Tips for Radicals

Is laughing the mic check of 2013? →

Famous (but not infamous enough) for being the world’s richest man, Slim was at the library to speak about his interest and recent investment in the free online courses of the Kahn Academy, yet his voice was drowned out by waves of laughter for the first 30 minutes of the event.

I literally don’t understand the comparison in the title.

They’re two entirely different tactics, like, what even

All of us encounter people whose behaviour we find difficult, and many of us are difficult ourselves, at least at times. Some people will sometimes act irrationally, or not nicely.

This is extra-difficult for people working for social change. We have higher standards of our own groups than we do for the rest of society, and feel more let down when they fail to be egalitarian. If we’re working in a local community, a diverse range of participants is often seen as an asset, but we often lack the tools to deal with substantial differences. For activity groups, consensus often fails as a tool if there’s a lack of good faith.

Luckily, we’re at a point nowadays where “group maintenance” is seen as a valid use of group energy (which is great) but we don’t always have a great range of tools at our disposal to tackle problems.

Luckily, some hero called Brian Martin has trawled through loads of different resources, and has selected some of the advice that’s most compatible with an anti-authoritarian outlook.

You can check out his article Activists and “difficult people” or read through some of the highlights I’ll post over the next day or so (kept together with the difficult people tag).

Enjoy!

How to spot a manarchist →

Manarchists: self-interested men anarchists who use their privilege in order to undermine the opinions and experiences of others. Usually perpetrated by the white/cis/hetero/middle-classs/Russell Group educated kind of man. We all know them, some who read this will be them.

Maybe you should just read a little more, yeah? I see your life experience, but I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong because I once read a thing by a rich white man that told me otherwise. It’s sweet and all that the oppression you face every day is important to your ideology but I read a book, so I win.
I won’t respond to that. If you criticise them, or anything that they have said/done, they will probably respond with something like ‘Look, I see where you’re coming from, I do, but I’m an anarchist, of course I care about patriarchy.’ Note the patronising tone. He’s a man, he knows better. Obviously.
You’re alienating me. As a white/cis/heterosexual man, I control everything, so it’s really important that you don’t alienate me. I determine the words that you use to refer to your oppression and I determine the tactics you use. You need me on side, okay?
There’s no such thing as community, accountability, or process. Also what’s safe space all about? It’s totally authoritarian. You don’t have the right to make sure your political spaces are free from dangerous people, and I have the right to say whatever I want because anarchy is totally about autonomism and I don’t know the difference between that and being an individualist so collective action and responsibility is really stupid lol.
We should totally be working towards post-genderism so you need to get over this feminism stuff. I don’t care if 1 billion women will be beaten or raped or harassed in their lifetimes because I don’t believe in gender. Now leave me alone so I can go and ignore the state of the world as it is some more.

True.

Five Things I Wish I Knew When I First Became Politically Active →

UNDERSTAND THE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN: have a vision (grand), a goal (concrete), and a way of getting there (strategy)
FOCUS: don’t over-stretch yourself and burn out.
WORK WITH OTHERS: understand why people are/aren’t engaging with your group, and understand your opponents and how to defeat/out-organise them.
STICK AROUND: think long-term, keep energy up with regular breaks, have a solid community around you
KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO WIN: consider the tactics and strategy seriously, and always keep victory as a guiding force for the work you do.

The articles got a wealth of useful tools and pictures too, read it!

A case study in organisation building: Anticapitalist Initiative

A recent example of the current drive for ‘left unity’ comes from the pro-organisation Anti-Capitalist Initiative.

In their words, the group aims to “overcome divisions between the socialist left and the new left movements by working together in a spirit of common activity and dialogue”.

Organising and working together - across differences in strategy or tactics - is one way to unite the left. Here’s some ideas drawn from the group about how to balance diversity with cohesion, and written with a radical libertarian angle.

** How to organise together **

Link with current struggles. As a recent article of theirs said, “the spirit dies without the struggle of the flesh”. Any organisation should clearly be linked in with current struggles, with members being genuine participants in other groups and movements - not just as a front!

Be democratic enough to let current issues guide the direction of the organisation e.g. in terms of strategies and tactics.

Be bottom-up: discussion and autonomy at local levels, with decisions made filtering up into national coordination. National coordination could be based on recallable delegates from local committees that serve short stints and do the organisational basics (e.g. running a website). It could take some other form… but it should probably exist.

Respect difference. Simple to say, often tough in practice.

Be as open as possible, making sure interested people (e.g. from other groups seeking to learn) can find out what happened in meetings, how decisions were reached, etc. Don’t hide the disagreements! They’re an important part of the process.

Have a plan for acting quickly if needs be! More for formal organisations: may be giving a steering committee more autonomy, may be a process for local groups to access websites to publish statements, whatever - but there should be a plan.

Don’t think your way of working is the only way of doing it. Seek solidarity with groups fighting for similar causes.

Don’t restrict disagreement. More for formal organisations: try to reach consensus where possible, and tolerate disagreement where not. Disagreement shouldn’t be restricted in any way, internally or externally to the organisation (obv)

Use the decision-making methods right for you. May be unanimous consensus, may be a consensus-oriented process with a vote used at the end, may be something else or a blend of different methods. Consensus isn’t the only option!

** More reading **

A new culture and a new approach - the type of organisation we need (ACI)

Learning not lecturing: why the left doesn’t have all the answers

A take on the ACI’s founding from a libertarian perspective, and a response from the ACI

Note: my actual experience of the ACI was one event, Up The Anti, at the end of 2012. IMHO, it was too much middle-aged white men arguing with each other, too many panel debates with speakers not really engaging with audience questions and instead just stating their views, wanky theorising, and not enough genuine non-elitist non-cliquey discussion - but I’m trying not to judge them just on that.

We urgently need to rethink the Left. In the trade unions, in the campaigns that spring up, in strikes (and we should not that strike days continue to be low and may remain so for some time yet) and social movements there needs to be a much stronger, better coordinated, anti-austerity, socialist, radical, anti-capitalist voice.

It has to be open, democratic, undogmatic and capable of reconciling difference. It has to be internationalist, anti-racist, a staunch champion of women’s liberation and LGBT rights. It has to be flexible about organisational forms. This is anathema to some groups on the Left and that probably explains their current woes. It also has to be generous and able to admit that it doesn’t have a monopoly on wisdom.

Vanguard parties that venerate Lenin/Lenin’s work aren’t the only way to organise ourselves.

So many people say we need to get creative in our organising, but how can we do this?

What this new group/organisation/congregation/coalition/whatever would need:

Ability to coordinate between different (pre-existing) groups.
A bare minimum of positive criteria e.g. radical, liberatory, socialist/communist
A bare minimum of negative criteria e.g. anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-cissexist, anti-ableist
A framework for pre-existing groups to work together, and constant acknowledging of disagreements as healthy diversity
A democratic structure (as direct as possible) so meetings and discussions can be held without any one group monopolising.

We don’t need another static group, or another dogma, or another monolithic anything. We need a way to get more people together discussing stuff.

One group that is trying to get different lefties together under one roof is the Anticapitalist Initiative - more tomorrow.

Should lefties really be making “demands”? →

This is that the use of the word “demand” – which has long been common on the left and among trades unions – is a terrible rhetorical strategy. People who make demands are tiresome – demanding! – and unreasonable.

The very use of the word is therefore a turn-off.

We know that people’s attitudes are shaped by the way in which options are framed. The left’s use of “demands” is a counterproductive frame.

The right, and the capitalist class, knows this. Read pretty much any rightist blog, and I doubt you’ll see their policy proposals regularly framed as demands, as James and the left so often do. And, of course, employers have for years made “offers” – how generous! – whilst it is unions that make demands. But this is not necessary. Unions could easily reframe pay “demands” as reasonable offers: “our members are offering to work for one-200th of the salary of the chief executive.”

I don’t really agree with the conclusion of this post – why should we phrase our core rights and basic tenets as requests to be negotiated? – but it’s a pretty interesting frame analysis.

Any ideas on what could be better than “offer”?

Tear gas stinging your eyes. Flashbangs overhead. Should you run?

Here’s the advice of a friendly internet street medic.

When not to run

People panicking means twisted ankles, falls, trampling over people. It can be “fucking dangerous”.
Running in panic can send you, and others around you, into a trap.
Running empowers the police with a prey/predator mentality.
If you’ve taken the street, and you want to keep it, then be prepared to defend it.
If you run, you leave behind your comrades that ARE willing to stand.

When to run

If it’s a tactical retreat, made consciously and free of panic. Develop a strategy ahead of time to fall back on. Otherwise, you’re letting the police set the terms.
If you’re past your comfort level. This will obviously be true for most people fleeing police, but remember that your comfort level isn’t necessarily a static thing - if you want to, change it.
If your energy is gone. Understand your limits, and leave with the peace of mind of knowing you have reached yours for the day, and have accomplished what you can.

“Not running is hard. Really fucking hard. Most of us are totally guilty of it sometimes, even if just for a few seconds before our brains click and goe ‘hey, wait just one effing minute’. But working towards being able to overcome that fear is important.

This won’t be an overnight transition. It will take time and experience, but it will be worth it. I know, because I can imagine the day when we ALL don’t run, but instead hold our ground and face down the state. Together.”

There is ongoing debate about how much of human behaviour stems from biology, how much from conditioning and socialized expectations, and how much from choice. It’s probably not a good idea to dismiss any of the three. Although they are vastly different from being LGBT, Bipolar disorder and some forms of autism have been demonstrated to have some form of biological causation or linkage, so there are certainly precedents. So we play the opposite response: “it’s genetic.” Well, maybe it is, at least in part, but neither chosen lifestyles nor biologically-driven identities of themselves validate or disqualify value in a human being. In the long run, we might not exactly be comfortable with the implication of imparting all things biologically-connected with legitimacy. Imagine a finding in which pedophilia is shown have some genetic trigger. Certainly, many predators describe a compulsion they feel is intrinsic and beyond their control, so it’s not unthinkable that there could be a biological component. But it would be repulsive to excuse the molestation of children for this sort of reason. And at that point, consistency fails.

So biological causation only proves that we exist. We cannot depend on it for rights or to change hearts and minds. We cannot rely on it to find pride in our lives. It’s fascinating, marginally validating, but it does not provide the standard against which we measure ourselves as humans. Biological predestination is a poor measure of who is entitled to human rights or whether or not someone has a legitimate right to be. We recognize that people deserve respect, freedom, access to employment and services, and to be treated as equals regardless of any disability, poverty, class, body image, level of education, faith and several other factors that are not inherently predetermined. The “choice invalidation” argument seeks to undermine far more than the acceptance of LGBT people. Discrimination does not occur purely because of the colour of someone’s skin — rather, colour is one of many indicators that are used to trigger presumptions about an individual’s culture, lifestyle, behaviours and tendencies. You hear this excuse all the time: “I have nothing against them, but you know what they’re like….” Prejudiced people are blind to their prejudice because they’ve seduced themselves into believing that what they’re reacting to are associated choices and not really the trait itself, when they’re acting on the unspoken and often inaccurate smorgasbord of inventions that go with it. When we insist on biological validation, we are playing along with an ideology that makes soft excuses for bigotry, rather than confronting the impulse to discriminate.

And for that matter, how much of the “born this way” argument boils down to people feeling like they have to make excuses and seek societal forgiveness for existing, rather than pointing the finger back at bigotry?

The concept of human rights, of course, was supposed to address the extent to which hatred between diverse human communities manifested. Human rights legislation was a response to the dramatic and horrific manifestation of hatred during the mass genocide that occurred in Nazi Germany — but it also recognized that mass extermination is not a new phenomenon, and that modern society cannot be fooled into believing that it would never occur again. The principle is that all people should be treated as equals, but we know from experience that if we leave it up to everyone’s discretion, enormous imbalances happen. Even with human rights legislation, there are glaringly different ways that privileged and non-privileged classes are treated. So human rights legislation is structured in a way that identifies various classes that should not be used as bases to include or exclude — to accept or to hate — people. The classes are, of themselves, neutral (for example, “race” covers white people as much as anyone else), so contrary to another modern myth, there are no “special rights.” It becomes the role of the judiciary to balance the rights of the minority with the rights of the majority. In an ideal world, of course, we would all realize that all are created equal, but in practical reality, reminders have to be codified into law, because there is always disagreement about who should be treated fairly and what the limit to fairness should be. At the furthest extreme, without rights legislation requiring the legal system to take occurrences seriously, it becomes common for people to excuse violence or murder of minorities as being somehow justified or inconsequential, thereby devaluing the lives of the victims.

At some point, we need to realize that risk-conscious, responsible, respectful and genuinely consensual behaviour need to be the standards by which we measure people — by their actions, rather than any assumptions associated with any traits… even those that are not necessarily intrinsic, genetically-determined ones.

https://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/intersex-conditions-within-the-transsexual-brain-why-born-this-way-is-not-the-point/ (via mumbl-tumbl)

yes, thank you!

this is covered pretty well in a Common Cause (campaigning for better awareness of values and framing in campaigns) blog post called Trade-offs in the gay rights movement

we have to watch the language we use!

Ten ways to survive as a woman on the left

Don’t take sexism that you experience personally - they did something wrong, not you.
Call it out. It will help you find supportive allies, and can turn into an empowering act.
Don’t rely on gender quotas - they’re a short-term fix at best.
Find support. Real-life support if possible!
The fight is too big to win on your own - make allies to struggle alongside.
Find some stats e.g. counting how many times women and men talked in the meeting you’re in.
Think before you speak, then speak.
Cherish the small victories, they’ll give you fuel to carry on.
Learn from your mistakes. Guilt can be immobilising, so try not to beat yourself up when you make them, but learn and move on.
Fuck the haters.

I’m a non-woman paraphrasing quite heavily, so go to the source article for more in-depth ideas — great article, Rosie!