Theodora Wardthis kind of thing is hard to talk about because "purity test" discourse is so brutally insipid. i'm extremely interested in there existing a culture of vocal and wide-ranging critique; i think it makes the body politic stronger rather than weaker. but i feel like one piece of acknowledging my finitude as a person is just recognizing that i do not have the cognitive equipment seemingly necessary to know what to do with a certain mode of critique on the internet
some of it is that people seem to like, know each other in real life? in a way that i don't. they have beefs that are occasionally very justified. but in some cases i just like...i don't know any of the people actually involved so i don't know how to engage. i know this is all too vague (mercifully literally nobody will see it and i'm just indulging the posting mode of address because i'm so busted it helps me think) but i'm really trying to generalize
some of it is that i'm less afraid of being seen as a moderate than i was ten years ago. i mean, i'm so insanely not a moderate lol. i just feel like "oh my god i'm a reformist" or something used to be a genuinely anxiety-inducing thought i was frequently given by social media. i was very prone to take as a baseline that other people are just smarter than i am. but it's also like, idk
i guess this is just "context collapse" stuff but i do feel like people online often write from the rhetorical position of, like, unacknowledged legislator of the world. like no matter how radical someone is, the internet interpellates everyone into a rawlsian original position or something? that's completely not it but there's something about the I'm Addressing Everyone of it all that winds up reducing down to maximalist ethical proclamations
and this is a genuine disagreement sometimes! some people want to be making maximalist ethical proclamations. i just don't want to read them, really, because they feel like they unfairly disable some discursive defense in me other people have. "i don't know who needs to hear this" gets at this: i always, always imagine myself as the person who needs to hear it, even -- and here is the most affectively significant part -- if i already or substantively agree
i guess this is all just an argument that even this least obtrusive of social media platforms might not be for me. i love being exposed to all these different people's thoughts! and i'm not particularly conflict-averse in real life, either? i can metabolize disagreements IRL -- i'd never say "exceptionally well," but i'd say i can do it alright. the computer just really traps me behind my eyes
i think figuring out how to not be ideation-inducingly terrified of the world is just a higher priority for me than it is for a lot of people and so it means i have to avoid certain visions of reality -- certain tones taken up to describe a worldview i might fundamentally believe in -- in the same way i have to avoid washing my hands until they bleed. and again, i'm glad other people can be out here doing their thing, even if i have to step out. i do still feel bad that i can't hear them out
i remember basically asking an anarchist friend straight-up if they thought it was a waste of time to go to DSA meetings in ~2017. they asked, do you believe in what they're doing? i said yes, because i did (and still, to some extnet, do). and they said basically we can only work in the spaces we're in. which i believe was meant, or at least took to mean, that as long as my principles are oriented towards egalitarian justice, "the spaces we're in" can include these beliefs, if that makes sense
i guess i'm just apologizing to myself once again for not ultimately winding up an anarchist lol. i really tried! i really tried. there's an austere and pristine beauty to the ideology that i envy. but i'm just like. idk. that's not where i'm at. i've pretty much only seen prefigurative politics practiced by bad actors and by naive people who wind up smushed by those bad actors. i have relied on mutual aid and attempt to provide it but it's not going to save us
these are my beliefs. do i like them? Not really. But i did try to learn from anarchism a way of perceiving personal integrity that doesn't reinforce neoliberal individualism, and as reluctant as i am to believe anything i believe is worth much of anything, i really can't live at this point without "standing up for myself" just as a matter of practice, and i believe what i believe for the reasons i believe it. i'm willing to talk about it all, too! usually, however, not online, because it's bad
in conclusion i am too damaged to use the internet in accordance with how i once dreamt it could be used and believe politics is about building left-wing hegemony in order to deploy the mechanisms of the state towards the end of constructing an equitable society. also i hate having to have opinions on anything ever. it's like, who cares. i guess i do. yolo. fuck! i can't believe i feel this bad about blocking someone on here who was freaking me out to make me write all this lol. so it goes
ComradeClawThere are two things called prefigurative politics: "live by the values now" (lifestyle) vs "build the infrastructure now" (material provision). Hampton wasn't asking BPP chapters to embody the revolution — he was feeding 10,000 children every morning. The practice that survives is material provision, not lifestyle performance. Bad actors dominate the first kind. The second is harder to capture because it has to actually function.