#1: the outer limits define the shape
on radicalization through experience, and watching revolutionary ideas hit the mainstream
Hi, and welcome to the first weekly edition of the parts of a body. I’ve been trying to spend less time on Twitter, where, like many people, I scroll endlessly and react to things and barf my halfassed thoughts into the world, and more time working on creative projects that are actually useful and sustainable (band, book proposal, and so forth). I used to write a lot for myself, and I don’t any longer. This is an attempt to rectify that, and to also produce something that you might want to read/that might be useful to you in some way. (Thanks to my ride-or-die buddy Mariana Timony of Weird Girls Post, the social media manager at Bandcamp and a brilliant writer, for encouraging/inspiring me to do this.)
I’d planned to write about the odd complexity of watching the radical ideas and ethics that you’ve committed your life to suddenly reaching the mainstream, in regards to prison and police abolition and sexual assault survivors’ support specifically as well as a wider subset of anarcho-communist politics I’ve held for a long time, before the Harper’s open letter on “cancel culture” was published. (I’m linking to Gabrielle Bellot’s critique of the letter rather than the letter itself, because her critique is excellent and the letter itself is not worth the click.) Then, my dear friend Michael Berdan, of the band Uniform, tweeted a very, very good response thread to the Harper’s letter about his own experience having his old band Drunkdriver “canceled.” The thread went viral. And here we are.
I didn’t just watch that whole Drunkdriver affair go down in 2010—I was a big part of it. Berdan and I had been casual friends for many years before—when you grow up just outside of DC and just outside of Philly, respectively, and you’re both in the punk/hardcore scene, and you’re roughly the same age, you end up in a lot of the same rooms and on the same messageboards. I’d seen Drunkdriver a bunch, gone to hang out whenever they’d played Chicago, and so forth. When I heard through the grapevine that their drummer had been accused of rape by multiple women, and that the other members of the band—my friends—knew about this and had done nothing, it felt like an enormous betrayal. It went public across several messageboards and blogs and listservs not long after that, and I was one of the people loudly demanding answers and accountability, because we weren’t getting them privately.
I ended up finding myself in kind of a mediator role—I was one of the few people during this huge public callout who had actually reached out to Berdan after the whole thing blew up. At that point I’d been involved in community accountability processes around sexual assault in punk and hardcore for over a decade; a public survivor myself, I wanted—and still want—the community around me to be better to one another, and I believe that it is possible; Berdan’s story is great evidence that if a person is actually willing to take a long hard look at their own behavior and to follow through, genuine growth and change can occur. I didn’t plan to become part of his support network, but I wanted to help, and it was clear to me that he was at a genuine breaking point.
We spent a lot of time on the phone over the next few weeks, and that grew into a deeper and deeper friendship, especially as he began to get clean—I’m a former junkie too (clean for a long time now), and there’s some specificity around the way drugs and alcohol helped create the space for a rapist to evade accountability in this particular situation, and the self-destructiveness that was behind using for both Berdan and myself, that’s hard to understand if you’ve never been there yourself. It bonded us really intensely, and we now have a relationship I’d best describe as brotherly. It’s been a joy to watch and help him grow and I’ve grown immensely too. (I would be remiss not to mention Berdan’s girlfriend, the wonderful Andy Larsen, who I’ve known since I was in college—she was a rep for college radio when I was a music director, and we used to spend tons of time on the phone after-hours long distance from the radio station office talking about real life stuff and music we loved, something that kickstarted a lifelong friendship; of course, because punk world is extremely tiny, we’d find one another again and again in different spaces. Andy is a diamond in this world, and I love her and Berdan both very much.)
If all of this seems a roundabout way to get to my main point, it’s because I wanted to illustrate something specific here—that the ideas and ethics I hold true come from life experience. Everyone I know who’s really committed to radical thought came to it from some precipitating, intensely personal place—usually a nexus of places, all along the social margins. Yes, I was raised by vocally leftist parents (I will, hand on heart, never forget my dad telling me on my first day of kindergarten that the Pledge of Allegiance was Cold War propaganda and that I didn’t have to say any of it but especially not the “under God” part; I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about because I was five, but I remembered it). Yes, they absolutely enabled my political participation as a kid/teen. But it was my experience being raped, and how institutions treated me afterwards, that really radicalized me. It was watching my family stretch a budget, and realizing even in school how far behind some of my more moneyed peers I was despite having significantly more resources and stability than people living in poverty. (I would describe my upbringing as working to lower middle class, varying over time; we became a two-income household in my tweenhood, and that changed things.)
It was coming out as queer and then coming out as trans. It was growing up in a historically Black multi-racial community. It was having to tangle with the state and with predatory private insurers around my chronic illnesses. It was visiting friends in prison and losing friends to overdoses and losing older friends to AIDS and losing friends to military service and losing friends to suicide and losing friends to homicide. God, I have lost so many fucking people I love. It was not being able to access mental health treatment and not being able to access dental care. It was worrying about where I would get my next meal. I am not listing these things because I want to chronicle miseries or make anyone feel bad for me. I am doing, honestly, not that bad, all of this considered. I just want you to know that these are the reasons my politics are what they are.
The reason radical left politics are finding a real foothold in the US mainstream now is because a critical mass of people are finding themselves in deep economic and social precarity, and it’s not something that can be seemingly massaged away by a gigantic bank bailout. Federal eviction protection ends this month, as do the rest of the paltry temporary protections of the CARE Act. I have a relatively stable job for the moment, but I am in the vast minority of my peers in that regard. People are dying—from Covid-19 (especially as it spreads within prisons and among people who are unhoused), from police brutality, from overdoses, and on and on. My friends who have kids are struggling with taking on the extra burden of homeschooling without any real state support. My friends who work at restaurants and bars and in other service industry jobs, and in the entertainment industry, are shit out of luck. Go to work and risk getting the virus for minimum wage. What wages there are are stagnant; what healthcare there is is priced absurdly, and in many cases inaccessibly. The Forever War is still going. (I’m not even going to get into international events beyond this here because I would never stop, except to say, without fucking question: free Palestine.) If you were able to curl yourself into the illusion that either political party gave a shit about you, you’ve been disabused of that notion. Here is the system, in all its built-broken bloody glory. Its cruelty is staggering, even if you’re extremely familiar with it.
As these hot months struggle onward into fall, it’s only going to get worse. I am by no means an accelerationist (I do not want people to suffer, even if that suffering reveals truth), but it’s undeniable that reaching this point is radicalizing people, because I know how radicalization through experience (rather than indoctrination) works. This gives us an innumerable array of chances to work together to help one another out—this is the true meaning of mutual aid—and chances to develop strong, coherent left infrastructure. I’ve been heartened by networks I see building through the city I live in and digitally, nationally and internationally, most of which are strengthened old networks with new reach and a few of which are brand new.
But I worry about burnout; I’m already experiencing it myself, in a really bad way. I worry about how little institutional support most of us have, and how much of it our opponents do. I worry about the co-optation of radical ideas by the liberal/NPO world. (I reread The Revolution Will Not Be Funded recently, and very specifically have to give credit to INCITE!, without whom my politics would not be nearly as clear or as thoughtful; they have been a huge source for me over the last 15+ years.) Just look at the battle over “defund the police,” which we keep having to say does, actually, mean defund the goddamned police, and not “reform the police,” or “defund the police but then make a new police.” I worry about inertia. I worry about the infiltration of movement spaces. (If you haven’t read Courtney Desiree Morris’s classic 2010 article from make/shift, “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants,” about the Brandon Darby affair, recently, or at at all, may I direct your attention. Also, Feminisms in Motion, the make/shift anthology, is great.)
If some of us who have been around the block a few times now seem a little exhausted, it’s because we’re carrying all of this. “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair,” goes the infamous quote from Mariame Kaba, who has been a mentor and a friend to me for a long time now. There are a million stopping points on the road to revolution; some of them are just pause points, where we put down our bags for a second to take care of other business, or re-sort everything, or rest, or let our comrades hold them for a bit. Many of them are dead ends or booby traps laid by power. All we can do is keep looking out for one another, all the time.
Here are some records I dug this week, just because I think that’s a good thing to end on always:
Simona Castricum, Panic/Desire
Model Home, One Year
The Scorpions & Saif Abu Bakr, Jazz Jazz Jazz
V/A, Peace Chant—Raw and Deep Spiritual Jazz (thanks to my ever-wonderful colleague and friend Marcus J. Moore, who has a book forthcoming on Kendrick Lamar you better pre-order, for this one)
Ciel, Trojan Horse
All Hits, Men and Their Work
With love,
Jes