The Personal Is Articulated By the Political, Sure, and Hence Is Always Politicizable -- But It Isn't Automatically Political As Such and To Think Otherwise Risks the Evacuation of the Political

I've sparred on an off lately with a reader who shares many of my larger aspirations -- for a sustainable, equitable, informed, consensual multiculture (where culture is construed as prosthetic) -- but whose "radicalism" and "revolutionary outlook" seems to me too often to be a matter of performing self-congratulation in front of a mirror or throwing darts from an armchair at those who make the questionable alliances and painful compromises through which social struggle and democratic reform are actually materialized in the world.

I am forever asking this person (and many like-minded others who show up here and there in the Moot) to demonstrate that their occupation of a position of superior radicalism is more than a pretense, and hence that they have actual actionable alternatives to offer to my own efforts at progressive reform and social struggle and understanding within existing constraints.

I do indeed regard myself as a radical -- I'm a green queer atheist vegetarian democratic socialist feminist aesthete trained in nonviolence and teaching critical and political theory at a San Francisco art school and at Berkeley, does sound radical to you? But my radicalism resonates with Michael Harrington's motto: "The best liberalism leads toward socialism. I’m a radical, but I want to be on the left wing of the possible."

My interlocutor recently responded to my request for substance, thus:

Dale recently asked me for specifics, so I reproduce my suggestions here. Forge passionate personal relationships based on mutual affection and a commitment to anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, decolonization, queer liberation, feminism, and non-hierarchical organizing. Support each other emotionally, intellectually, and materially. Choose one or more of the following: fight the pigs the street, oppose institutional racism in the academy, give out free food, form a union with your coworkers, network with radical communities across the world, tell people not to join the military, correspond with a political prisoner, burn migra cars when see them in your neighborhood, hack a government/corporate website, spread the revolutionary analysis to everyone you know. So much love to everyone in the struggle!

At the risk of seeming (seeming, hah!) a grumpy old man, let me raise a few issues here.

Without an organizational dimension “passionate personal relationships” -- whatever their supposed grounds, even when they are apparently political -- may amount to little more than another mode of subcultural signalling, and hence are perfectly compatible with the maintenance and consolidation of the violent, unsustainable, inequitable, homogenizing status quo. It’s too easily accommodated into just the usual consumer narcissism.

It isn’t that I disdain the beauty and delight, let alone deny the necessity, of providing emotional and intellectual and material support for congenial colleagues and strangers -- it’s that I do not mistake it, on its own, as serious political activity.

The indispensable feminist slogan “the personal is political” should be read as revealing the historical articulation of the terms on which personal life is lived and hence the politicizability of the personal.

I fear that your laundry list is pretty scanty on the details when it comes to “opposing institutional racism in the academy” -- what form does your opposition take? rolling your eyes at straight white assholes in the lounge or petitions to the administration or teach-ins or lawsuits? What form does fighting pigs in the streets take? Peaceful protest marches or leafleting neighborhoods about abuses or throwing rocks through windshields or calling police “pigs” on your blog and feeling naughty? Organizing the dispensing of food to the precarious or intervening in the military recruitment of vulnerable populations or creating a powerful co-worker union are all excellent things that do indeed demand sustained organizational effort -- but I wasn’t clear on whether you were glibly saying “it’s a good idea” in some abstract way every person of sense already agrees with or if you were claiming to have participated in such efforts yourself in any ongoing way -- ongoing is key. After all, anybody can scribble a manifesto or a master plan on a cocktail napkin over drinks -- the demand for specifics was about whether you are writing checks your ass can cash, you will recall.

I am glad you think spreading radical and revolutionary ideas counts as substantial political activity -- I’d like to agree with you, and I hope you are right -- but as somebody who blogs on politics, but more to the point has taught marxist, eco-socialist, eco-feminist, environmental justice, civil disobedience, critical media theory, p2p democratization, and queer theory to thousands of college age students both in art school and public university settings I do sometimes worry that there are better things to be doing (only some of which I manage to do).

I hope you will not take it too amiss that I still worry that you are far too easy on yourself and far too self-congratulatory for the good of the ends you espouse -- if it helps, I’ll confess I worry about this in myself also, and that I think these worries are a useful corrective to the powerful countervailing forces toward complacency available even to the bad subjects of an obscenely consequence-insulated exploitation-fat hegemonic order such as US is.

I like it that there is some walk as well as talk in this post, though. Especially to the extent that the walk isn’t just more talk.