when folks say you must vote blue in the presidential election, that "at least biden is better than trump" – i think it's safe to say that since the beginning of the "united states," every single president and their administration has been a proponent of the expansion of the US empire, of our perpetration of constant warfare and violent extraction. the slightest differences are found in domestic policy. so when you say that "at least biden is better than trump" – you say that your temporary comfort, given as the barest measures of appeasement, is more important than the lives and dreams of the global majority.
and perhaps someone will whip out the analogy about "put on your own oxygen mask before you help others" – and i say that this is also the time to break the mythology of the presidency (and also the mythology of the supreme court). presidents can do executive orders willy nilly and all that. but their actions have no power if people locally do not enforce them. the same goes for supreme court decisions. don't you all remember brown v. board of education, where many locales just kept on segregating, and how many schools today are still effectively segregated? so yes, put on your own oxygen mask, but not at the cost of other people's oxygen... it is our responsibility to build networks of local resilience to break away from violent extraction, the police state, the military industrial complex, industrial agriculture, and so on...
i won't pretend to know exactly what these networks might look like. i've been thinking a lot recently about how people will do things like quote Marx but not really discuss class, especially in university organizing spaces. i feel like a number of folks who have a decent measure of family privilege take a separatist mentality – i don't care about convincing you, i just want to be able to make our own space – but they don't really think about the technicals of what it really takes to make that space, and in doing so just create a space with the aesthetics of breaking away but that still depends on colonial and imperial structures. i feel like there's the implication that they feel that they're above technicals and that technicals are to be taken care of by a "lower class," as they currently are. like i'm sorry but you cannot "vibe" your way out of imperialism. you will starve or die of drinking sick water before anyone ever needs to pick up a gun and shoot you. i don't know how much this is colored by my own measure of family privilege and impression of urgency in the face of a lack of technicals, but there's my two cents. and it makes for a really strange blend: if you don't care about convincing people, then are you going to do the technical work, or are you just going to wait until people who have to work 9 to 5 are suddenly struck by lightning and flocking to you, or what? and at the same time these same people are focused on "well what's going to be my career"... so please, can you tell me what it is you really want? do you want liberation, or do you want to keep playing the game forever, or have you thought about how to play the game on the way to liberation?
university organizing, and i think plenty of politics at large, is rife with talk with no action, with people screaming past each other. sure, your voice has power, but so long as politicians and businesspersons own you, own your home, own your job, own how you get your food, own how you get your water, they couldn't give less of a shit. the people you're screaming at are not going to suddenly change their minds. the people who are watching just see a giant shitshow. those feel good stories about "at least we didn't forget, we didn't lose hope, we didn't let up" – that's great. but you didn't remember that you could do more, you failed to hope beyond nebulous dreams and make them reality, and you let up on pushing for more. it's an argument for moral purity to tout these stories. the dead and the wounded and the starving have no use for your moral purity. and while there's value in upholding your convictions and expressing your frustration, if you're being stonewalled by politicians, why don't you also move toward stonewalling them? it's an abusive / neglectful relationship on the macro level. you don't cry and beg and scream for the abuser / neglecter to take you back. you build your support network to get away, and maybe in the future you can consider if there's a possibility of healing that relationship and if so, how you might do so.
and more on the talk with no action, or perhaps more on hypocrisy and/or thoughtlessness, and on the lack of understanding of class: one of the people i know was going on about community based participatory research for one of their projects. they're super interested in doing research on a specific area and a specific group, but they've already built a timeline for their whole project before successfully making contact, and doesn't seem to have a plan for if the group doesn't even want this research to be done. "we'll just look at literature reviews first, and hopefully they'll respond sometime..." that's... very much not participatory. and i think on a broader level this comes from a misunderstanding that different groups and different individuals within those groups still have different thoughts and drives. it's disingenuous to say you're not trying to be a savior when you go in with preconceived notions of what someone needs or wants instead of asking them first. and maybe you do ask them first and you think that their plan isn't the best way, and that's fine! but if you offer suggestions, you need to understand that they are very much suggestions, the same as they would be for any other person you might give your two cents on their life to. and circling back to the bit about class and how Marx is discussed, i think this mentality is something that comes up a lot. like, so if a poor person isn't instantly radicalized in the way that you want, their views are totally invalid or some shit? that's an absolutely miserable, unconstructive, and narrow-minded way to go about life.
