She who stumbles

In the past month I haven’t blogged much because I’ve been focusing on assessments, the Big T, and activism. While I’m not as overcommitted as some of my collaborators, I’m definitely finding it difficult to balance all these projects as well as regular social and family life. As my theoretical adventures became more thesis-oriented, my political adventures got a bit more hands on, and I found myself heavily preoccupied with concepts in radical organising (caucusing, open spaces, facilitating, strategy, etc. etc. etc.).

I’ve been reluctant to write about the latter because recently police and intelligence agencies have made it clear that they are watching us and trying to infiltrate our organising. It’s suspected that these actions are part of a co-ordinated campaign to intimidate protesters in the lead-up to the APEC protests.

But I’m also apprehensive of the interpersonal consequences I might face if someone in the local activist community found this blog, because what I have to say about it isn’t terribly flattering.

When any group of people gets together and does anything in close contact, norms and orders develop. Ad-hoc hierarchies that people take for granted, not because that’s “the way things are” but because they know the reasons for it from the inside. Established methods become custom and then habit. Ideas attach themselves to one another for people to make sense of all these goings-on. I’m going to call this “orthodoxy,” cos that’s what I’ve been calling it in my mind for the last couple of weeks. You can call it something else if you like.

I hate orthodoxy. I always have. It’s part of the reason I don’t get along with popular people, or feel comfortable in social groups; and it’s part of the reason I’m feeling very anxious about getting involved in activism again.

In the long break I took from activism I spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking about politics. My politics changed a lot. Outside the influence of activists, I was able to critique both their politics and their methods. I’m gonna focus on talking about methods in this post, so that I don’t stretch things out too much and because that’s what the carnival is about.

I had a long talk with a couple of women about strategies and approaches after a protest, and it was wonderfully cathartic to be able to speak our piece about the effects of socialist activity in our social movements. What they’ve said has interwoven with my ideas, so I just want to mention that I don’t come up with this stuff all on my own and they have great ideas too!

We started by criticising the sorts of things they organise — large demonstrations, and only large demonstrations. Other activities, like forums, public meetings, film screenings, concerts, etc. are organised in such a way as they support the building of large demonstrations. And it’s always white men who lead these demonstrations, who are given the opportunity to speak, and who set the agendas.

These means of engaging can be really alienating for lots of people. Speaking at demonstrations involves loud, angry invective — talking at people, not to or with them. Inevitably they engage in every other conversation this way as well. Speaking to them is very one-sided (and that’s a criticism I’ve heard from people both within and outside the activist community), which makes it difficult to work with them or to get one’s priorities represented at organising meetings where the real decisions get made.

The reason they behave like this is because they get a sense of entitlement from their ideology. One of my interlocutors compared it to evangelical Christianity: aside from the need to evangelise (recruit), there’s also a single book/prophet (Marx, who has canonical interpreters), a teleological view of human history that will end in a single protracted moment where everything will be set right (in Christianity it’s the Second Coming, in socialism, it’s Revolution), inability to acknowledge any problems other than the ones they prescribe (e.g. patriarchy), and an inability to analyse with any other perspective (e.g. environmentalism).

Because there’s such a time-lag between our efforts and the proposed goal (revolution), their methods need to be aggressive, unilateral, and macho. “Building for the revolution” is proscriptive — it involves “radicalising” social movements by injecting their ideology and priorities into them. There’s no learning or change that goes the other way. In fact, socialist groups are so creepy because they never change, they only undergo divisive schisms over points of ideology.

That said, I also have to say that socialist ways of organising and approach to social change has been very influential for me, and it’s not all bad. Not only because I have found Marxist political economy to be the most sense-making and radical of all schools of economic thought, but also because I spent so much time around socialists that their methods rubbed off on me. See, I joined a socialist organisation when I was 14 and spent a whole lot of time reading things from a socialist perspective (even if I didn’t really understand how all the theory and practice hung together until I came to University), and I learned all about the Russian revolution in my latter years of high school.

While I’ll elaborate on this in Part 2, I definitely think that my structural and materialist approach to social injustice and conflict comes from that socialist background, and I definitely think it’s a positive thing. In a socialist frame, social problems are the result of an unequal distribution of power, which is based on an unequal distribution of resources. The solution to social problems is to equalise power and equip people to take care of things themselves.
While there’s a lot of other theoretical baggage that socialists carry along with that assumption, as a basic starting point, I haven’t been able to find better.

Where it goes wrong is that unilateralism — a belief in a single Prime Mover for all injustice, and a single solution to it. That used to be very compelling for me, when I was 14. I think I stopped believing in it the year I turned 20. I don’t think that the aggression and rage that motivates socialists is really a sustainable source of motivation for me, or a lot of other people, even if I do feel enraged at injustice. It’s not the kind of energy that I want to put into my activism, or into the lives of oppressed peoples. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s particularly effective.

Shortly after my break with the anti-war movement, I started to learn more about community-based fights against neoliberal imperialism in the Third World. The subjects of these conflicts were the revolutionary subjects — a global labouring class — that socialists always rabbited on about, but they weren’t organising in the ways that socialists prescribed. This occurred just after the anti-corporate globalisation movement was getting its act together for the Cancun conference in the Doha round of WTO talks.
Rather, these subjects were organising on a community-based level, around injustices occurring in their own lives which didn’t map neatly into the teleology of socialist critiques of capitalism. Issues like land reform, energy, food security and housing as well as workers’ rights have dominated the agenda of this global movement, and have done so in ways that defy the socialist orthodoxy yet warm the cockles of my little anticapitalist heart.

I’m not sure that I see a clear logic in these kinds of movements, but they do present a powerful alternative to the kinds of organising that socialists engage in. While socialists built the Cancun convergence as an end in itself, the Zapatistas organise indigenous communities in Mexico to empower and to make lives better.

It’s a distinction which Bfp hit on perfectly in her carnival post: between centring people and centring a more abstract goal. It’s a plague in most student organising; crippled by its own class privilege.

Socialists don’t centre people, so they don’t engage well and haven’t been able to build effective change. They have no space in their teleology for communities — the only legitimate social bonds according to socialists are those of class solidarity, sometimes a frightfully abstract thing. Yet this kind of radicalism — relentlessly pursuing a bare, almost metaphysical version of justice — is compelling because it doesn’t make the kinds of compromises that might lead to injustice. It will fight the power and fight it to the end.

It’s just a bit mistaken about where that power lies, which is why socialists can be up in arms about injustice overseas but ignore the injustice in front of them, when they talk over everyone in a meeting, and declare that racism or sexism in social movements aren’t their problem — without addressing how their organisations will become anti-racist once the war ends or the government is thrown out of office. Instead, they have abstract discussions about unionism and party organisation, which are supposed to stand in for real alternatives to capitalism and domination. It’s theoretically, politically, emotionally, socially and economically weak.

It leads to a kind of “anti-racism lite” on their part. They can bleat hard about the racism of anti-terror legislation but not be bothered to talk to the families of people arrested under it. They can condemn the racism of white rioters in Cronulla but not engage in self-criticism when they shout over young women of colour. Ultimately, it’s the same strategic hypocrisy that any other privileged group of people engage in: irresponsible buck-passing.

Focusing more on these kinds of issues has really facilitated by other women of colour, who link them into broader structural processes of oppression. Bringing the voices of woc to the table isn’t about quantitative representation, it’s about the qualitative character of a movement, how it functions, what it aims for, what it does.

I’m struggling hard to overcome ingrained socialist norms in my activism, though others seem to hold them, and to bring into it some of the priorities I’ve learned that I share with other woc bloggers. Sometimes it’s really difficult to adhere to my central priorities, while so many others don’t share them. Other times my willingness to self-criticise leads me into an unsustainable spiral of doubt and disillusionment. Blogging really is helping.