Divide Yourself; Then, Conquer

(note: I may use the gender-neutral “them,” “they,” “their,” and “theirs” to refer to imagined persons)

I want to start by saying that I’m skeptical of Starhawk’s proposed solutions. It seems to me that her positions aren’t necessarily unique, or even rare, among social movements. But first, I want to try to outline the problem and move on from there.

It seems clear that there’s a tendency in the last several centuries toward various comminutions: mind separated from body, grace as something acquired from outside ourselves, Christianity’s division into various denominations, divisions of labor, the dissolutions of our communities, and so on and so forth. Something similar seems to have long been happening to the left. Some people seem to have concluded that there’s no hope for a much better future, so we should resign ourselves to making improvements on the margins. I should clarify what that means because it could easily be taken in a number of ways. On one hand, I think that most social activists feel that there’s no good reason to privilege some future utopia, in which everything is perfect, over the contemporaneous improvement of the conditions under which people—especially traditionally marginalized people—live. That said, the thesis that says that we should stop looking at solving broad issues of power and focus on smaller, less ambitious movements is one that finds its logical end in each of us fighting against the particular configuration of oppressions that each of us as individuals feels, in solidarity with everyone else. Such an approach would, then, fail to recognize that it’s these particularized struggles that is the very cause for the oppressions that each of us feels. That is, we all help to constitute and reproduce power, so we all have some ability to add or subtract to or from the oppressive systems that rule over our lives. Instead of coming to the conclusion that we need to band together if we’re ever going to stop any, let alone all, of these problems, what often seems to happen is that we come to the conclusion that we should divide our efforts up so that smaller and smaller groups fight for fewer and fewer demands—the hope perhaps being that all of these movements would collectively apply enough pressure to cause broader change while specifically-targeted actions could achieve more specific goals in the interim. Juris enumerates several of the various movements, their different strategies, their different concerns, where they come from, etc. There is something very modernistic in this approach and it also seems, on its face, self-defeating.

Starhawk proposes that we should “be loudly and clearly identified as antiracist and antisexist.” (194) I agree that we should do that, but that doesn’t seem to me to be a solution. She goes on to describe what good allyship means, including developing “personal, not just political relationships,” “raising the issue of diversity,” “sharing resources” and “opportunities,” “interrupting oppression,” and “offering support” (199). Again, I agree that these are things that we should do, but I’m not sure how they help to integrate these movements or to produce substantive changes.

It seems to me that if social movements were truly serious both about intersectional considerations and about effecting broad, meaningful change, one place to begin to try to solve some of these problems would be to try to restart efforts to desegregate US society. When whites and POC are living in the same communities, seeing their conditions as the same as one another’s, seeing their fates and plights as the same as one another’s, then this would increase the common ground on which they could stand and help to develop badly-needed social pidgins, patois, and creoles. In other words, what Starhawk’s chapter showed was that people from differing backgrounds often have such differing experiences, cultures, and languages that there’s no hope for effective communication and action. By trying to desegregate society, there could be more reason to hope for the overcoming of these obstacles, as opposed to simply trying harder, as Starhawk seems to be suggesting. (Not to intentionally be too Marxist-in-an-archaic-annoying-way, but it also occurs to me that the fight for less working hours is another one that seems long dead but potentially highly relevant.)

While I’m talking about possible solutions, it also occurs to me that part of the problem on the left has always been that the left goes stale. This makes perfect sense. How relevant are factory unions today, anyway? And, even when they did have power, they spent so much time trying to negotiate with capitalists in order to make workers happy that it’s easy to see how other social movements and social consciousnesses began to outflank these supposed leftists. My point is that this seems inevitable in a more general way. As radical entities come to have power, they tend to have to deal with elements closer to the center in order to make things happen. If someone spends all their time compromising with people they disagree with, ideas about what can be attained and what should be fought for might become what would seem more realistic, i.e. less radical.

I’m sympathetic to Grubačić’s view of anarchism as non-sectarian, non-vanguardist, and non-elitist (39-40), but it seems to me that his conception privileges academia and professional activists over more common manifestations of anarchism. I especially appreciated when he said “creating webs of solidarity can make all of them more powerful.” (40) In part, Grubačić seems to privilege intellectual engagement in order to make power more diffuse and more equitable—if everyone has access to a great amount of knowledge, then it becomes harder for any class of people to exploit another. I’m sympathetic to this argument, as well. His framing of positive and negative liberties seemed odd to me (41). Positive freedoms are those that allow some people to exploit resources (including labor) at the expense of other people’s access to those resources, often to the very serious detriment of those deprived. I don’t think that anarchism’s problem has likely ever been a lack of advocacy for positive freedom, even if I agree that a utopian imaginary is a good thing (41-2). I also might oppose him (he doesn’t go into sufficient detail) when he takes issue with the “the worse, the better” concept (42). I think that exactly what’s necessary now, perhaps more than ever, is to undercut the privilege of those who have the most. A society in which people were willing to give things up is one in which people could perhaps eventually be on level ground. In the long run, I propose that what we need isn’t so much to focus on greater empowerment; instead, we need more disempowerment, from which more equitable empowerment (and, therefore, necessarily greater empowerment for many of the disempowered) would follow. To be clear, the short-run is a different case, but Grubačić seems to be more focused on developing a long-term strategy. His love for Chomsky and the Enlightenment makes me nauseous.

“Emergence” made the point that the Zapatista movement is in dialogue with various movements around the world. It further expressed that there is a tendency for these movements to recognize the various ways by which unequal power distributions hurt various people in various ways, albeit that the various carryings out of these forms of oppression tend to carry similarities, as well. Especially, the forms of these oppressions’ beneficiaries are often common between the different forms of these oppressions. Juris argues similarly.

“Emergence: an irresistible global uprising.” We Are Everywhere. New York: Verso. 2003.

Grubačić, Andrej. “Towards Another Anarchism.” The World Social Form: Challenging empires. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. 35-43.

Juris, Jeffrey. Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press. 2008. 27-60.

Starhawk. “Building a Diverse Movement.” Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. 2002. 179-200.

On Cultural Exchange

(Note: links in references aim to give a cursory understanding of the underlying thoughts to which they correspond. In more robust works by the authors referenced, they give much more thorough explanations than those embodied by the explanations given in the linked pieces.)

We live in a contentious and divided time. More and more, people seem to silo themselves among people who think and act just as they do, often choosing to see people who do differently as inimical to themselves, regardless of what the evidence might say.

An important question has arisen in regard to the place of contemporary cultural exchange, and for good reason. While it may be easy to point out that cultural exchange is a phenomenon that has always been with us, the stakes seem to have never been so high. Changes to art, religious practices, food products and preparations, languages, and other forms of culture have always been influenced by interactions between people of different cultures, leading to appreciable innovations in all of the above. However, cultural exchange under capitalism takes on a different form and involves different stakeholders acting on different motivations than on those embodied by past people. Perhaps this is increasingly the case.

The appropriations of blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop musics, Mexican and Chinese foods (especially “fusion” varieties), minority-founded revolutionaries’ salutations (“Peace in the Middle East,” “Power to the people,” etc.), emoji, parts of language, aspects of “exotic” religions, etc., ad nauseam increase at an increasing rate as global capitalism spreads its tendrils into more and more isolated locales, sped up by the incredibly rapid dissemination of communication technology and the like. Under capitalism, this more and more takes on the quality of commodity fetishism and postmodern jockeying for hipness currency (which then leads to commodity fetishism as well). Corporate communications reference the coolness and hipness of things, throwing in catch phrases and cultural references that give corporations credibility to younger, and more diverse, demographics. By doing so, they’re able to sell goods and services similarly extracted from cultures not their own, by means of cultures not their own, in order to cultivate and harvest the products of new markets, i.e. profits.

But, is cultural exchange always a problem? If it has always taken place, when and why did it start being a problem? Can it be avoided? In essence, why did this happen and what is to be done?

To address the first question first, it’s difficult to say whether cultural exchange is necessarily problematic on its own. What’s clearer is that it has likely almost always taken place and is almost definitely very difficult to avoid. Consider maybe the most common form of cultural exchange: that of communication between two peoples who speak different languages. It would appear inevitable for one culture to adopt some of the other culture’s words; after all, some languages have words for things that other cultures don’t. So, is this problematic? In order to consider what cases are and are not problematic, perhaps some examples would help.

If we think of pre-capitalist England, shortly after the Norman invasion, it would have been clearly problematic if the mostly Frankish-speaking king had gone down to the peasantry and addressed them in mostly Germanic language in order to try to win their favor. It would have been problematic because the king would have been dishonest and pandering for his (forgive the gendering, but the kings were all men) own benefit. Otherwise, it is difficult to imagine that most forms of pre-capitalist cultural exchange would have been so problematic, but this may become clearer later.

To help to think of why appropriation under capitalism is problematic, we might consider Paul Simon’s well-received and incredibly successful (by capitalist standards [i.e. highly profitable]) 1986 album, Graceland, which made heavy use of African sounds, including performances by African musicians. Controversy around the album’s release had to do with its apparent break with the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which addressed a highly tense issue of that time. What was not then controversial in the mainstream was Simon’s appropriation of African music. Simon decontextualized and recontextualized African musical forms and performance styles, repackaging the cultural products with rock and folk music aspects, and he gained personal accolades, as well as considerable profits from the production and release of the album.

But what, exactly, made this problematic? It might have been less problematic had Simon chosen to dedicate a track on the album to describing the historical legacies of the musical forms he was exploiting, including paying homage to prominent musical figures in Africa. Had he then donated the profits to African initiatives to help Africa and Africans, this also would have been less problematic than what he instead did. Simon exploited the work and innovations made by African musicians; he failed to clearly pay sufficient respect to the histories and contexts of the musics; and he benefitted greatly without having given back to those from whom he had taken these musics.

Borrowing from cultures seems to be somewhat inevitable, but these exchanges take on different forms. On one hand, privileged capitalists are often able to freely take at will what appears to them beneficial to take. On the other hand, people might experience a reality by which their experience of culture is inherently and unavoidably bimodal (or even multimodal), forcing them to operate on multiple cultural planes—in such a case, the deployment of one or the other set of cultural understandings and phenomena seems unavoidable and devoid of some of the problematic aspects of capitalistic appropriation. Between these two forms of cultural exchange lies a wide range of forms of cultural exchange by which some problems are avoided and some aren’t.

If someone grows up in a community primarily comprised of people of a different culture from their own, it is completely reasonable that this person might adopt many of the cultural norms of the people from this other culture. This can appear problematic if the person adopting these norms is a person whose difference affords them privilege not afforded to the people who embody the cultural practices being adopted. In such a case, the culture-taker can be faced with a choice of altering their behavior if it occurs to them (through their own inquiry or the influence of others) that this might be appropriate. If not, then it is difficult to see how a solution might present itself.

If someone grows up in a community of people who share their own cultural heritage, then it is easy to see why their adoption of others’ cultural aspects would come into question. It may be that such a person enters a social context in which it appears appropriate to adopt these foreign cultural practices, but it requires a choice on the part of the agent. At this point, if they are confronted with the problematic presented by the situation, the choice should be clear.

Often, the difficulty in these fraught social situations lies in the inherent tension that arises when a problematic case of cultural exchange appears. Blame of a particular agent appears to be unreasonable (for better understanding of this position, please see the work of Robert Sapolsky) and violent. In essence, blaming someone seems to be both without merit and it perpetuates the tools of privilege and power in an ironic reflexive (albeit mistargeted) response to capitalism. While violence toward those who control the most significant levers of power may be tempting, violence is proven less effective than nonviolence (the work of Erica Chenoweth helps here), while also presenting the inherent contradiction and paradox of responding with the ultimate expression of power in order to address the inherently problematic phenomenon of unequal power (along with helping to perpetuate this very phenomenon), but that is a subject appropriate for further discussion at a later point.

What appears to be an appropriate response to the problems presented by cultural exchange, then (as in many other cases), is to observe, learn, educate, speak out, and do what is in one’s power in order to raise awareness and to help to try to change the oppressive system in which these phenomena take place.