Summary: In this piece, we discuss the ways in which certain practices within Leftism, rigid ideologies, and political labels become roadblocks to our movement organizing. We argue that political institutions and ideologies do not capture or fully address what is most at stake in our liberation struggles: the fight to materially dismantle hierarchies of race, anti-Blackness, class, and gender. Many Leftists tend to push away people that are different from them—this reproduces the “good citizen, bad citizen” model of organizing that seeks to measure people’s “commitment” to an organization or cause. In addition, many forms of street self-organization tend to be opaque or illegible to mainstream leftists and organization-centric activists. In the end, this piece is a call for autonomous solidarity— the proliferation of diverse tactics and reciprocal community support needed to finally dismantle oppressive hierarchies. Autonomous solidarity functions by focusing primarily on meeting each other’s material needs, rendering ideology as secondary.
We want to discuss “leftism” and the widespread usage of political labels in this post. We argue that people should not be afraid to link up and get organized just because they haven’t figured out their “label” or “political identity” yet. As we fight for liberation, we must recognize that abolition and revolution are not necessarily about political institutions or ideologies. The fight is ultimately about race, anti-Blackness, class, and gender. Our lived experiences of oppression will NEVER become legible to society’s political institutions and – a lot of the times – political ideologies prevent us from seeing these lived experiences as autonomous struggles of their own. In other words, we are not concerned with politics, but with materially dismantling the oppressive structures that shape people’s lives.
Just because someone self-identifies as part of a certain ideology does not mean they do the work of dismantling the hierarchies of race, anti-Blackness, class, gender, ability, etc. To reiterate earlier points, we are ALL learning to dismantle these interpersonal oppressions and no one is truly free from repeating these behaviors. We should be centering people’s intentions to learn, grow, and engage in transformative change as opposed to assuming they are “down” just because they identify as part of x, y, or z political ideology. There are entire systems to be abolished and very significant work begins at home and in our communities. We must all (re)assume collective responsibility to each other by undoing inter-personal forms of oppression: this will never be achieved through political institutions, and most political ideologies overlook said inter-personal dynamics.
Identifying as certain political labels, in fact, is part of the problem. A lot of the times, we feel that if we do not know the entire theoretical positions or histories of certain political ideologies, that we are not able to engage with “politics.” Fighting against oppression does not require us to sign up for some organization or forcibly identify with a political tradition. The issue is the act of taking up an identity: it is an exclusionary way of existing, and it pretends to be free of all differences or deviations. For example, we all know how adhering to any kind of identity (i.e. ethnic, political, cultural identities) is almost impossible because everyone has different (sometimes contradictory) expectations and definitions of said identities. Most importantly, we can engage with liberation struggles without having to “identify” as anything in particular because liberation transcends political institutions and ideologies.
We should not be concerned with “the battle of ideas” when our community’s lives and well-being are at stake. More times than few have “leftist” cliques and their “in-groups” competed for clout or attempted to display the best analysis or practice. We gotta stay humble and keep it real with each other. Beef between different “leftist” ideologies, usually grounded in abstract debate and speculation, has almost ZERO correspondence to the needs and realities of regular people in real life. No one in the IE really cares about what theoretical beef Kropotkin and Marx had back in the late 1800’s; what matters most are material needs right now! Likewise, we should not be concerned with persuading or converting people to follow one abstract ideological line over another, but instead with collectively building a MATERIAL line of autonomous power. Ideology and labels should not be obstacles in the way of our self-determination.
Ideologies have preconceived notions of the world and its workings. When taken too literally, they try to scientifically explain the mechanisms of the world under their framework. However, social reality does not obey laws like in physics–it is complex, messy, and fragmented, so that every idealized formula for radical change will always be imperfect. Ideology tends to prevent a proper analysis of concrete situations or moments that do not fall under the scope of the ideology’s concepts or frameworks. For example, the over-fixation on the category of the worker/working-class does not access the positionality of Blackness or the lived experiences of disability. In fact, the best people to organize with are those who are not entrenched in a rigid ideology: ideology lays out only one way of seeing the world and only one way of engaging in action, instead of inhabiting multiplicity as it exists.
Rigid ideology tends to generate certainties and fixed answers that close off the potential for experimentation. However, these certain tendencies can harden into stifling patterns, especially when spaces become purist or dogmatic about their way of doing things – such as believing that politics can only happen by adhering to a set program or party line. As the foos from CrimethInc. put it:
“If the hallmark of ideology is that it begins from an answer or a conceptual framework and attempts to work backward from there, then one way to resist ideology is to start from questions rather than answers. That is to say— when we intervene in social conflicts, doing so in order to assert questions rather than conclusions. What is it that brings together and defines a movement, if not questions? Answers can alienate or confound, but questions seduce. Once enamored of a question, people will fight their whole lives to answer it. Questions precede answers and outlast them: every answer only perpetuates the question that begot it.”
The problem is the history of Leftism™ itself; to be clear, we are not right-wing or some “centrists.” But leftism attempts to manage and opportunistically seize moments of rupture when in reality, people take to the streets on their own terms and without managerial direction. Leftists take up too much space and ritualize a meeting-voting-recruiting-marching pattern without strategic reflection. The left in the US has been a nebulous, outdated, distracting, and, at key points, historically counter-productive force (i.e. ‘the left-wing of capital’). For example, just because some non-profits might be “leftist” does not mean that they won’t attempt to set their own self-serving agendas or seek out power. Instead, we should pay attention to the people and the streets, and not efforts made at recuperation by leftists. We can align and act “left,” but not rigidly identify as a dogmatic Leftist™.
To bring it back, we want to call for autonomous solidarity in place of leftism, the marketplace of ideologies, and rigid political labels. Autonomous solidarity could allow for the proliferation of diverse tactics and reciprocal community support needed to finally materially dismantle the hierarchies of race, anti-Blackness, class, and gender.
A few last suggestions:
- Learn to commonly respect group difference, heterogeneity, and multiplicity (EXCEPT if one group tries to overpower all the other groups, is an oppressive group with known abusers, etc.)
- Move away from only organizing with other leftists; also organize with regular folks. (The isolation of being “the only Marxist-Leninist” or xyz ideology in your town is, in part, addressed by doing this.)
- Stop adhering so rigidly to your ideological position and meet people halfway. (Twitter is not real life.)
- Trust in people’s ability to solve their own problems and take collective responsibility. Be responsive and attentive to others rather than prescribe how they should do it. (This is the basis for autonomy.)
- Encourage others to ask questions and listen sincerely to responses because new potential and openings emerge from these honest exchanges. (Since ideology tends to prevent growth.)
We might all have idealized images of how social change happens or occurs, and we must be honest about the times we encounter our own errors, frustrations, and mistakes. We gotta keep it real with ourselves and each other, and come to accept the inevitably imperfect nature of revolutionary processes.
From the book ‘Joyful Militancy’:
“To ward off ideology is not finally to see clearly, but to be disoriented, allowing things to emerge in their murkiness and complexity. It might mean seeing and feeling more, but often vaguely, like flickers in one’s peripheral vision, or strange sensations that defy familiar categories and emotions. It is an undoing of oneself, cutting across the grain of habits and attachments. To step out of an inherited ideology can be joyful and painful.”
In place of leftism, autonomy!
Further Reading:
“Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times” by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery
“Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind” by Jason McQuinn
“Why Leftism – All the Way to Anarchism – is the Last Colonial Project” by Peter Harrison