...on crawling out from under the failures which came before, and the ones which compound them further...

In the eighties, as one of only a few communist sympathizers in my small town, I was struck by the willingness of most of my friends and neighbors to tolerate my public possession* of a few works by Marx (and all the others they'd never heard of) - because communism was seen as so ridiculous and impossible, that only a contrarian, willful, rebellious young'n would trouble his or herself with it. My scout leader was amused enough to make me Senior Patrol Leader because, and I remember this distinctly, "At least a red believes in discipline." When I was finally kicked out of the Scouts, it was for selling pot, not for reading Karl Marx.

No one doubted that we'd grow up and get over it, which is of course exactly what happened. Because you don't get gainful employment posing as a red.

I suppose if I'd grown up almost anywhere but New England, the story might be differently told, but the only roles you couldn't inhabit (well, openly) during that time, and in that region, were (a) homosexual, and (b) pagan, and by the mid to late eighties, enough of the local kids were into Ouija, meditation, seances, tarot and the rest of the faux spiritualist baggage handling that Fag™ was really the only verboten identity. It still is, as far as I can tell. (Well, in a nod to some progress, skinheads get little love. See, sometimes advances are made.)

Those members of the dominant culture who had no cause or reason to question it, or even be aware of it in a conscious way, expressed and probably felt the abiding confidence which characterized that slice of history. They were sure of themselves, and their concerns and fears reflected this fact. Red baiting was still in vogue, obviously, and the Soviet Union was very much the Evil Empire which any right believing person disdained and pitied, in a distant and detached fashion, but in all truth the Soviets were way the hell Over There. They were a foreign threat, and one which managed itself very nicely, in tidy packages which were fit for domestic consumption.

They were a given. Easy to detest, because nothing was known about 'em except that they were Bad - but not supremely so, especially after Chernobyl and the Afghan debacle. They were also easy to ignore, those Soviets who were so much a part of a the world that I doubt anyone believed they were going anywhere, except perhaps the Party leaders trying to stave off collapse.

Plus, the wily Japanese were already in the ascendant as the new black beasts of foreign concern

Anyway, the real threat on the homefront was homosexual satanism, or satanic homosexualism, or demons in our midst, or homegrown nihilist godlessness...or black men. The kind of problems which might trouble a people who knew their place in a stable, divided and manichean world order and who just wanted to "get ahead" and keep the shit that proved they'd done so.

We had invented domestic worries, which everyone pretended were real, and therefore made so. Kind of like today, when it comes to Mexican migrant workers, Arabs, Muslims, Central American gangs and the Chinese.

The culture in force encouraged a facile self-satisfaction for those who benefited from it.

This was not the case, in that small circle of would-be revolutionaries. Or for the loose affiliation of like minded fellow travelers to be founded in Portland, Burlington, Worcester or Boston. Especially Boston.

In those circles, I remember almost no one who was sure of his or her self. It was a milieu characterized by self-doubt coupled with supreme historical arrogance, deliberately struck and ridiculous poses, sectarian nastiness, recrimination, turf conflict, ideological puritanism, doctrinaire immovability, implacable hatreds and an unjustified certainty in the immediacy of the historic moment when the various vanguards would announce themselves to the masses - often imagined, those anonymous multitudes, as historically ready and ripe for the exact message which the various vanguards and true revolutionaries had finally refined into the core dogma of a future perfect. Or, in equal measure, sure that the same masses were so dumbly benighted that only a true dictatorship of the proletariat could usher in the coming age of collective revelation.

Decades have passed, the beneficiary classes have grown smaller and the ruling class richer, but the anti-capitalists don't seem to have moved much from their treasured, comfortable and familiar estate, replete in their replication of all the same tropes. It's a whole new generation come and gone. Two of them, in fact.

And yet these kids are stuck in the same places as their various sectarian ideological forebears - sniping at each other from behind fictional barricades, convinced they alone possess the secret keys to a revolutionary tomorrow, as sure of their place in vaunted Clio's ledger as the Trots, Bolsheviks, CPUSAs, Maoists and Bakuninists who preceded them.

In truth, I think they're even worse off. Because now they not only have ideological baggage over which they can savage each other, they have all the identity shit to go with it. It's not enough to say, aloud, "dump the bosses, feed the poor first, break the banks and disarm the enforcers."

It's not enough - at least, that's what I get from reading their manifestos and complaints - to organize and stand together.

Now, you have to make sure you make all the right noises about the "queer struggle" and "white privilege" and "the kyriarchy" and "marginalized bodies." If you don't, you're an Enemy. Big E.

Not a class enemy. An identity one.

Never mind that very few identities are stable over time, or essential, or immune to influence and alteration. Never mind that most of us exist as cultural hybrids, since almost none of us are villagers from single industry, three family, one church backwater hamlets stuck in the lesser years of the Nineteenth Century.

Which brings me to a pause, because something has to be written in implied bolds before I continue: I don't for a moment think that it's easy to be handicapped, gay, black, trans, illegal, or often enough, female. White men, especially ones with money and legacy, do really still run the damned imperial project. And they make sure, in their various legal and illicit ways, that their sons and favored daughters stand to inherit it.

The capitalist endeavor - if a cobbled together series of crises, Emergencies, enforcements, enclosures, wars, conquests, dynasties and corporate boards can really be treated as a templated whole - produces its own conquered internal spaces, bodies, communities and symbols. Capitalism, in its everyday operation, in the outcomes of competition between factions of the ruling class, in the production of commodities, and in the consumption of them, also produces those persons who define capitalist existence by failing it, and failing within it.

It produces losers, defeated subjects - people not only immiserated, but signified as such. It is not mere coincidence that whore, cunt, nigger, bitch, faggot, tranny, wetback, gimp, crip, dyke, tard, idiot and gay  work as stand-ins for "outsider, excluded, loser, abusable, defeated"  whether or not their hostile users know it precisely in those terms.

They mean, in short, "glad I'm not one of you, and oh yeah, I can do violence to you."

All of this is true, I think, and not only particularly, regionally -  but generally so.

But...

When it comes to building an actual resistance, an opposition, and perhaps even a revolutionary movement which has any kind of resilience and durability, purity tests for attitude, doctrine, belief, outlook and especially identity sure seem like a shortcut to self-destruction.

Excluding anyone who doesn't pass muster on some aspect of identity marginalization is excluding everyone. Our encultured and assumed identities not only overlap, they also contradict each other. Insisting on a homogeneity of belief, with regard to identity, is insisting on failure, because the capitalist mode of production which produces us and our materially shaped outlooks also shatters, commodifies, marginalizes and/or absorbs any identity the co-option or isolation of which profits those who rule its centers of power and influence.

While in the schoolyard, during intense and almost routinized sexualization of gender and identity, as well as race, being cast out as a "faggot" or a "nigger" or a "bitch" can and does reinforce the disciplinary and normative order. But, years later, that same identity can be commodified, packaged, sold, accepted and marketed as a signifier of toleration, wealth and status, especially for those willing to embrace the gap between the process which isolated them as a defeated body and the process which re-absorbs the isolated identity as a confirmation of the rightness and goodness of the dominant order. If you don't believe me, look to Bravo, A&E, MTV and Lifetime as media examples how this is done.

Any identity produced by that order can be consumed or used by it, to whatever ends or means serve those who rule it, and enrich themselves by doing so.

Identity is febrile, shifting, unstable ground, because almost none of us possess a singular one, especially when it comes to those produced by our involuntary and enforced participation in capitalist exchange. (Perhaps the only people I know who have publicly singular, and almost neuter identities, exist as symbolized permanent toddlers - those with Down's Syndrome, Autism, severe mental handicap...and the black-men-as-bad-children which populate news casts, Hollywood movies, cop shows and rap videos.)

It is not a good place from which to make a revolution, or to challenge the order which benefits from the many competing identities which it itself produces, manages and fetishizes.

Identity conflict  - especially in the form of purity tests - serves the interests of those who rule, because they are the ones who arbitrate which identities signify success, and which ones confirm the system by virtue of their exclusion from it.

Struggling to make sure that everyone in a movement (especially one whose members propose to significantly challenge or even topple the status quo) consciously identifies as anti-racist,  pro-queer, feminist, and ally-of-this-and-that is struggling to ensure its defeat. There is no way to successfully police the attitudes of people who come together at great risk - and with the increased probability of sanctioned harassment, rape, injury, incarceration and death - in order to organize conflict within and against the capitalist system which produced them.

We can only learn to see how others are marginalized by living, working, struggling and fighting with them.

Didactic, moralizing tirades will not do it. These tirades will, on the other hand, cut off fellow workers and resisters before they ever commit their emotion, loyalty, bodies and reason to a conflict which promises hardship, isolation and the full force of a threatened order waged against and inflicted upon those who undertake the great work of destroying it.

This is not to suggest, even remotely, that a community in opposition ought to tolerate racists, misogynists, bigots or the package deal of inherited privileges.

But, if we are to avoid the sectarianism of the middle decades of the anti-capitalist project, we should probably avoid its more obvious errors.

And we can begin, I believe, by refusing to compound them with another set of purities.

I don't know, I could be wrong.

I probably am, and I've learned to count on that fact.

I know, all the same, that when I look upon the sleeping faces of my children, and wonder at the future they are forced to inherit, that I really don't have a choice. It's either my body, love, loyalty and mind against the system which guarantees their misery, or my complicity in their suffering.

And I'm not willing to let the manufactured differences produced by that system get in the way of what needs doing, and will be done...

* - in hindsight, it was all probably more ostentatious than I remember it was...