Because I’m really baffled about why more people aren’t trying? Where is our modern Love and Rage, or Movement For A New Society, or whatever else?

This isn’t rhetorical, I actually feel out of the loop and would love for someone to tell me where those discussions are at right now.

Where do you stand?

That is the question that we should be asking, constantly. The refrain. The invitation.

At this point, the stakes are so clear, the realities are so stark, the trajectory is so predictable that it is no longer truly a matter of debate about what is happening in our world. It is known. We know it. And we know, quite clearly now, that those who continue to express doubt about naming it have a vested interest in the confusion. The deniers are now caricatures of themselves. There is no going back from that. It is now common knowledge.

There is a millenia long war going on, and it’s now not even happening too slowly to notice it. It’s rocketing along. It is a war against almost all of us. It’s a war with ever multiplying targets. Like I said, we know this. It’s so well known that it’s boring.

So then it’s simple. Where do you stand? What are you doing? How are you going to contribute to ending the war? That should be the question. That should be as basic a getting to know you question as “what’s your sign?” or “what’s your favorite type of music.” Because the war is more constant than the weather. It’s not an “are you political?” thing. That would be acting like this is about opinions. This isn’t about opinions. It’s not an opinion where our water is going. It’s not an opinion who makes my stuff, and what it costs them. It’s not an opinion that each day not fighting is a day that they are consolidating power. And it’s not an opinion that there is a “they.” There is. They know it, and so do we.

So where do you stand? Everyone has an answer, whether implicit or no, and so everyone should be asked it. Because it’s going to take quite nearly everyone to turn this thing around.

I know that where I stand shifts. I know that I waver, I wobble. We do this a lot. I can live with that, and I will. But still, I know where I stand.

There is now no doubt that this thing is broken. Where do you stand on trying to help get it fixed?

Oops…now I remember why I didn’t ever post this! I thought it was too ableist to frame everything around “standing.” I’m going to ponder this a bit and maybe edit it or take it down. Hope you don’t mind seeing me in process.

Democracy Now has been doing a fantastic job of covering this story, so I don’t have much to say here except this: this has nothing to do with simple court disputes, and everything to do with Guatemala’s military oligarchy. How dare those poor blanket wearing Indians try to take down an ex-president and general–and potentially even the current president. How dare that uppity female judge actually lay down a conviction and then order additional investigations. The masters of Guatemala wouldn’t have it, and what they want, they get. For now, at least.

But this won’t go away so easily. That case, that trial, that conviction…all of it was hard-won by resilient people. They will not give up, and I doubt now that President Otto Perez Molina will get away so unscathed next time. Movements may take time, but they do move. Someday, oh someday, Guatemala will have its spring again. And justice will come, if not with courts, then with torches.

I don’t write too much about the ups and downs of my marriage, and related issues of masculinity in relationships, because I don’t quite trust the audience. I think there are still a few people out there who doubt my relationship or who would be a little too satisfied to take in that vulnerability, and even imagining that deters me from sharing (if you imagine that I’m talking about you, you’re actually probably wrong). I wish I could, though, because long-time relationships offer amazing food for thought…and I am disturbed by the power of gendered divisions of labor in my life.

I don’t write about my family very much, because that’s family business and it needs to be handled there first. If I don’t have the strength or energy to bring my analysis up directly with them, then I’m not going to share it with the world here first.

I don’t write about sexual assault and community accountability in activist communities, even though it’s been a huge part of my work in activism, and I think about it quite a bit. I don’t talk about it because that topic–in my view–is the number one way to destabilize movements and I don’t take that lightly, so I prefer to keep those conversations face-to-face. However, my close people know that I have A LOT to say about it.

I don’t write about all the ways I screw up with my family in Guatemala because it shames and embarrasses me…which is probably why it’s time to write about it.

I don’t write about topic __________ because I just am not making the time I should for it.

Say, have you ever read this book? The Ecology of Everyday Life by Chaia Heller? If not, you should go get it. For me, it was one of the more brilliant and creative pieces of theory to come out of the global justice movement period, and I thought it marked a high point for both the eco-feminist and social ecology arms of anti-authoritarian politics. Sadly, I think it was greatly under-appreciated and missed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Heller’s book referenced anywhere, especially in the last 5-10 years. Have you?

This would actually be a great book to do a reading group about, if anyone’s looking for something. I remember loving it and devouring it in a night.

Actually, why isn’t there more discussion of eco-feminism generally? Books like Greta Gaard’s Ecological Politics and Ecofemism: Women, Animals, Nature had huge influences on me in the early 2000′s, and they don’t seem to get any love or references anymore. Big mistake, because a ton of that thinking still holds up and it’s so, so rich.

Chris Crass’ Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy speaks to precisely the sentiments I expressed about anarchism in my previous post, and reinvigorates and validates just so many of the things that I have come to believe about winning social change for the long-haul. There are a number of elements I’ll hope to come back to in future posts, but for now I just feel fortunate to find this book right now. Yay!

And then we don’t even talk about anarchism again until some other smashy media spectacle months or years from now. Cue my responses one more time.

So, why am I an anarchist, then, if I don’t see myself at all in the current public face of anarchism? Why do I settle for just being an apologist for what I believe are losing tactics? What am I getting out of this, anyway? When is it time to cut the cord, and grow up from a philosophy that tends to always skew to the younger set? Why do I keep sitting at the anarchist table, when so many other bigger kids have changed seats?

It’s pretty remarkable how quickly my answer comes, and how simple it is. Because anarchism is my philosophy. That’s it. To say anything different would be an opportunistic lie.

I believe in this thing, in this idea. The core beliefs of anarchism–of social anarchism, of anti-authoritarian anti-capitalism, of libertarian communism–still guide and inspire me. Anarchism’s basic analysis of power still holds strong for understanding both the travesties and opportunities of society. The anarchist legacy–flawed though it is–of the Spanish revolution, of the First International, of Emma Goldman, the IWW, of Dorothy Day, of Gustav Landauer and Peter Kropotkin, is a legacy that I am proud to be a part of. For me to try and change the name while keeping the ideas is just playing into baiting and historical forgetting. For me to dump the ideals all together would just be betrayal of who I am. Seriously, what else do I want to claim to be? A Democrat? Some vague progressive? A plain vanilla socialist? None of these come close to the richness that I find in anarchism’s potential…a potential that still remains dormant in the 21st century.

Nope, I’m not going to give up on the word. I’m certainly not going to abandon it to the whims of whatever insurrectionists or smashy-types who want to throw it around. They can go ahead and keeping working with the word, too, because…yeah…all that hooligan stuff is part of the historical tradition as well (including that legacy that I mentioned above). I’m sticking around with anarchism in spite of the elitist crusties and all the the security-culture let’s-make-everyone-else-less-secures, not because of them; but at the same time, I’m not too scared of guilt by association.

But if I’m gonna stick with the word anarchism, I can’t just keep being an occasional apologist for what I see as crappy manifestations of it. I…better say we…we’ve got to go public with an actually different position, a reason why we keep siding with anarchism despite such tactically bankrupt nonsensery. If anarchism is something more than the same old bricks and windows, simplistic chants, and shallow promises of immediate revolutionary gratification–then what is that something else, and how do we let it manifest itself now? What are the other options?

Please don’t tell me that the only other option is the quiet, reluctant example of all those thousands of “mature” anarchists who are doing indispensable work on the reformist and non-profit sidelines. Yeah, yeah, I know about all them because I’m one of them–but that can’t be our great anarchist alternative to the street fighting. “We’re anarchists: we do liberals’ work even more energetically and effectively than them, but we sure have a mighty fine self-critique while we do it.” C’mon, can’t we do better?

No. My kind of anarchists, the anarchists who–in my opinion–really take winning seriously, need to start getting more public. More groups. More literature. More interventions in pop culture…and more toe-to-toe interventions with the smashy-kids to share some of our experience–as condescending as that sounds, and is.

Easier said than done, sure. And sure I’ve said this dozens of times before. Okay, what’s next, then, Jeremy the Grouch?

However, sometimes I just can’t bring myself to sing the original versions of those songs, so I retool them to match my values a bit more. A favorite example:

Silent night, hopeful night,
All is calm, the future is bright.
Proud young anarchist father and child,
Precocious infant, tender, yet wild.
Dreaming of justice and peace,
Working for justice and peace.

Each time, for about the last month or so, I get to enter the house and see my daughter’s masterwork. I get to see the joyful product of her newest, most dedicated hobby.

You see, my daughter is a radical librarian. And a damned systematic one, at that.

Pretty much each morning, afternoon, and evening, she race crawls into the living room, grips our bookshelf and lifts herself up, then proceeds to pull my books from their homes one, by one, by one. We put them back, she crawls back and does her work again. She will not be deterred.

—-

I think about those books today, and their soggy corners from all the chewing and slobber…and I can’t stop thinking about the news.

—

Guatemala. The historic, heroic trial of the dictator Efrian Rios Montt–the architect of the worst of the Guatemalan genocides in 1982-3. Just before damning testimony will be shared about the current president, Otto Perez Molina, and his involvement in the genocides as a young officer…the trial is annulled. There is video of those days, when his code name was Major Tito. He is standing over the bodies of some radical peasants. Their skin is dark brown, like Glendi’s brothers. Her dad.

The peasants had radical books on them. Like mine. They were killed.

—

Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Today. FBI agents in Hawaiian shirts are visiting activist houses. Not so subtle intimidation before May Day. They even visit Left Bank books, where so many of these books–now on the floor–once came from. Where so many times I thought about which titles would be most useful for building a revolution.

–

All the death and all the fear of so many generations who have struggled for a different world than this one. So many legacies are in those pages, now squeezed between those craggy, tooth-pocked gums of my baby. How many people have had to hide, or burn, or justify their possession of those books I come home to? How many comrades in danger, or shock, just because they happen to be more active than I am?

If, one day, my daughter chooses to agree with what those books are about? And she chooses to act?

Will she be safe?

Will she remain undeterred?

I just found part 2 in my drafts folder. It’s got some interesting stuff that shouldn’t just be forgotten. Here it is.Part 1 focused on lessons around handling conflict. Part 2 is focused on addressing oppression, and then the final part is about improving revolutionary praxis. Like I said in the first part of this series, these are my thoughts as I got them down on the page, and I reserve the right to change them, add to them, and delete them as I feel more clarity.

ADDRESSING OPPRESSION (this is focused on how revolutionary organizations address oppressive dynamics and try to build a liberated culture internally…questions of addressing oppression on the larger scale will be taken up in the next part)

Have a holistic, intersectional perspective. My own political trajectory has taken me all over the map about how I theorize oppression, and whether I think there are core oppressions or linchpin systems or anything. And although I feel fewer and fewer comrades at my side about this, as so many of them move toward more materialist perspectives, I still remain unconvinced that oppression has only one source, one foundation, or one weak point (such as class struggle, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.).

People are complex, our relationships are complex, and that means our social systems–and the dynamics of hierarchy and oppression underlying them–are complex. It makes perfect sense for radicals to seek out powerful, and efficient means of understanding these systems in order to identify priority areas, and I do think there are priority areas, but in the end I believe that revolutionary organizations are best served by a perspective that acknowledges and seeks to address–at least at the personal level–the ways that power and oppression manifest across all differences of identity and experience. That is, I think organizations should work from a holistic perspective that believes that all forms of oppression need to be addressed simultaneously–even if there are sometimes strategic priorities within that work.

I don’t say this because I believe all struggles are equal in their revolutionary potential, but rather because all forms of oppression actively live, grow, and do their damage within each of us, and we need to build organizations and a revolutionary culture that can hold us and help us heal and grow from where we’re at and what we’re feeling. We need organizations that can see us as whole people, which means we need organizations that can deeply understand the complexity of what keeps us boxed in.

Be clear about how huge and insidious oppressive systems are, in the world and within each of us. This one is pretty straightforward. Oppressions run deep, and the infrastructure that sustains them is ridiculously large and resourceful. We have to be honest with ourselves: this is a long struggle, and there are no magical shortcuts. Even those with an insurrectionist perspective need to recognize this. We will not experience total liberation in our lifetimes, and probably neither will the next few generations. Instead, we will have periods of progress and setbacks, and we will consistently push up against the limits of how fast society can move, and how much personal change is possible over the course of our lives. Within our organizations this means…

It’s important to expect and offer personal accompaniment, but it’s a trap to expect and offer personal liberation. There can be a real cheerleading element to revolutionary work, where, in an effort to stave off feelings of desperation and futility in the face of an overwhelming enemy, we rah rah about will, and transformation, and living completely new lives. This hopefulness is essential–because I do believe that social transformation is possible if we’re able to hold it as a vision–but it can also shoot us in the foot.

Revolutionary organizations–and larger social movements–cannot deliver total personal liberation, and often our cheerleading to the contrary causes us big problems. I would bet that thousands of potential organizers pass by the radical left each year because of the disconnect they see between our lofty promises and ideals and our less-than-stellar, very human realities. People get frustrated when we can’t solve their problems in timely ways, and especially when they see that our organizations and movements can’t alleviate the pain of living in this society.

What we can and should do as organizations is be present with people, and accompany them in their struggles. If a person is abused, downsized, evicted we can’t always win the fight, but we can be there fighting with them, and then–and this is critically important–we can still be there the next day as their comrades and community members. That presence, that essential solidarity is less fancy than the poetry of “build total liberation now,” but it’s far more lasting when things get hard in the movement.

Also, as people within a thoroughly messed up society, we are individually thoroughly messed up. We have weird hangups, prejudices, triggers, desires and compulsions that have evolved out of our daily practices while trying to get by in this world. These are deep within us, and we have to be patient with ourselves and each other as our perfectly clean and clear radical ideals crush up against our dirty and weird realities. That contradiction, and our presence and growth within in it, are the struggle.

Our lives don’t fit in their boxes, so our organizations shouldn’t be boxy. Okay, so our society is constructed around systems of oppression and exploitation that create social dichotomies and then box us into identities based on those dichotomies. At the same time, we know that society’s identity boxes don’t match who we actually are. They are social constructions, which often have been imposed on us through force.

So, if we are seeking to create something new, our organizations are not served by structuring ourselves around those same boxy identity forms that never fit us in the first place. Separatist groups, people of color or white only groups, women only spaces, or other identity based formations that key off of identities that the system made for us are not lasting formations. Sure, they are potentially very important for specific functions and caucus type spaces in order to make space to build skills and consciousness without the disruptive presence of privileged people’s defensiveness or entitlement. That makes sense. But in the end, the movement has to be multiracial–race being a social invention after all–intergenerational, multi-gender, accessible, and even cross class in the sense of multiple layers and cultures within all the non-owning classes.

I believe that building a winning movement means working with each other across identity, seeing and feeling commonality, and even holding each other’s pain–even if we feel that it’s coming from a more “privileged” place than our own.

We are who shows up, and we work from there. There are times when groups have a majority of one or another identity, and if that identity is more on the privileged side of things, then groups can sort of freeze up into this, “if we don’t get more diverse than we can’t do anything.” This is garbage, and it often only leads to either navel-gazing or awkward “diversity recruiting” drives. No thanks.

Instead, when groups gather, they should acknowledge who’s there, honor who’s there, and then have honest conversations about how best to move the group’s work forward. If the group happens to be majority white, for example, that doesn’t mean that the group doesn’t have legitimacy until it meets some quota or something…it still has the potential to do fantastic work. However, the group does need to recognize the dynamics of being majority white, understand why that might be, recognize what unique responsibilities and perspectives such a formation might have, and realize that in the end the group will probably have to dissolve into a larger multiracial organizational form rather than ever having the possibility of recruiting people of color into its existing form. Sure, sometimes groups do need to just dissolve and start from scratch if they are incapable of authentically and respectfully participating in community struggles because of their makeup…but I think the pattern of groups just stopping and starting around purely demographic issues is often a waste of time.

Avoid formulaic and linear conceptions of leadership. This is where my original draft stopped, and I can’t remember what I wanted to say here. Knowing what I think about this topic, I imagine that I wanted to talk about how organizations have many vital tasks to do, some of which are more celebrated than others. Within a group, members have a wide variety of strengths, skills, and interests. These all offer different forms of leadership, many of which are unacknowledged because they aren’t public. This is a classic feminist argument and I don’t need to go deeply into it, but…

The multiple forms and strands that leadership can take in groups can really help a group explode in creative directions if it is nurtured in the right way. Now, if only I remembered all my original thinking about this point!

All the other great reflections I forgot to write down. I can’t remember the specifics, but I know that I wanted to talk more about some of the specifics of personal improvement work vs. public political work. I wanted to talk about specific ways that oppression and superiority get internalized and play out in groups. I wanted to specifically talk about addressing oppressive dynamics in groups. I didn’t get any of that written down. That’s a shame. Right now it’s a school night so I certainly don’t have the energy to remember all this stuff…but here’s hoping that I come back and add more reflections in time.