The Danger of Bourgeois Politics

The personal is political? Maybe so, but in bourgeois politics, the political is personalized. And that means that sometimes leftist get hit with shit like this. Err, sorry dudes. The "left-wing revolution" sweeping Latin America is, with the probable exception of Bolivia, extremely concentrated power-wise at the top of the political system. When your main man turns out to have had a kid while a bishop, well there goes all your "popular power."

*sigh*

Towards a Critique of Actually-Existing Identity Politics, Parts 1&2

In the last few months, I've been in Mexico, working with the left and anarchist movements here and there when I get the chance. While doing this, I've come to realize that the Mexican and U.S. radical movements are extremely different, not just the work that they do and how they see themselves, but the internal culture and theory that promotes day-to-day functioning of organs of struggle. One giant difference in the internal cultures is the role of identity politics. I have become attentive to the way in which identity politics functions, or rather doesn't, in the Mexican movement. Yet somehow, despite the apparent lack in many situations of identity politics, the movement continues to have very high levels of participation and leadership by marginalized groups, some (women and queer folks) more than others (indigenous folks), in a culture considered both internally and externally to be quite "machista" and sexist. So how did this happen?

I'm going to set out in the next couple of weeks to write an account, rambling and undoubtedly full of occasional errors, of how identity politics functions in the United States anticapitalist movement and the ways in which it, at times, derails our work. I do not predict this project will be popular nor do I predict that I will change anyone's mind one way or another. More than anything, I want to set down in writing my thoughts on how identity politics work can hurt our organizing. Corresponding with friends, I have recently heard about several different problems created or exacerbated by identity politics in the movements I'm involved in at home. I am not interested in banishing identity politics or stop talking about oppression within movements, but rather showing how they function and ways that they at times hurt us, in order to build a more inclusive and successful revolutionary movement. I am not arguing against the use or function of identity politics as a whole, but instead pointing out particular uses or incarnations of identity politics with which I see problems.

1. Where I'm At

At the outset, I feel I should state several "proclamations of the faith." One of the first problems that one challenges dogma, as I believe I am about to do, is that one gets discredited for one's faith and I do not want that to be what turns people off from this project. Obviously, if the reader sees beliefs that they do not share, this may make the rest of this project irrelevant to them.

• I believe that we need to make a revolutionary change to form anarchist socialist societies, immediately and globally, and will do what I can to help that revolution in any way.
• I believe that to make those societies a reality, we need to struggle not just against an economic system, but a wide range of oppressions.
• I believe that fighting prejudice inside movements is almost or as important as struggling against oppressors.
• I believe in the right of free speech and open, respectful critique within the movement.
• I believe that the anarchist movement should strive to make strategic decisions based on empirical facts, not common sense or habit
  
• I recognize that I come from a specific background that gives me, in the United States, a series of privileges based on my race, gender, and sexual identity. I do not believe that disqualifies me from having a voice in the conversation about identity.
• I believe in the right and importance of my comrades who do come from oppressed communities to assert their control over their lives and to defeat intra-, inter-, and extra-movement oppression.
• I reject claims that logic is completely culturally conditioned.

That last bit is a whole other story and debate already taken up by people far smarter than myself. But what it means here is that I reject the "hard postmodernist" position that logic, science, and rationality in general are equally as valid as any number of irrational schemes. I don't plan on arguing that position here, but briefly, my defense of this rejection is that to embrace this "hard" position is to embrace a worldview of extreme theoretical eclecticism and nihilism, to accept a world that is fundamentally unknowable, even in its smallest mechanisms. Which is something I refuse to do and which I believe is fundamentally irreconcilable with the project of human liberation.

A final warning before I proceed with my actual critiques: I am familiar with identity politics almost exclusively through its use in the circles I have been involved in, ranging from affinity groups to national and international anticapitalist organizations. I am only slightly familiar with the vast body of theory regarding identity and politics, through a few classes in Black Studies and Women's Studies that I have taken in college. Hence the name of this project. I will likely not be quoting a lot of theoretical texts, but may use pamphlets and zines that discuss questions of identity politics within the movement. I will mostly be referring to the general zeitgeist of the logic and practices of identity politics because that is what actually forms our practice, not something that a scholar wrote about identity politics. What matters to me is what we do, not what we think we do.

2. Defining Identity Politics

One problem with identity politics and their use in radical circles is that we have unclear and conflicting definitions of what the term and associated ones mean. The idea of identity politics comes from a variety of different radical and bourgeois traditions and from a variety of different times periods and social contexts. I will only be talking about identity politics in the U.S. setting, because those of the ones I am familiar with.

A few terms we define to start with:

• Identity refers to the way that one sees oneself or the way that one is seen in society, and the various cultural and social beliefs, practices, and relationships that develop because of the interactions between and within identity.
• Politics refers to the interactions between people with varying degrees of power in society.
• Identity politics then refers to the interactions between people with varying degrees of power as seen the through the lens of identity. Taken to a practical level, it has come to mean the promotion of certain identities which are disadvantaged in relations of power, through the use of both internal and external activism.
• Anti-oppression politics is a similar term which I would argue is a subset of identity politics. It is used almost exclusively by radicals and I think probably represents a particular incarnation of identity politics that is uniquely radical. Anti-oppression politics posits that identity politics, as popularly conceived, does not connect the dots and that rather than individual identity groups struggling against dominant ones, that identities and struggles intersect and that intersection produces unique social locations and hardships, as well as possibilities for struggle. I will use basically use the term interchangeably in this essay, as it is not bourgeois identity politics that I am discussing, but radical ones.
• Feminism is 1. a theory and practice that takes up the fight against patriarchy with the ultimate goal of liberating people of all genders from oppression and 2. a theoretical critique which deconstructs and analyzes the way identity is used.
  

Already it becomes clear that identity politics can mean a wide range of practices at a wide range of levels. In my discussion of identity politics, I will be focusing on their function and use at the intra-movement level. Mostly, this is because I have not participated broadly in identity political movements that are focused externally, that is to say, those that struggle against oppressors outside of the movement (capitalists, governments, religions, etc). So my critique will be focused on these practices, which function within the movement and whose goal is to struggle against oppression and prejudice that is exhibited within the movement.

Historical Evolution and Resistances

Crossposted from RevLeft, where I have grudgingly taken up residence again. I'm not saying anything particularly novel here, I just figured I'd put it up because it's an error that I often see committed, particularly by orthodox Marxists. The long quote at the beginning is from one such person.

"What you said above is true to a certain extent but doesn't take into account the fact that, other than in the most 'primitive' societies, exploitation of man by man tends always to exist, and often, if not almost always, exists on a grand scale. Capitalism produces the conditions for the evolution of a society without exploitation and the rule of minorities. In this sense it is 'progressive'. But American Capitalism didn't require the extermination of it's Native population anymore than Japanese Capitalism did. By which I mean, for Capitalism to become the mode of production in America, it didn't neccesarily require the vast genocides of Indigenous peoples, and so there can be no defense for that, even allowing for Capitalism being progressive."

I think you're accidentally committing a kind of idealist error here. Capitalism is not an ideal Platonic Form, which exists out there in the ether as an idea unconnected from reality, and then we humans have gone about and created versions of it that, regrettably, involve massive violence and oppression. Capitalism is a system, complex and contradictory, that presents itself in a variety of different forms in different times and locations. All but the most orthodox leftists would consider China to be functionally capitalist today, but its form of capitalism differs tremendously from that of, say, the United States.

So first, let's take apart the idea the capitalism naturally "progresses" from the past and that it could do without things like genocide.

Some really important works that have emerged from the Marxist milieu in the last 50 years have been precisely the texts which challenge the idea that capitalism is natural and progressive. Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch points out the way that primitive accumulation not only brought about the conditions that allowed modern capitalism to come into being, but that these conditions need to be continually replicated. Primitive accumulation, she argues, isn't an event which happened back in England a couple centuries ago, it's something that is constantly occurring. Primitive accumulation, like that of the land theft and destruction of Native peoples in the Americas, is both the antecendent and the perpetual feature of capitalism. As Marx and basically everyone else has argued, capitalism must expand to stay alive. Primitive accumulation, as a concept, must continually occur for capitalism to create more value. As many in the school of Marxist thought that Federici is usually grouped with, the autonomists, have argued, this primitive accumulation has been expanded to include concepts that we wouldn't normally consider able to be "accumulated," like time and history.

So I would argue that capitalism is indeed impossible, or at least considerably more difficult, in North America had the genocide of Native peoples not occurred.

Second, the idea that capitalism creates the "conditions for the evolution of a society without exploitation and the rule of minorities" is another oft-quoted Marxist truism, but one that is increasingly coming under attack from evidence that resistance to the imposition of capitalism was not simply reactionary, but in some sectors, genuinely progressive. Again, Federici points out that those who organized against the imposition of wage labor were not just artisans or nobles, but those who would become part of the nascent proletariat and/or urban working class. Linebaugh and Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra talks in depth about the struggles of sailors, soldiers and slaves to globalization in the maritime age. These resistances against capitalist work ethic and conditions were not simply a desire to return to a guild-run economy, but were expressed in utopian and millenarian demands for an end to the capitalist economy (centuries before Marx put pen to paper, no less.) A favorite topic in recent years is of course the Diggers, who were certainly anti-capitalist but not pro-feudal.

So I think it's dangerous to say that capitalism is progressive. Yes, under capitalism certain technologies have been developed that can/have made life easier and production more efficient. But it's fallicious to say that these technologies had to occur or only occurred under capitalism and could not occur any other way because there are no other models of society to judge them against (some could argue that socialism does exist or did exist on a widespread level in the 20th century, and I will politely but firmly disagree. Even so, if socialism did exist in the USSR, it only helps my argument.) Did Einstein need to live in a capitalist society to develop his theory of special relativity? Did any other scientist or inventor need to live under the murderous capitalist system to develop what they did? Sure, those who devoted their life's work to destructive technologies like guns and bombs. But I think we can all agree that those aren't the kind of technologies that a communist society would be interested in developing anyway.

What it gets down to is the problem of the error of evolutionist models of history. Positing that the stage of civilization that we're at is the "highest" one or more progressive one currently available is interesting but untestable. Furthermore, it tries to simplify the actual details of human history into small boxes that fit into a model that always points towards the future, thus discarding the complexities of history that don't fit into that box. Like Linebaugh and Rediker's rebellious sailors or Federici's witches. Drawing history as a straight line, or even a not-straight-but-always-ending-in-the-same-place series of lines, is an error because it judges human history as a teleology instead of a series of complex events that led us to where we are today, but could have lead us elsewhere if things had gone differently.

Blah blah blah

Okay, let's get real here.

I'm totally tired of reading communiques/statements/expositions about short actions that run on for four paragraphs. There's this tendency to write these great pieces and delivery them during the course of a direct action, or even a symbolic but danger-zone actions. But no one is listening to you talk about the war in Iraq or political prisoners or whatever, while all your nearby buddies are locking down the building or tossing agitational pamphlets from a third story balcony. They are watching people do cool/weird shit. I respect well-worded statements and I think they can be powerful and affect people. But I've been in discussions which drag on for hours about the precise wording of a specific phrase for a statement during an action which assures that no one will ever listen to the speaker.

It's not a big deal ya'll, just read a few sentences and let everybody dig the cool shit you're doing.

Additionally, writing a three paragraph manifesto for some sneaky late night DA is equally lame. The most egregious recent example is a video called "19 segundos de guerra social" that's swirling around the anarchosphere. It breaks all my rules of things I like (smashing banks and thinking you're super-revolutionary, using the phrase "social war," being the same group that attacks people at the bullfights here in Mexico City.) Seriously gang. Go ahead, fuck up a bank if you feel like it. But post a long release about how hard you are and how you're fighting the system? And then get it translated? Self-important much? Sheesh...

Decentralization in Theory and Practice

I've been pondering this question for awhile now and have only been pushed to consider it even more strongly since I've been here in Mexico.

What is it exactly that anarchists mean when they talk about a society based on "decentralization"? What is being decentralized?

My experiences here in Mexico City have taught me that, if nothing else, decentralization of institutions is incredibly frustrating and inefficient. Decentralized capitalist institutions like immigration have provided me with a great deal of irritation, but that's understandable, as they are premised on a giant bureaucracy that makes things difficult to accomplish. Surely in an anarchist society, we wouldn't need the extensive decentralized bureaucracy that say, the Mexican or U.S. migration process provides.

But decentralization in our daily lives of institutions would mean a whole host of different problems. Take decentralization in institutions of learning. I'm familiar with the critique of schooling, but I'm still a firm believer that we can radically restructure education in order to produce institutions that educate without indoctrinating. Here, at my university in Mexico though, decentralization is already the rule of the day. There are literally dozens of autonomous bodies that make decisions which affect themselves but which carry consequences for the whole university. This means that inscription, application, class schedules, as well as more "institutional" tasks like maintenance of facilities require a knowledge of a Byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth to navigate.

This is obviously just one example, but I want to apply it to the theory of decentralizing all of our economic and social activities. What exactly does decentralization imply in terms of the daily lives of people and their well-being? The effects of decentralization in capitalist society reflect in some bizarre manner the so-called centralization of the economy in state socialist societies, where the centralization of power with the state resulted in a profuse diffusion of bureaucracy.

Am I just suffering the irritations of the infamous Mexican impulse towards bureaucracy? How can we decentralize our activities and institutions without creating shortages that could be potentially fatal? That is to say, moving beyond my rather silly example of an educational institution, what potential dangers would a decentralized agricultural system bring? How can anarchist theory account for, and plan to deal with, for these issues?

Today's Quote

"Normally, Wobbly bluster far outdistanced performance but it is undeniable that they sometimes acted upon, or intended to carry out, their wild schemes."

-Lowell Blaisdale, The Desert Revolution - Baja California 1911

Aleatory Modes

Ah ha! Now I remember why I used to be so passionate about surrealism.

Sorry, nothing here but a link dump. Check it out.