Tag Archives: bored now

gay wrath, revolution

on sponteneity

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i wrote this in september 2023, thinking back on the lessons of the previous few years (and of my many more years of movement work). this seems like the moment to put it in the world, incomplete as it is.

one of the left/progressive snarl words of the moment is “spontaneous”. we’re told that our struggles can’t rely on “spontaneity”, on “spontaneous revolts”. we’ve heard this again and again over the past few years. the grassroots mutual aid that sustained many of us and saved untold thousands of lives during the first two years of the pandemic was “too spontaneous” to last. the george floyd uprising’s “sponteneity” was its fatal flaw. that spectre of unreliability is used to push the idea that we should “build organizations” – on a centralized and hierarchical model (choosing only among the basically indistinguishable variations of the vanguard party, the 501(c) corporation, the trade union, and the membership organization) – “not movements”, to use the alinskyites’ phrase for this dogma.

but if we look at the material realities as we all experienced them, while we still have them fairly fresh in our minds, we see a very different picture. “spontaneity”, in the 2020s as always, is a fiction. what’s being decried, dismissed, and declared useless are projects that are or were self-organized and self-managed by the people participating in them. every one of them drew on deep experience (whether shared by people involved or through lessons passed on in a variety of ways) to plan its work and develop the structures its participants felt it needed based on the context where they were working. none of this came out of thin air in an instant – that’s a fantasy projected by people who cannot imagine anything happening without Someone In Charge except by some form of incomprehensible magic.

“spontaneity” is what you call self-organization and self-management if you’re against it.

what limited the success and sustainability of these projects was precisely the intervention of the organizations and people now putting the blame on “spontaneity”. rather than redirecting material resources into self-organized mutual aid structures, they created shoddy copies that they could tell their funders were “scalable”, or offered supposed support that in practice put them in control, or persuaded people to adopt their models of work. rather than find concrete ways to strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of increasingly militant street actions, they actively worked to make them less militant, promoted “peaceful” and “nonviolent” tactics, intervened physically and in the media to divert people from effective direct action towards symbolic gestures, and steadfastly pushed fantasies of legislation and electoral campaigns as the properly “serious” channels for creating change. predictably, these kinds of poison pills were damaging or deadly.

this same pattern played out over the last sixteen months of work in solidarity with the palestinian resistance, with the same results: opportunistic cooptation and demobilization through wheel-spinning activity, by both 501(c) corporations and vanguard parties. the flattening of tactical and strategic imagination into paths that decades of experience have clearly shown to be ineffectual. hierarchical organizations strengthened at the expense of the movement. and very little critical assessment of the successes and failures of the work.

as we in the u.s. head deeper into an overtly fascist regime’s rule (a meaningful and terrifying change in degree and tone, but not a shift in the state’s structure or priorities) we need to not do this same fucking thing again. our resistance will not – cannot – be effective unless it is self-organized and self-managed by its participants. let’s be spontaneous. together.

criticism, revolution

about Andor: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining

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piss on my leg and tell me it’s piss! how i respond will depend entirely on you, not on piss.

i just watched Andor, and now i’m having thoughts, and even opinions. i knew it was a bad idea. up til now, after a bone-deep enthusiasm that didn’t really last past 1988, i’ve been immune to the siren song of lucasville (aside from the visual design, which always looks great and makes no fucking material sense of any kind).

i know that makes me odd. but let’s get real, here.

Continue reading about Andor: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining →
gendertreyf, Uncategorized

you can’t support both trans liberation and medical ‘expertise’

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i’ve been talking about this for many years now (here, here, here, and even here – rejection emails not included).

but here we go again:

the main structuring fact of so-called trans healthcare is that the exact doctors who trans liberals hold up as “the best” (cohen-kettenis, for instance) have decades-long collaborative relationships with the exact doctors who trans liberals hold up as “the worst” (zucker, for instance). those two, for example, regularly co-author academic and clinical papers, textbook chapters, and such, and have for as long as they’ve been working in the field.

and what these supposedly “good” doctors’ practice (always remember: practice is purpose), especially when it comes to young people, is the same old gatekeeping with shiny liberal rhetoric. wanna get a trans clinic to question whether you should be there? all you need to do is let them find out you’re wearing a kind of underwear that’s marketed to your originally assigned gender group! (this recent example taken from one of the “best” clinics in the u.s.)

Continue reading you can’t support both trans liberation and medical ‘expertise’ →
gay wrath, revolution

when you say what the right says, you are the right

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i’m always impressed at how often, and how consistently, liberals & progressives repeat right-wing marketing rhetoric as if it were not just true, but self-evident.

lately, i feel like i’ve heard these floating around (all bullshit invented in the late 1900s, some of it in my lifetime):

– the right (or, sometimes, the far right) “moved from the margins to the center” between the 1960s and the 2000s. just absolute crap: if there’s one constant in u.s. politics since 1776, it’s the depth of white (especially wealthy white) support for the overtly white nationalist far right, which has never been separate from the rest of the u.s. right in anything but aesthetics.

– the right used to have an intellectually rigorous, morally grounded wing that kept its less respectable side in check. bill buckley’s patrician accent doesn’t make what he said, wrote, believed, and advocated – and who he was allied with – any different from what you’re hearing from any other rabid death-cultist, from calhoun to cohn to roof.

– the democratic party is in some way affiliated with the left. the least-justified fantasy since the faeries at the bottom of arthur conan doyle’s garden. perhaps such an alliance could could have been made at the 1964 democratic party convention, if it hadn’t refused to seat the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. it says everything you need to know that in ’68, when a not-lily-white delegation was seated, it no longer claimed to represent “freedom”: it was the “Loyal Democrats”. that loyalty – still driving electoral progressives near you! – is part of why we do need a name for identifying with people who are actively trying to kill you instead of folks trying to keep you alive (“stockholm syndrome” is a misogynist lie invented to curb criticism of the police).

– the “elites” of our society are media workers and the professoriate (who’re supposedly liberal: also generally a lie), not the people with actual economic and political power (including the ones who own media corporations and control universities).

it’s more disappointing (if less common) for folks who’re actual radicals to do this, of course. in that zone, the one i see coming up all the time lately is this:

– the right, or the far right, or some parts of the right, are “anti-state”. now, there is a small slice of the libertarian right that might in fact oppose state structures as such. but most libertarians, and all neocons, paleocons, and other rightwingers who use an “anti-government” rhetoric base their whole political program on the existence of the state. some don’t want the current state, based on the slaveowners’ constitution of 1787, but all of them are aiming to maintain, and to control, a hierarchical, centralized, territorial structure of rule that legitimizes violence (by its agents, its supporters, and at times others) in service of its policies. you can tell because they want borders, they want enforced order, and they want “free enterprise” to be “protected”. that, my friends, is a description of a state and its policies, not of an “anti-state” position.

aside from making me annoyed, when liberals, progressives, and radicals parrot these various lines of bullshit, it strengthens the right. it turns their lies into “common sense”. and it makes them harder to fight. don’t do it. talk with your friends who do. and treat any analysis based on this junk as what it is: a right-wing analysis that supports and assists the right, even – especially – when it comes from liberals & progressives.

revolution, yiddish & jewish

what isn’t antisemitism (more to come)

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i’ll expand on this sometime soon, but here’s a start, since it’s been on my mind for the past few days:

antisemitism is a specific political movement. it was one of the many innovations of 19th-century european nationalism (looking at nationalism as an overarching political movement with many nation-defining branches), and is alive and well and living all over world. it has a specific history, and a specific ideology.

all anti-jewish bigotry is not antisemitism.

all structural anti-jewish oppression is not antisemitism.

much of it is garden-variety christian supremacism, of a type most closely related to the kind directed against muslims. much of it is garden-variety xenophobia, in north america generally of a type most closely related to the kind directed against (some) asian communities. some of it is a now slightly antiquated type of white supremacism. (and all of it is inseparable from colonialism and misogyny.)

calling it all “antisemitism” is like calling all racism “white nationalism” (articulating that key distinction is one of the solid pieces of analysis eric ward has done, alongside giving progressive NGO cover to his far-right buddies at the ADL). it makes for muddled analysis, drains useful words of their meaning, and (worst of all) gets in the way of effectively fighting antisemitism, christian supremacism, xenophobia, and white supremacy.

longer writing
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just temporarily putting these here so i can write what i’m supposed to be writing today without them getting in the way.

(1) the main thing wrong (politically/ethically; morality is just dishonest theology) with andrea long chu (as a thinker/writer; i don’t know her any other way) is that she’s a heideggerian (this needs a two-part parenthetical too; yes, i’m a bit compulsive today).

(2) the relationship between the terms in marxism-leninism is the same as the one in judeo-christianity, and serves basically the same purposes.

these are unrelated thoughts, for which fact i am grateful.