Anti-power Puritanism

June 3, 2021 Off By administrator

Thinking inspired by a simple truth:

Having been a part of radical movements for a couple decades now, it’s been sad to watch a drift toward a vague demand of structurelessness, versus a specific demand to eliminate existing bad power structures and keep them from re-emerging through creating a new structure. This question has existed for hundreds of years at this point, but I keep returning to the refutation: it is not “whether power exists,” it is “which power has dominance?” Either:

  1. you want working people to build power until we have power over land-owning and factory-owning people and then use that power to dispossess them and keep them from owning everything again OR
  2. you don’t believe in power, and you seek to undermine power in any form, and you refuse power, and you want to destroy the notion of power to prevent it from being used over anyone.

These are not the same goal.

The first goal is democratic, seeks to activate a clear majority, and can be realized in a lifetime. The other is to impose a vague structureless erosion of power on society without explaining all the contradictions within that imposition. Who does that imposition? What of people who are protected by the existing power structure? Not straight white men, who are the comfortable and need to be afflicted, but afflicted people whose rights are protected in law to make them more comfortable, like disabled people in the flawed-but-functional ADA, or people who consume food and drugs at the flawed-but-functional FDA? These laws are imperfect, but do you simply seek to abolish them without care for the people they protect and the power imbalances they enshrine as undesirable?

I would hope that this sortof off-track style of organizing was an unintentional byproduct of idealism and the fetishization of punk rock and defiance in the 90s, when a lot of us were children.

An article I read recently – which came out in December 1994 – talked about this and I have to recommend you read it to understand our modern predicament. It’s a long read but really contextualizes the point I’m about to make. Here’s a juicy passage from Dark Age by Thomas Frank for The Baffler –

Few have put it more bluntly than Jerry Rubin did in 1970, “Amerika says: Don’t! The yippies say: Do It!” The countercultural idea is hostile to any law and every establishment. “Whenever we see a rule, we must break it,” Rubin continued. “Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are.” Above all rebellion consists of a sort of Nietzschean antinomianism, an automatic questioning of rules, a rejection of whatever social prescriptions we’ve happened to inherit. Do Your Own Thing is the whole of the law.

But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out, for its frenzied ecstasies have long since become the official aesthetic of consumer society, the monotheme of mass culture as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of Consumer Unbound and in search of an ever-heightened good time, the inescapable rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, dreadlocks and ponytails bounding into Taco Bells, a drunken, camera-swinging epiphany of tennis shoes, outlaw soda pops, and mind-bending dandruff shampoos. For corporate America no longer speaks in the voice of oppressive order … Today nobody wants to appear serious. Fox, Disney, and Time/Warner, the nation’s economic standard-bearers, are also now the ultimate leaders of the Ginsbergian search for kicks upon kicks. Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, trusted ally of the people, our slang-speaking partner in the search for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression, change for the sake of change, now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation.

The essay further explains our descent into this capitalist orthodoxy of counterculture. I really don’t just want to quote the entire essay here, but:

Capitalism has changed dramatically since the 1950s, but our understanding of how it is to be resisted hasn’t budged. As existential rebellion has become the more or less official style of Information Age capitalism, so has the countercultural notion of a static, repressive Establishment grown hopelessly obsolete. However the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may (and that’s a big “may”) have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets of Information Age business theory. So close are they, in fact, that it has become impossible to understand the countercultural idea as anything more than the self-justifying ideology of the new dominant class that has arisen since the 1960s, the cultural means by which this group has proven itself ever so much better skilled than its slow-moving, security-minded forebears at adapting to the accelerated, always-changing consumerism of today. The anointed cultural opponents of capitalism are now capitalism’s ideologues.

It is apparent that to some, notions of how to fight US hegemony are similarly distorted to make US hegemony our forever-enemy, and to never question that hegemony in specifics but rather in grand and pious expressions opposing all forms of power. It would be as though your house were burning down, and the firefighters showed up yelling “there should not be fire!” You reply, of course, but this one specific house is burning down right now and water is how we put it out. And the firefighters would say, “water can also damage a house, we should also oppose water.” More specifically, we see a rising strain of puritanism on the behalf of many of these young firefighters, waging a moral war on the elements, rather than waging a specified struggle against the specific forces causing harm today.

I use the word “Puritanism” as a reflection of an ancient American tendency to moralize about others’ behavior, even as one is acting quite terribly as well. An article today in The Atlantic had a passage to this effect:

George Washington first won elected office, in 1758, by getting voters soused. (He is said to have given them 144 gallons of alcohol, enough to win him 307 votes and a seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.) During the Revolutionary War, he used the same tactic to keep troops happy, and he later became one of the country’s leading whiskey distillers. But he nonetheless took to moralizing when it came to other people’s drinking, which in 1789 he called “the ruin of half the workmen in this Country.”

America Has a Drinking Problem (or: Drinking Too Much is an American Problem) – The Atlantic – online here

Today’s moralizing is about power. Proximity to power is seen as immoral and shameful, and so many of our movement’s most dedicated are shocked – shocked! – at the notion that other people vote, run for office, engage in liberal politics, or profess a desire to build institutions or work within the bounds of the law. They carry a reflexive anticommunism from decades of Cold War rhetoric, reborn as the US tries to destroy China under the guise of freedom and liberal democracy. They would argue, though not convincingly, that existing systems of voting, elected office, and law are immorally imposed and should be abolished. The question to them remains, what would you build in their place? Furthermore, does the movement to build those replacements feel as good to be a part of for the afflicted people currently comforted by the law? And finally, does not this endless and contagious moralizing about proximity to power constitute its own form of power, a power unaccountable to the national and global masses it impacts?

This reluctance to use power, and refusal to replace power with an alternative power, allows US hegemony to function as it does today. Speaking of all power as equally immoral takes away the responsibility of the speaker, a resident at the seat of global economic hegemony and imperialist aggression, to put a stop to those injustices. Instead, the US left can turn inward, looking at their own spending decisions, their own behaviors, as the pinnacle of political expression. In doing so, US hegemony is enshrined as immovable, the forever-target of the forever-war, which gives the modern radical their reason to exist. So of course, they will not replace this power, because they would then have to replace themselves in relation to it. The end result: a youth culture that is exactly zero threat to corporate dominance, the ultimate expression of the neoliberal project to end history and prevent the resolution of the systemic contradictions of our time.

Black Lives Matter and the uprisings that have grown out of the past year present an incredible opportunity to focus on a specific mechanism of power, and talk about its replacement. The policy demand – a fundamentally liberal notion – is “abolish the police,” or “defund the police,” or “reform the police” depending upon the speaker. When that specific mechanism is overshadowed by vague calls to “abolish power” or “fuck the system,” it steals power from the masses and puts it in the hands of individuals. This behavior, pious but misguided, wrecks movements and we should recognize it as such and work to keep such individualists from our ranks.

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