The most recent demonstration at Villawood Detention Centre in April once more displayed the level of torpor and ingrained passivity that restrains social movements in Australia from reaching any level of radical militancy that they might actually become threatening to the state. In a remarkable act of self-policing, reflecting some bizarre collectivised version of muscle memory, the demonstration automatically stopped at a one metre high brick wall that surrounds Villawood so as to gather around the area where the endless line of speakers were to be presented.
Despite the lack of police presence and just 2 security guards and 50 metres separating us from the first row of proper fences, when a couple of us crossed that imaginary line there was no inclination to follow from the mass of this demo. Just a few days after the detainees that we were acting in solidarity with had burnt their confines to the ground, and embarrassingly within sight of those still occupying the roof, the rally just stopped dead. It was another indication that a reactionary, conservative instinct has impressed itself on any potential for action here.
The purpose of this article is to identify the source of that reactive, conservative instinct as the ideology of liberalism, which has become the framework through which dissent to the status quo in Australia must always pass. It is a framework from which anarchists and other anti-authoritarian revolutionaries must detach ourselves so as to create alternative ways of expressing our disaffection with the capitalist, social democratic system we live under and our absolute rebellion against it. While I am not specifically attempting to define the entirety of liberal ideology, I will attempt to identify the ways in which this ideology manifests itself amongst revolutionary spaces and afflicts the potential of our action.
While starting from the specific point of the occurrence of a protest or demonstration, it is important to recognise that the negative impacts of liberalism extend far beyond the particular material or physical space where protest occurs. It’s most significant impact is discursive – it dominates the language of any oppositional politics to such an extent that it can become difficult to even imagine, let alone express a more radical vision. And it does so all the while claiming a position of neutrality, a supposed moral high-ground of non-politics. If it’s not seen as ideological it is because it dominates political discourse so thoroughly.
It’s really important here not to fall into the habit of speaking as if radicals and revolutionaries have politics and that liberals don’t, that they just need an injection of politics. Liberalism is very much an ideological vision – it is a way of seeing and interpreting the world and seeking change in it. The key defining feature of this ideology is the sense that society is an organisation of individuals and the state, with the state playing the role of mediating those relationships. In How Non-Violence Protects the State, Peter Gelderloos explains that:
“In this analysis, government is a neutral and passive decision-making authority that responds to public pressures. It is at best fair and at worst beset by a culture of conservatism and ignorance. But it is not structurally oppressive.”
It is accepted then, that there might be ‘injustices’, but that they can be reconciled. For liberals, it is ultimately both in ours and the state’s interests to reconcile those differences and have everything run smoothly. As citizens in the nation-state, we all ultimately have the same interests and where we do have opposing interests or opinions, we can settle them through the mediation of democracy. In other words, we can have nice capitalism.
Liberal ideology around the assumption of the freedom to protest constructs protest as an event that should happen in a certain form and look a certain way. It is viewed as the right of citizens in a democracy and plays the part of being the most visual element in a broader societal discussion around particular ‘progressive’ issues (eg, anti-war, pro-refugee, gay marriage). It is very much an event to be planned and stage-managed in minute detail so that it doesn’t step out of bounds from the ‘legitimate’ confines of mainstream discourse. The right people from the right political organisations will have to be on the speaker’s list and their supporters will carry placards that say little more than the name of that organisation (or in the case of The Greens at Villawood, no more).
This view of protest as a ‘right’ underlines how liberalism ties dissent to the functioning of the state. In Pacifism as Pathology, Ward Churchill describes the effect of this relationship:
“This comfortable scenario is enhanced by the mutual understanding
that certain levels of “appropriate” (symbolic) protest of
given policies will result in the “oppositional victory” of their modification
(i.e., really a “tuning” of policy by which it may be rendered more
functional and efficient, never an abandonment of fundamental policy
thrusts), while efforts to move beyond this metaphorical medium of
dissent will be squelched “by any means necessary” and by all parties
concerned.”
This is basically a description of the idea of the ‘spectacle of opposition’, where the occurrence of a certain amount of unthreatening protest allows the state to uphold the mirage that dissent is allowed.
The rights-based idea of protest that is dependent on a relationship with the state has defined how asylum seekers have been viewed within the ‘refugee movement’ – as they are not citizens and therefore have no rights or agency, it is us, as good liberal citizens, that must raise our voices on their behalf. It was noticeable at the Villawood rally that, despite occurring just a few days after detainees had burnt a few of the detention centre’s buildings to the ground in an extraordinarily defiant act of resistance, few speakers really referred to these actions. Further to this, a number of speakers focused particularly on the psychological effects of being kept in detention limbo. Without doubt such a situation would have damaging mental consequences for many people, however, in the context of the riot and the burning of the buildings, it seemed like some speakers had a specific agenda of pathologising militancy. The gist being that these were good people who had gone ‘mad’ inside.
Pathologising or otherwise ‘othering’ those who partake in militant action is a typical response when liberalism is the main framework through which dissent is legitimised. How this works is best expressed in a text written by Gertrude and Fuschia responding to the (liberal and authoritarian socialist) left’s outrage that the neatly stage-managed protest they had organised against the G20 meeting in Melbourne in 2006 had turned into a riot:
“A false dichotomy is set up between the role of the “disciplined”, politically mature protester and the inarticulate other. The other is positioned as a person or a group too worn out by oppression to resist tactically. This other is protested for, or on behalf of, but we must never indulge in their tactics. Both property damage and any spontaneous, emotional embodiment of resistance are seen as apolitical, as reactions to be left (pun intended) behind as we attain proper political maturity. ‘Oppressed others’ (in Redfern, Macquarie Fields, Palm Island, Lakemba) who are perhaps never expected by those who call for disciplined protest to reach the requisite levels of political maturity have been rhetorically defended for their “justified” anger. But those who set Macquarie Fields on fire are never presumed to be part of a mass resistance to capitalism.”
The thing about all this of course is that we should have no interest in having our resistance ‘legitimised’. In fact we should consider it extremely important that the idea of militant resistance is part of the everyday spaces and experiences of our lives so as to subvert that very idea that dissent can only occur in the narrowly defined ‘political’ spaces created to be separate from that.
The potential of militant spontaneity within protest is written out of the liberal idea of how change occurs, but then that shouldn’t be a surprise if we see liberalism as about changing government policy instead of changing society. Revolutionary militancy is uncontrollable and threatening. As much as it can directly confront capitalist social relations and the functioning of the state, it also challenges the comfortable view that capitalist social relations and the functioning of the state can be made ‘nicer’ through particular stage-managed types of opposition.
This is not to say that all people who partake in such demonstrations do not want real systemic change. Just that liberalism has such a monopoly on the discourse through which change is talked about in Australia – it is the canvas on which every sketch of dissent is etched. It is up to us to make a complete break from this by removing our implicit support of such scenarios – to stop thinking that it’s always better that at least something is happening. Sometimes it is better to just stand back and consider what is necessary to enact actual solidarity. Just as liberal forms of protest prop up the status quo by participating within the accepted confines of discussion around particular issues, we prop up liberal forms of dissent when we organise our actions and energy to participate within this framework.
A revolutionary view of protest should not see it as participating in a broader societal discourse of rights, reforms and ‘having our say’, but as entirely disrupting that discourse. It should remove itself from any idea of a ‘right to protest’, specifically because of how this affirms the concept of citizenship, and from that, tying ourselves to the interests and functioning of the state. The spectacle of a conformist, disempowered demonstration pleading to a higher authority must be negated. While often that negation will involve focusing our energies anywhere but those very demonstrations, there is also the potential to change the script within the physical space created by these.
Being even a little organised beforehand can do a lot to break the feeling of alienation and disempowerment that these rallies often engender. While it is completely understandable that people are skeptical about the purpose of these events it is also possible to push at the edges of these rallies and increase the level of struggle. So many other people who go to these are also looking for a way to increase the threat on the state and feel more empowered beyond pleading to higher authorities to change policy. We don’t have to be a vanguard or look to recruit them, we just need to use our methods to present alternative ways to behave beyond the ‘civilised’ walk around the block followed by speeches. Organising as a solid group that will look out for each other can lead us to having propaganda that expresses a more revolutionary politic, chants that go beyond empty sloganeering and, most importantly of course, a plan or idea about what action we are willing to take that breaks the usual codes and hopefully challenges the authority of the state a bit.
To further begin to really disrupt this dominant liberal paradigm we must be confident and assertive in organising in different forms and taking risks. A few days after the rally that has been the basis of this article, a small group of people self-organised to occupy the roof of the office of immigration minister, Chris Bowen, in solidarity with the detainees on the roof in Villawood. Apart from being a direct act of solidarity, an action like this had the effect of injecting a bit of militancy and vibrancy into an otherwise stagnant campaign around asylum seekers that had too easily fallen back onto a disempowering, ‘humanitarian’ discourse. Even the speeches from supporters on the ground that day were suddenly fiery and revolutionary.
While we are unfortunately not at a point where we can say a roof occupation can move us beyond the level of the symbolic – it occurred not because of the existence of a movement ready to fundamentally change society, but inspite of – it does immediately shift people’s concept of what is possible away from the alienating, dead-end liberalism of the usual protest. As well as taking risks with our actions, it is also important to take risks with how we articulate those actions. With the roof occupation, apart from the important secondary function of pushing the boundaries of what might be possible (assuming that its primary function was as an act of solidarity), it is additionally important to articulate its purpose in revolutionary terms so that it does not simply fall into being categorised by the standards of liberalism.
This was a lesson learnt after the protests against the G20, when what had looked like simply being just another summit protest had become a militant anti-police riot. As many people were being arrested in house raids in the months after, there was a real problem of articulating those actions in a radical way. While this problem revolved around a number of issues, its most obvious manifestation was in how even some revolutionaries who were attempting to show solidarity with arrestees constantly felt it was necessary to justify the riot within the discourse of a ‘right to protest’. A large part of why this occurred was in an attempt to win liberal-types to the solidarity campaign. However, this was only marginally successful and it might well have been more interesting and worthwhile to make the argument that people attacked the cops because, well, people don’t like the police. To see if that approach would have any broad value in building solidarity with the many people who might also have similar feelings. While a few people did try to express the politics of the protest in this way, the discursive space had once again been so thoroughly dominated by liberal rhetoric that it was hard to work out how to say something different without feeling completely off the wall.
In relation to Australia’s particularly conservative version of capitalist democracy, liberal forms of oppositional politics are reified as the legitimate forms. Legitimised, not just legally, but in a very psychological way so that passive rallies, petitions, lobbying, voting, posters in windows, etc carried out in the name of particular organisations (unions, The Greens, NGO’s, religious groups) compromise the scope of most people’s idea of dissent. These forms of dissent, needless to say, have no effect on the functioning of capitalist society and are nearly always reformist.
It is important to see the form as inherently containing the politics by which they are created. A more exciting, revolutionary approach will not suddenly explode from a series of boring rallies because their very occurrence is a sign of the embedded psychological stains of liberalism that serves to restrict the scope of dissent beyond those passive rallies. This leaves anarchists no option but to politically remove ourselves from such a framework – to start again. Hopefully we will be untangling ourselves from the ceaseless knots of reformist politics.
There are numerous examples of ways in which anarchists have become overly concerned and tangled within structures and campaigns that have no intention of moving beyond liberal reformism. While potentially controversial, it is worth naming these, although it is important to point out here that I am not absolutely arguing that engagement with these things must never happen. I am willing to accept there might be particular situational instances that makes such engagement necessary, however the problem arises when liberal reformism is seen as a strategic step towards a more revolutionary approach.
The most obvious example here, is that of choosing to constantly participate in the campaigns and structures of mainstream unions and their hierarchies in the hope that organising workers in this way will eventually empower them enough that they begin to self-organise in non-bureaucratised, non-statist forms. The recent history of unions suggests the exact opposite – that instead they disempower and pacify workers struggle. The campaign against Workchoices exemplified this in its extremely conservative rhetorical focus on ‘working families’ and in how the Unions stopped it cold when it became clear the ALP had the momentum to win the forthcoming election.
A further example is in how Greens politicians and members are seen as okay people to have alliances with or to garner support from for things that we are doing. To do this is to give tacit support to the electoral politics they are tied into and to add a particular cred to their attempts to be seen as some oppositional, ‘activist’ party. These ties exist particularly in environmentalist circles where ‘alliance-building’ of this kind is particularly entrenched. The inherent contradictions of this style of political practice are shown up in the odd alliances that have come to exist in the campaign against climate change, with revolutionaries and strident reformists often working hand in hand. It is a problem to keep choosing to partake in these liberal alliances, when so much of the remaining terrain for potentially building real revolutionary solidarity goes ignored.
Liberalism is not merely propagating a few reformist steps on the road to revolution but is instead an inversion of revolutionary practice. Even when not being practised in an ideological fashion, liberal tendencies within radical movements act as a tourniquet to all social tension by always holding back, always aiming for the reformist solution first. This is a critical issue in the Australian context. Many revolutionaries here will argue that there is nothing wrong with winning a few policy reforms in the context of a more radical movement. This position is possibly reasonable except that it is usually articulated in a simplistic, matter-of-fact kind of way without the many clauses to it being thoroughly interrogated.
The main issue is one of focus – when the main objective becomes to change government policy, to count those changes as victories and to hope these ‘victories’ are enough to pull more people into a more radical movement, the revolutionary potential ceases to exist. There is no such thing as winning enough reforms – of layering them on top of each other until some magical point where this top-heavy mass succeeds in pulling the roots out of this society. This is very different to attacking the roots at the bottom, to the existence of a revolutionary movement which through the power it builds can force the state and capital on the defensive to where they make reforms in an attempt to soothe social unrest (obviously then, there is a further question of how to take reforms ‘won’ this way to ensure they do not have that soothing function). A few victories of this sort in such a context can help strengthen solidarity between people and build an even stronger sense of empowerment.
Where there seems to be a general lack of hope that revolutionary ideas can have any purchase in the actual, grounded functioning of our day to day lives, it’s no wonder that many revolutionaries are constantly choosing to participate in broad, ‘big-issue’ campaigns. These are usually dominated by liberals and more often than not they take the form of a humanitarian-style struggling on behalf of others. Here the cliched language of ‘humanitarian emergency’ serves to hide any attempt to expose the structural causes of such an emergency or to argue for radical solutions, instead liberal tactics are once again the only non-partisan, non-ideological ones. As Slavoj Zizek argues in the book Violence:
“It is precisely the neutralisation of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and at its most effective. This is the dialectical ‘coincidence of opposites’: the actualisation of a notion or an ideology at its purest coincides with, or, more precisely, appears as its opposite, as non-ideology.”
So instead government is seen as the most likely and least ideological source of a change and so the campaign is reduced to pleading for policy reforms. Apply this analysis to campaigns against the Northern Territory intervention, refugees being locked up in detention centres or the campaign against climate change and I would argue it generally holds true.
Amongst the problems with trying to win reforms in the hope of building a bigger, more radical movement is that this style of politics invariably leads to building alliances with liberals when our energies could be better spent building solidarity with the many more people antagonistically struggling against the oppressive impositions of capital and the state on their lives. And the first step in building that solidarity is recognising the points of friction and antagonism in our own lives and treating those as the most important ‘campaigns’ we could be involved in. From there we can find where our struggles intersect with those of other people. Even in simple terms, an anarchist analysis of the the structures and functioning of capitalism suggests those intersections are numerous.
It is possible to find more inspiring methods and in doing so we should seek to reflect whatever disillusionment and antagonism exists towards mainstream political operations rather than try and ‘politicise’ that disillusionment by recuperating it into the mainstream discourse. While such recuperation would never be the explicit purpose of anarchism, when we constantly align ourselves with reformists and liberals in campaigns and ‘movements’ we are inevitably playing into this process.
Even if actual revolution in Australia seems inconceivable (and as an aside, I don’t believe in a set formula for how to predict if revolt is likely), a position of uncompromising resistance to the systems that oppress us all and of building solidarity with others in struggle seems to be a more worthwhile and dignified way to live than to constantly employ a strategy of trying to make small improvements that really only serve the functioning of capital and the state. Anarchists should not be watering down our politics at this time, assuming that people are only ready to hear something else – that something else, liberal reformism, has had its chance. When nothing more seems likely, everything is possible.
- From Wolves at the Door #1
