The liberation of myself from all that attempts to mediate, alter, and control my thoughts and actions is the most important struggle I can be involved in. This struggle is fought from an understanding of this society as an abusive, white-supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist system, which leads to a knowledge that in struggling for my own liberation means to struggle against those entwined systems. I am aware that having lived in this society without this awareness for over two decades means that these systems are embedded within me. However, self-improvement or challenging the way these systems play out inside of me is not enough. It must be done in order for me to avoid reinforcing those systems, but equally important is that I confront them. Similarly, this confrontation must not only be played out in the act of creating spaces, communities, ways of living which reject those systems, but the confrontation must be explicitly offensive. The importance of creating spaces, communities and ways of living should not be ignored, but it must be done with the knowledge that the more successful the creation of these things the more likely they are to come under attack. This attack will be both insidious and obvious, the obvious distracting us from the insidious. These attacks responded to on the front foot, that is to say, I must hit back before I’m hit at all. What I’m suggesting for myself is an existence which responds to the world in numerous ways at the same time, never privileging one more than another.
This society’s system is abusive, white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalistic; it mediates, alters and controls my thoughts and actions through a myriad of oppressions. The culture it creates encourages a uniform behaviour and the worship of property and ownership. It is not possible to live a life untouched by this culture; cultures are living things which are re-appropriated, reproduced and recreated by all those living within them. The same is true for the dominant culture of the current society, it does not exist without those who live within it. It is for this reason it is of importance that we challenge its fundamental characteristics in our everyday lives, taking none of its assumptions.
The most ubiquitous of these challenges currently are eco-friendly living and vegetarianism. However, these have been co-opted by capitalism and have become merely “ethical consumption” choices. Whilst there is a certainly a place for living a day to day life which minimizes ecological harm, it does not on its own challenge the abusive social relationships we exist within and reproduce on daily basis. Further challenges need to take place, limiting the ways in which we uphold white supremacy and patriarchy are amongst them. There is no easy litmus test where these are concerned, to a certain degree they will occur, but their vigour and viciousness can be limited by regularly assessing the role we play in their reproduction. Unlike the lifestyle options of eco-friendly living and vegetarianism there are fewer opportunities to hide behind consumption choices. Instead honest self-assessment is needed, this can be made possible by small groups of friends who are comfortable enough to be honest with each about the reality of their behaviour, but more importantly they need to be internalised. This task is not a small one, and neither is its importance if we are to work towards the total destruction of all oppression. It is a task which we must take on with utmost fervour and desire, at the same time recognising that it is only through practical experimentation that we will find a way that is true. Focusing ourselves and our energies on this alone, however, will not fully address all domination and mediating factors in this society.
Internalizing an anti-domination practice must work in tandem with the claiming and creation of physical spaces that overtly challenge capitalist, sexist, racist, classist, and ableist assumptions. These spaces can be, and perhaps should be, both temporary and permanent. Temporary spaces like discussion groups or meeting spaces which last for as long as they are needed, and allow individuals to come together for brief periods of time to discuss and assess the ways in which mainstream cultures assumptions dominate their lives are a place where those assumptions can be challenged. Alternatively, permanent spaces, such as community centres and homes can be made and developed in order that we are able to have permanent locations of resistance against the dominating forces of capitalism, civilisation and the state. Ensuring that these spaces are genuinely challenging to dominant culture is incredibly difficult. They will be inhabited by people like myself who have spent the majority of their lives in a society which has so many different hierarchies and assumptions based on race, class, gender, etc that they are walking talking versions of those hierarchies and assumptions. This is why any resistance to dominant culture, any hope of liberating myself, must include working on internalising anti-domination ideas and ensuring that those ideas are also challenged within the spaces that I inhabit. We must be vocal about these ideas, encourage others to challenge us when we reinforce dominant culture through our actions, as well as creating and maintaining spaces where those actions are not accepted.
I do not believe that internalizing anti-domination practices, nor creating truly anti-domination, anti-capitalist spaces will result in the liberation of myself from all that attempts to mediate, alter, and control my thoughts and actions. They must occur, but without direct confrontation with the dominating man made systems of this planet they will not be enough. The spaces that we can create will always be under attack from systems of power, particularly if those spaces expand and grow to include more people. Those spaces will be merely a pseudo utopian ghetto, as they will still exist within the context of society as whole which will mediate who has access to those spaces and who does not. The internalisation of ideas will be under constant threat, because unless I am to spend my time only within those spaces (pseudo utopian ghettos that they are), I would forever come into contact with a society which is devoted to having its inhabitants internalize and reinforce ideas which maintain the status quo of domination, capitalism, racism and the patriarchy. It would be a life led entirely on the defence, thus one which is not liberated but one that is quite clearly trapped. Only in attacking the system and the forces that maintain it can I possibly find moments of liberation. How long these moments last depends on the strategies and tactics that I choose to use, whether the attacks are forceful enough, whether they occur combined with those of others, whether my actions, along with those of others, are able to rupture this society for long enough to experience liberation for prolonged periods of time. However long these moments last I think they are the only moments when I am actually free, when the threats, the coercion, the fear of retaliation and the silent oppressions of this civilisation are not enough to hold me back.
I do not want to privilege these types of action over creating spaces and internalizing ideas. If these actions are organised and occur within a group of people where sexism, classism or racism exist then they will shorten the length of my moments of liberation. Likewise the more these three elements interact, the stronger and more affective each will be. Attacks against the system should be accessible to all, not merely the white male whose privileges are born out of this society’s hierarchies and oppressions. Internalizing processes, and creating genuinely non-hierarchical spaces develop the possibilities that all can participate in self-defence, self-liberation, and the destruction of domination.
The things that I need to do in order to be permanently liberated are immense and I do not believe they can be achieved on my own. If I merely view the struggle for liberation as an individual then I have already lost. My struggle is entwined with the struggle of others and a part of the struggle is making connections with others. One facet of state and capitalist oppression that reaches us all is the breaking down of those connections. The most obvious methods of doing this are class, race and gender, but they exist in the ways we form our subcultures, the ways in which we find personal and collective identification through our consumption habits, whether they be the food we eat, the clothes we wear and where we get those clothes from and the jobs/social functions we perform.
I live, and spend most of my time in a subculture which places great emphasis on it’s ethical choices. Inclusion and exclusion to this social group is often predicated on performing certain “ethical” habits. These include, but are not limited to: veganism/freeganism, freeshopping, permaculture, recycling, cycling, renewable energy, composting, home brewing, having an allotment, and art and education projects based around gardening or recycled materials. A lack of participation in these, or an overt rejection of these, makes inclusion into the social group that much more difficult, unless you have a regular supply of ketamine and dub step. That these habits have become so closely associated with anti-capitalist movements is to these movements’ detriment. I don’t believe any of them have anything to do with building a movement which will destroy capitalism, and everything to do with white university educated men and women carving out an identify with which they can view themselves and each other as women and men of conscience and ethics without ever having to challenge the pro-capitalist racism, classism, and sexism that they have had ingrained in them through living in this particular time and place in history. This behaviour is an act of domination, it is a refusal to internalise anti-capitalist, anti-state, and anti-domination ideas. A refusal to participate in spaces which encourage and facilitate such behaviour is an active attempt to generalize and spread the amount of attacks on capitalism and the state.
It’s because of this that I feel this subcultural baggage damages my struggle for liberation. If “ethical” work and “ethical” consumption remain as dominant as they are then there will always be a barrier between those who participate in them and those who do not. The simple answer at this point is to reject the subculture, for me to step out of it, but this does not take into account the fact that, like many subcultures, this one has created a supportive and protective environment where friendship and affinity can/has occurred. As well as this, much of the subculture has stemmed from genuine movements of resistance. The road protest movements, Reclaim the Streets, J18 and the G8 in Stirling all have their critics, but for me it is clear that they, at the very least, resisted capitalism and the state in some way. For these small reasons alone I think it would be foolish to reject them wholesale, but I am under no illusions that there are people within the subculture (whether you want to call it activist or environmental or whatever) who rely far too strongly on their privilege, and with whom I will never find any affinity, and am actually in a very profound state of conflict with.
I think that deep within the movements that exist (and their subcultures) is a need to reject capitalism and the state. Unfortunately the privileges that we have, which have been given to us by capitalism and the state, have not been challenged vigorously enough. We pay lip service to those privileges, we can talk a good talk, but in placing such a great emphasis on “ethical” work and “ethical” consumption we betray ourselves. And as I said previously, this betrayal damages my struggle for liberation. If instead of being evangelicals of “ethical” low impact living, we detected the things which stop us from being fully free, un-mediated human beings and challenged those things, whether they be inside of us, or inside our communities, or inside society as a whole, IF, after asking questions of ourselves, we then explained to others what we found, IF we did this, and then talked to others, without attempting to persuade or cajole, without making assumptions on what their needs and wants might be, we might find that we can make deep connections with people outside of our subculture. Then we can work on developing those connections, whether they are with one person or a hundred and we might be able to do something with those connections.
The anti-domination practices, actions and movements that I seek to be part of will always be short lived whilst those within the supposed anti-capitalist subculture/movement use their privileges to dominate the discourse. I don’t want to stay part of a subculture, never mind one which is ignorant of its flaws. Those of us who want to bring this capitalist society down must challenge those who attempt to distract everyone with notions of ethical work and consumption. If they ignore this challenge, then they are guilty of maintaining the shackles and chains of capital and the state which imprison us all.
