Author: Empty Hands

Empty Hands History is written by Spencer Beswick, a historian of anarchism and the left who hopes to offer inspiration and lessons for today's movements.

Theory as Toolbox for Everyday Life

Reading Guy Debord and Hannah Arendt side by side in the past week, I was struck by how alive the former feels while the latter feels hollow and distant. Why is this? Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle helps me explain my own life and experience; he lays bare the alienation and inhumanity of the total commodification of human society and the domination of life by the spectacle. Debord and his Situationist comrades also give tools for changing our lives; see of course Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. For me, this gets to the heart of theory’s purpose.

At its best, theory helps us explain our lives and experiences, deepens our understanding of society, and provides us tools to change both our own lives and the world. As Gilles Deleuze put it in a conversation with Foucault, “a theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate.”

To bring this closer to our own times, I have been moved by the outpouring of writing about Aragorn!, the recently-deceased anarchist responsible for Little Black Cart, The Anarchist Library, and numerous other anarchist projects and infrastructure of the past two decades. (See CrimethInc.’s excellent elegy for him here. Though I disagree with much of his political approach, I particularly enjoy Aragorn!’s “Stories of the Raccoon People” and “Stories of the Bear People,” the first part of a planned series of Anarchist Myths.) In a wide-ranging oral history interview conducted in 2018, Aragorn! addresses his approach to theory, practice, and everyday life, particularly regarding the impact of the Situationists on his own life:

“The [Situationist International] Anthology, just that book and then Society of the Spectacle: that was a full decade of my life, to really understand all the threads and the connections and why that shit mattered. No, absolutely.”

Interviewer: “As you’re struggling through these difficult texts and wrapping your head around them, did you have sense of how those connected to your daily life and your immediate sense of engagement with the world?”

Aragorn!: “[…] For me the, the immediate question I ask any time I receive a new text is, is, how does this matter to my life? That’s always basically been my central project. The reason I became a publisher was because I wanted these things not just to be relevant to my life, but to share that enthusiasm with other people. For me, the idea, the beautiful idea, is about—how do you connect ideas to living?

[…] So early on, I said that all of the anarchist texts that I’ve read, perhaps some of the reason why it took me a long time to read them was because I really found every page to be a challenge: how do I put this into practice in my life?”

Of course, this is decidedly not the dominant approach to theory within the academy. Even the most radical Marxist academics are typically divorced from social struggle, political engagement, and attempts to “live the revolution.” And as Raoul Vaneigem reminds us, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

As theorists and academics, we must work from within—or at least connected to—movements to change the world. Our own experience of struggle, of the creation of new ways of being and relating to each other, is necessary to produce theory which is useful to the movement. Just as important, we should take inspiration from Aragorn! and constantly ask how to apply theory to our everyday lives. Theory should be a tool for both individual and social transformation. If it isn’t, then what are we doing?

My Body, Too, Is A Battleground: Fighting Where We Stand

“Once the collapse of colonial power revealed the colonialism of all power exercised over human beings, the issues of race and skin colour became about as significant as a crossword competition. […] Far be it from me to contest the spirit of generosity that inspired antiracism in times still not far distant. But since I cannot alter the past it holds scant interest for me. I am speaking in the here and now, and nobody can persuade me, in the name of Alabama or South Africa and their spectacular exploitation, to forget that the epicentre of such problems lies within me, and within every human being who is humiliated and scorned by every aspect of a society that prefers to think of itself as ‘well policed’ rather than as the police state that it clearly is. I shall not relinquish my share of violence.”

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)

This passage has long stuck out to me for its crudity. As I reread Vaneigem today, I see a note from my past reading scrawled in the margin: “bad take!” I am inclined to agree with my past dismissal. There is so much wrong in this passage that addressing it hardly seems worth it: the idea that colonialism and racism was a thing of the past, that the violence and humiliation suffered by a white male French intellectual was in any way comparable to that of Apartheid South Africa or the Apartheid US South. Better, perhaps, to just bracket Vaneigem’s “bad takes” and focus on what the book still has to offer.

And yet, I keep returning to the passage. For all its flaws, what can we take from it? For I, too, am a middle-class white male intellectual. It is all too easy for those like me to deny our own stakes in social transformation. Indeed, it is much simpler to acknowledge our privilege and perform allyship with the oppressed than it is to acknowledge that we, too, have something to fight for. I do not trust people who only fight for others.

Capitalism is not simply a system outside of us; it is within us, too. Commodity production tears us in two. Our labor, that which should make us feel human, is alienated and turned against us. Our lives are deadened and anxious. As Vaneigem puts it, “what about the impossibility of living, this stifling mediocrity, this absence of passion? This jealous fury to which we are driven when the rankling of never being ourselves makes us imagine that others are happy? This feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let nobody say these are minor details or secondary considerations.”

Are these at all comparable to police brutality, oppression, and systemic violence carried out against Black people in the United States? No! Of course not! But unless privileged white people recognize the fault lines within ourselves, our own reasons to fight, our own skin in the game, then it is all too easy for our action to resemble (and descend into) liberal charity.  

“I shall not relinquish my share of violence.” This line can be read in multiple ways—and these multiple meanings can co-exist. Capitalism runs through each of us. My body, too, is a battleground. And we must each fight where we stand.

Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid: A Reader

The coronavirus mutual aid response networks that have been created to care for each other through this crisis are inspiring examples of anarchism in action. I’m reworking the syllabus of my current undergraduate course on anarchism to add a unit on disaster and mutual aid which will use the coronavirus mutual aid networks as a case study. Here is a modified version of the readings and videos for the unit (almost all of which are available for free online through these links, with the exception of a few of the books).

Week 1: Introduction to Mutual Aid

Week 2: Disaster and Its Uses

Week 3: Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Week 4: Coronavirus and Mutual Aid

Stay safe, stay healthy, and take care of each other.

Why Social Media Feels So Bad: Alienation in the Time of Coronavirus

Social media accentuates our profound alienation from our lives and relationships. Through social media, we construct images of ourselves which interact with the images of others. The social relations between images have become more “real” than the social relations between people. In order to understand the mechanisms at work here, this post will quickly trace a line from Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism through the Situationist “society of the spectacle” to the intensification of spectacular relationships through social media today. I end with thoughts towards a practice of care and connection in the time of coronavirus.

Commodity Fetishism and Alienation

Marx argues that capitalism is experienced as an intensely alienating social system because it perverts the fundamental activity that makes us human. Unlike animals, humans produce the conditions of our own social lives: food, clothing, shelter, culture, etc. When we labor, we put part of ourselves into the object of production. In a non-capitalist system, we produce goods for the use of ourselves, our families, and our communities. We put our life into the products, but we “regain” this life when our community uses the goods.

Under capitalist wage labor, commodities are produced not for use but rather for exchange value. We labor not to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves and our community, but rather for the sake of profit for a capitalist. We imbue the commodities we produce with our life, but they confront us as something outside of ourselves, in control of another person for their profit. These commodities become “fetishes”: they seem to be imbued with energy of their own which is disconnected from the labor that has produced them. Capitalism becomes a system in which commodities interact with each other in the marketplace, disguising the real social relations between humans. We suffer a profound disconnect with the world and our own sense of humanity.

The Spectacle

In Guy Debord’s seminal Situationist text Society of the Spectacle (1967), he argues that the commodity form has so thoroughly dominated modern society that it has produced a totally fetishized world in its own image. Life is dominated not by concrete commodities but rather by images and representations which relate to each other. “The spectacle,” Debord says, “is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” Capitalism first degraded being into having, then having into appearing. What matters now is less the reality of possessing money and commodities, but the appearance of possession. Appearance has become autonomous from social reality. Representation has become independent and even superior to our lived experience. Images are more real than reality itself.

Social Media

The advent of social media has intensified the domination of life by representation. The spectacle has deepened its grip on our lives further than Debord could imagine in his era of unilateral mass media. Social media has made us each producers of the spectacle. But our collaboration does not liberate us or give us control over the process of production. As Marx points out, alienation is located within the act of production itself. Labor is what makes us human; labor which produces commodities is itself degrading. When we craft an image of ourselves which represents us to the world, we lose part of our sense of reality and humanity. Our image interacts with other equally false images through the medium of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.

This is why social media makes us feel so bad: it is not simply that we do not live up to the carefully crafted images of others, but rather that we must craft our own image to interact with their images. We do not relate directly to others; instead, our images relate to their images, semi-autonomously from reality. Through our production of images, the fetish of representation replaces our human relationships. It is easy to say that the solution is not to participate, but coronavirus has eliminated even this seemingly easy choice.

Social Media and Social Distancing

Our social distancing during coronavirus will likely deepen this sense of alienation. It appears that our only option to maintain many of our social relations may be to embrace social media. But perhaps this is an opportunity to humanize our relationship to social media. Maybe we can let go of the compulsion to project a carefully crafted image of ourselves on social media. Can we share our fears and failures alongside our successes? How can we use social media to practice care and connection with each other, to make it through this crisis with our sense of humanity strengthened rather than depleted?

This time of uncertainty is also an opportunity to experiment with new forms of social relations outside of both social media and our typical daily lives. Alongside posting in our online mutual aid groups, we can take concrete actions in our community. We can buy groceries for those who cannot, organize our neighborhoods to look after each other, post art on telephone poles, and write messages of solidarity on every surface to forge community out of our solitary daily walks. Against the bleak atomization of social distancing we must act consciously to build community and solidarity.

Ten Theses on Coronavirus

1. The coronavirus pandemic will cause widespread death and suffering that will strain social bonds and the system of production itself. Economists predict a massive economic crisis and unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression. This opens the door to a radical restructuring of society, but the outcome is not guaranteed.

2. The fascist right will respond with blood and soil nativism. They will rally to defend the supposed purity of the white social body against the “foreign” elements of the virus and other perceived threats. The old, the immunocompromised, the poor, the “non-productive,” and the non-white will be allowed to die to preserve the health of the social body and economy. This is the path towards eco-fascism.

3. Neoliberalism will use this crisis as shock therapy to deepen economic restructuring that enriches the few and immiserates the many. Privatization and commodification will thrive off of the crisis.

4. Profiteers will exploit this moment to make untold sums of money. Petty hoarders and resellers are only the tip of the iceberg; the rich will take advantage of the plunging stock market and the widespread destruction of small businesses to cheaply buy up large swathes of the economy and reshape it in their image.

5. Capitalists will attempt to further commodify our social relations in the guise of tools to overcome the isolation of social distancing. They are already developing new apps that will monetize connections between homebound people. Commodified social connections will deepen our sense of alienation and despair.

6. Technological innovations also have the potential to transform our social relations in a decommodified fashion. Online mutual aid groups, free apps that facilitate neighborhood organizing, and free online live concerts are the first signs of an emergent paradigm. An online-coordinated rent strike will lead to a national rent freeze; this will be a major step towards the decommodification of housing.

7. In the face of callous state inaction, a new wave of mutual aid is emerging across the world. Online mutual aid groups will organically develop into systems of care and survival from below that have the potential to replace the functions of the state and market economy.

8. Against the alienation and atomization of social distancing, we will regain social cohesion through sustained individual and collective effort. Liberatory art, music, and poetry will be shared for free, producing a new culture of hope and possibility. Coronavirus will help us regain a sense of the social bonds that make us human.

9. The necessary decoupling of work from survival paves the way for a Universal Basic Income. We should embrace this moment as the beginning of the transition into a UBI-supported radical Green New Deal that points the way beyond capitalism towards an ecological society.

10. This crisis will force society to change. We may go further down the path of authoritarianism, ruthless competition, and ecological catastrophe. But we may instead embrace our inclinations towards joyful collaboration, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship. Strengthening these latter tendencies will guide us through the crisis and provide the basis for new forms of life.