Thanks for a patient, courteous, and thoughtful reply to what was admittedly a bit of a polemical post on my part. (My disposition reminded me of what Henwood once asked Wotjek on this list -- "get enough coffee this morning ?" -- except last night I lacked my dose of anti-asthma medicine).
You said:
>Hey, I only use the word "people of color" when I'm taking to academic
>leftists, which this list is full of. In normal conversation, I use the
>phrases "African american," black person," "latino" and so on. Also,
>that article doesn't represent my priorities.
In no way was I trying to establish connections between your rationales/ approaches to activism and those of the folks represented in the Seattle Weekly article.
>John, I think you are making too many generalizations about white middle
>class anarchists. How many do you know? Most of the anarchists I know
>work working class jobs and try to slack as much as possible.
>From my days as an activist/gadfly/observer in the Bay Area scene (now
on hold), I know quite a few "middle class anarchists" -- mainly through
my participation in and familiarity with the anti-gentrification/anti-police
brutality movement (Mission Agenda, Homes not Jails, CopWatch, etc.), and
with the international labor solidarity movement as well (namely the campaign
to blockade the Neptune Jade, the infamous "runaway ship" w/scab-loaded
cargo).
I think your assessment of the anarchists that you know corresponds w/my assessment. Just because anarchists of middle-class backgrounds currently have working-class jobs (some out of preference, some of out limitations of the job market) and may forever have working-class jobs doesn't mean that their middle-class upbringing doesn't significantly shape their views of what the system can't and will never permit, nor their "style" of doing politics. Anti-gentrification activism in SF/East Bay is thoroughly shaped by the resentment of middle-class anarchists that skyrocketing property values/epidemic of evictions fatally compromises their ability to live the boho slacker lifestyle. (I too share this resentment). The problems of a politics which are informed by this deep attachment to defending the boho slacker lifetyle are manifold:
1) In recent years, many new employment opportunities have arisen in the Bay Area, especially in the more "libertarian" realms of the multimedia industry, to get paid well (w/stock options) and maintain a diluted boho slacker identity simultaneously. So much of anti-gentrification politics in the Bay Area seem to be about an anarchist middle-class obsession w/accusing others of "selling out" by going to work in the multimedia industry, thus reproducing and intensifying the dot.com gentrification of the Bay Area. But at the same time, the accusers are tempted to bail out and join the crowd, which would at least would allow them the ability to continue to live in the Bay Area, go to punk shows, crank out 'zines, go to demos, hang out in non-yuppified bars and coffeehouses, etc. This obsession w/a split identity, of how to make marginality practicable, is one that working-class blacks, Latinos, Asians, etc. can't even begin to identify with.
2) Politically savvy advocates of the dot.comization of the Bay Area know that working class and poor people can't make any sense of a politics oriented around the maintenance of hipster poverty, and cyncially and demagogically exploit this "cognitive dissonance" between the boho slackers and working class/poor, insisting that the boho slackers are just spoiled middle-class kids who romanticize the very immiseration which working class/poor people are trying to escape from ("by their bootstraps," as it were).
3) Although "blame" certainly can't be pinned on them, middle-class anarchists usually unwittingly serve as the shock troops of gentrification by moving into low-rent neighborhoods, where they can afford to live and have free time to follow their creative DIY pursuits. In West Oakland, for example, working-class blacks knew that rapid neighborhood change was not long in coming once the crusty punks moved into their neighborhood. Sure enough, working class blacks/ poor tenants are now being evicted en masse along with the pierced-and-branded artists, students, activists, etc. -- and the latter can't figure out why the former aren't numerically represented in their demos against Jerry Brown's "New Urbanist" city hall.
For the most part, working-class/poor people want more of what the system promises to the many but only delivers to the few -- stable employment, decent health care, comfortable housing, etc. For the most part, middle-class anarchists are disgusted w/the use-values the system offers and hence aren't even interested in offering their labor-power for sale in order to obtain those use-values. They want autonomy from the state, from capital, etc. such that they can define, create, and enjoy their own use-values. These two political orientations are fundamentally at odds. Political alliances are inherently contingent and rife with tensions. E.g. -- middle-class anarchists can't empathize with the new working-class immigrant desire for upward mobility and are dismayed when the lucky few working-class immigrants who get a union contract and a wage raise at their workplace splurge on an SUV or a mortgage on a home in the suburbs.
I guess I am a bit of a Weberian-Marxist pessimist, and believe that with the inexorable forward movement of rationalization, commodification, etc. most working-class and poor folks long ago lost their felt need for communal self-governance and self-sufficiency. The last anarchist movement w/a mass working-class base was in Catalonia in the 1930's, and that was an historical relic. In my opinion, those contemporary middle-class anarchists who are knowledgeable and astute enough to trace a lineage between the CNT and their movement today (i.e. not Bookchin's reviled "lifestyle anarchists") are, despite my admiration for their principles and their specific vision of the good society, deluding themselves. It may be true that indigenous peoples and peasantries in the so-called "Third World" don't want to be incorporated into the international state system and the circuits of global capital, which explains middle-class anarchist support for the Zapatistas, the U'Wa, etc., but I think that even this claim is a bit of a stretch. Any time the middle class anarchists rally to a cause which they think is "uncontaminated" it seems to me its very "purity" has just been compromised by the romanticism of middle class anarchists.
I realize that these remarks may be based on a carcicatured portrait of middle class anarchism. And I suspect that I have more tolerance for anarchist tendencies which, ironically, offer more self-conscious and circumscribed views of whose interests their movements represent.
You also said:
A)
>Let's face it, sometimes our concerns as white
>middle class people don't coincided with folks from different walks of life.
B)
>I try to use my privilege
>to make the world a better place for everybody.
ChuckO, do you sense any tensions between statements A) and B) ?
Best,
John Gulick