Thursday 2 January 2014

Sometimes you don't even know that you're searching. And then sometimes you do.

So this is the newest incarnation of a blog that I started writing four years ago and never really put much work into.  I was really using it as a kind of sounding board: I was in the process of radically re-evaluating my political principles (insofar as I had any, which was not terribly far), experimenting with polyamory, and gingerly testing out the possibility of taking some kind of meaningful control over the things that I spent my life doing. To give you some idea of how alien those ideas were to the kind of life I lived, I should probably tell you that it took me about two years to even articulate to myself what I was doing. I'm sure that this is not an unusual experience, but it feels to me like I spent the first quarter century of my life more or less believing that the world was set up in a way which was ill-advised in spots but fundamentally not too bad, and that being a bit bloody miserable all the time was mainly a product of my own inadequacy. It didn't help that I was (and am) white, middle-class, cis-gendered and spending most of my time around that section of society whose sociality largely comprises of eating humous and reading The Guardian.

Anyway. I was lucky. I met people who had thought about this stuff, and thought about it a lot more than I had. What's more, they wanted to talk about it. And what's more more, they wanted to DO things about it. I thought about things like feminism and Marxism and anarchism. I thought about what the word 'privilege' meant. And at some point, these big, abstracted 'isms' ceased to be things that happened in books and I started to see the way that this stuff actually worked in my own life. I started to recognise that a series of unhappy relationships in my early 20s did not mean that I was unattractive or unloveable or mad or wrong, but that the structures of the way men and women relate to one another makes loving relationships, even if they are entered into with the best will in the world, really bloody hard. I started to recognise that 'feminism' and 'washing-up' are intimately related to one another. I started to recognise that when people talked about things like 'dialectical materialism', they didn't just mean the revolution was definitely going to happen and you should therefore join the SWP - they meant that there is a really basic relationship between questions like who has the money to buy a computer that works and people whose voices end up being heard in public.

And when you start to notice that stuff, it becomes very difficult to unnotice it.

So, I started trying to make some changes.

One of those changes was becoming polyamorous. Like many, if not most, of the big decisions in my life, this was partly contingent and partly a political decision. The decision to become poly was a big, scary deal for me, and I very much doubt that it would have happened if there hadn't been someone that I wanted to be poly with. But it did. That stuff has been part of my life for a long time now: this blog is at least partly a space for me to think about what it means, and to help other people think about what it might mean too.

One of those changes was the decision to become involved in class struggle. I'm now a paid up member of the industrial union the Industrial Workers of the World. This means that I go and stand outside over-priced winebars embarassing the customers for something to do on a Saturday. I carry membership forms around in a bag that says SMASH PATRIARCHY on it and regularly get accosted by religious fanatics, apparently because in me they recognise the kindred spirit of a fellow leaflet-giver-outer. This blog is partly about that commitment: about tactics, about direct action, about the way that gender operates in left-wing spaces - ultimately, about the pleasures and frustrations and anxiety of going out and interposing one's body between a fellow worker and the operations of a system that is out to fuck us for everything we're worth to it. Which is, I suppose, a more lyrical way of saying that if you want to know what it actually feels like to be one of those bedraggled looking maniacs standing on the ever-more-frequent picket lines you'll have noticed popping up about the place, you should read on. 

Lastly, a huge change for me has been to involve myself with DIY feminist organising, particularly around the LaDIYfest movement. My intention with this blog is to talk about the ways in which my experiences of organising around gender has deepened and inflected my understanding of how we deal with organising around class, and vice versa. It seems to me that there  is a central and worrying division of organisation in the ways that these spaces are run: feminist spaces for the girls, class struggle and antifa ones for the boys. We are never going to smash patriarchy without some dude feminsts, you guys! And if we're going to fight capitalism, we damn well need some women on our picket lines. So, this blog is about sharing my experiences in both of those environments in the  hope that it will make it easier for some people to think of ways to make the world a bit less shit.

When I was younger, I didn't really know that I was looking for anything. I know that now; and although I don't know what precisely, I think - think - that one thing I should be doing is thinking about how to search, and to search well.