there's our catastrophe

Reading David Graeber is such a weird experience for me.  he had all these political opinions and then realised quite late in life, after he’d already forged a solid career as an anthropologist, that he could actually act on them as part of a Social Movement.  then he started writing on anarchist social movements in North America.  I actually really like most of the things I’ve read by him, but it’s strange to see this guy who clearly knows a lot more than me about lots of things get really excited about the idea of “spokescouncils” and want to explain them to me like it’s something I’ve never heard of before.  And I mean, I want to challenge that reaction in myself, because I want to challenge the idea that if you don’t get involved in social movements when you’re very, very young, you’ve lost your chance.  But it also does actually shit me?  I’ve been active in anarchist-y social movements about as long as he has, why don’t I have a desk?  I am also wondering what this says about anthropology and about the rest of Graeber’s work.  What does it mean that I am vaguely annoyed by some of his work, but only the ethnographies of environments I’m familiar with? 

I should mention here that I don’t trust people who are not constantly challenging themselves — which describes a lot of the people I’ve met who critique theory as “inaccessible”.  I’m mostly talking about white, professional-class humanities students with English as a first language and no learning/developmental disabilities that make it particularly difficult to parse nonstandard language.  That is the #1 population I have heard make this critique of theory, by a huge distance.   But theory’s not inaccessible — to them. The word you are looking for is “challenging”.  I don’t understand how you even justify going to uni and doing a humanities degree if you don’t see the value of theory.  and like — I know so many people for whom this knowledge is a lifeline, who’ve struggled so hard just to get in the door — and then there’s a bunch of losers just vaguely percolating about because university seemed like the Thing To Do and it was the easiest choice for them, talking shit about what kind of loser actually thinks this is important, lol, eat pills, meet people who go to cool parties, complete your socialisation into the middle+ classes, that’s what university is for, that’s way less self-indulgent than theory. 

Obviously there are a lot of ways to challenge yourself and develop your understanding of the world, and some people are challenging themselves just by getting up every morning, or 70% of mornings, or staying alive at all, and there are a lot of problems with the applicability and accessibility of the loose conceptual lineage we call theory — but c’mon, some of us are just being lazy, and that’s a fundamentally untrustworthy quality, if you ask me.  to contextualise this, I once had an anglo Art History intentional drop-out from an elite uni throw their hands in the air and snap at me for my “academic language”.  The language in question was the phrase “social democracy”.  if this isn’t you, I’m not talking about you, but trust me, these people exist, and they make me a bit defensive sometimes, yes, okay, that’s true. 

However, I also don’t trust people who spend a lot of time developing their theory and then decide to put this elaborate conceptual framework into practice.  I’ve organised with sheltered radical theory nerds before and it’s a fucking nightmare.  they think they know more than everyone but actually they’re pretty useless.  theory needs to develop in concert with action or it gets weird and floppy and self-indulgent. 

I suspect this was what was going on with a lot of the problems with Occupy but I don’t really know.  this wasn’t even really about Graeber in the end.

mewmewfoucault:

The Adult Privilege Checklist

i don’t have a whole lot to say about this right now, but, quickly:

[1] it’s pretty fucked - and very often quite sexist, classist, and racist - when parents and other primary caregivers are structurally pushed out of activist and organizing spaces because of their status as parents/caregivers and the social responsibility that comes with that

[2] it’s pretty fucked for lots of reasons when kids are excluded from activist communities, too, obvs

[3] i really really really wish that i saw more children’s rights / pro-child folks being more vocally critical about the ways that (certainly in the u.s. and undoubtedly in other nations as well) parents and caregivers who are poor or non-white or immigrant or in some contexts queer are systemically denied resources that would give them and their children a greater number of choices about how they can act and what they can do with their lives - while those same non-normative parents and caregivers are regularly demonized as too stupid/violent/uncivilized/irresponsible/unnatural to be ‘good’ and so have their parenting and caregiving actions policed by the state and by privileged folks around them - sometimes to the point of temporarily or permanently having their kids taken or coerced away from them in unjust and oppressive ways and for unjust and oppressive reasons

idk i just overwhelming get the feel from a lot of pro-child stuff (as opposed to pro-parent or pro-kids-and-the-folks-who-take-care-of-them stuff, which definitely has a different tenor) that the rhetoric tends to boil down to blaming bad and mean and repressive parents/caregivers and condescending laws, rather than engaging in a more complex analysis of the ways that various communities and cultures construct childhood and youth and adulthood and parenting and caregiving, and how those constructions are implemented and prevented and modified in a world saturated with capitalism racism sexism colonialism etc - i always feel like the ideal parent/caregiver of the pro-child narrative has lots and lots of time and energy and resources and money to freely spend with their kid(s), and that really really bugs me

I agree with all of this, and also:

the people I know who are most vocal about child rights of the kind delineated in this checklist are generally not parents or primary caregivers or people who spend a significant amount of time with children or even teens and to be honest I think they’re generally operating off a half-remembered romanticised idea of themselves as children.  there’s just this totally abstract holier-than-thou thing where people think that being pro-child can be condensed down to: don’t be paternalistic.  which of course you can do if you never fucking engage with kid’s lives!  it’s totally exhausting looking after a kid.  I’m wiped out after babysitting my friends’ seven-year-old for a single evening.  It takes me an hour of begging, arguing, and pleading to get him to go to bed.  and if he doesn’t go to bed on time then it’s even worse the next day.  I’m not going to fucking judge my working and studying single parent friend for not negotiating on bedtime, jesus christ. 

I also feel weird about discussions of ageism that heedlessly analogise childhood to axes of oppression like race and gender.  (note: I think age-based oppression exists but I don’t find “ageism” to be a particularly useful way of conceptualising it.) analogies often obscure more than they elucidate and this is no exception.  not every oppression operates the same way, not everyone is the same, children are different to adults.  like for example I’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s fucked to deploy “childish” and like terms as insults, or that people shouldn’t complain about being treated like a child.  this particularly grates on me when people chastise marginalised groups (I’m thinking especially women and people with disabilities and Indigenous people) for complaining about being infantilised.  which, ok, children are continually devalued and disempowered and that is fucked up, no argument.  but compared to child-me, I am a lot more independent and a much more sophisticated thinker and a lot less focused on my own needs.  and I expect that of adults and I would be fairly unimpressed if they hadn’t developed since childhood and I would be pissed off if people thought I hadn’t similarly developed.  and I have very different expectations of children and it would be unreasonable and unfair to project the expectations I have of adults on to them.  they don’t always have the information and life experience to make good decisions or act respectfully.  and sometimes that means I cut them some slack and sometimes that means I make decisions for them.  children. are.  different. from. adults. 

I think the point where I differ from the Tumblr Social Justice Warriors is that I don’t actually think that everyone is entitled to complete autonomy.  I think you have a responsibility to try and prevent people from harming themselves, especially if you can be pretty sure they don’t fully realise they’re causing harm to themselves.  and that includes stuff like suicide prevention or taking my friend home when she’s off her face wasted or pushing someone out of the way of a speeding car or making sure the seven-year-old goes to bed at a reasonable hour.  autonomy is always negotiated, it’s never truly absolute, everyone has some point at which they’ll step in even if it’s unasked for. and I have my boundaries too, there are points where intervention is inappropriate, no argument, of course.  but there is no such thing as total autonomy and nor is that a reasonable expectation.  some things that can’t exist are important to strive for anyway but I don’t think this is one of them. 

I would also like to note that almost without exception people who are talking about ageism are young people talking about slightly younger people.  there’s rarely any discussion of, for example, the horrific disempowerment and abuse and invisibility faced by elders in most western societies.  can we look outside our own experience for a second?  cheers. 

can we stop talking like young people are the only group marginalised by age please

While multiple factors have combined to produce a climate in which the fear of witches thrives, there is a consensus that at the root of the witch- hunts there is a fierce struggle for survival that takes the form of an intergenerational struggle.

It is young men, often unemployed, who provide the manpower for the witch-hunts, although often executing plans hatched by other actors who remain in the shadow. They are the ones who go from house to house to collect the money needed to pay a witch-finder or ambush and execute the accused. With no possibility of going to school, no prospect of making a living off the land or finding other forms of income, unable to fulfill their roles as family providers, many young men, in today’s structurally adjusted Africa, despair about their future, and are easily led to war against their communities.  Often hired and trained as mercenaries by politicians, rebel armies, private companies, or the state, they are ready to organize punitive expeditions, especially against old people whom they blame for their misfortunes and see as a burden as well as an obstacle to their wellbeing. It is in this context, that (in the words of an old Congolese man) “the youth represent a [constant threat] for us oldsters.”

Thus, older folks returning to their villages with the savings of a lifetime have found themselves charged as witches and expropriated from their houses and earnings, or worse, have been killed —hanged, buried or burned alive.  In 1996 alone, the Congolese Human Rights Monitoring Commission “recorded about 100 case where elderly people, accused of witchcraft, were hung.”  Pensioners have been a common target also in Zambia, where “village leaders are believed to be conspiring with witch-finders to strip [them] of the assets they have acquired over the years,” prompting a newspaper article to comment that “Retiring, going back home has become a risky business!”. In North rural South Africa, young men have burnt old women alive, accusing them of turning dead people into zombies in order to get ghost workers and deprive the youth of work. 

Silivia Federici, Witch-Hunting, Globalisation and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today

(I really distrust this idea that disrespect for the elderly is specific to white western cultures.  I don’t think that’s true and so what if it was?  a superficial reading of white western culture would lead us to conclude that women are highly respected, but chivalry doesn’t disprove patriarchy, it’s part of it.)