Where did our movements go?
This post talks about some of the internal mistakes we made; throughout my other work on this topic I address what they did. This one is for movement self-reflection.
Where did our movements go?
Every single one of them has failed.
The anti-surveillance movement that got off the ground following the Snowden leak? We now have like 1000x more surveillance, its getting worse every single day, and venture capitalists are currently investing in more weaponized surveillance systems than ever as well as providing more surveillance infrastructure than ever to police, military, and intelligence agencies, and into new levels of foreign conflict.
There has been 0 reduction in surveillance and 0 improvement in privacy and 0 improvement in user rights. No one safer for it.
Diversity in tech? Women in tech? Teach girls to code? The demographics of the industry haven’t changed since the movement picked up momentum more than 10 years ago. Literally. In fact, we have slightly LESS women in the industry than we did before we started all that. None of the education and awareness and DEI departments worked; they may have gotten a few people hired, and a bunch of useless non-profits going, and some people even got Twitter famous. But as far as making the fundamental shifts we had wanted to see out of it all — more user control/ownership, less collaboration with the military and policing formation, meaningful wealth redistribution, democratic and open technology — it didn’t happen.
Even the long, long battle fought over the course of years to get sites like Twitter, CloudFlare, Shopify to drop hate groups from their platforms failed. Twitter is now owned by the richest man in the world, an unhinged psychopath and malignant narcissist actively ramping hate groups back on the platform; CloudFlare recently dropped one site (which was almost immediately back up), and made 0 changes to its overall approach. We haven’t even made any progress on “log off the Nazis”.
#NoTechForICE? I think there was one or two companies that actually dropped ICE as a customer. But those contracts, as well as broader contracts with the intelligence/security agencies and federal government, have only increased; beyond that, venture capitalists are actually turning from contracting into the government and into building an entire military of autonomous vehicles. There was no material change to the pipeline into these agencies. In fact, there’s more than ever.
Defund the police? The police most certainly haven’t been defunded, and in places this has been used as a justification to actually INCREASE police funding. The police continue to kill Black people, people with mental illness, with impunity; prisons have not been reformed, much less abolished. We still do not know what happened to Sandra Bland.
Reproductive rights? 10 years ago we were talking about delivering birth control and hormones to teens with drones, addressing the maternal death rates of this country, working against ongoing forced sterilization, how domestic violence is a reproductive rights issue too. Well, you know where we are with that now: Roe v Wade has very literally been overturned. Great!! This is the most glaring example of how we are far behind where we were an entire decade ago.
The DSA? We have what, a larger street team for the Democrats? We were WAY past that when they took over and watered everything down in more pointless voting. Great. They couldn’t even save Bernie from the Democrats, then turn around and focus on getting them into office? We expect to see results from them sometime in … in the next 40-60 years. Thanks, boys.
Climate change? I don’t want to talk about it. We’re literally simmering in carbon monoxide, half of the animals are dead, as far as I can tell most climate change scientists feel its completely over at that point, that we will all die in a ruined earth. Climate change hero Wynn Bruce self-immolated in protest on Earth Day, in front of the Supreme Court; that should have led to a new invigoration on the Left, but it didn’t.
We have to start being honest with ourselves: That every. Fucking. Single. Thing. That. We. Tried. Was. Eaten.
It disappeared. It went into the black hole of the enemy.
Our resistance hasn’t come anywhere near even holding the dam back. We have made progress in our structural map of the world and how oppression is operating, but that has not translated to structural changes; its arguable whether or not it has produced even interpersonal changes.
I think this is really important for everyone on the left to do:
Take a moment and think about the huge amount of time and effort that has gone into these movements. Think about every single protest… from employee walk-outs at Google to the demonstrations in Oakland for Michael Brown and Eric Garner… the literally 100s of thousands of people who turned up on their streets, often at great risk of police violence. The ones who showed up to vigils all over the country, who cried. Think about every single petition and campaign, from ones to end ICE contracts to demands to local politicians for better schools, protests outside their houses… think about every single meetup, the people who arranged them, hosted them, bought food for them, recruited for them. Think about every teach-in, every conference, thousands on thousands of conferences we showed up at to talk about change and justice; every cocktail hour and fireside chat, every teacher who told the truth in their classroom, every professor who told the truth to their grad students. Think of the Marches on the capital. Think of every single non-profit and all of their employees and all of those people working full time on these problems… think of every single article and book, and every single hashtag that we trended. Think of all the mutual aid raised and distributed — cash for the pandemic, rides to abortions, diaper drives, the sex workers who raised money for everything from prison abolition to SESTA and FOSTA. Think of all the money that was raised and given to the moment… think of how we fought with Hollywood and Silicon Valley and Langley and the New York Times… think of all the students who showed up for rape victims on campus… think about #MeToo, of the enormity of that movement, and the activists that died in cars, killed, lit on fire by the FBI, after Ferguson.
We may be able to point to small gains in some areas, but in the overall war between us and the fascists and the capitalists and the Nazis and the Proud Boys?
They’re winning. It is unquestionable that they are winning and it accelerates each day, as we fall further and further behind. As civil conflict promises to rise to whole new levels with the upcoming election, they have all the guns and we have none; we have no resistance, and we aren’t even able to defend ourselves.
We are getting our asses handed to us and I don’t see nearly enough acknowledgement that something absolutely terrible has happened to every single one of our movements and we need to figure out what that is IMMEDIATELY and reinvigorate the left for a new kind of fight.
When I’ve been thinking about our movements, and what happened to them, I conceptualize a piece of stripped, fleshy cow dropped into the teeming water of American power. It’s not one shark that eats it up, you can’t point to just one predator. Its 8 or 9, 15, a feeding frenzy of disparate but united enemies, one shark taking the haunches and another the face, until eventually there is nothing left; even any crumbs dropped by the sharks are taken in by other fish, bones drop the sea floor, every last bit of flesh stripped off by crabs, and then it becomes that platform for coral, and that coral dies of climate change. We are the sinking cow AND the dead coral. There was no single factor that doomed our work, rather, it was a configuration of factors; and yet, it was the same configuration over and over again, that ruined all of it.
The corporations and non profits caused pure devastation on the movement as we showed ourselves beyond willing to endlessly barter with them. We wanted to reform the companies… and that was their in. They absorbed truly devastating amounts of our activists. You started coming into a leftist position of influence or visibility and suddenly a corporation was dangling six figure salaries and stock packages; and because we said “reform”, they went. In absolute droves right into the very enemy.
In media representation, X in tech/Hollywood, democratic socialism, reproductive freedom, etc., we were working firmly within the system, and they took the opportunity to bring us even further in, to literally put the movement on payroll, to capture its labor, to hire up just massive amounts of our people and get them off the streets of organizing. They… enveloped us. We consistently underestimated how big of a loss even one person is to a movement, when they disappear into a corporate structure that allows zero meaningful reform, that is in fact built on squashing dissent and crushing resistance in its work force. We lose their energy, we lose their expertise and their leadership, we are faced with the probable scenario of reconciling the stated principles of the person with the reality of their full complicity with the very worst that corporate American has to offer. ONE alone was devastating… you could see the change in people almost as soon as they got their employee badge. Once people were hired in, (especially without an outside leftist structure shaping internal resistance), their goals were in alignment with the company’s goals; people perceived their role there as agents of reform instead of as, moles, spies, saboteurs, etc. It was all about reconciling with the company — a fundamental unit of capitalism — bartering with it for tiny trade-offs like getting a fucking code of conduct. The language turned down because that was their job now. And “leftists” hired into these roles did incredible damage by shutting down more radical viewpoints, serving as buffers for the very corporations they were supposed to be disrupting.
That was the was the cost of losing just one leftist into the corporate void, pulled out of an independent trajectory and onto a corporate or non-profit or government/public sector path. Their activism WAS their corporate job and their corporate job WAS their activism. We didn’t understand how much influence and power even a single person can have in the community, as leader, educator, an actor on society, an organizer or a theorist.
That is the cost of one; now what is the cost of thousands and thousands and thousands of our people getting hired by these corporations, who had the primary goal of stamping out the movement to the point it required no concessions? The “brain drain” into corporations was insane. They were funneled into essentially doing DEI work, which, as has been criticized many times, is assimilationist, discounts the ability of corporations to smash organizing from the inside, and aligns individual incentives with the system, not the resistance. One by one we lost our movements into the corporate and non-profit and academic black hole.
We allowed companies to start using our movements as slogans, as merchandise, as “We stand in solidarity”; our movements became ways of distinguishing the “good companies” from the “bad companies,” and we spent so much energy getting tech companies and sports brands and media companies to make statements about trans rights and police violence, even as it became clear it wasn’t working. They started hosting THEIR OWN panels on “diversity and inclusion”, and round tables and fireside chats. At one point tech companies were selling “rainbow” and BLM gear. Jack Dorsey was one of the first on the ground at Ferguson for a reason: there WAS opportunity for companies in our movements, things they could get from us that served their ends: page views, sign ups, traffic, new marketing verticals, labor, the allegiance of millennial and gen-z audiences, distraction from the truth of these organizations. Our movements gave them a disguise, a front, a mask, as progressive even if they so clearly weren’t in any material analysis. In a world where representation was the primary focus, hiring performed reputation-laundering, and also kept the movement focus nice and narrow: DEI, which is now just a cheap easy way for companies to deflect and absorb criticism while doing nothing.
There are so many jobs that people can do, outside of the worst companies on earth, the largest conglomerates. And there was no way to determine, and no effort to, what that tradeoff looked like and weather it was actually a good one to make. There was no strategy for what we were going to do once people got INTO the company; so it just stayed as what it was: more of us getting into the system. We didn’t even have a view of how many people were on the inside, what they were doing; we weren’t working in any kind of organized way to truly make those roles subversive or at least turn them into ways of generating funding for the movement more broadly. Lean In feminism, careerism, these were all major obstacles. Many trends within our movements were just satisfied with the very first steps of what should have been a much longer trajectory for how we were going to organize inside these structures. So the metric become simply diversity. And nothing was changed.
Overall, our movements started outside of the corporate and non-profit and mainstream media environment, but were sucked inward to these centers.
Culpability for this lies in the movement. We should have been having MUCH more serious conversations about what it actually meant to put people inside of the establishment and how that was going to work out. We did nothing as the situation slid more and more out of control, to the point where things barely got off the ground before the companies hired it up and smothered it and turned it inside out as a cynical marketing campaign. (That’s how you see companies pitching unionization as a “competitive advantage” now). Our movements leaned sooooooo heavily towards “fix it from the inside” solutions, with rare exceptions like the Defund the Police and prison abolition movements, which properly located activism outside of the policing system itself. It is no coincidence that these movements came from Black resistance, and that they directly confronted the power center. This is the model we should be adopting. But it’s almost like we learned nothing from the past 10 years. You don’t even see us discussing this on the left, when it should be a #1 agenda item: what happened?
Corporate America was a death blow to us, and the media situation only made it worse and worse. The more we agitated, the more media platforms and media jobs and media opportunities there were; they sucked us all up too. Activism has been a huge source of traffic for them — and no matter how much traffic they generated, nothing changed for us. People don’t realize that Buzzfeed started out as a way to track and measure independent activism and be able to swarm it earlier than other companies due to better data and pattern detection; they wanted to figure out how to use the “insights” from our movements and use them to drive advertising and create artificial virality. The relationship between media, especially digital media, and activism was always predatory, extractive, stripping, designed for corporate capture, but even when that became clear, we never stopped courting media attention and pointing to it as success — “awareness”, after all.
Why could we not let go? The media was an endless supply of attention, fame, potential admiration etc., as long as you were willing to keep things between the lines — otherwise, you weren’t quotable, publishable, etc., they would find someone else to provide. Even after gaining the information from activists, media found a way to water it down and make it more palatable. This moved our efforts more to the center, as the media companies themselves (many of them owned by venture capitalists) were selecting from all the available voices, which ones to put on, which ones to make dominant. We made “bringing awareness” an absolute priority, and considered awareness to be valuable in and of itself; we also did not adjust our strategies when it became clear that spreading awareness was also failing and even sabotaging us.
There’s a lot of culpability within the movement for this. Ground level, we needed to be MUCH more critical, skeptical, and careful about engaging the media, on OUR terms. That was tablestakes, but we all fell all over each other to get into the pages of some mid blog or a one-line shout out in the fucking Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos). Moving from there, we didn’t realize the extent to which this was happening on a ready enough timetable. This speaks to a larger issue which is that there was no revisiting of tactics — we didn’t change them, we just did MORE of them. MORE interviews in Teen Vogue (Conde Nast), MORE features on Buzzfeed (Conde Nast), MORE quotes in Wired (Conde Nast), MORE highlights in Allure (Conde Nast).
People’s greed got in the way. Point blank period, and its about time we start discussing it. They wanted to go work at the major tech company, they wanted to be on television, they wanted to have a podcast, they wanted to be on stage at a conference, they wanted to be in the writer’s room of a famous TV show, they wanted they wanted they wanted the lights. Everyone thought they were special.
In the formative days of the most recent era of movements, from about 2012-2014, we saw really a lot of amazing new theory for the digital age, social media age, AI age, and this was coming from primarily intersectional feminists. But because of jealousy and clout-chasing, creating theory became one of the priorities of everyone, everyone climbing all over each other, usually to produce theory that wasn’t grounded in any deep knowledge or experience, but simply feeling the need to be recognized as a “thought leader”, literally. Everything was about the individual, it was about the individual’s ability to succeed, to be recognized in the movement. We acted as if somehow these well-known attributes of human failing somehow did not apply, as if our righteousness and good intentions just defeated human fallacy with no other exploration.
It was clout chasing, pure and pure, period. That has fucked us up BIG TIME. Everyone got addicted to the likes and the RTs, everyone fancied themselves some kind of rising leftist thought leader, everyone started doing the things that were going to get them the most views. It seems like an obvious criticism, but the Left demonstrated literally zero understanding or foreplanning as far as understanding that we, too, were susceptible to the powers and downsides of social media, and to the individual fallacies of humanity in general. But in a movement that was so much framed around building awareness and individual success, then clout was inherently good; clout was actually forwarding the agenda, and if awareness was the measure of success, then we look at people who were clout chasing as successes.
This was a poison in movement and it spread and spread. While we should have been enshrining independent press, we worshipped at the altar of fame and Hollywood and Twitter followers. Representation was often the only acceptable avenue for the media to engage these topics; and this played a huge role in narrowing the strategy and tactics of the movements. Because a lot of these movements really took off on social media, we really thought that visibility was one of the most important factors — ignoring when it became crystal clear everyone *is* aware.
Out of all the clout chasing, we have been left with yet another shameful legacy: irony. This was a kind of avatar or branding of what the left would be in the social media age, a cultural trend of sorts, and what we came up with was literally some kind of white-trash, Simpsons-esque, crass suburban disaffection manifesting as cynical dismissiveness, superiority and intellectual flipness. This became the way you symbolized the movement or identified with it: by being smug, ideologically narrow terminally online losers, mostly white men who had finally found a way to make the radical online discourse about them. More on this coming in an article specifically about discourse disruption on the left, but the association of the left with “dirtbag Leftists” and “irony twitter” turned everything into a joke. People were doing “bits” online, playing fake characters, taking up obscure memes, spiraling into total inaccessibility, and using that to generate an “in-group”ness that was alienating and unwelcoming to huge swathes of the leftist population. This became a predominant way of politicking. It was led, of course, by disaffected white men mostly associated with the DSA.
Through irony Twitter, it eventually became very difficult to tell if people were real or sincere, if what they were saying was real or just a bit, the discourse got distorted beyond measure, and far from generating new and invigorating politics and tools of inquiry and inclusion, it fractured the discourse into more and more absurdity. It became almost a cool competition, competing for coolness — but no one won, because these were the absolute biggest losers of our movement, who had been rightfully left out of the dialogue, basically strong-arming their way into the discourse without even having to sincerely engage it or take a reliable stand. The loss of integrity of the movement was not only in the material world but in the discourse and cultural norms of the left itself. The tweets of leftist men because indistinguishable from the tweets of 4channers, as indeed, that is the tradition which irony Twitter comes out of.
The fractured, non sensical discourse and reliance on individual platforms, social media and mainstream media also highlights how we have failed to come up with our own coherent media platforms that would last longer than any specific movement or person or group of people. We should have been trying to set up heterogeneous, extensive, multivariate forms of free and new press — magazines, zines, radio stations, publishing imprints, book publishers. Instead, our “independent press” came in the form of a few podcasts glorifying specific individuals. Our “platforms” were the individual platforms of everyone in the movement, each fighting to be recognized within it more than to score actual points against the establishment.
There were few efforts to launch alternatives; I had a small technology publication for awhile that was publishing a broad intersection, there was The Establishment, there was a publication out of the East Bay started by sex workers, but it imploded almost immediately. Coming out of the last years, we should have had several independent magazines, and not podcasts for people but *broadcasts* for THE people. So today, we have really nothing to point to as a meaningful platform outside of Jacobin, which had been operating since 2010, and now is basically just a DSA pamphlet, making them look far more radical than they actually are. Oh, and we got Chapo Traphouse, which, again, harbored a pedophile for literally years, and has made over $100,000 a month for a very long time, which means it was also capturing a great deal of the Left’s money that was literally going into the pockets of pedophiles, at a time when that money was desperately needed to establish an actual media of the People, not just 3 disgusting jackasses who think they have anything to contribute outside of making DSA bros feel edgy because they swear and demean women. Chapo was fucking disgusting, members of the DSA have said that it was an OPEN SECRET that Virgil was a pedophile — we could have done something meaningful with that money. But we didn’t. People again chose clout-chasing and clout-worshipping and individualism ahead of the movement itself.
What it comes down to, is really a very simple concept: we sold out. Across the board, individually and as movements and movement formations, we sold out. The definition of selling out is you go to work for the enemy, you take money from the enemy, you go on the enemy’s media platforms, you bow down to the enemy’s clout chasing system, you enter into tepid negotiation with the enemy. It was all so superficial; to show the extremes of movement failure, consider that the effort to get more women into tech resulted in no gains in the number of women in tech, nor any of the other major demographics we had hoped to see change. The system itself was creating for us the illusion of progress; we had awareness, we had new hires, we were building generational wealth at tech companies. But it was only going great for the system itself.
Protections against this should have been built in right from the start, an understanding that we cannot compromise with these fucking corporate conglomerates, a recognition that we were dealing with very serious entities with absolutely no interest in reform. We got maybe small concessions (and rarely), but we didn’t see ANY radical shifts in the underlying system. And we just kept doing the same thing again and again: trying to build awareness, trying to do outreach, working on representation, protesting companies for a day or two, getting nowhere and packing it back in, doing an interview, trying to get more votes into a system that has made it 100% clear that votes are nothing, fuck your votes.
And we didn’t stop. And once we started compromising it was all downhill from there. We ended up in literal hellholes of compromising, like all the DEI “leaders” in tech going to work at the top 5 worst companies, producing no fucking results, and then expecting to still be idolized as leaders. It ended up with little girls being taught by Raytheon how to code. It ended up with “diverse” venture fucking capitalists, who are now working on a major military build out — but with white women at the helm. Great. A “left” that main focus is voting for the Democrats who are our provable enemies.
When we were doing this “inside the system” bullshit, the system was able to swallow any progress we made. Any small gains disappeared into the system, where they were turned into media articles to get page views for the system, jobs to work for the system, votes in the system that went nowhere, and to a party that literally sidelined Bernie Sanders. And you saw the “left” coming off of that, NOT proposing a direct confrontation with the state, but making the absolutely insane compromise of campaigning and voting for an actual genocidal war criminal, serial killer, Hillary Clinton, guilty of some of the worst crimes on the face of the earth (and by the way, she STILL takes the cake from Trump as far as material harm, period). That was a moment for change, when they pushed out Bernie for that psycho, but it wasn’t. It was just an opportunity for the DSA to swoop in and make sure that any meaningful opposition to the Democrat party was instead captured by this non-profit, non-party, Democratic boot-licking block of fail sons.
It would have been easier to resist selling out if we had been much more serious about money from the start. We put ourselves into a position where we were relying on direct funding from the state (for non-profits especially), from tech companies, from establishment media jobs, from grants, etc. There was a cultural attitude on the left that because we had a class focus, money was bad and not something we should be openly discussing or pursuing — how much we needed for different ventures, how much they cost, where that money should be coming from, where we needed to get to as a movement to be self-sufficient, etc. A movement needs a lot of money, a lot of ammunitions, a lot of funding to go really hard, really fast when we’ve identified a potential window of disruption. And we should have been super focused on how to get that money in a way that didn’t compromise us. We should have had goals like being able to independently fund movement leaders instead of funneling them into the establishment, being able to have a platform far beyond one pedophile and his fuckass friends, etc. The capture of leftist money, that should have gone into the left but instead went into fucking Chapo Fucking Traphouse, again, run by an actual pedophile (who used that money to flee the country on being discovered praying on underage girls), shows the degree to which we neglected the financial health of the movement along with everything else.
The thing is, we didn’t fund our own movement, and that’s a problem. We were trying to figure out how to get jobs and grants out of companies, big non-profits, etc. We should have been talking about how, if we did have people in those high-paying jobs that were created by community resistance, what that should look like as far as giving back. We should have been running our internal moles like an operation; and since these jobs were created by community activism, we should have been REQUIRING 10-30% of that money to go back into the movement.
In about 2012-2016 I was very involved in fund raising for independent groups, individuals and tech press — while promising, that type of independent, community fundraising had trouble translating into something that was happening across the movement, especially when the tech and media money started pouring out of the sky. All of the efforts to get people onto the inside of the companies did not result in an infusion of money back into the movement. We even abandoned wealth re-distribution except as an abstract concept. We should have been getting pledges from white leftists to tithe 20-30% of their income. But we were focusing on very abstract, non-material ideological commitment to the cause, even in our most privileged members -- we should have been focusing on harnessing those to create a sustainable, independent movement. When we got people into jobs, we should have had just a straight up rule that you had to give money back into the pot. It was outside agitation that was creating those jobs, but there was no give-back.
The overall individualism of the movement led to a fairly nationalistic movement — this is indicated to me primarily by the lack of a core anti-war ethos and movement foundational to everything else we are doing. We discuss colonialism and Imperialism, but do not put getting the hands of the US military off the throat of OTHER PEOPLES as a #1 effort. Of course, I’m not saying at all that there have been NO reach-out or connections; I.e. see the deepening of the ties between the Irish and Black Americans that we saw when the Queen blessedly died and went to hell, or connections between BLM and Palestine, or leftist support for Palestine in general here in the US. But in general, we should have been focusing far more on the colonized peoples, we should have made taking their complaints right to the fucking gate an absolute top priority. I think we failed to sufficiently connect with other struggles around the world, I think we failed to set up bonds between us and to really build a global base with other countries who have been affected by American imperialism and colonization; there are so many victims of America all over the world that if we served them, if we made it a top priority to serve them, not by proxy but directly, we would 10x our movement at least. They would have also loaned a more radical stance as well as a global support network.
We should have had way more of our people engaged in personal contact with others outside of the country, particularly in places like Palestine, and the struggles there should have trended here on the American left just as much as our own. We should be their servants; they are the ones who can achieve final victory over American Imperialism, and we may aid each other deeply in direct, material and potentially military confrontation with the American power structure. It is our responsibility, as people so close to the Imperial core which is generating such incredible global violence against women and children especially, to see ourselves as primarily in service to them, even above ourselves and the issues generic to us.
But our movement was as ever, us us us. I find it interesting to look back at the last ten years and see how much of the movement, particularly as it was captured by media and tech platforms, was about just… feeling better. Against the backdrop of all of these very serious conversations about violence and rape and surveillance, there was this other force which theoretically was softening it all — that the revolution was ALSO about self care and also about sexual liberation. Of course, these fit very cleanly into the corporation’s operations as well — have you seen how much the skin care market has grown? And that is happening under a premise of, not consumerism, but posturing as an actually a revolutionary movement. This has been one of the clearest examples of the warping that happens when we turn our movements over to Conde Nast and global makeup brands.
Self-care, self-love, sex positivity: yes, these were and are important, but something else has been missing to counter it, which is a focus on self-sacrifice to the movement. In an ideal world, of course, and once the demons are vanquished, we sleep safe in our beds at night and love and fuck each other and ourselves and we are happy; the reality is that we are not going to gain a meaningful change to material conditions in this framing. The world we are actually living in, is one in which resistance is extremely punishing, because that is what power does to us when we fight it. We don’t talk about things like, the importance of making financial sacrifice, of devoting time and effort, of giving up career opportunities instead of gaining them; we didn’t talk about what it would look like to die, to self-immolate for this; we didn’t talk about the lengths we would go to, the direct lengths, not just fucking around with bits on Twitter; we don’t build a radicalizing function pushing us to where we need to be to take these motherfuckers.
While I’m not arguing for bad working conditions for people in the resistance, at all, there’s certain realities that if you are meaningfully confronting these systems, that there is going to be discomfort, violence, work that is beyond a “reasonable” workload — we are not going to get the fruits of the revolution before actually completing the work. This ethic was reflected in the protests against police violence in particular, and we have seen great examples of dedication and sacrifice both there and in climate change, in particular; but these values were sometimes lacking in other areas of the movement as the resistance became very much about what individual life improvements people wanted: better jobs, a position as a leader, social media fame. An ethic of self sacrifice is more binding than an ethic of comfort. The measure of how we were doing, or how the movement was doing, was in ideas of self care and sex and money and consumerism and jobs; perhaps the measure should of been in how much we were willing to lose, what extremes we were willing to go to, what it means to make even a mortal sacrifice for your movement.
Because the result of our movements has been materially nothing. You can argue all you want, but any gains that are not couched in individual advancement are simply not in evidence. One of the most disturbing things about this is that you’ve seen precious little actual confrontation of the fact of how much of our movement has been disappeared, swallowed, destroyed, inverted, shit out by companies, lost, defunded, broken, dismantled, fallen. It’s almost like we’re keeping the secret from each other, just pretending it away, like it didn’t happen. Roe v Wade went down without so much as a whimper, no one is even talking about it now except for the non-profits who are continuing to extract money from the movement even as they have shown themselves to be an utter failure. We have been so throughly defeated that it seems the left is weaker than it has ever been; that we cannot even lift our heads to face the truth, that we are lost, that we are down, that this could be the end for not only us but for everyone else.
What we need to do is just belly up and take a firm, honest assessment of every effort we’ve made in the last 10 years, and take the time to process how deeply every single one of these efforts failed us, how throughly they got crushed into nothing, how surely they have been fragmented. That’s something that should produce really significant levels of anger, of sadness, and of regret; of panic and maybe even shame. And those are feelings we need to feel: we hurled ourselves at the enemy, the wall of oppression, with what we could muster within the limits. We wanted it all, maybe; we surely got none of it.
The fatal flaw is simple, the string that connects all of this — we didn’t go hard enough, and we didn’t go directly AT the problem, we did not engage in actual material confrontation; we compromised and equivocated with it, we avoided it, we longed for progress from reformism perhaps because we knew it was the only way for many of us to live; if this failed, this Herculean effort on the part of the left spanning so, so, so many intersections. If this failed, we would be looking at a far graver situation. And we are now.
It is ONLY by confronting this despair, confronting the absolute material failure of our movements, with rigorous honesty, and with willingness to have been wrong. When you deconstruct that all the way down, I think you will come to the conclusion I have, and the only one suggested: there is no other alternative than revolution .
They will never stop.