Activism

Currents that Divide

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By Cake Boy

Liberal, socialist, communist, or anarchist movements need mass support to achieve their political goals.

You can only create mass support if you fight for common goals and forget about niche issues.

For example. A socialist party could unite thousands of people around one common goal. A goal like ‘housing’ or ‘workers rights’ or something like that

What do we all care about? What is the core of politics? Housing, food, safety, defense, trade, and diplomacy. Every political faction needs well-defined answers to these questions.

After that, people can all come together to fight for these things. This is something that the Social Democratic and Neoliberal parties in the past did very well. They were able to unite all kinds of people under the same banner. Back then, politics was pretty pragmatic.

But in the current era, we have seen a lot of divisive currents. Currents that scatter and keep movements impotent

On the left, we had feminists who hate men. We had transgender people who hate feminists. We had black nationalists who hated whites.

On the right, we had national anarchists, who created division between black and white people, by using horrible white power symbols.

We had red pill conservatives and ‘incels’ who hate all woman.

We had feminists who hate women who are not progressive enough.

We had woke, who hate conservatives. We had conservatives who hate people who are ‘too progressive,’ etc.

It’s all a very silly kind of tribalism. Meanwhile, the big geopolitical and financial institutions ensure they are not divided by these kinds of nonsensical issues. They understand what real power is.

A political party or theory needs to be able to sustain itself. A socialist state needs a defense and needs to feed the population. An anarchist confederation is the same. These are the actual political goals you should look at.

If we look from an anarchist lens, the questions are: How can something like Rojava exist, trade, defend itself, and maintain diplomatic relations with all kinds of institutions? These are the questions. The questions are not: what kind of sex do trans people like to have? What is the color of your skin? Would you like to get married? Do you go to church or not? What is your ‘race’? Do you like men or women? When was the last time U2 had a concert? What is the color of your fingernail paint?

I think neoliberal culture created a focus on rational/calculating individualism. And this individualism is then defined by opposition to others. This is how people describe themselves. Im a liberal, so i have blue hair and i hate MAGA. Im a MAGA, so i go to church. Im a tradwife, im a lesbian, im a real straight man, im a real ‘queer’ man im this, im that.

This superficial form of individualism makes political formation impossible.

I think something like Rojava (the anarchist mass project) could exist, because in the Middle East, this form of neoliberal individualism doesn’t exist that way. And, there was a situation of crisis, which mean there was no time for debates between ‘cis’ and ‘queer’ people. The question was, how do we make sure everyone gets water, not: what is your pronunciation?

We now see that the current communists can step out of the divisive policies. And they can formulate realistic long-term goals and perspectives. The other leftist and liberal movements stay stuck in the swamp of division and sectarianism—the swamp of incompetence.

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5 replies »

  1. The problem isn’t that people care about gender, race, or identity. It’s that these things have been commodified under neoliberalism. They’ve been hollowed out and sold back to these people as lifestyle brands, detached from collective struggle. These issues aren’t distractions. They’re real and inseparable from the material. The real problem here is how they’ve been weaponized, while the cops still blow people away and landlords still take half of our bread and butter.

    Your critique of neoliberal individualism is fair. I agree, people are taught to build identities in opposition to each other, not with each other. And yeah. That mess goes deep. But the answer isn’t to throw out queer, trans, racial, or spiritual identity. It’s to reconnect them to life, to mutual aid, to survival. It’s about scraping out the layers of representation and plugging back into shared struggle. When gay guys fed each other during the AIDS crisis, that was both identity and material politics. When the Black Panthers built free breakfast programs and clinics, that was racial identity and socialism in action. And that’s how I understand the ATS project.

    Also, I don’t know that using Rojava as a way to get away from identity politics is a good idea. Rojava’s success explicitly depends on feminist, ecological, and multiethnic pluralism. Hell, those people take gender liberation so seriously that it’s a requirement that all their institutions have co-leadership between men and women. Not just neighborhood councils. Military units too. The reason they survive isn’t because they ignore identity or bury it as a distraction. It’s because they integrate it with class struggle and survival. They collectivize autonomy. They get it right, for the most part, IMO.

    Way I see it, it’s not about telling people anything about their identities. It’s definitely not about ignoring identity or trying to say hey look just put all that stuff on the back burner for a minute. I think it’s about de-commodifying, de-individualizing, and reconnecting them to communal power. To my mind, that’s liberation. And no one can do that for them.

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  2. I wrote this text pretty fast. I should have formulated some thing differently

    Uhmm, ok

    The problem isn’t that people care about gender, race, or identity.

    The problem isn’t that they care about it, but that they use it to bash each other, and create defines.

    Nothing wrong with being lesbian, but don’t bully straights etc.

    I think all these identity isues are secundary

    What i mean by Rojava. An anarchist kind of infrastructure could exist, in the face of disaster.

    I mean, something like that could exist, in a situation of life and death. Thats when people become the strongest, and they can not afford to quarrel over these identitarian issues, in that situation. Under pressure, people become the strongest, and the situation will show what really matters, and what doesn’t matter

    The succes of Rojava, is in the core material, economic and military. Thats the basis of it. If these Kurds are feminist or not, is secundary.

    The reason they survive isn’t because they ignore identity or bury it as a distraction. It’s because they integrate it with class struggle and survival. They collectivize autonomy. They get it right, for the most part, IMO.

    The reason they survive, is because they have an army, and America got their back. If they are feminist or not, has nothing to do with them being able to exist in the world.

    Its like, a tiger can survive because of her tooth and nails. Wheter she has stripes on her back or not, is not that relevant.

    You and i can agree/disagree with their feminist identity. But if they couldn’t defend themselves, there was nothing to agree/disagree with in the first place.

    I think that both the racial and sexual, and gender discourses, disrupted a lot of potential mass movements. And this helped neoliberalism a lot. I have seen endless agressive debates on anarchist fora, about ‘trans’ and ‘non binary’. all kinds of movements that fell apart, over nothing. People should be able to say at a point : we agree to disagree, but lets work on the things we agree on. lets built the basic

    cake

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  3. I get where you’re coming from, especially with the burnout around identity discourse online and all that. But I disagree with your view and treating things like feminism or queer autonomy as if they’re just stripes on a tiger (decorative, aesthetic, secondary, etc). In places like Rojava, they’re part of the claws. That co-leadership model isn’t just symbolic. It prevents authoritarian consolidation. It creates internal checks and balances. It means decisions aren’t just made by some little inner elite circle running things, which is how a lot of revolutions fail.

    You mention how disaster reveals what really matters. But disaster doesn’t erase identity. It sharpens it. People fall back on what they know: gender roles, kinship, ethnicity, class. If you don’t have infrastructure built to handle that, like Rojava’s women’s councils or ethnic representation, you get sectarianism, collapse, warlordism. It doesn’t matter who is funding you. Identity is not the problem. Lack of structures to deal with it is.

    Also, the idea that a life-or-death situation brings out the strength in people isn’t necessarily true. It might also bring out the weakness in people. The worst in people. I wrote about this in my book. War, homelessness, prison, natural disaster, the zombie apocalypse—these things don’t bring out the best in people. Or the worst in people. They just bring out whatever is in people.

    What’s wrecked movements isn’t people being gay or feminist. It’s neoliberalism turning those identities into brands and tools for social capital instead of collective power. Identity gets weaponized precisely because we never built systems to integrate it meaningfully. That’s the real failure.

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  5. Uhmm

    I get where you’re coming from, especially with the burnout around identity discourse online and all that.

    Here, both the anarchists and socialists, are massively harmed by identity discourse. It destroyed the left, and after that the whole MAGA/conservative kind of movement became ‘the opposition’. Identity based movements within the left, made MAGA, you could say

    It means decisions aren’t just made by some little inner elite circle running things, which is how a lot of revolutions fail.

    Uhmm, but feminism isn’t by definition anti authoritarian. Feminists could be as well be an inner elite. And the same goes for gays/queers etc. So this is disagree with Ocalan. I don’t think woman are by definition libertarian, or pacifist. Woman also have a dark side

    What’s wrecked movements isn’t people being gay or feminist

    It wrecks movements, when this gayness, or feminism, leads to endless clashes and fights, within the potential movement. And this is often the case. There is difference between liberal/logical feminism, and borderline insane anti male feminism. I have seen the differences. I have seen how radical/extreme feminism can really harm people

    There is also a difference between someone choosing to be transgender, and someone demanding massive cultural changes, within movements, based on you being trans

    I don’t think identity is power. Power is material. Power comes out of a gun, as Mao said. Also in Rojava, the power comes out of the gun. Not out of the fact that these people are feminist or queer, or vegan, or tradwife, of whatever

    cake

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