Against Labor
In the wake of an unsurprising electoral outcome, discussions about the work that needs doing swarm us all. For all the talk there is about stopping and preventing fascist violence, many have instead chosen to take their frustrations out on the primary targets of fascism. Like everyone who wrongly believed fascism could be defeated at the ballot box, the radicals we expect to know better still denigrate us, even as we’ve already been exiled from public life. Everywhere we manage to elude total erasure we are met with more derision. Our lives have been transparently marked as tolerable sacrifices in exchange for today’s eugenicist normalcy.
A number of self-proclaimed socialists, anarchists, and communists are more than comfortable paternalistically directing worried and disillusioned liberals towards their organizations, formations, and political parties. They see in people’s eagerness to feel like they are doing something about the state of the world an opportunity for near frictionless recruitment and effortless concessions to reductionist analyses. Liberal voters who once thought (or still think) themselves to be the last line of defense against a fascism they believe hasn’t yet arrived can’t help but be drawn to the next promise of a simple solution. And endless recruitment drives continue preventing people from meaningfully combating precarity and oppressive violence.
Meanwhile, those of us who have already been grappling with this swelling fascist tide attempt to resist succumbing to panic and despair in the face of how little support we find. While we invariably deserve compassion when and if these feelings come up for us, it is important that we remain cautious of becoming targets of opportunity for those paternalistically directing and recruiting others.
In our fear and waning resolve, we might look at what we once thought were valid reasons for not participating in exclusionary movement work, allowing others to dismiss and condemn us for not compromising sooner. We might lose heart and buckle when we are told our intolerance of anti-Blackness is preventing a “broader” movement from freeing us. We might relent when we are ridiculed and fedjacketed for taking precautions against an ongoing pandemic. We may even give up on our need for safety from abuse and our need for care in its wake.
How else are we expected to respond given how frequently our survival needs are made trivial in favor of catering to middle class desires? How else should we interpret people’s seemingly unbreakable attachment to patriarchal conceptions of militancy that chase after romanticized recollections of past struggles?
In anticipation of yet more violence from a calcifying fascism, plenty of radicals expect our compromises to pave the path to their saviorist fantasies. They ask us to help authorize more harm and violence so long as they’re inflicted upon us by our “comrades.” Even as communists, socialists, and anarchists relish the opportunity to “I told you so” liberals, many make the identical mistake, believing capitulation to and coordination with fascism will ever bring about our liberation. Where liberals thought the state would actualize this fiction, plenty of radicals see themselves as uniquely capable of such a fantastical feat.
Those of us fighting in the margins ask, on what grounds may any of these people declare themselves our saviors? What place for saviorism is there in the struggle to end white supremacy itself? There are so many calls to get started on “the work” and follow people aiming to direct our actions within their respective groups. And yet, their direction seems to always lack critically important forms of support.
For all of the demarcations of productive labor, who is and isn’t a worker, and who truly possesses the means to reshape the world for the better, shockingly few definitions include support for vulnerable folks. Wherever we should see proof of organizations’ capacity for care and self-defense against violence we find nonstop excuses and unapologetic vitriol in its place. They brandish their resentment against us because our existence reminds them of their flagrant negligence as the state openly preys upon our isolation and our exile.
What is the meaning of a term like “Labor” when it so consistently seems to exclude that which is vital to our survival and, therefore, our liberation? What is the utility of calls to “skill up” or do “the work” when most of the people making these calls are content to abandon disabled folks who have been left with no choice but to care for each other despite our limited capacity? What promise is there in the “revolutionary potential of the working class” during a pandemic that continues to whittle down our collective capacity?
Ableists and eugenicists alike would have us internalize these contradictory logics so thoroughly that we’d look at our disabled selves and companions and wonder whether we labor at all or produce anything of value. We may wonder this even as we are saddled with providing support for projects that claim to be getting us free, only to have that support invisibilized and erased. We are villainized and made out to be class enemies living a life of privilege the moment we vocalize our needs, as if we aren’t struggling to eat, get out of bed, or adequately protect ourselves from forced covid infections.
No, we will not tolerate this paradox that scarcely acknowledges our efforts and views us separately from our needs as we remain entirely within fascism’s crosshairs. We will not burn ourselves out for the sake of another’s daydream. We will not learn to stomach the parts of fascism most would prefer to never confront.
Why, as fascism steadily increases the burden of living, is the act of surviving seen as unimportant? Why, in supposed efforts to end capitalism, do so many take the stance of the shift manager demanding that care happen outside of work hours? What revolutionary benefit is there to divesting from care and support? Why, among so many radicals inclined to center class analyses, do so few understand why people may not have capacity to show up?
To venture an answer to any of these questions is to take a step towards care, accessibility, and support for one another. Today’s eugenicist normalcy is defined by near universal hostility and intolerance towards anyone who tries posing these questions in pursuit of honest answers. In this period where compromises with fascism are found everywhere, inaccessibility is conflated with revolutionary righteousness. The struggle to survive has been depoliticized and made out to be something other than the most pressing order of the day. This stubborn insistence on the total erasure of life-saving support is eugenics. Yet, the hollow justifications for these reactionary positions insincerely liken liberal inaction to our struggles to survive the margins of society as the primary targets of fascism.
Liberals remain confident that their submission to the state and their willingness to engage with it on its own terms will continue to be rewarded until at least the next presidential election. They’ve already made peace with genocides they presume exemption from and they willfully embrace a normalcy built upon cyclical reinfections. Whatever loss of “rights” under capitalism that may occur during the next four years will become their future victim blaming slogans when they next throw their weight behind blue fascists. Their values, beliefs, and behaviors align with oppressive violence because they benefit the most from its maintenance.
By contrast, we risk losing our lives to both precarity and more overt violence wielded by the state, fascist militia groups, and individuals who wish to hasten our deaths. Still, in the fiction that some anarchists, communists, and socialists alike have spun for themselves, our advocacy for our survival in the face of these mortal threats is sufficient reason to group us in with our executioners.
We recall just how many decades our would-be comrades have rejected our pleas for consideration and accommodation. We represent and embody the history these aspiring revolutionary directors are running from. We grieve for those who are no longer with us and we bear witness to each other’s pain in exile. In spite of our isolation, we make noise, we take up space, and we keep each other alive.
Refusal to learn from countless squandered opportunities to build networks of care, safety, and self-defense will always spoil whatever semblance of revolutionary potential a group claims to have. However heartbreaking it is to acknowledge the consistency of these forewarned consequences that always follow our erasure and our abandonment, this pattern still proves the inefficacy of compromise with our oppressors. These consequences demonstrate how critically important it is that liberatory efforts change course and reject the apathy eugenicist normalcy has instilled in everyday life.
The hypermilitarization of the state is not evidence that we should have remained silent about our survival needs and the harm of inaccessibility just to belong in groups that wont save us. The growing arsenals of the state merely represent the intent to exploit the ways we struggle to survive. This end is simply aided by people’s aversion to providing care. Divisions of labor often follow close behind the instances where socialists, communists, and anarchists manage to remember that support networks are important, ending up racialized, gendered, and ableist.
Unwillingness to change pace or reshape the contour of liberatory efforts will only help obscure the difficulties of surviving this increasingly inhospitable historical period. Groups pursuing a notion of productivity that is fully compatible with fascism’s own definition of the term are helping further the project of eugenics. Rather than fool ourselves into believing unyielding inaccessibility is revolutionary, we must instead understand how revolutionary it is to accommodate the robust survival needs of everyone fascism would eradicate to build its vision of normalcy.
Limited gestures of care are not enough, especially when used to justify organizing methods that increase the demand for care without providing it. We need collectivized care that is deeply familiar with our daily survival needs and proves capable of reducing scarcity indefinitely. We can’t accomplish this goal by settling for short-term means of mitigating the demands of an unrelenting capitalist economy.
Mistaking the slowness that complete care networks often require for an excuse to abandon the goal altogether is an exercise in futility. Whatever urgency is gained in exchange for ignoring care is eventually thwarted by its absence. Even if urgent responses could endure without interruption despite this, that urgency would not match the spontaneity gained by real unwavering networks of care.
Most attempts to merge care with efforts to imperil the state tend to only think of care for those who are doing the imperiling. Oppressive divisions of labor aside, this tendency misses the crux of the problem staring us down during this historical period. Care is not a supplementary arm of something more important. Robust networks of care necessarily imperil the state. In the fight against eugenics and genocide, care is the most effective tool in our arsenal. In a system that threatens all who cannot work with death, care and support for us disabled and vulnerable folks upends the value of labor under capitalism.
