A good thing about anarchists, and a bad thing about anarchists: or, on class and the Lumpenproletariat; or, pop the student-activist bubble
Posted by anarcholatina on 2023-07-19
I would like to tell two anecdotes. Put a pin on these, they will be relevant later.
The first was during the protests for the police murder of 16-year-old Black boy Mouhamed D. in 2022. The people organising the protest asked for a peaceful, nonescalative demo because they were afraid of police retaliation; particularly the family of the boy, who wasn’t from the activist milieu. I disagree with this attitude—if the police wants to be violent they’ll be violent no matter what, cf. the Lützerath eviction—but it wasn’t my protest and I was there to show support, not to start a debate club; so instead of the standard black bloc outfit I decided to dress fem, and went on latex pants, a pink leotard, white fluffy jacket on top.
A girl I had recently met at an antifa group wanted to march with us, but ditched us on the spot. She turned out to be a swerf, and thought it was grossly innapropriate of me to dress up like a whore during a Black protest (n.b. girl is German and white). She also critisised my penchant for posting sexy selfies online “without any class or niveau” (exact quote). Surely this was antifeminist, sexualising myself for the sake of men (n.b. I’m into girls). This woman wasn’t a terf or a tankie, she was a transgender anarchist.
Anecdote the second, a certain anarchist group puts me in the unenviable position of defending Die Partei.
To make it clear, I’m not a fan, and most of their humour smells like cis dude and falls flat to me, though they have their moments (I like “Nazis töten”, always brings a smile to my face). But in this case, they were being denounced on moral grounds. The joke was a faux police advertisement with the slogan: “Here the shooter, too, is just a human being: Dortmund police”, riffing on an old PR campaign about how the police are “just human beings”. Again, not exactly the height of political satire, but this isn’t evil humour, it’s still punching up. The joke is “police bad”.
And here, too, white Germans took upon themselves to heroically defend hypothetical Black people who, they figured, would be hypothetically offended at this, by publically denouncing how innapropriate it is for Die Partei to joke or laugh in such a traumatic situation. This prompted me to harper again about my one pet peeve, this Protestant attitude that Germans bring to activism—this misconception that you have to frown and look worried the whole 2-hour plenum and the less fun you have the more successful your politics will be. I compared it to my experiences with Latin American and Kurdish political circles (where you leave the political meetings feeling energised, rather than depressed), and how even the people at the height of tragedy use humour to cope. The person then replied that sure, the victims can use humour to cope, but if you’re not in the affected demographic you’re not allowed levity of any kind; at which point I could have continued, going on about intersectionality and vicarious trauma and self-martyrdom as a dysfunctional coping mechanism that suppresses and disarms a shared rage which could lead to communality and blabla—but I’ve been at this long enough to know when a duel of words is being fought purely to have the last word, and when it’s best to drop it and go hug girls and kiss trees.
One thing stuck with me, though: They said that even if the ethics of the joke are good, the joke was still bad because it was “in bad taste”.
Class. Niveau. Taste. Think a bit about what those concepts imply.
In the beginning there was naught but Kháos, the primordial abyss, and Nyx, the starless black night, who manifested Eros, desire, and Heaven and Earth, from whose incestous love a myriad ancestral beings sprung, including Prometheus who always perceived things beforehand, Epimetheus who always perceived things too late, Marx who was always wrong when debating Bakunin, and Bakunin who was always right when debating Marx.
From the start, one of the distinctive traits of Marxism when compared to the correct political position (anarchism) was an Eurocentric industrial-progressivism which embodies uncritically the imperalist undertones of the Enlightenment (it’s not by accident or circumstance that the great Marxist powers such as the USSR or China reproduced colonial ethnocide down to a T). This has had many tragic consequences, one of which is the palpable revulsion for, in Marx’ words, the “social scum”:
…ruined roués [sexual people] with questionable means of support and of dubious origin, degenerate and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.
Anarchists look at this list and think: friends. Bakunin thought that revolution couldn’t come from wage labourers with stable income, too invested on their status as workers to rock the boat, but from
free Cossacks, our innumerable saintly and not so saintly tramps (brodiagi), pilgrims, members of ‘beguny’ sects, thieves, and brigands – this whole wide and numerous underground world which from time immemorial has protested against the state and statism.
Bakunin recognised in the underclass, in the no-class, in the have-nothings rather than the have-littles, that wild and chaotic passion for destruction which to this day we all appreciate; and recognised that revolution requires “extensive destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction” to a much deeper, much more radical level than merely seizing the means of being a cop. Marxists by contrast see the “Lumpenproletariat” as orcs, too corrupted to ever make a good, productive Socialist worker:
The lumpenproletariat is the passive decaying matter of the lowest layers of the old society. It is, here and there, thrust into the progressive movement by a proletarian revolution; however, in accordance with its whole way of life, it is more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues.
One can taste the specifically queerphobic, slutshaming implications of the “whole way of life” in Marx’ notions of degeneracy. This has never stopped, either, it goes way beyond the queer persecution of every Communist state; the same visceral distaste for whores, bums and faggots underlies every Marxbro who tries to reduce every discussion to “no war but class war”. The CPUSA gives the game away when they say the lumpen are “un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle”. By “un-organisable” here they mean impossible for the vanguard leadership to herd.
Wanna know a little secret? The Zapatista insurrection has Marxist roots. The FLN was a Marxist guerrila organisation, inspired by Cuba, by Che, by Maoism, trying to pull off something similar in Mexico. The chairman figure, Germán, to this day is complaining about how the EZLN bleached out the Marxism out of it. People of the cadre were outsiders, including Marcos, who had an academic background. They found out they couldn’t sell Marxism, this Marxist theory that postulates indigenous politics to be “primitive”, to indigenous folk. Nobody wanted to cosplay Soviet aesthetics and die for another Fidel. The EZLN achieved success when accomplices stopped trying to fit human beings into their theories, and listened.
marxists.org also defines the lumpen with this lumping-together of examples, “I know one when I see one”-style:
…beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements.
Ever since I started dressing out in an overtly sexualised, anarchopunk style, people from these categories approach me (white immigrant ascended to middle-class) without fear, talk to me assuming I’m going to talk back, that I’m going to respect them as human beings. This is a testament to what our ancestors have achieved: that beggars think punks are good marks/mates is the greatest endorsement the punk movement could ever have. At our best, anarchists have been the political organisation willing to sit down with and learn from and show solidarity to bums, whores, scammers, the disabled, the addicted. At our best, we recognised the millenia of indigenous resistance to the State as bravery and commitment to be honoured, rather than an infantilised Other. At our best, at least.
Which brings me to my grievances with the policing of sex and laughter and joy in German leftist circles.
I often see First World leftists deriding, say, Donald Trump’s mansion as without class, in bad taste. Or the problematic materialism of rap lyrics, the bling. I think most of you understand that if you mock Donald Trump for being fat, you don’t hurt Donald Trump, you marginalise fat people. You know who else has bad taste? You know who else like gold and velvet and bling everywhere? Poor people. Me. Whores. Beggars. Thieves. You try growing up in the Third World, you try going through hunger and always having the worst version of everything, and see if you don’t develop an affection for shiny shiny gold. You try not wanting to look glamorous, when you’re spat upon on the streets.
“Bad taste” is by definition the taste of the lumpen. I’m not asking you people who grew up with access to books to partake in bad taste. I’m asking you to question where the revulsion comes from.
Picture a street pickpocket. Picture a transvestite homeless sex worker, picture a veteran swindler who’s been to knife fights, picture a bum who has lived 30 years on train-hopping and squats. If you’re an anarchist I don’t have to explain to you that these people have crucial sets of skills that we’re going to need desperately in the near future, and forever. I ask you to make a choice, are you going to be a fukken Marxist and kick all the scum out of your spaces, or are you going to bring them in? Because if you’re going to bring them in, you need to be willing to respect poor people’s needs, wants, and sensibilities. Like Subcomandante Marcos in 1983, you will need to listen. If you want to make the movement pop the student bubble, you need to be accomodating of poor people. And, as a rule, moralistic frowning upon gallows humour or sexy clothes or folk religion is not accomodating to poor people. As a rule, poor people are less interested in the niveau of the jokes in closed assemblies they feel too ugly and dumb to join, and more interested in whether you’re willing to mutually take care of children, open a place at your home for a stranger crash after an eviction, fund-raise for prisoners, provide a fake letter of recommendation for someone looking for a job, share medicines with the uninsured (n.b. lots of lumpens are uninsured in Germany). At the very least, open up for someone to bum a cig and talk.
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