Fuck Identity, We Need Solidarity!
Big thanks to Filler PGH for sharing this. We have some disagreements with some of what they choose to post and promote but we appreciate the work they do as a distro. This was originally published by Filler PGH in our correspondence with them. For accountability’s sake, we have chosen to remove one paragraph that referred to a specific protest at the Columbus statue where an organizer demanded that people CashApp reparations to the said organizer, mostly because we believe this organizer was young like all of us and learning, and because they gave their life to this struggle. While we need to hold each other to a high standard - and break away when we can not find agreement on key issues - this essay was originally written against the spirit of isolating new revolutionaries who are finding their way. As so we ask readers to forgive us and understand why we chose to remove that section, whose conclusions we still agree to nevertheless.
-BP, original editor of this piece.
Synopsis..........................................................................
I. We Need Autonomous Organizing!.....................................
II. The Situation Today!.......................................................
III. Anti-Oppression Theory & Practice in Pittsburgh has Failed!
IV. Pittsburgh as an Example
Fuck Identity, We Need Solidarity was written collaboratively by a group
of people of color, women, and queers – most of whom are students at
Point Park University and University of Pittsburgh – in deep solidarity
and in the spirit of conversation with anyone, be they anarchist, Marxist,
progressive, socialist, or what have you, who is committed to ending
oppression and exploitation materially. We’d also like to extend our
unconditional solidarity with all Pittsburgh protestors who are facing
charges.
This is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural essentialism has
been a boom in our city and how it has incapacitated antiracist, feminist,
and queer organizing in this country by taking identity categories and
equating them with culture, and culture with solidarity. This conflation
minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character of the
violence and material deprivation faced by oppressed people, and plays
up the division among the people who are out rebelling to a point of
making liberation impossible in the long-term.
According to this politics, white supremacy is primarily a individual
attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a
material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society
– from racially segmented labor markets to the mass murder of trans
people. It becomes a thing that can be countered through paying into
CashApps as "reparations" rather than something that must be
overthrown. Even when this material infrastructure is named, more
confrontational tactics which might involve the risk of arrest are deemed
“white” and “privileged,” while the focus turns back to reforming the
behavior and beliefs of individuals. Privilege politics is ultimately rooted
in an idealist theory of power which maintains that psychological
attitudes are the root cause of oppression and exploitation, and that
vague alterations in consciousness will somehow remake oppressive
structures.
This form of anti-oppression politics treats demographic categories as
coherent, homogeneous "communities" or "cultures." This will argue
that identity does not indicate political unity or agreement at all. Identity
is not solidarity. The violent domination and subordination we face on
the basis of our race, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a
shared political vision. But the uneven impact of oppression across
society creates the conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous
groups organizing on the basis of common experiences, analysis, and tactics.
There is a difference between a politics which places shared
cultural identity at the center of its analysis of oppression, and
autonomous organizing against forms of oppression which impact
members of marginalized groups unevenly.
This will argue that demands for increased cultural recognition have all
but failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and violence in a COVID age of
mass death, state repression, and increased paramilitary and fascist
organizing. Anti-oppression struggles repeatedly demonstrate that if
resistance is even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in
danger. But the choice is not between danger and safety, but between
the uncertain dangers of revolt and the almost guaranteed certainty of
continued violence and deprivation at the hands of the state. In closing
we will look at how certain establishment and NGO organizers have
used the specter of the former to guarantee the latter, with several "left"
groups falling in line behind those organizers.
~ I ~
We Need Autonomous Organizing!
As a group of people of color, women, queers, and poor people coming
together to attack a complex matrix of oppression and exploitation, we
believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By
“autonomous” we mean the formation of independent groups of people
who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression – including but
not limited to people of color, women, queers, trans* people, gender
nonconforming people, QPOC. But that doesn't mean we think that we
can organize for liberation without crossing racial, gender, and sexual
divisions.
Accounts of racial, gender, and sexual oppression as “intersectional”
continue to treat identity categories as coherent communities with
shared values and ways of knowing the world. No individual or
organization can speak for people of color, women, the world’s
colonized populations, workers, or any demographic category as a
whole – although activists of color, female and queer activists, and labor
activists from the Global North routinely and arrogantly claim this right.
These “representatives” and institutions speak on behalf of social
categories which are not, in fact, communities of shared opinion. This
representational politics tends to eradicate any space for political
disagreement between individuals subsumed under the same identity
categories.
We must explore the question of relationship between identity based
oppression and capitalism. We must reject a vulgar "class first" politics
which argues that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are
derivatives of economic exploitation. It is true however that one can not
end, for example, the fact that the US is a white supremacist nation with
a legally constructed "white race" which is given some privileges,
without organizing the white poor and working class in alliance with
BIPOC.
~ II ~
The Situation Today!
Nonprofits Against Revolution
Nonprofits are here to not just provide vital social services in the spaces
left by the state's retreat from postwar welfare provisions, but are the
21st century public face of counterinsurgency, except this time speaking
the language of civil, women’s, and gay rights, charged with preempting
political conflict, and spiritually committed to promoting one-sided
“dialogue” with armed state bureaucracies. Over the last four decades,
a massive nonprofit infrastructure has evolved in order to prevent,
whether through force or persuasion, another outbreak of the urban
riots and rebellions which spread through northern ghettos in the mid to
late 1960s. Racial justice nonprofits, and an entire institutionally funded
activist infrastructure, partner with the state to echo the rhetoric of past
movements for liberation while implicitly or explicitly condemning their
militant tactics.
When we look at Pittsburgh, we see countless examples. Philanthropic
organizations like the Heinz Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and
many others have grown exponentially not only as a result of the direct
privatization of America's New Deal-era social safety net, but to endow
many activist organizations and nonprofits. We are the city of Andrew
Carnegie, where the library system was literally built to throw off its
workers.
“With increasing frequency,” Filipino prison abolitionist and professor
Dylan Rodriguez argues, “we are party (or participant) to a white liberal
‘multicultural’/‘people of color’ liberal imagination which venerates and
even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and
Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate
these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of
foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. ...[T]hese
organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability
to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations
from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate
the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries. Having lived in
the San Francisco Bay Area from 1995-2001, which is in many ways the
national hub of the progressive ‘wing’ of the NPIC, I would name some of the organizations...here, but the list would be too long. Suffice it to
say that the nonprofit groups often exhibit(ed) a political practice that is,
to appropriate and corrupt a phrase from...Ruth Wilson Gilmore, radical
in form, but liberal in content.”
On Promoting Voting and Elections
In Pennsylvania some of the most racist policies and "reforms" have
been advanced by politicians of color. With an election year, we have
had it pushed on us that we should be interested in increasing the
racial, gender, and sexual diversity of existing hierarchies of power.
When police departments and municipal governments can boast of their
diversity and multicultural credentials, we know that there needs to be a
radical alternative to this politics of “inclusion.” Pittsburgh and
neighboring municipalities are perhaps one of the most glaring
examples of how people of color have not just participated in but in
many instances led – as mayors, police chiefs, and city council
members – the assault on poor and working class black and brown
populations. Wilkinsburg Mayor Marita Garret, for example, speaks the
language of social justice activism and civil rights but her political career
in municipal government clearly depends upon satisfying right-wing
business interests, corrupt real estate speculators, and a bloated and
notoriously brutal police force.
In Pittsburgh there are City Councilmen R. Daniel Lavelle and Ricky
Burgess, both who supported increasing funding for militarized policing
to control an unruly population, especially poor people of color, and
have supported several gentrifying developmental projects. Burgess in
particular wantonly ignored the demands of Penn Plaza tenants.
Even the "progressive" politicians like Summer Lee and Olivia Bennet
are like the reformist Prime Ministers of Third World democracies,
attempting to pass reforms and encouraging passivity and confidence in
an undemocratic process, but because the police are like an army
uncommitted to following their civilian governments direction, these
politicians attempts at reforms are denounced and organized
campaigns to oust them make their "electoral path" impossible. Like
Allende or Mossadeq, they are disregarded in their reform attempts.
The police prowl, categorizing, and profiling, engaging in mass death as part of their routine business. Making hunters of human beings more
diverse is farcical.
Establishing community mutual aid and self-defense against the
violence of emergent mainstream racist movements, against the
systematic rape and exploitation of women, and against the systematic
murder and/or economic ostracization of transgender and gender-
nonconforming people, are all part and parcel of finding greater unity in
our common struggle to racism.
We do not believe that autonomous groups will be able to sustain
themselves without creating non-state based support networks and
without recognizing the mutual implication of white supremacy with
capitalism and patriarchy.
Capitalism can neither be reduced to the “predatory practices of Wall
Street banks” nor is it something which “intersects” with race, gender,
and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a system based on a gendered
and racialized division of labor, resources, and suffering. In the US in
particular, the celebration of cultural diversity, the recognition of cultural
difference, the applauding of women and queers entering the
workplace, and the relative decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs
among younger generations, has not improved but instead masked a
dramatic deterioration of the material circumstances of racialized
populations.
The US economy reproduces racial, gender, and sexual inequality at
every level of American society–in housing, healthcare, food
sovereignty, education, policing, and prison. The category of “race” is
materially recreated and endlessly renewed through these institutions
which organize the lives of the undocumented, the imprisoned, the
residents of aging ghettos which increasingly function as open-air
prisons.
Speaking of capitalism as though it were somehow separable from
racist exploitation, gendered violence, and the gamut of complex
oppressions facing us in this world, confines antiracist and
antipatriarchal struggle to the sphere of culture, consciousness, and
individual privilege. The current dominant form of anti-oppression
politics in fact diminishes the extent to which racialized and gendered inequalities are deepening across society despite the generalization of policies promoting linguistic, cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity.
To destroy this means a great alliance of autonomous groups and
cross-identity organizing, not on the basis of guilt or requiring
"reparations" from working class and poor whites who simply do not
have access to the capital to make such a thing possible, but on the
need for mutual liberation of all.
inequalities are deepening across society despite the generalization of
policies promoting linguistic, cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity.
To destroy this means a great alliance of autonomous groups and
cross-identity organizing, not on the basis of guilt or requiring
"reparations" from working class and poor whites who simply do not
have access to the capital to make such a thing possible, but on the
need for mutual liberation of all.
~ III ~
Anti-Oppression Theory & Practice in Pittsburgh has Failed!
Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist,
feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity
categories with solidarity and reinforcing stereotypes about the political
homogeneity and helplessness of “communities of color.” The category
of “communities of color” is itself a recently invented identity category
which obscures the central role that antiblack racism plays in
maintaining an American racial order and conceals emerging forms of
nonwhite interracial conflict.
Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial privilege,
and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural identities as the
solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the dominant and largely
unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in the US today. According
to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one more “culture,” and white
supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural position of
dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence,
access to resources, and the economy.
Identity categories are treated like they indicate political unity or
agreement. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial
identity categories have typically been described through an additive
concept, intersectionality, which continues to assume that political
agreement is automatically generated through the proliferation of
existing demographic categories. Representing significant political
differences as differences in privilege or culture places politics beyond
critique, debate, and discussion, leading to many opportunists taking
over and coopting the movement.
For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the problem,
and state or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic “cultural diversity”
within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be the solution. It is a
well-worn activist formula to point out that “representatives” of different
identity categories must be placed “front and center” in struggles
against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But this is meaningless
without also specifying the content of their politics. The US Army is
simultaneously one of the most racially integrated and oppressive institutions in American society. We must urge all white "accomplices" -
there is no singular "Black leadership" and don't feel guilted into
following those that claim that they are!
In looking at our anti-oppression activists – who do advance a structural
analysis of oppression and yet consistently align themselves with a
praxis that reduces the history of violent and radically unsafe
antislavery, anticolonial, antipatriarchal, antihomophobic, and
anticiscentric freedom struggles to struggles over individual privilege
and state recognition of cultural difference. Even when these activists
invoke a history of militant resistance and sacrifice, they consistently fall
back upon strategies of petitioning the powerful to renounce their
privilege or “allow” marginalized populations to lead resistance
struggles. This was the case in Pittsburgh, as it was elsewhere.
For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege and
cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political framework has
become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address racism,
sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when people
of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to this
liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked as
white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and perpetuates
the dominant praxis.
Is it any surprise that unlike Salt Lake City, Portland, Atlanta, and other
places where the rebellion continued, there wasn't as powerful of a
trend to relinquish power over to political representatives? Pittsburgh is
a city with a vast nonprofit industrial complex and a class of professional
"community spokespeople" who define the parameters of acceptable
political action and debate. This politics of safety must continually
project an image of powerlessness and keep communities of color,
women, and queers “protected” and confined to speeches and mass
rallies rather than active disruption. For this politics of cultural
affirmation, suffering is legitimate and recognizable only when it
conforms to white middle-class codes of behavior, with each gender in
its proper place, and only if it speaks a language of productivity,
patriotism, and self-policing victimhood.
And yet the vast majority of us are not “safe” simply going through our
daily lives in Pittsburgh, or elsewhere. When activists claim that poor
black and brown communities must not defend themselves against racist attacks or confront the state, including using illegal or “violent”
means, they typically advocate instead the performance of an image of
legitimate victimhood for white middle class consumption. The activities
of marginalized groups are barely recognized unless they perform the
role of peaceful and quaint ethnics who by nature cannot confront
power on their own. Fuck reproducing stereotypes of passivity and
powerlessness, fuck voting, and fuck not defending our right to land and
housing, our right to live without police murdering us!
When activists argue that people should follow "Black leadership,” it is
clear that their primary audience for these appeals can only be liberal
white activists, and that they understand power as something which is
granted or bestowed by the powerful. Appeals to white benevolence to
let people of color “lead political struggles” assumes that white activists
can somehow relinquish their privilege and legitimacy to oppressed
communities and that these communities cannot act and take power for
themselves.
And of course it is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for the
oppressed to be infantilized and deterred from potentially “unsafe” self-
defense, resistance, or attack. The absence of active mass resistance
to racist policies and institutions in Pittsburgh and in the US over the
last forty years has meant that life conditions have worsened for nearly
everyone. Thankfully this is turning around, but it is not because "Black
leadership" (largely inadequate here) has led the rallies, it's because
Black and other oppressed people have disregarded the orders of these
peace police and have written in the streets with fire.
And when it comes to "allies" many of them have been guilted into
following false leaders. They have been told and bought into the racist
logic of communities of color being single, homogeneous blocs with
identical political opinions. Yet for identity politicians or those chasing
clout, claiming that they have such a program and homogenizing us
helps them build up a white fanbase. This has proven to be
fundamentally conservative, silencing, and coercive, especially for
people of color who reject that analysis and field of action.
~ IV ~
Pittsburgh as an Example!
After May 30 County Councilwoman Olivia Bennet took to Facebook to
decry "white anarchists." The same claim would be echoed by Mayor
Bill Peduto and the Chief of Police, Scott Schubert. Nevermind the
DADT's published arrests over time, showing the several Black and
POC arrested for participating in the rebellion! It became a potent
narrative in enforcing social peace. In our experience such
misrepresentations were not accidental or isolated incidents but a
feature of anti-oppression politics in the city which outlined how, instead
of mobilizing people of color, women, and queers for independent
action, people of color were erased and interracial coalition-building
made impossible intentionally.
Enforcing peace has become part and parcel of every street protest
after May 30. The exception of course being the East Liberty protest. At
this protest the organizers had chosen to respect the state enforced
curfew, ending the rally an hour and a half before the curfew was even
due to start at 7:30 PM. One of them started playing "Where is the
Love?" by Black Eyed Peas (not joking!) as they hoped the crowd would
dissipate. Soon after young Black organizers not affiliated with the main
group began urging people who were on the sidewalk to continue, and
were soon joined by white anarchists and communists chanting "off the
sidewalk, into the streets!" One of the organizers attacked the young
Black agitators, telling them that they were being swayed by the white
people who joined them. They were summarily dismissed, and correctly
so - none of us are too stupid to take advice or criticism from white
people, especially those who share our desire for liberation!
By now though, because of the intervention of the identity politicians
and pro-electioneering organizers, most Black working class people
have left the movement and stopped attending the events! You go to a
rally and it is mostly self-identified “white allies” yearning for the
approval of prominent organizers. There is no one left to call out the
bullshit, because these certified allies are too blinded in recognizing the
bullshit, too afraid of being labeled "racists" themselves, or of
"centering" their own perspectives. Today the last demonstrations are
"Uncivil Saturdays" which, though not bought off and tied to electioneering, have bought into the same guilting of white people as the road to liberation.
The truth is this. Broke white people are not going to be able to
aggregate their low wages together to defeat racism and pay
reparations, because you can not "buy" away capitalism's need for
racialized hierarchies in the first place. Those reparations can only be
seized through overthrowing capitalism and taking that back pay back
through forcing the corporate and state actors who have profited from
the legacy of colonialism and capitalism to pay up. And you can only get
those reparations by allying with broke white people to organize to
overthrow this system. In fact, hating on poor white people who are
coming out and attending your protests consistently is indeed a
capitalist mindset!
Organizers who do not support the voting shit must study the tradition of
Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Lucy Parsons,
Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Robert F.
Williams, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, the Third World Women’s Alliance,
CONAIE, the indigenous militants of Bolivia in 1990, the militants of
Oaxaca in 2006, the Mohawk people in the Municipality of Oka, Tupac
Katari, Chris Hani, Nelson Mandela (who led the ANC’s armed wing,
Umkhonto we Sizwe), Emiliano Zapata, Juan “Cheno” Cortina, Jose
Rizal, Bhagat Singh, Yuri Kochiyama, Kuwasi Balagoon, DRUM, Assata
Shakur, and countless other, who often enlisted the support of white revolutionaries and saw the path to liberation in the international and national support of all oppressed people.
All must study and grasp that anticolonial struggles are violent and
radically unsafe.
Pittsburgh must grasp that, while rituals of cultural affirmation are nice,
they are not what will destroy that which kills us consistently.
That the terrain of conflict is not within the public discourse, but is rather
with the material infrastructure of this system, and the social hierarchies
that both sustain and reproduce it. That it's not white radicals who put us in "harm's way," but often our own self-appointed representatives.
That those who would build their brand off representing “us,” those who
appropriate the iconography of past radical movements and remake it in
their own sick image, those who insist that everyone who won’t fall in
with their agenda is violating the will of “the” leadership... they all work
for the purpose of perpetuating this system.
