Some problems and a possible solution
OK, I know I'm always going on about this, but really...
WHY ARE OUR GUYS SO DUMB?
Take this article for example. Let me show you why it is a stupid article.
1. She allows herself to be photographed looking like she has just been sucking on a delicious lemon.
This really is a beginner's mistake. Presentation is vital; would you read anything written by someone who constantly scowls disapprovingly at you?
2. She mistakes privileges for rights and rights for privileges.
The title says it all (and yes, I have said the same thing on this very blog). But that is wrong. It is bad framing. Being alive should never be considered a privilege, and as soon as you do so, you lose.
Is there such a thing as "white privilege"? Well, yes, you could put it that way, perhaps, although it is grammatically incorrect, at least in white-majority countries.
But it is not helpful to frame it in this way, especially when you are speaking in terms of life and death. I repeat: Being alive should never be considered a privilege; modern juristictions and successful activists speak instead of "human rights". This article mentions the phrase "privilege" 11 times. It mentions "rights" not at all. Although at the bottom of the page, it says "all rights reserved."
Perhaps it was bad interview. If someone had printed an interview with me and it came accross like that, with its sour portrait and its endless scolding of an entire group of people, I would ask to have it taken down. If they refused, I would then approach a lawyer.
Claudia Rankine clearly isn't a stupid person. I am sure they don't hand out PhDs to morons. But intellectuals, especially American intellectuals, seem especially prone to behaving like idiots. It's as if their intelligence works against itsself; they get so wrapped up in signifiers and concocting new forms of jargon that have to be explained at length, that they forget that their function as activists isn't to show everyone how clever they are and flex their intellectual muscles, it's to help with "the work", to stop these horrific human rights abuses in their tracks.
Again, America is a huge part of the problem. Americans have a really hard time understanding the concept of universal rights, "the Commons" - something we all share and all have as a birthright. Even though universal human rights were supposedly enshrined in their Constitution, that document is the oldest that I know of that confuses rights with privileges - notoriously, the right to have a gun is enshrined before the right to a fair trial, the right not to be enslaved, the right to vote, the rights of women to vote, the right to life itsself, and even the right to your own property, practically a religion over there, is not considered as important as the right to bear arms. Everywhere else in the world, having a gun is like having a car, it's a dangerous weapon and in the wrong hands can kill even the person who owns it, so they are subject to stringent controls and licensing. Not so in the USA.
Americans also don't understand the concept of wealth held in common, even abstract concepts such as human rights, because to them everything is private. They think that if one person gains, another must lose. Everything is a zero-sum game to them. So that explains that- the capitalistic culture of the US is a form of ideology, in the Slavoj Zizek sense, which tends to taint everything a person does. To use the language of the Social Justice activists, the problem is systemic and unconcious.
But that doesn't explain why the Left has been so stupid in the past.
I've been either a left-wing activist or a keen supporter or at least a sympathetic observer of the Left for thirty years. I went to my first protest in 1990; I went to my last protest in 2019.
Since then I've seen big wins - like the Poll Tax campaign, gay rights, and local victories for squatters and the homeless - morph into terrible, horrible losses.
I've watched the Left, or as they were then, the environmental movement, screw up in the 1990s. As a result, the environment is fucked.
I've watched the Left screw up the anti-war movement in the 2000s. As a result, the government can basically bomb the shit out of anyone they feel like.
I've watched the Left screw up the anti-capitalist movement in the late noughties and early 2010s. As a result, capitalism has, as Umair Haque puts it, gone full Soviet - the government spends endless amounts of cash propping up the stock market and big business while the people literally go hungry on breadlines.
Now the Left are screwing up on human rights and ethnic minority issues, as a result, the American police are a literal death squad and racist attitudes are entrenched at all levels of society, and not just in the USA. The news is grim for sexual minorities as well; even many Leftists of the previous generation are openly hostile to Transgender people, including people whom I know personally.
This isn't just an American problem - I've watched all this happen in the UK as well. I've watched as black activists framed their cause in terms of resentment for whites, I've seen anti-capitalism degenerate into a pointless conspiracy theory jerk-off, I've observed the anti-war movement rapidly turn into an anti-Semitic bandwagon of sympathy for terrorists, and I've been there when environmentalists sat around and got stoned, got in peoples' way, or just smashed things up for the cameras.
It has driven me to despair. I no longer believe the Left will be relevant in my lifetime except as a straw man for the Right to knock down, a sort of controlled opposition.
I think the only hopeful strategy remaining is to elect social-democratic and liberal parties (which the Left also oppose unless they're in charge of them). We can then leverage our protests to get what we want from them, as they are more likely to resort to reform than the Right (who simply repress protest with brutal violence).
ANARCHO-SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
This is the meaning of Anarcho-Social Democracy. "Anarcho-", which means "going to demonstrations, drinking a lot, listening to punk rock and dressing all in black", means you're not confined to any particular leftwing party or ideology. This decentralization has disadvantages, but the great advantage is that it is hard for any one group or party to monopolize power. It also means that anyone, anywhere, can join in, from liberals to socialists to sympathetic capitalists (depending on the issue of course). Anarchism is, generally speaking, inclusive.
Social democracy, because, well, you have a vote, it's the only formal power you have, so you might as well use it to elect a somewhat more sympathetic government than we would have otherwise. It's not much, granted, but it exists and you'd be stupid not to excercise this right.
