"The Privatisation of Stress", by Mark Fisher from Soundings magazine

Ivor Southwood tells the story of how, at a time when he was living in a condition of underemployment - relying on short-term contracts given to him at the last minute by employment agencies - he one morning made the mistake of going to the supermarket.¹ When he returned home he found that an agency had left him a message offering him work for the day. But when he called the agency he was told that the vacancy was already filled - and upbraided for his slackness. As he comments, `ten minutes is a luxury the day-labourer cannot afford’. Such labourers are expected to be waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with their boots on, every morning without fail (p72). In such conditions:

daily life becomes precarious. Planning ahead becomes difficult, routines are impossible to establish. Work, of whatever sort, might begin or end anywhere at a moment’s notice, and the burden is always on the worker to create the next opportunity and to surf between roles. The individual must exist in a state of constant readiness. Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of `occupation’: all
belong to another historical world (p15).

It is hardly surprising that people who live in such conditions - where their hours and pay can always be increased or decreased, and their terms of employment are extremely tenuous - should experience anxiety, depression and hopelessness. And it may at first seem remarkable that so many workers have been persuaded to accept such deteriorating conditions as `natural’, and to look inward - into their brain chemistry or into their personal history - for the sources of any stress they may be feeling. But in the ideological field that Southwood describes from the inside, this privatisation of stress has become just one more taken-for-granted dimension of a seemingly depoliticised world. `Capitalist realism’ is the term I have used to describe this ideological field; and the privatisation of stress has played a crucial role in its emergence.²

Capitalist realism refers to the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism - though `belief’ is perhaps a misleading term, given that its logic is externalised in the institutional practices of workplaces and the media as well as residing in the heads of individuals. In his discussions of ideology, Althusser cites Pascal’s doctrine: `Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’: psychological beliefs follow from `going through the motions’ of complying with official languages and behaviours. This means that, however much individuals or groups may have disdained or ironised the language of competition, entrepreneurialism and consumerism that has been installed in UK institutions since the 1980s, our widespread ritualistic compliance with this terminology has served to naturalise the dominance of capital and help to neutralise any opposition to it.

We can quickly grasp the form that capitalist realism now takes by reflecting on the shift in the meaning of the famous Thatcher doctrine that `there is no alternative’. When Thatcher initially made this notorious claim, the emphasis was on preference: neoliberal capitalism was the best possible system; the alternatives were undesirable. Now, the claim carries an ontological weight - capitalism is not just the best possible system, it is the only possible system; alternatives are hazy, spectral, barely conceivable. Since 1989, capitalism’s success in routing its opponents has led to it coming close to achieving the ultimate goal of ideology:

invisibility. In the global North at least, capitalism proposes itself as the only possible reality, and therefore it seldom `appears’ as such at all. Atilio Boron argues that capitalism has been shifted to a `discreet position behind the political scene, rendered invisible as the structural foundation of contemporary society’, and cites Bertolt Brecht’s observation that `capitalism is a gentleman who doesn’t like to be called by his name’.³

The depressing realism of New Labour

We would expect the Thatcherite (and post-Thatcherite) right to propagate the idea that there is no alternative to the neoliberal programme. But the victory of capitalist realism was only secured in the UK when the Labour Party capitulated to this view, and accepted, as the price of power, that `business interests, narrowly conceived, would be henceforth be allowed to organise the shape and direction of the entire culture’.⁴ But perhaps it would be more accurate to record that, rather than simply capitulating to Thatcherite capitalist realism, it was the Labour Party itself that first introduced capitalist realism to the UK political mainstream, when James Callaghan gave his notorious 1976 speech to the Labour conference in Blackpool:

For too long, perhaps ever since the war, we [have] postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our economy ... We’ve been living on borrowed time ... The cosy world we were told would go on forever, where full employment could be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellor’s pen - that cosy world is gone ...

However it is unlikely that Callaghan foresaw the extent to which the Labour Party would come to engage in the politics of `corporate appeasement’, or the extent to which the cosy world for which he was performing the last rites would be replaced by the generalised insecurity described by Ivor Southwood.

The Labour Party’s acquiescence in capitalist realism cannot of course be construed as a simple error: it was a consequence of the disintegration of the left’s old power base in the face of the post-Fordist restructuring of capitalism. The features of this - globalisation; the displacement of manufacturing by computerisation; the casualisation of labour; the intensification of consumer culture - are now so familiar that they, too, have receded into a taken-for-granted background. This is what constitutes the background for the ostensibly post-political and uncontestable `reality’ that capitalist realism relies upon. The warnings made by Stuart Hall and the others writing in Marxism Today at the end of the 1980s turned out to be absolutely correct: the left would face obsolescence if it remained complacently attached to the assumptions of the disappearing Fordist world and failed to hegemonise the new world of post-Fordism.⁵ But the New Labour project, far from being an attempt to achieve this new hegemony, was based precisely on conceding the impossibility of a leftist hegemonisation of post-Fordism: all that could be hoped for was a mitigated version of the neoliberal settlement.

In Italy autonomists such as Berardi and Negri also recogised the need to face up to the destruction of the world within which the left had been formed, and to adapt to the conditions of post-Fordism, though in rather a different manner. Writing in the 1980s, in a series of letters that were recently published in English, Negri characterises the painful transition from revolutionary hopes to defeat by a triumphalist neoliberalism:

We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected ... The very blood in our veins had been replaced.⁶

We are currently living with the effects of the left’s failure to rise to the challenge that Negri identified. And it doesn’t seem a stretch to conjecture that many elements of the left have succumbed to a collective form of clinical depression, with symptoms of withdrawal, impaired motivation and the inability to act.

One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the condition, the depressive does not experience his or her melancholia as pathological or indeed abnormal: the conviction of depression that agency is useless, that beneath the appearance of virtue lies only venality, strikes sufferers as a truth which they have reached but others are too deluded to grasp. There is clearly a relationship between the seeming `realism’ of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism.

This depression was not experienced collectively: on the contrary, it precisely took the form of the decomposition of collectivity in new modes of atomisation. Denied the stable forms of employment that they had been trained to expect, deprived of the solidarity formerly provided by trade unions, workers found themselves forced into competition with one another on an ideological terrain in which such competition was naturalised. Some workers never recovered from the traumatic shock of seeing the Fordist-social-democratic world suddenly removed: a fact it’s worth remembering at a time when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government is hounding claimants off Incapacity Benefit. Such a move is the culmination of the process of privatising stress that began in the UK in the 1980s.

The stresses of post-Fordism

If the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism had its psychic casualties, then post-Fordism has innovated whole new modes of stress. Instead of the elimination of bureaucratic red tape promised by neoliberal ideologues, the combination of new technology and managerialism has massively increased the administrative stress placed on workers, who are now required to be their own auditors (which by no means frees them of the attentions of external auditors of many kinds). Work, no matter how casual, now routinely entails the performance of meta-work: the completion of log books, the detailing of aims and objectives, the engagement in so-called `continuing professional development’. Writing of academic labour, the blogger `Savonarola’ describes how systems of permanent and ubiquitous measurement engender a constant state of anxiety:

One of the more pervasive phenomena in the current cod-neoliberal academic dispensation is CV inflation: as available jobs dwindle down to Kafkian levels of postponement and implausibility, the miserable Träger of academic capital are obliged not just to overfulfil the plan, but to record ... every single one of their productive acts. The only sins are sins of omission ... In this sense, the passage from ... periodic and measured measurement ... to permanent and ubiquitous measurement cannot but result in a kind of Stakhanovism of immaterial labour, which like its Stalinist forebear exceeds all rationales of instrumentality, and cannot but generate a permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety (since there is no standard, no amount of work will ever make you safe).⁷

It would be naive to imagine that this `permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety’ is an accidental side-effect of the imposition of these self-surveillance mechanisms, which manifestly fail to achieve their official objectives. None other than Philip Blond has argued that `the market solution generates a huge and costly bureaucracy of accountants, examiners, inspectors, assessors and auditors, all concerned with assuring quality and asserting control that hinder innovation and experiment and lock in high cost’.⁸ This acknowledgement is welcome, but it is important to reject the idea that the apparent `failures’ of managerialism are `honest mistakes’ of a system which sincerely aims for greater efficiency. Managerialist initiatives served very well their real if covert aims, which were to further weaken the power of labour and undermine worker autonomy as part of a project to restore wealth and power to the hyper-privileged.

Relentless monitoring is closely linked to precarity. And, as Tobias van Veen argues, precarious work places `an ironic yet devastating’ demand on the labourer. On the one hand work never ends: the worker is always expected to be available, with no claims to a private life. On the other hand the precariat are completely expendable, even when they have sacrificed all autonomy to keep their jobs.<sup>9</sup>
The tendency today is for practically all forms of work to become precarious. As Franco Berardi puts it, `Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers’.¹⁰ Such `packets of time’ are not conceived of as having a connection to a person with rights or demands: they are simply either available or unavailable.

Berardi also notes the effects of digital telecommunications; these produce what he characterises as a diffuse sense of panic, as individuals are subjected to an unmanageable data-blitz:

The acceleration of information exchange ... is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to consciously process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognize, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious (p40).

One of the effects of modern communications technology is that there is no outside where one can recuperate. Cyberspace makes the concept of a `workplace’ archaic. Now that one can be expected to respond to an email at practically any time of the day, work cannot be confined to a particular place, or to delimited hours. There’s no escape - and not only because work expands without limits. Such processes have also hacked into libido, so that the `tethering’ imposed by digital telecommunications is by no means always experienced as something that is straightforwardly unpleasant. As Sherry Turkle argues, for example, though many parents are increasingly stressed as they try to keep up with e-mail and messages while continuing to give their children the attention they need, they are also magnetically attracted to their communications technology:

They cannot take a vacation without bringing the office with them; their office is on their cellphone. They complain that their employers rely on them to be continually online but then admit that their devotion to their communications devices exceeds all professional expectations.¹¹

Practices ostensibly undertaken for work, even if they are performed on holiday or late at night, are not experienced simply as unreasonable demands. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it is easy to see why such demands - demands that cannot possibly be met - can be libidinised, since this kind of demand is precisely the form that the psychoanalytic drive assumes. Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing by (Freudian/Lacanian) drive: individuals are locked into repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless, but nevertheless unable to desist.¹² The ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle: the insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch which gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to people who are unable to resist the urge to send and receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when they are driving a car. At the risk of a laboured pun, this is a perfect example of death drive, which is defined not by the desire to die, but by being in the grip of a compulsion so powerful that it makes one indifferent to death. What’s remarkable here is the banal content of the drive. This isn’t the tragedy of something like The Red Shoes, in which the ballerina is killed by the sublime rapture of dance: these are people who are prepared to risk death so that they can open a 140 character message which they know perfectly well is likely to be inane.

Public renewal or private cure?

The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. Dan Hind has argued that the focus on serotonin deficiency as a supposed `cause’ of depression obfuscates some of the social roots of unhappiness, such as competitive individualism and income inequality. Though there is a large body of work that shows the links between individual happiness and political participation and extensive social ties (as well as broadly equal incomes), a public response to private distress is rarely considered as a first option.<sup>13</sup> It is clearly easier to prescribe a drug than a wholesale change in the way society is organised. Meanwhile, as Hind argues, `there is a multitude of entrepreneurs offering happiness now, in just a few simple steps’. These are marketed by people `who are comfortable operating within the culture’s account of what it is to be happy and fulfilled’, and who both corroborate and are corroborated by `the vast ingenuity of commercial persuasion’.

Psychiatry’s pharmacological regime has been central to the privatisation of stress, but it is important that we don’t overlook the perhaps even more insidious role that the ostensibly more holistic practices of psychotherapy have also played in depoliticising distress. The radical therapist David Smail argues that Margaret Thatcher’s view that there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families, finds `an unacknowledged echo in almost all approaches to therapy’.<sup>14</sup> Therapies such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combine a focus on early life (a kind of psychoanalysis-lite) with the self-help doctrine that individuals can become masters of their own destiny. Smail gives the immensely suggestive name magical voluntarism to the view that `with the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer cause you distress’ (p7).

The propagation of magical voluntarism has been crucial to the success of neoliberalism; we might go so far as to say as it constitutes something like the spontaneous ideology of our times. Thus, for example, ideas from self-help therapy have become very influential in popular television shows.¹⁵ The Oprah Winfrey Show is probably the best-known example, but in the UK programmes such as Mary, Queen of Shops and The Fairy Jobmother explicitly promote magical voluntarism’s psychic entrepreneurialism: these programmes assure us that the fetters on our productive potentials lie within us. If we don’t succeed, it is simply because we have not put the work in to reconstruct ourselves.

The privatisation of stress has been part of a project that has aimed at an almost total destruction of the concept of the public - the very thing upon which psychic well-being fundamentally depends. What we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organised around the problem of public space. In its break from the old stalinist left, the various new lefts wanted a debureaucratised public space and
worker autonomy: what they got was managerialism and shopping. The current political situation in the UK - with business and its allies gearing up for a destruction of the relics of social democracy - constitutes a kind of infernal inversion of the autonomist dream of workers liberated from the state, bosses and bureaucracy. In a staggeringly perverse twist, workers find themselves working harder, in deteriorating conditions and for what is in effect worse pay, in order to fund a state bail-out of the business elite, while the agents of that elite plot the further destruction of the public services on which workers depend.

At the same time as a discredited neoliberalism plots this intensification of its project, a kind of right-wing autonomism has emerged in Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism and Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labourism. Here the critique of social-democratic and neoliberal bureaucracy goes alongside the call for a restitution of tradition. Neoliberalism’s success depended on its capturing of the desires of workers who wanted to escape the strictures of Fordism (though the miserable individualist consumerism in which we are all now immersed is not the alternative they sought). Blond’s laughable `Big Society’ and Glasman’s disturbingly insular `white working-class’ `communities’ do not represent persuasive or credible responses to this problem. Capital has annihilated the traditions that Blond and Glasman hanker after,
and there is no bringing them back.

But this should not be a cause for lament; far from it. What we need to revive is not social formations that failed (and failed for reasons that progressives should be pleased about), but a political project that never really happened: the achievement of a democratic public sphere. Even in Blond’s work, the lineaments of a hegemonic shift can be discerned - in his startling repudiation of the core concepts of neoliberalism and his attack on managerialism; and in the concession that, contra Thatcher, it turns out that there is such a thing as society after all. Such moves give some indication of the extent to which - after the bank bail-outs - neoliberalism has radically lost credibility.

The recent upsurge in militancy in the UK, particularly amongst the young, suggests that the privatisation of stress is breaking down: in place of a medicated individual depression, we are now seeing explosions of public anger. Here, and in the largely untapped but massively widespread discontent with the managerialist regulation of work, lie some of the materials out of which a new leftist modernism can be built. Only this leftist modernism is capable of constructing a public sphere which can cure the numerous pathologies with which communicative capitalism afflicts us.

This article is from issue 48 of the journal Soundings and is exclusively available online at NLP.

Mark Fisher writes regularly for frieze, New Statesman, Sight & Sound and The Wire, where he was acting deputy editor for a year. He is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths,  University Of London, and maintains one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org).

Notes
1. Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia, Zer0 2010.
2. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 2009.
3. Atilio Boron, `The Truth About Capitalist Democracy’, Socialist Register 2006, p32.
4. As argued by Jeremy Gilbert in, `Elitism, Philistinism and Populism: the Sorry State of British Higher Education Policy’, 2010, opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom.
5. See Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, Lawrence & Wishart 1989.
6. Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude, Polity 2010, p10.
7. Savonarola, `Curriculum mortis’, conjunctural.blogspot.com/2008/08/curriculum-mortis.html, 2008.
8. Phillip Blond, The Ownership State: Restoring Excellence, Innovation and Ethos to Public Services, ResPublica/Nesta 2009, p10.
9. Tobias van Veen, `Business Ontology (or why Xmas Gets You Fired)’, 2010, fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org/2009/12/business-ontology/.
10. Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, Minor Compositions 2009, p32.
11. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other¸ Basic 2011, p264.
12. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Polity 2010.
13. See Dan Hind, The Return of the Public, Verso 2010, p146.
14. David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress, PCCS 2009, p11.
15. See Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity 2007.

"Anarcha-Indigenism", an edited excerpt of a conference paper presented by Richard J.F. Day

Short Description:

(The following is an edited excerpt of a conference paper presented by Richard J.F. Day)

Anarcha-Indigenism is an emerging body of academic and activist theory and practice that works across and in between traditions of anarchist and indigenous political theory. The anarcha (as opposed to anarcho) part of the term refers to affinities with both Western and indigenous feminisms. If anarcha-indigenism 'is' anything, then, it is a meeting place, a site of possibilities, a potential for mutual aid in common projects within, outside, and against the dominant order. It is not an ideology or party, but part of an emergent and ever-changing network of autonomous subjects, organizations, and institutions.

Indigenous author Taiaiake Alfred writes:

[t]he basic substance of the problem of colonialism is the belief in the superiority and universality of Euroamerican culture, especially the concepts of individual rights as the highest expression of human freedom, representative democracy as the being the best guarantor of peace and order, and capitalism as the only means to achieve the satisfaction of human material needs (Alfred 2005: 109)

What Alfred sees as the heart of Canadian colonialism is immediately recognizable as what has long driven anarchist critiques of mainstream western institutions and practices, i.e. the rejection of capitalism, self-interested individualism, and the state form. Andrea Smith argues, in a similar vein, for the necessity of "creating those structures within our organizations, movements, and communities that model the world we are to trying to create... an alternative system not based on domination, coercion and control" (Smith 2005: 130).

Federation

These alternatives were understood by the classical anarchist Petr Kropotkin as examples of federation, distributed networks that rely upon shared protocols rather than top-down command, leading to the free linking of localized structures and processes into larger and more complex systems. Of course, in the nation-state system, federation is a top-down affair, with clear lines of control. In non-statist anarchist and indigenous paradigms, however, in involves dense, shifting, multi-dimensional networks that defy a simplistic hierarchical analysis, and are therefore much more difficult to manipulate.

Stateless anarchist and indigenous federations generally involve three elements: consensus decision making at all levels; the ability to remove or recall representatives; and the ability of the community to decline, in certain circumstances, participation in decisions or actions undertaken by the larger structure. (Barsh 1986: 185, 195; Burnicki 2005).

Hierarchy

Related to the problem of hierarchy is that of authority. Both capitalism and the state are deeply dependent upon structures of arbitrary authority, which can be wielded as a weapon over others. Anarchists have long been critical of this kind of authority (bosses, priests, cops, scientists, etc.). As Marie Smallfalce Marule has noted, "in traditional Indian societies, whether band or clan, authority was a collective right that could be temporarily delegated to a leader, under restrictive conditions to carry out essential activities. But the responsibility and authority always remained with the people." (1984: 36).



Direct Action

The rejection of arbitrary authority in both of these traditions is linked to "a belief in bringing about change through direct action" (Alfred 2005: 46). Direct action helps us train ourselves to look after ourselves, rather than relying on state or corporate institutions to do it for us. For many indigenous peoples, it is becoming increasingly clear that direct action in sustainable consensus-based communities and federations both depends upon, and contributes to, a process of cultural revitalization. Taiaiake Alfred emphasizes that this process is not about somehow 'going back in time,' but requires a critical relation to a living tradition (Alfred 1999: 5). It is about values and practices, and how we embody these values in our daily practices.



Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Colonial

The western world has not always been capitalist, just as it has not always been burdened by parasitic state forms. Nor have its practices always been as environmentally unsustainable as they are today. These are relatively new developments, related to modernity and industrialization. Before the white man could colonize anyone else, he had to colonize himself. This points to a need for both structural and social reorganization as processes of decolonization. A mere change in structure cannot overcome the power of structure, as Bakunin pointed out, but neither can a mere change in structure overcome the power of socialization. Evidence of this lies in the endless list of insurrections that failed to lead to the Big One, such as the recent rise and subsequent decline of autonomous institutions and practices in Argentina. Cultural revitalization has been recognized as a much-needed element to any resistance and reconstruction; the existence of autonomous women's movements within each of these traditions tells us that there is still work to be done in dealing with issues of gender and sexual oppression.

Feminisms

Anarchist feminism, which has existed as long as anarchism itself, seeks not only to dismantle patriarchy, but to abolish all arbitrary authority and hierarchy and replace them with spontaneous and decentralized organizations. Of course, if anarchism as a discourse opposes all forms of oppression, then the term 'anarchist feminism' becomes redundant: all anarchists must be feminists, not just some of the women. Despite the indisputable logic of this argument, anarchist men and women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often differed in the relative importance they gave to fighting patriarchy vs. fighting the so-called 'big three' of capitalism, the church, and the state. Patriarchy also permeated interpersonal relationships among anarchists (as it still does, to varying degrees).

Anarchist feminists have a long history of dialogue with non-anarchist women, pointing to the 'here-and-now' changes feminist movements have been able to accomplish for women. Radical feminism and anarchist feminism have a close affinity; they diverge, however, from those streams of radical feminism that advocate for matriarchy as an alternative to patriarchy. Anarchist feminists seek not to 'seize power,' but to 'abolish' it (Ehrlich 2002: 44). The attempts by anarchist feminists to radicalize feminism seem not to have been successful. There seems to have been more success, however, in feminizing anarchism.

Indigenous feminists tend to see patriarchy as an imposition from the outside (patriarchal colonialism); while some indigenous women reject the label of 'feminist' outright, others have constructed hybrid approaches. What ends up being called 'matriarchy' when talking about socio-historical organizations of indigenous communities is better seen as a complex system in which men and women share power through complementary roles. There is no simple relationship, then, between western and indigenous feminisms. As Andrea Smith points out, "these theories are not monolithic and cannot be simply reduced to [a] dichotomy" (2005: 118). However, Smith and other indigenous women do argue for a certain specificity to an indigenous feminism, in that it necessarily understands that "attacks on Native women's status are themselves attacks on Native sovereignty" (Smith 2005: 123).

Anarcha-Indigenism

Theoretically, an anarcha-indigenist perspective is based on an interlocking analysis of oppression, without privileging one over another. How might anarchists, feminists, and indigenous peoples work together, as individuals, communities, and nations, in ways that protect our autonomy and promote mutual aid and decentralization? It seems that the two-row wampum model is a very good one, especially once it is generalized into an 'n-row' system. Each of us must repsect the desire of the others to steer their own vessels, as we all travel down the same river together. This model could be implemented as a non-statist federation, which would include communities and nations that share the principles just discussed and are committed to acting upon them. Non-statist federation represents a turn away from "the assimilative lure of the politics of recognition," towards "direct[ing] our own struggles, ... our own on-the-ground strategies of freedom" (Coulthard 2006: 12). In the context of settler states, it would mean inverting and undermining the whole 'land claims' process, so as to recognize the historical fact that we, as settlers, are present on indigenous lands, to which we have no 'claim' at all, in the sense of ownership. Rather, we must return to our original agreements and work out sustainable modes of peaceful co-existence.

Communities and nations in a non-statist federation would have to pay close attention to diplomacy, that is, to creating and maintaining good relations between all of its constituencies. This requires protocols, which could emerge out of an explicit project to 'indigenize' and 'anarchize' dominant western understandings of 'international relations.' Indigenizing such relations requires, I think, working at a number of different levels - political and social, structural and interpersonal. Politically, settlers must stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples reclaiming land and fighting for self-determination, by taking action within and against the dominant order in their own societies. This action can and must be both symbolic and direct, including such tasks as media work, jail and court support, blockades, protests, information sessions on the history of colonialism, and so on. This kind of work is ongoing, but it tends to be sporadic and take on a crisis-response modality. Once the barricades come down, the settlers go home and don't come back until they go up again. We need to build more, better, and stronger social and personal relationships across the colonial divide. By learning about each other's traditions and practices, we can begin to address existing tensions marked with centuries of colonialism, genocide, and oppression.


Related Groups and Practices:


Wasase Movement
Indigenous Governance Program
Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement
Friends of Grassy Narrows
Barriere Lake Solidarity
Kingston Indigenous Solidarity Network
Warrior Societies
(un)Settler Network



Related Theorists and Traditions:

Taiaiake Alfred
Ward Churchill
Chiinuuks Ogilvie
Glen Coulthard
Richard Day
Jackie Lasky
Andrea Smith
Daniel Morley-Johnson


Related Interviews:

Anarchist-Indigenous Solidarity in Ontario (Anonymous)

Anti-Colonial Resistance on Turtle Island (Anonymous)


External Links:

Wasase Movement Statement of Principles
iGov
New Socialist Indigenous Resurgence Issue
No 2010 
Solidarity for Grassy Narrows
Taiaiake Alfred



source of article:
http://affinityproject.org/traditions/anarchaindigenism.html

Maintaining the Borders: Identity & Politics by Jamie Heckert

Maintaining the Borders: identity & politics

Jamie Heckert

30 October 2002

Identity is the process of creating and maintaining borders, creating different kinds of people. This keeps the world packaged in tidy little boxes. These boxes, in turn, are necessary for the violence and domination of hierarchical societies. There cannot be masters or slaves, bosses or workers, men or women, whites or blacks, leaders or followers, heterosexuals or queers, without identity.

Social movement, both past and present, often attempts to use identity as a tool of liberation. Movement based on gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnic and ability identities all have some success in challenging hierarchy and oppression. By no means do I mean to diminish the impact of past and present activism. Personally, my life would have been much more difficult before feminist and gay liberation/equality movement arose. I argue that identity politics is inherently limited in its ability to challenge hierarchy because it depends upon the same roots as the system it aims to overthrow. 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Does that mean we should all be the same?

Identity is also the answer to the question, 'who am I?'. This is different from answering, 'what kind of person am I?'. Labels like 'woman', 'white' and 'heterosexual' tell us about someone's position in various hierarchies. These positions, these identities, are significant to how a person thinks of themselves. But, they don't answer the question, 'who am I?'. Each of us is unique, both similar and different to everyone else in various ways. Working to eliminate identity in the hierarchical sense (e.g. some animals are more equal than others) isn't the same as eliminating identity in the individual sense (e.g. I'll still be Jamie). When I talk about the problems with identity, I mean the ‘boxes’ rather than individuals.

Let me use 'sexual orientation' as an example. Supposedly people can be put into three boxes, depending on whether they fancy women, men or both. While this is a popular idea, it seems to cause an awful lot of suffering. People worry a lot about their image, and try very hard to make sure that others realise 'what' they are. We also worry about 'what' other people are – are they like me or are they different? Some people are so unhappy and anxious about these things that they attack others, either physically or verbally. Even people who think of themselves as heterosexual can be attacked. Finally, people suffer when they desire others of the 'wrong' gender, or if they worry that others think they do. One alternative is that we all try to be 'equal opportunity lovers' and fancy everyone. Those who succeed could then feel superior to those whose desires are less politically correct. Another alternative is that we try to give up thinking of people (including ourselves) in terms of sexual orientation and instead recognise that everyone's sexual desires are complex and unique. This would mean being yourself rather than a heterosexual, a queer or whatever, and to recognise people as people instead of members of categories. We could never all be the same, even if we tried!

What is wrong with political identity?

Identity separates people. It encourages us to believe that 'we' are different from 'others'. Identity can also encourage conformity. How else do I show that I am one of us other than conforming to the accepted codes prescribed to that identity? This construction of similarity and difference exists whether we are talking about traditional identity politics groups like 'disabled people' or political identities like 'environmentalists'. This separation of us from them has serious consequences for political movement.

Identity encourages isolation. Political ghettos cannot exist without political identity; and their existence reinforces it. Not only are the 'activists' separated from the 'non-activists', but within a broad political ghetto, anarchists, feminists, and environmentalists (amongst others) often see themselves as involved in separate struggles. People who consider themselves politically active are separated both from each other and from others who do not share an 'activist' identity. Effective movement for radical social change cannot be based on such divisions.

Identity reduces social phenomena to individuals. Concepts like anarchism and racism are social. They are not embodied by individuals as terms like 'anarchist' and 'racist' suggest. Rather, they exist as ideas, practices and relationships. In most societies, racism is inherent in our institutionalised relationships and ways of thinking. We can and should be critical of racism, but to attack people as 'racists' can only further alienate them from our efforts. Besides, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe that 'racists' can be separated from those of us who are non-racist. Likewise, anarchism exists throughout every society. Every time people co-operate without coercion to achieve shared goals, that is anarchy. Every time someone thinks that people should be able to get along with each other without domination, that is anarchism. If we only see racism in 'racists', we will never effectively challenge racism. If we only see anarchism in 'anarchists', we will miss out on so many desperately needed sources of inspiration.

Identity encourages purity. If we believe that concepts like feminism can be embodied in individuals, then some people can be more feminist than others. This leads to debates about ‘real feminists’ and how feminists should act (e.g. debates regarding feminism and heterosexuality). Feminist purity allows for hierarchy (e.g. more or less and thus better or worse feminists) and encourages guilt (e.g. asking yourself 'should real feminists think/act like this?').

Political identity simplifies personal identity. A related problem for feminist identity, for example, is that it demands we focus on one aspects of our complex lives. Feminist movement has often been dominated by white middle-class women who have a particular perspective on what is a 'women's issue'. Many women have had to choose between involvement in a woman's movement that fails to recognise ethnicity and class issues, or in black or working class politics that did not acknowledge gender. But, the alternative of specialised identity politics could get very silly (e.g. a group for disabled, transgender, lesbian, working-class women of colour). Likewise, if I describe myself as a feminist, an anarchist, and a sex radical, I am suddenly three different people. However, if I say I advocate feminism, anarchism and radical sexual politics I am one person with a variety of beliefs.[iv][iv]

Identity often imagines easily defined interests. Feminism is often presented as for women only; men are perceived to entirely benefit from the gender system. Many men do clearly benefit from the gender system in terms of institutionalised domination. If we perceive interests as inherently stemming from current systems, we fail to recognise how people would benefit from alternative systems. If we want to encourage and inspire people to create a very different form of society, we should share with each other what we see as beneficial. We must recognise that different value systems (e.g. domination versus compassion) result in very different interests.

Identity discourages participation. If people are worried that they might be excluded through labelling (e.g. racist or homophobic), they won't feel welcomed and won't get involved. Likewise, people do not get involved if they believe that it is not in their interests. If we pepetuate the idea that feminism is for women, men will never see how it could also be in their interests to support feminism. Or they might support feminism, but feel guilty for their male privilege. Either way, men are not encouraged to be active in feminist movements. Radical social change requires mass social movement. Identity politics, by definition, can never achieve this. Political identities, like ‘environmentalist’, can likewise become a basis for minority politics.

Identity creates opposition. By dividing the world up into opposing pairs (e.g. men/women, heterosexuals/queers, ruling class/working-class, whites/blacks), identity creates opposite types of people who perceive themselves as having opposing interests. This opposition means that people fail to recognise their common interests as human beings. The opposition of two forces pushing against each other means that very little changes.

Identity freezes the fluid. Neither individual identity (the 'who am I?' kind) nor social organisation are fixed, but are in constant motion. Political identities require that these fluid processes are frozen realities with particular characteristics and inherent interests. In failing to recognise the nature of both identity and society, political identity can only inhibit radical social change.

It may not be perfect, but can't it still be a useful strategy?

It is a very good strategy if you don't want to change things very much. Identity politics fits in nicely within the dominant neo-liberal ideology. Groups created around oppressed identities can lobby the state for civil rights. This idea of trying to protect individuals without changing relationships or systems of organisation is compatible with the individualistic basis of capitalism and representative 'democracy'. I would never argue that a strategy has to be 'perfect' to be useful, but it must be consistent with its aims. Ends and means can only be separated in our minds. If the aim is to reduce or eliminate hierarchical social divisions (e.g. gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, class), a strategy which depends upon those very divisions can never be successful.

If political identity is such a poor strategy, why is it so common?

On a personal level, political identity makes us feel part of something larger at the same time that it makes us feel special were different. In the short-term, this can be very successful defence mechanism. For example, I'm sure I would have been a lot more damaged by the sexist and homophobic environment in which I grew up if I had not been able to convert stigma into pride. However, feeling yourself to be different and separate from other people is not a successful long-term strategy, either psychologically or politically.

What's the alternative to political identity?

If borders are the problem, then we must support and encourage each other to tear down the fences. Two crucial tools for dismantling borders are systematic analyses and compassionate strategies.

We should recognise oppression is not simply a practice of individuals who have power over those who do not. Instead, we could see how forms of organisation (including institutions and relationships) systematically produce hierarchies and borders. People will only see an interest in getting more involved if they realise that their individual problems – anxiety, depression, exhaustion, anger, poverty, meaningless work,unsatisfying sex lives, etc – are not unique, but are systematically produced. Furthermore, their action will only be effective if they work to reduce all forms of hierarchy and domination. Constructs including gender, sexuality, capitalism, race and the nation state are interdependent systems. Each system of domination serves to reinforce the others. This doesn't mean we have to solve every problem instantly, but we must recognise that all issues are human issues. At the same time, we must not imagine that a particular system of domination (not even capitalism!) is the source of all others.

Radical politics is rarely appealing because it focuses on the evils of the world. This offers little that is hopeful or constructive in people's daily lives. If we want to see widespread social movement for radical change, we have to offer people something they value. Listening to people's concerns, caring about their problems and encouraging and supporting them to develop systemic solutions requires compassion. Offer people a better quality of life instead of focusing so much on depressing aspects of our current society.

We should also recognise that people positioned in more privileged categories may in some ways suffer. At the very least, people who feel a strong need to dominate and control must suffer deep insecurities, the results of competition and hierarchy. Insecurity, domination and control are not conducive to fulfilling and meaningful relationships with other people. Attacking people in 'privileged' positions does little to dismantle these systems. It also gives entirely too much credit to people in those positions – they are both products and producers of systems, just like the rest of us.

To radically reorganise our society, we should aim to both diminish systematic domination and suffering and encourage systematic compassion. Just as apparently disconnected and often incoherent forms of domination can reinforce and maintaining each other, so too can a compassionate organisation of society become systematic and self-sustaining.

Encouraging people to be more comfortable with sexuality in general has been a key focus of my own political efforts[v][v]. But, sexuality is only one area in which a compassionate and systematic approach has much more radical potential than politicising identity.

Find sources of suffering, whatever they are, and support and encourage people to find ways of relating to themselves and others that reduce that suffering. Help build compassionate, co-operative institutions (e.g. social centres, support/discussion groups, mediation services, childcare support, food not bombs). Tell people when you admire or appreciate their efforts. Support people trying to change their environments (e.g. workplace resistance). Offer alternatives to people who are involved in or considering authoritarian positions (e.g. military, police, business management).

Demonstrating the pleasures and benefits of co-operative, compassionate organisation offers a strong threat to the world of borders and guards. I suspect that fragmented groups, anti-whatever demonstrations, unfriendly, exclusive meetings and utopian 'after the revolution' lectures will never be quite as enticing to people outside the activist ghetto.

Further Reading:

Anonymous (1999) Give Up Activism in Reflections on June 18^th. Also at http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm#

Begg, Alex (2000) Empowering the Earth: Strategies for Social Change. Totnes, Green Books

CrimethInc. (2002) Definition of Terms. Harbinger (4) http://crimethinc.com/library/terms.html

CrimethInc. (2002) Why We're Right and You're Wrong (Infighting the Good Fight). Harbinger (4) http://crimethinc.com/library/right.html

Edwards, David (1998) The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism. Totnes, Green Books

Heckert, J. (2003) Sexuality | Identity | Politics in J Purkis and J Bowen (eds) Changing Anarchism. Manchester, Manchester University Press

hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for Everybody: passionate politics. London, Pluto Press

LeGuin, U. (1999/1974). The Dispossessed. London, The Women's Press

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