Oh 2019 — things are going to get worse before they get better, aren’t they?
Every time that I land after a few days away, it takes awhile to adjust. To feel like I’m home. If work is busy enough, that’s easy. I just get back into writing. But, these last two weeks, work has been slow. So I kind of rot my brain by staring at Twitter too much — a bit like staring directly into the sun, if the sun were dynamic and fast-moving and full of quips and humour and energy and analysis. But the sun is the sun — present, abundant and ironically cool to our existence. It doesn’t care if we destroy the planet. It’s already giving energy to eight other deadscape planets and seems good with it. Unlike the sun, Twitter needs us, which is where the analogy ends. But, while staring into the sun will burn out your eyes, staring into Twitter can swiftly burn out your soul.
As a freelance worker, I exist in total isolation. No office chatter. No coworkers. I’m my own stimulation, my own motivator and my own Christmas party. A friend of mine who works with colleagues that she can hardly stand once told me that my work life must be a dream. I had to agree with her — that for the low price of daily and relentless solitude, and being called a cunt more times than I can count, I’m living a dream.
But it’s in this isolation that the social forces that are ripping us apart are most apparent to me, especially within leftist circles. To be a leftwing person is to come to know the world through a lens of struggle. We see injustice, hypocrisy, corruption often because we bump up against it directly. To bump up against these things is to struggle against them and with understanding them — why does injustice exist? How to we fight power? How do we undo corruption?
Unlike freelance life, struggle cannot happen in isolation. Struggle is a collective experience. When we find ourselves struggling against the same forces, we can start to identify patterns that exist in society that hurt people in different or similar ways. The action of taking these experiences and understanding the theory behind what is happening, or developing effective responses is a process that, until very recently, happened in meetings. Not necessarily formal meetings but also reading circles, affinity clubs and informally, in cafés and bars. Through unstructured and structured meeting, people would debate, learn, synthesize and develop ideas about how to fight back. For socialists, this has always been true. For trade unionists, civil rights activists, for anarchists, this has always been true. These meetings form the engine of what The Left is, can become and can do.
It’s no surprise then, as our interactions are increasingly mitigated by for-profit, private corporations (and closely monitored by the state), The Left has lost this tradition. Not entirely, of course, but largely. People interested in progressive politics and who want to learn more are more likely to turn to Google than they are to show up at a physical location IRL. And why not! Google has the sum total of humanity’s collective knowledge just sitting there waiting for you to search for it.
Except — we can’t struggle in isolation. Social media is to friendships the way that porn is to sex: inventive, performative and idealized. We are chasing experiences that we see online that we can’t recreate IRL because they only exist in a space that is literally not real life. The big difference, of course, is that while most people who love and enjoy porn know very well that what they watch and what they participate in IRL are not the same, I’m not sure we have the same awareness in our relationships — how to be a friend vs. how to project a curated image or how to interact with people in text (which is actually hard). Online relationships cannot replace real-life ones. But even if we know this, we oftentimes are happy to forget because our online friends are always there. Kind of. Similarly, online struggle cannot replace IRL struggle.
The past decade has featured the split experience of hurtling towards the future and crawling back to a past that humanity was supposed to have collectively scorned. We can see the destruction of our planet and we experience climate change all the time (some people far more than others, of course, especially if you’re Indigenous, racialized, poor and/or disabled). At the same time, we’re watching fascism make a come-back. Who knew that fascism would start with irony and jokes? Who knew that the mainstream media would have been so ill-equipped to deal with it? Who could have guessed that rather than embracing those of us who are pulling the fire alarm and trying to get people in power to feel the pressure that many of us feel, we would be defamed and marginalized? Ah, maybe it was obvious.
The past decade has laid bare the clear need for The Left to go back to our roots and organize in the ways that people have always organized when the stakes felt impossibly high, when those in gilded palaces felt too far away for us to reach. I’m not saying that we should all abandon the Internet — anyone who knows me knows that I literally can’t. But we need to make an effort to reconnect with one another IRL and collectively grapple with, well, everything. There are groups who do this, and who do it well (land protectors, Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, Climate March and Extinction Rebellion activists). There were attempts to do this that failed (Occupy’s many study circles). Learn from them. Get involved.
Every impressive and inspiring social movement in the past century engaged in studying theory, debating readings, understanding the classic socialist texts. But they also adapted these texts, read contemporary analysis, debated what they mean for a current context and spent time together. It is no less important for us to do this now than it was half a century ago.
Most people know me based on what I write. But it’s my IRL life that is my most important: the hours I participate in meetings, the coalition building, the collective struggling we engage in over what is to be done. There is no better feeling than finishing a difficult meeting and saying: whew, that was work! It’s like emerging from a sauna — inside, it was getting pretty rough but once it’s over, you feel good about what you’ve accomplished.
So if the teens sucked (and mostly, they did), let’s make the twenties the decade where social movement organizing comes roaring back. Let’s create spaces where we can come together and share, study and learn. Let’s struggle together and in doing so, create those bonds that must be ironclad if we have any hope of bringing power to its knees.
