A strange, sad week.
Am having thoughts about how revolutionaries (and other people interested in direct action or other concrete interventions) need to get ourselves out of a slave mentality in relation to the right wing of the antiwar movement. Some of us go to these big rallies to show visible and offensive defiance to the conservative antiwar lobby, get frustrated by the lack of room to move in such spectacular spaces, and then get demoralised. Some of us avoid going to these big rallies, preferring to work in less coded spaces, but often cede ground to the right in the process, or disappear into the ghettoised social interstices, equating the dubious "need" to communicate to an imaginary "public" with the very necessary task of popular engagement. Both positions have honourable motivations (I've oscillated between them often enough), but I can't help but think that both unconsciously replicate an Oedipal relationship with the movement's (parental) leadership. Obsessing over those who would control us can distract us from the possible. The sometimes violent marshalling of the rallies is very real (on Sunday the leadership hired fuckin' private security to beat people up who stepped the barest fraction out of line), but it's also a trap. Can't we just sidestep the trap of reactivity that lurks behind these issues, and draw lines of flight? Can't we be truly autonomous? (And to make a point that needs underlining in this sometimes overly tribal era, "autonomous" needn't mean separate. Or absent. Or laissez faire.)
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I'm really cut up over leaving, on the weekend, a certain virtual community into which I've made huge emotional investments over the past year. In the middle of my recent thoughts about sidestepping reactivity, it was ironic that the issue that led to my tearful departure was the apparent "narcissism" and childishness of direct action, which seemed obvious to a lot of people there, some of them friends. The actions in San Francisco, in which people have been out in the streets continuously for days in an attempt to shut down the city, are in many ways a beacon of hope for me, a kind of proof that something good in the this world is still possible, that alienated kids organising together can still affect the smooth running of a war society. That people I respect had so much casual contempt for these actions was crushing. But it was the structure of that dismissal, that smug overeagerness (using whatever bankrupt or even protofascist justifications available) to construct oneself as the embodiment of the reasonable citizen, that made me leave. I couldn't stay in such an ethico-political arrangement where these are the standards of behaviour, and I believe that in the case of this community, they ironically are, despite people's best intentions. "Civility" was supposed to be the social lubrication of this place, and to my surprise it often worked, but as in the wider world, this has an unavoidable dark side: the compulsive and often repressive maintenance of our pretense of "civilisation". But this was one of the few places in the world where I could feel okay being vulnerable, and now that's gone. I feel cheated by liberalism. And I miss the friends I have there.
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Listening to: a whole bunch of angsty, broody music. The Manic Street Preachers' Know Your Enemy. Yes, I know they're embarrassing, but I can't listen to shiny R&B pop when I'm this depressed. I need that earnest lack of poise that only bombastic white boys with guitars can deliver.
