Posts Tagged ‘riots’
How not to run a revolution
In what may be my greatest act so far of petit-bourgeois irony, I picked up a copy of The Coming Insurrection a few days ago in the closing sale at Borders. I haven’t gotten around to starting it just yet, as I’m already halfway through Beowulf and I long ago gave up on the hope that I could read two books at once without getting confused. But I did do some background research, and in the process, I found this:
Maybe we should question the basis of the liberation we aim for: you read shit that says “the more anonymous I am, the more present I am,” but what does that mean? That I must lose the emotions and experiences that make me who I am in the process of becoming a revolutionary actor?
It is my ennui that draws me to the street, my resentment that throws the brick, my desire that makes the nights in jail bearable – and these emotions don’t come from nowhere. Are all emotions beyond nihilist anger invalid and antirevolutionary? Because if they are, the lucidity and liberation I find through them are as well.
This should remind you of something quite unlike what I’m sure the author intended; namely, Lasch:
The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security. Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy. Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose. In her memoir of the Weathermen, Susan Stern described their attraction in language that owes more to psychiatry and medicine than to religion. When she tried to evoke her state of mind during the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she wrote instead about the state of her health. “I felt good. I could feel my body supple and strong and slim, and ready to run miles, and my legs moving sure and swift under me.” A few pages later, she says: “I felt real.”
In the politics of the narcissistic mind, change becomes a means not to a better society, but to better feelings; “lucidity and liberation” is found not through living in a better society brought about by said change, but through the translation of emotions into the political realm in the form of that change. Revolutionaries must hold on to their emotions, and they must do so to reach purely emotional ends. The emotions, in fact, may very well be the ends, since the proclaimed goal is clearly far too utopian to be realized, at least in the lifetime of the revolutionary, who is almost certainly narcissistic. Sorry, kids; you’ve been pwned. And memes are very adaptable, especially the ones that radicals of all sorts are currently fighting against, so it would be absurd to think at least some of them could not outlast a revolution.
The application of this principle to certain other current events should be obvious. When a protest against the police in the most notorious police state in the developed world degenerates into an orgy of consumerism surpassing even Black Friday, when ‘the people’, whoever they are, turn a perfect opportunity for mass mobilization against patently absurd political abuses into a Mammonic mockery, a rally for free shoes, can it really be said that there is any hope of attacking the roots of the problems? Of course not!
The left will never be successful. Why? Because the left has all been pwned, and once you’ve been pwned, you can’t be un-pwned. How can you have a successful revolution when you can’t even break away from the values of the ideology you’re trying to destroy? How can you educate the next generation in such a way that they will not be infected when your ideology cannot produce any learning materials that do not contain the virus?
Notice, however, that I said specifically that the left will be successful. If you buy the above, it follows necessarily that the only revolution that can succeed is a reactionary one.
