…long-time revolutionaries in Rojava believe that the real revolutionary struggle is not the one in the geopolitical and military realms. Rather, long-term outcomes will be defined by the ideological struggles within revolutionary movements. To the extent to which ideological depth and organized autonomous actions can decolonize politics, movements can resist being compromised and can continue to claim to present alternatives to the dominant world-system, even in times of genocidal wars. The movement’s perspectives define moments of crisis as chaos intervals within which different forces compete; the most organized will become the subjects who can define outcomes, even eras.
– Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement, p. 240
“The most organized will become the subjects who can define outcomes, even eras.” A current, crucial concern for the radical left in the United States is that we do not take ourselves seriously enough as a legitimate alternative to the late-stage capitalist, techno-obsessed, fascistic set of crises we live in. Relatedly, we do not commit ourselves to autonomous organizing practices that could build sustainable counter-institutions. As someone who entered movement at a time when we did take ourselves and our work more seriously as an alternative, I find this absence to be challenging to understand and deeply unsettling.
I struggle to fully know how to articulate this because I do think that there is good work happening in community. It is unfortunately not enough. Where I live and organize, it is also not actively working to grow itself larger, broader, or deeper. If anything, the opposite. In their concise and on-point article, “How Much Discomfort is the Whole World Worth,” Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write, “Efforts to build diverse, intergenerational movements will always generate conflict and discomfort. But the desire to shrink groups down to spaces of easy agreement is not conducive to movement building.”
This concern around taking ourselves seriously is linked to and rooted in a lack of ideological depth combined with a lack of commitment to being organized. We further immobilize ourselves by being incapable of productively engaging with and holding conflict and discomfort. We must grow and complexify yet instead we shrink and simplify. Were we to take ourselves seriously as those willing to birth a new world into existence, were we to embrace the imaginary, we might build a movement that could live at the scale and complexity required to be strategic, tactical, caring, effective, and liberatory.
To do this, we have to be able to dig much deeper into our understanding of what we want to build and how we want to build it. We have to read and discuss and debate; learn movement context, history, and spend time understanding current international struggles. And we have to grow a movement. Which means that we have to abandon the purity and cancel politics that the radical left is rife with at the moment.
In my neighborhood in South Minneapolis, once the pandemic had taken hold and, then, following that, the uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd, mutual aid work was everywhere. Neighbors were jumping in and helping out and moving resources. As both of these ruptures settled a bit and became more a part of daily life, needs continued but people also burned out. Crews solidified and subcultures within them were created. An interesting divide became apparent. There were still people who wanted to get involved. But they weren’t always “cool” – they might be white or middle-aged or just generally not somehow magically indoctrinated with the correct language and demeanor. They might fuck up and say something wrong. So an impasse has been created – on the one hand, we need to be welcoming, grow the movement. On the other, (well, maybe the belief that we don’t – different conversation) we believe that it’s not fair to expect BIPOC and/or queer and/or young folks to have to put up with offensive things that newbies might say. While legitimate arguments exist on either side of the debate, this is a solvable problem – if organizing based on solid and shared ideas were clear. The work without theory or lack of praxis, means that this just continues unresolved. More and more burnout, less and less memory of recent work, at the same time that there are people who feel like there’s no way into movement.
Hayes and Kaba continue:
We are not talking about launching search parties to find an undiscovered army of people with already-perfected politics with whom we will easily and naturally align. Instead, organizing on the scale that our struggles demand means finding common ground with a broad spectrum of people, many of whom we would never otherwise interact with, and building a shared practice of politics in the pursuit of more just outcomes. It’s a process that can bring us into the company of people who share our beliefs quite explicitly, but to create movements, rather than clubhouses, we need to engage with people with whom we do not fully identify and may even dislike.
Welcoming people means doing the work of building of our own structures – physically and ideologically – in order to hold the discomfort that comes with people who are all at varying points on their own paths; just as we individually and collectively are at our own points of growth and evolution. Reading and learning and focusing our energy on relationships as well as ideas can teach us to continue to evolve our efforts and our beliefs while simultaneously grounding them in the acceptance that they cannot be instantly nor ever perfect and pure.
When I reflect on times where this ability to believe in ourselves felt more central to the work I was a part of, even the broad strokes look different. We knew what we thought and that informed how and what we built. We had our own infrastructure. Literally, whether it’s a clinic or bookstore or bike coop or food project, etc., we were actively building – in tangible ways – a different world. This is called “prefigurative” politics. The politics of building the world you want to see right now. We were trying all kinds of experiments, we were creating and evolving projects, trying to make that new world. Of course, it was not all rainbows and unicorns. It was messy and hard and we failed a lot. But we also won way more than we have in more recent times.
The work was also not entirely based in reacting. To some extent, movement work has an inherently reactive aspect to it – there is the tearing down of the current world that needs to be done while a new one is being created. And, clearly, sometimes reacting is what we need to do. When a homeless encampment is being evicted, when Gaza is being bombed, when the cops are on the block, yes, sometimes our action must be a reaction. At the moment, though, our reactions are the vast majority of what we do. Which seems to then also be all we know how to do. To take ourselves seriously is to recognize that reacting is only one part of what we do and who we are.
When building is a central part of radical movement, even reacting is more effective. Think about it. If you have a long-standing affinity group or something akin that, you and your crew know each other deeply because you’ve been building that clinic, bike shop, co-op, whatever for years. Then, there’s some whack shit going on in global capitalism and there’s a call for AGs to go participate in mass organized actions to shut it down. You already know what your skills are, people’s quirks, and you trust each other. When that is combined with movement space that starts from trust and not from purity and cancel-culture, it is also possible to work together with people you don’t know in order to create large organizing space that seeks to be horizontal and directly democratic.1 So you shut that shit down. Well, sometimes.
I can’t emphasize enough that this wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t enough, and, at best, I would look to it as a time of creative experimentation from which to learn from and grow into something better. But this kernel; this belief that we were building the new world was powerful.
Fast-forward a decade or two and the anarchism I came up with that was at the heart of most of this is a faint memory. The culture and politics of insurrectionism – individualistic-leaning anarchism, burning over building, anti-organizing (thus, anti-institution building) are now what is synonymous with anarchism. Even more, just as the praxis of prefiguration had a notable influence on the rest of the left; now insurrectionism has created a default non-organizing that percolates throughout scenes who have clear desires for change but have little-to-no structure.2
Thankfully, there are many (mostly) BIPOC femmes of the world, writing other content under the banner of anarchism and/or abolition – very much appreciated. Unfortunately, the building work they inspire, while falling outside of the critique I’m laying out here, continues to feel all too small a part of movement or, in general, what is happening in the world. Don’t mistake me, I think that this is arguably some of the best of what movement is doing right now.
We can’t go back to the world of my youth. Nor would I want to (for a number of reasons – easily top of the list would be the huge strides movement has made around race, gender, sexuality, and ability since then). But I do want us to be organized. We could learn from the structures that have been built before us where we live as well as those that continue to be forged in liberatory struggles across the world. There must be a reclamation of ourselves enough to believe that we can make this world a better place. This requires that we put ourselves in rooms together; requires we learn together. We have to accept the impurity of building. To take ourselves seriously is to believe in ourselves. Thus, it also means that, ironically, we must find humility. Because it isn’t that I believe that I have the correct answer. It is the belief that we can – together, collectively – find many good answers by trying.
This ability to take ourselves seriously could begin to address the question of scale so often discussed as a need for movement. Additionally, I prefer to focus on an ability to replicate our work – proliferate. In choosing to learn from the past, there is the potential to not make the same mistakes. Instead of the “big tent” mass organizing or disconnected cells, how about directly democratic autonomous confederalism? Feels like a curveball to throw out such a specific proposal of how to make the world around us. Because we do not take ourselves seriously enough to dream that big. We throw down hard and we show up every day for our mutual aid work. But, are we at a point of engaging with the complexity required in order to build parallel institutions that can actually facilitate liberation?
So, what would it mean to take ourselves seriously?3 It is a grounded commitment to phrases like “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for” being more than just chant fodder. The idea that a new world is possible and it’s up to us to build it. It implies a desire to build, to work, to attempt the manifestation of our dreams; and that we have big dreams. It means committing to collective organizing work that both creates liberatory institutions outside of the system while continuing to evolve what our relationship is to the current systems we are attempting to survive.
It also means we need nuance because it will be messy – there is no pure world out there we can magically make. It means failing and learning from our mistakes and trying again. It also means continuing when we don’t fail but it’s still hard to get up and do it again each day. It means that there is a world that doesn’t look like this one. It looks like how we make it. No one else is coming to save us (and would we even want that?). It means recalibrating our perspective away from assuming we will continue to lose.
To paraphrase the words of Adrienne Marie Brown and many abolitionist thinkers, “What is the responsibility we take when we call for the abolition of the police?” In that regard, there are quite a number of writings and projects aiming to answer just that question. In tangible liberatory ways. What about the climate crisis? What about this pandemic? What is the responsibility that we take when we call for the abolition of capitalism and colonialism? We must embrace that it is our responsibility to build something else to replace these systems of tyranny and that any new world is only liberatory if we build it to continue to work each day to be so.
~
Hediye Yusuf, at the time of our interview in 2015, co-president of Jazeera canton, elaborated on what she perceived as the difference between Rojava’s model and other protest movements in the wider region, namely, a pre-existing (left) revolutionary network, a concretely emancipatory project to be implemented in a coordinated manner with the guidance of experienced cadres and organized political communities, and a reluctance to trust global or regional state agendas that claimed to demand freedom for Syrians in an abstract sense. In other words, coordination, not spontaneity, made Rojava’s revolution. “There was an already organized community here, a pre-existing political culture. Experienced people provided farsighted perspectives and analyses to lead the process of self-organization. Unlike other regions of the Arab Spring countries, we did not have a sudden outburst of events in Rojava. As the Syrian opposition was co-opted, as the Free Syrian Army splintered into dozens of groups, and as al-Nusra, Daesh, and similar groups took over, the narrative of the war in Syria turned from being a demand for freedom against dictatorship to a war on terrorism. The armed groups jumped from front to front with their weapons, whereas we liberated our own communities, secured their safety and immediately established people’s councils.”
– Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement, pgs. 219-220
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- which is not to say that there aren’t just a ton of critiques of this organizing. but also try to imagine shutting down the WTO in 2024. the level of trust in each other and in structure required for that is all but gone in radical movement. ↩︎
- i will continue to write more extensively on my critiques of insurrectionary anarchism and its tendencies soon. ↩︎
- note on “seriously” – i have to add that i struggle with this concept because while i do desire it, i also love a movement full of joy and silliness. additionally as street medic trainers and educators, we teach people that they need to take care of themselves in the streets. one specific thing we challenge people to consider is when they are taking themselves too seriously thus manifesting a demeanor that is unwelcoming and, potentially, a sign of exhaustion if not full burn-out. so, i don’t mean we act serious all the time. some of the best work i’ve ever done where we took ourselves seriously, we did with lots and lots of satire and humor in our tactics. despite the multiple interpretations of the word, i still find this concept of use in the piece but as with everything, i want to introduce nuance. ↩︎
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