Re: <nettime> Fascist "trolls" and back on track

["Dan S. Wang" <danwang@mindspring.com>]

Dear Emaline and Alice,

Thank you for generous replies. Nobody's ever pinned down what may or many
not be attributed to consciousness unencumbered by four or five decades of
lived experience and memory, but I detect something vaguely optimistic in
both
your responses, an optimism that I sometimes have difficulty projecting.
Maybe it has to do with what Alice said, that for many in your age cohort
the call-out is so yesterday. That is good to hear, and I kind of see it.
Not only have people like Angela Nagle and now Haider offered some very
fair critiques, but I kind of see it in my own life. For example, in the
students I taught this summer and in the Millennial-heavy DSA meetings
I've been attending, people are very into developing a
class-consciousness, one that is informed by social difference in its very
core self-understanding. Reactive Suey Park-style shaming is over it
seems, or at least has died down into background noise. The new generation
proceeds with diversity as a fact, not an aspiration.

What Emaline says about the socializing as an attractive feature of
today's grassroots activism, that would be a welcome silver lining to the
toxic effects of social media. On a basic level the socializing was ever a
feature of insurgent political cultures, going back to the dances and
picnics of the early British trade unionists. If the socializing satisfies
presently in a new and different way because of our screen time, esp for
the young who know of no pre-Web world, then so much the better. Your
remark about it sometimes feeling like engagement boils down to a choice
between socializing or grant writing, well, that certainly speaks to a
compulsory professionalization that, to me, also seems like a symptom of
post-'89 (to take a convenient marker of time) neoliberalized work. This
is a condition at least equal to the movement problems I described,
probably a lot more harmful in terms of assembling mass movements.

Angela,

For the sake of simplicity, I admit that I probably overstated some of the
generational differences. But I am not sure what you mean by my
"historiography" ­ in relation to social movement history, most of what I
said is more or less settled, the broad turns, anyway. Further, I am just
trying to make sense of what I lived through and have observed, helped
along by texts by others that people can read, instead of just hearing
about my experiences.

>I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is
>depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the
>treatment of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been
>conducted through more or less tacit assumptions about identity that
>link to entitlement. And your disappearance of white men's identity
>politics as a tacit default or "universal" has the effect of yielding a
>narrative that says (incorrectly in my view) that "identity politics"
>>only began when the former's claim of universality was challenged.


Also let me clarify, what I mean is that there is a tendency within
identity politics (which, simply put, I take to be a constellation of
discourses in different fields and disciplines, as well as in activist
settings, that foregrounds interpretations through the lenses of social
difference) to privilege moral status over questions of power. Obviously
there is slippage between "moral" and "power"; so much of the
intra-movement Civil Rights conversation was about that relationship
(because, yes, the Christian thing, etc).

But no, I did not and have never said that identity politics is
"depoliticising" in a blanket fashion. A tendency, not the whole. If my
original post did not make it clear, I myself, including much of my
activist history, am a product of the 1980s full emergence of identity
politics. Mine is a self-critique. Which is also to say, I never said the
younger generation "is doing it wrong." What I said was, we (including
myself) failed in transmitting the history. That so many, including Alice
and Emaline, are doing it RIGHT despite the failures of their leftist
elders, speaks volumes to the hope I have for the up and coming.


But yes to Marx as a writer, not a cult figure. But quite a writer he was.
Maybe you already went deep enough to read his articles on China and the
opium warring. Check out some of those dispatches if you haven't, just for
another angle on Marx and his times.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/china/index.htm

Thank you,

Dan w.



On 11/10/18, 11:54 AM, "Emaline Friedman" <emalinefriedman@gmail.com>
wrote:

>Dan, 
>
>
>Even before your solicitation, I was prepared to be the American
>20-something (thanks, also, for your post, Alice):
>
>
>What an interesting experience it's been here on Nettime for the last few
>years as I've been writing a critical-psychological dissertation about
>"Internet Addiction" (a perfectly Foucaultian generational problem)! In
>between then and now I became deeply involved with a post-blockchain
>project called Holochain and so went from resistant net-asceticism to
>deep web, crypto-cultural exploration. What sets Holochain apart, at
>least in the core group, is its having started with eco-hippies who had
>been designing complementary currencies for intentional (and religious)
>communities for decades. Which brings me to the point about the 60's...
>
>
>I'll make the same preface about criticizing the youth, but in the other
>direction. Please don't take my agreement with your points as Oedipal
>variety anger. I do wish to emphasize, though, that it's worth taking a
>good hard look at what's been created through the de-politicization of
>60's social movements. In my (odd) tech world this has taken the form of
>solutionism + a staunch DIY ethos that refuses engagement with national
>governments and other major social institutions and thus also eludes any
>realistic political context. Simultaneously, in grade school as much as
>in grad school, teachers and professors sang the praises of the 60's
>greats. While first as moral heroes and later as exemplars of driving
>affective flows, we never got much more than celebrated lifestyles that
>never seemed to match up with the modes of reading the present from which
>they are ostensibly generated.
>
>
>The primary rift between young activists on the left and right (though
>these terms are SO RARELY used) is that the young "left" believes that
>mass movements are now smaller, but that that's *ok* because the most
>important thing to uphold is being a good person...even if it never gets
>anywhere or benefits anyone. The young alt-light has a deeper
>understanding of power operating in the shadows and, contrary to Bard's
>Marxian heroism, accepts that it will not look like it did in the 60's.
>Unless of course you're at Burning Man or one of the numerous regional
>burns quite popular among gamers and others in the Southeast.
>
>
>By the way, I use the alt-light label to denote folks who will confess
>their ultimately 
>fascist ideals on lots of drugs but who have no problem working with a
>jewish woman (me) by day on tech we all understand as a powerful
>pharmakon. We happily hold our own hopes about whose hands these tools
>will fall into. Note that the kindness you spoke of indeed crosses these
>political boundaries. And why shouldn't it? As I said, these terms are
>never used. They are hardly identities for us, making cooperation a given
>on the backdrop of "you've got your fantasies and I've got mine".
>
>Please understand that for me, like many young Americans, diversity has
>always been depoliticized and thus is often rightly met with the
>proverbial eyeroll of moralistic education. I'm from suburban California
>and then moved, first to the rural, then urban, south. The moralism is
>extreme off the heels of a disavowed Christianity, and I sometimes feel
>here as if I'm occupying a place so far to the left that I appear to be
>looping around to the far right -- ironically, because such morals feel
>impossible to uphold provided one is not white, male, privileged, etc. As
>I see it, without school or jobs, socializing is a huge motivator for
>involvement in activism. So, when your peers begin to morally lambast you
>harder than your parents for discursive missteps, prospects seem few.
>Compare this to the style of engagement of someone like Bard. At least he
>gave a sporty acknowledgement of your effort.
>
>
>I often feel torn between participating in overtly activist spaces, what
>sometimes feels like "just being a body" and doing the not so glamorous
>work no one seems willing to do. Shake hands with people in positions of
>"power over". It's a choice between socializing and grant writing. This
>is where identity comes in for me -- I am grateful to be a woman when I
>have a minor surge of hope that it'll give me better opportunity to
>struggle to fund my peers and me to live how we want: in zero-waste
>communities, learning regenerative agriculture, and confidently networked
>enough to know that we can provide and receive swells of support in what
>are obviously impending disaster zones. Not a far cry from the pamphlet
>Ian just posted in the other thread, which was promptly accused of being
>masculinist alt-right literature. Sigh.
>
>Thanks, Dan, and everyone, for your insights. I've wanted to express my
>appreciation for this group for a long time. <3
>
>
>On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 7:30 PM Dan S. Wang <danwang@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>
>Thank you, Angela.
>
>Until Ryan singled out the tasteless and revealing remark about
>Charlottesville, it hadn¹t registered for me. Why not? Because in Bard¹s
>response addressed to me, his first line about my post being "so very very
>brilliant" put me off to the extent that I didn't even read the rest of
>it. I had seen enough to engage directly. My desire was to throw some
>thoughts, spun out from that  thread, for the list at large. My references
>to Bard's lines and "arguments" were, I hope, taken as intended. Which is
>to say, with an edge of ridicule.
>
>
>The fascist shibboleths regarding identity politics can be dispensed with
>and I thank Ian, Alice, Angela, Ryan, Ted and others for clearing this
>space of that. I, for one, would be grateful to have the conversation
>continued about the genesis of identity politics in various national
>contexts, and its contemporary usefulness--or dysfunction. Without the
>fascist Bard. So, back to the irregularly scheduled programming:
>
>Here is an observation about the Millennial activist US subcultures to
>which I have been exposed. In my experience both in activist and teaching
>settings, today's twenty-somethings have an understandable fascination
>with the 60s/70s period, of course as I did. Their relationship to a
>comparatively more distant time is itself interesting to me, and, I would
>say, presents challenges that sometimes are not met productively.
>
>(Let me say here, before I get accused of hating on the kids, that the
>young people are our hope in the US. GenQ, I call them, for Generation
>Queer--the POC/mixed/queer rad youth who were the first ones out in the
>streets in a rage on election night in 2016, the ones who are knitting
>together causes and constituencies as intuitively as they take to the burn
>of 
>the tattoo gun, the ones who are feeling the despair of climate
>catastrophe in ways a 50 y.o. like myself cannot even imagine--and yet
>press on, with a general kindness toward each other that I never expressed
>as a young person. I am critical but that doesn't lessen my admiration.
>Btw
>I have a 22 y.o. daughter, so I am not entirely personally disconnected to
>the new generation.)
>
>There is now a social movement canon in place that was not yet established
>in my 80s student days; we were still living through a hangover period.
>Many of the figures vaunted today as legend were still out and about, no
>longer on the lam, resurfacing to haunt the college lecture circuit, and
>still raising
>ruckuses in perfectly human--which is to say, contradictory ways. On many
>levels it was easier in the 80s for young activists to feel a continuity
>with the old guard, people who were no more heroic than we
>potentially could be. The fact that overall life conditions, particularly
>around information technology and other kinds of speedy mobility, had not
>made the quantum departure it would in the late 90s, also had the effect
>of linking us to the earlier radicalisms, even with movements in retreat,
>even when we were reacting against their excesses and blind spots.
>
>For younger people now, the gap between the 60s/70s and the present day
>must feel like the chasm between myth and reality. And yet, those are the
>go-to touchstones. Panthers, SDS, Malcolm, Stonewall, etc etc. The
>beginnings of those movements, the full expression of those figures and
>projects, remain inspiring. But it is in the defeats, failures,
>cooptations, and disintegrations that the most valuable lessons lay. The
>decline of the mass movements--and parallel opportunism of the right
>wing--is missing in the received history. The reason for this? My take is,
>liberal mainstream education seeks to include a diversity of narratives
>but depoliticizes them. Thus, what gets taught--and consequently
>internalized--is a moral narrative rather than a political one. For
>example, it is the moral analysis of the Civil Rights movement that gets
>emphasized in US high schools, not the problem of political powerlessness.
>So US history gets taught as a forward march of moral progress, not a
>back-and-forth contest over resources and labor.
>
>The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
>afflicts radical political subcultures in the US, and I see it
>particularly in the younger generation. I do not dismiss such moral
>calculations at all, but I do think they can be destructive to
>movement-building when the pseudo-politics of moralism play out in close
>range, producing conflict horizontally among would-be allies, and not
>vertically, leaving those who hold positions of 'power-over' untouched.
>That the pseudo-politics often deploys a discourse of identity is where my
>afore-described 80s context for the rise of identity politics would be
>helpful, I think--to reclaim identity politics for it was and always will
>be: a reserve well of power located in the deeply personal (a kind of
>incipience, Hardt & Negri would call it) that even slavery could not
>eradicate, and from which we may build out the broad tide of insurgency
>that vastly
>overflows the personal.
>
>My critique of Haider's book is that he draws almost exclusively from a
>fairly distant past for his models of a new class politics: Combahee River
>Collective, etc. He makes no argument for present day models, does not
>outline a potential model for today's conditions (even as he makes clear
>that the Occupy movement held promise), and largely skips over the
>'movement of movements' of the Zapatista-inspired 90s.
>
>I think it is appropriate for Nettime, being a living relic of that 90s
>moment, to be grappling with the question of new class formation now, i.e.
>a class meaningless without POC/womyn/genderqueer/migrant leadership at
>its very center--but that will, given the logics of oncoming plurality
>math (first in the US, then in Canada, Australia, and European countries)
>need to include for full political strength white segments beyond the
>already 'woke.' 
>
>Any perspectives from actual 20-somethings would be most welcome, of
>course!
>
>Yours in infinitely divisible social difference,
>
>Dan w. 
>
>


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