Some Thoughts About The Response to a Controversial Everyday Feminism Article

A think-piece by the website, Everyday Feminism, has produced quite a bit of criticism on a variety of platforms, from Facebook to a variety of blogs. The criticism shouldn’t have been terribly surprising. After all, the blog managed to write an entire post about the proper way for employers to respond to food insecurity without suggesting the possibility of paying the person a living wage. In response to the criticism, the site has pulled the essay, and issued what can fairly be called a substantial apology. Within that context, I suspect that the whole issue is going to disappear relatively quickly, and will be overtaken by some other controversy.

However, I thought it might make sense to return to the controversy from an analytical, rather than polemical framework, and attempt to read the posting as a symptom of the present moment. While there are some real reasons to criticize the website, and its approach to understanding social phenomenon, I want to avoid focusing on its particular foibles and think about the way that the response stands in for a wide swath of behaviors. In order to do that, I propose to look at the initial attempt an apology, instead of the original article or the more substantial apology that followed.

The initial apology attempted to frame the problems of the essay as a failure of rhetorical context, simultaneously apologizing for the rhetorical failure, and attempting to defend the larger message of the think-piece.

We've received a lot of pushback on this piece and we appreciate all of the critical perspectives you brought to the table.

We agree with you that raising wages and pursuing economic justice is, first and foremost, what's needed to alleviate food insecurity.

For the author (who commented numerous times here), sometimes our survival can't wait for raised wages, and in some places (like non-profits), wages can't be raised at all. Sometimes meeting people where they are, while also pursuing other avenues for justice, is what sustains us in the immediate moment.

However, that nuance was lost, which is on us. Our editorial team is discussing the best way to move forward and we will keep you posted.

Thank you for always pushing us to do better – we are the platform we are because of the amazing community that surrounds us.

The message begins by acknowledging the need for economic justice, but then argues that the demand for higher wages is in some sense out of reach, either in the short term or completely out of reach, when referring to non-profit employment. It then tries to retrospectively reframe the article as one that operated under this assumption, one that took for granted both the need for higher wages, and the inaccessibility of those wages in the short term. They effectively accomplish this shift through the phrase, “that nuance was lost’ which then shifts the substantive argument to a rhetorical one. While I think there is a reason to be skeptical of this reformatting, I’m going to accept it for the sake of the more significant assumptions that are embedded in that argument.

That more significant issue is the way a wage increase is framed as a political demand, one that is either a distant goal or completely inaccessible. Small, informal and interpersonal forms of activism are the only forms of change that are possible. We see a profound shift in the terrain of possibility. Practical political work is no longer incremental reform, but the act of scraping by to survive, or the facilitation of that contingent survival. The idea of a wage increase, previously a modest and incremental political goal, has become remote and almost utopian in nature. Lest we think that this shift is an exceptional one, we can look at the common-sense response on the part of many rank and file liberals to the Sanders campaign. The fairly modest suggestions of an expansion of Medicare and the subsidy of public education were derided as utopian delusions.

There are a number of legitimate reasons to be skeptical of our ability to accomplish these modest, incremental goals at both the micro and macro levels. After all, we have seen the power of unions gutted, and the wholesale destruction and neutralization of any number of social movements. At the macro level, we can see a series of concentrated efforts to increase the political power of capital, and to neutralize the strength of poor people’s movements. But efforts such as the one under discussion never frame these limitations within the framework of political defeat. Such a framework is pessimistic, but it nonetheless understands the present moment as one that is constructed, for the lack of a better phrase, within the terrain of a wide swath of social struggles. It would provide an analysis that would mark the present moment as one that was constructed through a lens of contingent political struggle, and point to ways in which that present could transformed.

Instead of this mode of analysis, we are offered an analysis that operates within the generic logic of ‘realism.’ This generic logic is signaled within the piece with the following language, “Sometimes meeting people where they are, while also pursuing other avenues for justice, is what sustains us in the immediate moment.” The ‘immediate moment’ is the moment of reality, while ‘the other avenues of justice’ are never given thought beyond the gesture. Through that process, the ‘immediate moment is reified and the social relations of the present are effectively naturalized. We might think of this as the moment where social movements embrace the logic embedded in Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, “There is no alternative.”

The political theorist Jacques Ranciere provides a useful framework for understanding the framework operating within the aesthetics of this realism. He notes, “Realism claims to be that sane attitude of the mind that sticks to observable realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only doing the only thing possible to do." (Ranciere 132) Realism is, in effect, the aesthetic logic of Thatcher’s phrase. It justifies the existing order by positing its existence as natural and inevitable. It effaces the possibility of transformation, and marks it off as impossible, as utopian. Through such an engagement, it becomes a form of enforcing that order, of operating within the logic of the police, as Ranciere and Foucault understand that term, as defenders of the hierarchical structures of a particular society.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that we find the expression of this sort of logic even among those who are ostensibly trying to transform the world. After all, we operate within a world that is constructed through those modes of policing, in opposition to a long history of social movements. Those modes are articulated through a dense grid of institutions, social practices, and media representations that are enmeshed in our daily lives. It’s easy to understand why we might begin to naturalize these projects; after all, they all but constitute our grid of intelligibility. In many ways, it’s very difficult to imagine meaningfully transforming it. But that has been true of every dominant order. We have seen profound challenges to those previous orders that imagine profoundly different social structures, and have managed to change or destroy those previous systems, even if they frequently fail themselves. That engagement depends on a continual process of estrangement, a process of denaturalizing the categories of daily life, recognizing their historicity, their contradictions, and their possibility of change.

What comes after that moment of tarrying with the negative? I’m not sure.  

Activism and Siege Mentality: A Critique of the Critics of Boots Riley.

      Recently, Boots Riley placed a pair of political critiques of the recent actions coming out of the extra-parliamentary and primarily anarchist milieu of a set of subcultural formations within Oakland.  He notably argued that the forms of property destruction used by the Black Bloc as a political formation were making it difficult to bring folks not already a part of those subcultures into the movement, often because of their lack of direction, but also because they were occasionally directed against working class property.  There are certainly problems with Riley's initial posting, particularly in the the way that it often reproduced some of the assumptions about insiders and outsiders, authentic and inauthentic community members that echo to an extent the earlier criticisms presented by city officials to legitimate violence against the movement.  But Riley's intervention can't be simply limited to that mistake.  He is making a significant and substantial intervention, noting the alienation that he is picking up on in his day to day organizing, as well as the increasing isolation of the various political formations operating under and near the "Occupy" banner.  I want to offer a critical reading of the various refusals to recognize that criticism, refusals based in a 'siege mentality' that shuts down critical engagement and dialogue to protect a political line in the name of security, solidarity, and an overlapping series of demands for political loyalty.  Before I move into this critique, I want to acknowledge that the events that Riley describe involve a great deal of violence on the part of the police, and the need to provide support financially and otherwise for those who were arrested.  It's also very frustrating to receive critical input when you have put time, pain, and labor into a political project, from perceived outsiders.  However, critique is crucial to radical politics.  Riley's critique, while pointed, remains principled.  The responses, however fall into a number of substantial political errors.

      As I have already noted, the most immediate error was the refusal to recognize the need or even validity of producing a radical critique of the contemporary moment.  Despite the fact that Riley didn't identify individuals or provide any evidence for future prosecution, a number of folks claimed that his response would legitimate state prosecution.  All too often, the discourse of security is used to secure and legitimate a particular political position through the invocation of security culture, a point I made in an earlier essay.  As Riley notes in a later response, "I would also say that many of the folks who are conflating my critique of folks doing bb tactics in a certain situation in Oakland- with the idea that I’m not showing solidarity to the folks who WEREN’T doing bb in SF and were arrested- are misleading and it speaks more to other issues than this one. Two separate issues. My post actually implies that the folks who get arrested for bb aren’t the ones doing it. Most times bb is done at actions in the bay area, somebody gets arrested. So using this logic no critique should be put out about the planning until the media aren’t talking about it."  As Riley notes, the demand that one cannot critique the tactics of an action while folks are under arrest, effectively infinitely defers the ability to present that critique.  It transforms critique into a sort of treason, a refusal of a sort of political loyalty.  Open critical speech is then limited to a very small and private set of spaces, effectively limiting broader conversations about political activity to small interpersonal groups, keeping those critiques isolated and scattered, while leaving large swathes of the population of the conversation.

      The second notable error in the responses to Riley is the continual attempts to take Riley's unique critique of a particular set of tactics in a particular situation and transform them into a series of very familiar discourses.  A set of respondents immediately tried to associate Riley's critiques of the tactics with the critiques made by Mayor Quan earlier in the year.  Another set attempted to match up Riley's critiques with the highly problematic statements made by Chris Hedges on the Black Block.  Still another group attempted to translate Riley's critiques into a series of predictable anarchist vs. marxist debates, and a final set of groups attempted to reduce the political options for action to a binary opposition between the sorts of random property destruction and either inaction or minimal symbolic action.  In many of the responses to Riley, we saw a return to a number of forms of redbaiting, generally framed in a manner that accused Riley of opposing anarchism to some sort of marxist orthodoxy.  In each case, the respondents substantially refused to engage with the argument that Riley had presented, instead making a easy set of straw man arguments, in response.  Cliche becomes a way of enforcing a set of normative practices, of refusing to challenge the categories of thought that define a conservative form of common sense.  I don't want to exclude the possibility of criticizing Riley.  After all, it would fall back into the same set of bad habits and errors that I'm criticizing, but criticism should work towards breaking up these forms of cliche, either through gesturing towards new categories, new forms of knowledge and action, etc. or towards showing the limitations of our present.

      Which leads me to a third notable error in the responses, the demand that those who criticize immediately have a solution for the problems that they have brought up.  At an immediate level, this criticism doesn't fall into the same immediate fallacies that the other categories have fallen into.  After all, Riley doesn't offer a positive solution.  However, the demand for immediate answers leads to a far more significant problem, the inability to pose fundamental questions, questions that don't simply challenge a small aspect of the current framework of the world.  At a fundamental level, it erases the ability to pose a radical critique.  After all, all current approaches to anti-capitalism have failed.  It's likely that a successful approach to creating a radical anti-capitalist social formation is going to take a form of organization and structure that is currently unrecognizable.  The way to that formation is going to need voices to point to the limitations of current forms of organization, along with the points that we step into the marshes of disorganization, even when we can't identify the road to create new forms, to complete Lenin's metaphor.  Let's create the possibilities of accomplishing that. 

A Brief Comment on a Critique of Occupy Wall Street

     I recently came across an interesting critique of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon on Racialicious recently.  There's a larger conversation around identity that could be taken on with this piece, but I don't think that I'm the person to do that, and it would be a distraction from the questions of organization that I want to discuss.  This is not to say that I'm discounting the questions of identity, and more specifically, the racism implicit in the behavior of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but that I want to consider those questions through the question of organization, rather than working through the framework offered by Racialicious.  I don't intend this as a critique of that particular framework, but as an argument that the identitarian perspective needs to be taken seriously, even if one doesn't accept it's intellectual framework.  As this piece reveals, the refusal to engage with the long history of organizing around a variety structures of oppression and domination around categories of identity, also damage the ability of social movements such as Occupy Wall Street become a counter-hegemonic force, or perhaps more specifically, to live up to its claims of representing the 99%.  

    OWS protesters often make it seem like they are the birth of social justice activism, that they are here to teach us how to protest because none of us know what the fuck we are doing and need their wealth of experience to help us out. I was not at all surprised when that woman so naturally assumed that she, as a white woman, knew better than me – she thought that I had found a blowhorn somewhere and decided to play around with it. It didn’t occur to her that we had been planning this for weeks and thinking critically about every step, that it was led by a civil rights organization that has been at work for decades, that we had applied for 4 different kinds of permits so that our event could safely and effectively achieve its purpose.

     The actions of these OWS protesters showed that they were at the march and vigil, not to show their support for Danny Chen’s family or the ongoing work on their case, but to provoke and garner attention for themselves and their brand, and then try to turn our strategic work and planning into a nonsensical, self-righteous tantrum. They acted like tourists on vacation in the social justice world, and our efforts and long-term goals were expendable in light of their self-interested pursuit of an interesting experience.

    The two paragraphs above manage to identify all of the significant criticisms that I have had with the "Occupy" movement in my fairly limited interactions with them.  The first paragraph lays out two common assumptions that occupy protestors fall into, a lack of recognition of other social movements, and within that context, a tendency to take over actions when other activists don't behave in the same manner as the "Occupy" encampments.  Through its very particular history, the "Occupy" movement has produced a number of tactical and organizational methods, some patchwork responses to necessity, some quite clever innovations that we'll probably be using for years whether the movement survives or not.  However, as the organizational model moved out of New York, there was a tendency to fetishize those methods, that is, to see a set of contingent practices as the only practices that one can use to organize successfully.  It's understandable when new "Occupy" activists lean to heavily upon these now familiar techniques to begin organizing.  After all, the social structures of the country don't exactly encourage the kinds of horizontal cooperation that are crucial to organizing.  But when those activist refuse or can't recognize that other situations may call for other techniques, or that other histories of organizing may exist that naivete quickly becomes a form of chauvinism, and when it ignores the needs and histories of activists of color, a form of racism.

      In addition to slipping into chauvinistic behavior, the commitment to one set of tactics also limits those movements abilities to respond to different situations.  For instance, as the "Occupy" movement moves away from the encampment model, different tactics and conversational styles are going to be required.  Additionally, the police and politicians are going to develop responses to these additionally successful responses.  The anti-globalization movement is an excellent example of this.  The action in Seattle was a spectacular success, but each following mass action in that model was less so.  Why? Because, the novel became the familiar, and the police were able to develop a set of responses to that model of protest.  Without an ability to adapt, we're going to see the movement quickly collapse in the same manner as the anti-globalization.  The movements that the "Occupy" protestors are all too often ignoring have dealt with issues of police violence, cooptation, and neutralization.  Moreover, they have come up with some pretty impressive new forms of protests themselves.  When movements engage in this sort of nonsense, they not only lose the important ability to grow in numbers, but they lose out on histories of counter-systemic movements.

     The second issue is the obsession that the movement has with the brand of occupy itself.  Rather than acting as allies for a variety of social movements, the "Occupy" movements have the uncanny ability to look like they are more interested in promoting themselves.  As a practical example, when the "Occupy LA" protestors showed up to labor protests in Los Angeles, their main slogans weren't focused on worker's issues, but were a continual drumbeat for the "Occupy" movement itself. This didn't offend anybody, but it effectively cut off any meaningful conversation between the public sector workers of ReFund movement and the "Occupy" movement.  "Occupy" wants to take a kind of vanguard role in social movements, but any vanguard role is created through a willingness to do hard work, to make sacrifices, and most of all, to take the responsibilities of mutual aid seriously.  If the groups took up those responsibilities, they would get a lot more traction, rather than the embrace of the brand model introduced by Adbusters at the beginning of the first "Occupy."  That model is going to translate into a very small and isolated movement.  I would prefer not seeing that.         

Initial observations about Occupy LA

      Most of the fairly limited amount of people reading this blog have been following the rather large to-do about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.  There's been a lot of writing on this subject, and I've read a fair amount of it.  For better or for worse, it has been the central focus of conversation for both the liberal-left, reformists, and revolutionaries.  I've largely stayed out of the conversation until this point because my engagement with the struggles has been limited to the variety of written communiques of the group and the variety of critiques produced inside and outside the movement.  I guess I could have taken up my role as a literary critic and produced an ideological critique of those documents, or perhaps take up the fashionable 90's pose of deconstructive reading, but I find the prospect of writing such an analysis almost as boring as most of its readers would find reading it.  After all, the most powerful aspect of the event, and its rebranding across the country, is its creation of political space and its creation of assemblages of people, not documents.

       While I'm excited about this shift in the political environment, I'm a little confused by the cacophony of claims that this event marks a new day in political protest.  Don't get me wrong, it's good to see a lot of folks out on the streets, taking action.  The occupy movements can possibly represent a shift from the melancholy and defensiveness that defined radical activism since the collapse of the anti-war movement and the reelection of President George Bush.  A lot of folks are excited and they're making their presence felt.  At the same time, there isn't anything particularly new about the kinds of tactics and political organization that are at the heart of this series of events.  One can go back to the formation of SNCC in 1960 and its to find the kind of horizontal organizing discussed by David Graeber and others as so unique to the occupation events.  SDS activists basically borrowed the 'beloved community' model from SNCC and spread it across the nation.  From there, the tactic has been taken up by anti-nuclear activists, environmentalists, ACT-UP, and the anti-globalization movement from there.  Each of these groups have modified the horizontal structures, making it there own, generally shifting away from some of the formalized structures contained in the original SNCC formation.  In this sense, rather than constituting a break from earlier counter-systemic movements, the occupy formulation stays resolutely in that set of post-68 practices, drawing particularly from the anti-globalization movement.

      I'm not bringing this up because the movement lacks some sort of antiquarian respect for the past, but because some of that social memory might help the movement.  This fact became immediately apparent during the short period of time that I spent at the OccupyLA site, attending meetings, and observing the daily life of the event.  From that short period of time, a couple things became immediately apparent, 1. there's a fairly small, top-down leadership structure, and 2. that leadership structure is pretty detached from the vast majority of the day to day life of the people involved in the occupation.  I was already aware from a number of conversations with comrades involved in the action that there were some substantial problems with the activities of the camp.  A number of well-known veteran activists were singled out as 'violent agitators' by the leadership, and fliers were passed out with names and photographs.  Rather than being cliched debates about 'violence vs. non-violence', the arguments that led to these actions were largely focused on taking actions that risked arrest, and the relationship of the occupation movement to the police.  The critics of the leadership felt that the movement needed to make its presence known through non-violent, confrontational protests, directed towards disrupting the daily life of the financial system, while the current leadership thought that the movement should focus on getting more people in the camp.  A legitimate debate, but one the 'appointed' leadership structure was never willing to openly engage in.

      Even with that foreknowledge, I really wasn't ready for how badly the meetings were run.  The 'action committee' met under a small pavilion, a space that clearly didn't fit the 15-20 people who were in attendance.  In addition, the facilitators made no real effort to create a sense of community within the space.  There were no introductions, no attempts to get people introduced to each other through icebreakers, or attempts to define community rules for the meeting.  Instead, the facilitators opened with a set of tasks that needed volunteers, creating a distinctly top-down atmosphere.  When the meeting moved into a discussion of possible actions, any action that could possibly lead to arrest was shot down on the basis that a general assembly had decided to avoid arrests about 6 days ago.  Perhaps, but the meeting wasn't created to pass resolutions, but to make a set of proposals to the general assembly.  There is no conceivable reason why the committee couldn't suggest that the assembly revisit the question, particularly when the population of the camp had changed so drastically in the past few days.  But beyond these political concerns, the meeting was miserable and inefficient.  With a change in location, and the introduction of some basic rules, the whole thing could have ran much more smoothly.  It also gestures towards a structureless environment that effectively constructed a leadership without any real formal responsibility to the rank and file of the movement.

      Which leads me back to my earlier comment, these aren't exactly new problems, and a lot of smart people have been thinking about these concerns in a variety of contexts.  These discussions range from how to run a meeting, how to a participatory environment, to larger critiques of racism and sexism in movement structures.  And some of those problems were pretty evident.  The camp was pretty diverse, but the leadership structure really didn't reflect that, remaining fairly white, and often male.  If you want to claim you're representing the 99%, you might want a leadership that looks like it.  Additionally, there was some pretty sexist behavior at times in the camp, which clearly wasn't getting dealt with.  The New Left put together some interesting material on these topics that could be talked about in discussion circles, stuff that's pretty smart and accessible like Audre Lorde's critiques of the white feminist movement or Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."  It was also help to create a set of much more transparent rules around running meetings, to create a friendlier environment for them to occur, and to work at making those meetings more friendly to the participation of folks new to activism.  Furthermore, the collective agreements of the occupation need to be revisited from time to time, precisely because of the transitory nature of the movement.  In short, rather than needing less process as Doug Henwood's thoughtful critiques indicate, I think the movement simply needs better process, process that would acknowledge the forms of representation and leadership going on in the occupation, and would make that leadership more formally responsible to the rank and file.

      At the same time, there is a wide swath of the life of the camp that remains fairly removed from the political intrigues of the meetings, people talking, holding signs, discussing how to transform the country, etc. It's a pretty diverse lot, a lot of radicals, reformers, with the some Larouchies, Ron Paul supporters, and believers in lizard people thrown into the mix.  (One of the stranger moments that I saw was when a particularly belligerent and possibly mentally ill Barack Obama supporter was told to chill out by a believer in the lizard people, 'because people protest in their own way.'  It's never a good sign when the lizard people guy is the voice of reason, especially when all the ostensible security people did nothing but rile the guy up.)  I think that if there's something really great about the protest, it really might be this, and I'd recommend that folks go down to the encampment to chat with some of these folks.  It isn't really a political community yet, but it could be come one with some work.  However, as long as the existent political structures of the occupation don't facilitate the incorporation of this group, we aren't going to see the creation of a genuinely political community.

       Despite my fairly low opinion of the 'leadership', and some of the fairly atrocious things that some of them did, notably driving out some of the veteran activists of color out of the camp and copbaiting, they struck me as a fairly hardworking and serious group of folks.  I never saw them sitting down.  They were always on the move, always planning, always working, but that activity seemed to lead to a kind of proprietary attitude amongst them, treating OccupyLA as a name-brand that needed to be protected, rather than a living, social movement.  The simple fact is that you can't control the messaging and political direction of a social movement.  You can try to influence it and direct it, but movements are movements because they're way bigger than any individual group.  In their attempt to control OccupyLA, these folks could very well kill it. 

       There are a lot of references to sources that I should make, but I think that I am going to leave that for a rather substantial links page that I will create tomorrow.