaginative lineage for cycling adventures. The next year, I cycled to
Bordeaux, followed by trips around Britain and then around Tunisia. Each time, I stretched my imaginative conception of what was possible on a bicycle. As my imagination grew, I burst with new ideas and, gradually, I became able to turn those ideas into realities.
But none of my journeys would have been possible without the imaginative lineage I inherited from my parents and from Alastair Humphreys.
The Ripples of Transformative Stories
As a society, we need people like Alastair, Simon and Maria to do these crazy, stupid, arduous things because they are the ones who stretch our imagination and our conception of what is possible. Everyone who comes into contact with Simon’s story now understands that such an audacious adventure is within their grasp.
Hearing Simon’s story forces us to confront an alternative reality, an alternative way of doing things. We can’t ignore Simon’s journey precisely because it is crazy, stupid and arduous. It is a challenge to ourselves to overcome whatever struggles we are facing. You cannot listen to Simon and go back to your life unchanged. He has given me the gift of an expanded imagination, an expanded reality, in the same way that my parents and Alastair
Humphreys did. Their stories are transformative; they force you to reconsider your conception of what you are capable of in life, in an instant.
That’s why journeys such as Simon’s are important to our society and that’s why I believe he should persevere.
Not for himself (although he will learn much from the journey), not for his charity Syrian Eyes (although they will benefit much from messages of solidarity and fundraising), but for the immeasurable millions of ripples his story will riffle through society. Unbeknownst to him, Simon is transforming lives, opening minds, broadening imaginations. His arduous journey, his risking death, is not in vain; he offers us the gift of expanded imagination and a new perspective from which to examine our lives.
In this way, these kinds of journeys are a precious social service and it is a shame that they seem to be undervalued in our society. Because their impact cannot be easily measured or monetised, these journeys are dismissed in value and left to people like Simon. And people like Simon, if left without appropriate recognition of their positive impression on society, can get disheartened about their worth and think about giving up.
We must treasure these people; not worship, but treasure them. They do productive and inspirational work that is no less great for the fact that its impression is immeasurable. Support them, share their experiences, spread their ripples. We need them.
I’m not saying that I’m going to rush off and sail to Lebanon, by the way, and I’m not saying that you should either. But I can never go back to believing that such a thing is impossible. And, if sailing 3,500 miles in a dinghy is not impossible, then what else in my life is not impossible? What other potentials must I reassess? What else is my imagination capable of conceiving and making manifest?
We must not ignore or run from the audacity of our imagination. We must embrace it and surprise, delight and inspire the world.
Into The Wild - Rebecca LaMarche
Into The Wild Essay
Matters of Independence:
A Study of Self-Reliance in Into the Wild
Rebecca LaMarche, May 2010
In Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, the focus of the book, Christopher McCandless, displays self reliance very nearly to the point of monomania and self-absorption. It was not until he took off on his Alaskan Odyssey however, that those closest to him realized the intensity of that independence. Through careful research and a personal connection to McCandless, Jon Krakauer gives the reader an inside look at a young man who did not let many people close. To assert his independence and become entirely self-reliant, McCandless took drastic measures to uncover the Truth. Many parallels can be drawn between Chris’ ideals and Emerson’s essay, Self Reliance, in which he teaches that people must seek solitude to hear their own thoughts, because society, and its inhabitants urges men to conform. The increasingly common theme of self-reliance and independence in American literature is a commentary on the ideals people still value. Some of the values that many people in modern society seem to have forgotten are; the quest for personal knowledge, the pursuit of individual happiness while not taking it from others, and above all, the ability to be comfortable in solitude and independence. Emerson goes so far as to call society “a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” (Emerson, Self Reliance). This quote is just one of many examples of Chris’ beliefs that he took to heart and in this case, he could not allow himself to conform.
To assert his independence Chris McCandless threw away subtlety and immersed himself in the values he thought were worthwhile and pursued the ideals that he felt were important. He alienated his family, invented a new name, and created a new life as Alexander Supertramp. Many people call his actions selfish and cruel, but others believe that while it may have been self-centered, it was a noble and necessary change for him. By not even communicating with his sister, Carine, with whom he was quite close, Chris made it quite clear that he did not want to be found. Chris pushed himself throughout school; academically and athletically. Then later he pushed himself to be completely self-reliant because: “…it was important for him to see how independent he could be”
(Krakauer 125). This quote demonstrates the side of Chris that is testing himself, not only for the romantic aspects of independence and solitude, but for the experimental part as well. To bring this to the reader’s attention,
Krakauer connects Chris with Gene Rosellini, a well-educated man from an affluent family who was, “interested to know if it was possible to be independent of modern technology (Krakauer 74). With this statement, Rosellini is showing similarities to McCandless through his interest in the science of independence, not only from people, but material objects and tools as well.
Christopher McCandless saw the world in black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, rather like a child does.
The way he reacted to his family’s secret about the circumstances surrounding his parents’ marriage illustrates this: “Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency and this was especially true in Chris’s case. More even than most teens, he tended to see things in black and white” (Krakauer
122). Even thought Chris was willing to forgive and overlook the flaws in the authors and philosophers he admired, he could not forgive his father for the mistakes he made in the past. What made matters worse for Walt
McCandless’ relationship with his son was that he concealed the fact that Walt had a relationship with Chris' mother and fathered Chris, while still being romantically involved with his first wife. By Chris’ high moral standards, this was inexcusable. The absolute way that Chris viewed and judged those around him is also childlike in its loyalty.
In his essay, Self Reliance, Emerson writes of self-reliance not as anti-people, or even anti society. Instead
Emerson advocates self-reliance as a starting point or a way to be, instead of a goal to reach, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace like the triumph of principals” (Emerson, Self Reliance). This quote is clearly reflected in Chris’ actions, “He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around” (Krakauer 45). This shows that Chris valued self-reliance the way Emerson did – he needed to be his own person, with his own vision and way of thinking so that others would not inadvertently influence him along the way. He recognized that the only way for him to find his own Truth would be to be self-centered and focus on his own being first, without others clouding his sense of being.
Krakauer views Christopher McCandless’ stubborn nature, even pigheadedness, as important and meaningful because, “”McCandless distrusted the value of things that came easily. He demanded much of himself – more, in
the end, than he could deliver” (Krakauer 184). With this quote, the author is saying that Chris went into the wild with minimal supplies entirely on purpose. His goal was to test and challenge himself every step of the way, and so he did. He knew the risk and what might happen to him, but it was important for him to be truly alone, without human companionship or human resources, to provide an honest test of his independence. As Jack London put it,
“It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild” (London, White Fang). This quote says exactly what
Chris was up against – what he knew he was up against. He wanted to live simply, in the raw, harsh wilderness and he did. Toward the beginning of his trip, upon being asked if he has a hunting license, McCandless replies:
“Hell no…how I feel myself is none of the government’s business. Fuck their stupid rules” (Krakauer 6). With this statement, Chris reveals that he is the ultimate non-conformist, nearly bordering on anarchy, and proving that he would be a “rebellious subject” in Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority. The experiment involved a “teacher” asking a “learner” questions and for every question answered incorrectly, the
“administrator” would administer an electric shock to the “learner”. The experimental part was too see how long the “teachers” would let the “learners” suffer before standing up to the “administrator”. The entire experiment was controlled and no one was actually harmed, although the “teachers” didn’t know that.
In the experiment, Milgram tested people’s reluctance to challenge those who abuse their power. After viewing the results of the experiment, Milgram concluded that: “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority”
(Milgram). Through the ideals, letters, and actions of Chris presented by Krakauer, most readers would conclude that he was one of the few people who would resist authority. Even though he escaped entirely into the wilderness to avoid that authority, the extreme nature of his independence and adversity to government, rules, and money, suggest that Chris would be able to resist just as well in the city.
Through his commentary about the nature of his death, Krakauer suggests that Chris was not necessarily ready to die, but content with what he had accomplished and discovered for himself: “McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme. He has a need to test himself in ways, as he was fond of saying, “that mattered”. He possessed grand – some would say grandiose – spiritual ambitions” (Krakauer 182). Because of
Chris’ strongly opinionated, idealistic, and rather stubborn mindset, Krakauer believes that the only way his life would have been meaningful is if he was doing exactly what he wanted for himself, and he does. According to the
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, self-reliance is the, “reliance upon one’s own efforts and abilities”. Since Chris made sure that everything he gained was through his own efforts and the success of his abilities, he maintained true self-reliance throughout his Alaskan odyssey.
Chris was strongly opposed to any kind of unnecessary material possession. He wrote a letter to his sister before he took off to Alaska, complaining about his parents: “I can’t believe they’d try and buy me a car” (Krakauer 21).
He reasoned that he has a perfectly capable car, despite its age, and that receiving a new one was nothing short of ridiculous. This connects to Emerson’s Self Reliance once again, “Men have looked away from themselves and things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because the feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is” (Emerson, Self Reliance). Chris sees this in his parents and the “rich kids at Emory”, and he detests it. Chris is embarrassed by his family’s modest wealth, believing that “wealth was shameful, corrupting, inherently evil” (Krakauer 115). Like Emerson, he believed that people ought to be held to higher standards and not judged by what they had, but who they were.
Humanistic physiologist Maslow set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic human needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of need exist, including the need for understanding, esthetic appreciation, and purely spiritual needs. However, upon examination of Chris McCandless, the reader would notice that although he requires
Maslow’s five basic needs, such as the physiological and self-actualization, the higher levels he spoke of are prevalent as well. This further demonstrates the Tolstoyan values, such as simplicity, truth, and pure goodness, which Chris holds to such a high regard.
Through Chris’ idealism, independence, and true self-reliance, he was able to create a new life for himself. That life was filled with meaning, purpose, and, “the raw throb of existence” (Krakauer 22). That life meant more to
Chris than anything or anyone ever could. This deeply romantic story is one of many American literacy works that holds people all over the world captive. The fierce idealism and searing self-reliance are seen as unattainable qualities that are mysterious and wonderful, but frightening and dangerous all the same. As Leo Tolstoy said,
“There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth”. And Christopher McCandless found greatness in himself, the world, and the people in it on his Alaskan odyssey.
Solidarity Activism https://toleratedindividuality.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/from-e2809crefugeee2809d-toe2809cmigrante2809d-in-calais-solidarity-activism-re-staging-undocumented-migration-for-a-future-politicsof-asylum.pdf
Thoughts on Saving the World
The other day, someone accused me of “trying to save the world” through my activities in Calais, the English teaching , the UKHIP cricket match, the bike ride .
I’m not, I can’t and I don’t want to try to “save the world”. I don’t even want to try to change the world. Changing the world is not something that you can approach directly. Like happiness, any direct approach only ends in disappointment.
So my only aim, both in words and in actions, is to help people think about the world. That’s it.
I can’t change what people think, I can only invite them to think about the world.
Sneaking up on change
The best form of thought is experience. Words (like these) are good, but never enough. To think about the world deeply, you have to seep yourself in the reality, the physical reality. One experience of Calais, one connection, will always be much stronger than any news story or blog post. Words can be a catalyst, but that’s it.
So I invite people to join a cricket match or a bike ride. My sole aim is to lower the barriers to action and try to make the experience rewarding.
If that invitation is accepted, then I’m happy, because as soon as someone does something, their reality changes and that change inspires change in their ideas, thoughts and future actions.
In turn, that change in the individual will create ripples throughout their social groups, as they talk to their friends and share their ideas and actions. Eventually, in enough numbers, those ripples might influence change in our wider society. And, maybe, just maybe, that’s when the world changes.
It’s a long road, but it’s approachable, one invitation at a time. My method is certainly not saving the world, and neither is it changing the world directly. At best, I’m sneaking up on change, hoping to take it by surprise.
Process, not results
For me, none of my trips to Calais have been about what the migrants “need”. The trips haven’t been humanitarian missions or any form of charity. They have always been about forming solidarity and connections between different people, between people in this country as well as with people from Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea
– wherever.
The Critical Mass bike trip was the grandest expedition that I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in. Dozens of strangers came together and formed strong bonds of solidarity, helping each other, sharing their knowledge, skills and optimism. Even close friends discovered new sides to each other during the journey. Before we’d even left the country, the “bike ride” was already a success: it had already galvanised people to exchange and connect.
Before we’d gone one mile, I was already delighted. A healthy and happy process is always much more important than achieving what we’re tempted to think of as “results” – how many bikes distributed or how much aid delivered. My favourite results are almost immeasurable and I have to take them largely on faith: sharing, smiles, stories. These three Ss are what cause ripples in society.
Be there
The primary importance of process stems from the idea that, in my opinion, no one can say what any other human being “needs”. What do I need? I’m not even sure I know myself.
The people who live in Calais are hugely resourceful; one more tent here or there is far, far less important than the smiles and stories that one more human connection can provide – on both sides of the interaction.
Whenever I have gone to Calais, I have always learnt and discovered far more about the world and myself than I feel I have contributed – yes, even when we brought over a huge van full of tents and sleeping bags.
Everyone who I have seen go to Calais has come back inspired, their lives altered, sometimes dramatically. Many have gone on to encourage their friends to go over and bear witness for themselves. At the very least, everyone has returned with a more nuanced impression of Calais, of migration in general and with deep memories of the people they met in particular.
Those impressions and memories will hold far stronger than a whole barrage of bigoted media coverage. Nothing beats being there, planting yourself in the kinaesthetics of the reality that, to some, is just another news story.
Whatever you do, be there.
The message
So my message is very simple: go over and see for yourself. That’s all.
Go and see for yourself, try to understand, exchange stories, find out why these people are coming here and what they want. I don’t mind if you go there and decide for yourself that you still want borders and immigration controls – as long as you hold that view from a position of knowledge.
In my experience, however, people tend to return from Calais inspired to tear down these fictional boundaries between mankind. It is usually obvious, once you’ve experienced the reality, that to militarise and strengthen the border is to put yourself in the same position as the builders of Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China or the
Berlin Wall. Not only will it create more problems than it solves in the short term, but in the long term, sooner or later, the people will be free.
So I urge you to go to Calais and see for yourself. Obviously, don’t go as a tourist, camera clicking – it’s not a zoo.
But don’t go as a charity worker or a humanitarian crisis worker either. Go as yourself, be yourself, be curious.
Share your stories and your experience and be open to hear the stories and experience of others.
Charity or Solidarity?
A tall, thin man spots us and veers towards my companion, his fingers pressed together in supplication. “Madame
– ticket, ticket, ticket!”
“I don’t have any tickets with me today. No tickets, no tickets!”
The man turns away, not so much disappointed as empty.
“Why are they asking you for tickets?” I ask my companion, who volunteers for a wonderful French charity.
“I am the one who holds the tickets,” she replies. “They can exchange tickets for shoes, jackets, such things.”
The incident, although brief, shook me. This man had treated her like a vending machine, not a fellow human. It made me wonder at the difference between charity and solidarity, and how those differences inevitably affect the way we behave toward one another.
During my stay at the migrant camp in Calais, I have been treated with great respect, kindness and generosity. My home for the week was a small hut, built from wooden pallets and sheets of plastic, recycled from advertising banners. The migrants call this hovel a “hotel”. It might sound like a humble kind of a shelter, but if hotels were classified by the gentleness of their neighbours, this one would be awarded five stars out of five.
I have been teaching English in the camp, mostly to Sudanese who have escaped the genocide in Darfur. On my first day here, an Afghan somewhat bluntly asked me, “Who pays your wages?” I replied that I was not being paid at all. He stared at me in disbelief. “Why are you here, then?”
It’s a reasonable question. I am here motivated by a desire to show solidarity with the migrants, to show that not everyone in Europe sees them as animals and to share what I can with them as they transition from bleak past to hopeful future. I am certainly not motivated by wages, but neither am I motivated by ideas of charity.
Charity is something you dispense to those less fortunate than yourself. It is founded on a fundamental assumption that there are those who are above and those who are below. Charity can even be used as a weapon, to prise people apart. Think how you would feel if someone you considered a peer tucked a twenty pound note into your pocket, saying, “I can see things are hard for you, go and buy yourself a nice clean shirt.”
I bet you’d throw their money back in their face and never speak to them again! How quickly a gift can turn into something patronising and divisive.
I am not, absolutely not, questioning the motives of the humble and hard-working charity volunteers in Calais.
They do great work and have acheived some notable victories against the French government for migrant welfare.
But charity as a concept is difficult to love and, in my experience, promotes inhumane treatment in both directions. Charities may treat the communities they serve as “clients”, while those “clients” may treat charities as vending machines.
So what is the distinction between solidarity and charity? How can you tell one from the other? Is there such a distinction?
To be honest, I’m not sure. There are no black and white answers to these questions. But there are two aspects of my stay here that I feel are significant.
Firstly, by living and sleeping in the camp, I am a part of the group – albeit a temporary and highly privaleged part.
In contrast, all the charity workers in Calais live off-site, forcing a separation between the volunteers and the group they hope to serve.
That separation encourages a “them” and “us” mentality, no matter how well-meaning the volunteer. This separation is further riven by the branded tabards that the charity workers wear, marking themselves out in uniform as “not one of you”. I come to Calais as an individual, not as part of an organisation.
Secondly, the nature of teaching is itself one of solidarity. There is no well of English that I can scoop out in buckets and hand out like water. The English language can never be passed down like charity; it must be shared in solidarity. As a teacher, my job must be to share my knowledge, not give hand outs.
The distinction comes down to how you behave and what you offer. I feel like these two differences alone affect the way that I am treated in the camp. As I walk around, going nowhere, I am greeted with happy shouts of
“Teacher, teacher!”, not “Ticket, ticket!”.
The Spaniard
Two new migrants had arrived in Calais weary from their long and tragic journey with no place to go. I locked up my bike and walked with them for an hour with all their bags and some bedding we’d picked up at the garage, to a squat we’d opened the night before. It was a Thursday night and even though we’d arranged to meet up late at night when we got there, too many people were hanging around on the street for us to just walk in. There was a risk we’d get the police called on us, so we walked for another half an hour to the last squat I knew.
When we got there I let them in and showed them the only room that didn’t have a missing wall or a river of water flowing through it. We arranged their bedding on the floor and ate some snacks I’d brought along. Sitting down we remembered we were all very tired, so I said my goodbyes and walked back home. On my way I was imagining how great it would be if we had enough funds for one of those little electric cars you don’t need a license for.
I get back to the women’s house and tell the Spaniard about my long walk. He stares back, his eyes getting bigger as comprehension sinks in.
‘Don’t tell me you used the space, after I said it’s off limits’; he reminded me of the other group of migrants who had said they could make something of the space, and not to tell anyone else about it. As it turned out, they stopped using it as it was a long walk from the car parks where people try for England, and no one was around when we got there.
‘The building site, yea I didn’t know what else to do, I couldn’t tell them to sleep on the street after I’d walked them around for an hour already.’
He shouted at me for a few minutes until he had enough and went down into the basement to sleep. In the days ahead he was inconsolable, telling everyone how bad an activist I was, what a stupid call I’d made. I didn’t know how to respond to his anger. So I carried on doing what needed doing, going skipping with the bike trailer, organizing the garage, climbing over walls to scout out new squats, doing morning watch at the jungle. All the time the Spaniard avoided me, telling everyone how I’d dashed his efforts.
Then about a week later after this happened I was in the office and got a personal voice recording through on email, talking through a problem I’d been having with recurring traumas from previous relationships. The bell to the office rang, t’was the Spaniard. So I buzzed him in and just started to crack up giggling, before he even got to the door, because I knew what I wanted, nay, needed to ask him.
I’m going to need that computer soon… What… what is it?
Aha well… you know how I love you right?
*stern look back*
I just got this really important audio email, I really need to listen to this, its super important to me, is there any chance you could just go back outside for like 2 minutes while I listen to it?
You’re kidding right?
*me with a Cheshire grin on my face, can barely believe what I’m asking, just laughing at the tension*
Pleeeeaaasee, you’d be my best friend in the whole wide world!
*leaving with a cigarette in his mouth, huffing and puffing*
I listen to the recording, full of joy at being listened to and understood.
He comes back in the room and sits down at the computer, and he’s trying to hide a smile, because he can’t quite be angry at the absurdity of it all.
I’m moving round the room in a little dance because I’m so happy, chatting away to him. Then I make us both coffee, and bring it over to him. He turns around at a fatal moment and the coffee knocks all over the table.
If he’d really been angry I couldn’t have pressed more buttons to make him that way if I tried. But in that moment I sensed that the sickly vulnerability of my position was just comedy gold, and I took a risk that we could laugh about this story later.
I realized quite quickly this comedy could turn into a drama before I knew it, so I moved to exit the room picking up my bag like the end of a scene, but silly me thinks I need to do an encore to really drive the message home.
As I’m leaving I’m dramatically pleading with him, ‘what crime did I do but to love with all my heart, to deserve such heinous punishment’, a la opera style. As I’m shutting the door on myself slowly like I’m being shut out the
Garden of Eden, I say ‘no! Please don’t hate me! I was but a fool!’
After a week of tension, it took just 3 minutes of play acting, and we were good as gold after that. I learnt that when you make even the smallest gains in Calais, not to be flippant if the situation changes and said gains don’t seem so relevant anymore. Be delicate with other activists achievements.
It’s hard to hold our heads in these spaces. When a friend is looking for a target to vent their anger, it’s good to be able to throw ego to the wind. It’s good to be that inoffensive skinny boy who dismantles the image of me as being socially competitive by dancing around wildly and singing Delaney had a Donkey with pie on my face.
We learnt that day that it’s OK to go a bit mad and get our anger out at the situation in Calais; a crazy, surreal place like no other, a time capsule in peoples journey, a place that means a different thing to everyone going through it; a joke, a bullet, a game, a kick, a song, a police cell. But like every other war zone, border, hospital or prison in the business of systematizing people’s lives, people are able to enter these spaces on the worst days of their lives, because everyone of us is holding on to that hope of better days ahead.
A huge mess, pt I
Posted on November 29, 2009 by Marcel Dubois
Needing time to rest and having a place to stay, I’m thinking: why not take some time to write about my little journey. I also had many thoughts that I want to record, and this is the best place, I’m guessing.
I have been out of Calais since the 11 th of November. The time seemed right mostly because I had the opportunity to take a lift with a couple of friends, A and R. They have helped me a lot, and I am very indebted to them. I could see that they were worried, in the way that they were trying to map out the whole journey for me. This was on the 10 th , in the office of Calais Migrant Solidarity, end of afternoon. I’d just finished delegating the next day’s tasks, those that I was personally responsible for, to another dear friend, S. Then, I took the decision to leave.
Some words about the past
The decision to leave Calais was as personal as it was political. I had problems with some members of my family, who kept giving me trouble because my activist life stopped me from attending to dinners and lunches as often as before. I was still doing the washingup, as part of an agreement for maintaining the house. But that wasn’t enough apparently. This was what they gave me; my mom, another activist who was barely at home as well, and who did some cleaning once in a while, got a lot worse abuse.
It wasn’t pleasant, to say the least, seeing my dad give a disgusted look at my mom every now and then, and always making snarly remarks about the fact she had so many debts, and the house was ruined. I suppose there was some truth to that; yet, I couldn’t stand seeing all this acid poured over her all the time. So I needed to leave.
But where? And how? For a long time, this wasn’t possible at all. I’d just given up and let time pass, mostly using the internet as a distraction, reading blogs, setting up my own, doing translations, subtitles, chatting on MSN
Messenger, etc. All those activities have paid since I can now speak a pretty good English.
As I was still reading political blogs by the end of 2008, I learned about the Israeli attack on Gaza, and that really pissed me off. I needed to get out somewhere, and so I enquired to my mom where demonstrations were held. I won’t detail all the things I’ve done, but I turned my attention to Zionism over the following months, and this led me to attend a meeting with a Palestinian teacher in Lille. As I needed a place to sleep for the night, my mom hooked me up with an anarchist friend of hers. That friend, J, then told me about the No Borders camp as we were sharing dinner. Pastas and beef steak. “OF COURSE I’ll go there”, I said, “if it isn’t too far from where I am.” I haven’t got any money, you see. I live on ruined-parent-welfare (RPW).
This was how I started getting seriously involved in migration activism. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have any prior experience. Seeing as my mom was still working as a teacher, there were times when I was needed, to help with such things as going to the ASSEDIC, the post office bank, the CAF. All those meetings and interviews and administrative crap gave me an inside look into the system, if I’d decide one day to live on benefits. I went there to help refugees understand what was going on, for they didn’t speak French yet. I couldn’t do that really properly, for a lot of the words were technical or I just couldn’t muster the translation fast enough. In the end, I had to take notes and promise to provide a translation.
I did those things occasionnally, and reluctantly. Most of the time, I learned about my work the very night before.
My mom would enter my room late at night and slowly approach my bed, making a pleading face and just saying,
“Matthieu?” And I would respond, angry and outraged because I knew what was coming, “WHAT?” She would approach still more, doing the same face consistently, not saying anything, knowing that I knew. And after a little while, she would explain that there was really no other way, I would explain that I was very very tired, and she’d say sorry, and I would prepare to get a very very short sleep, and say “Okay, alright. _Thanks! _Yeah, nevermind.”
At the Calais No Borders camp, I really loved the way I could be open about my anarchist leanings. It was a liberation. I loved how I could just turn up and find something to do, and make myself useful. That’s what I’d always wanted. I think back to those enormous job gatherings, where hundreds of young persons like me try to impress employers. I tried going there, but I never went all the way. I mean, I looked at myself, and I looked at them, all of them, and it never made any sense to me, that I and not any of these guys would be selected, for some particular special skill, or some other shit like looking good. In French, they say you have “une bonne presentation.”
I’ve always been about modesty and simplicity. The job market is not for me. I can’t begin to try. So working at the camp was lovely. All equal, no stress, make yourself useful whenever, wherever and however. The simple fact of writing this gives me strength and hope again.
After the camp was over, I left with my abusing family to go on a holiday in the south of France. They are much nicer when you are always around. By that time, I’d developed tender feelings for one of the persons of the camp, and those feelings later turned out to be unilateral. While on holiday, not being active all day like before felt disheartening; I was also crushed by the lack of any internet, and therefore by the fact I couldn’t sort out my situation with that too-dear friend. I wanted to go back to Calais so much.
I did that in the end. I also found out that friend was too-dear indeed, and I tried to get over it. This was at the end of July. Some of the activists from the camp decided to have a lasting presence in Calais, and rented a lot at the municipal camping. That’s where I spent a lot of time, going back and forth to attend daily meetings, and that’s when I started getting trouble from some people at home (my lifestyle was called ‘deviant’ at some point).
While I was active
Once again, I loved how easy it was to help out people in such a big way. The first few weeks I spent standing back as I’d always done. My position was this: I can’t cycle because I’m afraid of the circulation, and I do the least possible cause I can’t afford to burn out. I speak French and English, so there were times when I was required, and
I didn’t flinch from that. One thing I didn’t participate in was patrols.
I’ve made friends with so many people in just a month. I fell in love again (and once again, it later turned out that I shouldn’t have). I also noticed a peculiar thing. While I was working in Calais, every single person I’ve met and worked with, I feel like I’ve always known them. Usually when you meet strangers, you feel a little weird right?
Not too comfortable. Well, the opposite was true here. That was quite incredible to me.
The migrants have given me confidence. There is a lot to learn in their struggle. I remember being quite afraid of being evicted from my home, because of all the fines my mom got for speaking her mind freely on the indymedia lille website, and that got her in the red with regards to bills of all kinds. In France you can’t insult an official.
There is actually an offense that says the honor of public officials needs to be maintained. It is called “le delit d’outrage.” Most of the activists who participate in French demos, if they get trouble with the police, ANY KIND of trouble, even the slightest, will get a trial for “outrage et rebellion.” It’s how cops make ends meet at the end of the month. A few hundred quids from demonstrators.
But after seeing all the cooperation and solidarity that existed among migrants, and seeing how they were fighting day after day to cross the channel, my fear disappeared. There is a lot to learn from them. My fear disappeared because I knew and felt that I wasn’t alone anymore. My fear disappeared because I knew there were people enduring a lot LOT worse, and they were still struggling, and a lot of them, winning, against this whole crap. The state is able to prevail because people are too afraid to relinquish it, as most of them must be if the sense of community is dead, killed by the state capitalist system.
I did end up cycling, after S (another S) forced me to, under threat of ridicule. I thought I was gonna lose my life over a car accident. As we were heading towards the docks where we needed to meet someone, she looked back at slow me and laughed at my awkward-I-don’t-want-to-die-cycling. I was quite pissy about the whole thing, as you can guess from this paragraph.
After this, I was more open with the idea of doing the patrols around town. Patrols are the main activity in Calais; we do help here and there as needs arise, filing a request, going to the PASS clinic, going to the hospital, giving out blankets, etc. But patrols seem more meaningful, finding and filming the cops as they arrest innocent people; they take in a lot of energy as well, and one feels he has done all he could after two hours of cycling around.
This is the hardest part about Calais. The misery is such that activists are always wondering if there isn’t more to do, more efficiently. I have had that worry a lot of times, and I have felt guilty. I burnt out in Calais, took a day off, and I was back the day after. The town and its fascism cannot be escaped. That day off wasn’t really one. I pretended I did not care about the CRS officers/vans I saw three times in a day, when all I did was cycling around
with no purpose. There is no rest from these assholes.
I cannot go on with this part without doing an endless account of everything I did. The point is, that I was living what I felt was a full life (FINALLY), unlike the previous one that was dull and empty in comparison. I had ideas and hopes. But those ideas did not seem to converge with other people’s. I wanted to speak but I felt my French coactivists were not on the same wavelength. I just had a vibe with people from Britain, probably because they were anarchists, like me.
Anarchy in the UK
So now, we address the political reasons that I had, of leaving Calais. Since the British state unlawfully blocks the movement of people across the channel, and since it seems to be the more willing one to implement that policy, it would follow that a weakening of that state is the best course of action. The principled opposition to state action is anarchist in nature.
I am a particular kind of anarchist. I stick to the dictionary definition in the first place, and in the second I go about my business and let the others do that too. The name is mutualism, or free market socialism. But under anarchy, who cares? Well, sadly, my anarchist friends would. They are anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-collectivists, etc. and when I’d say what I stand for, they’d ask me questions like “But would we have trains? Universities?” One of them did.
As I was stocking up on anarchist theory from America over the years, I understood that anti-state was the principle that moved all anarchist movements, and the rest was to the preference of everyone. Alliance is possible, and desirable. The state, to use Spooner’s definition, is “the name given to the territorial limits of power.” As soon as it is possible, inside those territorial limits, to escape such a power and to have your own way,
then the state is down, liberty reigns. Therefore, in order for anarchy to reign, it is sufficient to be able to opt out.
This possibility I’ve been wanting to present it openly to the public, in the form of a plan.
The plan runs according to the following lines: we know that not everyone’s gonna agree with everyone else.
That’s not a point for tyrannical rule. That’s a point against it, and against the state, whatever process it portrays as justifying its existence. That’s also a point for community organization with consensus decision making. That’s a point for anarchy.
There shall be in Britain, not one rule for all, but as many rules as there are consenses. If we can get an idea what communities would arise where, we could simply map out the post-state-capitalist Britain, and give the possibility to every citizen of simply moving where they would prefer.
This could be difficult; not everyone is ready to leave, for personal reasons, and the balance is sensitive, between having the theoretical possibility of opting out, and being practically forced to stay. I’ve had this while at home.
Battered women have this as well with their abusing husbands. It’s not enough, therefore, to know where it is possible to go and be free from the state. If it is sufficiently difficult, then the theoretical possibility of liberty still retains the practical stain of tyranny. I would hope that care and attention are given to this.
We could also use some anarchist legal theory, to put the statist criminals back into place. A lot more could be organized and prepared, to make the possibility of practical anarchy much more realistic and within everyone’s reach.
Resentment - a universal language
Accomplices
Posted on April 15, 2011 by dangerousconversations
As a child I smashed cash machines, robbed students, broke into fancy houses, and set fire to stolen cars.
Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone; sometimes it was planned and sometimes it was a spur of the moment thing. I couldn’t articulate it then, but now I can. I/We wanted to send a message to everyone who was having it better than us, whoever had the money, the power, whoever was included in the thing (whatever that thing was) that we were excluded from. The message to them was always “Fuck you, fuck you and your world. Your world which keeps you safe and me/us at the mercy of how things are.” These actions also had a direct impact on our lives – money from the students to buy us drugs and booze, cool shit from houses to take home or sell to our neighbours, fires to warm us on the nights we were too scared to go home and the smashing of a cash machine gave us a giddy glow a sense of control over our external world, which did not exist anywhere else. These were acts of resistance, before we knew what resistance meant, when it was just about taking back a bit of control, a bit of freedom and directly improving our immediate lives. Those friends I carried these acts out with I found in stairwells, under bridges, at raves and at school. We didn’t have consensus meetings we didn’t need to, we already knew were we stood.
Two decades later and my immediate life has changed, I don’t have the same worries about where my next meal will come from or whether I’ll be able to go home at night. I’ve been accepted into the world of the included, where hot baths are run easily and it’s not necessary to lie in bed with one eye open. But I still want to send that message, I still want to cause as much damage to the world which creates the included and excluded through state and capital. I want to use my position inside the included as place to attack from. My reasons for this are in many ways the same. Left over animosity for the damage this society did to me, and the damage it still does.
Because I am under no illusions that just being on the inside, just because I have those hot baths and comfy beds, that I am not being systematically fucked over by this society and the conditions it cannot help but create.
As a child I found my accomplices in attack, and as an adult I’ve found accomplices in defence. I’ve found people who want to have as much control over their day to day substance is possible within the confines of the system.
Through collective housing and workers’ co-ops, collective housing and workers’ co-ops, through semiautonomous social spaces, it has been possible that those who do not wish to collect as much capital as possible can still sustain themselves. We are able to do this, because it poses no threat to the established order of things.
In merely minimizing our participation in capital we pose it no threat and are allowed to continue do so. Our aims of encouraging others to reduce their participation is equally of little threat as a reduction in participation is still participation. Despite this I cannot entirely dismiss this way of living, as it creates spaces in which some accomplices in attack can be found. Those that want to minimize their participation in capitalism are occasionally also those who want to see its destruction. However, they should not be viewed as the only place to find accomplices. Those that find themselves in permanent structures which enable them to minimize their participation in capital will often find themselves dependent on those structures, and those structures depend on capitalism.
What do I mean by accomplices? In my case they are those who wish to attack the entirety of social structures, they are those who view this society as endlessly interconnected, those who do not see multiple issues that need to be resolved nor situations which merely need to be improved, but those who see those issues and situations as inevitable results of the current society. I may find connections with those who wish to attack a particular issue or change a specific situation, but it should always be known by all involved that in attacking an arms manufacturer, government cuts or a fur seller, my goal is not to end the existence of the thing that we are attacking, but to create space to discuss further targets and find more ways in which our lives are connected. It is from these connections that accomplices are to be found. The connections maybe limited and thus we will not be accomplices for very long, or the connections may grow and expand and we will be accomplices for many years, whether that be intermittently or constantly.
Why do I need accomplices? I don’t. I can, and always will attack with all that comes from me, but this society thrives on atomizing us, refuting our collective impulses, and because of this attacking with others is that much more powerful. In finding long term accomplices, those who share the same to desire to attack society in its entirety I am able to share my autonomy, to act with others in a way which represents the desires of all of us, where each of us is acting for freedom and against domination in a way which is true to each of us and without coercion. Each of us knowing that if further connections aren’t made then we’ll not need act together again.
How many accomplices? One. Six hundred. Nineteen. The quantifiable amount does not matter, what matters is the quality of the connection. If it takes eight thousand of us to act together to burn parliament to the ground, then let each of us know one another. I have no wish to be one of those eight thousand if half of them want to build a new parliament in its place. My thoughts here, if they are not clear, are that I wish to struggle for my freedom with people I know, specifically people who wish to struggle for their own freedom and in solidarity with others fighting for their own.
For me the largest difficulty here is that it is easy to limit myself to working alongside only those who I socialize with, those who attend the same bars, go to the same houses for dinner, watch the same films, listen to the same music i.e. those who have the same points of reference to me. I see the answer to this is to enter into different circles, primarily other areas of confrontation with authority, where particular individuals have identified an aspect of their life in which they wish to confront authority, and act alongside them, not for them or on behalf of them, nor as an ideological ambassador, but as an individual who sees their struggle as connected to his own. In order for this to occur in a way which is mutually beneficial then I must take particular care to listen to the opinions of all those involved, and articulate myself and my motivations clearly, so no confusion or coercion occurs. If I am unable to work directly with the group of individuals, due to differing understandings of power and collectivity then I am always able to express my solidarity in other ways. In taking part in activities which are full and vigorous acts towards my own freedom from authority, but which are done with empathy for others involved in the same struggle. Participating in different circles will allow different connections to be made and opens up the possibility of new accomplices to be found.
But I cannot participate in movement building, in the development of a mass fighting under one banner, one ideology or one identity as this is a process of homogenisation, a process which will lead to the silencing of individual voices and the erosion of autonomy. There are those that identify as anarchist who believe in permanent formal structures for organising themselves. It is important for me to say that whilst I disagree fundamentally with this, that I still wish to act in solidarity with them and to act alongside them when to act in such a way would be appropriate. I do not view them, nor for that matter any other organisation or individual which wishes to destroy the current social order as an enemy. They are often friends with whom I have many connections with, and as such I hope to have ongoing and honest conversations with them, without ideological stagnation or defensiveness.
There is no one true way to confront all forms of domination and oppression, no single strategy or tactic which is applicable in every context. And I don’t dare to presume I ever know the correct way to act in any situation. I am however able to know which way is most appropriate for me to act and know that this might change depending on the context I find myself in. The challenge is to learn as I act, to embrace my autonomy and allow it to be an
open expression of my ideas, needs and aims. I don’t believe this can be done in permanent formal organisations nor in isolation, thus the need for making connections and finding accomplices, thus the need to listen carefully to myself and to the others who I cross paths with.
i am no hero, and neither are you thoughts on how our histories of abuse inflect our anarchist practice
These contributions were made in response to the prompt “How have our histories of abuse inflected our anarchist practice?”
They may be triggering. for starters
Most anarchists share an understanding of security culture practices that discourages spreading information about peoples’ private political involvement. It is also important to avoid handing over emotional information without consideration of the potentially damaging ramifications. We need to build a practice of emotional security culture: mindfully protecting the emotionally charged parts of our friends’ lives.
In our scene, snitches and cops have been given easy access to personal information through the seemingly benign stories told about people’s private lives. This information is often used to create divisions between their targets. It is almost always an element of snitching, and sometimes is the driving force. This is one reason we should be keeping our friends safe when sharing parts of their emotional lives in the same way we protect parts of their political activity: they are really not separate at all.
That’s the big scary example. What happens more often is the casual spreading of other people’s emotional lives amongst friends, sometimes in the form of divisive gossip. Although the definition of gossip is debatable, what is clear is the harm that can come from people sharing emotionally sensitive information about other people’s lives without knowing if it is OK to do so. This isn’t to say we should never talk about other people’s stories; rather, we should do so with discretion, and get permission when possible. These boundaries are consistent with the principles of security culture in general.
On the other hand, we don’t feel an obligation to protect those who’ve harmed us. We must feel free to share our own stories of emotional vulnerabilities, and to pass on those of others when they consent. Doing so safely may take some extra consideration, but this additional effort is totally worth it.
When dealing with emotionally sensitive information, be sensitive with it.
the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down
Everyone I know is so fucked. We are all damaged broken ugly things, with huge, gaping faults that make us always near the brink of condemnation. At times, I think our greatest redeeming quality is that we know this, and hate ourselves more than anyone, and want to kill the parts of ourselves that have come to resemble those who made us this way. In this situation, among the ones who cannot leave anarchy because we have no other options, despair has come to constitute the real basis of our affinity. False positivities feel insulting, hope seems treacherous—but, also, sometimes necessary. How to fight them without being just like them, how to survive them without being just like them, how to love each other with all our oozing infected wounds?
When elephants are born into captivity, they sometimes are chained to a stake when still small. The young elephant learns its limits, the circle within it may act; it can see the rest of the world, perhaps imagine its ability to act outside the circle, but it is not permitted to. Perhaps it rages against this constraint, but the fact remains that, when it is old enough, the stake and chain can be removed. The elephant will continue to walk its small circle, having been taught that no greater freedom exists. This is called domestication.
But, sometimes, the elephant revolts and kills its trainer. Sometimes herds of wild elephants rampage through a town, destroying infrastructure and people alike. Let’s not kid ourselves—these elephants pay for their rebellion, are put down or further confined. But in that moment of freedom that comes from biting the hand that feeds, there is an opening, a hope, an anarchy.
There are many qualities of anarchist spirit I have come to appreciate: bravery, humility, the tendency to listen to others and take them seriously, a deep hatred of the world and disdain for its offerings, an empathy with the struggles of others that translates directly into material solidarity, and a complicated relationship with death—a desire for it that overtakes us completely sometimes, a guiding vision of its necessity for those who control us, but a total regret and sadness for its power over us at present. (Sometimes, the knowledge feels liberating: in the
Algerian insurrection of spring 2001, “the young rioters fought police and gendarmerie forces during several weeks shouting: “You cannot kill us, we are already dead!”” 4 )
One way to sum these qualities up is as a great generosity of spirit. We are not afraid to give of ourselves. We recognize, in fact, that there is little difference between ourselves and our comrades, with whom we have a fluid bond; we cannot help but share everything. We can extend further, to find some solidarity with those forms of life estranged from ours… although the relationship is attenuated and made difficult for our differences at times. And, truly, we all inhabit different forms of life at once—the queer anarchist is unhappy amidst their straight comrades, but even more so among queer radicals.
All of this generosity, though, and its attempts at generalizing itself, are constrained by the circle we have been taught to walk.We may be taking the Ring to Mordor to destroy it, but, at times, we are not Frodo, or even Sam.
Sometimes we are Gollum, desiring and hating what destroys us, bent and broken by it already, not always able to resist its temptation. The poor abused Smeagol in us is not always on top.
Other ways of saying this: we are Frankenstein’s monster, misshapen by our experiences and trauma, but still with a human heart that can feel and bleed. Nietzsche would say that we have a slave morality, that we try to bring down those around us, that we hate our oppressors so much that we try to become their opposites—the perfect victims. We are full of ressentiment, our natural anger against our conditions turned inwards for our own destruction. We are Reich’s little man, reactionaries fighting against our own liberation, covered in character armor. Our defense mechanisms have outlived our need for them, and come to define and control us.
We are taught our own constraints by subtle means, often “positive”—to buy from the co-op if we can afford it, and to feel guilty if we cannot; to patiently stand in line at that co-op; to not leave the line in disgust and walk out with our arms full of stolen groceries. We are also taught, if this omnipresent manipulation is not enough to
4
* Semprun, Jaime. “Apology for the Algerian Insurrection.”
Tr. Karim Al Majnun. Edition de l’encyclopedie des Nuisances, 2001.
confine us, by more blunt, sovereign power—the violent arrest, prison and the abuse we might experience there.
But, as for the elephant, the most effective teachings we endure happen early—the advice of our parents, the tone of our interactions, whether or not they hit us, and so on. These things are not small—studies show that the single most important fact defining whether or not someone will do well in life is whether or not your mother loves you. Even if for only a year, when you are too young to remember her—it matters.
The killer in me is the killer in you
This whole time I have said we, because I suspect I am not alone in this, but now I will say I, and speak from my own experience. My mother did not love me. She hated me, in fact, and spent my childhood reenacting a less horrifying version of the abuse she experienced in her own childhood, although she would not describe it so; she often told me that I had it easy, and described things terrible enough to make me agree. My dad loved me, though, and I chalk it up to his care that I am sometimes able today to love and care, to feel a tension towards freedom within myself. Now that I am grown, and have a child of my own, I am determined to not become my mother, to never hurt her. I want to believe that experience is not destiny, that the story does not have to repeat just so.
As anarchists, we seek to defy the limitations of society in blatant, powerful ways—attacking abusers, institutions, physical manifestations of what we hate. We affirm our own sovereignity, or try to destroy what destroys us; so many slogans. This is good, and more of it is needed, but... as I get older, and as I come up against my internal limitations more and more consistently, I am reluctantly coming to believe that we must also resist and undo the subtle inflections of our terrible experiences. I am afraid that, otherwise, my practice will be forever constrained and uncreative, that I am doomed to reproduce the state in every relationship. For years I have mouthed “it’s not what, but how” without fully believing it—if there were a thousand more attacks a year, it might not be enough, but it would certainly be encouraging! But I look to history, and see how it has been bad before, and feel unwillingly convinced of the need for personal and social destruction on an intangible level.
If you hit me and I hit you, we still ain’t even
The most common definition of the cycle of violence is something like: you hit me, I hit you, you hit me back, and it never ends. This is a disempowering and flattening definition: one thinks of the liberal narrative of Israel and
Palestine. The definition used by the anti- domestic violence “community”, however, is a bit more useful.
It describes a process that happens largely within the abuser: a honeymoon period in which everything is good, better, more intense than other relationships; then a building tension; next a violent outburst; then apologies, promises of never again and a return to the honeymoon period. It is not just a circle, but a spiral turning clockwise, tending to tighten each time. The survivor becomes invested in the cycle too, certainly, but that is a result of the abuser’s manipulation: you can’t leave me, I need you; you can’t leave me, I love you more intensely than you’ve ever experienced; you can’t leave me, or I will make you hurt.
Within this context, if a survivor reacts violently against their abuser, it is not so much an act of participation within the cycle of violence, but a blow of self-defense, a push towards freedom. (Of course, it is often not this linear.)
But there is yet another cycle of violence, and it is generalized. Statistics, for what they’re worth, say that 30% of those who are abused as children go on to abuse their own children. Fredy Perlman’s Against History, Against
Leviathan is this narrative on a global scale. Perlman tells the story of many different sets of people resisting their conditions, fighting their oppressors—then forming their own new Leviathans, corrupted by the harm they experienced, sick with the virus of civilization (some would say.) These situations are horrible and complicated and not this simple—there are so many structural oppressions and points of history at play—but, still, this pattern seems too true to look away from.
You could believe from all this that we are poisoned at the core by all the damage we’ve experienced, too likely to repeat the past—but that eliminates the possibility of choosing otherwise, means that resistance is never real or possible for long, that all lines of flight hit brick walls. I don’t think so. I think it is true that we are nearly doomed,
and that it is delusional and dangerously short-sighted to believe otherwise—but I don’t want us to use that as an excuse to give up. We must think and talk together and try again; only in that effort can we learn.
So in my own life: the shit I experienced so long ago became a self-destructive tendency. Then it started to harm my practice. Now those tendencies have begun to negatively affect others.
All of the times I’ve had sex I didn’t want to have, not because the other person forced me into it but
because it was a narrative I had become used to playing out—I thought that I was only hurting myself, but now I see that I was hurting others too, that the wrong lies not only in forcefulness but, sometimes, in withholding an answer. The bad habits it has taught me take me to the edge of an unthinkable precipice.
After I escaped my mother, I felt invulnerable to further abuse. But, when shades of it come to me after all, it feels more like real love than anything positive I have freely engaged in. It is so hard to decline.
I consider the bitterness and resentment I feel when others are doing projects I feel incapable of because
of my circumstances or insecurities, and I see an enemy.
I try to create the magic moments of revolt I have sometimes stumbled into with others, and they fall
apart, crumble in my hands. I become afraid to even try.
There are other ways to look at it, of course. Surely our desire to fight against what has been done to us (and who does it and how it is done to everyone) is based in our own experience, the most legitimate basis for attack. One could argue that one of the reasons why so surprisingly many privileged people are anarchists—or, conversely, why it seems that a disproportionate number of anarchists have experienced abuse—is because surviving abuse can give you a basic ability to empathize with others, to feel an impulse towards solidarity, that privileged people would otherwise lack.
What happened to us is terrible, but it fuels our desire for something else, our hatred of the world and need to resist it. This is not to psychoanalyze our resistance away, but rather to recognize our emotional resources so that we may more explicitly draw on them. Knowing what we do about how abuse has shaped us, we can also look at our practices critically, search for the poison in us, and build a tension towards dissolution rather than replication.
And it’s not all holding us back: we have learned practical skills in our personal attempts to survive, not only outdated defenses. We know how to smile when we want to cry; we know how to keep secrets. We know how to be beaten without making a sound. We know how to strike back in small but meaningful ways, and how to keep a little piece of ourselves out of their grasp, hidden and free. We have learned, in a very direct sense, that there really is an outside; that it may take years of failed attempts, but that one can escape not only in death.
Freedom lies in revolt; we are good in a crisis, and the crisis is always on.
fever dream i am illegible. i am convulsing and we are not fucking. your tongue cleans my wounds and we are not fucking. i swallow the sickest parts of you and we are not fucking. we are not fucking because we cannot fuck. fuck is irrelevant. fuck is redundant. you exhale down my throat and i breathe your breath. you spit in my mouth and i digest your teeth. i taste you - under my finger nails, in hair clinging to my cheek, in my death lines. the lines blur. all we are now is voice. scream at me. break the wall. you give me the violence of your vocabulary. animal. monster. faggot. scum. your words do not name me, do not bring me back into the labyrinth of identity
(ripping skin, endlessly stepping on needles). animal. monster. faggot. scum. you do not inscribe me with Nature and Law and Light and Beauty. no, your words do not entrap the fetid mire that is my body. they open up possibilities: how many scars can my skin accumulate? how many teeth can i fracture? how much shit can i swallow? how much nature can i profane? your words loose in me the monster hiding: stabbing her father, castrating her self. do your violence to me. set fire to our childhood homes. let old selves die. until we are born, the horror we want to be.
every time i attend a consent workshop, sexual assault accountability discussion, or even read a survivor support zine, i fight back tears.
every fucking time it’s a trigger for me to hear that the most important thing you can provide as support is to listen, to believe. when i went to my family about being sexually abused they continued the abuse by screaming at me for hours, insisting that i was lying. i was moved into my grandma’s house where my life was threatened if i ever ‘said anything about the men in her home.’ my mom tried another go with housing me a year later. another three years of abuse. i ran away when i was 15. my family didn’t want to believe me when i told them i was being assaulted because my abuser was, to them, virtuous beyond reproach. this belief was fostered by the parallel created between my mother’s first husband (my dad) and her second (my abuser.) my dad was an alcoholic and outwardly abusive, so i was actually happy when mother divorced him. my happiness was shortlived; soon after the divorce she brought home something even worse. with this one the abuse happened when no one was looking and didn’t leave visible marks. to everyone except me it seemed like my mother had improved her situation. nobody wanted to believe that this man who held a steady job, went to church, and gave expensive gifts could ever be the monster i was calling him out for being. i was told that i was ungrateful and awful to make up such stories about someone who did so much for my mother and i. many things have become a part of my core beliefs and personality based on my formative experiences. some i try to resist, and others i try to see as the positive takeaway from an overall negative time in my life. having my mother, a figure imbued with assumptions of unconditional support, turn against me and not believe and defend me, has made it so that i struggle with speaking up and asking for help. i feel like she defended her partner over her child because she felt like she had to maintain a relationship with a man in order to survive. this understanding has been the basis for my cynicism of the power dynamics between men and women. the societal pressure for two by two pairings and the inherent co-dependence that ensues is what i primarily blame for the destruction of my relationship with my mother. as a result of not having familial involvement i also have a heightened understanding of the importance of the bonds established within my community of chosen family. my abuse also made me question everything that my abuser believed in. his value as a person for making money and spending it on gifts (bribes), has definitely formed my anti-work/capitalism ethic. his faith in god as our holy father and his conviction to submit oneself to the authority of god has made me retch at any patriarchal pyramid scheme bullshit ever since i was made to submit to his authority. and i guess that plays into my overall distrust of any person in a position of authority. i sometimes wonder what my life would be like if my mom never met him. would i be less cynical? would i be able to communicate easier? would i have a relationship with my bio family? i don’t really know and i try to not fixate on the things that might have been different and focus on the things that i can have an impact on. helping other folks in their struggles helps me deal with my own. i know that i would have figured that out, even if i never had to struggle in the ways i have.
All that is ruined in you, I cherish. All that you have endured, every pain you have known brings me closer to you; I would not take you into my heart but for each crack in yours. Every bruise your mind cannot get rid of, every little detail that is hideous I fid beautiful beyond clouds. It is only with the exposure of our horrifying scars that I can learn to love, and be loved.
Delete me I’m so Ugly
on vigilance: toward another impossibility
1: a consideration what does it mean to be an anarchist survivor of abuse what does it mean to have been abused by an anarchist what does it mean when men who want to fuck you because you have “good politics” keep fucking you when you don’t want to what does it mean when your lifelong comrades lie to you for years about what they did what does it mean when you don’t trust anyone what does it mean to be real, really real, about how capital has poisoned your idea of intimacy over and over again what if the first person who ever abused or manipulated you was an anarchist, a popular one, one whose press people still recommend you read zines from, what does it mean when the friendships that were the only thing you could still believe in are sick with the rot of cruelty, manipulation, emotional expropriation, how do you cut out the rot, can you cut out the rot, why can’t you find exactly where the rot is, if you could find it you’d kill it, if you could find it you’d kill it, you call them scene enmities as to discount them when you’re looking for someone else to trust but you know it’s something else, know your reputation is monstrous if you talk shit, what does it mean to have survived anarchist abuse, what does it mean in our tiny scene, its impotent gestures utterly destined for failure (we know this) except god damn can its practitioners destroy you easy, what does it mean to be an anarchist survivor of abuse, if anarchy as a politic has taught me to take solace in nothing then what’s the next step, more zines about accountability processes, more baseball bats, except nothing leaves you unabused if anything anarchy means failure to me and even if the failure isn’t mine i know that there is no other side, there is no abuse>>[slide missing]>>communique>>then healing complete, abuse terminated, history wiped clean, trust restored, community standard upheld, perpetrator cast out, redemption achieved, ready to block capital flows in accordance with my ability forever and evermore, amen anarchy’s not like a video game and neither are our lives. you can’t win on the other side of abuse even if you kill the motherfucker. you can’t and won’t win. all the actions that want you to win feel like shit because they are shit. you don’t have to disappoint anarchist narratives of healing and accountability, too. you’ve got enough disappointment in the depths of yourself. you don’t have to pretend you don’t feel like shit. i see one attainable goal for abusers, which is a lifelong commitment to not abusing anyone else, ever. accountability per se should be understood as a failing gesture at an impossible project, that of unabusing the survivor, of building a world where people aren’t systemically encouraged to abuse one another. survivor solidarity means understanding that i’m not going to feel better, and that you don’t get a pass from feeling bad. solidarity is agreeing to feel bad with me for a while. maybe really bad, maybe a long while.
2: an expansion lest we fucking forget that many kinds of abuse can be understood, for the guileless marxists among us, as a special kind of forced value extraction: a coerced accumulation of care from the abused to the abuser. the flows of affect and care that reproduce culture and therefore subjectivity are unequally maintained by women; emotional abuse forcibly directs those affective gestures away from the surviving subject and onto the abusing subject; the abuser’s selfhood is affirmed endlessly through the survivor’s maintenance of it, and at the expense of the survivor’s selfhood. one leaves the abusive situation shattered, unsure of which affective bonds can be trusted, starved for care or attention whose implicit purpose is not control, confused as to where oneself ends and the other—much less a network individuals connected by affinity—begins. on a better day i’d argue against conceiving of all social life as the circulation and maintenance of affects and subjects mirroring the circulation and maintenance of capital and the commodity, since that framework is limiting and terrifying. but in terms of abuse, it can perhaps be useful to lay out an analysis that treats sociality as perhaps
not work, but as circuits that produce value, keeping in mind particularly the material consequences of surviving abuse. which is to say: we can conceive of the things we do to maintain each other as gestures that have value both to a capitalist machine that requires healthy subjects to perform labor and to ourselves and each other, as creatures who need to be cared for or take part in a social life. the marxist intervention into the concept of labor is that people who work for wages are subject both to giving over the value of their labor to an employer (“consensually”) and to the extraction of profit from that labor, which accumulates in the pockets of their bosses. the wage they receive can never be commensurate with the work they do, because the work goes toward reproducing capital. by this token, we might understand abuse as that which reproduces the abuser’s selfhood unilaterally, with a violence that mirrors that which is inherent to capital exchanges. abusers mimic bosses not only in their manipulation of survivors, but in the value of which they rob the survivor.
“abuse” is a nebulous term, handed down to us in clinical settings to explain our maladaptive behaviors and busted attachment styles, a floating signifier easily taken up to mean “anything we don’t like” to end conversations and win arguments. especially as anarchists, who need not value civility or niceness for the sake of making our enemies comfortable, it can be difficult to find the lines between “mean” and “shitty” and “abusive” to describe the behaviors of people who have wronged us. a key component of my understanding of abuse is the idea that abuse seeks to control or maintain power over an individual, to use their body, mind, work, feelings, speech, etc. to one’s own ends and without their consent. one would want to believe that even without an elegant definition of the boundaries of abuse, we might “know it when we see it,” but its invisibility, or its congruence with capitalistic modes of social interaction, is perhaps the most damnable aspect of abuse. it can be awfully fucking difficult to see close up, since coercion and manipulation are implicitly encouraged by capital as long as their goal is the production of more value, more “success” for the individual. “it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.” one must be careful, then, of where the value goes. it’s hardly news that we as anarchists require a particular kind of upkeep, wedded as we are to trouble. the labor we do to produce affinities, projects, spaces, and actions is obviously bound up in the care-labor we do to maintain one another. we need not put one above or below the other—indeed, they’re inextricable—but responding to abuse in our circles requires the pluck and ire we bring to all of our projects as anarchists. it seems absurd at this point to bring up another reason why we should pay attention to patterns of abuse in anarchist circles, but the prevalence of abuse among anarchists would suggest that it couldn’t hurt to remind ourselves to pay attention.
3: a call love, and the feminized subjects out here know this, is hardly a space for opening up: safety there has long been an illusion. home is where the heart is hardened to the regular violences of the family. it’s infuriating to hear anarchists invoke invented community standards or purported shared politics as evidence that abuse cannot occur among us, that our spaces are safe, that we’ll take care of each other so we can be dangerous together. risk pervades a culture structured around violence. anarchy is not safe, and neither are we. we all know better than to oppose violence for its own sake: if violence is that which erases, which cuts off subjects from producing, then we need it for our project of ending this world. but we must take care to not end each other. i am struck again by the impossibility of the anarchist project set against the seemingly endless ability of anarchists to render each other impossible: abused but alive, surviving, hated and hateful in a hellish world. being careful with each other isn’t enough. active consent models aren’t enough. accountability isn’t enough. if they were enough, we wouldn’t need them in the first place. but if you’re on the team, be on the fucking team. we are owed vigilance as survivors of abuse. we know we will not get it. we are compelled by capital to get better. we know we cannot do it. we are asked even by our so-called comrades to heal. but there is no self uninflected by capital, and there is no going back after abuse. “solidarity is vigilance redistributed.” 5 we are owed vigilance.
5 berlant. http://supervalentthought.com/2013/10/26/the-game-8-and-9/
vigilance need not reproduce the opacity of self-satisfied call-out culture. vigilance requires attending to nuance, to sussing-out, to messy overlaps and incoherent subjects, to weird nonlinear narratives. vigilance may require conflict. we know better than to rely on assumed communities. confronting affinity and lack of affinity in the wake of abuse is tiresome, complicated, noxious. so be it. vigilance doesn’t mean taking sides in callouts that have nothing to do with you, or arranging your allegiances for social gain in the wake of someone’s alleged abuse: vigilance has no room for a failure to critically approach abuse. the expansiveness of “abuse” as a category, combined with the rhetorical weight it holds, makes it an easy concept to, well, abuse. rape is not the same as emotional manipulation; intent matters; there are degrees. none of it should be regarded lightly, but the ways in which abuse destroys us are multiple, the consequences varied. surprise: we live in a world that defies simple binaries; survivors of abuse become abusers; situations can be mutually abusive. it serves no one, least of all survivors, to address abuse as a monolith. vigilance is required.
ALL THIS IS TO SAY THAT it isn’t easy and it feels horrible: to be abused, to support survivors, to conceive of abuse, to address reactions to abuse and abusers in our circles. but if you’re on the team, be on the fucking team. pay attention. you’ve chosen the impossible project. so do it already.
There is a point when shit comes at you with such brutal force, everything is associated with trauma. Once this threshold has been reached and it is no longer clear where the pain is coming from, we forget language ad everything detestable is exposed to the violence of our surviving limbs.
Delete me, I’m so Ugly
trauma, abuse and anarchist practice
I am not exactly sure how to say what I aspire to say. I feel uncertain of how to begin a conversation or piece about trauma as it relates to my Anarchist practice, because these things feel so convoluted, hard to separate.
Both are innate and inform each other, and I don’t always know how and when and in what ways. This is due in part to how entwined abuse and trauma are with Anarchism, both ideologically and in my lived experience, and in part to an ongoing internalized struggle I am engaging in constantly. It is a conflict of implicit and contradicting desires, like being accountable for myself in a broader context of community, friendship, trust, and commitment, and just doing without thinking what I know viscerally to be effective methods of surviving and coping.
I FEEL A CERTAIN AMOUNT A DISASSOCIATION coupled with an innate capacity for understanding that is complicated to navigate, and is hard to discern and articulate. Abuse is such a fundamentally damaging and harmful violation of trust that it inescapably colors the ways in which people perceive and experience the world. I can have a certain amount of self-awareness and still not understand all of the ways in which abuse manifests in my life.
I do know that my survival led me to desperate acts, and to body and mind-numbing behaviors and substances for which I was criminalized and marginalized. These experiences were translatable to a larger context of systematic oppressions that felt easy to see and place myself within.
IT FEELS IMPOSSIBLE TO LIVE IN THE WORLD, but we survive somehow, and we attempt to paint a picture that makes more sense then the one we are staring at. Anarchism articulated certain truths about the world and gave me a means to begin reconciling with myself little by little. Through that process, still ongoing, of reconciling with myself, I learned to breath a little slower; live; develop over time deep, meaningful, trusting friendships; and fuck in ways that didn’t seem possible. I think people have come to similar places by very different means, but my
Anarchy and my trauma have never been separate because it’s impossible to separate myself from the trauma I have experienced. Thus they inform each other, fuel each other.
It didn’t take a huge leap in consciousness to relate trauma to a larger context of oppression and violence. In making that connection through the lens of Anarchism, I was able to shift my conception of self and identity from this place of feeling desolated by particular acts by specific persons to a critique of the larger systemic conditioning and perpetuation of abuse that lends itself by design to the creation of monsters, perpetrators, and victims. Anarchist rhetoric and energy tried to make sense of the monsters I still wanted to love, and took the spotlight off of my own experiences, and allowed me to step outside of my pain body a little.
MY EARLY EXPLORATION OF ANARCHY AD MUTUAL AID built a bridge that connected my isolation to the isolation of other folks, and there was something hopeful about this. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that where trauma led me into isolation, addiction, remorse and self-deprecation, Anarchy led me into a place where my struggles became relatable, gave me a context to understand the underlying motivations for patterns of abuse and made me feel connected to a larger network of people with similar experiences. In this way Anarchism created space for me to heal and engage in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. I felt elated by a framework of critical resistance that was ripe with possibility and complexity, one that was integrated and uncompromising in its demands for change.
Living in a world axised around the absence of coercion, violence, force and authority feels very practical in contrast to the abusive relationships rooted so deeply in force, shame, and negligence that we experience everyday, and which made me feel heavy and helpless. I have always been circumstantially at odds with the powers that be, and I have always felt like I had to fight for my life, which felt disposable, but Anarchism demanded vengeance and annihilation and I wanted that more than I wanted to die. This emotional and reactionary sort of desperation is indicative of my Anarchism in practice.
IT IS CLEAR THAT ABUSE PERPETUATES ITSELF, that it affects us so pervasively that we are prone to repeating, engaging in, or otherwise participating in the furtherance of abusive behaviors. My Anarchist practice is very much inflected by the fear of this potential in myself, and motivated by a refusal to be complacent in my potential participation in these cycles of abuse. I am an Anarchist because nothing else makes sense, and it is among comrades that I am inspired to act in ways that make me feel alive. Thus it is my early experiences with abuse and trauma that led me to Anarchism in the first place. I don’t remember a necessity to deconstruct my pre-existing notions of “privilege” or “violence” or “danger” or whatever in order to come to a place where I could develop a relationship with anarchist principles and actions.
I do realize, though, that in order to live the kind of life I want to live, as persistently and fearlessly and dangerously as possible, I have had to and continue to engage in a lot of intentional self-evaluation and work. I have struggled with addictions and other mind numbing coping mechanisms. I have struggled with being dependable, flighty, impulsive. Trauma affects the ways in which I relate to my own body, obvi; I internalize stress, fatigue, agitation, and periods of deep unrest, depression, anxiety and hopelessness. It limits my ability to engage as consistently and persistently as I would like to imagine possible for myself.
I FEEL THE MOST ABLE IN CRISIS, in times or situations that require a lot of reactivity. I can deal with a lot of emotional chaos without feeling weighed down or immobilized by it as it’s happening. These are practical and useful skills. I am intuitive, perceptive, sensitive, patient, and pretty level headed in a lot of ways, and these are all strengths that are, at times, a part of my practice. I feel especially good at conflict resolution, mediation, facilitation, legal defense type stuff and various support efforts. I think that I am fairly accessible, easy to talk to, and receptive, which feels important, and I think that these skills are derivative of past experiences.
On the flip side of this, I think that trauma has also been hugely limiting in the ways I have engaged with anarchist projects and community. I don’t have the energy, stamina, or attention for sustaining projects long-term. I don’t even have a deep interest in that, which feels weird to say. I mean only that my own practice feels more reactionary, more spontaneous, and the skill set that feels inherent to me and my experience is more centered around responding to moments as they’re happening.
I AM RETROGRESSIVE MAYBE in the sense that I am at my best in states where I am ‘triggered’ to respond in ways that feel very inherent to my essential character. I feel especially capable in times of urgent necessity. I can hold a lot of disparity, heartache and excitement without being halted by it, while being, in a way, moved to act or react because of its existence, its intolerability. Highly stressful situations feel easier to navigate because that environment of reactivity is what I am most familiar with; the monotony of daily life, of work, of sustaining meaningful friendships, paying bills and doing all the things feels a lot more overwhelming. It takes a great deal of effort to resist self-destructive behavior in the face of that monotony. There is a paradigm that I am trying to speak to of great strength, intuition, and perception, juxtaposed with a tendency towards just surviving days, of being easily distracted, impulsive, in varying states of depression. The really intense empathy and sensitivity I feel in light of my experiences drive me to act, but also affects my tolerance of the odious act of day to day living..
There are a thousand ways to dissolve
Sexual assault,
I have no more words for you, I disappear
Into murder, beating
Murder, plots on the linoleum floor
There are no ways of actualizing a total dissolve
Of sexual assault and murder
Counting rail ties between here and Seattle
99, 100, 101
I could throw you off a grainer
Abandon you in White Fish, mile post 1217
Or tie you up under a chase
But scheming is like a runaway train,
And I don’t want to be closer to get you away
Pepper spray, bottle rockets
Mile markers between here and Kansas City,
Read something like
“I should have been older to have touched you”
Read something like a ten hour drive
Something like pepper spraying a room full of people
Might be worth it
If I can aim at your eyes
Something like igniting a fist-full of bottle rockets
From here to the Great Plains
To set the fields between us ablaze
Might be worth it if
It takes out the churches with the tall steeples
It takes out every monster who felt up
Drunk 14 year old me at every party
From here to Nebraska
From here to Astoria
From here to Monterey Bay
From here to I was wearing my mother’s bra
Out of shame for my small tits, and now I
Wish they were concave, so every monster’s mprints weren’t fossilized on my chest
Like the limestone pyramids
That we walked to without socks
During our hippy white trash vacation to
Escape to the mountains
There hasn’t been any reason, in quite some time, to imagine a different reality than this. Our bodies grow tired as they take repeated blows; it is increasingly difficult to create that secret world in our head, the world saturated with beauty and congregated in conflict.
Delete me, I’m so Ugly
Personal Solutions
Political Ethnography as Art and Science
Charles Tilly
Adam Ashforth has written one of the recent political ethnographies I most admire. His Witchcraft, Violence, and
Democracy in South Africa draws on a total of about 3 years’ residence during the 1990s in Soweto (South West
Township), an Apartheid-built black suburb of Johannesburg, plus subsequent visits to his adopted family and friends there. Earlier, Ashforth wrote an impressive historical analysis of the process by which Apartheid took shape (Ashforth 1990). But preparation for his book on witchcraft, violence, and democracy plunged him shoulder-deep into ethnography. Through first-hand observation, personal intervention, and incessant interrogation of his acquaintances, Ashforth built up a powerful picture of coping, strife, and hope amid vicious violence. Ashforth’s ethnographic involvement forced him to abandon many a preconceived category and explanation of struggle during and after Apartheid.
Ashforth’s ethnography yielded remarkable, even disturbing, results. His analysis persuades me, at least, of two surprising conclusions I long resisted when hearing them from Adam: first, that no one can make sense of local
South African politics without understanding the enormous part played by fears about, accusations of, and reactions to witchcraft in Soweto’s (and, by extension, South Africa’s) everyday politics; second, that no one can hope to deal with South Africa’s devastating AIDS epidemic or build local-level democracy without confronting witchcraft directly. Many a political ethnographer will resonate to Ashforth’s reflection: Fortunately, from my first day in Soweto I was blessed with remarkable friends who guided me through the pleasures and perils of life in the township. They steered me toward what little understanding of their world I can now claim, though they do not always agree with the way I have come to understand this place. I have read widely in the years since I began getting to know Soweto, but the essence of whatever I know about this place I have learned through my friends: how I know it is by being there as a friend. This is both the strength and the weakness of what follows. For what I came to understand – dimly, slowly, over many years of fumbling in the dark – is that their world is my world, and mine theirs, and yet we also live in worlds apart (Ashforth 2005, pp. x–xi).
In order to do his ethnography, Ashforth had to become at least moderately competent in Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, and the special brands of English Sowetans speak. It helped that he learned to play the violin Zulu style with other musicians in local drinking places, and that he was ready to defend his adopted brothers and sisters from recurrent threats of attack by weapons and witchcraft. His deep involvement in local life allowed him to reconstruct South African politics at the levels of persons, households, and small groups.
To the extent that politics actually consists not of big structures and prescribed roles but of dynamic, contingent interaction among persons, households, and small groups – and I believe that extent to be very large – political ethnography provides privileged access to its processes, causes, and effects. It makes little difference in this regard whether we take politics in the extremely broad sense of all interactions involving the exercise of power or in the narrower, more manageable sense I prefer: interactions in which at least one government participates as actor, object, and/or influential third party. In either the broad or the narrow sense, political ethnography brings field workers into direct contact with political processes instead of filtering that knowledge through other people’s testimony, written records, and artifacts of political interaction.
As the superb reports in this collection indicate, to be sure, “political ethnography” commonly includes a continuum of procedures for collection of evidence, from intrusive to inobtrusive:
1. In-depth interviews
2. Conversation
3. Participant observation
4. Passive observation of interaction
5. Covert observation of interaction
6. Inobtrusive observation concerning residues and consequences of interaction
With the exception of Matthew Mahler (who relies on a version of item 6: analysis of nonfiction retrospective reports of political involvement), every author in this special issue employs more than one of these approaches to political ethnography. Each approach has distinctive strengths and weaknesses. To avoid turning this brief introduction into a methodological treatise, however, let me concentrate on examining what our authors actually have to teach us about political processes, and about how to study them.
Here is my main point: if you believe (as I do) that how things happen is why they happen, then ethnography has great advantages over most other conventional social scientific methods as a way of getting at cause-effect relations. Most methods depend on correlations and comparative statics, asking whether observed variation corresponds to plausible consequences of one condition or another. Ethnography engages the analyst in looking at social processes as they unfold rather than reasoning chiefly from either the conditions under which they occur or the outcomes that correlate with them.
Effective political ethnography resembles good clinical medicine in connecting art with science. A clinical artist picks up clues about patients and their maladies that even probing mechanical and chemical tests fail to detect, then assembles them into competing causal accounts that suggest alternative therapies. But only systematic knowledge of the body’s operation, of the symptoms presented by different diseases, of test results, of the available therapies, and of those therapies’probable consequences – in short, of the relevant science – allows a diagnostician to move from preliminary observation to treatment. On the whole, political ethnographers stop short of intervening directly to cure the ills they observe. Otherwise, the analogy holds: art involving shrewd observation integrates with systematic use of accumulated knowledge. First-rate political ethnography cannily combines art with science.
Yet the analogy fails us in one crucial respect: the range of questions being asked and answered. Despite the somewhat different orientations of epidemiology and public health, by and large medical clinicians are trying to figure out what caused some individual’s pathology, and what will alleviate that pathology. Political ethnographers ask a wider range of questions. In the set of papers at hand, we can group those questions in three rough categories: (1) How does a given cause produce its effects? (2) What explains the variable processes that occur in ostensibly similar situations? (3) How can ethnographers produce valid, credible knowledge of social processes? Seen in this light, the papers cluster as follows:
From Cause to Effect
Wendy Wolford: How do people get involved in political mobilization, and what impact does it have on them, especially on their sense of what happened? Rosanne Rutten: In patron-client relations, how does shame affect a worker’s interactions with employers, and how do activists overcome the inhibitions produced by shame?
Patricia Steinhoff: How do protest participants and police negotiate limits to acceptable performances?
Pamela Price: How does the decline of authoritative inequality affect interpersonal interaction patterns, and participants’ interpretations of those interaction patterns?
Enrique Arias: How does the emergence of powerful criminal organizations affect the operation of previously existing patron-client systems connecting politicians to citizens?
Variation in Processes
Tammy Smith: How does the presence or absence of interpersonal trust affect the capacity of groups to confront collective problems?
Kathleen Blee and Ashley Currier: How and why do social movement groups vary in their response to national electoral campaigns, and how does the character of their involvement in such campaigns affect their retrospective assessments?
Mirella Landriscina: What determines the extent to which activist organizations operate within routine politics, in contentious politics, or both in alternation?
How to Create Knowledge
Elisabeth Wood: What ethical choices confront ethnographers in conflict zones? How should (and do) those choices affect their work?
Matthew Mahler: What analytic approaches yield adequate accounts of individual experience in political engagement?
I won’t spoil readers’ enjoyment of these rich papers by summarizing how the authors answer their questions. But notice two features of the questions. First, all of them overflow the immediate situations in which the authors did their ethnographies; they give the lie instantly to the idea that the chief value of ethnography is to provide more interesting or adequate descriptions of social situations. Second, they all concern processes rather than correlations or comparative statistics. I rest my case.
References
Ashforth, A. (1990). The politics of official discourse in twentieth-century South Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ashforth, A. (2005). Witchcraft, violence, and democracy in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hate Kills: A social justice response to “suicide”.
So, Joe is the person who has died, Elliot is Joe's counsellor, and Sarah is one of the counsellors who was one of the witnesses to Elliot's struggles. (These names are fictional, the accounts are not).
Elliott's reflection as the Interviewed Counsellor in the Solidarity Group
Our "Remembering Joe" session today was healing for me as a counsellor and as a person. It allowed me to value my work with Joe in a human, non-"clinical" way. I've been trained to examine my reaction to clients in order to provide effective and ethical service. However, none of my training has prepared me for the intense, sometimes overwhelming nature of working with a population of highly marginalized, oppressed clients struggling with mental health and addiction issues. I've often felt my work is a "drop in the bucket" of help and support clients need and deserve. The witnesses reminded me of how precious our relationships with clients can be, how dignity matters. Remembering Joe's amazing strengths and his resistance against oppression left me with an honouring view on his life, rather than focusing on the tragedy of the loss of such a beautiful person. Your questions about
Joe's gifts, what he taught me, combat my feelings of helplessness and this session is going to help me in my work with all my clients.
The structure of the witnessing today (you interviewing me, then the others in the room, and then connecting back to me) allowed me to start feeling my emotions rather than holding on to the safety of numbness. As the supervisor, your transparency helped solidify how important it is to resist over-editing our responses in the guise of being "professional". The witnesses shared their responses of pain in their lives and work and this validated my struggle losing Joe. The group helped quiet my inner over-critical voice.
On my jog home (more like a walk with a hop than a jog really...) I saw Joe's physical features in many people passing me by, and it was a very positive, spiritual experience.
Sara's reflections as a Witnessing Counsellor in the Solidarity Group
The witnessing exercise Vikki lead us in created a space to honour and re-member a client in all his greatness.As I listened to Elliot talk about his client Joe, I was aware howthis stranger transitionedintoa man with an identity, soul and passion --I wished I had known Joe. Vikki asked Elliot if there was a way that this client's life could enter into Elliot's work so that his death was not forgotten, whichreminded me how important it is to honour the intimate knowledge we get from ourclients.
My mind wandered to how I bring Brenda, who committed suicide last year, into my clinical practice by sharing what she taught me with clients to combat the blame game of stigma that our clients are labelled with.
When Vikki turned to me and asked what arose for me from this remembering process I was overcome with emotion about how real the work we do is and how we as counsellors offer moments of truly seeing our clients for who they are and acknowledging their struggles.I was struck by the privilege of learning from clients and how it has shaped my life and shifted my values.
I was saddened that we didn't make more room for Joe to be in this society because of prejudice. The act of witnessing allowed meto safely question how I fight for marginalized populations and look for acts of resistance in the face of oppression and violence.It reminded me that it is okay to hold the faces I love and have lost in my mind in order to fuel and encouragemy work.Thanks Vikki and Elliot for being present and creating a sacred space of remembering for Joe.I am grateful for the work you both engage in.
Sincerely,
Sara
Involving Others From Toolkit to Ethos for a Different Kind of Democracy
Naomi Millner
Here’s the scenario: you are a group of individuals, concerned with the housing issues in your area. You are aware of dozens of empty buildings in various states of disrepair, whose only prospects are eventual redevelopment by private firms. Together with a group of activist friends, you begin to imagine how acquiring one of these buildings might form a hub of autonomous organising in the area. One of these derelict buildings might be the basis for a community centre with a difference, a centre of collaborative learning, a space for people of different walks of life to encounter each other. The problem is, you don’t know if that’s what the other people in the area would want.
There’s no history of autonomous organising there. Local residents you have spoken to are interested, but haven’t really thought about the idea before.
Wall drawing on a building in Barcelona, Spain.
Some are positively against the idea, fearing that it will bring ‘black-clad anarchists’, graffiti vandalism, and increased crime to the area. How can you begin a process that involves more than just those in your social group?
How can you ensure the process which takes place properly attends to the opinions and desires of others invested in the area, without losing sight of your vision?
Countless models, techniques and ‘kits’ have been created to enable decisions to be made more collaboratively.
The aim of these resources is ostensibly to introduce democratic openness into a situation which risks sidelining dissident voices or alternative interests. For example, a group of scientists might use a ‘participatory’ approach to come up with a solution to the repeated flooding of an area that draws on the personal experience and knowledge of local people. Rather than presuming that scientific studies will give rise to the best solution, this approach acknowledges that there are many aspects of the problem which will be hidden without a more diverse array of knowledge-producers.1 In another example, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is interested in funding initiatives which use participative approaches to develop poverty reduction schemes. The idea here is to allow the
experience and insights of people who have experienced poverty to drive the formation of solutions, as opposed to theories conceived at a remove from the actual realities of poverty.
6
But in each scenario there is a problem to be faced. Whoever initiates the process has an interest in the question, place, or project at stake. Those invited to take part may have no interest, or a very different interest in the same object. To involve others in such a process whilst also maintaining integrity to this dissonance, something more than a set of techniques is required. A set of techniques can only lay out a recommended set of steps for action. It can’t ensure attention to minority voices, or guarantee that an equitable process will take place. For these reasons, participatory approaches have been extremely susceptible to incorporation into corporate and commerce-oriented agendas. The idea of participation is an attempt to respond to the ‘democratic deficit’ in the contemporary western world – a lack of opportunities for everyday individuals to be substantively involved in decisionmaking or social change. However, the language of participation can be used without any commitment to equality. It is possible to ‘consult’ a local population before a large-scale property development, and to tick all the ethical boxes, whilst keeping the planned design working firmly in the interests and pockets of the developers.
So how can we take back a language of participation? Beyond a tool-kit, participation requires an ethos if it is to play a part in equitable social transformations. An ethos is a set of values which are embodied into repeated practice. Rather than reducing a participative process to a model which can be reproduced with lip-service, the ethos asks certain commitments and dispositions from facilitators, and involves them in a wider project for which the name is ‘democracy.’
Stencil art in Madison, Wisconsin. Creative commons license.
Democracy in this sense is not the same thing as the political system which, in the UK, means that we vote to have someone to represent us in the House of Commons. Instead, it is a body of political values which have developed through a long history to try and give rise to more just and equitable ways of organising social life. For example, anarchist and environmental social groups have devised a repertoire of ‘radical democratic’ practices which address less visible hierarchies of speech and listening, such as ‘consensus decision-making' and co-operative financial structures.3 Such techniques address the way that, in contemporary society, knowledge too is produced through processes which recognise the capacities of some over others.
Knowledge is often produced in a manner which reproduces and sustains existing power imbalances – whether across a given society, or within a particular social movement. For example, on issues of sustainable agriculture today, scientific evidence is increasingly trusted and brought into the domain of international policy-making. But
6 See Bennett, F. & Roberts, M. (2004) Participatory Approaches to Research on Poverty, Joseph Rowntree
Foundation). Available at: http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/participatory-approaches-research-poverty.
the experiential knowledge of peasant-farmers around the world, who have farmed sustainably for centuries, is rarely recognised.
The development of participatory methods marks an effort to respond to this imbalance of access to resources and a recognition of unacknowledged capacities. Yet close examination of such techniques reveals that participation today is being adopted into policy-making and planning in ways which further disempower those with a stake or interest in a particular problem. Once it has been reported that members of a local community have been ‘consulted’, plans for an urban generation scheme may be placed on a fast-track, and even given a
‘green’ status. As an ethos, a participation agenda asks for more: it entails a set of commitments which make the interests of invested parties vulnerable and open to change. By making clearer the values which are in question, the ethos also makes the participation agenda more robust and resilient against commercial co-optation.
An Ethos of Trust
Democracy in the making of knowledge or of decisions is a key aspiration for ‘participative’ methodologies. This means allowing all those with a stake in a problem or question to speak back to the process from its beginning to its end. But how can others be invited into a process in a manner which moves beyond the superficial? Take the case outlined in Part One. Your group wants to involve others. But do they want to participate? Do they know they want to participate? It can be difficult to convince people to take part. Once a group or process has been established it can be even more difficult to simultaneously pursue a goal (for example, to create an architectural plan for a disused building) and make space for participants to disagree, or introduce their own ideas. Part of an ethos for participation entails an act of giving trust. Only when the facilitator of a participative process actively trusts the current knowledge and abilities of those taking part can a solution be created which is able to successfully invite participants into a process, and move beyond the framing or interests of a narrow group of people.
There is a story which shows the meaning of this act of giving trust. The story is told by the political thinker
Jacques Rancière in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. 4 Here Rancière follows the lesson learnt by the historical educator Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840). Jacotot was a distinguished academic, popular with his students whose ‘long and eventful career should have made him immune from surprises. He was once a passionate subscriber to this technique of ‘explication’ for teaching – of progressing students from more simple to more complex contexts. However, he is by chance converted to new methods when, in exile in Belgium, he is approached by a number of Flemish-speaking students, who beg him to teach them as well.
Speaking only French, Jacotot cannot invite them to his classes – but he acquires for each person a bilingual edition of Fénelon’s Telemaque, recently published in Brussels. Through a translator, he instructs the students to learn this text for themselves, repeating it over and over. Without much confidence in the experiment, Jacotot is nevertheless sufficiently astonished by the results for him to abandon a canon of methods he has preserved for decades. When he asks the students to write down their thoughts on their readings, the students not only proficiently articulate themselves in French, but express their thoughts on the first half of the book with astounding coherency. Jacotot grasps at once that despite his firmly held convictions, the students are capable of learning quite independently of his intelligence. From this moment he abandons the ivory towers, and goes amongst the country's poor, conducting a series of further experiments to discover how he can actualise his new discovery in such a way that all may realise what lies already within their power. This is the lesson that anyone can teach. It consists only in an act of legitimising the learning which is already taking place, outside the language of the academy. This discovery, he realises, does not need to be explicated; ‘it sufficed only to announce it’.
The point of the ‘pedagogy’ – the art of teaching and learning – that Rancière draws out is that intelligence lies everywhere. To involve this intelligence in a properly democratic way is to understand it on a plane of equality. To involve this intelligence in a properly effective, ‘participative’ way is to learn how to make explicit our own interests in the specific problem at stake. Rather than presume the interests of others we need to recognise the presence of diverse interests and forms of knowledge. A process which moves beyond a liberal, woolly lip-service to participation is thus a process of facilitation, where the problem identified forms a beginning point, an opening, but the solution is to be created through a reiterative return to redefining the problem. What does this mean for the vision which first inspired the process – must it be entirely surrendered? The key is to frame the problem in the initial stages in such a way that it resonates with the existing concerns of others. This requires a period of research on the part of the initiating group – conversations, encounters, and the creation of an interested ‘public’ in a particular object, whether this be a physical space, a barrier to collective life, a
neighbourhood. The object must be larger than the problem identified, so that a diverse audience can be brought together from the perspectives of their own interests and investments.
Engraving of Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840).
However there is still a place for leadership, and for a ‘holding’ of the problem, in this process. The goal of leadership is to create a structured space-time of engagement from which a journey of inquiry can emerge as a response to the initial problem. This requires a commitment on the part of the facilitators to suspend their own hopes, views, and intelligence with regard any possible solution, whilst continuing to exert their ‘will’ in fidelity to their initial inspiration to act. Jacotot didn’t give up on his role as a ‘pedagogue’ – someone wilfully engaged in a process of shared teaching and learning. But through his experiments he learnt that he must refrain from relying upon his own intelligence to convince his participants of the nature of the problem, and invite them instead to play their part in defining it. This commitment brings values of trust, listening and openness to the centre of an ethos for participation.
Trust, Listening and Openness
Trust is not only a matter of realising and legitimising the capacities of others. It also means establishing a ‘space of trust’ in which participants feel their involvement is structured and their contributions are respected.
Establishing spaces of trust mean that individuals can feel confident to speak out in ways they are not used to, or take risks which make them feel vulnerable.
I have another story to show what this looks like in practice. It is drawn from my research with young people in
Bath and Bristol who were not in education or training. They were enrolled in ‘access’ courses to get back into education, and I was working with a research project that was testing and developing models for enhancing individuals’ capacities to learn. I worked with a group of teenagers who had left school without gaining any qualifications. My task was to adapt an inquiry-based learning process, designed by researchers for other groups, to enable these individuals to become aware of their own existing interests and knowledge, and the connections between these interests and existing fields of knowledge. In the process, each individual identified a place or object which fascinated them. One person chose Cheddar Gorge, the last place she remembered being truly happy with her family, before her parents split up. Another chose a picture of himself visiting a famous racing car demo, and sitting in a red Ferrari, since this had inspired his interest in racing. A third chose the quarry she had visited for free parties at which she felt most herself. Each person then created a project book in which the object
was documented, measured, revisited, and studied. After this, I worked with them to draw out and write down key questions which had arisen during the documentation process: how was Cheddar Gorge formed? Had anyone ever lived there? What do we know about its past?
In individual supervisions we linked these questions with areas of existing study, and each person was supported to develop the skills to find out their own answers, and share them with the group. The project surprised me with its successes. One boy chose ‘the Sun’ as his object and ended up making a connection with a local astronomer to view the Sun through an optical telescope. Although the boy was profoundly dyslexic, he created a Powerpoint presentation for the group introducing them to the physical and astrophysical specificities of the Sun, and involving them in his questions about its chemical composition. But when I asked the group about why and how they had each produced such brilliant work, opening new intellectual avenues for themselves, they surprised me again.
It wasn’t so much the methodology, they said, as the personal trust that had been developed through individual meetings that had encouraged them to take the risks with their involvement, and the small steps we had taken along the way. Feeling heard and feeling safe made them feel able to go along with the process, although most confessed they hadn’t really seen the point of it until they were quite a long way in. The quality of relationships and the trust invested in them was more important than the techniques for participation.
The Sun as viewed by the Soft X-Ray Telescope (SXT) onboard the orbiting Yohkoh satellite.
Trust in others and spaces of trust are best established when the participative process is seen as one of inquiry.
There is a problem at stake identified by the facilitator, and others are ‘co-investigators’. To bring of their knowledge and experience to the inquiry, sufficient intermediate steps must be made for links to be made between participants’ own invested interests, and those of the facilitator. The facilitator acts as a ‘learning guide’ or pedagogue during the inquiry, and structures the intermediate steps. However he or she does not have the final framing of the problem – that belongs to the group. This calls for a reiterative process in which the facilitator actively listens to what is emerging from the exercises, and allows it to build into a collective sense of momentum.
Active listening in this sense means attending to the responses – visceral, linguistic, and tentative – of the group to draw out emergent directions. From this point the facilitator will be in a position to rearticulate the problem and remaining parts of the inquiry process, in a way resonant with this momentum, and to make it explicit and accessible to participants. This requires a difficult level of openness to disagreements, new tensions, and unforeseen directions. However it will result in an affective, felt sense of ownership within a given group, and will allow for the development of a solution which far exceeds the imagination and experience of the facilitator(s).
Authority as the Capacity to Inspire Trust
What is the place of ‘authority’ within the collaborative relationship between the facilitator of a participative process, and participants? Authority, then, is not about coercive power or a manipulation of others for personal interests. Authority is granted to a teacher, government official, or leader, when others recognise and value the tradition or experience which set that individual apart. The facilitator of a participative process has authority when those involved invest them with a certain distance, or ‘outside’ status. Science has authority in an
investigation when it is accorded the weightiness to govern and influence decisions. But within an ‘ethos’ of participation there is another layer to add to authority. Authority is a capacity to inspire trust. This is what marks a participative inquiry apart from the liberal models which consult others, but never fully recognise, nor invite, their intelligence. By structuring an inquiry in such a way as to involve others and their experience in the making of knowledge, and by drawing these forms of knowledge onto an externally recognised platform of validation (eg. scientific practice), a facilitator is creating something which can be relied upon. This something reflects the interests of those whom the problem at stake concerns and it can be compared and translated into the languages of science and policy-making. In this sense an ethos of participation can take part in the making of democratic forms of knowledge, which can be trusted for guiding new ways of governing and organising social life. Beyond tokenistic representation this is a matter of remaking the social through authoritative, trust-ful relationships.
1 See, for example, Whatmore, S. J. & Landström, C. (2011) ‘Flood Apprentices: An Exercise in Making Things
Public’, Economy and Society, 40(4), 582 - 610.
3 See http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/
4 Rancière, J. (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Biographies
When Kerouac Met Dostoyevsky
by Stephen J. Gertz
Jack Kerouac's "Dostoyevsky Mad-Face" by Allen Ginsberg, 1953.
Sometime during March-April, 1949, John-not-yet-Jack Kerouac, 27 years old and living with his parents as "The
Wizard of Ozone Park" (Queens, NYC), as his Beat friends referred to him, bought a cheap reprint edition of short stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky . He annotated the book, and entered his ownership signature.
Dostoyevsky was an important influence on Kerouac; his novel, The Subterraneans , was consciously modeled on
Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground , one of his favorite books, and there are many references to the Russian author in Kerouac's novels and letters.
Dostoyevsky was something of a guiding literary and philosophical spirit to the Beats (and buddy - Kerouac affectionately called him "Dusty"), and Notes From the Underground, which Sartre considered to be a major forerunner of existentialism, a handbook of sorts for the Western Man isolated, apart from, and at odds with the culture in which he lives, alienated from the mainstream, an outsider creating and living life on his own terms.
Notes from the Underground is the companion piece to Mezz Mezzrow 's Really The Blues (1946), the gospel of hipster-jazz subculture that the Beats adopted as their book of revelations. The two books serve as the liturgy to
Beat theology.
In 1949, the year that Kerouac bought this book, he had just completed the legendary road trips with Neal
Cassady that began in July, 1947, wrote The Town and the City , was working on Dr. Sax , and crafting the first draft of On the Road (in its essential religiosity a sort of Brothers Karamazov in a car; Kerouac, a devout, though lapsed Catholic; a lonely, fallen altar-boy on an odyssey seeking enlightenment, redemption and communion with the Godhead, Brother Cassady his co-pilot and navigator riding shotgun no matter where he sat. On the Road is not about getting kicks on Route 66. Kerouac is an Irish-Catholic Siddartha). 1949 was a key year in Kerouac's journey, and Dostoyevsky was heavily on his mind.
In a letter written to his friend Alan Harrington on April 23, 1949 Kerouac wrote: "I've just read 'An Unfortunate
[sic] Predicament,' a long story by Dusty-what's-his-name. I studied it carefully and found that he begins with
'ideas' and then demolishes them in the fury of what actually becomes the story. This letter is a similar venture.
However, nothing detracts from the fact that this is a mad letter. 'So be it! So be it!'"
And boy, did he so be it. The first two pages of An Unpleasant Predicament (1861), one of the stories in the collection, are annotated by Kerouac, who has written six remarks in the margins commenting on Dostoyevsky's usage and writing.
For example, next to the sentence that begins: "The fact..." Kerouac writes: "Truly 'the fact.' Always fluffs the rest,
& gets to the 'fact.'"
Next to the word "fond" Kerouac writes: "fond always gives a batty tone -- just right."
About Dostoyevsky's use of the word "actual" he writes "Dusty's way of being a card."
Commenting on the sentence, "He was a bachelor because he was an egoist," Kerouac writes "A Family man's reflection."
Inappropriate behavior, scandalous activity, moral experimentation, ambiguity, and socio-political and literary polemic set within a mocking, carnivalistic atmosphere characterize this story of three generals' argument of ideas that degenerates when one of them, wishing to test his liberal-humanistic thinking, leaves, crashes the wedding of a subordinate, and gets drunk to satirically disastrous result. This was the Beat's bread and butter at its merriest, stepping on sacred cultural cow-pies, enjoying the squish, and hoping the scent offends bourgeois nostrils.
This copy of Dostoyevsky's short stories is a wonderful personal artifact from Kerouac's developing years as a writer, demonstrating his early literary thinking and roots. The year he bought and read it, the author, the subject
- here dawn energetically breaks on the Beats and especially on Jack Kerouac.
Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism: one practice, no dogma.
“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must overcome these propositions...” {Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.54}
“The most important point is to establish yourself in a true sense, without establishing yourself on delusion. And yet we cannot live or practice without delusion. Delusion is necessary, but delusion is not something on which you can establish yourself. It is like a stepladder. Without it you can’t climb up, but you don’t stay on the stepladder.”
{Shunryu Suzuki, Not always so, p.41}
Chapter 4: Bad Faith and de Beauvoir’s Gendered Self
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir acknowledges this conflict only briefly in terms of bad faith before breaking from
Sartrean existentialism to find a more complete solution. Acknowledging her unequal status with regard to her union with Sartre in their relationship, I will argue, de Beauvoir gains an insight into the condition of women’s situation as one which restricts their project for authenticity and transcendence. With this emphasis on situation as a limiting factor for transcendence, de Beauvoir breaks from existentialism, which has proven inadequate in handling the conflict she and Sartre notice in their own relationship. Thus, I will show how it is in the understanding of her relationship and dialogue with Sartre that de Beauvoir finds both the need to rethink her conception of authenticity and a method with which to proceed in her own way.
From Solitude to Solidarity How Camus Left Nihilism Behind
Absurdity, he saw, was nothing more than a first step toward the truth. In his private journal, he wrote that the absurd “teaches nothing.” Instead of looking only at ourselves, as do Sisyphus or Nietzsche’s superman, we must look to others: We are condemned to live together in a precarious, unsettling world. “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”
Love saves us from absurdity. At this point, Camus shed Nietzsche: Commitment to others becomes primordial in a world streaked by the absurd. This is the subject of The Rebel, a book conceived during the occupation and published in 1952. The rebel, affirms Camus, rejects not just metaphysical, but also political absurdity: namely, a state’s insistence on giving meaning to the unjustifiable suffering it inflicts on its citizens. The rebel not only says
“no” to an unspeaking universe, but also says “no” to an unjust ruler. The rebel “refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose”—to impose himself on a meaningless world, as well as on those who deny his humanity.
Most critically, however, the rebel seeks to impose a limit on his own self. Rebellion is an act of defense, not offense; it is equipoise, not a mad charge against an opponent. Ultimately, it requires an active watchfulness in regard to the humanity of others as well as oneself. Just as the absurd never authorizes despair, much less nihilism, a tyrant’s acts never authorize one to become tyrannical in turn. The rebel does not deny his master as a fellow human being, he denies him only as his master; and he resists the inevitable temptation to dehumanize his former oppressor.
For Camus, rebellion lives only as long as does the balance between daring and prudence. Hence Camus’s embrace of a profoundly un-Nietzschean “philosophy of limits.” Since we cannot know everything, this philosophy argues that we cannot do anything we please to others. Rebellion, unlike revolution, “aspires to the relative and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice. It supposes a limit at which the community of man is established.” Revolution comes easily, while rebellion “is nothing but pure tension.”
Ultimately, rebellion means unending self-vigilance: It is the art of active restraint. At the end of The Rebel, Camus declared that our task is to “serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” His many critics dismissed this phrase as mere grandiloquence, a heroic glibness disguising an absence of deep thought. Yet the truth of the matter is that there is nothing glib or easy about Camus’s claim.
Instead, it recognizes the difficulty, doubts, and desperation tied to true rebellion, and the realization we must live with provisional outcomes.
Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
“Kincaid’s novels do indeed withhold happy endings and she adds the fine shading to the narrative of colonialism by creating characters who can never thrive, never love and never create precisely because colonialism has removed the context within which those things would make sense. In Autobiography of My Mother, for example,
Kincaid provides her readers with a motherless protagonist who, in turn, does not want to be a mother, to reproduce under colonialism or to claim kinship with her colonized father. She opposes colonial rule precisely by refusing to accommodate herself to it or to be responsible for reproducing it in any way. Thus the autobiographical becomes an unwriting, an undoing, an unraveling of self. Kincaid concludes an interview about the book, which the reviewer has called “depressing” and “nihilistic” by saying: “I feel it’s my business to make everyone a little less happy.”
Jack/Judith Halberstam, The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies
A Conversation Between Alexei Penzin and Dmitry Vilensky From the Perspective of Hope
In our day, many radical leftists appeal, rather, to “desubjectivation”: “Become nobody, do nothing” (Tiqqun). We believe that despite its apparent tactical effectiveness in the contemporary society of the spectacle, this is a false path strategically.
Contemporary capitalism’s entire ideological apparatus is constructed on desubjectivation: by neutralizing subjectivity, capitalism generates the appearance that its own system is “objective.” We need, rather, to activate new mechanisms of subjectivation.
Zapatista Spring – Ramor Ryan
Eight volunteers converge to help campesinos build a water system in Chiapas—a strategy to bolster the Zapatista insurgency by helping locals to assert their autonomy. These outsiders come to question the movement they've traveled so far to support—and each other—when forced into a world so unlike the poetic communiqués of
Subcomandante Marcos—a world of endemic rural poverty, parochialism, and shifting loyalties to the movement.
The quiet dignity of the local compañeros and echoes of B. Traven, Conrad, and Camus, round out this epic yarn.
Sociology of the homeless man
In hard times when work is scarce and wages are low, voluntary quitting of jobs is much less than in good times.
Hobos are easily piqued and they will "walk off" the job on the slightest pretext, even when they have the best jobs and living conditions are relatively good. Hobo philosophy is disposed to represent the man who is a long time on the job as a piker. He ought to leave a job once in a while simply to assert his independence and to learn something else about other jobs.
Toby Higbie - Crossing Class Boundaries Tramp Ethnographers and Narratives of
Class in Progressive Era America
On a late winter day in the early years of this century, Alice Solenberger met an unemployed male laborer on a
Chicago street. Solenberger worked for the city's Bureau of Charities, and she recognized the "Irishman" as one of the many seasonal workers who had applied there for work during the past winter. Although the man had worked steadily from April to October on railroads and in the harvest, Solenberger recounted, he was "unusually extravagant" this particular winter and found himself broke by December. Not the type to beg, the Irishman had applied for work at the Bureau of Charities and finally found employment in the ice harvest. Surprised to see him back in the city only a few weeks later, Solenberger asked why he was not working in the ice fields. When the man replied that he did not need to work there, Solenberger assumed that he had another job and inquired about that. To this question the laborer replied, "No, I mean I've got money. I don't need to work any more"
"Well, you are lucky. Is it a large sum?" inquired Solenberger. "Did some relative leave it to you? What are you going to do with it? Tell me all about it." To which the laborer replied: "Relative! No, I ain't that lucky. You don't understand. I mean that I've got money that I worked for. I got a job that last day I was at the charity office and I worked nearly two months. Just stopped it here last Saturday. It was good pay and I've got a-plenty of it now.
That's why I ain't working on the ice. I don't need to."
This was logic that Solenberger could not understand. She pressed her subject about saving for his old age or for sickness. The Irishman offered several alternative explanations focusing on his relative youth, his lack of family commitments, the fact that summer work would open soon enough, and even his dislike of working on the ice.
When none of these satisfied Solenberger, he offered what she took as "the philosophy of a great many seasonal workers." "I'm real sorry to disappoint you, Miss, since you seem so set on the idea of me working on the ice, but to tell the truth I really wouldn't think it was right to do it. I'd just be taking the work away from some poor fellow who needs it, and it wouldn't be right for a man to do that when he has plenty of money in his pocket."
