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.
