Author: Jonathan Matthew Smucker

The personal is political. #FreddieGray

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The phrase “the personal is political” was originally intended to mean that the oppression that you experience as an individual is patterned—that there are structural factors underlying your experience, and so there are probably others experiencing similar things. “The personal is political” encouraged individuals who were experiencing oppressive situations—for example, a woman abused by her husband, or a worker exploited by her employer—to view these situations not as personal problems, but as political problems, and to realize that remedial action requires coming together with others to address the issue collectively in the public sphere. Such a process is precisely what has been happening across the United States as police killings of our black and brown brothers and sisters are now being seen as a pattern, a structural problem, and a political problem, by more and more people. This means that each needless death and each instance of excessive force is now understood as part of a bigger moral narrative. Victims’ families and communities no longer have to struggle on their own, isolated from each other. …

my articles on Occupy Wall Street

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A reader recently brought to my attention that there’s no landing page that houses all of my publications on Occupy Wall Street. Now there is… Smucker, Jonathan Matthew. 2014. “Can Prefigurative Politics Replace Political Strategy?” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 58:74–82 ——. 2013. “Occupy: A Name Fixed to a Flashpoint.” The Sociological Quarterly 54(2):219–225. ——. 2012. “Radicals and the 99%: Core and Mass Movement.” Pp. 247-253 in We Are Many: Reflections on Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, ed. by K. Khatib, M. Killjoy and M. McGuire. Oakland, CA: AK Press. ——. 2012. “Falling in Love with Ourselves.” n+1 Occupy! (An OWS-Inspired Gazette), September 2012, pp. 28-29. ——. 2012. “A Practical Guide to Co-option.” n+1 Occupy! (An OWS-Inspired Gazette), May 2012, pp. 5-8. ——. 2012[2011]. “The Tactic of Occupation and the Movement of the 99 Percent.” Progressive Planning Magazine, Spring 2012, pp. 6-9.

more notes on ‘prefigurative politics’

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In convening a forum on power and prefiguration this past month for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, I have had the opportunity to engage in a lot of deep and clarifying discussions—with readers and with the forum’s seven other authors. There is no way around the ambiguity of the phrase prefigurative politics and the fact that, as its usage has increased—and as it has become a buzzword within some contemporary social movements—the people who have come to use or identify with it now often intend divergent meanings. Is it accurate or useful, then, to interpret the phrase as I did in my article: “as a claim to replace strategic politics altogether?” I have debated this question for some time, in my own head and with comrades. Essentially, my choice was between interpreting prefigurative politics as either (A) an assertion that political contestation is unnecessary or obsolete—which I did—or (B) allowing a more ambiguous interpretation that references some form or other of ‘being the change you want to see in the world.’ Even though I went with …

The Story of the Righteous Few, Exhibit #1: “a very solitary journey”

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A friend just brought this meme to my attention: I’m elaborating on problems with the (relatively new) concept of activism and also about the story of the righteous few in my manuscript. For now, here’s an excerpt concerning the latter (from my chapter in AK Press’ book We Are Many): Too often we get stuck in a story of the righteous few. Radicals tend to become radicals because we become disillusioned with aspects of the dominant culture. When you feel like you’re up against the culture, it’s easy then to develop an inclination to separate yourself from that culture. When we begin to become aware of the destructive impacts of capitalism, racism, sexism, and whatever other social systems we encounter that we see perpetuating oppression, we don’t want to be part of it. We feel a moral repugnance and a desire to not cooperate with injustice. However, this desire to separate ourselves from injustice can develop into a general mentality of separation from society more generally. In other words, when we see the dominant culture as a perpetrator …

Berkeley Journal of Sociology Forum on Power & Prefiguration

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In case you missed it, the Berkeley Journal of Sociology relaunched on October 1st. I’m part of the collective of Berkeley sociology grad students who worked this past year to re-imagine the BJS’s mission, which ultimately led to the launch of a really great new website: berkeleyjournal.org — check it out! The idea is to publish articles that critically engage with unfolding events, political struggles, cultural trends, and so on — through a sociological lens. Our new tagline: “The point, after all, is to change the world.” I’m currently sharing the managing editor position with my friend and colleague Martin Eiermann. I also have an article in the new print issue of the BJS. My article, “Can Prefigurative Politics Replace Political Strategy?” is part of a forum on ‘Power & Prefiguration.’ Here’s a teaser figure from my article: You can read the whole article online here, the rest of the forum here, or you can download a PDF of the print version of the forum here (It shows off the great layout of our new …

#PeoplesClimate: “a radical critique of a radical critique”

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Michael Premo and I have a piece in The Nation this week: “What’s Wrong With the Radical Critique of the People’s Climate March”. We didn’t write the title. Maybe a more accurate title—which I saw in a Tweet of the article—would have been “a radical critique of a radical critique of the People’s Climate March.” (Then again, as a title, that might have come off as sectarian/ultraleftist, which is exactly what we’re taking issue with.) We argue that “Radicals who are serious about political change—and not just engaging in self-righteous sideline critique—would be wise to learn” from the Climate Justice Alliance and Flood Wall Street’s strategies in relation to the larger People’s Climate March. You can read the whole piece here.

The danger of fetishizing revolution

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Originally published at Waging Nonviolence.

(Flickr/tetedelacourse)  

What do contact with extraterrestrials, the return of Jesus Christ, apocalypse, and revolution all have in common? In a sense, they are all imagined redemptions — epic reset buttons for humanity. Onto these we can pin our heartbreaks and frustrations with the world as it is, with all its suffering, mire and messy details. Any of these redemptive apocalypses can serve as the X that solves the daunting problem of our sense of impotency. This messianic X — this unknown and imaginary seismic intervention — might help us to hold onto a kind of hope despite overwhelming evidence of a hopeless reality. Somehow, someday, something will occur that stops the madness, and we will be able to begin anew.

We need hope — in life and also in political mobilization. Hope is an essential ingredient in scaling up collective action beyond the limited pool of martyrs, saints and counter-cultural usual suspects. Organizing large-scale collective power requires something of an art of raising popular hopes and expectations. A long-term vision of a radically transformed world can be an important grounding for such hope. And isn’t such radical transformation precisely the idea of social and political revolution? Isn’t it a bit unfair to include revolution as an item on the same list as the Biblical end of days?

Perhaps it is a bit unfair. It depends on whether we mean revolution as horizon or revolution as apocalypse. Do we imagine a revolutionary restructuring of power relations in society as an all-or-nothing totalizing moment or as an aspirational horizon, something to always be moving towards? If the former, then what incentive do we have to study the details of the terrain where we are presently situated? Why would we bother to strategize about overcoming the particular obstacles that block our way today, if we believe that the accumulation of all obstacles will ultimately add up to a grand crisis that will somehow magically usher in a new era? Believing that things will “have to get worse before they get better,” we may become disinterested in — perhaps even sabotaging of — efforts to improve real-life conditions in the here and now. After all, why put a band-aid on a gaping wound? Why prolong the life of an oppressive system? With such logic we can excuse ourselves from the trouble of getting to know our political terrain. It is, after all, the very mess we hope to avoid.

dissent and resignation

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With the relatively recent invention of the activist as a special category, non-activism becomes the implied norm. Non-activists—i.e., normal people—are excused from having to wrestle with the content of pertinent political issues and what remedial collective action might be taken, as activism is treated as a distinct realm unto itself—an elective activity in some ways equivalent to football, Burning Man, or World of Warcraft. Its political impotency is a general unstated assumption, and so its members are seen as value-expressive rather than political-strategic. Too often activists themselves feed this perception. An example that epitomizes the tendency is the bumper sticker slogan “I’M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR.” Hardly a political intervention, this sad message proudly proclaims resignation to a future in which there are inevitably more wars, while the individual dissenter can celebrate their moral commitment to be there protesting tomorrow’s wars as fervently and impotently as they protest today’s. My point is bigger than this one bumper sticker. Its message epitomizes the problem of settling for—even celebrating—a resigned self-expressive dissent. One of the biggest …