Sometime last year I had a conversation with a person I
admire very much about leftism since she’s one of the more involved people in
the IWW, and I mentioned that one of the biggest things that kept me out of
left activism is the terse and really toxically personal infighting. Flash
forward maybe a few months and I got heavily involved with a left activist
group founded out of a group of really toxic infighters.
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Let’s switch gears a bit and talk about ethics for a bit. My
major in college (and frankly my ongoing passion) was anthropology, which is
the broad study of humans as a whole. The modern discipline is divided into
Linguistics, Archaeology, Physical Anthropology (sometimes referred to as
Biological Anthropology), and Cultural/Social Anthropology. Each part of the
discipline has its own questions and concerns but as a field that explicitly
deals with people in all possible forms across the entire planet and throughout
history, there’s an overt need for examining the ethical procedures by which
study is done. Anth as a discipline has a history of ethically nebulous figures
performing spurious research and is likewise fraught with a century of attempts
to counteract these individuals through codes and creeds and coercion. The
feuds are as epic and legendary as any across other disciplines, and there’s no
sign of a real conclusion so long as the AAA refuses to maintain blacklist
powers.
Point is, I sat in a lot of ethics courses where students
were kinda uncomfortable with making any strong statements either way and the
professor was no dang help. Being involved in general leftism is kind of like
that, really. That or the other reaction where every ethical violation no
matter how convoluted is trying to be respected at once, and then there’s the
whole issue where people decide that their ethical commitments stop at their
specific identities and then there’s the whole concern where ethical
disagreements should be swept under the rug in the name of preserving the
community, which ultimately means less that a community is being preserved and
more that the cracks are being waxed over and forgotten just long enough for
the whole thing to blow up later.
And it’s all entirely an exercise in futility, since The Discourse
itself doesn’t really help anyone, just entrenches whatever ideological point
of view can outlast the others as an epistemological fact. One of the other
takeaways from anthropological theory courses was that consistently across a
century and a half of cultural formation/perpetuation theories there’s rare
suggestion that individuals might have agency in the creation or formation of
culture. Instead myriad theories assume that culture is essentially too large
to ever really be in control of a single person or a single group. A metaphor
might be: the French nation created Napoleon, rather than napoleon creating
France.
So ultimately leftism and leftist movements might themselves
be ridiculously inept and it doesn’t matter since the fate of whether or not
leftism succeeds or racism or sexism or homophobia ends is out of any individual
group’s hands. Economic forces are probably going to drive us toward something
that looks very much leftward simply due to technological development the same
way capitalism successfully globalized thanks to the Long Peace created by
nuclear weapons and communications technology.
But of course that still leaves us with in-fighty leftist
movements. There’s definitely a put-up-or-shut-up element to ongoing
involvement, a sort of “hey if you’re really committed you’re gonna be here”
kind of morality both for the groups themselves and for the sort of turgid call-out
exercises popular among a certain crowd, where anything that feels more like
you’re doing something is preferable to feeling like you’re not doing
something.
The thing is, struggle sessions are easy. Arguments are
easy! Holy shit is rationalization easy. Literally if you don’t want anything
to be your fault and you have even a small understanding of what makes people
tick it’s incredibly simple to build dozens of justifications for anything you
do. Despite my couching anthropological ethical violations as largely historical
in nature, this is only the case because present ethics are exactly the sort of
wobbly, finicky issues that can be propped up with twigs, leading to pointless
repartees between two sides that are both plausibly correct. Ethical violations
continue anon, depending on who you’re reading.
What’s hard is creating strong, lasting communities of
people who’re mutually invested in each other’s wellbeing. It’s tremendously
difficult, even as it’s a patently obvious necessity for any kind of radical
organization. There’s several reasons that this is so difficult, and they cross
over largely into how consumerist-individualism has thoroughly entrenched a
primacy of the self in the modern West combined with an understanding of the
internet as a customized content delivery device first, communications platform
third, but at their base core leftist groups exist as organizational vectors
for a particular political bent. If you’re not a leftist, you’re not in a
leftist group. What this means is your entire time and involvement in that
group hinges on your political beliefs, which in turn leads to constant
reexaminations and redefinitions of what those beliefs are.
An effective counter tactic should at this point become
clear: take the politics out of the leftist spaces. Create groups that have
reasons to exist beyond leftism itself. Create a set of rules that explicitly
bend toward a leftist angle and suppress rightist talk within the group as much
as you like, but decenter the politics and you decenter the infighting. Do this
and you stand that much better of a chance of creating a space where leftism
ceases to be a trial of purity and begins to be understood as simply the way
things should be, an unspoken expectation that reaches beyond the rational, argumentative
political thought-process and into the centers of the brain that drive cultural
creation and interpretation. Do this and create a new culture all our own.
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