This story begins with the Law and Disorder Conference in Portland, Oregon and the chaos that descended upon it. It should be seen as somewhat of an embarrassment for today's left. However, not necessarily for the reasons one might imagine. It was not a matter of anarchy gone awry, necessarily. It was more a cognitive dissonance within anarchism between individualist libertarianism and collective democracy.
The melee ensued as a result of Kristian Williams' status as a panelist in a forum about the role of agent provocateurs in the anarchist movement. However, his stated purpose for being there was not the bone of contention that caused the feud. The disruption arose from his insistence that issues of sexual assault have become off limits to anyone other than abuse survivors. These sentiments were stated in an essay entitled "The Politics of Denunciation." The most controversial of the statements made in the essay are as follows:
Under this theory, the survivor, and the survivor alone, has the right to make demands … one obvious implication is that all allegations are treated as fact. And often, specific allegations are not even necessary.... It may be enough to characterize someone’s behavior … as ‘sexist,’ ‘misogynist,’ ‘patriarchal, ‘silencing,’ ‘triggering,’ unsafe,’ or ‘abusive. (additional source)
Earlier this year a blog post entitled "The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary" by Stephen D’Arcy was published, which analyses more precisely "calling out" culture in today's left circles. D'Arcy's article approaches the problematic more sensitively and is a more rounded critique, centered on historicity.
One major concern is that I and others have expressed is that this "calling out" culture uses humiliation as a tactic. It is a strategy of the defeated. If we are to win in the broader struggle for liberation, we cannot shoot ourselves in the foot this way. We are embarrassing and thus alienating our allies. The problem arises when privilege is unconscious. Suddenly individuals new to today's leftism are being called out for things they don't understand. The cry then becomes: My privilege has been checked. I'm still not liberated. What next?
Many of these current left tendencies arose at a point where damage control was necessary after a particularly reactionary period (Regan, Bush, Bush Jr.). Perhaps the way to proceed is to be liberation oriented as opposed to doing constant damage control. I understand this means different things to different demographics, but I would advocate a return to the orthodox Marxist critique of political economy, whereby these particular oppressions can be linked though economic imperatives of the ruling class. I'm not suggesting, however, that all dialectical struggle arises from class antagonism. Certainly sexism was around much longer than capitalism or feudalism. I'm saying the reason these oppressions continue to be very real today is because they benefit the ruling class.
However, the embarrassment at the Law and Disorder Conference, was not necessarily an overly self-reflexive left. Perhaps the precise critique lies not in defending the correctness of Kimberly William's statements regarding the hegemony of abuse survivors, but in the failure to reconcile dissent from those statements within a "libertarian" framework. "Libertarian" socialism fails in its marriage to individualist freedom as a fundamental precept. In this arena "anarchism" is rendered impotent in its ability to appropriately respond to theoretical questions of privilege.
Recently, Mark Bray wrote a critique of what he deemed "liberal tendencies that plagued Occupy." The first he discusses is what he deems "liberal libertarianism." However, why does he necessarily adhere to "left libertarianism" while denouncing "liberal libertarianism?" Much of what he criticizes in "liberal libertarianism" in inherent to libertarianism/anti-authoritarianism itself, particularly, the aspect of idiosyncratic individualism. This liberal tendency arises from multiculturalism, which states that all points of view are valid, and so censorship, on whatever basis, is reproachable. The "mic check" phenomenon at occupy exemplified this. The collective voice of the movement could become whatever idiosyncratic rant whomever had the moxy to yell out "mic check" determined it to be.
Bray defines the "liberal libertarian" thusly:
The Liberal Libertarian is the person who has learned enough about the potentially heinous repercussions of coercion and exclusion to renounce authoritarian organizing structures, but takes this in such an individualistic direction that they also often dismiss even directly democratic structures and reject collective attempts to prevent boisterous individuals from completely disrupting assemblies, meetings, actions or any other collective endeavor.
So why define the prevailing tendency in today's left as "libertarian socialism?" I understand that this has a historical significance in the history of the IWW and other proposed libertarian socialist movements in America, but why not, instead, demand direct democratic socialism? Here is an example of how the tolerant libertarianism of Occupy could go wrong when a reactionary throws a monkey wrench in the gears:
The incident(s) this wing-nut is referring to occurred because of OWS's reluctance to have any safety measures in place, what so ever, such as a kind of "people's security" like they did in Tarhir Square. Why give these individuals fodder to attack our movement? Self-conscious leaderlessness gives individuals whose will is opposite from the leftist values we espouse not only a platform for their idiotic rantings (and why give them one of ours when they have so many already?), but also creates an opportunity whereby oppressors can exploit the weaknesses of our movement, including, but not limited to physical and even sexual violence.
A discussion of the film The Act of Killing is relevant here. It's international title was "Free Men" because the Indonesian word for gangster sounds like the English term "free men." As is a plague for foreign films, the title was changed to the more moralistic "Act of Killing" for ideological reasons. This concept of freedom is something that we should respect as a myth but beware of as a reality. Mussolini said "Every anarchist is a baffled dictator." There is perhaps some truth in that. Are not the stars of this postmodern film personifications of freedom gone wrong? Were they not free to live out their darkest fantasies with no consequences?
Passolini's sado-masochistic film Salo also comes to mind, where at one point the sadists say, "The true anarchist is the fascist, because true freedom comes only from power."
An intriguing current in cyber-politics has arisen from these lines of thinking. Moldbuggian neoreachtionarism has arisen from counter-intuitive roots: voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. Neoreactionism is a high-tech, Silicon-Valley based brand of techno-fascism pushed by nerd-blogger Mencious Moldbug and Google engineer Justine Tunney. Tunney touts herself as an Occupy Wall Street activist, but her recent endorsement of Moldbug makes one wonder if she really "gets" OWS or how sincere her motives are for being involved with OWS in the first place.
OWS's triumph was its distinction between the "99%" and the "1%." On Tunney's Twitter page she has a picture of her holding a sign that says "Give Class War @ Chance." Which class does she want to win the war, one must wonder? I like the slogan "we are the 99%" precisely because it creates an "us vs. them." Because we are not the 1%! Some sentimental people have perverted it to be "we are 100%" but I feel this deludes the power of the message.
Power is a finite resource and it must be meted out equally for liberation to be possible. That means some must lose some power/freedom. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with losing my white-male-hetero privilege if it means a more complete liberation in the end. I'm just interested in actually achieving emancipation, and not simply sitting at the cool kid table in the lefty club.
It is incredibly baffling to those less theoretically inclined to decipher the link between vonluntaryism/anarcho-capitalism and neoreactionary techno-fascism. It appears that fascism hegemonically becomes its opposite, unrestrained freedom. Of course this is not new. See the trajectory of Georges Sorel from syndicalist to fascist, or even Mussolini (prominent in the Italian Socialist Party early in his political career) for that matter. What is clear is that radicalism for radicalism's sake is not enough.
Seeing power and freedom as interrelated and from there seeing power as a finite resource that must be distributed with an interest to egalitarianism is a necessary step. A revival of Gramsci is incredibly important in these times. The concepts of praxis and hegemony have taken on renewed relevance. How creepily appropriate that Gramsci was executed by the ultimate left wing traitor, Mussolini.
For all our hope that things will continually get better and better, it is an unfortunate fact that in politics (as in physics) for every action (in the pursuit of emancipatory progress), there is an equal and opposite reaction. The rise of the Nouvelle Droite in France, the participation of Svoboda in the recent Ukrainian revolution and the fascist character of their current regime, the current democratically elected regime in India, and the anti-Bolivarian protests in Venezuela make it clear that those of us on the left have a continuing responsibility to be ever vigilant against all forms of reactionarism and fascism that threaten to undue the progress already done.
Liberation is necessary before any kind of liberty can be pronounced. One can declare a space a Beyian "Temporary Autonomous Zone," but until we have a society where the autonomy of all is respected, it is premature to declare universal freedom.
Dare to struggle! Dare to win!
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