Politics – Page 5 – Empty Hands History

Democracy, Whiteness, and Fascism: Reflections on the Jan. 6 Capitol-Storming

What follows is a collection of three short reflections on the far-right storming of the Capitol on January 6th.

Initial Thoughts on Tactics Vs. Politics

I have seen a lot of people say that the far right storming the capitol is a terrible assault on democracy and its institutions. Many of these comments conflate condemnation of the tactic with condemnation of the politics of the demonstrators. But I’m not sure that this is a good read of the situation.

Many (most?) of these people in DC actually truly believe that the election was stolen and that democracy is dead (though many of them are indeed straight up fascist opportunists). The protestors are totally wrong in the specifics of their conspiracy theories (but perhaps correct that US democracy is largely a sham)… But isn’t it true that storming a capitol building in defense of democracy against a real coup would actually be a good thing? At least arguably?

Let’s say that Trump was a more effective fascist and he managed to throw out the results of the election and install himself as the Great Eternal Leader, with support of the DC police and the national guard as well as most of the elite political institutions that might otherwise act against him. Might it not be a good idea to storm the capitol to try to remove him?

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I think the left has been totally outmaneuvered here. Somehow many people on the left (we could say many socialists/socdems/progressives, rather than anarchists and communists) find themselves defending the sanctity of US democracy as Biden and Co. prepare for four more years of the status quo, while the far right has managed to position itself as the more radical opposition in the streets. This sets a dangerous precedent.

This is in many ways a reversal of the politics and street norms of how things played out last year with the George Floyd rebellion. How did this happen? What can be done to build a more effective left in the coming years?

Note: I probably overemphasized the fascists’ belief that they were indeed “saving democracy.” What follows are further thoughts on how to interrogate their relationship with democracy.

Saving White Democracy — or Abolishing It

I’ve been thinking about how to evaluate the far-right Capitol-stormers’ claim that they were “saving democracy” from being “stolen.” On the face of it, it’s ridiculous. The QAnon conspiracy theories are dumb and the many known fascists and neo-nazis photographed in the heart of the action are quite likely using “saving democracy” as a cover for what they really want: white power. But I think it’s not this simple, or rather, it is more accurate to say that in many ways “democracy” has always been a cover for white power and white supremacy in this country.

These reactionary white people have a very different understanding of what democracy means than we do. For many white people in the US, “democracy” has always meant “white capitalist democracy.” We know how this worked historically.

White (male) democracy has from the beginning rested on systematic exclusion of BIPOC, poor people, and women. Democracy and citizenship were originally conceived as the domain of only white male property owners. Only certain people were considered “fit” for self-government, and Black people in particular were understood to be constitutively unfit for self-government. Their exclusion was part of the foundation of republicanism (not meaning the GOP), democracy, and whiteness in the US. I’ve been reading David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy, which have helped me contextualize the historical interweaving of whiteness, citizenship, and democracy.

But democracy has always been a contested category, and it has changed over the years as BIPOC and women have fought for and won the right to vote. They have not simply expanded the electorate, but indeed expanded the very notion of democracy itself. In order to understand the current “stop the steal” mobilization, we have to see that for a certain sector of fascists and white supremacists, these changes have always been illegitimate. In their minds, Black people in particular are not and cannot be fit for self-government. They are not democratic citizens. They are necessarily the excluded Other, so their participation threatens white democracy itself.

This is why, Joel Olson argues, we must abolish white democracy. We need to abolish whiteness as a social category that produces hierarchy and racial oppression, and we need to abolish the system of white democracy that defends whiteness and capitalism.

But I do believe in democracy. My vision of it is similar to that old vision of “participatory democracy” that they talked about in the 1960s. Democracy is an active practice in which people make decisions about the things that affect them. It is about self-government, true equality, and true freedom. It is incompatible with the vision of white democracy that these fascists support. It is also incompatible with the settler empire called the United States.

Final Thoughts on Fascism’s Growing Threat

To be clear, I think that the storming of the Capitol is a Very Bad and Scary Thing and that fascism is a large and growing threat that must be taken very seriously. But I do think the danger is probably more in the medium to long term rather than in the short term. This gives us time to prepare so that we won’t continue to be outmaneuvered by them.

Short term: they are not well organized. They clearly had no idea what they were going to do in the event that they actually got into the capitol building. Trump is largely ineffective. Most Republican officials have repudiated them. The majority of the government and the majority of the population clearly found the whole thing awful and I don’t see a real possibility of any kind of actual coup before Biden takes office.

Medium term: the far right gets to claim a major win and this will embolden them. We will very likely see a major escalation in both street violence and lone wolf violence coming from fascists (and as a friend pointed out, likely further actions on inauguration day and future coordinated actions at state Capitols). I would not be surprised if this also functions as the beginning of the consolidation of a more significant mass fascist party/organization/movement. Which brings me to…

Long term: think of this as analogous to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. A couple thousand Nazis led a doomed insurrection, some of them were killed, Hitler ended up in prison for treason. This is when he wrote Mein Kampf. Although the putsch was a total failure, it was a very important moment in the development of the Nazis, and we know what happened ten years later. Is this the most likely direction that history now heads in? Probably not. But this is the danger: that fascists successfully use this experience to help build a militant mass movement.

This is why we must continue to vigorously oppose fascists at every turn. Biden won’t save us. The Democrats won’t save us. The State won’t save us. Only sustained organization and action will.

Willem Van Spronsen and Histories of Resistance

A year ago today, 69-year-old anarchist Willem Van Spronsen attacked an ICE facility in Washington state. He attempted to sabotage the buses the facility would use to transport people to concentration camps. For this, he was shot and killed by the police. We should remember him, tell stories of him, and draw inspiration from his sacrifice. We need to believe in the possibility of collectively organizing and acting to stop the atrocities that the US capitalist state commits.

Last summer, a presenter at a critical theory workshop I attended outlined his conception of “counterhistory.” He argued that counterhistory has two main components: 1) Identifying and dismantling the dominant historical imaginary and 2) Reconfiguring our methodological tools for understanding how history operates. He primarily writes counterhistories focused on the operations of power and what he calls the military-academic-industrial complex. I agree with this, but I think he missed a crucial third step.

I am convinced that we must complement these two components of counterhistory with a third: telling histories of resistance, struggle, and the possibility of building alternative worlds. These histories inspire action today, instill the belief that resistance and alternatives are possible in the face of a history of oppression and loss, and give us practical lessons for how to fight most effectively. Willem Van Spronsen was guided by this conception of history.

Van Spronsen had a historical understanding of the dangers of our present times and the need to fight back against the rise of fascism. In his final note before attempting to sabotage the ICE buses, he says that: “when I was a boy, in post war Holland, later France, my head was filled with stories of the rise of fascism in the 30s. I promised myself that I would not be one of those who stands by as neighbors are torn from their homes and imprisoned for somehow being perceived as lesser. You don’t have to burn the motherfucker down, but are you just going to stand by?”

History provides both a caution of the dangers of fascism as well as inspiration for struggle. Willem identified himself in a line of struggle going back to John Brown’s attempt to start an insurrection to end slavery. This historical understanding of the possibility and duty of individuals to act against violent oppression seems instrumental to his ability to make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight for freedom and justice today. As he said, “I follow three teachers: Don Pritts, my spiritual guide, ‘love without action is just a word.’ John Brown, my moral guide, ‘what is needed is action!’ Emma Goldman, my political guide, ‘if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.’”

Spronsen follows with: “I’m a head in the clouds dreamer, I believe in love and redemption. I believe we’re going to win. I’m joyfully revolutionary.” And he ends with “keep the faith! All power to the people! Bella ciao.”

Willem Van Spronsen, presente!

After Coronavirus: Intervening in an Explosion of Potentiality

Coronavirus has accentuated the isolation and alienation that so many of us already felt. The short- and medium-term outlook is bleak. But once the crisis is over, I anticipate an incredible flowering of blocked potentiality and I am eager to see and experience the possibilities of what may come. New forms of life, new ways of relating to one another, new commitments to a joyful and meaningful daily existence, will proliferate across the country and the world.

The exhilaration of coming back together, of non-distanced life, will explode into thousands of new encounters. For a crucial moment, going back to our previous way of life—the drudgery and anxiety of life under late capitalism—will be unthinkable. This will be an incredible opportunity for those of us with alternative visions of life to intervene and propose—nay, demonstrate!—the possibilities for living, organizing, and relating differently.

I have been reading Tom Wolfe’s invigorating book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicling the acid-fueled bus trip that Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took across the United States in 1964 spreading new forms of life and consciousness across the country and helping kick-start the ‘60s counterculture. Last night, I got pretty stoned for the first time in a while (I’m getting old, give me a break) and watched Across the Universe, which features the Merry Pranksters in a great scene. And I suddenly thought: this is it. This is the intervention—or better, one of many interventions!—to be made in the post-coronavirus moment.

I have so many dear friends scattered across the country. Five years ago, I took a mostly-solo road trip around the US in which I reconnected with old friends and saw their amazing experiments in life and politics, from the “Avant-Gardeners” in Eugene to the rollicking fun of a Halloween weekend in New Orleans. It seems that this should be repeated, but this time in a bus with a collection of friends, comrades, and fellow travelers spreading anarchy and living communism: distributing literature, propaganda, art, music, puppet shows, perhaps even a talk or two based on my research. An autonomous zone in every park, a block party on every street!

Crucially, we would see firsthand and participate in what is happening across the country. Everywhere we go, we would ask the same questions to folks involved in infoshops, communes, alternatives to policing… what are you doing? How is it going? What is working well, what is not? What do you think others could learn from your experience? And then we would spread their answers in other cities through zines and talks and fireside conversations. After so many months communicating digitally, we need to come into contact again.

As the Invisible Committee put it in their ever-relevant book Now: “the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.”

The Merry Pranksters’ bus named “Further”

The Grounded Intellectual: Articulating Self-Knowledge from Within the Movement

As a PhD student working on movement history, I think constantly about how to best use my position within the academy. It is easy to get sucked into the logics of the academic world, no matter our political commitments. How do we prevent this? How can we relate to movements outside the academy in a way that both strengthens them and transforms our own subjectivity? It seems key to me to remain grounded within movement spaces. We must function as part of movements—certainly with our own particular knowledge and tools to contribute, but as part of the movement and thus helping to articulate self-knowledge from within.

I recently read Raúl Zibechi’s excellent book Territories in Resistance and I appreciate how he frames this process:

“We strengthen and expand social movements by understanding the meaning of the actual social practices, of the ‘historical movement that is unfolding before our eyes’ (Marx). Understanding is a creative act […] But the process of understanding is a form of action; one understands only what one lives. Hence we can only understand the meaning of social practices in and with them—from within. […] In Argentina, Colectivo Situaciones and the MTD Solano have developed the concept of ‘the militant researcher.’ This is being part of the social movement—not just integrating into the organization, but participating in the disengagement or place shifting that the whole movement pursues, an act of moving-oneself that captures and reconfigures.”

In the words of the Italian Autonomist Marxist Raniero Panzieri, “analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles.”

When I was involved with Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop, I felt that my studies and my political activity were each part of a connected whole. I shared my research with my non-academic (but equally intellectually committed) comrades, who in turn kept me grounded and pointed in the right direction. Without this anchor, my research process feels adrift. I feel an urgent need to rediscover a radical intellectual community on the border between academia and movement spaces, dedicated to consciously articulating self-knowledge from within the movement.

Reflections on Defeat and Disorientation: Nine Years on the Left

I have been feeling very politically unstable and unsure lately. Experiencing several projects fall apart in the past couple years as I struggled to hold them together while immersed in my PhD really took a toll on me. I’m currently teaching a course on anarchism to a class of 18-year-old freshmen—my age when I first got involved in radical politics with Occupy Boston—so I’ve been reflecting on that time period. During Occupy the possibilities seemed endless and I was convinced of the rightness of our approach and the imminence of change. Now I feel cautious, a bit bitter, and so unsure of what the correct political approach is. My optimism has been tempered by almost nine years of defeats, by countless hours poured into campaigns and projects of many kinds, often with barely anything to show for it.

I generally maintain an anti-state left orientation, but I simply do not know how to get from where we are to the world I want to see. My growing disillusionment came to an inflection point last fall. The anarchist projects to which I had dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy for the previous two years—Food Not Bombs and an infoshop we named the Antidote—had fallen apart, in part due to a lack of structure and unwillingness to have serious conversations about politics and strategy. An attempt to establish a local version of Cooperation Jackson likewise collapsed. Bitter from the latest setback, I felt incapable of mustering the energy to co-found yet another organization. Although I flirted with the idea of founding a Black Rose chapter, what I wanted was simply to join a national organization with an established structure and plug into the work they were doing.

In light of this disorientation, and in the context of living in a relatively small town without many options for a political home, I joined DSA. Yet I quickly discovered that our DSA chapter suffered the same basic problem as the anarchist groups I had left: an aversion to real conversations about our politics, our goals, and our strategy. Months into my involvement, the truth set in: I had nothing in common with the people in my chapter. I disagreed with their politics, though I was willing to accept this. We did not have a shared cultural understanding, as I had with the punk-adjacent anarchist crowd. I came away from every meeting more frustrated than the last. Worst of all, we barely even did anything political. I began to see the organizational structure as an impediment to taking action. A week ago, I finally decided that I was done. This experience has driven home a simple point to me: if you want to take action, then you need to find a few friends and comrades wherever you can, link up with others with similar ideas and affinities, and take action together. You may find these people in your local DSA chapter or you may not.

I don’t currently have the capacity to help found yet another small organization and struggle to keep it together—if that would even be possible in the context of coronavirus. So I try to take a step back, focus on my studies and their political implications, teach my class on anarchism, and regroup. Yet I am wracked by feelings of political impotence and frustrated by inaction. The relative success of the Bernie campaign was of course a spot of hope in all this, as is the burgeoning climate justice movement led by young people. But in some ways it all feels too little, too late (particularly after Bernie’s defeat) and I don’t have the patience for the long hours of strategic discussion to produce the reorientations that we desperately need. Instead, I read for hours each day desperately searching for lessons from those who came before.

In this context, I found resonance in a piece by Nietzsche that I recently read “On The Use and Abuse of History For Life.” “To be sure, we need history […] we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action […] We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life.” So I ask myself: how can I work to put history into the service of life? Perhaps this question will help reorient me in a disoriented time. I want—I need—to rediscover a new sense of possibility and a new mode of political engagement. Maybe then I will recover my previous faith in our collective project of building a new world.

This post is by nature quite melancholic. But as I survey the last nine years I am also struck by how much I have learned and grown since my days in Occupy Boston. In many ways I am now much better equipped to contribute to radical projects. Yet I have also calcified and have brought a certain bitterness to my recent activities. As I struggle to correct the course, I am reminded of the way that CrimethInc. ended their somewhat satirical but very earnest 2006 CrimethInc. Shareholder Report: An Incomplete Report on and Critical Analysis of the Past Decade of Activity: OUTDO US! OUTDO US! OUTDO US!

I wrote most of this before the coronavirus crisis really hit. The crisis has produced a widespread disorientation and the left has struggled to respond. But in the mutual aid networks and beyond, we see glimpses of the new world struggling to be born.

Sharing the mic with future Occupiers (2011)

The Quarantine Commune

We call ourselves the Moth Mother Collective to honor our kitchen’s many winged inhabitants. Even before coronavirus, we strove to live our lives in common. Six days of communal meals each week, a rotating chore wheel, a garden and workspace, and collective care for the needs and desires of five beings: three humans, our cat Reno, and our wise old hamster Toby. Social distancing measures have forced us to band even closer together to face the crisis. We are becoming the quarantine commune.

Social distancing has paradoxically compelled every household and living group to orient towards the commune form. In their book To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee argue that “what constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn […] to stand together as a body […] So a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way of being in the world.” Today, a home must be a commune or it will fracture and die. Each decision must become a collective decision: how much risk to take, how to relate to others outside the living group, but most importantly the collective decision of how to live together, of how to be together in the world. The quarantine commune-orientation is a silver lining of the crisis which we should embrace and deepen.

We cannot go back to normal when this crisis ends, for returning to life as atomized individuals would be a significant defeat. Instead, the commune may become the new foundation for our social relationships. Before, during, and after social restrictions are lifted, each commune should make prudent contact (physical or otherwise) with other communes. Links should be forged, networks formed (mutual aid and beyond), the territory of communal relations deepened and enlarged. We have taken the first step—whether by choice or necessity—in the fragments of our own immediate living situations. The next step, when we can take it, is to link the fragments, to form circulation between them and collectively elaborate a new form of life-in-common.

Lifting social distancing restrictions will release a torrent of energy, mobility, and circulation. In our fragmented, socially distanced world, bringing people and places back into contact and re-articulating our social relationships in new forms becomes even more crucial. There is an opportunity to build from our communal foundation towards an entirely new community. As The Invisible Committee put it years ago but seemingly speaking to our moment, our goal “is the great health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with life.”

For the Moth Mother Collective and each other quarantine commune, it is time to begin.

From Mutual Aid to Counter-Institutions: Revisiting scott crow

Mutual aid networks have rapidly spread across the United States in response to the coronavirus crisis. While mainstream media outlets have approached this with some confusion, this is nothing new for anarchists: mutual aid is the bread and (vegan) butter of anarchist theory and practice. Following the post in which I compiled a reading list on Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid, I found it useful to revisit scott crow’s excellent book on the anarchist response to Hurricane Katrina, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (2011). scott crow’s book is a gripping, eminently useful account of mutual aid that also points beyond the immediate responses to disaster. How can we transform mutual aid networks into permanent institutions with transformative capacity? crow encourages us to embrace our “emergency hearts” and act in a spirit of love and solidarity to meet people’s needs now while planting seeds in the concrete that can blossom into broader autonomous infrastructure and counter-institutions.

Black Flags and Windmills tells the story of the Common Ground Collective, a mutual aid organization formed in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. As we know, the state cared far more about establishing military order than it did about helping people, particularly poor Black people. crow rightly insists that the real disaster was the long history of oppression and exploitation of the poor Black community in New Orleans. In response to the state’s inaction, the Common Ground Collective was established by Malik Rahim (a former Black Panther), scott crow, Sharon Johnson, and others to provide food, shelter, medical aid, and other necessities. Common Ground successfully organized to save lives and rebuild destroyed neighborhoods—not only without the help of the state, but indeed in spite of the efforts of the state and white racist vigilantes to disrupt their organizing. For anyone interested in this experience and its political implications, Black Flags and Windmills has so much to offer, from practical organizational knowledge to theoretical background. I can’t recommend it enough, especially in these times.

crow encourages us to think about turning mutual aid networks into durable autonomous infrastructure. “Could street medics and their temporary first aid stations become a permanent clinic or hospital? Could groups who served food once a week set up long-standing free kitchens? Would we be able through alternative media […] to tell the deeper untold stories that countered mass-media sensationalized hype?” (66). This seems crucial to moving from networks of limited mutual aid to actually establishing anti-capitalist alternative infrastructure that can support life long-term. crow’s reflections upon his experience in New Orleans showed him that “movements need infrastructure and counter-institutions if we want people to stay engaged. If we want people to leave the destructive capitalist system, we have to create something better” (168). This led him to help create a network of cooperatives and mutual aid projects in Austin. Could we similarly pivot in the coming months from mutual aid networks to counter-institutions and infrastructure? One could certainly imagine local food systems deepening in strength, neighborhood networks transitioning to grassroots organizing, and online organizing becoming real-world activity.

Apart from mutual aid, crow’s discussion of his political influences is fascinating and very helpful. He identifies three main movements that inform his work: anarchism (largely from Spain), the Black Panthers, and the Zapatistas. These three influences lead him to approach political work undogmatically, and he takes some of the best parts from each. He emphasizes the kind of anarchism that I can most identify with, which is based in building autonomy and direct alternatives to capitalism. From the Black Panthers, he emphasizes self-defense, survival programs, and political education. His entire approach is shaped by the Zapatistas, who he says created a “living revolution” which “chang[es] people’s lives now and after the revolution” (83). The Zapatistas’ “anarchism that is not anarchism” provides perhaps the best path forward for serious anti-state and anti-capitalist political work, acting as what crow calls “a living synthesis of two disparate methods for liberation: the Black Panther Party’s integrated programs and the open-ended horizontal practices of anarchism” (83).

This was realized, however imperfectly, in the Common Ground Collective, which crow says was “closer to the Zapatista model, with a base decision-making body that consulted and accepted some leadership from the various communities we were in” (136). What more do the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, and undogmatic anarchism have to offer to our own practice of mutual aid today? In moments of respite, we can reflect on the political implications of this crisis and orient ourselves towards the radical possibilities of mutual aid networks.

In response to the continuing disaster we live in and the greater ones we see coming in the future, Black Flags and Windmills provides hope. In response to these disasters and crises, crow reminds us that “another beautiful and flourishing tendency has been revealed: the efforts of decentralized responses to disasters, both ecological and economic, rooted in anarchist-inspired solidarity, direct action, and mutual aid. These emerging tendencies are offering rudimentary, but viable alternatives to the continuing crisis wrought by climate change and capitalism’s effects on communities in direct response and in rebuilding pieces from below” (178). If we all embrace our “emergency hearts” and help to cultivate seeds in the cracks of the system, perhaps we will not only survive the coming disasters but actively use them to help create another world.

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.