On psychedelic feelings, queer pride, and practicing for revolution
A song, a Twitter thread, an article, a podcast, an underwater scream, and a chance to give
Happy dog days, dears, and welcome to my sixth installment of my ongoing attempt to turn more of the internet into some combination of Google Reader ca. 2010 and Livejournal ca. 2007. Below are my seven six favorite things from the internet this month.
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Revolutions, Seasons 7 and 8. History as praxis. What can we learn from past revolutionary struggles? I’m reading Eduardo Galeano; next on the stack is Paul Bjerk on Julius Nyerere, Frances Fox Piven on poor people’s movements, and Aviva Chomsky on Cuba; I’m also on the home stretch—longtime followers know how big of a deal this is!—of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast. Last month I wrapped up Duncan’s long, sprawling account of Europe’s “Springtime of the Peoples” in 1848 and this week I’m charging through his short account of the doomed and beautiful 1871 Paris Commune (cried on the train hearing about the first time the red flag was raised over the Place Vendôme). So, what have I learned?
(1) Middle-class liberals want political reform; working-class radicals want social reform. If they don’t fight together, they’ll be crushed separately. In Duncan’s analysis, the failures of the 1848 revolutions are what laid the groundwork for the horrors of World War I and II. The year’s uprisings mostly succeeded at first. But, in the subsequent infighting among democratic radicals, socialists, and liberals, it was imperialist (and often reactionary) nationalism that won out. Romantic ideals of shared ethnic and cultural belonging curdled into exclusionary bigotry and violence against ethnic minorities. Liberal constitutionalists tried and failed to achieve national unity on the basis of shared political and civil rights, empowering nation-states to forge unity instead through “blood and iron.” And finally, crucially, middle-class liberal reformers kneecapped themselves by betraying their own working-class foot soldiers. It was working people who threw up barricades, mobbed palaces, and beat back imperial soldiers in 1848, and what brought them out wasn’t (say) an enlargement of the franchise, free trade, equality before the law, or freedom of the press, but issues like rent relief, bread, guild rights, pensions, and the right to strike for better wages. In the face of united middle- and working-class resistance, imperial regimes buckled, but, as soon as middle-class liberals established provisional governments, they enshrined political reforms without making a gesture at social reform. Newly-formed liberal National Guards fired on strikers; liberal assemblies shut out socialist petitioners. When the displaced imperial regimes found their footing again, they handily crushed the new liberal governments as the working classes (quite sensibly) declined to return to the barricades for them.
(2) Practice helps. When Paris was besieged by the Prussian Army in the miserably cold fall and winter of 1870-71, it was the city’s self-organized Vigilance Committees—not the clumsy, milquetoast-y leadership of France’s brand-new Third Republic—that equally distributed food rations, took up collections for widows and orphans, pressured the government (successfully!) for debt and rent relief, and organized workplaces to protect employees’ tenuous legal rights. This was politicized mutual-aid work. The key organizers of these committees were working-class followers of the late anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, committed to voluntarist direct democracy and collective ownership of workplaces.
Theory met practice in a hungry city; the two met again in revolution. During the winter siege, forty thousand Parisians died of sickness and hunger; the siege was lifted only when France’s government surrendered to the Prussians, agreeing to a massive indemnity that required the retroactive suspension of debt and rent relief (meaning, Parisians now owed back rent for the entire duration of the siege) and the ceding to Prussia of the prosperous French territories of Alsace and Lorraine. Working Parisians were disgusted; they understood that their sacrifices in the siege had been squandered, and that their government feared them more than the occupying Prussians. Less than two months later, when the city exploded into revolt, the anarchist Vigilance Committees formed the heart of the new Paris Commune: for the first time in revolutionary history, working-class people (and not just radical middle-class professionals riding their backs) were voted into a revolutionary assembly. These Proudhonists, as experienced organizers of a non-state within the official state, formed a near-plurality within the Commune, and they pushed the body toward not just democratic political reform in the city but the support of worker ownership, welfare for poor citizens, and the reinstatement of debt relief. They were seasoned political educators, and they’d had practice in the mutual-aid work that got their city through its last crisis; they were ready now for this one.
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Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Psychedelic Switch.” Had the stonerish thought, listening to this absolute banger of a French-touch style disco song, that the love song arc is more a form than a subject. That is, a love song needn’t mostly be about an artist expressing a feeling; instead, it’s a space in whose conventions and emotional possibilities—here, a sublime uplift, an infatuation aware of itself—an artist works. CRJ is a tenacious craftsman and a serious nerd for this sort of uplift; her emotional range is much narrower than, say, Taylor Swift’s, but she believes fervently in the joy she’s constantly retooling. I can’t think of a song that’s brought me more delight this year.
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Summer outrages. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way.
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Southern Fried Queer Pride. Speaking of theory meeting practice, want to give to an organization doing vital work? Your gift will support artists’ spaces, community potlucks, affinity group meetups, mutual aid, and soon the opening of a Black-led community space (arts programming, hot meals and showers for homeless queer and trans neighbors, housing resources, community garden, more) in Atlanta.
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Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò, “Who Gets to Feel Secure?” A take from deep-COVID times that’s stayed in my mind. Táíwò wants us to wrestle the concept of security back from authoritarians and cops; in this essay, he tries to articulate a language to do so.
We don’t yet quite have the terms. Sixty-five years ago, political-philosophy bigshot Isaiah Berlin coined the distinction between negative and positive liberty: freedom from and freedom to. Negative liberty, a concept beloved of liberals and libertarians, is the freedom from imposition of a dominating force (state, boss) on our will and desire. Positive liberty, by contrast, is a freedom to act, requiring both rational self-mastery and appropriate outlets for political expression. But, Táíwò asks (drawing on the memoirs of mid-century Brazilian favelanda and diarist Carolina Maria de Jesus), what meaning does either sense of freedom have when we are “slaves to the cost of living,” surviving in the absence of material or communal security?
Security is what underlies the possibility of free action. When authoritarians use this term, they mean security from, an “antagonistic security”: who do we need to surveil, dominate, ship off, incarcerate, or kill in order to feel safe on our side of the barbed wire fence? Our current dominant modes of global production depend, in fact, on the distribution of insecurity. Some are forced into a constant state of surveillance, degradation, material scarcity, and death; others can thus enjoy relative agency, comfort, and abundance. These security hierarchies have their roots in European modes of production (“racialized” even before mass enslavement) at the time of colonization; they’ve been present here since the first mass Native land thefts and the institution of chattel slavery. “For the people whose resistance would be most threatening to the social order, it was dangerous to use land, to use one’s own bodily autonomy, even to use one’s rational capacity (reading was often outlawed) due to the threat of militias and overseers.” In the twentieth century, activist movements pursuing security—Táíwò discusses both ‘60s urban Black communities seeking relief from violent crime and ‘70s feminists seeking state protections from abusers—have been pulled into compromise with the state that led to more incarceration, more surveillance, and more violence.
Táíwò is a humane, intelligent thinker; he isn’t interested in declaring whose fault these compromises were. Instead, he wants to abstract general lessons: “The ways that we seek to secure ourselves can conspire against deeper and more complex articulations of our political commitments. However noble our intentions, racial capitalism tends to draw the ways we aspire to produce safety and stability into its antagonistic gravitational pull, splitting the world into secure winners and precarised losers.”
What, instead, might non-antagonistic security, “security with,” look like? What is the shared material basis for both positive and negative freedom? This could look like robust public health infrastructure; common ownership of a nation or community’s productive forces; adaptations to climate change prioritizing those in the Global South suffering its heaviest tolls. On Twitter (you should follow him), Táíwò has suggested that this question will be the heart of his next book (you should read his books).
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Erik Baker on Twitter (followup note here). Speaking of alienation, Baker, the author of one of the better essays this year in Harper’s, says:
“The loss of a ‘world’”: There’s a throughline for me here on the spread of conspiracy theories, the brain effects of social media, disaffiliation from institutional life more broadly, and the centrist management of “disinformation,” one I think it’ll take a few months’ more reading and thinking to tease out. Stay tuned, dears.
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Substack of the month: I heartily recommend Jeremy Noel-Todd’s Some Flowers Soon, a crowded garden of poetry history and contemporary readings.
Replies? Notes? Suggestions of something I should read? Hit me up in the comments.