Up With Dialog, Part 1
Cool tumblr dude jones300 recently sent me a very nice note and asked three questions. For the sake of time and space, I will answer each one in a separate post. First up:
How did you first get involved in politics?
I come from a pretty political family. My father is a trade unionist who led a major strike in Boston back in the late 1980s and won. My mother was involved in the Women’s Movement and her father originally worked on the lead up to the Vietnam War for the RAND Corporation before having a moral crisis whereby he became a pacifist. My father enlisted in the Marines when he was 18 but became a conscientious objector on religious grounds (he was Roman Catholic at the time) and received an honorable discharge. In addition, one of my parents’ closest and oldest friends is the daughter of the most accomplished Marxist labor historian in the United States.
I joined the International Socialist Organization, a Trotskyist group, when I was a senior in high school after attending a rally against the build up to the Iraq War. At that time I was educating myself on the different schools of Marxism mostly through the websites Red Encyclopedia and BroadLeft. I left the ISO shortly after due to school and social constraints but rejoined during my freshman year of college.
I stayed with the ISO for a little over a year before leaving over ideological differences. I wrote a criticism afterwards which promoted a more ultraleft perspective and was originally published on the anarchist site InfoShop. I had some minor associations with other socialist groups afterwards, specifically the libertarian Marxist World Socialist Party USA and the labor oriented group Solidarity.
Despite my continued interest in socialist philosophy, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the impotence of contemporary activism. Not only did all that marching and yelling seem pointless and absurd, but the uneasy alliance between socialists and anarchists and the larger groups of Democrats and liberals, who didn’t seem to mind endless war as long as it was approved of by the UN, pissed me off to no end. How could it be properly called an antiwar movement if there wasn’t even a majority consensus against military interventionism? The view from the ground was that the Left had no cohesive values and was only named as such because it’s members would shrink in horror at being called “conservative” or “right wing.” Lastly, the social politics promoted by both the radicals and moderates (i.e. antiracism, gay marriage, identity politics) seemed to compliment the narcissistic individualism of consumer capitalism much better than a system based on economic mutualism.
Thoroughly fed up with the Left and activism in general, I focused on developing a political outlook in tune with the values I felt most committed to. As such, I developed a slogan based off the motto of the French Revolution:
Liberty • Autonomy • Community
The first plank refers to civil libertarianism. The second to the concept of self rule in terms of individual choices as well as economic ones, most notably the right of workers to control the means of production though cooperatives or councils. Lastly, the right to a collective identity and living space. That is, the freedom of association and therefore the right to establish closed societies according to the principles of self sufficiency.
It was through this refocusing of political principles that I came into online contact with a group of people who had seemingly come to the same conclusions I had but from the other end of the political spectrum. These folks had origins in far right, nationalist scenes but were sick of the authoritarianism, the rank bigotry, the crazies and the uncritical allegiance to an economic system which promotes exploitation and atomistic individualism at the expense of national and local communities. They called themselves National Anarchists.
While this group was organized primarily online through a few egroups, on an intellectual level it was far superior to anything I had participated in before. Through these associations, I became aware of and receptive to certain conservative (one might say arch conservative) and right wing ideas. Specifically an aristocratic critique of democracy and equality as well as the Stoic anarchism of Ernst Jünger.
While I wouldn’t necessarily consider my contemporary outlook right wing or conservative, I would classify it as illiberal. The reason for this is that our current socioeconomic system is the end result of Anglo-American liberalism. Leftism and American “conservatism” are brother enemies who both originate from this now fetid well. Leftist social schemes aimed at producing an individual without preference for gender, ethnicity or culture are reminiscent of the New Soviet Man. What Leftists (liberals, socialists, and anarchists alike) fail to realize is that this deadening universalism has been far better achieved by neoliberal capitalism whereby individual identity is the product of consumer choice. We can now simply buy who we want to be. At root we are economic animal, everything else is fleeting and ancillary.
Likewise, I see nothing sinister about religion per se or the preference to associate with others of a shared ethnicity or culture. A corrupted or exploitive power structure breeds corruption or exploitation, regardless of the intentions of it’s creators. Methodology is often just as responsible for how beneficial or malevolent a system will be than the ideology behind it. That said, ideological presumptions often dictate methodology.
If I’ve learned any lessons from this political journey, it’s that ideas never remain liberatory forever and the way the we do things is just as important, if not more so, as the things we say.
