Leona's blog

05/11: the once a year show

i appreciate the RAT very much, with all its attendant frustrations (mostly along the lines of too many activists), and the fact that i actually travel across this insanely huge continent to go to it (meaning that i have to put up with being locked into big traveling cans, with screaming children and plastic people and unhappy workers offering me synthetic substances while pretending to be robots - i could go on) is an indication of how much i really do think it is a valuable thing.
so if i sound too cranky in the following post, put it down to my slow recovery rate.

this year i was not only doing my own workshop, which ended up being disappointing (i take full responsibility for this - more on that in a later post, i think, as well as reports on the other workshops i attended), but was also asked to be on a panel about green capitalism and how to re-invigorate the eco-anarchist movement.
you may ask "why would you allow yourself to engage in a panel when the introductory terms already make your blood vessels pop?" to which i can only respond that

my history in movement circles gives me the experience and some credibility that i continue to think should be used to derail those exact circles.
in this particular case, while the people requesting my attendance didn't know anything about me and merely needed a fourth participant (and perhaps one who addressed some sort of identity quota - but then, i am cynical), i had some useful um... accomplishments that made my participation more appropriate than some. i could not deny to myself that the fact that for years i was the president of the board of a grassroots environmental organization, that i have been thinking about environmental issues since grade school, that i can speak the language as well as anybody else, were all reasons that it made sense for me to be the one to go on this panel and attempt to kick some ass.
the other panelists were one more philosophically minded person who was working for a green company, and two activists, one of whom works for ngos on environmental issues. (yes, that means that there were two people working for green companies.) in the middle of these people who were talking about how to encourage people to do more/better "work" (ah, the assumptions of the "w" word), was me. this was what i said...
We all know that capitalism is all about recuperation - it isolates pieces of the things that we care about and need and then sells them back to us. Anything that can be isolated -- water, air, food, our own bodies, relationships, our own lives -- can go through this process. Obviously this has happened with multiple things and issues that are considered environmental, from recycling to organic food.
When this happens people get attached to the symbolism of, for example, buying organic food, even though the food is grown on factory farms with disenfranchised workers, and shipped from out of state, and wrapped in plastic. Even more ironic, organic food becomes a luxury item, a status symbol, meaning that the market works to keep it scarce so that the prices remain high.
So in order to create fundamental social change, we have to learn a different way of thinking, one that doesn't isolate us.
As a separate but related point, speaking clearly in favor of something when talking about recuperation is contradictory, since there is no single concrete act or idea that I can present that cannot be taken out of context and sold back to me. So I speak in generalities that it is up to you (and me) to make real in our own lives.

The premise I want to bring here is the idea that the environment, and environmentalism, are concepts that are part of the problem. Part of what we as anarchists are trying to get rid of. They are concepts based on an augustinian understanding: that we are separate from, better than, outside of, the world. What does it look like to consider ourselves part of what we are saving? How does that change our relationship to our actions? It means that we don't talk about organizing other people. It means that we address issues that have a deep resonance with us. It means that we don't make money from doing the work that we're doing. It means that we don't move from one issue to the next, especially not because we think that the next issue is the one that will awaken the masses. Organizing other people, trying to awaken other people, is treating other people as if they are the the same inert mass that environmentalism tends to make of the non-humans in the world. Anarchists are not the chosen people. We have something important to offer the world, but it is not salvation, and we have to stop using christian constructs to interact with the world.

nobody responded to this, which was by far the briefest presentation on the panel.
in fact all the audience questions completely ignored my points.
feedback to me later was that it would've been helpful if i'd pointed that out, and next time i will.

interestingly, a man who i'd never seen before, one of the older people at the conference, came up to me later and said that he was happy that i was disagreeing with people, and that he'd lost the ability to even talk in these workshops because he disagreed so much and got so mad that he wasn't sure how to articulate his points.
bonding with cranky old people makes me happy.
maybe that will be a future workshop.

p.s. there aren't enough images of angry people on the web. some artist should do something about that.
gdmt.

looking again at my presentation statement, i realize again how densely i pack things. there are at least three serious concepts in this statement - the idea that environmentalism is based on christian concepts, that people getting paid for their political work is a bad idea, that organizing is a bad idea, that positive visions are more likely to be recuperated, and that recuperation works through isolating/disconnecting things (okay, five ideas) - that are all deep enough to need exploration. and i string them together and dump them in people's laps.
not surprising that people didn't respond, when i think of it that way.
i have this idea that rich, dense things are good for people's imagination, that they encourage people to think about things on their own terms, that spoon feeding ideas and connections to people is a bad thing, not only disrespectful but deleterious to their ability to figure things out and do their own thinking.
i guess this is one of the ways that i remain idealistic and optimistic.
or lazy?