#kelsey cham c

[dailyanarchistposts]

Appendix 2: Breaking Down the Walls around Each Other—An Interview with Kelsey Cham C.

Kelsey Cham C. is a former collective member of the Purple Thistle who worked with carla as a youth at the Thistle.

Nick and carla: One of the things we’re trying to think through with the notion of sad militancy is the way that Empire gets smuggled into radical movements in spaces through mistrust, fear, rigidity, shame, competition, and so on … but we want to think this through without blaming individuals. It’s not about individual feelings or behaviors; it’s about ways of relating that are coming out of this system.

Kelsey: Yeah, we’re recreating it.

Nick and carla: Yeah, and we’re interested in talking to people that seem to be able to tap into something different, and I think you do that.

Kelsey: (laughs) I’m glad you think so.

Nick and carla: I guess the first question is: does this resonate, does this description of sad militancy make sense to you?

Kelsey: Yeah, it’s funny because I don’t use those terms, but I find myself in situations where we’re having conversations about the exact same things, but with many different folks who are politically aware and trying to create change. It is really hard to not fall into sad militancy; I catch myself being overly critical of either myself or other people in their efforts to organize and create something better and new, or something that’s never been done before. It’s frustrating, and I find myself asking “why is this happening, this constant critique?” It’s totally internalized capitalist patriarchal shit.

I think it’s connected to perfectionism and the desire to do things “the right way” that becomes a part of us—it’s hard to not recreate that when that’s how you grew up and have learned that this is what’s true.

Nick and carla: So what do you think made you get to a place where you’re able to catch yourself and do something else?

Kelsey: That’s a really good question … well, all those things are super isolating. Most people in this culture have experienced that pretty in-depth in their personal lives. I have, and when I’m critical of myself or other people, I try to strive for something that doesn’t exist, I’m always unhappy and I get frustrated, I get angry, I can get violent … those are things that aren’t productive.

I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s one specific thing; I don’t even know if I’m very good at being joyfully militant or whatever. I think my background in karate has helped, though … And basically recognizing that we’re all in this together and we all have a common goal, and making efforts to love each other—not just tolerate each other—but actually see how we can feel love for everyone to some degree. I think we’re capable—maybe that’s naïve or whatever—but I think we’re capable of doing that … that’s probably arguable too.

Nick and carla: Do you think there are things that make rigidity or sad militancy spread?

Kelsey: Yeah for sure, I think people get sucked into stuff, right? I found myself going back to what’s comfortable. If I’m part of a group and people start hating on a certain thing in a way, I think it’s easy for me to get caught up in that. It’s something that I try to catch myself doing and recognize that’s not how I feel at all … it’s old patterns coming up again, and when you’re in new situations it’s easy for those patterns to come out.

Nick and carla: Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy to sad militancy, or vice versa?

Kelsey: Yes, I would say so. I think I’ve seen spaces where everything has ups and downs, and people have ups and downs—going from sad to joyful to sad again—it’s exciting and then a key person leaves, or a project falls through, or maybe people are not happy with the way that everyone is contributing … sometimes that energy falls or maybe people lose interest.

But sometimes I can shift the energy of an entire crew of people … I find that usually, when people are able to recognize that we’re all in this together and it’s not a battle against each other. I think that’s usually what it is: having that foundation of common vision or goals or whatever. And usually there’s someone who is able to be joyful … in the same way that sad militancy is contagious, joy is also contagious; people get excited by new energy.

Nick and carla: What do you think encourages and sustains joyful militancy?

Kelsey: I dunno … I’m pretty new to this whole way of being I guess, but I think humility is a huge part of it, and also community credit—“we did that together”—and celebrating tiny accomplishments can be really awesome; celebrating each other’s accomplishments, and respecting that stuff. I think part of the sad militancy—just to go back to how it catches on—is because I think in our society we learn to be overly critical and perfectionist … it’s so easy to criticize people’s work and what they’re doing without recognizing what they’re trying to do and what they’re actually accomplishing. At the same time, criticism can be a gift for everyone involved when it’s about learning and figuring things out together.

Nick and carla: So it’s not even that criticism equals sad militancy; is there a way to do criticism that can be joyful?

Kelsey: Oh, totally. I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. I think it’s important to talk to people about how they receive criticism and how they would want to, or if they even can safely, I guess. But for me I think it’s really, really, really awesome when people give me feedback and constructive criticism in a respectful way; even if it’s in a non-respectful way, I’ll take it, I might be angry about it, it might make me irritable or hate on something, but I’ll absorb it as well. All criticisms are gifts because they’re perspectives that I probably didn’t have before and I can work with. And I acknowledge that I can’t make everyone happy and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I want to be as inclusive as possible with the work that I’m doing, but there’s no way that every single person is gonna be super stoked about it. And to receive criticism I also need to have a positive feedback system, where it’s like: if I receive 10 things I’m doing so-called “wrong,” it will make me feel like I’m not doing anything right, and I don’t know what to keep and what to change. It’s like if you’re playing cards and you think I’m just gonna fold and leave every time. But probably there are some things I should keep, so positive feedback is also really important.

carla and Nick: We want to talk about the importance of trust, and the radical potential of trust, without turning trust into some commandment. Does this resonate? Can you talk about the potential of trusting folks up front, and how you saw it play out at the Thistle?

Kelsey: Yeah totally, I think that’s awesome. Actually I think you [carla] were one of the first people to actually trust me without even knowing me. And I was like what the hell? Why? Why? How do you know I’m not gonna just fuck everything up and run away and steal a bunch of money and go? How do you know that? But in trusting me, I was like, holy shit: I trust this situation and this collective twenty times more and I want to give back to it because I’ve been given this opportunity to do something that I’ve never been able to do before, which is awesome.

But I have been thinking about trust and how with trauma we build all these walls and we start to mistrust everything. I have a pretty hard time trusting people. There’s a point where I’m like, this is too personal and too intimate and now my walls are going to go up. I was sitting and thinking about how it’s probably one of the best ways to break down the walls of the system is to break down the walls around each other first, and I think that requires trust.

Joyful Militancy and trust, and compassion, and humility are all tied together, I think: in other cultures, traditional cultures—I don’t know a lot about this—but from what I know, older Indigenous cultures have these ideas of respect, humility, compassion, and I think in karate I’ve seen it and it’s interesting because karate is a martial art, a fighting tool, and one of the things that we learn is that we have to love everyone including our opponents. And that’s the toughest thing to say in this community. People are like “what the fuck, how can you say that, you can’t just love your abuser.” And it’s true, I can’t just let go of everything. It’s not that; it’s being compassionate, I think, to situations.

carla and Nick: What makes it hard to nurture trust? What’s been your experience with trust in your everyday? And in radical spaces?

Kelsey: I feel like trauma is the biggest hurdle for me. From what I see happening around me and my own self, a lot of people—not everyone—but a lot of people who are politically involved and radical are there because they’re the short stick: they’ve been oppressed and traumatized. That’s often what leads people to these ideas and values, maybe? Well, for me that’s true … but I think when we lose trust in anything—either family, or relationships, or the system that we’re part of—we build walls to protect ourselves. And it takes a lot of work to break down those walls, and we need to trust, and when you’re trying to defend yourself all the time, and you don’t trust anything, it’s like a sad circle—a catch-22—and that’s what I’ve seen go on. It’s not just about organizing in the community, it’s not just about unlearning belief systems; it’s also unlearning ways of being in ourselves and that takes a lot of work and a lot of that shit nobody wants to look at or bring up again. And I know a lot of people are like, “this thing keeps coming up and I’m blocking it because it’s too scary.” And I think that that’s keeping us isolated and rigid.

carla and Nick: So there’s like a comfort and safety in remaining rigid, skeptical, untrusting?

Kelsey: There is! This whole world is based on fucking misery and to be joyful is scary because it’s kind of unknown. In capitalist systems, we’re not meant to feel joy; I think it’s about domination and power and gaining respect by taking part, but it has nothing to do with joy. Even now, I feel like people judge me for being too positive and too happy; people think I’m way younger than I am often because of my attitude; they’re like “why aren’t you bitter yet?” It’s really interesting because it’s scary to feel new things and not know where they’re going to take you.

carla and Nick: Can we have the expectation of trust up front? Do you think there’s an alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be earned?

Kelsey: It’s so hard in our society: you gotta earn everything; you earn money, you build trust, and respect. You gotta prove to me that I should trust you, or respect you. And that’s an interesting point; I have a tough time with that, trusting people. But I think it’s a feedback system: probably the more you allow yourself to trust people initially, probably the more well-reciprocated that will be. I felt it: you trust me and I didn’t understand it. That’s how fucked up our system is. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, or to harm you, I didn’t understand how someone could trust me without knowing me first.

Nick and carla: There’s this perception that all this stuff—trust, curiosity, uncertainty, joy—is naïve: if you’re joyful or trusting you probably just don’t understand what’s going on, or how bad things are. And with that, there’s a perception that only people who are super privileged have the capacity to be joyful. How do you think about joyful militancy and trust in relation to privilege and oppression?

Kelsey: I think some of the most joyful people I’ve met are not coming from privileged backgrounds. I don’t think it’s true that only privileged people can be joyful. It’s a blanket statement and it’s also kind of really oppressive and ignorant to say, I think. I think that’s harsh for me to say, but I think that there’s a lot of people and friends that are coming from privileged backgrounds are some of the most rigid people and the most isolated. They don’t feel at ease and they’re not comfortable, they’re guilty. A lot of privilege makes it difficult to learn how to work cooperatively. But I’ve seen the effectiveness and power—I don’t mean power like people who dominate—I mean power like the energy that comes from compassion and love and real collective work and humility. Humility’s such a huge one.

It’s part of our society to discount that all that as naïve. Naïve is inexperience—what is inexperience? It comes from an ageist perspective: you’re young, you only think like this because you’re young; you haven’t experienced enough. Actually some of the youngest people—kids—are often the most connected and able to absorb and create. It is ageist to associate joyfulness with naïveté. Maybe that’s super harsh to say but I think it comes from our society’s idea of what it means to be an adult, a youth, a child. Those systems are in place to keep us fuckin’ stagnant, and to keep kids stagnant and devalued and powerless.

carla and Nick: Yeah that’s a useful way for us to think about it because it’s easy to make all this into another set of norms: “just be this way.” It’s hard to talk about this in other ways, maybe because part of rigid militancy and activist-speak is constantly prescribing behaviors, and it’s easy to hear joyful militancy as another prescription.

Kelsey: Maybe it’s not a prescription, it is a practice … I’m excited because I’ve been having these conversations with friends. I think it’s really awesome that you’re really intentionally introducing this. Because I think probably the amount of work it must have taken you (carla) to just start off trusting people is a fuck-load, probably … and I’m realizing how important it is to share that … once we have something, we can share it with younger folks so that they don’t have to go through the same struggles to get to these points. I feel like what I’m learning is probably at a way earlier stage in my life than when you probably learned it. And I’ll be able to pass that on to the kids in my life when they’re way younger, like four or five, starting to introduce these ideas, and they won’t have to face the same struggles again, and we can go deeper, and it’s exciting.

Kelsey Cham C. is a community organizer and settler of Chinese and Irish descent. Being involved with projects like the Purple Thistle has brought them depth and insight into trying to understand what the hell is going on in the world. Kelsey is focused on organizing experiential learning projects with youth and adults in gardening, mycology, fermentation, and “ki” (chi) based karate.

[jazbaaati]

Ironically, the biggest advocates for people like me—the people ready to throw down stats about harm reduction and youth, gender queer folks, and the vulnerable people in society—many of them had no patience for me.

Kelsey Cham C, Radical Language in the Mainstream

[leftpress]

Radical Language in the Mainstream, by Kelsey Cham C.

pglavin16 | Institute for Anarchist Studies | March 9th 2017 As a person who did not come to radical perspectives from academia, I’ve had quite the challenge trying to find community with people whose politics I respect. I grew up in the suburb of Newton, Surrey, territory of the Katzie, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples. I was an athlete and last-minute procrastinator who never understood […]

[didanawisgi]

“When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.

Commentators have skewered social justice activists on the toxicity of the woke mindset. This is something that many radicals across North America are aware ofand are trying to understand. Nicholas Montgomery and Carla Bergman’s Joyful Militancy (JM), published last year, is the most thorough look at radical toxicity from a radical perspective (full disclosure: I very briefly met Nick Montgomery years ago. My anarchist clique did not like his anarchist clique). As they say, “there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out.”

Montgomery and Bergman see radical toxicity as an exogenous issue. They do not wonder whether radicalism itself could be malignant. As a result, their proposed solutions are limp and abstract, like “increasing sensitivity and inhabiting situations more fully.” Perhaps this is because the solutions all exist beyond the boundaries of radical thought. As Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, “morality binds and blinds.”

Unfortunately, toxicity in radical communities is not a bug. It is a feature. The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects. What follows is a picture of what happens in communities that are passionately, sincerely, radically woke, as seen from the perspective of an apostate.

Faith

Commentators have accurately noted how social justice seems to take the form of a religion. This captures the meaning and fulfilment I found in protests and occupations. It also captures how, outside of these harrowing festivals, everyday life in radical communities is mundane but pious. As a radical activist, much of my time was devoted to proselytizing. Non-anarchists were like pagans to be converted through zines and wheatpasted posters rather than by Bible and baptism. When non-radicals listened to my assertions that nazis deserved death, that all life had devolved into spectacle, and that monogamy was a capitalist social construct, they were probably bewildered instead of enticed.

Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”

Trent Eady says of his own radicalism in Montreal, “When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues.” When my friends and I did have theoretical disagreements, they tended towards the purely strategic or to philosophical minutiae. Are cops human? If we pay attention to the few white nationalists in town, will that stir them up? Is polyamory queer, or privileged?

Deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question. Radicalism is like a clan too suspicious of outsiders to abandon cousin marriage, and, like incestuous offspring, radicalism’s intellectual offspring accumulate genetic load. Narrow theories must perform increasingly convoluted explanations of the world. For example, Montgomery and Bergman describe Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s use of the term “Empire,” in their book of the same name, as both a miasma that “accumulates and spreads sadness” and an anthropomorphized figure that “works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.”

No worldview maps reality perfectly. But when a worldview encounters discordant knowledge, it can either evolve to accommodate it, or it can treat it as a threat to the worldview’s integrity. If a worldview treats all discordant knowledge as threat, then it is an ideology. Its adherents learn to see themselves as guardians rather than seekers of the truth. The practical consequences of such a worldview can be devastating.

Fear

When I became an anarchist, I was a depressed and anxious teenager, in search of answers. Radicalism explained that these were not manageable issues with biological and lifestyle factors, they were the result of living in capitalist alienation. For, as Kelsey Cham C notes, “This whole world is based on fucking misery” and “In capitalist systems, we’re not meant to feel joy.” Radicalism not only finds that all oppressions intersect, but so does all suffering. The force that causes depression is the same that causes war, domestic abuse, and racism. By accepting this framework, I surrendered to an external locus of control. Personal agency in such a model is laughable. And then, when I became an even less happy and less strong person over the years as an anarchist, I had an explanation on hand.

There is an overdeveloped muscle in radicalism: the critical reflex. It is able to find oppression behind any mundanity. Where does this critical reflex come from? French philosopher Paul Ricœur famously coined the term “school of suspicion” to describe Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s drive to uncover repressed meaning in text and society. Today’s radicals have inherited this drive by way of Foucault and other Marxo-Nietzscheans.

As radicals, we lived in what I call a paradigm of suspicion, one of the malignant ideas that emerge as a result of intellectual in-breeding. We inherited familial neuroses and saw insidious oppression and exploitation in all social relationships, stifling our ability to relate to others or ourselves without cynicism. Activists anxiously pore over interactions, looking for ways in which the mundane conceals domination. To see every interaction as containing hidden violence is to become a permanent victim, because if all you are is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.

The paradigm of suspicion leaves the radical exhausted and misanthropic, because any action or statement can be shown with sufficient effort to hide privilege, a microaggression, or unconscious bias. Quoted in JM, the anarchist professor Richard Day proposes “infinite responsibility”: “we can never allow ourselves to think that we are ‘done,’ that we have identified all of the sites, structures, and processes of oppression ‘out there’ or ‘in here,’ inside our own individual and group identities.” Infinite responsibility means infinite guilt, a kind of Christianity without salvation: to see power in every interaction is to see sin in every interaction. All that the activist can offer to absolve herself is Sisyphean effort until burnout. Eady’s summarization is simpler: “Everything is problematic.”

This effort is not only directed at the self, but also outwards. Morality and politics are intertwined in this system so that good politics become indicative of good morality. Montgomery and Bergman skewer this tendency mercilessly: “To remain pious, the priest must reveal new sins … The new Other is the not-radical-enough, the liberal, the perpetrator, the oppressor.” Because one’s good moral standing can never be guaranteed, the best way to maintain it is to attack the moral standing of others. As Montgomery and Bergman point out, this is also a thrilling and actionable alternative to the discouragement that haunts radicals after each loss in conflict with capitalism and the state. This is how cliques and status games emerge in communities that purport to be opposed to all hierarchy, turning people into what Freddie DeBoer once dubbed “offense archaeologists.”

Bland friendships and events are the result. Conversations are awkward and tense as radicals contort to avoid the risk of hurting each other. As an anarchist, I did not engage with individuals as individuals, but as porcelain, always thinking first and foremost of the group identities we inhabited.

Escape from the paradigm of suspicion is hindered by kafkatrapping: the idea that opposition to the radical viewpoint proves the radical viewpoint. Minorities who question it have internalized their oppression, and privileged individuals who question it prove their guilt. The only thing radicals are not suspicious of is the need for relentless suspicion. As Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write of similar norms on campuses, “If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it.”

Failure Modes

Radical communities select for particular personality types. They attract deeply compassionate people, especially young people attuned to the suffering inherent to existence. They attract hurt people, looking for an explanation for the pain they’ve endured. And both of these derive meaning for that suffering by attributing it to the force that they now dedicate themselves to opposing. They are no longer purely a victim, but an underdog.

However, radical communities also attract people looking for an excuse to be violent illegalists. And the surplus of vulnerable and compassionate people attracts sadists and abusers ready to exploit them. The only gatekeeping that goes on in radical communities is that of language and passion—if you can rail against capitalism in woke language, you’re in.

Every group of people has some mixture of stable, vulnerable, and predatory individuals. That radicals have a poor mix does not doom them. However, radicals also dismiss longstanding norms that would protect them, in favour of experimental norms. They are built with the best intentions and are aimed at solving real problems. But intentions do not matter if one does not consider incentives and human nature.

Abusers thrive in radical communities because radical norms are fragile and exploitable. A culture of freewheeling drug and alcohol use creates situations predators are waiting to exploit. A cultural fetishization of violence provides cover for violent and unstable people. The practice of public “call-outs” is used for power-plays far more often than for constructive feedback. Radicals value responding to claims of harm with compassion and belief. But abusers exploit this the way children exploit parents and teachers—crybullying becomes a way of punishing opponents or prey. While norms such as “believe claimed victims” are important in families and close friendships where trust and accountability are real, they become weapons in amorphous communities.

One particular practice illustrates this well. The accountability process is a subcultural institution whereby survivors can make demands of perpetrators and the community must hold them accountable. Radicals are hesitant to report abusers and rapists to the police, for fear of subjecting comrades to the prison system. But turning victims into judge and jury and shared friends into executioners is a recipe for injustice that satisfies no one. And in light of the instant truth-value given to claims of abuse, accountability processes are an oddly perfect weapon for actual abusers. As one writer for the zine the Broken Teapot says, “The past few years I have watched with horror as the language of accountability became an easy front for a new generation of emotional manipulators. It’s been used to perfect a new kind of predatory maverick—the one schooled in the language of sensitivity—using the illusion of accountability as community currency.”

Entanglement with such an individual is what finally broke me from my own dogmatism. Having somebody yell at me that if I didn’t admit to being a white supremacist her friends might beat me up and that I should pay her for her emotional labor, was too much for my ideology to spin. The internal crisis it induced led to gradual disillusion. In the end, however, this was the greatest gift I could ask for.

Flight

What is the alternative to radicalism, for the disillusioned radical? She could abandon the project and commit talent and energy elsewhere. Flee the cult. As Michael Huemer says, “Fighting for a cause has significant costs. Typically, one expends a great deal of time and energy, while simultaneously imposing costs on others, particularly those who oppose one’s own political position … In many cases, the effort is expended in bringing about a policy that turns out to be harmful or unjust. It would be better to spend one’s time and energy on aims that one knows to be good.” Slow, patient steps are a more reliable road to a better world than dramatic gestures that backfire as often as not. Conversation is less romantic than confrontation, small business ownership than Steal Something From Work Day, soup kitchens than vandalism. If an individual wants to end suffering, she should think hard about why she’s joined communities that glamorize violence, vengeance, and anti-intellectualism. Having left that scene, I am amazed at how much effort we put into making the world a more painful and difficult place than it is in service of a post-revolutionary utopia.

Radicals should take stock of the progress liberal democracies have made. As Steven Pinker points out in The Better Angels of Our Nature, nobody in the West has an argument for wife-beating or denying women the vote anymore. Infant mortality rates have cratered, and extreme poverty rates are falling precipitously. With trends like these and more, liberal capitalism appears less like the arch-nemesis of humanity, and more like a miracle machine. It could even be improved by the compassion and devotion of former radicals. It is worth noting that this progress does not mean that exploitation and oppression have been solved; but it does mean that our current society is the only one to have made significant inroads against them.

Most of all, radicals should learn to abandon false truths. The only way to escape dogmatism is to resist the calcification and sanctification of values, and to learn from the wisdom of different perspectives. As Haidt argues, there are grains of truth in opposing political positions. Radicals do themselves a disservice by seeing the world of thought outside the radical monoculture as tainted with reaction and evil. There is a rich diversity of thought awaiting them if they would only open their minds to it. One of the achievements of liberalism has been a norm of free speech wherein individuals can both share and consume that spectrum of thought. Every new and challenging school of thought I discovered after anarchism rocked my worldview, as somebody who formerly thought that wisdom could only be found through “the struggle” or in esoteric French theory. Even if opposing views are not assimilated, the ability to contend with them on the intellectual field instead of silencing them is a sign of a seeker of the truth, not a guardian.

Young adults often become radicals after they realize the immensity of the cruelty and malevolence in the world. They reject a society that tolerates such suffering. They sanctify justice as their telos. But without truth to orient justice, seekers of justice will crash and crash again into reality, and will craft increasingly nightmarish and paranoid ideological analyses, burning out activists, destroying lives through jail or abuse, and leaving the world an uglier, more painful place. To paraphrase Alice Dreger, there is no justice without wisdom, and no wisdom without surrender to uncertainty in the pursuit of truth.”

Conor Barnes is a student, writer, and poet. His writing has also appeared in Areo Magazine and the Mantle. You can follow him on Twitter @ideopunk

[konvolutes]

Freedom was once inseparable from interdependence, close ties, and kinship: I am free because of others I can depend on. Today, freedom tends to mean something different. It is about being unconstrained and having options.

At bottom, all of these definitions are about getting away from external restriction or influence: being unhindered, unaffected, independent. The 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined freedom as nothing more than an ‘absence of opposition’ possessed by individuals. For Hobbes, the free man is constantly armed and on guard; “when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests.”[5] Hobbes imagined a form of life that would become more and more pervasive: an isolated and selfish existence backed by contracts and violence—a vision of freedom fused with exploitation.

If capitalism works by dismembering transformative relationships, can friendship be revalued as a radical, transformative form of kinship? Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, who keep us comfortable, rather than becoming different and more capable together.

Even in Europe, where so many tools of colonization were refined, the roots of freedom were different. Centuries ago, some Europeans had a more relational conception of freedom, which wasn’t just about the absence of external constraints, but also about our immersion in the relationships that sustain us and make us thrive.

“…friendship will be the soil from which a new politics will emerge…” Ivan Ilich

Freedom here is not the absence of restriction, but the capacity to become more active in shaping our attachments and situations. This becoming-active is not about controlling things, but about learning to participate in their flow, forming intense bonds through which we become implicated in each others’ struggles and capacities. Similarly, feminist philosopher Donna Haraway has argued that ‘making kin’ across divides of species, nation, gender and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task today.[13] Through friendship or kinship we undo and renew ourselves in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense, freedom is rooted in friendship.

As The Invisible Committee write in To Our Friends, “‘Friend’ and ‘free’ in English…come from the same Indo-European root, which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties, because I am linked to a reality greater than me.”[8]

A story: two friends fold their lives together; they draw new capacities out of each other. They hurt each other, and they work through it, emerging more intertwined than before. They are no longer sure which ideas and mannerisms were ‘their own’ and which belonged to the friend. They know each others’ triggers and tendencies, intimately. One finds himself in trouble, and the other drops everything to help, at great personal risk. But this risk and sacrifice is not because it is morally right, or because they have calculated that it is in their own self-interest. It not even felt as a choice; it is something drawn out of them.

By creating relational webs that reinforce the values we aspire to, relationships can help undo violent or depleting patterns ingrained by capitalism and other forces of oppression. Loving relationships can be what allow us to face the things we fear about ourselves. They can help undo the ways that we have internalized notions that we are not good enough, not worthy of love, or that we have to put up with things that deplete us and those we care about. Relationships of mutual support can enable us to see and feel the toxicity of some of our attachments. They can help us to look at our patterns of addiction or depression without shame. Those we love can be our reasons to stay alive when we aren’t sure that we want to. They can help us leave miserable situations by leaping with us into the unknown. Friendships can be the source of our capacity to take risks and fight in new ways.

If one would have a friend, then must one also be willing to wage war for him: and in order to wage war, one must be capable of being an enemy.

–Frederich Nietzsche [14]

Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness and competition? The authors call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into radical movements, posing as the ‘correct’ way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone. Rather than proposing ready-made solutions, they amplify the questions that are already being asked among movements. Fusing together movement-based perspectives and contemporary affect theory, they trace emergent forms of trust, care and responsibility in a wide variety of radical currents today, including indigenous resurgence, anarchism, transformative justice, and youth liberation. Joyful Militancy foregrounds forms of life in the cracks of Empire, revealing the ways that fierceness, tenderness, curiosity, and commitment can be intertwined.

Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Tasnim Nathoo, Kelsey Cham Corbett, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Sebastian Touza, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, Melanie Matining, Zainab Amadahy and Mik Turje. The book includes full interviews of Silvia Federici and Kelsey Cham C.

[anarchismhub-blog]

Anarchist Studies @ https://t.co/FLp18MopWC : Radical Language in the Mainstream, by Kelsey Cham C. / #anarchism

— Anarchism - news (@anarchismhub) March 9, 2017

(http://twitter.com/anarchismhub/status/839874707642019840)

[dailyanarchistposts]

The beginning of a conversation

How can these processes of transformation be nurtured and defended, not just in their most dramatic and exceptional moments, but all the time? Are there common values or sensibilities that nurture transformative relationships, alive and responsive to changing situations, while warding off both Empire and rigid radicalism? What if joy (as the process of becoming more capable) was seen as fundamental to undoing Empire? What would it mean to be militant about joy? What is militancy when it is infused with creativity and love?

It was with these questions—much vaguer and more muddled at the time—that the two of us began having intentional conversations with several others. And who are we, the two of us? Both of us live in so-called British Columbia, Canada—Nick in Victoria and carla in Vancouver. We come from different generations, and we have pretty different life experiences across gender, class, ability, and education. carla has been involved in deschooling, youth liberation organizing, and other radical currents for a couple of decades now, and she became a mentor to Nick several years ago as Nick was realizing that he was a radical in his mid twenties without many mentors from older generations (a common phenomenon in anarchist and other radical worlds). What began as a relationship of mentorship and political collaboration evolved into a deep friendship. In terms of our organizing, we are both oriented towards prefigurative experiments: trying to contribute to projects and forms of life where we are able to live and relate differently with others, here and now, and supporting others doing the same. Both of us are white cis-gendered settlers, and for us this has meant trying to write in conversation with people with very different life experiences and insights, including Indigenous people, kids and youth, Black people and other folks of color, and genderqueer and trans folks, all of whom struggle against forms of violence and oppression that we can never know. We have also sought to talk to people from a wide variety of movements in many different places throughout Turtle Island (North America) and Latin America.

Over the course of a year and a half we spoke with friends, and friends of friends. This was a unique research process, in part, because we were inviting people into an ongoing conversation, asking them to reflect on and respond to our continually evolving ideas about joyful militancy and rigid radicalism. We formally interviewed fifteen people in all: Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Kelsey Cham C., Zainab Amadahy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Melanie Matining, Tasnim Nathoo, Sebastian Touza, Walidah Imarisha, Mik Turje, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, and Richard Day. We also had many more informal conversations with folks from a lot of different backgrounds, of all ages, who impacted our thinking immensely.

These people are not representatives of any particular group or movement. Nor are we holding them up as the ultimate embodiment of joy, militancy, or radicalism. They are people with whom we share values and who inspire and challenge us. All of them are committed, in various ways, to forcing Empire out of their lives and reviving and nurturing other worlds. They are involved in a diversity of movements, struggles, and forms of life: the uprisings in Oaxaca and Argentina; small-scale farming and urban food justice; Black liberation and prison abolition; Indigenous resurgence and land defense; transformative and healing justice movements; radical ecology and permaculture; scavenging and squatting; youth liberation and deschooling; feminist and anti-violence work; the creation of autonomous, queer, BIPOC{1} spaces; direct action and anticapitalist organizing, and much more, including the beautiful and fierce ways of being that are difficult to capture in words. Experiences among the people we interviewed ranged widely, from long-term commitments to places and communities to more itinerant and scattered spaces of belonging; from being steeped in radical theory to forms of knowledge arising through lived experience; from being well known in radical circles to being known primarily among friends, loved ones, and close collaborators.

Some we interviewed in person, some over conference calls, and others through written correspondence. We have tried to show this conversation—and to keep it going—by including extended excerpts from some of the interviews, putting them in dialogue with our own ideas and with each other. Some people we interviewed were unequivocally enthusiastic about this notion of joyful militancy, offering encouragement and affirmation. Others were more critical, alerting us to dangers, shortcomings, and confusions, and challenging some of our ideas. We have tried to show some of the ways our interlocutors challenged and disagreed with us—and diverged from each other—without pitting anyone against each other in a simplistic way.

We learned a lot from the apprehensiveness of some of the Indigenous people and people of color we interviewed, whose emotions are constantly policed and regulated, and whose struggles are constantly appropriated or erased. We heard from them that centering things like kindness, love, trust, and flourishing—especially when it comes from white people like us—can erase power relations. It can end up pathologizing so-called “negative” emotions like fear, mistrust, resentment, and anger. It can legitimize tone policing and a reactionary defense of comfort. It can fall into simplistic commandments to “be nice” or “get over” oppression and violence. Similarly, pointing to the importance of trust and openness can be dangerous and irresponsible in a world of so much betrayal and violence. These misgivings have taught us to be clear that trust and vulnerability are powerful and irreducibly risky; they require boundaries. They can never be obligations or duties.

We have also found that Spinoza’s concept of sadness can be very misleading. In contrast to joy, it means the reduction of one’s capacities to affect and be affected. Initially, we had been calling rigid radicalism “sad militancy,” drawing on others in the Spinozan current.[7] But while the concept of sad militancy was immediately intuitive for some, for others it was frustrating because of its resonance with grief and sorrow, which are an irreducible part of life and struggle. Interpreted in this light, it could be seen as belittling grief and pain. For that reason, we have decentered the concept of sadness in this book, while trying to hang onto what Spinoza was getting at. In its place, we often use words like stagnation, rigidity, and depletion, connoting a loss of collective power and the way Empire and rigid radicalism keep us stuck there. With joyful militancy we are trying to get at a multiplicity of transformations and worlds in motion, but there is a danger of implying that we are all in the same situation, and erasing difference and antagonisms. BIPOC women, trans, queer, and Two-Spirit people, in particular, have worked hard to show the specificities of the oppression they face and the specificity of their resistance and the worlds they are making.

In the face of this, we have mostly questions and tentative ideas: can joyful militancy affirm and explore a multiplicity of struggles and forms of life without homogenizing them? By attuning us to open-endedness of situations, can joy help us undo some of the universalizing and colonizing tendencies of radical Western theory and practice? Can movements be explored in ways that enable mutual learning and transformation, rather than erasing difference?

Here, we want to return to the dynamic space beyond fixed norms on the one hand, and “anything goes” relativism on the other. Outside this false dichotomy is the domain of relationships that are alive, responsive, and make people capable of new things together, without imposing this on everyone else. It is in this space where values like openness, curiosity, trust, and responsibility can really flourish, not as fixed ways of being to be applied everywhere, but as ways of relating that can only be kept alive by cultivating careful, selective, and fierce boundaries. For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.

How do we know when to be open and vulnerable, and when to draw lines in the sand and fight? Who to trust, and how? When are relationships worth fighting for, and when do they need to be abandoned? These are not questions with pre-given answers; they can only be answered over and over again in a multiplicity of ways. A crucial outgrowth of joy and fidelity to it, we suggest, is that people will take different paths and have different priorities. Movements and forms of life will diverge and sometimes come into conflict. There is no trump card that can be used to dictate a path to others: not the state, not morality, and not strategic imperatives of unity or movement-building. Encountering difference might lead to new capacities, strong bonds, and new forms of struggle. Or it might be more ambivalent and difficult, mixing distance and closeness. Or it might mean being told to fuck off. For all these reasons, we try to share some of our own values, and some of the struggles and movements that deeply inspire us, without saying that they are right for everyone or that others should share our priorities.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes 101 - 188

[101] Toby Rollo, “Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child,” Settler Colonial Studies (June 2016), 1–20.

[102] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992), 3–7.

[103] Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “We Are All Very Anxious,” WeArePlanC.org, April 4, 2014, http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/.

[104] Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions, 37.

[105] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 12.

[106] Our readings and understandings of Illich’s work, and our understanding of conviviality in particular, is indebted to conversations with friends who either knew Illich personally or worked closely with his ideas, including Gustavo Esteva, Madhu Suri Prakash, Dan Grego, Dana L. Stuchul and Matt Hern.

[107] Quoted in The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 232–3.

[108] Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006); Sitrin, Everyday Revolutions.

[109] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 2.

[110] Idem, 7.

[111] Leanne Simpson, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” Yes! Magazine, March 5, 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.

[112] Quoted in Tony Manno, “Unsurrendered,” Yes! Magazine, 2015, http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=b24e304ce1944493879cba028607dfc7.

[113] INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, “INCITE! Critical Resistance Statement,” 2001, http://www.incite-national.org/page/incite-critical-resistance-statement.

[114] Rachel Zellars and Naava Smolash, “If Black Women Were Free: Part 1,” Briarpatch, August 16, 2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/if-black-women-were-free.

[115] Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/.

[116] Creative Interventions, “Toolkit,” CreativeInterventions.org, http://www.creative-interventions.org/tools/toolkit/ (accessed December 1, 2016).

[117] Quoted in carla bergman and Corine Brown, Common Notions: Handbook Not Required, 2015.

[118] Gustavo Esteva, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, video, 2012.

[119] Kelsey Cham C., Nick Montgomery, and carla bergman, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, October 26, 2013.

[120] Marina Sitrin, “Occupy Trust: The Role of Emotion in the New Movements,” Cultural Anthropology (February 2013), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/75-occupy-trust-the-role-of-emotion-in-the-new-movements.

[121] Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books, 1998), 91.

[122] Day, Gramsci Is Dead, 200.

[123] Zainab Amadahy, Wielding the Force: The Science of Social Justice, Smashwords edition (Zainab Amadahy, 2013), 36.

[124] Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism, 89.

[125] Amadahy, Wielding the Force, 149.

[126] Emma Goldman, “The Hypocrisy of Puritanism,” in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1998), 157.

[127] Chris Dixon, “For the Long Haul,” Briarpatch Magazine, June 21, 2016, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/for-the-long-haul.

[128] We first encountered the concept of “public secret” as a way of getting at the affect of anxiety today, described by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness. Earlier uses can be traced to the work of Ken Knabb (which credits the concept to Marx) and his curation of Situationist writing, as well as Jean-Pierre Voyer’s reading of Reich. See Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Movement Internationalism(s),” Interface 6/2; Jean-Pierre Voyer, “Wilhelm Reich: How To Use,” in Public Secrets, trans. Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997), http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/reich.htm; Jean-Pierre Voyer to Ken Knabb, “Discretion Is the Better Part of Value,” April 20, 1973, http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/Reich.add.htm.

[129] This was suggested to us by Richard Day.

[130] brown, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

[131] Amador Fernández-Savater, “Reopening the Revolutionary Question,” ROAR Magazine 0 (December 2015).

[132] Federici, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

[133] Touza, interview by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery.

[134] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 32.

[135] Foucault, “Preface.”

[136] Cited in Ashanti Alston, “An Interview with Ashanti Alston,” interview by Team Colours, June 6, 2008, https://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/an-interview-with-ashanti-alston/.

[137] Thoburn develops his conception of a “militant diagram” through a reading of Deleuze and Guattari, and we have found it useful in thinking about rigid radicalism as an affective tendency that is irreducible to the gestures, habits, practices, and statements that are simultaneously its fuel and its discharge. See Nicholas Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” New Formations 68/1 (2010), 125–42.

[138] Colectivo Situaciones, “Something More on Research Militancy: Footnotes and Procedures and (In)Decisions,” 5.

[139] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” 129; Cathy Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 265–300.

[140] Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, eds., Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiques of the Weather Underground 1970–1974 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 18.

[141] Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 154.

[142] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[143] Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” 134.

[144] Esteva, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[145] Sitrin, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[146] Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 54.

[147] amory starr, “Grumpywarriorcool: What Makes Our Movements White?,” in Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 379.

[148] Idem, 383.

[149] crow, Black Flags and Windmills, 81.

[150] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[151] Richard J. F. Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, phone, March 18, 2014.

[152] Alston, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[153] CrimethInc., “Against Ideology?,” CrimethInc.com, 2010, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/ideology.php.

[154] Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (Oxon: Routledge, 1947), 235.

[155] See Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, revised edition (New York, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1998); Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 21–60.

[156] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, 33.

[157] Idem, 36.

[158] Quoted by Maya Angelou in Malcolm X, Malcolm X: An Historical Reader, ed. James L. Conyers and Andrew P. Smallwood (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 181.

[159] Kelsey Cham C., “Radical Language in the Mainstream,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 29 (2016), 122–3.

[160] Asam Ahmad, “A Note on Call-Out Culture,” Briarpatch, March 2, 2015, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture.

[161] Ngọc Loan Trần, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable,” Black Girl Dangerous, December 18, 2013, http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/12/calling-less-disposable-way-holding-accountable/.

[162] Ibid.

[163] Chris Crass, “White Supremacy Cannot Have Our People: For a Working Class Orientation at the Heart of White Anti-Racist Organizing,” Medium, July 28, 2016, https://medium.com/@chriscrass/white-supremacy-cannot-have-our-people-21e87d2b268a.

[164] Ibid.

[165] Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Scribner, 1999), 137.

[166] This section title is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, from whom we’ve also taken the concept of paranoid reading. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 124–51.

[167] Killjoy, Interview with Margaret Killjoy.

[168] Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.”

[169] Day, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[170] Mik Turje, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, March 4, 2014.

[171] Walidah Imarisha, Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), 113–15.

[172] Walidah Imarisha, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, email, December 22, 2015.

[173] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[174] John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, 2nd Revised Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 215.

[175] Coulthard, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[176] This turn of phrase comes to us from Stevphen Shukaitis’s wonderful book Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (New York: Autonomedia, 2009), 141–2, http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ImaginalMachines-web.pdf.

[177] This idea is paraphrased from Lauren Berlant and her conception of “cruel optimism,” a relation in which our attachments become obstacles to our flourishing. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

[178] Federici, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman.

[179] Zainab Amadahy, interview by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, January 15, 2016.

[180] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.

[181] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969).

[182] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine, July 1973.

[183] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338–46.

[184] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.

[185] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media Co-op, November 5, 2013, http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.

{1} BIPOC is an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We understand these not as ethnic categories or essentialist identities, but complex political categories forged in struggles against white supremacy and settler colonialism. For instance, the creation of BIPOC-specific spaces or “caucuses” within various struggles has created opportunities for understanding how racism or whiteness is playing out, and how it can be confronted effectively.

{2} ISIL stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, often used interchangeably with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

{3} Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original terminology is retained throughout.

[dailyanarchistposts]

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[dailyanarchistposts]

Morality in movement

Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.

—Malcolm X[158]

Liberal morality seeps into movements in the form of incessant regulation and pacification of struggles. It replaces the transformative power of dignity with moral indignation and its tendencies of shame and self-righteousness. It pathologizes anger, hatred, and destruction, turning non-violence into a moral imperative rather than a tactic. This is the morality of the cop who tells you to calm down with one hand on his gun; the sympathizer whose “support” for you evaporates as soon as things become “violent”; the citizen who says you had better vote or you can’t complain. People in struggle are constantly told about the “correct” way of conducting themselves if they want to be respected and heard. The liberal morality of whiteness converts racism and sexism into matters of individual prejudice. Conversations about violence and oppression are constantly derailed by individual emotions and the erasure of power relations where white feelings matter more than Black lives.

Under the stifling weight of liberal morality, anti-liberal morality has grown in reaction. The targets and the enemies change, but the structure remains, and radical morality can reach new heights of corrosive self-righteousness and punishment. From this perspective, things are always in danger of becoming infected or diluted by liberalism. Liberal or oppressive sentiments must be attacked wherever they are detected. Call-outs and radical take-downs proliferate. Indignation grows: everything is corrupt and tainted; nothing is as it should be. This “as it should be” is no longer determined by Christian priests, or politicians and good citizens, but by a radical certainty that one is on the right side of a moral drama between good and evil.

Like the old Christian morality, new forms of moralism subsist on the evils they decry: to remain pious, the priest must reveal new sins. This can surface as an incessant search for oppression and a ceaseless attack on anyone who is found guilty, including oneself, through new forms of confession, trials, and punishments. The new Other is the not-radical-enough, the liberal, the perpetrator, the oppressor.

A number of our interlocutors have pointed out how these moralistic tendencies toward punishment can end up excluding many of those who are supposed to be centered by anti-oppressive practices: poor people, people without formal education, and others who haven’t been exposed to the ever evolving language of radical communities. In a compassionate way, Kelsey Cham C. shares their experience with call-out culture and language policing upon being introduced to radical communities:

When I came out as queer in Montreal … I started to find accurate words to describe how I felt about the world. Even though this skill was my entry into more political communities, I still felt incredibly judged. It was like an ultra-heightened experience of not being allowed in the cool-kid club in high school — but with all new rules that I had not learned and that no one took the time to explain to me. The language I grew up with could no longer be applied and would sometimes get me kicked out of social settings. My entire experience of growing up was judged and I felt totally isolated in trying to figure out why. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve figured out the “right way” to navigate in these communities by learning language protocol and radical terminology while dropping the offensive and oppressive slang. I don’t disagree with changing language to support systems we care about. I do disagree with judging people for not knowing the rules—especially since radicals are often organizing in favor of marginalized communities who are generally not aware of these rules. If I wanted to fill out a form to describe my identity, I could check a bunch of boxes that would make my experience worth standing up for: Queer. Trans. Person of Color. Former Sex Trade Worker. Ironically, the biggest advocates for people like me—the people ready to throw down stats about harm reduction and youth, gender queer folks, and the vulnerable people in society—many of them had no patience for me. I came into their communities looking for support, friends, and direction. I came having left abusive and sexually manipulative partners. I came in hella lost, unaware, and not very educated. But I came in agreement with their political perspectives, because I knew society was fucked from the time I was twelve—maybe even younger. In high school, while other kids wrote about teen heartbreak, I wrote about injustices I saw everywhere. I came into these radical communities wanting to make change, but all my habits and the language I had learned to protect myself with got me in shit.[159]

Cham C.’s story gets at a common experience in radical milieus, in which language and conduct are intensely scrutinized, and those who fail are often forced out. Far from arbitrary, these rules are often earnest attempts to root out oppressive behaviors, with the aspiration of creating spaces where everyday habits and language are less laden with structural violence. In a world where white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and other forms of violence are incessant, the desire to create spaces that feel a little safer makes a lot of sense. Yet as Cham C. explains, they can become stifling and exclusionary in the enforcement of a “right” way of being.

What reinforces rigid radicalism, we think, is not the attempt to change language or behavior, but the way these attempts can be subsumed by moralism and reinforce shame, blame, punishment, and guilt. Morality is dangerous not only because it can reinforce oppression, but because it can divorce people from their own power. People are reduced to their statements, becoming symptoms or examples of violence, rather than complex and changing beings. Moral indignation can promote stagnation, encouraging complaints and condemnations that lead nowhere. The desire to be morally right can get in the way of here-and-now transformation.

[dailyanarchistposts]

The power of baseline trust

I think we cannot have any kind of trust in a mass of 100 million individuals, they will produce the horror. But if we bring everything to the human scale, to the communities, to small groups of people, then we can really trust that the people will have the wisdom to discuss and to generate consensus.

—Gustavo Esteva[118]

We have argued that Empire’s institutions are a ceaseless attack on conviviality, and we want to hold onto emergent forms of trust and responsibility as common notions. In this context, we want to share an excerpt from our interview with Kelsey Cham C.:

carla and Nick: Can you talk about the potential of trusting folks up front, and how you saw it play out at the Thistle? Kelsey: Yeah totally, I think that’s awesome. Actually I think you [carla] were one of the first people to actually trust me without even knowing me. And I was like what the hell? Why? Why? How do you know I’m not gonna just fuck everything up and run away and steal a bunch of money and go? How do you know that? But in trusting me, I was like, holy shit: I trust this situation and this collective twenty times more and I want to give back to it because I’ve been given this opportunity to do something that I’ve never been able to do before, which is awesome. But I have been thinking about trust and how with trauma we build all these walls and we start to mistrust everything—I have a pretty hard time trusting people—there’s a point where I’m like this is too personal and too intimate and now my walls are going to go up. I was sitting and thinking about how it’s probably one of the best ways to break down the walls of the system is to break down the walls around each other first, and I think the only way we can break down those walls is with trust. And that’s the core thing you said. Joyful militancy and trust, and compassion, and humility are all tied together: in other cultures, traditional cultures—I don’t know a lot about this—but from what I know, older Indigenous cultures have these ideas of respect, humility, compassion, and I think in karate I’ve seen it and it’s funny because karate is a martial art, a fighting tool, and one of the things that we learn is that we have to love everyone including our opponents. And that’s the toughest thing to say in this community. People are like, “what the fuck, how can you say that, you can’t just love your abuser.” And it’s true, I can’t just let go of everything. It’s not that, it’s being compassionate, I think, to situations.

carla and Nick: Can we have the expectation of trust up front? Is it an alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be earned? Kelsey: Yeah that’s like our society: you gotta earn everything; you earn money, you build trust, and respect. You gotta prove to me that I should trust you, or respect you. And that’s an interesting point; I have a tough time with that, trusting people. But I think it’s a feedback system: probably the more you allow yourself to trust people initially, probably the more well-reciprocated that will be. I felt it: you trust me and I didn’t understand it. That’s how fucked up our system is. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, or to harm you, I didn’t understand how someone could trust me without knowing me first.[119]

At the core of this conversation is the potential—never an obligation or guarantee—of trusting people up front. In a practical sense, it’s our experience that when people offer trust up front, most people rise to the occasion. Without turning it into a commandment that everyone should follow, we want to affirm the ways that expanding up-front trust can be transformative and enabling. It can feel strange and scary to be in situations where people think well of us and trust us to do our best, without having to “earn it” or “prove it,” but it also can be incredibly freeing, making us feel more capable. This is a trust not only in individuals, but in unfolding processes with open-ended potential, without fixed rules. In this sense, it is trust in joy: in emergent capacities to increase collective powers of acting.

But what does this look like? It happens in all kinds of subtle, relational ways. One of the things that made the Thistle different from many other youth projects was that everyone in the collective had keys to the space and were free to use them anytime. No one had to go through a formal interview process, or sign over their life to have a set. Many bureaucratic procedures like this are based in distrust, as are many radical spaces that replicate institutional norms of Empire. But this up-front trust also entailed responsibility: it required that folks met regularly to check in, talk about how things were going, and so on. These practices helped to create an environment of shared connection and kindness, a space filled with friendship and mutual support, and ultimately a place to build community.

When we have been involved in movements, spaces, and forms of life imbued with this sense of trust, along with a fierce sense of mutual responsibility, we have noticed that it gave us an ability to be brave, to try new things, to be vulnerable, and to take risks. This is not a politics of “let’s all get along” pacifism. Writing in the context of collective resistance to evictions in the United States, Sitrin argues that trust is intimately connected to direct action:

It is not only about changing relationships and “feeling good” but inextricably linked to direct action. It is about creating the alternatives that we now desire and need. It is using the base of trust so as to occupy homes and prevent foreclosures and evictions, all the while knowing that to call on one’s neighbor means they will come out and support you—as has been done many hundreds of times throughout the US in only the past few months. People doing eviction defense in support of their neighbors even speak of how they might not have “liked” that particular person, but that they “felt” a connection to them and cared so much about what happened to them that they were risking possible arrest by putting their bodies between the marshals and the person’s home. From these relationships, in dozens and dozens of neighborhoods and communities across the country, networks of support and care have been formed. Neighbors go door-to-door to let others know that they can (and will) be defended if they need it, and also to just share stories, food, and support.[120]

These conceptions of care, trust, and openness are not new ideas. On the contrary, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash argue that what they call hospitality—a radical openness, generosity, and trust in others—is common among many traditions that have not been lost to bureaucratic institutions, industrial dependence, and other trappings of “development.” Among those less entangled in Empire’s radical monopolies, hospitality remains alive:

Common people learn to trust each other and be trustworthy in ways that are rapidly vanishing among the “social minorities.” Their common faith is seldom deposited in abstract causes or phantoms, like human kind. Instead, it is entrusted to real men and women, defining the place to which they belong and that belongs to them. Rather than the private hope and public despair of the “social minorities” (some hope for their personal lives, no hope for public affairs) …we usually find expressed among them a common hope in their own capacity to deal with their predicaments, whether good, bad or indifferent. Given that condition, they can be both hospitable and responsible.[121]

The notion of hospitality is not just about welcoming guests; it connotes a sensibility of trust based on people’s sense of their capacity to face the world together. Being held in this way also enables people to be open to strangers: not simply “tolerant” but capable of open-ended encounters, generosity, and curiosity. To encounter a stranger and be open to difference in this way is not at all the same as tolerance. Liberal tolerance treats individuals as atomized entities who are required to put up with each other, with the state as a universal arbiter. Hospitality starts not from rights-bearing individuals but from a sensuous and lively world, composed through common notions that have evolved to sustain joy or conviviality. To be “hosted” is to be allowed to encounter a world, to be invited into it. For the same reason, it is not individuals who are trusting; there is no self-enclosed individual who “chooses” to trust, but bundles of relationships in which the capacity for trust is activated and drawn out of people.

This is not a romanticization of “premodern” or “preindustrial” cultures, but a recognition that Empire’s radical monopolies are uneven and contested. Esteva and Prakash insist that people are always recovering, sustaining, and reinventing convivial forms of life. This can be seen in insurrectionary spaces, in disasters, in a whole multiplicity of projects and struggles: anywhere that people find the capacity to formulate problems together and carve out some wiggle room from Empire’s monopoly over life.

[jazbaaati]

Breaking Down the Walls around Each Other—An Interview with Kelsey Cham C.