Quotes from this article:
There are definitely too many phonies running around acting like they’re down for the people but only looking out for their own interests and will be quick to snitch, betray, and sell you out. This is also to combat and to struggle against these behaviors, this is not an attempt to point the finger at anyone. We cannot blame the people for 500 years of colonialism; we have to attack the system, the real problem that we are facing that is killing us at this very moment.
This is something with which I couldn't agree more.
I think there are two things that are becoming more apparent in the Left today: 1) we are seeing clear lines being drawn (meaning we are seeing people’s true colors come out), which is good in the sense that alliances are being made based on principled unity; and 2) we are seeing people who would rather attack and make enemies with other oppressed people or people in the movement than go after the real institutional enemies of the people in terms of the system as a whole.
Depending on where this piece goes, I'm definitely in agreement. (If it hits a tone of 'left unity', I'm going to struggle with it; if it hits a tone of 'there are too many in what we call "the left" fighting others', I'm in agreement.)
... one of the biggest forms of opportunism today is political careerism where people use the grassroots and larger movement to build their own networks for their own future political career in a sense.
This isn't the first time I've heard this. In fact, this sentiment was expressed in the interview with Tariq Mehmood about the Asian youth movements in Bradford with Working Class History (Part 1, Part 2).
There are far too many people seeing that they can 'grab control' and 'build a career' on the backs of people suffering, and they simply don't care. Because:
These folks usually like to play all sides, have their hands in everything, and be known in every circle of activists, organizers, and even radicals because they want to use these networks for their careerist intentions.
Another form of this opportunism we can see inside the Non-Profit Industrial Complex where many political careerists hope to build up their networks and hold leadership positions already.
This is an area that really needs to receive a lot more attention, especially with regards to global organisations. There are a lot of governments that use or manipulate non-profits for their own goals. (I say 'manipulate' because there are countries where getting away from non-profit structures is incredibly difficult was a result of laws.) They continue:
Non-profits, however, have hired many people of color who in other sectors of work would not have a job, but looking at the role that the Non-Profit Industrial Complex plays in guiding the struggle in a direction that is not a threat to the state because their funding in large comes from the state itself.
This is true in countries where they 'compete' for the tax-based donations from the public (e.g., Slovakia has a 2% contribution from taxes that people can donate to their choice of non-profits -- this directly links the state to those organisations, and it also informs them about which non-profits to work with).
Another way some use the movement, is to promote themselves, build themselves up as an activist celebrity, build their own “legacy,” and many times it is because they also want to get paid.
Definitely this, too. It pairs well with the careerism that was previously discussed.
This is part of the social conditioning and colonialism of building up personalities and not empowering individuals to realize their own potentials as revolutionaries and as human beings. This is not to say we shouldn’t celebrate our revolutionaries, our victories, our communities and individuals who have made that “revolutionary sacrifice,” what I’m being critical of something completely different.
Definitely this. There's a glimmer of this when people (particularly non-anarchists) start asking about different anarchist figures, assuming that all of them spoke for every one of us. Their work is/was important, and it's important to recognise them (and their flaws). However, the perspective a lot of us have on the world is that these people do not represent us; they help us build the movement, help us describe things through theory, help us orient praxis, etc. They're not our idols, and they shouldn't be.
There are those however that wish to get paid. That is okay as long as some of that is getting back to the oppressed communities and the revolutionary movement. The real issue is the liberals, who have no other way to build a legacy or are good at anything else so therefore they seek to do that for themselves in the movement.
Fucking this right here. I am fine with people making money (in a society that requires it to survive), but it needs to be in conjunction with helping part of the community in some material form.
So what we have instead of a real movement is these folks taking the struggle in a direction of personality cults in a sense and we lose sight of the people who are the real makers of history always.
Yes. Another element of personality cults is that they try to build their momentum into political campaigns.
Self-Righteous behavior is too common in the activist circles today where they divorce themselves from the oppressed communities because the activists see themselves as better. This is an elitism, that comes from being separate from the oppressed communities, where activists see themselves as above “the people,” because they see that they have the correct language, the correct internal behavior and practice.
Yes. This is too fucking common. (And this is something that we all need to work to rid ourselves of. It's hard, but it needs to be done.) He continues by saying:
All oppressed people have been socialized and colonized under this White-Supremacist-Patriarchal-Heterosexist-Capitalist-Imperialist system, so even the activists are going to carry some baggage from the system even though they say otherwise. We have to understand that we are living in unhealthy conditions and these conditions are brought with us into the movement.
And:
There are some who do not wish to change or are not doing so at this moment, and we have to figure out how to deal with them if they come from our communities as well. So this is where we have to work with our people where they’re at not where we want them to be, otherwise we will be isolated from those we really have to reach right now.
The personal is political in a sense, but we cannot be neutral when the system is waging war on us. These also manifests itself today in people not calling out oppressive behavior when it happens and not challenging opportunists when they come into our communities and try to use us.
What I mean by the White-Left Vanguard Party is the white-left organization who survived the 60’s (after the truly revolutionary organizations were defeated) or is new, and think that they need to lead the struggle and impose themselves on oppressed communities and communities of color.
So they have the white savior complex and feel that they need to speak for the oppressed. This does not just exist in the authoritarian left but also within the anarchist circles. This is something that is prevalent in all of the white left, and we should rely on other white leftists to challenge. Oppressed people however, should never allow them to come into our communities and impose their programs on us where they see only other whites being fit to lead us.
I think more white anarchists (and I'm not excluding myself here) need to read this and let it sink in.
In the Third World today people are organizing more in a horizontalist and autonomous ways in the communities because the state is not providing for them and they build up the mutual-aid relationships out of their need for survival. Many have found out this way of building is the only way to build something fundamentally new.
The illegitimate leadership today can manifest itself in many ways: the people who do no work but want all the credit, sideline haters (who basically criticize from the sidelines of the movement but are not willing to fight with the people or who intend to make poster children out of the youth and let them catch all the heat from the state and will not defend them), opportunists, people who wish to co-opt the movement or organizations that they had nothing to do in building (a form of opportunism), and of course the state and organizations with deep ties to the state. The Non-Profit Industrial Complex now represents a form of illegitimate leadership in our communities and do many of the things mentioned. Many of them have also deep ties to the state but act as the representatives for our communities.
We should not allow this to happen anymore; we shouldn’t give them any power.
A lot of the research that comes from [academia] feeds the war machine, so how can this be a revolutionary institution? It is not. Its role is to act as training for the people who will become the new middle class and upper middle class, fundamentally this is the role of the university.
After many students graduate from universities the only jobs that are available to them for the most part is in the Non-Profit Sector, which also promotes the idea that the ones with a university education are the best qualified to lead. I do think that if our people decide to attend a university they should come back into their communities and democratize their knowledge.
Name mentioned: Rodolf 'Corky' Gonzales (Chicano organiser and revolutionary)
Also Academia and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex have attempted to hijack the revolution, take credit for, change the language, and again be the “legitimate” forms to struggle. Academia takes folks away from their communities if they’re people of color and oppressed. They attempt to define the struggle for the people from the ivory tower and they have a monopoly on book knowledge inaccessible to the majority of society.
And this is a succinct reason for why I think academia can never be the center of a 'revolution' or any form of actual change in society. Co-opting is the best they can do.
Looking at the education model within academia where you have an expert on a subject talk to you for hours and you are expected to regurgitate what they tell you in a test or essay. Do people really learn this way? We need to look at forms of popular education. Just because you are not a professor does not mean you do not have things to teach, based on your experiences. You probably have many things to teach your professors; there is a lot of value in your life experiences and they are valid.
Fucking spot on, and I'd apply this same principle to compulsory schooling.
We have to be relevant to the most oppressed and our communities. We cannot build organizations and events just for us but where non-activists feel that they can relate to and think is interesting.
Yes!
