Sometimes I think that to the left of liberal social justice types dislike antifa because the principles of complete anonymity/secrecy in organizing means you can’t use antifa affiliation to boost your social capital or build a career, so they don’t consider it useful because they use social justice mostly for that…
THIS. Performative activism // performative allyship is sooo important to these types and they can’t wrap their mind around why someone would go do all this stuff and not tell anyone for brownie points and it draws attention to the fact that they’re so clearly in this for social capital
True true true true truuuuuueeeeee
Performative activism sounds more like a liberal thing to me. Not that I know very many slightly left people to know if they do it as well
Performative activism is definitely very common in liberal social justice circles where a lot of people use their activism years as a leg up towards a career in some kinds of humanities field, professional charity work or politics.
However performative activism is also a pretty big thing in many more radical activist scenes where a lot of people are always very loud about how active and woke they are, make sure they always get recognition for everything they organize etc in order to build social capital within the activist community (in other words: to be popular, respected, admired).
They can use this social capital to get intracommunity power, to avoid being accountable, to get housing in cool activist living groups, to get friends, to get laid, to get invited to parties, to get self-esteem, to be able to chase out people they do not like, etc etc. These look-how-radical-I-am-activists will never spend a significant amount of energy on something that they won’t be able to take credit for.
QueerAnarchism 