Towards a Critique of Tumblr Theory

(Note: I no longer agree with some of the central claims of this piece and am hoping to write a new piece some time in the near future. Particularly, I think the idiosyncratic way I use the term “class” here is both confusing and ontologically suspect. That said, I think the general critique of idealism here remains useful.)

This piece aims to critique a particular representation of social justice (which sometimes even calls itself anarchism) prevalent in online political discussion spaces, with a particular focus on tumbr social justice blogs. Centrally, I will contrast ‘privilege’ and ‘class’ as objects of political struggle, and discuss the limitations of identity politics and call instead for a revolutionary praxis that is conscious of identity-based oppression but enables us to move beyond identification.

This piece is incomplete and unsatisfactory, and I welcome criticism.

I. Class, oppression, metaphysics

Class is commonly understood as a system of categorization of individuals on a socio-economic basis – e.g. the three class model (lower, middle and upper class) or proletariat and bourgeoisie – but here we understand class as occurring in between individuals and groups. Class is a set of social relations that position the subject relative to power. Class has both an objective and subjective component: objective material forces create the basis for the subjective experience of class. Our definition of class is not a narrow economistic one, but includes patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity, etc. and understands particular oppressions as inter-related and mutually supporting.

It follows immediately that privilege – the experience of being empowered relative to another – is an aspect of class but not the whole picture. Privilege often presents itself as a social fact without any apparent material cause, as if racial privilege, for example, is created by racist ideas, which simply appeared out of the ether. (In truth, race-thinking has historical roots in colonialist strategic thinking, which required the creation of races both as an ideological justification for colonialism and as a way of managing recalcitrant populations in colonised areas.)

II. Check your liberalism privilege

When separated from class as an object of analysis, the focus on privilege lends itself to a form of liberal idealism and moralism. Awareness-raising becomes the central form of political intervention as though, once we make everyone aware of their privilege and get them to act according to a particular set of moral standards, then privilege will disappear. Thus political struggle becomes political correctness.

Once class is reduced to privilege, then privilege is further reduced to a list of privileges – specific ways in which the privileged group are treated differently, such as men being allowed to have pubic hair etc. – which are endlessly cataloged. Thus, particular manifestations of class are made to appear to be constitutive of class itself. Capitalism, a real material phenomenon with concomitant processes of biopolitical control, is replaced by ‘kyriarchy’, the union of all master-slave relations, presented with no apparent underlying cause.

This is not a dismissal of kyriarchy or intersectionality as such, but rather a critique of an idealist conception of intersectionality which mystifies the material basis of oppression. Without intersectionality, the class struggle becomes identified with the concerns of white cisgendered heterosexual men, but conversely, without class struggle, intersectionality becomes critique without transformative potential. Concretely, awareness of privilege is of central importance if we are to prevent the replication of gender/racial hierarchies within the struggle, but awareness of privilege alone offers little in terms of possibilities for transformative direct action, or, put another way, awareness of ones own privilege is substituted for the kinds of actions that could pose a threat to systems of oppression.

III. Identities, identification, legitimacy

The tumblr social justice community adopt a kind of incoherent synthesis of queer theory, post-structuralist feminism, and liberal rights discourse and identity-politics, constructed, Chinese Whispers style from half-understood fragments of theory abstracted from their metaphysical framework. The postmodernist framework of queer theory entails a radical critique of essentialism and a rejection of fixed and stable identities. To try and reconcile it with the thoroughly modernist framework of identity-politics produces absurdities.

Genderqueer, for example, is not a gender identity, but an approach to performing gender: a radical attack on essentialist conceptions of gender which, through the body, exposes the performativity of gender and thereby undermines the ideological and semantic basis of heteropatriarchy. To claim to be genderqueer and to be oppressed on the basis of being genderqueer is to miss entirely the point of what you’re supposed to be doing: that gender is something you do, not something you are. The very act of defining oneself as genderqueer is to replicate the process of definition which reifies binary gender in the first place.

But that is precisely what tumblr genderqueers do. Genderqueer is claimed first as an identity and secondarily as a basis to make demands for recognition and protection, with performativity playing at best a supporting role, turning attack into defence. Worse, this becomes a basis for appropriating the language and laying claim to the legitimacy of trans* struggles by people who are, in the final analysis, thoroughly cisgendered.

Worse still are the entirely artificial identities and spurious associated oppressions – e.g. transethnics (white people who decide that they really belong to another race, usually one strongly associated with anime production), otherkin (non-humans trapped in human bodies), multiples (bodies supposedly containing multiple identities who ought to be recognised as real and autonomous individuals, an idea which would mean that people with real and serious mental illnesses would be denied treatment) – conjured ex nihlo by those wishing to feel special on the internet.

While these made-up oppressions are dismissed by the more sensible elements of the community„ the basis on which they do so is often theoretically inconsistent. A politics which is built entirely around the right of individuals to define themselves subjectively, with no material or historical basis in the real world, has no real basis for defending against parodies of itself. To dismiss otherkin on the basis that they appropriate trans* stuggles, for example, while obviously correct, within this context amounts to an a priori assumption that trans* struggles are legitimate and otherkin aren’t. It is only by returning to materialism (and to class) that we find a basis for doing so. Trans* struggles have a material and historical reality (real processes by which gender is imposed upon their bodies), which flows ultimately from the particular historical development of capitalism as a gendered power structure, which cannot be said of kids who think they’re dragons.

IV. Against identity

Identity is a cage. That is to say: identity, being, is the antithesis of spontaneity, doing. Identities are alien categories imposed upon us by biopolitical processes of identification, with which are constantly in conflict. Capital needs us to be certain things at certain times and in certain places in order to effectively police and manage us. The revolutionary subject, then, is one without identity. They act authentically in their situation, inhabiting their history without being constrained by it, acting against identity-based oppression in order to open up new possibilities and new experiences, rather than to reify the same categories of cold capitalist managerial logic. Ultimately, freedom means a world beyond identity, beyond capitalism, built on the basis of human solidarity, with a diversity of experiences and ways of living. This means that, while we struggle based on who we are, or who we are made to be (and thus autonomous identity-based organising is sometimes the most effective form of resistance) there is only one revolutionary class and one world to take.

Is Eilis O’Hanlon the worst person ever?

TRIGGER WARNING

for extreme transphobia, suicide

I’d never heard of Eilis O’Hanlon before this weekend, when she opportunistically pounced on the media shitstorm around the Swedish House Mafia gig to launch an attack on the Irish underclass.

“Swaggering brutes with raw fists and short fuses are not the victims of society — society is the victim of them”

“Drugs Don’t Stab People, Knackers Do”

Oh but it’s not racist to use an ethnic slur for Travellers cos urbandictionary said so. Urban Dictionary also says that my name is “usually given to a person of extreme sexiness(even if they are ridiculously pale)” but I guess that would be totally a legit thing to write in a national newspaper.

But it turns out that might not be the worst thing she’s written.

Maybe it’s this piece where she laments that the “fact” that most Palestinians “want to destroy Israel and drive all the Jews into the sea” is absent from Irish public discourse.

Or maybe this piece about how Gary Speed was “a selfish person who didn’t give enough thought to how his wife and two sons were supposed to pick up the pieces of a broken life whilst the world tiptoed respectfully around his memory” and there’s not enough good old-fashioned stigma surrounding suicide any more. “The loosening of sexual taboos around unmarried motherhood led to more teenage pregnancy. The loosening of ethical taboos around suicide leads to more suicide.”

It’s probably this piece though, which is all about how hilarious/disgusting/weird trans* people are.

EDIT: Although this piece attacking Dr. Lydia Foy, titled “A scalpel can’t rewrite history, whatever the surgery” might be a close second. “The brain isn’t the most objective judge of its surroundings, after all. The brain sometimes tricks its host into thinking he’s Napoleon; the chromosomes never make him think he’s the Duke of Wellington.”

Politics averted: thoughts on the ‘Occupy X’ movement

This post was written for the Workers Solidarity Movement site in October 2011 when the Occupy movement was just kicking off. It attracted quite a lot of attention at the time, because I think it echoed a lot of the frustrations leftists were feeling towards the movement. It was even picked up and republished by the IWW in the Industrial Worker newspaper.

I’m mainly reposting this because I want to copy some of the better stuff I’ve written for activist publications over to this blog, but it is interesting to read over this in retrospect and see how some of these dynamics played out in different contexts around the world.

What are we to make of the global ‘Occupy X’ movement which has exploded onto the streets of cities across the world, turning public spaces into campsites of opposition? Certain things are obvious: Firstly, the fact that there are thousands of people across the world taking over public spaces to express their anger at the financial system is undeniably a good thing. Having camped out outside the Central Bank on Dame Street on Saturday night, I can also say that these protests exude a positivity and hopefulness that is so often lacking from the ritualistic parades of anger that make up most protest marches. But there are also, in my view, serious political problems that prevent the movement from moving beyond a ‘radical sleepover’ and becoming a genuine anti-austerity grassroots resistance movement.

The analysis below is based in my own particular experience of the Dame St. protest on the ground and of the US protests as a media event. Obviously any attempt to discuss a diverse and fluid movement like this as a whole can only ever be approximate and reductive. This account is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to sketch what I see as the major trends and tendencies emerging within the movement, and should be read with that in mind.

Non-politics, incoherence, (neo)liberalism

The ‘Occupy X’ movement has since its inception shown an extreme aversion to being seen as political. Some aspects of this, such as banning political party banners, are an understandable pragmatic reaction to the tendency of various Leninist parties to hijack these kinds of events by swamping them with flags, banners and paper-sellers. But the anti-politics of the movement, at least on the part of the organising core and the Adbusters collective who issued the call for the original Wall St. protest, is also ideological: an odd synthesis of post-leftist anti-organisationalism (which sees formal political organisations, trade unions, etc. as being necessarily oppressive) and neoliberal post-politicism (which sees a Left vs. Right contest of ideas as being largely irrelevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall). After decades of neoliberal governance and media spin attempting to drive ideology and politics out of public discourse in order to enshrine the liberal-capitalist consensus as being ‘above politics’ and to reduce political questions to technical ones best dealt with by ‘experts’, it is perhaps unsurprising, but nonetheless disheartening, to see this depoliticisation reflected in contemporary forms of resistance.

Most obviously, this has been expressed in the movement’s unwillingness to attempt to agree on a coherent set of positions beyond some very basic points of unity with no underlying analysis of society. Instead, the occupied space is used by individuals to express a range of incoherent and often mutually contradictory ideas which are related only by being in some sense opposed to the status quo and the political and financial elites. On Saturday, I spoke to individuals who believe in everything from Rawlsian social democracy, to anarchism, to paranoid crypto-anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (the New World Order, etc.), to Stalinism. Of course, the advantage of this is that it’s extremely inclusive – the only requirement to participate is a sense that things are not as they should be and that the financial sector and the state are in some way to blame – but this also means that reactionary ideas are treated the same as progressive ones rather than being robustly challenged. In practice, this means that the ideas that come to the fore tend to be those that are already dominant in society: the ideas of the ruling class. In the US context, the dominant messages from Occupy Wall Street have been liberal, reformist and nationalistic: those that posed the least threat to the establishment. For example, a call to “make Wall Street work for America” amounts to little more than a call for increased exploitation of the Third World as an alternative to imposing austerity. A call to reform banking practice to constrain “corporate greed” is merely a call to stabilise capitalism so that the course of exploitation runs more smoothly. The problem is capitalism, not regulatory failure, or corporate greed or a lack of economic patriotism, and the inadequacies of these analyses need to be exposed rather than uncritically welcomed. The Irish protest seems to be following a similar pattern, with a particular anti-IMF/EU flavour.

The theory underlying this anti-politics, so far as I can gather, is this: no two people experience oppression in the same way, and thus any attempt to unite people under a political programme inevitably ends up erasing some people’s perspectives. This is superficially quite a pleasing analysis, since it creates a framework under which all ideas can be understood as equally valid, since they all derive from lived-experience, but it’s extremely problematic. Implicitly, it denies the possibility of coming to an inter-subjective understanding (i.e. one based in mutual recognition of shared experiences and understanding of differing ones) of oppression through collective discussion and compromise, and instead collapses into a naive relativism that produces a vague and weak politics, which plays into the hands of those who wish to dismiss the protesters as ‘hippies’ who don’t understand the complexities of capitalism. In any case, it’s easy to overstate the case for subjective perspectives and ignore the objective factors that shape experiences: the processes and structures of capitalist domination.

Bring back the working-class!

One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world – an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs. This is reflected in the idea of ‘the 99%’ which has become the slogan of the ‘Occupy X’ movement, which expresses a very crude understanding of class, where the ruling class are an arbitrarily defined proportion of the wealthiest people in society. This makes for some great chanting – “we are the 99%!” – but is a poor criterion for membership of an anti-capitalist or anti-austerity movement. Put bluntly: there are an awful lot of capitalists, bosses, managers, bankers, CEOs, politicians, police, prison wardens, pimps, heroin dealers, etc. in the 99%.

Properly understood, class is not a classification system of individuals based on how much money they have, it’s a social relation between people that derives from the organisation of labour under capitalism. In other words, it’s the way people are forced to relate to one another in order to participate in capitalist society. Class oppression is not a small cabal of the ultra-rich in Wall Street or Washington or Leinster House, it’s in every workplace, every police station, every dole queue, every courtroom, every prison and every territory occupied by Western militaries, and can only be sensibly understood as such.

Conclusion

The radically democratic nature of the occupations creates the potential for the movement to evolve in any number of possible directions. Whether or not they become genuine resistance movements depends largely on how much the radical left are willing to engage with them, and re-assert the importance of class politics in understanding and countering oppression, by participating in the actions, discussions, and assemblies. A key hurdle has already been overcome: people are on the streets, expressing their dissent, reclaiming public spaces; it remains to be seen what comes of it.