This sentiment is beyond infuriating, and it doesn’t make me care about “normal” people because “normal” people—or anyone who claims to be “normal”—just don’t care about people like me. Queer and disabled people are never seen as “normal,” so we’re automatically written out of this statement by virtue of existing. The world in which my neurodivergent self can happily and safely exist is not the same one that “normal” people even want to support because they’d rather pretend that everyone understands everything in the exact same way.
Every time we say that we need something, we’re told that it’s “too much” or that it’s “too hard” or “too expensive” to possibly include everyone.
“Normal” also often implies a certain set of hegemonic values that are frequently colonialist and patriarchal in nature. This means that a lot of people, based on a race and ethnicity alone, don’t get to be “normal” in whatever geographic location they live in. They’re often seen as “strange” and “weird” and “foreign,” and their needs go overlooked because “normal” people wherever they live just “won’t understand.”
And yet people keep saying that we should be more considerate of “normal” people, as if we haven’t spent our whole lives doing exactly that. What they’re us is that we’re not allowed to loudly and collectively envision a world in which we want to exist.
Because it “scares people.”
“Normal” people need to be scared. They need to start realising that they aren’t in control of everything anymore and that they don’t get to decide who is and isn’t acceptable. They need to recognise that the world isn’t made in their image and that they don’t own it, that the people they’ve written off as “abnormal” and “weird” and “undesirable” for simply being who they are is abhorrent. They need to know that we no longer accept their constant and systemic bigotries in the ways they choose to try to deny us safety and joy.
They need for us to make it clear that everything they have been doing to us and the planet is unconscionable. “Normal” people need to be forced to reckon with the pain, frustration, and abuse they have made so many of us endure just to fit in and deal with the world they created for their own benefit.
I don’t care about “normal” people.
When I’m told to be less scary and to make myself more legible to “normal” people, it enrages me. Why should I have to accommodate those who see themselves as “normal” in envisioning the worlds we want to exist within when they’ve never accommodated anyone else? Why should we make sure that people who have always been comfortable remain comfortable in envisioning and building the kinds of worlds that we all need?
It doesn’t make any sense. Why is it that we seem to think that they should be coddled while the rest of us are left to struggle?
We’ve already seen what a world controlled by those who are perceived as “normal” looks like, and it seems to be one that they’re intent on killing. It doesn’t even seem to matter to them that they’re willing to go down with it, that they’re willing to die with it as long as they get to live in comfort and luxury and lord it over everyone else that they perceive as “abnormal” or “wrong.” They want to pretend that everything is fine because, for them, it has been.
We’ve been shown repeatedly, especially through the COVID pandemic, that “going back to normal” is what everyone supposedly wanted despite the fact that it left many of us in even worse situations than we already had. Many immunocompromised and disabled people were, almost as soon as people started going back out, left to figure out how to remain connected to their communities and be safe. Anxiety and fear increased among whole populations, and instead of dealing with it in ways that would be healthy for everyone, we were forced to just manage it and figure everything out for ourselves.
“Normal” people don’t care, and I don’t know why we should care about what they think.
Because “normal” benefits them even when it’s lethal to the rest of us.
The concept of “normal” is hard to unpick and to really define because it contains so much within something so incredibly small, and these things all change and have different meanings based on where we are and who we’re around.
If someone’s part of a culture that deviates from that of where they live, they’re often seen as strange and weird—as abnormal—because that “isn’t what we do here.” They often aren’t even allowed to participate in their own cultural practices unless it’s seen as something that can help them assimilate into society, even if it means sharing cultural practices with people who use them as costumes or to pretend they’re more “culturally enlightened” than everyone else. Companies will find ways to capitalise on the existence of these new traditions, trying to increase their audience by pretending to be far more inclusive than they ever really care to be.
Representation is great and being able to see people like you is immensely helpful, but at what cost when the people capturing it are only doing so to profit? When people are still being shoved into some narrow definition of “normal?”
When those practices can’t help in assimilation, they’re often relegated to being hidden behind closed doors when they can be practised at all. The people of the dominant culture will refuse to understand them and intentionally misrepresent them in the least charitable light possible to make it stop or at least force it into hiding. They will enable and use their children to exert pressure on the future generations of a marginalised culture, ensuring that they feel guilt and shame for being themselves. All of those children grow up learning what’s “normal” and what society deems as “acceptable,” and they enforce it upon everyone else.
That’s what we’ve all done. We’ve seen “normal” as we’ve grown up, and we persist in forcing everyone else to do it.
We police everyone into these narrow confines of what we feel is “acceptable” unless that version of “weird” can be capitalised on in some form. Being “normal” is an act of domination. The kinds of food we eat, the clothes we wear and when we wear them, the ways we want to live our own lives are all things that other people feel they should have control over. Because they hold their beliefs and behaviours to be “normal,” they see it as part of their duty to police and dominate everyone else until they fall in line.
We shouldn’t want “normal” people to feel comfortable. We should want them to recognise that shit’s got to change, and there isn’t any way around it.
We’re trying to change the world we have. We’re trying to create space for multiple and connected worlds within this single planet, and we’re scared of what happens when “normal” people find us just a tiny bit terrifying because it unsettles their reality and upsets what they value?
It’s absurd. So many of us have spent our whole lives knowing that we don’t fit in, and we’ve dealt with a lot of years of being made uncomfortable by the “normalcy” of it all. We’ve watched as we’ve been forced into unhealthy situations all for the sake of “normal,” and we’ve seen people completely neglected by “acceptable” society.
I don’t give a shit about “normal” people. It’s their turn to be made uncomfortable, to know that we don’t want their world because their world is harmful and dangerous. And at the worst, the most they will ever have to deal with is recognising that they will have to be a little less comfortable than they were before.
And I especially don’t give a shit about anyone’s anarchism if it coddles them and leaves everyone else to drudgery, abuse, pain, and neglect. If your anarchism is scared of creativity and imagination, if it’s scared of trying to find new pathways out of this garbage world, I don’t want it.
It’s not worth having.
]]>But I don’t get them.
I understand why people celebrate them, at least from a distance. I can see the kinds of joy that people have when celebrating these things with other people, though it’s not something that I ever really had. I’ve spent most holidays since leaving home either on my own or with people for whom they weren’t really part of their own cultures. A lot of this has left me considering my own relationship to them and what they represent to me, if anything.
Afterall, what can an independence day mean to someone who both isn’t from the country they live in and is for the abolition of all borders? What is the point of religious holidays when you’re not religious? How are some anniversaries important when you feel the passage of time differently or notice that we’ve lost much of what they represent?
That’s not to say that I don’t partake in any holidays. There are some that I take great joy in participating in and do genuinely understand, like the many different holidays that revolve around death. Perhaps that’s a bit ironic, but those are the ones that make the most sense to me. There is comfort in looking to the past and how it can help us to better understand both our present and future, and I get that because I feel it very strongly. Those days are also moments where we can celebrate the lives that the people we loved had, to remember them and what they brought to everyone and everything they touched.
Remembering someone, even remembering something, makes sense to me. I get that. Or, at least, I get most of it as long as it has a more personal connection or recognises people, groups, and moments that are all about trying to achieve and maintain some form of liberation (regardless of whether it was successful or not).
But I don’t get most holidays.
In particular, as I’m writing this starting on New Year’s Eve 2022 and going into New Year’s Day 2023, I don’t get this obsession with celebrating a new year. At the very least, I don’t get what it even means to us today and in this fashion. Perhaps it’s because it feels particularly forced that we should all look forward to the new year as if it’s going to be responsible for bringing significant change when that’s only ever been up to us, or maybe it’s because it’s a time where people are told to set unreasonable goals for themselves and to meet those challenges without any community to support them.
Everything is individual. A person can change as long as they do it alone. It’s all up to you. No one else, it seems, is responsible.
And if they don’t achieve those goals, they’ve failed. It’s no one’s fault except their own.
Many of these resolutions are made around ideas of self-improvement, which isn’t an inherently bad thing to focus on. But it almost always takes the same structure found in the self-help manuals that people peddle, focusing on the demands of a neoliberal society rather than our own genuine well-being. It’s always something tied to what some part of our society claims is necessary and is supposedly within our control: losing weight, getting a better job, and so on. They’re visions of ourselves that society wants to see, not things that we’re actually happy to be. They typically focus on what other people expect of us, and they almost never come with any form of collective care.
If we want to “improve,” we’re on our own.
Most people fail them and will be reminded of this time and time again, particularly on the eve of a new year when they go to make the same resolution once more because this time they’ll definitely succeed. The commercials about getting gym memberships for the new year will play on the guilt of someone who has tried, and failed, to lose weight. Family often prods those who failed to give up an addiction, like smoking, as if it’s something that’s so simple to do alone and without being able to create a better environment to do it in.
I recall that years ago when I partook in resolutions that most of my own, if people asked me about them, were about weight loss. That was the expectation because I was, and still am, a fat person. I only ever managed to meet that goal once in my life, and it was because I became so violently ill I couldn’t eat actual food for over a month and took even longer to recover. People congratulated me for all the hard work I had done and how proud they were that I had achieved that goal, including my doctor who knew how violently ill I was and what toll it took on my body.
It really fucked me up, and I’m still dealing with that. People congratulated me for getting sick. But they were happy because I achieved the goal I’d set for myself to fit within the boundaries of society. At any cost, even one that has left so much damage upon my being.
They really don’t care what it costs anyone to meet those goals. Our mental health can be destroyed, and we can be left struggling with chronic illnesses. As long as we assimilate into the ‘correct’ social standards, it doesn’t matter. But we’re on our own until we meet society’s absurd expectations.
Honestly, we’re on our own most of the time anyway because we’re also left to deal with the consequences of meeting them, too. We’re left to figure out how to silently deal with everything we’ve endured, and we still remain isolated and alienated in ways we hoped we’d never be. The community we thought we’d have if only we just did everything right never seems to materialise. It always seems just beyond our grasp, existing in the most superficial of ways and weaving us further into the systems that do more harm than good.
But I also don’t understand this timing. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in places where I’ve seen multiple new years within the same year, further making the “global” date feel all the more inappropriate. From the fact that it’s set in the middle of winter instead of at the end and on a specific date rather than tied to something like the cycles of the moon—much like Lunar New Year—is to the fact that most people celebrate it in the same standardised ways that we expect from of everyone (whether they want to or not), this holiday has always left me with far more questions than answers.
Sometimes I question all the obvious things that I’ve often asked about ever since I was a child, all those things that never had satisfactory answers. But more than ever I find myself asking about purpose, about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
Like, why do our celebrations of this ‘global’ new year focus on individual achievement rather than collective responsibility? Rarely do I ever hear discussions where people spend time working out what they plan to do as a collective and how they plan to build systems of support for those who need them. I have yet to see any organisation with resources under their belt discuss how they plan to support multiple smaller projects, ensuring that they can at least try their damnedest to get off the ground or keep going in any meaningful capacity. I don’t see any of the labour unions I’ve been a part of setting forth actual and stated goals for what they want to do, even if it’s only to their membership.
What I do constantly see are organisations dropping projects they did support left and right, leaving people to pick up the pieces on their own or give up entirely. I see labour unions holding yearly elections for things that, ultimately, have little impact beyond changing names rather than any functional policies or structures. I see little movement about how we could radically change the world and what we can do to get there. Beyond “being better,” there seems to be radio silence on any coherent goals to work toward.
But that “being better” never seems to materialise. Or, if it does, it’s always reminiscent of a diversity, equality, and inclusion statement.
There are rumblings of wanting to “decolonise” our spaces, which really is only halfway to where we need to be considering all the co-option that term has undergone. If anything, we need to recognise that we should be anti-colonial and try to figure out what that even looks like, especially for our own context. This includes how we celebrate holidays and which we opt to focus on.
Why is it that we avoid recognising that this specific New Year celebration is part of the global hegemony? Why do we fail to acknowledge that it continues to enforce imperialist and colonialist values on many who never asked for it? What about all of the other times of year that hold significance and embody symbols of renewal, fresh starts, new opportunities, and hope? Where is the recognition of those other new years beyond neoliberal marketing campaigns designed around faux DEI campaigns?
It remains to be seen how inclusive we really can be. I wonder if there’s a resolution we could make there.
A continual request that is made around this year is for there to be no fireworks, especially as they easily trigger trauma responses in many people for a range of reasons. It doesn’t matter that there are people for whom these displays disturb and interrupt their sleep cycles, forcing them into adapting to something they shouldn’t need to. It’s continually pointed out how much damage they do to our environment, including the ways in which they terrify animals. Yet people, including anarchists, fight back against this because they… enjoy them. It doesn’t seem to matter how much harm they cause or how dangerous they can be; it doesn’t matter what they do to the health of others. They’re pretty and fun! Why should we stop?
Perhaps we could use a group resolution to consider the needs of others over our desires for pretty explosions.
In other instances, people choose to celebrate by imbibing lots of alcohol. This doesn’t inherently annoy me on its own, but it comes with an absurd amount of social pressure on those of us who opt not to. As someone who doesn’t drink for a range of reasons, I am always met with people telling me how often I’m “ruining the vibe” and push me to do something I have never enjoyed. And despite our focus on resolutions, which often include working towards sobriety for many people, there is still a constant push of partaking in social drinking.
Maybe we could use a group resolution about allowing people to do what they feel is best for themselves and refraining from pressuring them into celebrating in the ways we want them to.
New beginnings can happen whenever we need them, and they can be tied to any time: today, tomorrow, and anything beyond. This arbitrary date, this arbitrary year… They have no inherent meaning to us.
I think I don’t get this time of year because, rather than being a joyous occasion, it feels more like a time where people are in pain and coerced into hiding it. There are too many memories of all the things we could have done and could have changed but never did. It’s an all too clear reminder of how often we choose to maintain the status quo as we look back on the choices we’ve made, even within our “radical” communities.
It’s hard for me to look back at what has happened and believe that there’s a point in celebrating something “new” when all I see are the same old behaviours and the building of the same few pedestals. Holidays like the ‘global’ New Year only seem to symbolise a failure to change, a failure to act, and a failure to care. They feel like distractions that keep us fighting for the bare minimum, especially as we stand in awe of expensive and tedious displays of wealth and opulence that are used to ring in the new year.
Maybe I just don’t get it because it feels like the “just go vote” of holidays, as if people expect changes to come with the increasing numbers rather than taking responsibility for doing things themselves. It feels like so many leave it up to fate rather than our own capacities, whatever those might be.
Or maybe I do get it, but it just seems so incredibly unimportant because it’s a pacifying kind of fun that keeps us quiet without really engaging with the world around us.
]]>From one perspective, it’s something that’s never asked with the intention of actually learning about anarchism. People are attempting a ‘gotcha’, trying to prove that anarchists still need certain structures that “only the State can provide” or pretending that anything we do would create an “anarcho-state” of some sort. The people asking it are looking for concrete answers to everything, refusing to accept that “I don’t know” can be good enough right now. They ignore the fact that all people genuinely don’t know how to solve every problem. They’re people who fail to recognise how the world really works.
From another point of view, generally that taken by self-described anarchists, it’s an assumption that never goes completely explored. It’s something that’s seen as being so obvious that it doesn’t need to be answered even when we demand to think about how society can be structured for the liberation of all people. They’ll tell us that it’s obvious that we’ll thrive because society, when it’s at its best, is anarchic. This is often said by people who haven’t thought much about those who may need a concrete answer of some kind, people who may need reassurances that others will be including them in society. It’s a question that frequently goes ignored by people who’ve rarely ever had to question their safety within general society. Yet, when those of us who are scared of remaining excluded point out how our current existence still draws from the hierarchies we’ve been indoctrinated into, we’re often ignored.
I hate this question, but it’s a question that demands we actually consider it. Not as a gotcha, not in vague speech and pretty slogans, but as a genuine question with many possible answers.
I often feel hopeless, like we’ll never achieve even a modicum of the world where everyone is liberated. This is probably because I spend a lot of time explaining why it is that I think we need to build learning spaces that support everyone, and I waste way too much time explaining why all schools are inherently harmful to children only to be told that we “need” public schools. Hell, I get into so many arguments with people about why we need to ensure that our organising spaces can accommodate anyone of any age. It often feels like I’m screaming at brick walls about how we need to ensure that our movement spaces are accessible in a variety of ways, enabling disabled people, neurodivergent folks, children, and the elderly more opportunities to participate.
It’s so fucking exhausting.
It’s also incredibly demoralising because the response, maybe at its best, is for people to just shrug and continue as they’ve been. Others continue by giving excuses, telling us that there “aren’t enough resources” to make necessary changes or outright claiming that they don’t even need to consider making changes “because no one like that is here” and ignoring how that silences anyone who would dare to contradict them. At its worst, people actively fight back and continue to loudly lambast anyone who would dare change their precious hierarchy.
Of course, they won’t actually claim to be in support of a hierarchy, but it’s beyond obvious that they do. No one who is hostile toward the needs of people, especially marginalised and vulnerable people, can ever claim themselves to be an anarchist. They’re too invested in maintaining the power they have over others while wearing the aesthetic.
It’s too fucking common.
Honestly, it feels as if there are too many people who just absolutely refuse to unlearn any of the hierarchies we were indoctrinated into. It feels as if there are even more who choose to blatantly ignore any systemic oppressions, believing them to be either unimportant or things that we’ve “already dealt with” despite all the evidence to the contrary. It feels like there are too many people out there who are willing to victim blame every single person who has left organising spaces because they were disillusioned with how they were run or never once felt the solidarity of people standing them in their time of need. So many people have given whatever they could to help and had obstacles placed in front of them when trying to even just start projects that mattered to them and others in their lives and would’ve furthered the same goals.
All because someone else wants that credit or wants to be perceived as better than they really are.
So if I were to reflect upon how we could survive in an anarchist society while considering the things I’ve experienced in organising with other anarchists, I would say we couldn’t. We have too many gaping flaws that are just not being worked on, regardless of how often we point them out. There are too many cis men who pretend that the patriarchy was defeated long ago, who continue to push care work on anyone they perceive as feminine. There are too many neurotypical and able-bodied folks who refuse to work with disabled people to ensure that our needs can be adequately met. There are too many people who focus on the superiority of citizens and ignore the needs of migrants. There are too many people who still adhere to racist structures, refusing to recognise even the small ways in which they perpetuate them. And it is still far too common for families to be pushed out of spaces, focusing on adults without children.
These aren’t even all of the problems we need to deal with, either. There are just too many holes for me to confidently say that we could thrive in an anarchist society because it requires actually doing the work to support those around us and their needs.
To put it simply, if people do not make fundamental changes to how they recognise the humanity of others, many of us will not survive in any society let alone an anarchist one.
Now, none of this is to say that an anarchist society will not support everyone. Without a doubt, I believe that the only way we’ll ever really be able to thrive and have a healthy future where everyone’s liberation is on the table is through anarchism. The problem is less with anarchism as a set of principles that many people share, but it most certainly falls with anarchists as a flawed group of people with a lot to (un)learn.
That is truly our biggest obstacle.
We’ve all grown up with these hierarchies drilled into our heads from birth. We can’t just simply denounce them and pretend we’ve done everything there is to do. This is why, despite so many of us pointing out the ways that patriarchy continues to harm everyone, it is able to persist through the blatant denials of those who refuse to listen to its victims. This is why we still have a culture that supports abusers, giving them multiple chances and a ridiculous amount of space within our spaces, while victims are left to struggle in almost every way possible. It’s why, even through the claims of anti-racism, so many people gaslight others into pretending that it has all been solved.
We say that we support victims, we say that we’re anti-racist, we say that we support all genders. But do we actually believe that? Have we done any of the work to dismantle those structures in our own brains? Do we do anything when we see injustices happening?
If I were to base it on what I see now, I would be inclined to say no. Far too many people are comfortable in stating they hold beliefs that they act counter to.
It is a lot of work to remove these hierarchies from our own brains, and much of this is part of a personal journey. This doesn’t mean we have to do all of it alone, but it is something that we need to be willing to work on. There are far too many people who think they’ve ‘finished’ their journey just because they’ve recognised that they maintain harmful views about a demographic of people. The recognition is only the beginning of the journey. We need to be able to question the thoughts and beliefs that we have as we go along, and we need to do that in real-time. We need to be able to think about the choices we make. We need to be able to listen when someone tells us we’re fucking up and not fight so goddamned hard because we intended to do well.
For me, this is the first step to being able to successfully create and live in an anarchist society. Yet so many people have missed this crucial step in their learning processes, and it often creates hostile environments for the rest of us.
Supposing people finally get past that point, the rest of it is uncertain. I don’t know what, precisely, that ‘anarchist future’ will look like or how we even get there. This is something that frustrates many people, particularly non-anarchists. They want exact and concrete answers to problems, rather than merely possible solutions that we could use.
I get that. Too many people have been burned by lack of inclusion, by people making decisions for them and either being forced to rely upon either a system that was designed to fail or a very small handful of people they trust. And this is something that far too many anarchists fail to recognise, particularly if they don’t find themselves struggling under that specific oppression. Many barely see it in their own actions and thoughts, maintaining that they don’t have any bigotries because of their political alignments. This is particularly common among people who, wherever they may be, are part of the local hegemonic demographic and haven’t had to interact with some of the most oppressive structures around them.
But the people who really weaponise this supposed “uncertainty” are those who seek to undermine it in bad faith. Uncertainty is normal, but there are those who use it as one more element to attempt to play gotcha games. This applies to both non-anarchists and self-described “anarchists” alike, and the primary reason is to score ‘political points’ for their specific party or view. They want to pretend that we have “no plans” and “no goals” because we don’t have concrete solutions that can be enacted immediately or everywhere. This is an intentional misrepresentation of how anarchists tend to think, which is largely why many of us tend to be drawn to anarchism in the first place.
This bit is going to be anecdotal because I don’t have formal research or evidence to claim that it’s the truth, but there are patterns that I tend to notice in the anarchists I spend time with both offline and online. There are consistently appearing traits that I observe in the people that I organise with, and it’s the reason I continue to both work with and develop relationships with them.
These characteristics include that we tend to be very fluid thinkers, often willing to quickly integrate new knowledge and adapt to tactics and strategies that work better. When someone presents us with criticisms about how something is happening, we are more likely to stop and figure out how we can address them. If we encounter problems that we’ve not encountered, we are likely to stop and reflect upon how we can deal with it. Is there something we’ve done before that could work? Let’s try it. Did it fail? Let’s see what we can do instead.
The anarchist folks I spend the most time with recognise that we can’t just do the same things all the time. They are full of incredibly creative people who want to use that creativity to improve other people’s lives and material realities.
It’s impossible to turn these kinds of responses to problems into policy. It wouldn’t make sense to have legislation about, for example, disabilities that includes phrases like “we’ll just wing it” or “we’ll see when we get there” for problems we haven’t previously encountered or haven’t yet found solutions to, but that’s how the world works. What policy did we have that created the curb cut? How have dyslexic people figured out how to read, even as specialists have failed to help many of us? How have people with ADHD learned to exist, even when they’re prevented from taking medications they may need?
How many times have we had to solve our own problems because the systems refused it? Because a policy said we couldn’t do it? Because, even though a law existed, obstacles were put into place to deny access to things we needed?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve never received services I was told I could get, regardless of how correct my paperwork was. We’ve all had to solve our own problems, individually and through sharing our experiences. We don’t need formal policies to do that because we can do and have done that on our own. I have been forced to solve so many of my own problems through trial and error, through interactions with other people who’ve had to go through the same issues. We don’t need the legislation. We’ve never needed it.
But we do need people to listen to our needs and be willing to work with us to address them. We need them to understand our fears about being, once again, left out. I understand why so many marginalised people bristle at the lack of concrete solutions, especially because that gives them a perception of safety. They know that a tool, however useless it might be, exists. It’s something they can point to when they need to really find ways to push people to treat them correctly. These wouldn’t exist in an anarchist society.
But we would, and we have to ensure that everyone’s needs are met. “No one is left behind” should be far more than a pithy slogan. It should be reality.
This kind of treatment is also clear in how people view children. When conversations of youth liberation are brought up, the initial response of many is to make fun of bedtime discourse in order to bait people into arguing about it or claim that anarchists who support getting rid of homework “just didn’t want to do it” when they were kids. They want to make it clear how “immature” we are for thinking that children should have more of a say in their own lives, and they do this by exaggerating what they perceive as being the “most absurd” opinions that anarchists have.
Never do they stop and actually consider how strictly enforced bedtimes can hurt a child’s health or how the excuse of a child who “isn’t obeying” their bedtime (for whatever reason) can be folded into the logic that enables some parents and caregivers to abuse or neglect them. They don’t stop to consider how homework interferes in the lives of children (who have already put in a full and completely pointless workday, for free) and how it prepares them for taking on unpaid overtime in the future. These things have many legitimate criticisms—far more than those I used—and people, just to gain their political ‘gotcha’ points, love to denigrate them without even taking time to consider the issues.
Rarely do people stop and consider the ways in which children are treated by their families and society at large as property and how we continue to oppress them, removing so much of their ability to have agency in their own lives. We fail to acknowledge that there are serious conversations to be had around the ways that children exist within our societies and how adult supremacy continues to push them out and away from spaces that should support them. We continue to exclude children from our organising spaces by focusing on the needs of adults without children. They are treated as if the only thing they can ever be to anyone is a nuisance or an inconvenience.
We give them no space to genuinely learn or make decisions for themselves. We provide them little safety, especially for those who live with dangers in their own homes. They are used as pawns by nearly every political movement. We even force them into institutions that will never support them and try to coerce them into whatever is most profitable, ignoring how unsafe those spaces are to their mental and physical health.
But should we finally be able to live in an anarchist society, we have to acknowledge that all people should have agency in their own lives. Everyone needs access to the tools and strategies that enable them to live their lives to the fullest, regardless of how old they are. We cannot continue to exclude anyone on the flimsiest of circumstances. We must create spaces where everyone can learn, where learning is seen to be continuous and never-ending, where we can change our own paths to whatever we want or whatever is needed.
We need to imagine a world where everyone is understood to be a whole person and part of the community.
I hate this question, but It’s a necessary question that needs some kind of answers. It’s a question that prompts reflection about the ways in which we relate to others around us and whether or not the ways we engage in them are healthy. It’s a question that lets us think about our context, about solutions that we have already seen, and how they might be adapted to our own context should it seem right.
It gives us time to pause, reconsider, adapt, integrate, and create. We need that more than anything right now.
The unfortunate part is that these answers may never be pleasing to hear because so many of them will be vague and sound uncertain, but that uncertainty is required. There are so many options we have never considered because we haven’t dared to dream beyond what’s currently available. For many of us, we’ve been punished for thinking “outside the box.” And even when there are options we’ve been aware of, we haven’t even bothered to do them because there are far more excuses that enable us to do nothing than even putting forth what little we have to try.
But we need people to think differently, to expand beyond what’s currently believed to be possible. We need everyone to admit that there are times where they don’t have the answers, where they don’t know something, where they can admit that they might be wrong. We need them to do this because it means that people who might have an idea of how to solve a problem, especially one that isn’t flashy or worthy of publicity, can actually be heard rather than spoken over. We need this because that helps us to learn and grow, and it helps us to better understand others and what they know.
We know what little the State has done to placate us while others are ignored and silenced. We can do it ourselves.
But just as much as we need to be willing to (un)learn and be willing to act, we also need to listen. We need to be silent, to hear hard truths, to integrate new knowledge even if it might be painful.
And I think genuinely asking how we can thrive in an anarchist society is what we need to do, but not as a ‘gotcha’.
We need to ask it as a way to understand where we are and how we keep going.
]]>And yes, it is exhausting to constantly have those discussions about what an anarchist society could look like only to later find that they’re happening in bad faith and that the person you’re talking to is only interested in tearing everything down.
But prefiguration is something that we need to give more credence and thought to, something that needs to be fleshed out a bit more and have more ideas attached to it. Though I mostly don’t think it’s done out of malice, anarchists tend to throw around the solution of “prefiguring society” like some kind of bizarre buzzword that should just end an argument. It’s vague and doesn’t really tell anyone anything, leaving people with only the question of what we mean when we say it.
It probably also doesn’t help—though it’s entirely logical and wonderful—that all of us have differing ideas of what it would actually mean to prefigure society. We have so many ideas, but that’s really born out of the fact that we all live in a huge range of contexts. There can never be one perfect answer to any of the following questions because our experiences, connections, identities, and geographies necessitate that we all have different strategies and tools, and that’s fine.
So it’s worth stopping and asking: What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? Who are we going to include?
I’d like to think that the answers to all of these questions are pretty obvious, though they can also feel equally as vague because of how intuitive the answers may seem to us. Starting with the question of who first, we should all be prepared to actually recognise that the answer is everyone. Afterall, what’s the point of liberation if it’s only for some and not all?
Yet I keep seeing that so many of our tools, strategies, and responses are developed merely as reactions to things that happen: things that we didn’t plan for or even consider and things some of us were trained to never pay attention to in the first place. While this isn’t an inherent problem—sometimes we can’t possibly know what will happen until we try to do something—having so much of what we do based only on our responses to events and problems leaves me wondering how much we’re really prefiguring the world we want to live in or even considering the world we’re in now.
Part of this may be a result of our understanding of what prefiguration is or how we view time and our place in the world. It hasn’t escaped my notice that a lot of people talking about “prefiguration” also seem to be neglecting the current generative aspects of what we should be doing. For them, there is a belief that what they’re currently doing is achieving something in the future. It’s not necessarily something that is happening now, and that often enables them to feel reassured that what they’ve done now is helpful because they believe that it will have impacts later. This isn’t inherently wrong, but it does open itself up to questions: What exactly are these people doing? What impacts has their work and activism had? Who is engaging with it and who is it for?
I can see these structures in a lot of the spaces I’m in, even those that I cherish and support. It frustrates me to no end, though that may also be because I recognise that sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking in this way. Sometimes it feels like the “prefiguration” that’s being discussed is only theoretical, only something that is vaguely seen in the current moment and cannot possibly be done until later because there are so many things wrong that must be righted. How those things will change is uncertain and rarely discussed. It continually comes back to things that we must do and prepare for now in order to get there later.
Wherever there happens to be.
For others, our understanding of prefiguration requires looking at the current moment and understanding how it impacts us now. It’s not entirely focused on immediacy, but there is an undercurrent of urgency running through some of it. There are people who speak of a desire for us to model what we want to see, hoping that others may follow suit. Occasionally, there are boundaries that have been set, but the way that people following this model of prefiguration discuss it often reminds me of the ‘golden rule’ (or ‘great commandment’) that was so frequently referenced in my own family when I was growing up: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
In some respects, this can be a functional guideline to work from. If you want people to treat you well, you should also treat them well in kind. However, it’s the hopeful aspect that always flusters me, the fact that it frequently feels as if inviting people into certain behaviours isn’t enough. After all, a lot of the people who continually reminded me of that rule also seemed to really hate it once everyone else started treating them as they did others. They almost never stopped to reflect upon how their negative behaviours were hurting other people, even after people explained to them how they were impacting those around them. They still assumed that they were being kind or tolerant, even when they absolutely weren’t.
Perhaps it’s because, even though this idea of prefiguration is more firmly set in the current moment than the former, it doesn’t really think about currently existing people and currently existing communities. There’s little thought about the ways in which simply modelling behaviour does very little to shift the perspectives and attitudes that people around us have now, especially when we’re seeking a significant shift from the ways we’re currently doing everything.
Which all leads me back to my initial questions: What are we going to do? How are we working towards prefiguring anarchist societies?
In a lot of ways, it can be far easier to simply respond to something than it is to create an entirely new thing. Similarly, it’s even easier to see the supposed “solution” that we’ve seemingly always had (even if that “always” is only a few generations) and try to figure out how we can reform and rework it to better serve us. Though I’m not one who wants to completely throw everything away, I think we really need to do more to deconstruct and dismantle those systems to better understand how they function before we even dare to consider using them.
But every time a problem comes up, what I tend to see is that people simply respond to it in some way (even if their chosen method of response is to ignore it). We haven’t done anything to prevent it, and we haven’t tried to do much of anything to pre-empt it. In a lot of cases, we haven’t even done the necessary steps of unlearning the bigotries and assumptions within our own heads to make sure that our responses are at least helpful and appropriate.
Since we’re often still recreating what we know, what we’re doing is leaving other people out or leaving messes for them to correct and clean up. Often, these are people who are already quite exhausted from having to point out the existence of these bigotries in the ways that people speak and behave (or just silently deal with it because they’re just too tired of speaking up on their own), these are people who have to fight for others to listen to them explain how group dynamics and structure are still operating on particular assumptions that exclude or harm them (only to still be talked over and excluded), and they are people who are already doing this work in so many places (even though most of those spaces won’t do anything beyond making excuses to solve the issues).
What we need to be doing is shifting our thinking entirely. We don’t have to rebuild everything immediately, but we desperately need to understand how those tools and strategies work; we need to learn their history and their original intent so that we can understand how they’ve become what they are. This includes looking at the ways in which it helps some people, hinders others, and what assumptions are buried within them. By deconstructing those strategies and tools and understanding everything that forms them, perhaps we can either find new ones that actually take everyone in our communities into account, rework them to be more useful, or discard them entirely. This doesn’t mean that all people have to be capable of the same things, but we must ensure that our actions clearly recognise the many different people and their vastly different needs.
If we neglect anyone, if we’ve done something to hurt them, we have failed—no matter if what we’ve done has succeeded in making things slightly better for a few. We cannot leave people behind, assuming that they will “catch up” or that we’ll all shift our focus to them should at least one demographic be liberated. It’s all of us or none of us, and there is no other way.
We should also be applying this to the moments when we take inspiration from other movements. Instead of simply removing successful strategies and tools from their context, we need to learn why they genuinely worked or merely appeared to be successful. We need to break them down to understand their integral parts, to see if we can make them work for us rather than simply repeating what someone else did and finding that it often fails. What allowed them to succeed? How can we translate their actions into something relevant to us? Did they leave anyone behind?
It’s kind of obvious to say, but it occasionally feels like we forget this: Prefiguration, though focused on the future, requires that we look around at our past and present. We need to know what we’ve done and what we’re doing; we need to be able to think about and plan for what could happen in the future, especially if we want to adapt fast enough and still be inclusive.
All of this has been quite vague, so let me put forth a clear example of a demographic who routinely gets left out, ignored, turned into jokes or insults, and made to feel unworthy within our movement spaces: disabled and neurodivergent folks.
I’m saying this from experience, as someone who is both disabled and neurodivergent. We are seen as an afterthought, left to figure everything out for ourselves and to have people ridicule us for whatever our needs may be. People lament how “weak” we are, how we’re “unable to cope” because some of us struggle with things like sensory overload in places that have been designed using neurotypical assumptions. Others portray us as “needing too much” and “being burdensome” if we ask for something as simple as ensuring enough room for people to navigate wheelchairs or for there to be sign language interpreters for Deaf people who need them. Disabled people are often told that they are responsible for their accommodations, rather than it being a community effort.
Hell, as someone who just wants to sit down sometimes because of chronic pain in my back and knees, people get upset when I complain about how there’s nowhere to just rest. Clearly, we still have much work in unlearning everything we still cling to from the eugenics movement.
Sometimes we have specific accommodations that people often view as silly or childish. This can be seen in the sorts of comments that people make about things like lanyards that help people know how to interact with others, which largely come out of communities who have to deal with sensory overload. When many neurotypical people see someone wearing a lanyard indicating that they “don’t want to be talked to,” they question why it is that this person would even go outside; they get visibly upset at the boundaries that we’re setting in order to enjoy ourselves and feel comfortable in a shared space because the boundaries we’re asserting are different from their expectations.
In going to book fairs with my friends, some of whom carry around small stuffed toys that help them to decrease their anxiety in spaces with a lot of new people, I have overheard and confronted a number of people who—despite their claims to be “leftists” (and more specifically, communists)—jeer at them for being ridiculous and juvenile, as if either their needs or those qualities should even disqualify someone from participating in their community. They are often looked down upon and treated with little respect, and many of our spaces do absolutely nothing to pre-empt or prevent this.
We can see the same types of issues for other bigotries: Racism tends to only be addressed when someone has crossed a boundary, ignoring the needs and wishes of people of colour. Sexism and misogyny are frequently overlooked, with many pretending that they don’t happen at all until they do (and even then they’re only seen as an individual act and not a systemic issue). Ageism plays a huge role with many spaces not making room for either the young or the old, focusing predominantly on people in their twenties and thirties who are largely childless while also excluding families (and definitely single-parents). And immigrants and refugees typically get entirely ignored, with citizens frequently leaving us to figure everything out for ourselves unless we properly assimilate.
It should be very clear that we haven’t really done the work of prefiguring most of our spaces because all of these things continue to happen. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do it. We just have a lot of work to do.
Because of that, I often like to focus on the tools that we use. It’s not so much the innate design of them—I can only really speak to my personal preferences and needs in that regard—but the ways in which they’re created and run. So many of them have been created with assumptions that people will not hurt us or with very superficial understandings of what causes people to engage in negative behaviours while using them. This has been done to the point that those developing the tools have failed to recognise the harm that marginalised communities may and will endure should bad actors actually use those tools against them, especially because many of those very abusers have not faced any consequences at all for anything they’ve done.
We know this because it keeps happening. As much as we definitely see it on corporate media with their constant support of and failure to remove people who engage in stochastic terrorism, we see decentralised platforms struggling to deal with many of the same behaviours and attitudes. Just because the platform is decentralised doesn’t mean that our bigotries disappear. We haven’t solved anything; we’ve simply moved and possibly obscured it.
This is where prefiguration should factor in a lot more than it currently does, particularly as this is a chance to reflect upon the past and present. It’s a moment to see how the behaviours we’ve engaged in, the attitudes we’ve held, and the assumptions we’ve made have brought us to the current moment. It’s a point where we should be able to point out the things we’ve completely fucked up and how we can make amends while also building tools that are better and healthier for all of us.
And yes, I do mean tools. Having more than one option enables us to better meet the needs of more people and to be culturally and geographically responsive. This should be part of how we develop our concepts of prefiguration, rather than it becoming some vague buzzword that gets passed around at parties.
Along with these tools, we need more strategies that enable us to build more inclusive communities. Many more of these strategies should be focused on potentialities, helping us to build more flexible and responsive communities. This doesn’t mean we can’t keep the things we’ve done that worked, but we need our strategies to be flexible and adaptive to whomever is around us. Far too often, we still ignore marginalised and vulnerable community members. Though we know about their experiences, many of us still don’t consider them in the boundaries we set or the structures we use.
Overall, we really should be asking ourselves a lot of questions: What have we done to make sure that everyone can be part of the community, should they want to participate? Have we recreated anything—tools, systems, structures, or bigotries—that we also claim to be working against? What have we done in order to make it possible to pre-emptively meet the needs of our community members?
There is very little recognition that many of the tools we have must be adaptive or flexible for a range of uses, that they should start from a place of care and prevention instead of responding to violence when it happens, that they should be safe for all of us. Instead of recognising that the creators of such tools have enormous responsibility in working with multiple communities to prevent and decrease the harms they cause while also being responsive to different needs, we tend to shift the blame to individual users for what they’re doing.
And while those individual users should take responsibility for their actions, it should be easy to understand that we are continually recreating tools and systems that do not help foster environments of community and safety (which, by the way, is not synonymous with surveillance). If we’re not actively working to provide structures that can be preventative in harm, encourage community, and enable people to feel safe, we aren’t actually doing anything other than shifting the locations of communication and changing who controls us.
The same is true of our institutions, our societies, our worlds. Many of the tools and systems that surround us do not help foster communities of trust. Many of them are built almost entirely on distrust and skepticism, often assuming the worst of all people instead of actively cultivating spaces that encourage growth and compassion. And while it is healthy to be cautious of others, it does nothing to ensure that we can move beyond those feelings to building a cohesive community of people who are capable of trusting and supporting each other.
Afterall, trust is an important component in being able to build healthy spaces. It’s also a necessary part of learning and growing.
]]>In a lot of ways, they share a lot in common. They shut out voices to focus on a few key people even if they don’t share common values, they ask individuals with little knowledge to cover topics they’re unfamiliar with, they’re incredibly insular and require an immense following to even be considered for projects, and they commodify pain.
However, the “by teachers, for teachers” media model at least doesn’t generally pretend that it’s doing something else. They make their goals of “reforming schools” known and tend to act similarly to traditional media by occasionally paying lip service to more humane options and co-opting radical movements. They know they’re selling something, and they know they’re doing it largely for profit or to maintain their positions within the system.
This makes perfect sense when you look into their funders and find the ‘charitable’ organisations of Bezos and Gates supporting them, even for the so-called nonprofits. And though the end result is them muddying the waters and obscuring the pain that our school systems cause in order to further their existence, it’s at least clear what their purpose is.
Meanwhile, many anarchist media organisations seem to have forgotten what their purpose was beyond producing goods and services for people to consume and buy.
Perhaps it starts with the fact that these anarchist media organisations are often established as formal businesses and nonprofits (even if they call themselves worker-run collectives). Infuriating though it might be, they have to be established in some way because they’re aware that they have to exist within a capitalist system. If they sell things and generate any kind of revenue, they’re required to submit taxes so that they can continue to provide their products for our “intellectual self-defense,” a term that feels a bit holier-than-thou for what buying a book or listening to a podcast is.
And honestly, I’m not here to say that all of the work they publish and share is meaningless because it isn’t. I have found numerous texts that have shifted my own ideas or helped me build upon or articulate others, and I’ve listened to people who have improved my understanding of different topics or sent me down rabbit holes I never expected to follow.
But it is telling that, though they claim to hold anti-capitalist values, they persist in using capitalist strategies and fail to recognise how that impacts them, the way they organise, and their customers. And that third category is customers because it’s not really comradeship to sell stuff. It can be seen in the ways they talk about their work and what they do, and it can be understood in the gaps they create because they’re too focused on competing in a capitalist system against traditional media (whether they recognise it or not).
It’s a bit perplexing that we’ve bought into this model so thoroughly, they’ve actively chosen to use these strategies. They recognise that traditional media is their competition, but they’re choosing to compete with them using their tools.
Should we be there? Yes. Should it be our primary focus? I really don’t think so.
So far, this has been somewhat vague, so let’s get into specific choices about strategies that feel counterproductive to an anarchist media and the development of anarchist communities.
For people who claim they want to “kill their idols,” there is an absurd amount of name recognition needed to even participate in some of these spaces. When new books are announced, it’s difficult to find authors that you’ve never heard from because the same few people keep popping up. Books about labour have the same few people, books about anarchist education are almost always around the same project because they’re written by the one expert anyone recognises, and books about anti-fascism are always from the perspectives of the same few supposed researchers (many of whom have grifted their way to popularity and run defense for “leftist” abusers).
The same voices, the same ideas, the same topics are constantly dredged up in apparently ‘new’ ways with very little space given to anyone else.
How many books do we need about Francisco Ferrer y Guardia? How many other anarchist pedagogical projects are there that we’re ignoring in favour of always talking about the Modern School, if we even deem talking about pedagogy important at all (and we rarely do)? Why do we need yet another collection of essays from the same few classical anarchists, like Emma Goldman or Pyotr Kropotkin, as if no one else existed with them or even exists now?
I can’t explain how tired I am of seeing the same few things all the time. How is this helping us learn and grow? How does this build anything other than a personal library or an ego?
And how many times can the same author repackage the same topics and essays for our consumption? Rarely do I see new authors being promoted or given even a glimmer of a platform, but I will see the same few people being touted around as the most knowledgeable about a topic or the best at editing anthologies. It’s a jarring development of a hierarchy that is intentionally overlooked because the people involved are supposedly anarchists, but it’s more than a little obvious that there are far too many people focusing on building up their friends and people they know to everyone else’s silence and detriment. They almost never step outside of their comfort zones, and they rarely go out of their way to engage people doing things differently to them.
And this isn’t uncommon: Rarely do I see anarchist media organisations going out of their way to meet new people, to find people in the areas they want to know more about. Instead, they put all of their energies on building connections to rising stars, to people with established platforms because those people will bring their audiences with them.
Much like their competitors, they’re using the same strategies that shut people out as they promote their own supposed growth.
But why bother doing any of that hard work to build a community when your publishing house can, instead of working on a range of books and pamphlets about lesser known union struggles or pedagogical projects, support one of the most exploitative traditional publishers that they pretend they’re competing against? Why create your own media from people who are genuinely trying to share information when you can just purchase and sell books from the people you claim to be competing against in this “intellectual war?”
Instead, we just get the same old things from people who claim to have politics that more align with ours. More of the same, and more of the hegemonic structures.
These publishing houses, though this can extend to other media organisations along with the academic groups, get to “keep going” and “continue surviving” while selling people books that are almost entirely devoid of praxis and experience simply because the person who wrote them is an “ally” of movements they claim to support. Much of this is supported by them sending their “community” (in reality, their customer base) notifications about sales during major tragedies and strike actions.
Did you know that there are strikes across multiple Starbucks? Well, if you want to learn more, buy this book!
And I wish I were kidding, but every single time some horrible event happens, like abortion rights being rolled back by the Supreme Court in the United States or a Black person being murdered by police, there is always some kind of sale ad in my email that talks about it and tells me what books to buy so that I can “learn more” about why I should support abolition.
It’s grotesque.
This absurd commodification of organising or awful events is something that, when mainstream media outlets do it, we critique. Rightfully so, too! But the sheer number of times that I’ve watched sales start on the backs of union organising or the countless deaths of migrants at highly politicised borders astounds me, and it often continues with little pushback. Instead, I often see people whose books are on sale try to promote more people buying them.
And none of this considers how this consumer-focused structure of selling stuff, be it merchandise or ideas, really impacts the physical world we live in. How many objects do I need sold to me that tell me about climate change? Why don’t these emails ever tell me, or anyone at all, how we can support actions in different places and what groups, particularly small-scale organisations, are doing?
I don’t feel informed by someone selling me something, and I certainly don’t feel connected.
We are supposed to be anarchists, not salesmen or capitalists. And yet, here we are, being sold books that will help inform our politics while the organisations (structured as companies and NGOs, usually residing in the United States or the United Kingdom) are doing very little to show that they share the values we claim to share.
This really is a particular issue with anarchist media in the Anglosphere, for it ignores everyone outside of it almost entirely. And though I am originally from the United States, I see the absolute lack of care these ‘anarchist’ media organisations have for areas outside of their boundaries. I see them asking people who are unfamiliar with politics or regions to write or speak about what should be done in far-flung places that they’ve barely even thought of, as if the only answers can come from people within my country of origin.
I see them putting a great deal of focus on people in Western Europe to discuss places they rarely engage with, as if places within Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or South America are anomalies that can never be explained or understood by anyone else except people who have always discriminated against the people living there.
Calls for internationalism are almost entirely superficial, for those in many of the anarchist media organisations want very little to do with people from somewhere else and do very little to even offer a glimmer of solidarity to help projects get off the ground or continue. They leave many of us at the grassroots level, watching us all burn out as they put forward their next few rising stars.
Of course, they’ll never admit to having ‘rising stars’, but they do.
You can see it every single time the same handful of people are trotted out to talk about union campaigns, as if they did anything beyond observing them. You see it every time they put a focus on certain antifascist researchers, people who’ve often built a career on talking about what fascism looks like and ironically collaborating with the police, while they continue ignoring the people fighting antifascism on the frontlines. Ironically, some of them are people who will discuss the kinds of responsibility that people with large platforms have, only to completely dogpile teenagers.
They talk as if their experiences are the only ones, often extrapolating what happened to them to everyone else. These people fail to recognise how different their experiences are to everyone anywhere else, and that is to their own detriment and our own. Yet, they are held up as experts for us to trust.
When they do support some degree of internationalism, it is to support names that have already been made, people who already have established platforms. I wonder if they realise how difficult it is for people who experience life in places that are so commonly left out to even be heard, since it’s more common for their voices to be drowned out. I wonder if they recognise that, for a lot of us, they are one of the few sources of information we have access to because our own have all shuttered.
And that information is mostly in English.
I have little issue with any of those people in particular who ‘make it’ and can talk about their experiences as widely as possible, as many of them do beautiful work and offer insights that are otherwise ignored. But it is beyond frustrating that organisations proclaiming to be anarchist require some degree of name recognition in order for them to acknowledge someone, meaning that many people are going to be left out.
These are supposed to be systems that we fight against, and yet the organisations purporting to support us perpetuate them instead.
Along with their production and sales strategies, I can’t help feeling disappointed when I see anarchist publishing houses supporting the traditional models of publishing instead of actually doing the work to break them down. If that is your stated goal, if that is a belief you claim to hold, then why aren’t you doing it? If you think there’s a problem with the Big 5 Publishers, such as their attacks on projects like the Internet Archive or the constant development of imprints so that they can continue to profit off of right-wing filth while catering to everyone else, why do you support them and why do you encourage your customers to do the same through you?
The strategies and the politics don’t match up.
One claim that I’ve seen is that it’s in self-defense of our collective knowledge. What’s published is decided collectively and democratically among the workers within the organisation, just as the decisions about what to sell in their stores are. But wait, it’s important to know that it supports the author to sell those books, too! So that way those authors can keep going on with their very important work, sustained by the very people who water every radical idea down just enough to make it palatable for their own sales or use their authors to do so.
They’re sustained by the very people who would prefer to see any form of revolution crushed beneath their boots before it ever got off the ground.
What difference is it if I buy a poorly written labour anthology of “untold stories,” all of which were told before because they all come with a whole host of citations, from my local chain book store or an anarchist publishing house when it’s still profiting Simon & Schuster (which is still trying to merge with Penguin Random House to create an even smaller oligopoly of publishers)?
Why would an anarchist publishing house even want to support them rather than build a space for ourselves? It’s beyond me.
At some point, though, those reasons all sound like excuses. It’s the same vibe as someone mumbling “no ethical consumption under capitalism” and continuing to make intentionally harmful decisions despite all the knowledge they have about how not to.
Something has to give.
But this continues into other spaces where, rather than rely on donations (something difficult to come by because of how limited our collective resources are), they incorporate the strategies around including sponsorships and advertisements or grant funding.
Look, I get it. We have to exist somehow in this capitalist hellscape and make sure others can, too. If we want to develop spaces where people can create and share and build, we often find that we have to use those tools in order to get what we need. There’s an element of coercion here, and it’s important that we don’t forget that.
It’s during those times that a lot of radical media, and this does include anarchist media, engage in subvertising. They make funny jokes when doing outright ad-reads or prior to ad breaks, even though they fully acknowledge that people are likely to engage with the products being sold because of who is selling it and where this advertisement is located. It feels as if there is an element of disdain for the company whose product or service they’re advertising, but that ultimately feels shallow.
It functions in that unclear middle ground: To what extent is this a joke? If they genuinely want to develop an anti-capitalist space or promote anti-capitalist values, how is that being done when advertisements are often front and center in their work? Are they subvertising at all or are they using the aesthetics of subvertising to maintain their own space?
Clearly, it’s still functioning in building some degree of sales for the companies, otherwise they’d request that their advertisement be pulled from that show or just stop having those people do ad-reads. Not only does it clearly function the way it’s intended to, but it still serves a purpose in normalising whatever they’re selling and the idea that advertisements are necessary. It creates a range of conflicting interests within people.
But we all need to eat, right? We need to make money somehow, right? So who cares where we get our money…
Right?
There has to be a point where you stop laughing about the advertisements that a company you choose to work with puts on your shit and the mixed messages you’re sending because of the jokes you make about it. Subvertising can only go so far.
There has to be a point where you recognise that you’re tacitly supporting companies and organisations that act directly in contradiction with your stated values, even when they claim to stand with you. Perhaps one of the best examples here are all the people who take sponsorships from a “carbon offsetting” subscription model called Wren, taking advantage of their audience’s desire to do better for the environment and failing to engage with the psychology of how their program makes people feel like they’re doing something when they actually aren’t.
This is a common problem with “carbon off-setting.” It’s gimmicky manipulation, not a functional solution, and it’s one that rakes in enough money on the backs of people hoping to do something good.
The critical engagement with the companies that these advertisements come from isn’t happening, and it feels like one more example of people shrugging their shoulders and muttering the sacred mantra all over again: “No ethical consumption under capitalism.”
But if the money you receive comes from organisations that promote and host media influencing parasocial relationships with CEOs while taking money from State institutions to advertise their police force, I really have to wonder what the ethics here even are. Even if many listeners don’t agree with those, it starts building a way for it to creep into our thoughts and support the ideas that we haven’t fully engaged with. It’s one more way to support someone in the development of their conflicting views that we should both abolish the police but work from within the institution.
What about some of these individuals who are also hawking their books on Amazon? While they may not have the ability to control that it’s sold there, why do they choose to advertise its availability there instead of finding places more aligned with their own views? And that’s especially in a time where we all know what Amazon is doing: how they treat their workers individually, how they put immense efforts into busting up unions and organising efforts, and how they collectively penalise whole staff at warehouses (especially those trying to unionise) by letting them fall into disrepair and outright closing them.
And it’s not just people advertising their own work on Amazon, we can say the same thing of the sponsorships that people choose to work with, like BetterHelp or Hello Fresh. These things have actively hurt people, even if they seem “nice.”
BetterHelp definitely wants you to believe that it’s really helpful for mental health, that it’s great because they provide people access to therapists whenever they need since they’re an online platform. But have you stopped to consider anything about their business model and how that harms and undermines our understanding of mental health treatment? How it exploits everyone in the process? How they manipulate users? How they mistreat their own therapists?
And Hello Fresh? What rubbish. They want you to believe that they’re a healthy food alternative for busy people! That you can reduce your food waste by purchasing their products (while somehow neglecting increases in both transportation and packaging). But if you look into them, they have horrendous conditions for their workers in packing facilities and have worked pretty hard to secure a no-vote for a union through intimidation.
If you’re choosing to have them as sponsors or know that the company you choose to work with gives them ad space on your work, what does that say about your views?
This is something that all anarchist organisations, particularly those that choose to formalise themselves under their local laws, need to consider.
This is something even David Graeber highlighted when discussing the time someone donated a car to the New York Direct Action Network, which he described in “Dead Zones of the Imagination”:
“The DAN car caused a minor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that legally, it is impossible for a decentralized network to own a car. Cars can be owned by individuals, or they can be owned by corporations (which are fictive individuals), or by governments. But they cannot be owned by networks. Unless we were willing to incorporate ourselves as a nonprofit corporation (which would have required a complete reorganization and an abandonment of most of our egalitarian principles), the only expedient was to find a volunteer willing to claim to be the legal owner.”
He continues by stating that the car caused more problems than it solved. It became a headache for the group, one that was brought on by the systems of bureaucracy that influence our everyday lives. These same systems continue to shape the media organisations in anarchist spaces, and I don’t think it’s necessarily for the better.
It’s bad enough that we have multiple organisations that have to deal with legal channels, whether they want to or not. Sometimes it’s necessary. It’s bad enough that there are people who have to play by the State’s rules if they want even a modicum of safety in their everyday lives.
It’s beyond absurd that we keep losing spaces, we keep losing ground, and the organisations that claim to support us rarely put forth any work to help them continue or get off the ground. It’s like they’re not even trying to fight but are just waiting until the next book fair or the next conference. Hell, even when they can’t help, they rarely talk about any of the issues affecting even the most globally recognised communities, like Rog in Ljubljana or Exarcheia in Athens. Rarely do we get perspectives of the people living in these places until something bad is already happening, if we get that at all.
If that’s internationalism, why are they bothering?
And while our media is but one small part of this, we need to think: How do these spaces and the way they operate, the way they’re structured, the choices they make “to survive” help us get to the futures we want to see? How does this impact the ways in which we think about other spaces we develop for us?
How do we build what we really need?
]]>Perhaps, honestly, they were all things that were sure to happen in the downfall of structures that were built pre-pandemic as they attempted to survive people recognising them as being incredibly and obviously pointlessness.
Throughout this year, I saw a continued failure of anyone I worked with to acknowledge an ongoing pandemic that had been going on its second year by the time school started. This resulted in a lot of condescending messages being sent home to parents from the principal about how they “need to take their child’s attendance more seriously” while a bunch of kids were at home sick and trying their best to get through a supposedly “normal” school year with absolutely minimal support (if any, since so many teachers expected them to complete work as per usual).
I experienced constant criticism from a principal who thought that trying to build healthy and deeper relationships with my students was “not part of the job.” I had him tell me that those relationships appeared to be “more important” to me than the work we did in class (which they were), even as he claimed to acknowledge that developing them was integral to creating an environment more geared toward mutual learning and respect. He continually was frustrated by me trying to work with them to give them the best chance they could have at succeeding in this heinous system, and he was simultaneously upset by my lack of desire to work with openly bigoted students and the number of requests I made of him to deal with it when my abilities and energy were beyond exhausted.
Obviously, he never did. Instead, he decided to both-sides and no-sides precisely everything anytime there was a complaint of bigotry against anyone. He claimed it was “necessary” to give everyone an open platform to say their own opinions, even those he claimed were ‘unpopular opinions’. He thought it was fine for our students to question the humanity and existence of other people. Something which I disagree with wholeheartedly because bigotry, for the record, is not an unpopular opinion; it’s will never be an opinion. It’s a grotesque and dehumanising action that results in harming people.
There were a number of times where I had been publicly (and vaguely) “corrected” by the principal and many more times where my private issues were shared among other staff without me being present, without him asking for my consent to discuss them with others, and often entirely without my knowledge until I told someone how annoyed I was about something he’d said. Even when (never if) I had a number of people telling me that the kind of garbage he would say behind my back toward the end of the year was absolutely nonsensical, I knew that none of the other staff members would step up to speak in support of me.
Which was so incredibly frustrating because I very often told him to stop talking to me about someone else’s perceived issues without their permission.
Honestly, it would’ve been nice had they actually stepped up to show that solidarity instead of telling me about everything after the fact. But the same people also talked of him as “the best” principal they’d ever worked under, making me feel sorry for all of us if that were truly the case. Charismatic though he may have been for many adults, it wasn’t uncommon for students to accuse him of sexism or various forms of harassment. And it wasn’t hard to spot these problematic behaviours when you knew what to pay attention to, when you actually paid attention to the moments where he’d make sexist jokes with the boys or say things during games of Bingo with the whole school (like “O69… ‘o’ for… Oh, you all know, I’m sure!” and follow it up with a wink and a nod).
This would often feel really creepy considering the consistency with which he talked about how “sexy” the girls’ clothes were (while complaining about how “revealing” it was) or how he would invade the relationships of our students (deciding that some girls could “do better” than they were). And paired with his victim-blaming of a student who had been assaulted at prom, his proclivity for making these kinds of jokes really made me uncomfortable.
Beyond all that, I experienced yet another bomb threat while working at a school. This one was handled in perhaps the most insensitive and ableist of ways, making it entirely unclear what was happening and leaving people confused for far longer than they ever should’ve been. The way it was handled increased anxiety in a number of people, particularly neurodivergent people who had no clue what was happening or what they were supposed to do because new directions were being given almost every minute for a good hour. On top of that, as if it wasn’t already a horrible thing to be dealing with, that day also featured my principal making racist jokes about how a student’s brother was a terrorist, “joking” that the boy had sent all the threatening emails because he stayed home that day. (It should go without saying that, no, their brother did not do anything of the sort.)
This student rightfully got upset and asked the principal what the fuck was wrong with him. For saying that, they were promptly suspended for “disrespecting authority.” Because the so-called “authority” doesn’t have to respect anyone, especially if they’re “just joking.”
And disgustingly, many of the other staff members supported his decision to suspend the student because they should have “acted more civil” in the face of a grown ass man being racist about children to their fucking faces. I made it clear, when students asked me what I thought of the suspension or when colleagues brought it up, that I found it extremely inappropriate for the principal to abuse his authority for his own absolutely horrific and bigoted behaviour.
On top of all that shit, I watched as the school I was working at was sold in the middle of the year to a school I had already worked for, forcing us to relocate with only a few months left in the school year to a place that I had already spent a long year being mentally and emotionally abused by their head of school. While this was happening, many of the people I’d been working with kept telling me that it “couldn’t be that bad” and that “maybe things would be better this time.”
I already knew this wouldn’t be true. I was sick to my stomach with anxiety every single day, and I couldn’t contain my rage at my principal for being so cagey with families because of some fucked up idea around “professionalism.” I kept hinting at what little information I had about what was happening, sometimes telling certain kids straight up so that they could start pushing their families to look into it.
When the move finally happened, I really had to work hard to convince myself to stay, and I had to use the common tactics that are used to coerce teachers into staying and making up for the short-comings of schools: Do it for the kids. And everyone else kept using that same tactic on me, too. Of course, it was usually attached to sentiments like “Be more positive about it!” or quickly attaching it to the sentiment of how difficult it’d be to find another warm body to teach classes with such short notice.
Staff, students, and families were not immediately told about the sale. We were all left with minimum information about it, if we heard anything at all. At first, no one was told about the sale at all, and we were merely told that we “would simply be relocating” to somewhere that was more fitting of a school than the office building we resided in. This was, we later found out, a lie.
Some parents started getting a bit suspicious of what was happening and started searching for information about the school’s new owners. A few found out about the sale before anyone was told because they started looking into the national business registry, discovering that the school had already been sold a month before and that there was nothing they could say or do to stop what was happening. At no point had anyone who would be impacted by this sale been consulted or involved, highlighting just how much of a business the school is despite its outward claims to the contrary.
And the new owners made sure to make this clear multiple times, blaming people who had zero control over the situation for any students who left as a result of the change. They made it clear that the only reason they bought the school was because they thought they could simply buy students, believing they could effectively trap many of them through contractual nonsense.
The new owners, people who I already had known for years didn’t care about learning, had wanted to buy a school with a different and “easier” curriculum accreditation so that kids who were, in their view, “too stupid to complete the IB” had some kind of backup plan. Unless it’s been rectified in some way in the past month, they were unable to complete the accreditation because the process hadn’t finalised before the former owners had alerted the accrediting body about having sold the school.
All of this, all of this, made this year so incredibly difficult. It meant that a lot of us started relying on each other more deeply than we would’ve before. It meant that students struggled far more for reasons beyond their own control and received less kindness and grace to do so by many of their teachers. It meant that everyone involved was provided zero information because the owners and the actual head of school hid everything from everyone, making it harder for them to even make decisions that would be beneficial to either themselves or their classes.
Despite being told that “nothing would fundamentally change,” as had been promised repeatedly, it became more and more clear that the culture and structure of the school would be required to change regardless of what anyone wanted. Rules were to become more strict and controlling (particularly for girls, as many of them focused on dress codes), and the way classes were structured would be far different from what everyone expected. Things that students and families had intentionally selected the school for would disappear, and they had no recourse beyond changing schools.
For me, all of this meant that I was at the end of a career because I simply couldn’t deal with shit like this anymore. It was like a brightly glowing neon sign, flashing reminders about how little anyone involved in schools (particularly private schools) cared about anyone. It was so difficult to miss all the people who controlled the school who didn’t care about the kids they worked with, who only saw a few refugees as a good marketing gimmick but refused to give them any compassion, and who only owned a school because it was “cheaper to own a school than pay tuition.”
I couldn’t make myself exist in an environment that was openly abusive toward everyone, that held children and their families with disdain, that viewed every single person as being easily replaced. I couldn’t be complicit in harming kids anymore, especially not for a corrupt private school.
I had to start answering questions about whether or not I’d be working there next year, telling kids that I would never be allowed to stay “even if I wanted to” and “even if people fought for me.” I had to tell them that, even if they did let me stay, there was no guarantee that I’d be working with them because of how unreliable the actual head of school was and how he always lied just to get people to stay or trap them in situations where they had limited options.
Something else, ironically, that gained me a lot more criticism from my colleagues. Until everything I said started ringing true and many of them started coming to me for advice about how to handle it or what to expect.
Not that any of that matters, since so many people are putting their heads down and choosing to ignore things in the name of self-preservation.
The end of June marked the final day of school for me this year and, most likely, my final day ever as a teacher within a traditional school. It was so full of mixed emotions that I’m still processing them, still trying to figure out how to build my life “post-career.” But even as I try to search for where I might possibly belong or how I might possibly survive, I’m so incredibly glad to finally leave behind one of the most corrupt schools I’ve ever worked for, getting away from some of the most abusive administrators and collection of owners, and leaving behind a system that I have no hope for.
I’m beyond happy to, once again, have room to breathe and remember who I am and can be. I’m looking forward to having some time to myself and being able to go back to working on projects that I truly enjoy and love and believe in, things I haven’t been coerced to do all because of someone else’s whims on what a curriculum is. I’m curious about what my future might contain, what things I might be able to do.
But I will miss the kids. I always miss the kids.
And I’m so absurdly sad that I likely won’t get to work with these particular kids again for so many different reasons, afraid that all of the relationships we built will be fleeting and that I won’t know if they’ll get through everything, that I won’t know if everything will be okay for them in the future. Even though that’s a risk that can happen (as it does with every school because of how we structure them to be temporary “communities”), this one hits me particularly hard this year because I’ve had to watch these kids go through so much shit all at one time, being forced into so many situations without even an ounce of respect for anyone involved in the situation: them, their families, or their teachers.
I’ve seen grown adults just completely disrespect them to their face for the most tedious of reasons (enshrined within a “handbook” that is apparently never meant to be ignored or changed), and I’ve supported the kids in their own fights by helping them navigate pathways and fighting in support of them with the very people treating them like garbage.
Overwhelmingly, because I love them so much, I am deeply worried for them. I worry that things will only get worse. And I really hope that my worries will be proven wrong.
But I doubt it because some of the worst people aren’t likely to leave, and the owners see the kids as nothing more than as coins in their own personal piggy bank.
Yet I can’t express how much relief I feel to not be a part of that, even if I have no idea what I’ll do from here on out. It’s a weight off my shoulders to know that I no longer have to comply with systems that I cannot agree with, to be away from specific places that only see children as objects and currency. It’s so freeing to know that I don’t have to work in a field that intentionally harms children and ignores their needs, regardless of whether it’s a public or private institution.
I only hope more people can escape, that they will seek to build the places they need, that they can get out from these harmful spaces of frustration and coercion.
And I hope they know that I will happily be there for them, to do what I can, if only they ask me.
]]>As he often manages to do, he almost immediately pissed me off. He spent the whole meeting treating me as if I’m someone who is so wildly incapable of doing my job. He tried to make me feel bad about making decisions for myself on how to handle situations that the school forced me to deal with because they have constantly refused to even consider putting in any structure that would create a semblance of a healthy environment.
Because doing that costs money, and the school is a business. And if we can force someone to fill that gap, it’s better than wasting money on yet another person.
From the very beginning of our conversation, he decided to put the school’s (not very stellar) reputation above the needs of everyone in it. Parents have shown concern that he has side-stepped their concerns and suggestions, ignoring potential solutions that would’ve created a healthier environment. Specific students have outlined all the ways in which they feel frustrated with his decisions, making it beyond clear that they recognise how much he hates them. Other teachers have indicated that they no longer trust him and feel betrayed by his behaviour and the fact it feels like he’s keeping secrets.
Yet, instead of trying to understand me and my needs (something he has never even made an attempt to do at any point) and instead of trying to understand the situation that the company has put everyone in, he thought it would be a good idea to waste my time by blaming me for having created an environment where “negative behaviours flourish.”
These supposed negative behaviours? Using “inappropriate” language, students openly ignoring dress code, and students questioning the usefulness of different tasks. As he talked to me in our meeting, it became obvious that he thought everything would be better off without me, that there wouldn’t be any problems to address if only I didn’t exist.
Granted, it helped that he specifically stared me down in a staff meeting the week before as he vaguely commented on how we need to be better at controlling all of these negative behaviours and demanding that the students obediently follow every rule. He made it clear to my colleagues that I am the problem and that it’s largely my fault, even if he didn’t openly say it.
This isn’t surprising. I have increasingly been recognising that he believes it’d be easier to control everyone if not for me providing a space to question the structures found in a traditional school. It would be better, so I’ve been told, if I kept reminding our students that school is important, necessary, and useful. It would make everyone’s job easier if I’d stop letting them share opinions.
It would all be so simple: Shut their questions down. Don’t let them question the system, our strategies, and how things are organised. Create obstacles to keep them from engaging in meaningful thought about the world and their place in it. Think critically, but don’t think about that.
But it’s also clear that he, along with the owners, want to control my narrative. They want to do damage control because I’m leaving and have been marked as a “problem.” They want to ensure that things work out in the most profitable manner. This was made clear when he told me that he wished I hadn’t told the students I was leaving, when he told me I should’ve “hid the truth” from them.
And that conversation really solidified my desire to stay out of traditional schools, especially those operated as companies.
“There’s a rumour going around the students that you’re leaving,” he opened with after I’d finished going over the design of our yearbook. It was a strange way to start a conversation, particularly considering it’s less of a rumour and more of a true statement. I made it clear to him in the middle of the second term that I had no desire to return, that I had no desire to work for owners who saw children as nothing more than ways to pad their piggy banks, that I never wanted to work for people who were so openly corrupt and willing to lie.
I made it quite clear that I thought our school, which had been purchased by the owners of another, was doomed from the moment the deal closed. No matter how often we were told that “it will not fundamentally change,” I genuinely believed that it would become something entirely different. I never hid that from anyone; I openly let them know that I thought, rather than keep two schools, they would merge them into one and keep the second in name only. I made it very clear that I thought the owners of the school were buying the students, as if they could simply buy human beings.
And yet I’ve been proven right on all counts.
But ever since it was announced that we were moving and the school was being purchased by new owners, I have also thought that the school would become an unhappy, unhealthy, and overwhelmingly harmful environment because that’s what it has already proved to be. The people running it will betray the trust of those who attend, providing as few answers as possible and neglecting all concerns or suggestions. It will just get worse than it already has been, and that’s a huge part of why I’m leaving.
So when my students asked me about which classes I’d be teaching next year, I told them that I wouldn’t be there. It would be incredibly irresponsible of me to lie to them, especially when they’re trying to make decisions about next year’s classes. I don’t want them to make decisions based entirely on me only to find out that I won’t be there; I want them to make decisions knowing as much information as I can give them, even if that information is upsetting or frustrating to them. It’s the least I can do.
“I wish you hadn’t told them. You should’ve said that you don’t know yet, even though you’re fairly certain,” he told me after I’d given him that exact explanation.
But how could I do that? How could I respond to someone asking me which classes I’m teaching next year with “I don’t know yet” when I have no intentions to return? That would be ludicrous, and it would be purely nonsensical since they know what subjects I’d most likely be teaching. So, as I have with my previous schools, I told them.
And never before has that been a problem nor has it ever been discouraged. In fact, it was largely the common practice because it helped students to prepare for later. They had some knowledge of what to expect in the next year instead of being left to guess or made to feel disrespected.
“But it has caused more problems in their behaviour,” he boldly claimed.
I wish I had asked him to name them. What problems were cropping up because I’d made a decision to respond with honesty to questions I was receiving about the next school year? I can’t think of any that have any impact beyond my classes.
Unless he’s now having to deal with questions about why I’m leaving or having to cover up all the reasons I’ve made this decision. It leaves me wondering: Is he afraid that he’ll have to deal with parents contacting him? Is he trying to create a web of lies and half-truths to hide behind, as he does with everything else?
Is he trying to decide what the best way is to say that, with regards to my departure, he is part of the problem? Or is he trying to develop a narrative that uses me as a scapegoat?
But since he pushed the issue about how inappropriate it was of me to tell my students that I wouldn’t be returning, I decided to explain how I have built my relationship with them all and that it requires me to be my authentic self. They all know that I have tried my best to stay true to who I am while making room for consideration of who they are and their needs, and they know that I have done as much as I could to build a relationship based on mutual respect and honesty.
Even when I couldn’t find it in myself to respect one of my students, especially one who continually regurgitated anti-trans and bio essentialist rhetoric at me, I still tried my best to treat them with what politeness I could muster while also being firm in my positions.
“Sometimes it seems that your relationship with them is more important than any others,” he spat.
And it’s true. I can’t deny that. I spend more than half of my time with my students. My relationships with them are of the utmost importance, and that is particularly true of those with whom I’ve developed strong bonds. Of course my relationships with my students are most important to me, and anyone who knows why I started teaching would immediately recognise that simple truth.
I started teaching because I wanted to create a healthy environment for kids. I wanted them to feel safe to explore their interests, and I wanted them to have a space where they felt comfortable asking questions (including uncomfortable ones) and being able to discuss anything (even difficult topics). I started teaching so I could work with them to create the environment that I know so many kids needed when I was their age, one that was far more open to curiosity and much less coercive.
Honestly, why else would someone bother to go into a caring profession if they only intend to be dismissive of the people they’re working with?
The only answer I can think of is one that fills me with rage: They want to feel powerful by controlling those who are made vulnerable to their whims.
It actually makes sense to me that this would be the reason he’d even want to work in a school. I genuinely do not see him as caring about the people with whom he works, and this is doubly true for anyone he perceives as being feminine or who questions his authority in the slightest. He’s the kind of person who thinks that he should have full control over everyone he sees as being “beneath” him.
And it’s clear when you check out the way he talks to people, the way he views the rules and our roles in enforcing them.
It’s so obvious in so many interactions with him. Like when he suddenly shifted from previous claims that we’re a “really good team” to “we won’t agree on anything,”, following it up by telling us that he is “paid to enforce the rules.” That’s really only one door down from the Nuremberg defense of “just following orders,” of being someone who enforces unfair and harmful rules on everyone without even attempting to be critical of them and consider their impact.
At no point did he even entertain any of the obvious questions: Who makes the rules? Who can be part of that process? Why do some rules exist? Who is most frequently targeted by the rules? Are the rules we have harmful and for whom? Why do so many rules have no specific definitions for what are clearly subjective values (inappropriate, vulgar, sexually provocative, etc)?
Are these rules relevant to the world we’re living in?
Nor did he ever address the fact that many of the rules give him the final say, refusing to consider any other teacher’s concerns. Unless he directly includes us because he wants our opinion, he has the ability to suspend students on his own terms. He’s able to punish them in order to silence them, ensuring that he does not have to deal with the consequences of his own bigotry.
If he wanted to, he could decide not to enforce any of them and recognise many of them as needlessly pointless. Instead, he both sets and enforces the rules as he desires because he likes the power it gives him. He interprets them however he desires, refusing to recognise the interpretations of anyone who questions them.
And he expects the same of us. He expects that we, too, “just follow orders.” This is something that he has openly stated during staff meetings, making sure we know that we are to enforce the rules as they are written in the handbook “as long as we work under him.” We shouldn’t bother ourselves with thinking about them critically.
We should precisely enforce them. Question nothing.
Infuriatingly, he’s not alone. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into someone like him, and it’s almost certainly unlikely to be the last.
Should I go back to working in schools, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever find administrators who actually care about the children they work with (outside of using them as political pawns). It’s highly doubtful that I’ll ever find someone who cares enough about anyone in the building to ensure that their needs are met, regardless of whether they have the correct paperwork or not. And it wouldn’t be surprising to find more people who simply want to abuse their power to control people, particularly those who are most vulnerable in the systems we create.
Because the overwhelming majority of people in those positions don’t want to question anything. They don’t want to change anything.
They want us to keep our questions to ourselves.
]]>It’s a field that, because I’ve always loved working with kids, I’ve struggled to stay connected to. Between administrations that simply don’t care about children and colleagues who actively refuse to acknowledge the humanity or personhood of children, I have pushed myself to stay. Even when I started realising that compulsory schooling could never be reformed in any meaningful way to help liberate people, I stayed because I had convinced myself that I could be someone who was able to reduce the amount of harm caused by schools.
I’ve realised that this position is no longer viable. In fact, it was never viable in the first place. And that lesson was one of the hardest for me to actually learn.
Those of us who try to fill these roles of ‘harm reduction’ are far beyond our breaking points. We’re burning out at a faster pace than other people around us, especially because we have to work against so much, including high levels of abuse or being directly targeted by management. This is particularly true for those of us who are already marginalised and looked down upon in this horrible system, regardless of whether we’re working in a public or private institution.
Queer teachers are exhausted by feeling as if we don’t belong anywhere and that our existence in many classrooms is illegal, being forced by legislation passed by people who “represent” us to hide who we are even in the smallest of ways or receive consequences. Black teachers and students alike are being forced to deal with yet another injection of anti-Black racism into school systems in response to a wave of “anti-CRT” legislation (as if there wasn’t enough already). In some US states, trans children risk losing everything that is close to them should they even so much as admit to being trans to the wrong person because teachers are expected to report their families for “child abuse.”
But this isn’t new. This is how schools have always functioned; it’s how they’ve always behaved. They have always been institutions of harm, especially for marginalised communities.
And we can’t really mitigate that, no matter how much we try.
I remember how hopeful I was when I first became a teacher, even before I went to university to get a teaching qualification. I remember how much I cared about schools being a healthy and safe environment for children and how much I believed they should be communities.
Looking back, I see a person who I vaguely remember and all of the beliefs they held that have been persistently shattered through the various ways adults around me have shown how little they care about children, through all the many ways they seek power. It’s weird to think about how much of the pro-school propaganda I had readily believed despite the fact that I had joined teaching because of my love for learning and my disgust for the ways school forced us to “be educated.” At the time, it was as if there couldn’t be any other way to exist so we had to fix it.
I had grown up being told that schools were a force for good, that they were the “great equaliser.” I remember how often we were told that they “supported a healthy democracy.” I’d never once seen an indication of that supposed “truth,” but I wanted it to be true. I thought I could work towards that goal, to actually help accomplish that.
Funny how the same story can be spun to grab a range of different people for the same field.
I had hoped that I could change the system for the better. Like many others around me, the constant messaging of the day was that the only way to change the system we existed within was to change it from the inside. Remembering how tormented I’d been by it, I wanted to improve it for other kids who also struggled to tolerate it. I wanted to make it better for people who felt like some element of school was just out to get them, even though they tried their best.
I wanted to support kids who often got tossed to the wayside, shoved into structures that only served to hurt them in the future because the school saw them as useless and unworthy. I was that kid growing up. I didn’t want to see more.
And I tried, but I don’t think what I’ve ever done has been good enough.
I feel this way largely because the only thing I have ever really been able to do within schools has been to act as a form of harm reduction. Though I’m happy about the spaces that I was able to create – spaces where children often felt freer to be themselves, felt they were more able to engage in activities that improved their learning and focus, felt more open to exploring their interests, and felt that they could take risks because it wouldn’t hurt their grades in the slightest – I hate the toll that it’s taken on my own mental health to simply exist in those spaces at all. I hate who I sometimes have to become in order to keep going.
Very few people around me have ever really known how much fighting I have had to do to keep those spaces going and alive, when I was able to. They don’t know the number of times colleagues have told me that the “kids are taking advantage of me,” treating me as if I have no agency or haven’t been an active participant in what’s happening. They have no idea how often I have been so completely shut out by those around me, intentionally denying me access to any relevant decision-making process unless it’s something so entirely superficial and meaningless. Not many have known how frustrating it has been for me to constantly fight with other adults about why children are people and how uncomfortable it has always made me that they have consistently tried to force me to exert more control over them.
It has been beyond exhausting to work with people who actively engage in bigotry of all forms, to have to help students deal with the racist teachers in their midst who have openly harmed them through “jokes” and then tried to invalidate the anger they rightfully feel. It has been so fucking nauseating to work with open misogynists who scream at girls about showing their shoulders while simultaneously hitting on the same girls, making their lives hell when they refuse or try to report them. I have hated so much that I couldn’t help create a better environment with those kids beyond my own classroom, even if that is better than nothing.
It’s been fucking horrific to work with people who actively deny or put down the mental health struggles of those around them. I’m so burnt out from having to explain to people constantly that their desire to “be a saviour” to someone and ignore their needs will only result in further harm. I’m tired of having to put additional energy into validating the anger and feelings of children because some other adult has told them that they’re “misunderstanding the situation” or “being irrational.” I am sick to my stomach of having the same five conversations about attendance and having to constantly fight with people about how it doesn’t matter, especially if it’s because that student is struggling with something that no one is even bothering to help them with. And don’t even get me started on how absolutely atrocious it has been to work with (and fight against) school principals who tell students with visible scarring that they need to hide it because it “disturbs others” and “makes them uncomfortable,” without even a hint of recognition or care for how they continue to negatively impact that kid’s view of themselves and the world.
And I just can’t do that to myself anymore, as much as I want to stay with the kids and be there to ensure they still have access to spaces where they feel most comfortable and less anxious. I can’t keep putting myself in spaces like that because it is making me lose all hope for the possibility that the world can be better, since I only see it getting worse and more ridiculous.
The main lesson I’ve learned throughout the course of my career is the one that’s making me leave it: The system isn’t broken, and it’s always been designed around ways that enable us to do the most amount of harm.
For many, it has been a site of continued colonialism and imperialism. It has been a place that has committed grave acts of genocide, both in terms of actually killing people (particularly Indigenous people through a system of residential schools) and systematically tearing them from their culture and replacing it with the “correct” one. It has helped murder languages, flatten multiple identities, and assimilate many into one “proper” people. They have damaged our collective ability to recognise that there are many different ways to understand something, to know something, and to learn something.
They have brutalised us for thinking differently and questioning what’s happening to us (even when claiming to teach “critical thinking” skills). Children who think differently are tormented until they think “correctly,” until they perform normative “logic” for the adult in the room. If they can’t do something, they are deemed “lazy” or “unwilling.” And for all that absolute absurdity, people still support the system as if it “helps” anyone.
It never has, and it never will.
And though some may leave it with fewer scars than others, we all leave it with immense amounts of damage done to us and society. From the very ways that schooling limits our capacity to learn and explore other potential worlds to the many forms of oppression that take shape in every policy, we have all left with so much damage to deal with. We’re left with so many things to unlearn that we were indoctrinated into before we ever had a real say in our own lives, things that enable us to continue to harm others after we leave.
We’re all victims to this structure, but some of us are also perpetrators (and some more than others).
That’s also something that I’ve felt uncomfortable with. Even by existing as a “harm reducer,” I still have had to enact various forms of harm towards my students that I never wanted to do in the first place. For instance, I’ve never believed in grading people and the structures we’ve developed to do so. I see no value in arbitrary numbers or letters that do little more than confuse everyone, prompting them to figure out why they lost a point or what the actual difference is between an A or a B. No matter how much we try to make grading “equitable,” it still requires active participation in systems that increase anxiety and fear in children.
I’ve even openly said this to my students and some of their parents, but saying that does nothing towards getting rid of it or other processes that are based entirely upon it. Hell, I even have to preface my anti-grading statements with nonsense about how I “know we all exist in a system that values it” which means we “are forced to care.” The only recourse I have is to harm them as little as possible while also drawing as little attention to myself as possible so that I can continue doing as little harm to them as possible in a never ending cycle of bullshit masquerading as “best practices” in a field that feigns to care about learning.
And that is probably on the more mundane side of the scale in terms of harm. The sheer amount of control exercised over the bodies of children is astounding, and the active refusal by adults to engage with kids questioning their actions or rules infuriates me. Even the people who claim to want to “create lifelong learners” simply aren’t working toward that goal, participating in institutions that actively quash an interest in learning and shut down those who question their strategies.
The kids know something’s wrong, and they know that things aren’t working. So many of them see the institution for what it is: a sham that has been invented to “put them in their place.” Many more see it as something that is actively trying to hurt them. I cannot count the number of times in the past decade that I’ve had students tell me that they want to kill themselves because of stress and anxiety they feel when at school. They aren’t alone, either, because there are way too many kids considering it.
I just don’t know how we keep doing this. Everyone realises there’s a problem, yet no one wants to give up schooling in favour of figuring out something healthier.
Really, I just wanted schools to feel safe for kids who felt traumatised by existing in them. But I couldn’t change that because my individual existence couldn’t change the other adults around me. It couldn’t make them pause and think that their views on children were genuinely harmful because there was only one voice challenging them. And honestly, I just have to say that the reason I couldn’t change that is because no one can do that on their own.
The system doesn’t give in to individuals. It will never stoop so low as to consider the ideas of a single person. It will only continue to actively tear down or push out those who fight against it.
I could only give kids a very temporary and momentary reprieve. That space will disappear the moment I leave. There is no guarantee that they will get that back in any capacity, and there is no guarantee that the next person will try to support struggling kids as much as they need. There is no guarantee that the next person will work with them to solve issues in ways the kids see as being helpful or work with them to find solutions to harder problems. Those spaces aren’t sustainable and they never will be, especially when we rely upon individuals to function that way within systems.
The system is functioning as intended. It’s designed to cause as much trauma as necessary. And it will chew up and spit out those who want to do something better. It will grind our bones to dust before it lets us change it. Individually, we cannot defeat the system. It will always win, trying to tire us out and extinguish whatever fight we may have left in us.
And I refuse to be that individual anymore. So I quit. I’ll find some other way to work toward prefiguring a healthier world, and I will find people of all ages with whom to organise.
Because I need hope and beauty in my life, not the disgustingly soul-crushing environment of a school.
]]>At the beginning of 2020, around the start of the pandemic, we realised that we had an immense need for a supportive community, somewhere that helped us realise that we weren’t alone despite our growing isolation both emotionally and geographically that intensified the feelings of loneliness. Much of this comes from the fact that, as educators in schools and academia, we rarely have the space to discuss how the practices we’re forced to engage in are inherently abusive and authoritarian, how we’re engaged in work that forces us to focus on racialised capitalist structures and are required by the system to prepare students to work in that world. We were rarely able to share how the contradiction of working in those spaces constantly makes us negotiate our own values and understanding of the world.
Much of this came down to the lack of anarchist infrastructure that exists in many places, which is a topic that often goes overlooked in a culture that appears largely focused on the idea of “just join an organisation” and “just go do something” without recognising that many of us have a need for safe, caring, and supportive infrastructure that enables us to do sustainable work towards liberation. Many of us felt constantly frustrated by the infrastructure around us, which rarely focused on building community. Many of us were effectively cut off from spaces that we ordinarily would’ve been working in because of how the pandemic impacted them, causing them to close down or go into hiding. Others lived in countries that had next to no leftist infrastructure at all, let alone spaces that were explicitly anarchist or even remotely anarchist-adjacent.
All of us felt isolated and alone, wanting to find people to cultivate an inclusive community with, even if it had to be something digital, even if we had to be spread across large distances.
A lot of hard truths have been learned in the past two years about how many organising spaces and collectives have been built around ego and saviourism rather than community and liberation for all. For some of us, we recognised that the spaces we genuinely cared about didn’t really want us there in the first place and saw limited use or value in us beyond our labour and how they could use our existence. We saw them focusing effort on ineffective strategies that were focused entirely on short-term “wins,” actively refusing to build anything that could be sustainable and would exist in the long-term.
Overwhelmingly, many of those organisations didn’t actually seem to care about us, either as activists or human beings. Like the workplaces we were already infuriated by and sought refuge from, they saw us as productive bodies.
So, along with other people who felt similarly, we started building a space that we needed, a space that we hoped others would want or need and could help bridge the gap as best we could. This space took the shape of a digital collective that could hopefully help create community during a time of excessive lockdowns, physical alienation, and a lack of safe and inclusive radical infrastructure within our respective regions.
We started a digital collective to create a sense of community, for mutual aid, and for support among anarchist educators. This space was intended to be a safe space outside of academia, outside of the persistent institutional oppression, and with a clear goal of lifting practical experiences in anarchist learning spaces and environments.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the feelings of loneliness and alienation were overwhelming. We needed, at the same time, to open up to the realisation of how temporary chaos could shine light on systemic failures. These failures were like open wounds that, in our everyday capitalist society, remained difficult to address. But due to how so many places across the globe effectively stopped, many more people had time to reflect upon what life was like pre-pandemic, how it was perpetually abusive and exhausting, and that there was a need to break away from that deadly form of “normal” that was connected to our workplaces, compulsory schooling, state control… to almost everything.
Fighting for accountability and mutual care
As we started building this community and as we started trying to collaborate with and provide resources to others, we kept running head first into the same few issues we had met in other collectives before the pandemic. Though we weren’t surprised by any of this, we were tired of running into the same behaviours that have negatively impacted so many people in other collectives: the perpetual refusal to unlearn the most common elements of patriarchy and whiteness, the complete lack of desire to even consider the most basic of accessibility needs, the constant resistance to understand how much cisnormativity and heteronormativity influenced our very thoughts, and the persistent assumption that we should follow the same standards as the very imperialist “educational” institutions we were critiquing.
Both of us, as non-binary and gender non-conforming people, are ignored both in society and academic spaces. This happens even more because we are disabled. At this point, it’s like we are automatically seen as incapable of being able to be reflective or knowledgeable people, as if we are either too demanding for asking for whatever it is that we need to feel included and recognised. Having to always be the people who directly deal with the internalised queerphobia and cisheteronormativity in others is so exhausting, but our only options for dealing with it in our spaces tends to be that we either have to constantly remind people that we exist or remain entirely silent.
For the record, we tend to prefer the former over the latter, though we completely understand why marginalised people often choose silence. We’re forced to pick battles and decide where we can expend what little energy we may have, even among the people who claim to stand with us in solidarity.
But this creates unspoken hierarchies that provoke us to live in a constant state of self-defense. It forces us to permanently live with an underlying rage that exists beneath the surface, a rage that is always there and feels inescapable. At times, it feels like an epic multi-headed monster, especially when we have to deal with it both in society and in spaces that claim they support us.
We are constantly under attack because we’re expected to act as perpetual educators, even as we seek respite from having to always do that work. Because of this, it’s so difficult to even meet our own needs – needs that overlap with the very same ones that so many others have openly told us they need addressed, too. But because we’re doing the work of providing basic education around how the internalised hierarchies kept hurting our ability to organise together, we found that we kept losing time and energy for things that could be done to meet the more explicit needs of care and support that others were asking for. We were stuck in a continuous cycle, not just personally but also one fueled by our compassion for and solidarity to others who we also knew experienced this level of violence, if not in more horrifying ways than we do.
The level of anger has become more palpable, more than just the constant background noise to everything around us. But all of these issues were compounded with the complete rejection to reflect at all on how any of those issues were manifesting in how our collective was organised and just how common they were.
And the story repeats itself….
As has been common in our experience in other collectives, we noticed that most of the responsibilities, including organising activities and meetings, fell on us to deal with despite having shared tasks among us. We each had a set of responsibilities that were primarily for us to take care of, though we also knew that we could either ask for help or give notice that something might be delayed due to our personal lives. Some tasks were mundane and common, like making sure that we checked the collective’s various channels of communication; other tasks were more sporadic, like graphic design and the development of any materials that we needed in order to share information about or facilitate meetings or events.
But some of the tasks were routinely left incomplete, and members who had volunteered to do them hadn’t communicated with us at all about leaving them undone or not having time to do them. Messages and emails would go unread for days until we finally checked them; information would go unpublished or unshared unless we logged on and actively checked that someone had done it. More often than not, we were finding that we had to pick up the pieces. We started to feel as if we were obligated to just get them done so we could maintain the kind of structure that we needed, that was co-created and agreed upon, that supported us emotionally. We felt that we had to just get on with it in order to keep things going, to make sure that we could continue building a community space.
In many ways, it felt as if this digital collective that was very important to our well-being, something we saw as necessary to our own mental health, was being treated as a hobby by other people. It seemed like it was something to do whenever they had time or whenever they felt like it, as if it could be put away and neglected until they decided to deal with it. And while we never wanted the collective to feel like a job or to require people to do things when they weren’t able to, we did want people to communicate that they were having trouble or that they didn’t have enough time; we wanted them to let us know so we could help distribute the responsibilities more evenly among us, making it possible to better provide space to people who also needed a similar community and keeping things going while others rested and took breaks when they needed to.
Beyond internal communication about responsibilities, we noticed a growing issue with the ways in which external communication was handled, how some people would continually use their personal email to communicate with people who our collective wanted to collaborate with. Though these collaborations were intended to be for everyone, everything that happened felt secretive and exclusive.
Frequently, we would reiterate that external communication needed to be done in an open manner towards all the members of the group. This either would take place through the collective’s channels of communication, like email. We also were open to communicating through personal accounts, depending on the person’s preferred platform, but we were clear that these messages needed to be shared and, as best as possible, collectively responded to when decisions had to be made. We modelled this repeatedly and precisely. We clearly explained what was needed and why it was important. We made it clear that we wanted, in the event of any negative interactions, to be able to reflect upon what could’ve been done differently in order to avoid them in the future. We wanted to have access to clear information, even if it was a copied message pasted into our collective workspace. But one member continued to hide information and engage with people outside of the collective on behalf of the collective, never sharing any of the communications that were sent, never elaborating beyond “there was a problem.” We always asked them to elaborate on what they meant, but we would be met with nonsensical stories that blamed the other person.
We didn’t know the truth. We just knew that, every time this member communicated with people outside the collective to suggest a collaboration, there were always problems. They would tell us that someone had suddenly “ghosted” us or that there were issues as a result of their relationship with another academic. We had nothing to go on but their word, as flimsy as it always felt. How were we supposed to know when the communication was taking place in a space that was disconnected from the one we intended to share?
Beyond the fact that we couldn’t understand why interactions with other people continually fell flat, it felt like they were continually misappropriating the work of the collective in favour of their own ego and personal CV. Keeping certain contacts close to their chest felt as if they were greedily protecting their precious connections and networking opportunities. It felt counterintuitive to the health of the community, making it harder to build a larger and more supportive network.
When discussing the collective in academic settings, they would claim that it was theirs and give themselves a title for a position that didn’t exist. It always felt as if they wanted to seem important, to be seen doing something even when they actively made it difficult to do anything at all. Simply put, there was a refusal to recognise that the collective didn’t belong to any one person; it was meant to be shared among everyone who wanted it, who needed it.
This enraged us. It made us feel alienated and disqualified our efforts to create small and sustainable spaces to share outwards. We were disgusted by the selfish behaviours that disconnected us, that continually gave us clear messages that our opinions on anything were not welcome. We wanted to see the collective growing as if it were a tree: healthy roots to support the top heavy crown, growing simultaneously to create long-term networks of care, compassion, and liberation.
This cycle of behaviour continued to happen regardless of how often we brought it up at assemblies, with the frustration of being overlooked and neglected, growing every time we had to take it up with the others. As in many other situations outside the collective, we didn’t want to be seen as ‘feminist killjoys’, but at the same time, we continued to spend a ridiculous amount of time talking between ourselves about how we could break out of this cycle of patriarchal attitudes that continually pushed unfinished collective tasks onto us by default.
All of that left us acting as the support arm of the collective, which was something that we unwillingly tolerated. This was never something that was directly ‘delegated’, but we recognised the continuance of a perpetual unspoken ‘tradition’ that has often existed throughout the history of patriarchal anarchist (among other) organising: Cisgender white men leaving work for everyone else and rarely engaging in the necessary task of unlearning the hierarchy into which they were born, rarely asking how things even get done when they’re not the people doing it.
When these members of the collective failed to carry out the tasks they had chosen to do, we felt obligated to take them over. They were necessary to our functioning, to building a community. Because of this, we found that we were taking on the overwhelming majority of the care work and becoming increasingly more responsible for ensuring that everyone was aware of how to build the environment to be as inclusive as possible. While we were busy trying to build the cohesive and supportive network elements, we were also having to constantly be cheerleaders for everyone around us regardless of how tired we were or how much we needed the same support.
Because of our experiences elsewhere, we constantly had to make it clear that everyone needed to consider topics about accessibility and ableism. No one else was considering how difficult our space might be for a range of disabled people, and no one else was putting in the effort to ensure that anything we created was as accessible as possible. This is still something that we struggle with because we simply don’t have the energy on our own, especially when we’re constantly pushing for others to even consider them.
But we also found ourselves constantly fighting against the queerphobia, misogyny, and racism that is inherent in so many structures that we take for granted. It felt like our messages weren’t getting through to other people, as if they weren’t even taking the time to reflect upon how they had internalised so many forms of bigotry throughout their lifetime, as if they couldn’t be bothered to simply think about unlearning them.
And when we found ourselves fighting against the desire of certain members to recreate academic structures in the collective, the very structures that we both had openly rejected because of the abuse we have endured throughout compulsory schooling and academia, we started finding that we were burning out. We found that we were tired of having the same discussions and feeling as if we had to create a bibliography in order to justify why we wanted to do something. Certain personalities seemed to be working on their CV, on building their personal connections, on building their careers; they wanted us to engage them in their ways of knowing and learning, forcing us to ignore the ones that we felt comfortable in.
Thankfully, in these processes we realised and implicitly understood that we could support each other. This gave us small moments of peace, allowing us to access the oasis of support in this dreadful capitalistic desert.
Invisibilisation as fuel to anarcha-feminist resistance and co-creation
For us, creating this space came from a need for mutual support and mutual care; it’s not a hobby that we just do when we have spare time. Our commitment to fighting the reproduction of oppressive patterns, hierarchies, and structures is downplayed by the aforementioned processes. The space we hoped we could co-create as safe, inclusive, and free was just another replication of many other collectives we have participated in before, except it was in a digital format.
To us, it seems like an impossible task to provoke people to give up their own privileges and their own internalised patriarchal attitudes to understand that they must understand how they recreate the very hierarchies they claim to fight against. Instead, many people directly sabotage collectives and groups due to being driven by their anarcho-curiosity instead of working to unlearn the behaviours they have been encouraged to perpetuate in a racial capitalist and patriarchal system. Rather than striving to build an underlying foundation of anarchic principles in their behaviours and everyday lives, in the way they interact and can relearn from other people, they resist the very actions they need to participate in to unlearn harmful and oppressive behaviours.
It doesn’t matter that their active refusals or passive resistance isn’t intended to hurt us directly, that they don’t mean to cause further harm or frustration, but the lack of recognition that they need to work on themselves and to reflect upon their own behaviours and actions strongly impacts on the ways we collectively create spaces that further respond to the growing need for mutual care to exist alongside mutual aid.
Some may ask why, with us being so conscious about these dynamics and patterns, we didn’t choose to confront our other comrades or even completely split from the collective. These are always difficult decisions because, while we have been doing so much more of the care work to keep the collective running, we have also found a lot of comfort and support in each other. In moments of despair, in moments of exasperated frustration, we find comfort in being able to meet and recognise each other’s feelings. The very act of validating each other’s experiences, recognising all those we have in common, and being able to build on our own understanding of those we do not strengthen our friendship. Being in this collective space, despite what difficulty may exist, has made us aware of these mechanisms and how they are able to persist even within radical spaces.
As anarcha-feminist educators, we have come to realise the importance of unlearning ableist racial capitalist and patriarchal values that we have internalised in our own actions and thoughts. We have recognised that they are the source of annihilation and invisibility in so many of our collectives and movements. Unfortunately, our experience isn’t unique and has been recorded across different territories, with worse experiences of oppression and within so many groups throughout history.
Though a lot of women and gender non-conforming people have always found solutions to similar challenges, the truth is that we are all impacted by different presentations of patriarchal and cisheteronormative dynamics across our geographic areas. They are two major issues that continually stand in the way of our many and very diverse paths to liberation, and we must work to unlearn and recognise how we can perpetuate them.
We have to work to dismantle them.
It doesn’t matter how hard we hold onto anarchist values and principles if we’re not making a conscious effort to both live and practice them in our daily lives, as best we can. It doesn’t matter how much anarchist theory we read if we cannot take time to reflect upon how our actions, coerced or intentional, still uphold the hierarchies we seek to destroy. Some may even think that mutual aid is a principle that has a strong foundation within anarchism, but what is mutual aid without mutual care? What are freedom and liberation without respect and acknowledgement? What does resistance against state control mean when we also have to resist similar control, oppression and violence in our activist relationships?
Digital mutual care is possible and necessary
It started becoming clear that we were fucking burning out, that if we just kept going we wouldn’t be able to do anything for anyone – ourselves included. But this gave us time to reflect upon the issues we saw, the negative emotions we were experiencing, and how we were responding to everything. In doing this, we started realising what we needed in a supportive space.
It wasn’t just that it had to be something that outwardly claimed it would support everyone; it had to be something where that core value was built-in with care and intentionality. No longer could we deal with the superficial nature of someone just saying they were against bigotry; the people in it had to actively work against it, and they had to be able to think of how their actions impacted people beyond them.
Perfection wasn’t expected because that is an impossible goal, but we needed a space where people showed a willingness to genuinely and consciously unlearn harmful behaviours, thoughts, and patterns and relearn liberatory and caring ways of building up together. We wanted a space that, just as we supported everyone in it to unlearn, we were also encouraged and challenged to unlearn whatever we still had internalised.
The pandemic continued to rage on. By 2021, in the midst of feeling as if we were constantly having to activate our self-defense mode and recognizing that we didn’t want to be purely responsible for all of the emotional and organisational work in a digital collective, we decided to invite others from around the world to work with us on an entirely new project, though it would still be digital. The feeling of being ignored – as if neither our existence, experiences nor comments were important enough for others in the original collective to actually make an effort to analyse or reflect upon their own actions in order to align with many of the values we all claimed to share – were the catalyst for us to support each other and give it another try.
Since we both felt tired, angry, and fed up from having to do so much emotional work on top of everything else – work that was done while we saw no visible change in those who most needed to recognise how they continued playing into the very structures we were supposed to be working against – we wanted to invite people to openly participate in this other digital project that would be based largely on values that have long been alive in more marginalised anarchist spaces but have received little more than lip service in many more well-known and dominant spaces.
We felt an urgent need to put more focus on anarcha-feminism, on understanding anarchism through a queer lens, on realising the different ways that so many of our spaces could be seen as entirely inaccessible to disabled and neurodivergent people, on recognising the many ways that race and ethnicity were neglected in favour of pure class-based analysis or how all of the related bigotries continued to permeate through our ideas and interactions without us even recognising it. We needed a space that better supported the ideals of internationalism that so many anarchists call for, that could be adaptable and flexible enough while still encouraging processes of both learning, unlearning and relearning. We wanted a space where people could recognise the interconnectedness of systems across the world and be able to handle the many nuances that are often lost in understanding how bigotries function in different geographic locations, particularly as local frameworks occasionally become overwritten by those of people in the United States.
We had no particular goal when we sent out invitations. We just felt the need to reach out to other people, to keep on creating a community even while everyone was still trying to exist under the pandemic. And we knew that it needed to be a place where everybody could feel as if their existence mattered, that they were appreciated, and that they could both care for others as others cared for them.
It needed to be a space that was explicitly built around mutual care.
But as we built this second space, what we weren’t prepared for was the fact that being open about our own vulnerability and need for care actually has been pivotal to this new collective that emerged from our international invitation. As we received feedback to the invitation, and while communicating with collectives around the world, it was also made excruciatingly clear that many people were simply exhausted, that they were too burnt out to do something more. It wasn’t only the pandemic that caused this burn out; it was also because they faced the same resistance to their needs and because they were fighting just as much for their needs to be met, making it clear that they also needed collective care in order to create new societies.
In this new collective, the digital atmosphere, the respect and appreciation, and the intentional care for each other is almost a bit overwhelming. People are aware of other peoples’ health and situations; we actually listen to each other and try to meet each other’s needs collectively.
Is care gender-based? In some of our patriarchal societies, it still is. And this is something that is reflected and reproduced in our digital platforms. We don’t think digital collectives are colder or more alienating than those that exist offline. Honestly, for some of us with disabilities or with a lot of care work to do, digital collectives have been a great support in a time of physical distance and increased state control. For us, this second digital collective is a wonderful place to both co-create and support each other. It’s a place where we are mostly women and non-binary people.
However, it’s also interesting to note that the members of the second collective are also diverse in terms of our life situations and ages, and this also feels like something that breathes new life into much of the work that we do together. Perhaps it’s worth considering the ways in which we create spaces where both people who have families and where children and teenagers are able to participate as equals. A lot of care work that activists do, either analogue or digital, tends to be based on what they’re responsible for in real life. This tendency to reinforce these hierarchies is something that both pushes people into certain roles, enables some people to silence those, or functions as a way to ensure some people remain alienated despite the so-called desire to support them.
For some of us, the desire to participate in social movements or collectives has been directly undermined by the fact that these spaces rarely ever develop practices that collectivise care tasks that so many people across the collective would need. They are still frequently dominated by people who retain ageist values and who, intentionally or not, discriminate against and exclude the elderly, single parents, families with children, and teenagers.
In this digital collective, we have an overall abolitionist perspective around educational systems and many other capitalist systems. It feels like the anger and the continuous self-defence state is not needed when we are there. We can just exist, focusing on creating and supporting each other instead of being responsible for pushing other people to unlearn hierarchies, even as they continue to be unwilling to be accountable. It feels free; it feels safe. Regardless of the fact that we’re sitting in different places on the planet, we’re able to give each other space to rest and to make everybody feel seen. The group is not used to create a platform where people push an agenda of self-promotion. On the contrary, it is a platform that seeks to destroy oppressive structures.
We have mutual goals, and we embrace the diversity among us.
It might happen that different platforms and applications actually facilitate a more loose and interactive communication. In our case, we use completely different platforms for the two different groups, which in every case have been chosen by consensus. We have had conversations between us about the fact that many people might think that digital care is not as meaningful as analogue and in-person care.
Of course, we can’t replace human touch and physical embrace, which we acknowledge is also needed; we openly recognise that we need to use all of our senses to feel the wide range of emotions. But at the same time, digital communities are very much capable of showing and giving mutual care if all the members of the collectives are aware of our own responsibility to take care of each other, showing love and gratitude for other people’s time, effort, and militant engagement into creating new social systems.
There are no big conclusions to be given in this process, though we find that digital collectives provide another space for us to meet the needs we can’t elsewhere. These collectives are intended to continue; they are meant to be spaces that include everybody who wants to participate and build together. They are another example of our everyday work, places where we must also hold ourselves accountable for our own actions and attitudes.
At the same time, they are spaces where we can be clear in what needs we have. We can take care of each other through our resistance to and creation of spaces. It’s an ongoing process. and as anarcha-feminist educators there are some learnings to get from these experiences. Above all, is the idea that just by rationality we can free ourselves and others. Is it so? Because during this pandemic, struggling to reach out to each other, we have very much become aware that self-experienced safety, appreciation and mutual care are actually the biggest anti-capitalist actions we can do.
It has absolutely been a painful, meaningful and giving process that has strengthened our friendship and expanded it to include new people. Our conversations, common projects and burning desire to create community have been the support we needed to go through this not-quite-finished pandemic. What is certain, is that we are not the same people that got to know each other at the beginning of this pandemic. The messiness and the loneliness brought a lot of us together, despite the geographical distance and the state-control.
But we’re here, and we’re ready to keep on supporting each other.
]]>I learned very quickly that you can’t do that. It’s all bullshit.
I blame a combination of my own youth and inexperience along with the persistent messaging that we give young people all the time: If they participate in the system, they’ll be able to enact the change we need and “make everything better.”
Yet, we constantly ignore the pleas of young people and enable adults to harass autistic teenagers who merely state the obvious in their activism. We tell young people to participate and punish them when they try.
Right now, there are more than enough examples of younger adults entering systems “to change them.” We’ve seen this exact same narrative in our political battles of the past decade, though it’s been around far longer. We watched as people went out in numbers to elect some of the youngest and “most progressive” people to the United States Congress, but that narrative both helped to hide things that were happening simultaneously. It hid the fact that people had also voted in some of the youngest members of the conservative party who also sought to make changes (most of which would harm the most vulnerable among us) and obscured the fact that the very voices that gave so many people who still believed in the system hope were mostly capable of doing very little (with many of them sliding into the same behaviours that they once critiqued of their ‘establishment peers’).
And we don’t even need to look at recent examples because we have an excess of historical ones, too. Just plow through any moment in labour history, read about how the AFL-CIO continually let workers down because they kept siding with the government (particularly because many of the members ‘at the top’ would go on to get roles in government offices, and they couldn’t very well fight the people they sought to work with).
The system can’t be changed from the inside. The only change that happens is to the people who enter it. We should all know this by now, and it should be widely discussed.
The number of teachers and other educators who believe in this exact trope astounds me. The fact that, at one point in my life, I believed in it still amazes me when I reflect upon my growth and learning. You’d think that we’d be better at recognising it because our field is almost entirely built right on top of it. It’s right there all the time. It’s baked into every single thing we do, and we just can’t seem to escape it.
Yet, while it sits right in front of our face and influences everything we do, we miss it. We claim to teach so-called “critical thinking,” and yet we’re so easily manipulated into believing that we’re saints, that we’ve been “called” to teach, that (as it exists in our current situation) it’s “more than a job.” It becomes an identity that we refuse to let go of, fearing we might lose something about ourselves if we stop clinging to it.
It’s not healthy. We need to stop.
I think it’s part of the moralising of the work that takes place across many of our cultures, simultaneously holding teachers up as heroes while also condescending to us as if we’re completely incapable of doing anything at all. Many of us enter the field, viewing it as a “noble cause.” And honestly, why wouldn’t we? It’s the exact narrative that is constantly on display, particularly when it comes to explanations for why we can take on enormous sums of debt in the university but receive next to nothing in a field that requires absurd amounts of credentialing, constant professional development, and steals as much time as possible both after school and on the weekend. It’s the kind of bullshit you hear professors claim in the beginning of a first-year class of a teaching program, as if they’re trying to sell you on the idea of constantly giving everything you’ve got in return for buying your own supplies and materials just so you can get shit done.
Hell, it’s the precise story that sells in Hollywood movies about teachers. Especially if it’s about a white teacher going into a non-white neighbourhood and trying to “save” them all from themselves.
How else do you get people to pretend the work is even worth it? How else do you get people to buy into a field that, if we talked about it honestly, would probably make more people run from it than support it? How do you get people to even overlook the pain and frustration they felt as a student in order to continue enabling it within the school as a teacher?
What other strategies do you have to get people who claim they care about children’s well-being to engage in a field where harming some of the most vulnerable people is seen as necessary? It’s because we dress up all of the harm in the trappings of that so-called “necessity” and apply labels about who “deserves” access to any of it that we can get people to overlook all the psychological, social, and cultural damage that is done through our schools and educational institutions.
It’s probably because of our proximity to that very structure that teachers often fail to register the moralising component of it all. We feel the tension that comes from the conflicting views about how teachers and educators are somehow one of the “most important” jobs for society but also should have little autonomy because families should “be responsible for” choosing what children get to know. That conflict is a weapon created of a false dichotomy, built on top of an artificial community, and sharpened through a tension that will never be slackened because they need us to see ourselves as “more capable” than the families we work with and to feel as if we’re constantly against them even as we claim to be helping them.
They trap us in an area of complete condescension, both on the receiving and giving ends. It’s a spectacular use of a classic tactic that helps maintain schooling as a necessity: divide and conquer.
And even that aspect of our job, tied so closely to the increased professionalisation of the field, enables us to be so easily fooled to think we could even make a real difference inside a school. We’re set up to fight everyone all the time, we’re pushed to “think about the children” and do our work “for them,” and we’re never allowed to really think about ourselves or what our work actually means for the world we live in. When do we get time between all the paperwork, lesson preparation, and teaching hours to even stop and consider that maybe what we do causes harm?
We’re supposed to view ourselves as saviours (especially when it’s useful to the State so we don’t fight back and we don’t stand in solidarity with everyone else around us), and we’re supposed to sacrifice whatever we can to ensure the kids have what they need and are taken care of.
I hate that absolutely shitty world, and I want to abolish it completely.
So many of us believe that we can change the school if only more of us entered it and worked to support initiatives that would “improve quality” and “increase access” for more kids. But we fail to recognise that the narrative of “improving” the school and “making it better” works just as well across the board and regardless of political affiliation. Afterall, we all have our own definitions of what it means to make something “better.”
The first school I ever worked at used its status as the only school for foster youth that could help provide a “more stable life” for them. Most of the people who worked there were insistent that they could “improve the lives” of the students who went there, that they could make sure they weren’t a statistic. The people I was forced to engage with the most during my time there were the wealthy people responsible for all the charitable contributions, the people who came to say they were “doing good” without ever stopping to consider whether that was true, the people who just wanted to make it look like they gave even one iota of a shit.
But no one stopped to consider the harm going into that school (and they still fail to account for it, focusing only on how it is “better than nothing” for kids who are defined as at risk of entering foster care, unaccompanied minors, or being in the juvenile justice system). How many people have stopped to consider that “unaccompanied minors” also include children whose families have been deported, while they’ve been left alone and at the mercy of the State? How many people have stopped to recognise how both foster care and the juvenile justice system target Black, Latinx, and Indigenous children far more than any others?
No one stopped to consider how often we heard from our students about being scared of social workers or of feeling isolated from others because of how far away the school was from the city and how difficult it was to leave without permission. I can’t remember the number of times that I saw school administration ignore students’ concerns about certain social workers, especially when they made it clear that one of their friends was being coerced into an inappropriate relationship with an adult caretaker. It wasn’t uncommon for students to hitchhike to town, trying to find any possible way to go visit what family they had nearby.
Surprisingly, no one stopped to really ask what the consequences were of having such a campus specifically devoted to a specific population and what that could do to them or others in the future. Could it, like our other carceral institutions, perpetuate and increase the population through a warped sense of “justice” that helped line people’s pocketbooks and control entire demographics of people?
Everyone was happy to completely ignore what was happening there. They were more upset that I, a person who had been given literally nothing to do my job (not even an indoor space of any kind) had “done very little” to build a complete curriculum within a given year. It was fine that more than a few of our recently graduating students at the time had, almost immediately, entered into openly acknowledged relationships with people who had once been their social workers. It wasn’t fine that someone who was intentionally set up to fail had actually done so.
You can’t reform any of that. There is no way to fix that because the system is structured to enable all of it. You can only abolish it and build something better in its place.
Today, I see my job in a school as “harm reduction.” That’s the answer I give a lot of people when they ask me why I still teach. I say that I care about kids and that they deserve to have someone who supports them, who advocates for them, who does what they can to ensure that they have access to a safe and healthy environment with less stress. I’ve talked a lot about how I try to create a space where kids have access to an understanding adult who won’t punish them for trying and doesn’t slam their grades through the floor because they turned something in late. I try to be someone who recognises that kids have lives outside of school and give them that courtesy.
But it’s killing my mental health, and I come home crying most of the time.
Largely, it’s because the system is self-reinforcing. Something somewhere will always come back to force you on to the ‘correct’ path of how a school should operate. You try to bring in a range of diverse texts in a class? Some parents will always complain, and the school will tend to err in their favour. Just in case.
You want to turn your classroom into a creative learning space where kids can do whatever they want for even a moment? Well, many of them will also struggle against that because it’s unfamiliar and doesn’t match their continued expectation of what a school is. It’s not because they want what the school offers, and it’s not because they aren’t creative; it’s because many of them just want to get it over with, since that’s how school has been for most of their lives. That’s how the system is designed for them, and they feel it. So they respond accordingly.
Meanwhile, your head of school will look at your classroom management and deem it “too unorthodox” and “too chaotic.” They will sit in your room to observe you, coercing you back into a more rigid classroom management style. The choices you made, even if you highlight all the research supporting your decisions, will be deemed unfit for the desired “school culture.” They will force you to sit through weekly meetings during your single prep hour, combing through to make sure you comply with whatever it is that they deem “appropriate.”
You want to build a space that encourages diversity? Well, at some point, you really can’t. Of course, diversity will exist in the most superficial of ways possible, especially if the accreditation body of your school requires that you have one “world literature” unit or international comparisons in the history curriculum. You’ll be stuck choosing from a list of pre-determined “books in translation” that you can use, and none of them will be truly diverse. It’ll just be the same few names, the same few books, and a complete and total rejection of whole demographics because their chosen examiners “can’t examine student work if they haven’t read the texts they discuss.”
It’s not that no one wants the change; it’s that people keep looking to the same systems to do the change. And it can’t happen. It’s literally impossible.
The most our schools, including universities, can do is co-opt the language of radical pedagogies so that they can water it down and sell it back to us, pretending to “liberate” us from all the confinement. This happened to critical pedagogies, to unschooling, to self-directed education, and to other alternative pedagogies. It’s a huge part of the ungrading movement, which seems to be full of university professors who think that the academy can be the center of all change (they can’t). All of these things found their way into the sphere of marketing, either as schools designed mostly for the wealthy or sold back to poorer schools through shoddier resources.
None of these things will “fix” our schools. Our schools were built to work the way they do and accommodate very little change beyond what’s necessary to continue as they are.
Nothing is broken. They can only be dismantled and replaced. There’s nothing more to do.
Some of my frustration is because of what the schools I work in tend to focus on, as they’re international schools. They view children as bodies that generate profit, nothing more. Many of them have been set up as schemes to turn a short-term profit, while others have been established as ways to launder money. They’re often owned and run by some of the most irresponsible people, all of whom attempt to feign that they give a fuck about kids while often dealing with issues through profit incentive as opposed to health and safety of the people in them.
Their websites are full of bullshit claiming some kind of high-minded and noble goal of being ‘for’ the students and encouraging ‘well-rounded learning’ of the ‘highest quality’. Meanwhile, they underpay and overwork their teachers, often leaving them to spend their own money on any supplies they need to teach their class because they refuse to provide an actual budget to buy even the most basic things. What this means is that we spend as little as we have to, trying to avoid incurring any costs because they will never be recuperated. It also means that the ‘highest quality’ tends to be whatever a person can offer by creating something out of nothing.
It’s also harder for the teachers and staff to organise because of both the structure of these schools and how immigration functions. Not only are many of them located in places where labour unions barely exist (and if they do, they’re more often attached to the State than they are the workers they claim to support), the teachers and staff working in them often are trapped by the fact that their employer holds an absurd amount of control over their residence status and visa.
How loud can you really be when your employer holds all the cards, having the ability to change your life in an instant?
That’s part of why international schools function the way they do. People who run them will make the claim that it’s about “having access to teachers who speak a language natively” (be it English, Spanish, German, or French) or “having access to the world’s best and brightest” (a joke on its own), but it’s largely because it is far easier to control or get rid of people who are forced to survive under the precarity they create. They’ve created a group of people who are genuinely more beholden to the whims of the school.
It’s all an elaborate façade, even if it is one of grandeur. It’s another arm of how private schools function, and it’s often one that goes entirely neglected because people simply don’t know about it (nor do many people care to know, including many labour organisers).
Therefore, the teachers who arrive to work in these schools are often subjected to disgusting environments, both in terms of actual facilities and in terms of openly hostile administrations. We arrive at schools already filled with broken promises that are entirely unenforceable, especially because it requires that we already know and understand the labour laws of the places we’re working in from day one. Even if we learn those laws, many of the places will still side with our employers. In fact, one of my first experiences with trying to get out of what should have been an illegal contract, I had to negotiate through the labour board to get a “better” deal that still required I pay the company back for wanting to leave early, even though I had presented a clear cut case of deceptive hiring practices.
That was almost a decade ago now. It was also one of my first experiences that really made me question who the law was for, something I’d rarely done before that.
While I still remember that moment vividly, I know the conditions can and do get worse. That’s the point.
There’s no way you can reform it.
So many of the schools I work with infuriate me. They present themselves as institutions of beauty, of wonder, of curiosity. They have elaborate values and mission statements all claiming noble goals, wanting to create “student-led” environments (while still enforcing a range of unnecessary tests). They want to “inspire the world’s future leaders,” and they all read as if they took the hollowest of statements straight from the mouths of the world’s most boring techpreneurs.
At best, they’re bland. At worst, they’re dangerous.
Though most of those pages are clearly designed for the obvious goals of enticing parents to enroll their child(ren), they’re also designed to meet the vague requirements of accreditation bodies. Mostly, they seem to be geared toward the meaningless drivel provided by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO), though they also attempt to meet the requirements of other accrediting bodies and the people who pretend to care how ‘good’ a school is.
They don’t actually care.
That much should be obvious by now, and I wouldn’t include them if they did. Though it’s a non-profit organisation, the IBO is certainly making quite a bit of money on the backs of schools paying fees to be accredited by them. They make quite a bit every time they host a professional development seminar (especially of the online variety), and they pull in a pretty chunk of change for taking exams in the final year of the DP (especially if kids need to retake them to meet university requirements).
They also keep a lot of their fiscal information close to the chest, so it’s pretty difficult to really know what their financial statements look like. That should really raise far more questions than it ever seems to, and it’s likely because of their connection to a paternalistic goal of “educating children.”
These schools are run by people who have stepped all over others in order to achieve their status. I’ve worked with a school manager who chose to ignore multiple instances of sexual assault in the school because they “needed to keep tuition-paying students,” though they also claimed it was because the victims were either “unreliable” or “over-emotional.” It should be unsurprising that the people who’d been assaulted were the children of teachers or autistic students.
I’ve worked with a head of school who only managed to get his position because, as a teachers’ assistant, he helped to provide information to the owners so that they could oust the founder of the school. I’ve worked for owners who blamed the staff for all of their own short-comings: choosing an inappropriate location for the school, not having certain facilities available, not having adequate marketing, and so on.
Hell, I’ve even worked somewhere that told me, as I was being forced out of my job, that I was one of the “best teachers they’d had” but I couldn’t stay because “I wore jeans.”
But I’ve also worked in public schools with equally abusive structures. I’ve seen the police called on students who were struggling with a mental health situation while working in the United States, and I’ve watched the same police hand abused and terrified (usually white) children back to abusive parents, with precisely zero care or concern for what would happen when that child got home. I currently live in a country that segregates both disabled and Romani children from schools, even as the EU tells them they shouldn’t.
Why should we try to reform any of that?
The last public school I worked in was during the early part of the pandemic, and I stayed for two months before I gave up. I left after I got severely sick and couldn’t work. I quit because my department coordinator pulled my mask off my face, complaining that they “couldn’t understand me.” I shouted at them for even daring to touch my face, let alone remove my mask during a global pandemic for which (at the time) we didn’t have a vaccine. The school principal sided with them, claiming I was being “irrationally upset” at a “harmless interaction.” (Granted, the school principal also didn’t seem concerned that someone had signed all of our emails up for conspiracy theory newsletters, either.)
Every school is abusive in some way, and none of them give a single shit about the people in them.
The school system reinforces all of that.
With all that in mind, I struggle to understand why people continue to think school is even remotely useful. Why is it that we keep trying to ‘fix’ them, even as the State or corporate owners continually show us that they think schools aren’t worth caring about? Why is it that we let them set agendas, even when we know what our communities need?
Why don’t we stop to recognise that building these ‘silos’ for children actually ensures we’re building our own obstacles for a healthier society? We should be questioning how more young people can participate in the building of our world if they’re being segregated into spaces “meant” for them. We should be ensuring that all of our spaces recognise that children should be there, especially because we should be learning everywhere.
It should be obvious that we can’t prefigure any kind of healthy and liberatory society if we continually leave children out of everything.
Schools cannot be reformed. They shouldn’t be. Let them fall so that we might be able to actually move on.
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