I am seriously considering that am I never going to say the word "politics" again.
There are many good, specific, accurate and insightful terms to use to discuss socioeconomic and institutional criticisms. But "politics" these days is a pejorative. It's just what people who think the status quo of neoliberal capitalism is inevitable like to label any criticisms of that status quo. It's the label that dominant groups and the ruling class apply to inconvenient criticisms about themselves. "Don't get political." "Let's keep this civil." You're all heard it before. At dinner tables, board meetings, golf clubs. Well, I don't think I've ever been to a golf club. Not my scene. But I have an imagination.
Were you seriously expecting me to say anything about the election? I'll say this... "I REJECT OUR NEW NEOLIBERAL OVERLORDS."
I also think you should go back and read some of my earlier posts. But, strictly for the benefit of anyone not in the mood to binge on this blog, I do have SOME things to say.
I have already come up with cute names. Harris is "Top Cop Kamala." Biden is "Crime Bill Joe." Some of us have what Utah Phillips called "The Long Memory." We don't forgive, we don't forget... until there are reparations. Until there is justice. That's not going to happen because "somebody who isn't Trump" is president.
The Democratic Party had an opportunity to stand for something other than Not Being The Party of Trump. They blew it. Now they are already blaming Black Lives Matter and "socialism" for their losses. Even Democrats who won in their districts, because dishonest political ads by Republicans tarnished them as "socialists" who supported "defunding or abolishing police," are blaming BLM and socialism for other Democrats' losses in other districts.
"Politics" is a dismissive pejorative. And it's theatre. It's fluff. It's bad form "debtates" and talking heads. It's red and blue and meaningless pretention. It has nothing to with reality.
A couple months ago I tried an experiment. I decided I would never talk about Donald Trump unless someone else brought him up. I figured that liberals would do it. Which of course they did, any time I articulated a general critique of the status quo before Trump, they deflected to talking about Trump. They couldn't conceive of anything being wrong with our political system or our socioeconomic order. Of course, they would pay lip service to that conception. But all they wanted to do in practice was blame the guy on top. It's not a very nuanced critique. So I purposefully didn't bring him up in conversation for months, I just waited for liberals to do it, so I could point out that there were a lot of problems inherent in the structures and systems that preceded his presidency. It's only now that I break that pattern, to illustrate a point. My experiment worked.
The only good thing about last week, is that liberals can't blame Trump anymore for all the worst aspects of neoliberalism. That's not a defense of the guy, I didn't like him, but I understand his presidency as the culmination of a trend that has escalated over the past several decades. Yes, there is a straight line from the Moral Majority, to the Christian Right, to Trumpism. But there are other tributaries to that river, and just like we can't honestly blame all of society's problems on one person, we also can't, honestly, blame them all on one party. Fascism is merely a "wing" of imperialism. It is capitalism in decay. It's part of the oppression, but not the beginning of it. It maps particularly well onto neoliberalism's outcomes, but the pure, ideological fascists are just one faction in a broader coalition, and even that coalition alone is not solely to blame.
Liberals and Democrats had an opportunity to hold themselves and their own party accountable. They failed. They sunk to the lowest bar possible: "Anybody but him." Now, the architect of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill is President and a top prosecutor who herself not long ago called him out on his opposition to bussing, is Vice President. It seems that Blue Lives Matter is very much alive, despite the upcoming end of the Trump Regime. This is just another regime. And in a way, it's much more honest this way. But I have no faith that Democrats and Liberals will hold themselves accountable. They are already casting the blame left, targeting a lot of people who went along with them because they- we- agreed that Trump had to go.
This is how the Overton Window shifts right. This is how authoritarianism becomes mainstream and basic economic justice becomes mischaracterized as a radical fringe. I don't expect Medicare for All from this administration. But it goes beyond that...
Listen, I'm a fucking social worker in Philadelphia. Every single one of my clients is black. The child welfare system is disproportionate in that way. That's not a Philadelphia problem. The pattern holds in majority-white counties. Black children are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system because institutional racism persists, and that's still going to be a problem under the Biden Regime.
When my black teens go AWOL from their placements and are out past curfew in the middle of the night, I will worry about their safety in a hypothetical police encounter just as much as I would have worried a few weeks ago. These are black kids who have experienced trauma from abuse or neglect, and also from being separated from their families. The cops are more likely to perceive them as older and bigger than they are in reality, and more dangerous. Cops are more likely to be afraid of these kids than white kids or Asian kids. There is extensive research to support this. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are not able or willing to endorse the kind of policies that would make this country safer for my kids. The fact that Kamala Harris is a woman of color has no bearing on this, because neoliberalism does not promote positive social change. It's an illusion and a deflection from the reality. Real change is bottom-up. It doesn't matter who's at the top. I am going to still fear for these kids' safety under the next administration as I do under this one.
And you can't have it "both ways," by smearing me as an "idealist" either. There's nothing ideal about this. I"m being utterly fucking realistic.
I do have hope. But not in political parties. I have hope, not in the State, but in the Public, which is the Enemy of the State. The State is the authoritarian instrument of industrial capitalism. It is the violent and coerceive defense of private property, which is prioritized over human health and safety. The State is a monopoly on coercion. It's not different from any megacorporation. Democrats like to talk about change, and liberals like to talk, in general, and hear themselves talk. Meanwhile, I hate the sound of my own voice. I like to actually see policies that have a real meaningful impact on systemic poverty, systemic racism, systemic patriarchy. And I'm very, very frustrated with a lot of "educated" people who seem to think that these things can be technocratically managed by elite appointees of a ruling class that will never oppose the capitalist system that maintains and reinforces these systemic problems because that would mean opposing their own interests.
I'm not a fool. It's people who think the status quo works out who are the "idealists," and it's the people who think it's just inevitable who are the "pessimists." I am utterly fucking realistic in my analysis and critiques. It doesn't come from some dusty old philosopher. It comes from being a practicing social worker and community organizer.
The other thing- and this needs to be said- I used to be a liberal. Back then, like many liberals, I thought I was a radical leftist. I considered myself a socialist, but I voted Blue No Matter Who and I wasn't connected to a broader Leftist community with an ongoing dialog and dialectic that could have helped me deconstruct my own racial and sexual and class biases and prejudices at an earlier time in my life. I wish I had been like that, then, but I had to grow. People hear me now, they hear my criticisms, and they don't consider that I've not always been this way, that my critiques, at various points in my past, were misdirected and problematic. I used to locate blame in the "other." Republicans. Conservatives. And it's hard for liberals and moderates, increasingly hard, it seems, to consider how leftist criticques don't necessarily replicate that kind of dogmatic and factional blame. And that's why I feel like people only hear half of what I say. They just want me to tell them who to blame, so they can play like they have the moral high ground and make it like I'm the one villifying "Christians" or "Republicans" or whatever, and they are oh-so tolerant because they find common ground with people who think we're both agents of Satan, or evil secularists. They don't listen to the part of my critique where I empathize with people who are being exploited. That includes a lot of white Christians, even though White Christians are a politically dominant and culturally dominant and very wealthy group in the United States who put of a lot of pressure on government to let them impose their views on other people and make things hard for various minorities. I think this movement is a product of capitalist exploitation as much as the existence of an underclass is the product of capitalist exploitation. As a (religious) leftist friend of mine put it recently, "Religion is a market in America," and political parties like the Republicans and increasingly, the Libertarians, exploit that market. People confuse my secularism with "anti-religion," but these people are the ones looking down on religious conservatives as a "scary other" and I'm the one saying that a lot of them are also part of an exploited class.
But you didn't hear all that, did you?
You just want me to lay all the blame on Trump. Or on Republics. Or "Christians." Or "uneducated people." You haven't been listening. Educated people need to hold themselves accountable. Especially educated white liberals. It's not going to be so easy for them to play the moral high ground when the next police murder- and there will be a next one- happens in Biden's America.
So, no, I didn't celebrate last week. I don't fucking care about national elections. Talk to me about socioeconomic issues. We can talk about systemic racism. We can talk about class stratification and why, even though I don't agree with their proposed policy solutions, plenty of conservatives actually have half-decent critiques of the liberal welfare state. Namely, it does keep people poor. I don't think the solution is to take government programs away. I am against means-testing. Look that up.
I'm for abolishing capitalism, and I'm for full wealth redistribution, and that would alleviate most of the socioeconomic and psychological stressors that Americans are constantly acting on and not fully aware of. But don't talk to me about this thing you call "politics." That's not a conversation I want to be a part of. It's misleading at best, and dishonest at worst. There is no such thing as "politics," not in the way you mean it. There is policy, which is real, and there is spectacle, which is theatre. As a social worker and an organizer, I care about public policy. And it is this that made me increasingly consider myself an anarchist these days. I wasn't always an anarchist. I was first a liberal, who thought I was a leftist. Then I was a "social democrat," and later a moderately leftist socialist. Reality kept pushing me Left. Then, the worst socialist organizers I've ever met, who really don't deserve to be called socialists at all (they are really just left-liberals and social democrats) smeared me as an "anarchist" because I had more nuanced critiques of trade unions tan they did, and I associated with the IWW (which is a labor union, and not, I repeat, not an "anarchist organization"). I didn't even consider myself an anarchist then. I did after I allowed myself to be influenced by other organizers, and I found it just seemed right. And a lot of the good organizers I met through Leftism drifted toward Anarchy too, for the same reasons. So it really didn't come from any dogmatic theory, but more as the sum of my experiences as an organizer and a social worker.
So don't talk to me about "politics" unless you want to hear some inconvenient critiques of power. And maybe even of yourself, if it puts you on the defensive. When that happens, it's usually about ego. I believe we all need to hold ourselves accountable. I'm not letting anyone off.
I still consider myself locked in struggle with the very foundations of this racist, patriarchal, heterosexually and religiously supremacist country.
Don't tell me "All Lives Matter." They clearly do not.
Don't tell me "All viewpoints are equal." Some ideas do more harm than others, and some ideas are more just than others.
Don't tell me "It's inevitable," because if I believed that, I'd be mouthing the same bullshit platitudes as the people I'm complaining about. You think it's inevitable. I don't. That doesn't make me an idealist. Don't smear as that. I simply have a more nuanced critique of power structures and institutional systems than you.
And I am saying this for the benefit of anyone reading because I very much do have hope, in people, but not parties. I don't have a horse in the race here. There's no one running on an "anarchist" platform, that's really not how anarchism works. I wouldn't trust anyone who took themselves seriously as an "anarchist candidate" (although some people did well making a joke out of it). Anarchism is about communities organizing themselves. It's not top-down.
Historically, conservative, moderates, liberals, fascists, and many socialists and communists have confused the public with the State. It's a deadly conflation. But anarchists know that the public is the enemy of the State, and the State must be abolished. It's the same thing as abolishing capitalism. Because the State is capitalism's defense by military and police.
You can't ask for a more cogent critique because every other "political" theory conflates the State's interests with the interests of the public, even groups like the Christian Right, who like to pretend they're victims of both, despite all their power. But it's not just about them. It's about all of us, not holding ourselves accountable, but instead casting blame and vilifying a scary "other," a boogieman. For liberal secularists, that's the Religious Right. For the Religious Right, it's everyone else. For a lot of people, for the last four years, it's been "Trumpism." But for me, it's always been Supremacy, whether patriarchal, religious, racist, heteronormative, or anything else you could name- it's all part of global capitalism. In that way, neoliberalism is a far scarier prospect than Trumpism. It will outlast the Right's infatuation with that man and over a longer period of time, will do more harm than he could in 4 years. Actually, it already has, and it will just keep on doing harm.
There never was a status quo. Trying to impose that now is just about holding back the demand for more radical anti-supremacist policies. Neoliberalism will prove just as oppressive as it always was. And because of this- fascism will rise again.
But I still have hope that more people will come to see it that way. They will become "realists" too, and they will cast aside neoliberalism's chains when they learn they have nothing else to lose.
I was not alone in not celebrating last week. But then, I did something that made me feel much better.
I re-registered as an independent and I made a vow never to vote in a presidential election again. I don't even believe in having a president. I made a vow never to be vote-shamed by people with more privilege or less perspective than me. I made a vow to vote only in local elections for city council and possibly mayor if there is a challenger to a neoliberal incumbent or candidate, but I will never vote for a neoliberal again. I will not choose the "lesser of two evils." I will simply not participate in evil. I will be very selective, and I will continue, every other day of the year, to do what I have been doing for years- organizing in communities, building a radical, anti-capitalist movement. Nothing's changed for me. It was never really about Trump.
I really don't think national elections are very important. If you insist on calling this "politics," it doesn't change my point. There are better things to do with your time than vote once a year, or once every four years. There are 365, sometimes 366 days in a year when you can be part of something bigger than yourself. If you still want to vote, that's fine, no one should stand in your way (though, realistically, some communities experience more voter suppression than others). But don't get on your high horse once every four years when I'm in the room. I will shoot that horse and rip you down. Take some accountability for this mess that is America, please. Because we don't have long left before the powder keg explodes again.
"Workers of the World, Unite."