On scope

angualupin:

shinelikethunder:

One thing I think is under-acknowledged in leftish activism spaces is that power structures come in layers. Who has access to power at the local level, within a community, can be dramatically at odds with how power and exclusion works on a society-wide level.

What’s more, no power structure neatly cancels out the others. In fact, they interact in incredibly complex ways depending on the nature and scope of each power structure and the issues at hand. I suspect the lack of easy, pre-filled answers is one reason it doesn’t mix well with activism.

Looked at in this light, a lot of the pathologies and absurdities of the social justice movement come down to a pretty simple disconnect: local allocation of power and system-wide allocation of power cannot cancel each other out. They interact, but the bulk of each exists independently from the places where they run into each other.

Meaning:

• It is impossible to fix a systemic power structure by changing a community’s local rules about who gets priority/credibility/deference/veto power in interpersonal interactions.

• Locally-allocated power is still power on local issues even if it’s the exact inverse of how power is allocated on systemic issues. Inefficacy on problems inherited from wider society =/= inefficacy on issues that are specific to a community or friend group, and the scope being more restricted doesn’t change the nature of power and its potential abuses all that much.

What we’ve been seeing in SJ activism is a weird, distorting feedback loop that happens when local power structures get overrides built in that say “the [societal] last shall be first and the first shall be last.” Because you’re defining this separate local entity in terms of something it can’t affect no matter how far it goes, and by giving those overrides the final say, you’re disabling all the natural checks on power that come from the community itself. And the people with newfound local power do all the dumb things that humans do with power, at least on community-scale issues they can actually control. One of which involves kneecapping anything that might threaten or limit their power. Like dissent from people near them on the societally-marginalized/locally-elevated end of the inverted power scale (“punching sideways”). Or in some cases, effective systemic reforms that would help them in wider society, but erode their claim on the little fiefdom they’ve been lording it over. “But that’s not real activism”–no shit it’s not real activism, that’s the point, the stuff that was intended as a fix is having the exact opposite effect, because it underestimated the pitfalls of local vs systemic scope and removed its own ability to self-correct in the face of self-reinforcing accumulations of strictly local power.

A certain amount of counterweight to society-wide imbalances is useful in community norms, but mostly to improve the local power structure and inoculate it against reproducing the pathologies of the wider system. Not to change, neutralize, or “make up for” all the system’s effects. That’s not something that can be done locally–systemic problems require systemic fixes. Once you start using the continued existence of systemic injustice as a reason to blanket override local checks on power and rules for interpersonal interaction, you’ve cut the brake lines and fucked up your community’s power structure even worse than if you’d done nothing at all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of thing, in particular with reference to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Oppressed*, which I think should be required reading for everyone involved in activism, and for that matter everyone not. One of Freire’s basic premises is the adage “no one is free when others are oppressed”, but he takes it farther than the original meaning by exploring what the creation of a truly free society would look like if those who are currently oppressed are no longer oppressed, and makes the point that flipping the tables – last first and first last – creates a society that is as unfree as the original. Freedom comes from an absence of oppression, not from oppressing the oppressors. Power structures that are used to oppress are inherently oppressive not because of who they oppress but because they enable oppression; handing them over to other people simply ensures that a new group of people is oppressed. The challenge of true revolution is to create power structures that cannot be used to oppress rather than from handing over the current levers of power to a different group of people. 

Freire’s other basic premise is that the key to revolution lies in educating people to recognize how it is the structures of power that are inherently oppressive. In many ways I think this is where much of the ‘social justice’ movement has fallen down – there seems to be the belief that if we just get the right people in positions of power, then justice will happen, rather than acknowledging that justice is impossible in an unjust system, and to enable justice, the system itself must change. Not that there isn’t activism that is trying to do just that, it just that… said activism is far away from ‘purity’ culture, which is a prime example of the oppressed using the tools of the oppressor and claiming that it’s ok this time, because it’s for the right reason.

*Dude got exiled from Brazil for 15 years for being the kind of person that oppressive regimes really don’t want around, so he’s at least worth a read.