“The environment being destroyed, refugees dying, workers being exploited, neocolonialism etc. is all the work of a small group of super rich people.”
Absolutely true.
But they are only able to do so through our passive collaboration. Every job we do, every moment in which we do not revolt, makes this system possible.
And it is true that resistance is dangerous and our choices are based on an estimate of the risks to our physical safety. Even those that do actively resist the system make that estimate and don’t fight every battle. If we were the kind of heroes we really want to be, standing up against everything we can not accept, we’d probably be dead.
But that doesn’t mean our complicity isn’t real. It is. Our complicity is as real as the complicity of those who lived under past fascism, colonialism, slavery.
In Holocaust history we learn that genocide can be imagined by a small group but can only be carried out if the majority decides to not actively resist it. That is no less true about all the other horrible things that happen in this world.
History also teaches us that there is no level of powerlessness where resistance is impossible. Concentration camp inmates revolted. Slaves revolted. Our own sense of powerlessness or the danger involved can be very real but it doesn’t absolve us of our agency and complicity.
I believe we can hold the weight of our complicity AND the knowledge of where the real problem is. I believe guilt doesn’t help us, but an honest understanding of our place in this system does. I believe we can practice self care and self love AND understand our complicity.
I believe that once we really come to terms with this it might actually make us more compassionate towards ourselves and towards our comrades, because our love for each other isn’t based on the fragile illusion of innocence.
I think it only makes sense to hold yourself culpable for a problem if you could have acted to prevent (part of) the problem.
You’re culpable for [not helping a child drowning in a pond because helping them means your death]. You’re not culpable for [not helping a child drowning in a pond because you’re three thousand miles away and can’t afford a plane ticket]. You’re not culpable for [not helping a child drowning in a pond because you can’t swim and don’t know where to get reliable swimming lessons and would assuredly drown alongside the child if you tried to help].
My point here is mainly: not only would many forms of direct action or protest endanger the actor’s life, but they would also not actually help the people who need help, and are thus undesirable. Bear in mind that revolting incorrectly could be worse than doing nothing at all.
There’s the kind of powerlessness where you’re afraid of being murdered, and the kind of powerlessness where anything you are currently capable of doing is ineffective or actively counterproductive due to lack of money and information. This post (dangerously?) conflates the two.
I don’t actually know how to begin to solve neocolonialism or refugee crises or anything of that nature, so it cannot be the case that I am culpable for not having begun solving them.
Your lack of moral fiber is not the only reason that you do not fight every battle. You do not want to fight every battle. You want to fight the battles that you can gain advantage in.
I’m still trying to figure out how to articulate my own feelings about this topic, but I’ll make an attempt to respond here.
There are smaller sacrifices than literally putting your life at risk. You could devote more of your time and energy to understanding how to tackle the problems and implementing what you judge to be the best solutions; you could make sure more of your money goes where it’s most needed and less to support the worst offenders; you could attempt to only do work that you think is making the world a better place, passing up better pay or working conditions or job security to do so.
The point is that everyone faces these tradeoffs and everyone makes the selfish choice sometimes. We all fall short of what we could do and what we could be. We all do things that support and involve us in harmful systems in ways that aren’t strictly necessary. This isn’t a way of saying that we’re all bad people – it’s a rejection of the idea that being a good person requires a moral purity where we have no responsibility at all for the bad things happening. It’s saying that a total absence of complicity isn’t a realistic standard to hold ourselves or others to.
Uncertainty can be a reason to spend more time figuring out what to do before acting, but the only way it can be a reason not to ultimately act is if the situation is so uncertain that every possible course of action stands a significant chance of doing at least as much harm as good. I think that although the best course of action tends to be very hard to determine, it’s very often the case that there are at least some courses of action which we can be reasonably confident will make things better and not worse.
A couple of thoughts on this:
– Underlines the importance of speech and assembly. Individuals don’t fix collective problems, institutions fix collective problems, and when existing institutions prove impotent then its key that new ones be created to respond. Too much focus on the individual’s responsibility acting alone is counterproductive – the individual’s responsibility (if any) is to form or join a large enough gang to make a difference.
– Sacrifice doesn’t come out of no where. Small sacrifices on the individual are meaningless except as training for large sacrifices. If you’re never going to make the large ones then don’t bother with the small ones, they’re just masochistic display. Best practice is to choose some number of large sacrifices that you’re able to sustain and incorporate a steady diet of small sacrifices in that domain in order to maintain motivation.
“Understanding our complicity” is useless without a plan to change that fact. Guilt is useless without repentance and repentance requires a credible commitment to change. Intent does not pass the bar for credibility and it is not actually noble to point out problems without helping organize around providing solutions.
It’s possible that we have very different ideas in mind behind these words or a very different context, but if we’re on the same level than I disagree with you on.. well, everything, so let me clarify mine a bit.
– New institutions don’t fix problems, they create new ones, because they centralize power and centralizing power reproduces existing oppression dynamics, bringing people with more power to the centre of the new institutions, and because centralizing power creates new oppression dynamics. What we need is voluntary collaborative collective action without institutionalization.
– Small sacrifices are fundamental. In fact, they’re most of what our work is. Things like waking up at 6 AM to make breakfast for the activists going out today, waiting out in the cold for a comrade to be released from jail so they don’t have to walk home alone, doing the dishes at a fundraising party when you’d rather be dancing, not going to the concert of your favorite band because a comrade got assaulted and needs someone to spend the night in their house. These things matter so much. The big sacrifices, the people who risk their lives and freedom for the struggle, are highly visible and they do very important work, but the small sacrifices matter so so much and a lot of the best activists that create the most change are the one consistently making small sacrifices in the background of the flashy work.
– Understanding our complicity isn’t about guilt or repentance at all, it’s about getting over our constant rerun of guilt & repentance. It’s about having a realistic view of our imperfect place within society and within our activism, so that we think twice before demanding perfection from our comrades. It’s about not being faced with our complicity over and over again in a periodic self-flagellating kind of way (while lashing out at others for their complicity) but instead to see the inevitability of our complicity AND the parts of it that we can improve. And to treat others with that same space for imperfection.
It’s about understanding that a complete lack of complicity, a personal state of innocence, isn’t the goal, creating real change is.
QueerAnarchism 