I am a communist, and an anarchist, and – despite the fact that I have not the slightest hint of belief in God – a Catholic. There are some, I’m sure, who find the last particularly worthy of ridicule or contempt, but so be it. And many who will wonder at how I identify as both communist and anarchist at once, some simply puzzled and some presuming this must be indicative of a failure to understand what either term really means. Again, so be it.
This post is not ultimately not about me. But as I think about political engagement, resistance, the incredible risings across the Middle East and North Africa, the re-igniting of labour’s spark in Wisconsin, and recent conversations fireside with friends from a wide range of communities and associated great breadth of political struggles, I can’t help but reflect upon my own identity as a radical, where it comes from and where it finds me now. But for now, I am thinking about the human relationships of struggle, and how hard it sometimes is, for those of us whose lives are largely defined by our political struggles, to distinguish bonds of love and respect among our friends from bonds of alliance and support in our politics. Or, to frame it from the other end, how common it is for what we believed were friendships and loves to go up in smoke because in a particular moment a particular political or strategic disagreement seems insurmountable, seems a symbol of profound betrayal.
Make no mistake – political values are crucial to relationships as far as I’m concerned, and I have many times found myself less interested in maintaining or building a friendship if some core principle is at odds. And, being such an intensely political creature, sometimes very specific moments in struggle or seemingly-minute details of analysis take on the weight of fundamental principles. However, more often, I think, it is possible to recognize where a disagreement is a disagreement and where a disagreement is really about a fundamentally competing values system. And increasingly, I am finding myself paying more attention to core values than the politics espoused. I am less impressed by the talk and more interested in the walk – and by ‘the walk’ I mean such basics as respectful interaction with others, generosity in kind and generosity of spirit, forgiveness and gentleness with our own failings and those of our friends and comrades. I am not nearly so impressed, these days, by boisterous defenses of this that or the other as I am by the intangibles – kindness, care, welcoming.
Oh, I like a good argument as much as the next guy – how could I not, coming out of both the radical left and academia? There’s nothing better than a loud argument at the WISE, with folks drinking together and laughing together and battling over this or that theorist, this or that strategic possibility, this or that way of moving a struggle forward. That’s fun. One of the best kinds of fun, as far as I’m concerned. But those arguments are fun precisely because of the trust and care involved, precisely because everyone at that table knows that everyone else is part of the same movement, part of our community, a person deserving of respect and trust. Ever had one of those battles with someone aggressive or condescending or contemptuous? Not nearly as much fun at all.
There are issues of core human values that we on the left talk about alot, that we toss around in our language and our organizational process. But all too often those values become the first thing out the door when some kind of disagreement or dispute arises. Quickly we rush to re-draw the boundaries of our community, to re-write the history of the argument, to re-frame every action ever taken by the person on the opposing side, all in order to write them out of the “the movement”, “the community”, “OUR left” so as to maintain some kind of ideological purity. Yes, the Left may have a monopoly on obnoxiously introducing the concept of “Othering” into general conversation, but the tendency to Othering is pretty damn universal, and rarely does a day go by that I don’t see it in our community; and, in a moment of self-reflection, I know that I myself play that game not infrequently. So I gotta work on it.
It’s a funny thing, community-building. It is a process of exclusion as much as it is of inclusion, neither of those terms having any meaning without the other. Who “we” are always involves who “we” are not, and who is not “us”. And I am not so naive as to believe that’s ever going to change. In fact, I don’t think we’d even ever want that to change – exclusions are important to our identity as individuals and our identity as groups, and those boundaries of who is part of various communities are hugely important for making sense of the world and hugely important for organizing politically. They are, however, critically dangerous as political acts, fracturing movements, de-railing coalitions, and actually doing real damage to ourselves as individuals and as groups ostensibly inspired by greater freedom, greater equality, greater respect.
No great insight here today. But it is what I am thinking of, and sometimes I just gotta come here to jot down what I’m thinking. The boundary between political struggle as anti-capitalists anti-racists, activists anarchists socialists feminists – whatever it is we call ourselves – and struggle as community-builders neighbours friends parents children human beings: these are very different things. We universalize the struggles of our own political identities as struggles of the common good – and so we obviously believe they are, or we wouldn’t adopt such identities. But in doing so, we lose the ability to see where our political boundaries end and basic human solidarity begins. That’s a blurry area, I think. And one that deserves to have a light shone upon it now and then, not to forever eliminate that boundary, but at least to keep us mindful, make us a little more wary of pronouncements, a little more gentle on ourselves and others, reminded a little more often that mostly, whoever else we are, we are just people muddling through, trying to make sense of a social order too large and too complex and too fractured to ever fully understand, and mostly hoping for the same things in life – some friends to laugh with and share our stories, the safety of our families and loved ones, places to cry when we need do, the knowledge that our friends and families will let us make mistakes sometimes, decent sex, some reasonable combination of work and play, good food, clean water, clear air, communities in which we get along with our neighbours and help each other out in a jam. Not at all a revolutionary program. But a human program. And I expect a damn-near universal program. Hmm…on second thought, perhaps a profoundly revolutionary program after all.
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