Submitted by An_Old_Big_Tree in Anarchism
Like liberals, post-left and anti-social interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes called “biopolitics”) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called “necropolitics”). This framework is decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly “produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject position.
Jackie Wang - Against Innocence
Necropolitics (PDF) - Achille Mbembe
anarchist_critic wrote
The most bullshit critique of the post-left. "Waaah waaah you're not going on about racism and colonialism every five seconds and that means you're racist". "Anything that's not going on about race every five seconds Embeds White Assumptions and therefore is racist". People coming up with this bullshit never bother to actually prove that there's any "white assumptions" in the pieces they criticise. They just assert that, since it disagrees with them, there must be. Lupus Dragonowl destroyed this line of argument years ago, showing how it was rooted in ressentiment. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lupus-dragonowl-against-identity-politics https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-the-continuing-appeal-of-nationalism
It's pretty absurd to accuse the post-left of "minimizing direct relations of force" when so much of post-left theory is insurrectionary and anti-pig. Tiqqun say that "we are living under a police occupation". How the fuck is that minimizing direct relations of force?!
It's similarly absurd to suggest that the post-left ignores "Black and Native social death" given the strength of anarcho-primitivism and the frequency of accounts of genocide of indigenous peoples. Not to mention that Ward Churchill is Native, Aragorn! is Native, Rod Coronado is Native, Hakim Bey is Muslim, Alejandro de Acosta is Latino, and Fredy Perlman is Jewish. And that there's insu cells in Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Indonesia.
Oh, and by the way, capitalism DOES encourage middle-class and politically aspirational Black, Native, women, LGBTQ+ and other marginalised people to produce themselves as docile conformist subjects by identifying with their marginalised identities. And a lot of them fall for it. That's where idpol comes from. This shit isn't being formulated by black kids in the ghettos or Brazilian shanty town residents or starving Ethiopians, it's being formulated by middle-class academics on $100,000-a-year contracts, whose job is to channel and tame the radicalism of marginalised groups. It's in their interest to deny the importance of capitalism and statism, and focus instead on racially divisive themes (which divide and rule the oppressed) and on trivia such as "cultural appropriation" and language policing and how many black people are in movies. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/07/pers-o07.html https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/21/the-invention-of-the-white-race/
Social death is easily theorised within non-idpol radicalism in relation to the demand to conform and the "relative surplus population" (see Karatasli et al. on the Arab Spring, and Clover's Riot, Strike, Riot for examples). The relative surplus population does not produce value and so is treated as disposable by capital, and sometimes its brutal treatment serves as a threat to included workers. It tends to be racialised because of the historical distribution of primary and secondary labour market roles, but there's a growing white male sector of the relative surplus population who were very prominent in the 2011 unrest. Because the left can't unglue its eyes from the antics of middle-class spokespeople for the "marginalised", this layer are effectively pushed towards the alt/far-right (and by the way, a lot of the non-white relative surplus population are also in the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, RSS, Mara Salvatrucha, Mungiki, PCC, or whatever the local equivalents are, because this style of gang/sect politics is actually a very effective survival strategy).
Post-left anarchy actually has the most effective response to the situation of the relative surplus population: recovery of subsistence, creation of autonomous zones, struggle against state repression, immediatism, illegalism, squatting, skipping, Travelling, DIY. Creating a world where no-one is disposable. While idpols whine to the powerful to check their privilege and stop being so mean to us poor oppressed middle-class academics, post-left anarchy is actually building another world - and idpols are doing their best to sabotage it.
If you can't see how alienation, capitalism, the state, prisons, biopolitics, industrial society, ecocide, are structural oppressions just as significant as race or gender - and that recognising and fighting these oppressions is not at all a matter of "white assumptions" - then you're not fighting the system, you're a liberal fighting for racial and gender equality WITHIN the system.
And if you're "against innocence" then you're FOR GUILT, which means you're FOR SUPEREGO, which means you're AGAINST DESIRE, which means you're part of the authoritarian system of repression, inhibition and hatred created by civilised society.