They have always called us bourgeois, selfish, counterrevolutionary, and unproductive. Parasitic, undesirable and unserious. Because we are poets, artists, punks, sodomites, cocksuckers and shit-talkers, exhausted mediators and throwers of hands, because we are sisters, lovers and friends. Because our allegiance is first and foremost to each other.
Of course we are critical. And for this, we have been shit upon literally forever. Against this world and its structures, we continually come up against its replicas. “The movement would have won if you hadn’t sabotaged it with your stupid feelings and impossible demands.” Simply put, “Shut up.”
To suppress and marginalize one’s critics is no hot new take. It is not rooted in a well-studied understanding of anti-colonial militancy. Defensiveness aids the actual workings of counterinsurgency, forever coursing along currents of pre-inscribed biases. It is an early symptom of authoritarianism. It is simply a tired tale of deflection, older than the oldest revolutions.
Because we are concerned with the proverbial “home” – our intimate relationships, dynamics of power, the social substance our movements rest upon – you call us individualistic, identitarian, confused and destructive. Lifestylist – because the feminized tasks of everyday life and our attempts to subvert them are irrelevant and isolated. Because we are unproductive in our fucking (or unavailable), solely for pleasure, not to bring new life to staff the world of jails and jobs, we are constantly reminded of our uselessness, both in the society we live to destroy, and the micro-societies of the Left.
They pursue doctorates from private universities, produce films, court book publishers, speak on panels; work for tech startups, buy houses in redlined cities, and run invite-only academic-style conferences at wedding retreats. They then write off black feminists, “diasporic organizers,” nihilist homosexuals, and anyone else they don’t agree with as middle-class and out of touch – far from the pedestal of the unnamed and objectified black proletarian teenage boy setting fires. It could never be that someone could riot and have interpersonal concerns. Exist in the moment and consider it later. Be and act. We get it, you’re the only ones rational enough to intellectualize revolt.
In your dismissals of identity politics and their trappings, you’ve upheld the colonial system of gender quite perfectly. The weak sit around and complain about our oppression, the strong don a black mask, get over ourselves, and act. But despite your attempts to segregate them, Doing and Being are non-binary.
Fuck your vanguardist fantasies.
The communist loves to call us selfish, because we have not yet transformed the world in our image or adequately served the People. The basic leftist calls us white and privileged for our risks and transgressions, transplants for seeking healthcare, love, and connection, our collaborative efforts pointless until they take aim at capturing the abstract masses. The ultra-leftist is more insidious; we used to be friends. They implore us to ignore race, evoking a hypocritical class-war puritanism wherever it’s convenient. Tell us to stop worrying about abuse and repair, “safety” and care, the pacifying distractions of the weak.
As some OG lifestyle anarchists once said, “there is no authority but yourself.” We’re just doing our own thing, without charity, false promises, or coercion. (we’re really obnoxiously into consent) Sometimes “fires” spread in surprising ways. Other times, we’re content to reach only those we come in direct contact with, effected in return. Despite the alarms of the “family values” sect, we don’t recruit. Gestures often speak for themselves. We don’t endlessly create organizations, slogans, perfect-bound booklets, websites and accounts to gain influence. If we are to effect others, it is on a different vibration – through mutual recognition, inspiration and dialogue. The process of social transformation can’t be quantified or scientifically reproduced. We love the daily solidarities of life in the city. We love the riot, but it lies beyond our abilities to recreate. If we had that power, it would become something else. Something more like a war. That war, all around us in daily ways, comes closer to military combat everyday. I hope we’ll treat each other better by the time it arrives.
Queers and self-assured women have long been seen as suspicious by revolutionary men of all races and colonial positions. Sensitive people are feminized, weakened and made inefficient by their expressions of pain and need. Our camaraderie is easily, absurdly written off as a luxury – imperialist, corrupting, susceptible to infiltration. Ahistorical assumptions which figuratively and literally killed many of those who came before us.
Our ancestors died alone, in rivers and gulags, SROs, sidewalks, closets and prisons.
Lately, it really feels as if everyone has suddenly forgotten about feminism! The elite capture of identity politics in the neoliberal age has conveniently erased half a century and more of the labor to articulate a language to describe our once invisibilized, intersecting experiences. (it’s crazy any of us even get the chance to create knowledge “legitimately” – if the right gets their way, our studies will be a brief historic experiment. Political education is one of their most focused upon targets) The maligned “safe(r) space” inherits its defining factors from this complicated lineage. We know that safety is illusory. If we find fault in the way these attempts have been swooped and turned against us, it is not the labor itself we reject. It remains a gift from our elders, to adapt and translate. We pick through the wreckage of ivory towers and marketplaces for wheels we won’t have to reinvent later.
Our “comrades” who never had time for our worlds, our ideas, our complaints, needs, joys and revelations, then or now, love to reference nuanced critiques of identity, born from places of true liberatory desire, and spit them out without context, as if they were written solely to affirm their dying projects and the leadership of their weird white friends.
Sometimes our pain really does hold us back, and we need to reevaluate and seek new ways. Sometimes we’re fucked up, for days or months or years, because the state is crushing us, because we’re broke and unhealthy and strung out or trying to stay sober, grieving, on supervised release, taking care of sick family members, raising children, tired and burnt out because you all stayed friends with some creep who fucked us over a decade ago. Maybe we started hanging out with people who respect us more. Sometimes we don’t act because we know we don’t have our shit together to take care of each other if something goes wrong. Sometimes we act unspectacularly, and no one hears about it.
Aftercare makes sustained confrontation possible. We’re in a low time right now, reeling from state-sanctioned murder and a massive show of repression. This year is going to be crazy, whether we’re ready for it or not. If we’re really trying to build up to something bigger, we have to take care of our home and learn from our mistakes. Is this lull counterinsurgency at work? Is it the need for healing, reflection, and regrouping? Definitely both. We won’t overcome it by daring each other to care less.
We aren’t color-blind insurgents, nor are we pain-obsessed liberals. We are illegible. We do not exist in an easy equilibrium of privilege and risk, of danger and safety. Our identities are both mutable and imposed. We are complex individuals drawn together for a time. We cannot ignore the larger violence we inhabit and inherit, especially here in the united states. We talk about it and attack it.
To scoff in the face of power is the basis of anarchism. Now all of a sudden, it’s a sign of our own impotence, our unseriousness to the task of revolution, our “willingness to remain slaves.” But we’re already infertile, so we don’t really care.
Maybe you’re talking about someone else, and I’m taking things too personally. You’ll have to excuse me – queers are notoriously sentimental and defensive. Especially when we forget to do our shot. (and I am a few days late, because of some drama with Medicaid, but I digress…) But when you write off concerns within your already extremely niche scene as bourgeois, intellectual, ineffectual, non-profit-pilled, social-media ready, peace-policing, or whatever, (all shit we also take issue with) you shut us down with the same counterrevolutionary cries raised against true anti-authoritarians forever, though now with more modern references.
“You, who we once worked closely together with, are now the enemy.”
We feel the need to remind you that we care nothing for your horizon, your ulterior motives, your grasps at power; your “real struggle,” your disregard of individuality and difference for the sake of a coercive communalism to come. There is no horizon, there is no future, and there is no progress.
We find meaning only in our daily disobediences, our unproductivity, our stolen frivolity, our inside jokes and secret worlds. Our love for each other is a slow build of trust and choreography to help us do things we’ll never tell you about. (and it’s better if you don’t think we’re capable of it)
We don’t play to win – we struggle and play for its own sake. Because if we didn’t, we would be dead.
We never win, we know this much by now. And when you win, we still lose.
So we set our table with a bowl full of fruit and candles lit for the suicided, COINTELPRO’d and murdered, the AIDS dead, the OD’d, the bitter, violated, discarded and shut out. And then we sit around and talk shit and laugh and smoke and cry until the sun comes up, because this is all life is made of.
It’s no surprise that the “culture war” at large has found its mirror in the left, where anti-woke discourse is shrouded as insurrectionary potential. A tearing down of dialogue itself; a refutation of allegations of racism, sexism, ableism and abuse, of our attempts to name reality and expect more from those who claim to fight alongside us. Discarding our elders and their “liberal abolitionism” – decades of black feminism, prison agitation, and the projects and theories of current and former prisoners of war, who, despite compromise and trauma, and even though we may disagree with them at times, still have much to teach us.
Just because our intimate struggle against authority has been sideswiped and confused by the same forces that co-opt and tangle all revolutionary politics, does not mean that these attempts are useless. A politic of care is not antithetical to a politic of attack. Those of us who know this continue to find each other and act accordingly. And continue to Be. Though our enemies wish us dead.
We can work towards shutting down the immediate with people who don’t understand us, with respect for our individual opacities, a dignified and distinct constellation of relation as per Glissant (concepts you love to misquote), or we can accept that you will never. fucking. get it.
Our movements will suffer, but not because we were too sensitive.
We will continue to revolt. We will continue to fail.
We will continue to sleep in, drop out, do our hair and makeup, do drugs and steal books and groceries and hop the turnstile and commit various petty crimes, draw pictures, write poetry and call outs, make satirical newspapers, have sex, talk shit about stuff we haven’t read, start bands, eat garbage, get voluntary surgeries, and spend our money on the bathhouse. We dress rich and look homeless sometimes at the same time because fashion is artifice, we get arrested for non-political offenses, go traveling, clean up after people, talk about our trauma, go to therapy or don’t, get in stupid fights and do our best to take care of each other. We continue to create those rare spaces where we do not need to explain ourselves, spaces of refuge and understanding which allow us to keep going. We will continue to warn each other about those who have hurt us. All this is to say, we will keep loving and fighting.
More importantly, we will never stop throwing the best and most wonderful parties – whether in the decadent, leaking corners of capitalism’s appropriated excess, or in the work camps of the world of your logical conclusions.
For a generalized frivolity, severed, wherever possible, from capital.
For the recovery of our time and energy through daily acts of refusal.
For feeling too much.
For conflict for its own sake.
For mass inefficiency, liable to begin at any moment.
xo
an anti-social element
Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, Cuba 1967