Tag Archives: combat liberalism

gay wrath, revolution

the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state

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As the U.S. President and other members of his administration say aloud that they will ignore court orders that disagree with their actions just as steadfastly as they will ignore legislators’ objections, there’s more and more talk about “the rule of law” and a “constitutional crisis”. That may, for certain purposes, be a reasonable account of what’s happening within the state, but it’s useless as a lens for looking at what’s happening in the country – that is, on the expanse of stolen land that the U.S. state rules. In fact, it is a way of actively avoiding dealing with what is going on in any way that can inform strategic or tactical thinking about how to resist.

Again and again, over the past five years of uprisings and discontent, we’ve seen progressive and radical groups (especially, but not exclusively, 501c corporations) and prominent movement figures fall back on two core strategies for responding to the far right.

One is elections: either backing the Democratic Party as a whole, as it moves steadily from the right to the far right1, or backing liberal candidates within it, who are uniformly marginalized, attacked, and defanged by the party leadership even as their presence legitimizes that leadership. It would be nice if that approach’s abject failure to win any material victories over the past decade discredited it, but given that its abject failure over the previous four decades didn’t, we can’t count on that.

The other is lex ex machina – intervention by the courts. That alleged strategy is based on the idea that legal decisions command a moral force that cannot be countered (which every U.S. justice movement’s history disproves), or that they are fundamentally self-enforcing magic words that control the state.

On the practical side, Andrew Jackson pointed out the problem with that last position back when the U.S. Supreme Court tried to restrict the State of Georgia’s authority over the Cherokee Nation. “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” is the way Horace Greeley imagined him phrasing it; Old Hickory himself just called the decision “still born” (and in practice embraced, rather than rejecting, the court’s guidance on how exactly to go about committing genocide). But the problem for movement strategy isn’t the practical side, it’s the ideological underpinnings that let so many radicals who know that punchline continue to act as if they’ve never heard any such thing.

There is no such thing as a government of laws. There is no such thing as the rule of law. Laws are words on paper (or graven in stone, or incised on clay tablets, or preserved as digital 1s and 0s). They do not rule, they do not govern, any more than the Statue of Liberty does, or a pothole on I-95, or any other inanimate object.

States are made of people, say the state-preservationists of the left, and they’re correct. There’s even a grain of partial truth in their fantasy that this makes the state as a structure infinitely malleable. Laws are products of the state – of specific people within its structures – but what being a state means is that the people who act in its name decide what concrete effects its laws will have. The state is a specific kind of structure, and a key part of that specificity is the discretion that its agents hold.

We see this every day.

Continue reading the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state →
revolution

“late capitalism”

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this is just a very brief and very overdue rant, because.

“late capitalism” is bullshit. it’s a meaningless phrase that exists only to pretend that the leninist theology of a Guaranteed Path To Salvation Revolution is real. which, as the past century of the abject failure of leninism (with or without other names added to it*) to create any form of socialism anywhere except in its own press releases shows, is patent garbage.

capitalism does indeed look different, and function rather differently, today than it did fifty years ago, or a hundred, or a hundred-fifty, or back when it emerged a few centuries ago. there are quite a few excellent books analyzing those shifts: personally, i like the Monthly Review gang’s analysis of the mid/late 20th century (braverman, sweezey, and magdoff being the Big Names), rosa luxemburg’s analysis of the previous turn-of-the-century period, cedric robinson’s analysis for the whole arc, and the johnson-forrest/Facing Reality circle’s analysis for many different periods (c.l.r. james, grace lee & james boggs, etc).

but the only reason to call any of these modes of capitalism “late” is a teleological fortune-telling fantasy, which has been a massive obstacle to actual strategizing for over 150 years. it was dumb and wrong when marx did it. it was dumb and wrong when lenin did it. it was dumb and wrong when trotsky, stalin, mao, castro, che, and anyone else you care to name did it. it’s dumb and wrong when people do it now.

stuart hall was talking about the desperate need for “a marxism without guarantees” forty-two years ago. it’s disheartening to hear people – even people who align themselves with hall and his thinking; even people who aren’t marxists at all – still using language that exists only to insist on the fiction of a guarantee.

“contemporary capitalism” is right there. it’s specific, and it’s accurate. “late capitalism” tips your hand that you haven’t actually thought about political economy, whether you’ve managed that by just not doing it, or by internalizing leninist theology instead.

you can use “late” for capitalism after we’ve defeated it – as in “the late capitalism”. and that time will come more speedily, and more likely in our days, if we don’t reinforce a fantasy of inevitability that inhibits creativity and encourages repeating failed approaches like the ones leninism offers.

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* as a side-note, the leninist way of naming ideological currents is hilarious, and gives away the uncritical reliance on The Authority of the Great Fathers that’s at the heart of that tradition. leninists call themselves “marxists”; trotskyists, stalinists and maoists call themselves “marxist-leninists” or “leninists”; followers of various later apostles (gonzalo, avakian, etc) call themselves “marxist-leninist-maoists” or “maoists”. the actual immediate authority, the one whose orders and whims are being followed unquestioningly, must not be named; instead, followers have to make it clear that they do indeed Know Who His Father Is. (you can fill in your own christian-theology glosses on this; it’s trivially easy, and every one of them is accurate as well as funny)

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, longer writing, yiddish & jewish

dyspepsia

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pepi litman: double entendres, workplace sexual assault, and khazones without theocracy

last summer, Klezcadia hosted the premiere of a new show by the great yiddish singer/scholar jeanette lewicki (no relation, as far as we know), featuring the repertoire of turn-of-the-20th-century yiddish cabaret-chantant singer pepi litman. through jeanette’s efforts over more than a decade of exploration (and those of other singer/scholars like miryem-khaye siegel), litman has become a known name again in the yiddish cultural landscape, especially among queer yiddishists. she remains, however, better known through photos showing off the sharp sartorial style she brought to her onstage menswear – shirt, tails, and top hat; or kapote, hitl, and a hint of peyes – than through the many 78rpm discs that preserve her voice. her yiddish is from the theater and street, not from YIVO or borough park, and its slangy, topical flavor can be very hard to parse even without the scatchiness of century-old grooves, which is part of why jeanette’s work is so important.

a friend asked me what i was so excited about in jeanette’s tour through litman’s repertoire, and i thought i’d write up longer versions of the three things i said, and share them a little more widely, since i think these songs are important and fascinating as well as awesome.

double entendres

first of all, litman’s songs are so inventively filthy!

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revolution, yiddish & jewish

genocide warrants

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any meaningful long-term jewish response to the current acceleration of the zionist genocidal project in palestine is going to need to reckon with the ways that the central texts of the rabbinic (and priestly, and, yes, priestessly) tradition actively and repeatedly call for and celebrate genocide.

i’m talking about the commandment to exterminate the amalekites and steal their land. i’m talking about the physical destruction of the bnei amram’s political opponents – specifically, the group opposed to hereditary theocratic rule whose spokesperson was korakh. i’m talking about the mass killing of the children of mitsraim. i’m talking about the supposedly pre-emptive massacre of 75,810 people (explicitly including children) in ahashevrosh’s empire.

these are genocidal acts – the extermination in whole or part of an identifiable social group, because they are members of that group. and those are just the quickest four to come to my mind. the quickest four large-scale actions, that is: i’m not even bothering to include the countless incitements to genocide, like the one in psalm 137, which begins with weeping by the rivers of babylon and ends with a blessing on those who systematically murder the infant children of peoples defined as “enemy”.

all of these actions (and more) are presented as inherently good. some are divine actions, so their positive character cannot be disputed within a rabbinic/priestly frame. some are the actions (with or without divine assistance) of moses, whose correctness is only slightly more debatable within the rabbinic/priestly tradition. some are explicitly intended to continue into the present, considered as binding positive commandments rather than mythic accounts. some are the basis of celebratory holidays.

they are what comes immediately before and after practically every mythic story that liberal and progressive religious jews love to tell as examples of heroism in the service of justice. the bravery of nakhson and crossing of the sea follows the mass murder of children and leads into the extermination of the bnei amram dynasty’s political opponents. the esther story ends with the slaughter of tens of thousands – not in self-defense, but after the danger had definitively passed. i could go on.

support for genocide is not extractable from a rabbinic/priestly approach to jewishness. it is not a subject of debate within that tradition, except in the sense that some writers pick and choose which genocides and calls for genocide they actively defend and which ones they remain silent about. it is the heart of the “prophetic tradition”, whose heroes constantly call for purification through mass murder – often the mass murder of specific groups of the people they are supposedly trying to save – and when the genocide they call for does not arrive (as in the story of jonah) they are enraged. it is woven through every prayerbook and many rituals, and through commentaries, analyses, and rulings on subjects of all kinds, generally with directly fascist implications (for example, blaming the “erev rav” – the internal diversity of the jewish people – for resistance to the hereditary theocratic rule of the bnei amram).

and it has direct, bloody consequences in the real world. we are seeing them now, as the full spectrum of zionists call for the genocide of palestinians with rhetoric and specific goals drawn from precisely this tradition. pre-emptive mass murder. the slaughter of children. massacres of those who speak against autocracy. wholesale extermination in pursuit of land theft.

after all, zionism, even when some of its advocates claim secularism, is very specifically part of the rabbinic tradition. its only justification for jewish rule in palestine – its defining political project – is the rabbinic canon: the fantasy of a divine land-grant, the fiction of a powerful ancient israelite kingdom, and the rest of the mythology zionism pretends is history come exclusively from those texts.

so it’s no wonder zionism is a movement that makes constant use of the genocidal tools celebrated in the tanakh and its religious tradition. it is pursuing a goal defined in terms taken from that tradition, through a practice modeled on the genocidal conquests the tradition celebrates as steps towards that goal.

if you want to “embrace tradition” through the rabbinic/priestly path advocated by the ‘progressive’ religious sphere – yes, including Kohenet; yes, including Svara – genocide is a pervasive part of what you’re being asked to embrace.

luckily, the rabbinic/priestly tradition is not the only way to be jewish. at the core of the jewish left for the past 150 years – from marrakesh to madras to montréal to melbourne, from buenos aires to baghdad to brooklyn, from istanbul to indianapolis, from tehran to toledo to tetuan – has been a rejection of that tradition as the defining center of jewishness. that is what has made possible a jewish politics of solidarity, a jewish ethics of liberation, a jewish practice of heterogeneity, a jewish radical diasporism – all imperfect, all evolving, but now possible. one no that leads to many yeses (as the zapatista proverb says).

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gay wrath, yiddish & jewish

when the enemy of my enemy is my enemy

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as usual when the israeli state accelerates its ongoing attempted genocide against palestinians, Neturei Karta is getting attention (this time, from what i’ve seen, almost entirely under their publicity label “Torah Jews” as opposed to the usual name of their sect).

which means it’s time to remind people that they are a part of the religious far right, and should not be considered allies to any liberation work. their anti-zionism is not based on any anticolonial vision; it is theological, and even so a matter of disagreeing with the zionist movement about the timing and conditions of the conquest of palestine. NK believes that it should only happen under the auspices of the messiah, whose coming they hope and pray for. when he cleanses the holy land, it’ll be just fine by them.

[edited] they also directly tie their antizionism to their virulent and violent anti-queer politics, as in the NK statement from 2006, below. it is about the jerusalem Pride march scheduled for the next day, but is in response to that summer’s (rather small) pinkwashing World Pride march in jerusalem and the (quite large) queer palestine solidarity march that countered it. both are “perversion”, “desecration”, “evil” in their eyes, and responsible in part for the existence of zionism.

[edited to add] to be clear: this statement is their endorsement of – and promise to follow through on – threats of physical attacks against queer and trans people at Pride, which the previous year had involved the stabbing of three participants, and would escalate to murder during another stabbing spree in 2015. because of those threats, the mainstream (i.e. zionist) march was cancelled in 2006 – which meant that only the pink-and-black bloc of queer and trans radicals (mostly involved in militant palestine solidarity work) took the streets the day after this statement came out. where NK and their friends attacked them, with the support of the israeli police.

the far right has no place in our solidarity work. NK should not be welcomed or celebrated by anyone committed to liberation.

When the fear of the Almighty is Absent All Becomes Permitted

A Neturei Karta Statement on the Parade and Demonstration in Favor of Moral Abominations in Jerusalem

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revolution, yiddish & jewish

from Yidishistn Mit Palestine / Yiddishists With Palestine:

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כּדי אָפּצוגעבן כּבֿוד דעם אָנדענק פֿון די אַלע פֿאַרשניטענע, מוזן מיר אָפּהאַלטן דעם איצטיקן חורבן – النكبة, און שטיצן דעם פּאַלעסטינישן געראַנגל צו באַקומען זײער פֿרײַהײט און צו מאַכן אַ סוף צו דער אַפּאַרטהייט. מיר שרײַבן אױף ייִדיש װײַל מיר גלײבן אין אַ צעבליִענדיקן ייִדישן גלות, פֿרײַ פֿון דעם ציוניזם און אַלע אַנדערע מלוכה-נאַציאָנאַליזמען. מיט דערמעגלעכן דאָס חרובֿ מאַכן פֿון עזה – غزه – קען מען נישט באַװײנען די אומגעקומענע. מיר מוזן פאַרהיטן דעם גענאָציד. פֿאַראײניקט זיך מיט אונדז.

kedey optsugebn koved dem ondenk fun di ale farshnitene, muzn mir ophaltn dem itstikn  khurbn – nakba, un shtitsn dem palestinishn gerangl tsu bakumen zeyer frayheyt un tsu makhn a sof tsu der apartheyt. mir shraybn oyf yidish vayl mir gleybn in a tsebliendikn yiddishn goles, fray fun dem tsionizm un ale andere melukhe-natsionalizmen. mit dermeglekhn dos khorev makhn fun aze – gaza – ken men nisht baveynen di umgekumene.  mir muzn farhitn dem genotsid. fareynikt zikh mit undz.

To honor all the dead, we must stop this next catastrophe. We must struggle alongside Palestinians for their liberation and to end apartheid. We write in Yiddish because we believe in the thriving of a Jewish diaspora free from zionism and all other state nationalisms. Enabling the destruction of Gaza is not a way to grieve. We must interrupt genocide. We must do this together.

Pour honorer tous les morts, nous devons empêcher cette nouvelle catastrophe. Nous devons lutter aux côtés des Palestiniens pour leur libération et pour mettre fin à l’apartheid. Nous écrivons en yiddish parce que nous croyons en l’épanouissement d’une diaspora juive libérée du sionisme et de tous les autres nationalismes d’État. Permettre la destruction de Gaza n’est pas une façon de vivre son deuil. Nous devons interrompre le génocide. Nous devons le faire ensemble.

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.

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revolution

abolition and the state

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this is mostly comment-bait, to see whether the folks looking for spaces off twitter for some of the conversations that happen there are interested in talking here (which i’d like)!

there are exciting conversations happening about whether abolition (of the prison-industrial complex: cops/cameras/courts/cages) necessarily implies opposition to the state as such. (spoiler: it does.)

here are a few of of them:

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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’ →